Exposure

Startups For the Rest of Us

Episode 240 | Podcasts for Startup Founders

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Show Notes

In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike talk about podcasts for startup founders. They list and classify their favorite podcasts and discuss them in detail.

Items mentioned in this episode:

Transcript

Mike: [00:00]: In this episode of “Startups For The Rest Of Us,” Rob and I are going to be talking about podcasts for startup founders. This is “Startups For The Rest Of Us” episode 240.

Mike [00:16]: Welcome to “Startups For The Rest Of Us,” the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products. Whether you’ve built your first product, or you’re just thinking of it. I’m Mike…

Rob [00:23]: And I’m Rob.

Mike [00:24]: And we’re here to share our experiences and help people avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s going on this week Rob?

Rob [00:29]: MicroConf Europe tickets are on sale. Feels great. Go to microconfeurope.com if you’re interested in hanging out with us for a few days in Barcelona at the end of August.

Mike [00:38]: I am so looking forward to that.

Rob [00:40]: I am too. It’s going to be fun. It’s going to be sunny and it’s right on the water. I’ve heard it’s a pretty amazing city. So we are planning our annual month in Europe again, so we’ll be leaving around the first of August and going to France for a couple of weeks with Sherry and the kids. And then we will be heading down to Spain for the latter half of August, and I’ll meet up with you guys in Barcelona for the conference.

Mike [01:04]: Very cool.

Rob [01:06]: How about you? Are you going to do any sightseeing when you’re in Barcelona?

Mike [01:07]: I don’t know. I’m still trying to work that out with the wife to figure out whether or not she can make it or not. Like right now, the answer is no. She probably cannot just because it’s right around the time that school starts for the kids, and we really cannot. We could probably pull them out, but it’s just a matter of how long would be able to pull them out. Plus she’s got a fitness studio that she runs, so it’s a little bit harder for her to get away for an extended period of time, just because she has clients who come see her every week. So we are still trying to figure out exactly what we are going to do or if she is going to be able to make it at all.

Rob [01:35]: Sure. Hey, you and I did our first, I guess we’ll call it a Q&A webinar inside Founder café yesterday, right. So in the past, we’ve done conference calls inside Micropreneur Academy and Founder café, and we wanted to try out more of a visual format and so you and I did Google Hangout, and then we had Chatroll there, and so the members of micropreneur.com and Founder café were able to ask questions. We took a bunch of questions in advance and talk through it. I have to admit, I really enjoyed it.

Mike [02:04]: Yeah. I think it works really well. It’s funny because I hadn’t really considered the dynamics of using something like Google Hangouts and Chatroll versus the conference calls. My impression or at least my belief early on had been that, “Oh, the conference calls are going to be more interactive because everybody can talk to each other”, but it never really seemed like that was the case, and I don’t think the attendance ever really got to the levels that we really wanted to when we are doing the conference calls. And I think part of that is just because, if it’s a conference call people have to get on the phone in order to make the call, and they can use Skype, but it’s a little bit difficult to do that versus something like what we just did, where people can be in a chat room at their computer and just listening on their headphones and streaming it, and that works so much better for somebody who is maybe sitting in the office or sitting in the co-working space or whatever, and being able to participate without having to actively be on a phone call.

Rob [02:57]: Exactly. And it was kind of like a live ‘Startups For The Rest Of Us’ Q&A episode. I spent time preparing and thinking about it like I would on an episode and it was cool that you and I could discuss these questions that were coming from Founder café members, and then folks were able to ask questions live right there in the chat for kind of confirmation or for maybe clarification on points that we are making as we were talking about them.

Mike [03:21]: My initial impression going into it was that it was going to be more like a podcast, only it was video, so there is going to be no editing, so try not screw up too bad.

Rob [03:29]: Yeah, indeed, I know. We are used to the editing. How about you? What’s been going on?

Mike [03:33]: Well, this past week I’ve visited a co-working space over in Worcester. Did that on Friday morning and I spent a couple of hours working there, but my laptop really wasn’t set up for me to be working remotely, because I haven’t travelled for work, probably close to a year at this point. So it was a little bit of challenge just because I don’t do a lot of work on my laptop any more, so there was a lot of stuff that just wasn’t there or wasn’t set up, so it was kind of a pain in the neck. I ended up calling it quits after about two or three hours and just came back to my home office and worked from there for the rest of the day. But, I spent earlier today wasting a bunch of time getting all of my data moved out of SugarSync and into Dropbox so that I can work remotely a little bit better. I think my laptop is in a little bit of better position right now, but I’m going to try it out for a couple of months this summer mainly because the kids are home and I moved my office to another place in the house, so I know that they are probably going to be interrupting me a little bit more this coming summer than they have in the past. So it’s going to be a nice little experiment to try out and see if a co-working space will work out. And there are some software developers there, so that’s kind of nice to see as well.

Rob [04:42]: That is nice, yeah. It’s good to be around the energy of other folks working. We’ve talked about in few of just being able to get out of your house whether the kids are there or not, it’s nice to have the change-up. It creates more creative energy and stuff like that. Before we dive into podcast, my last update is that I’m starting to gear up for some Drip webinars. We are getting that part of the funnel going. We have a bunch of flywheels running right now with content marketing on the blog and word of mouth and referral programs and all that stuff, and so we are getting decent flow of incoming trials and I’m looking taking the next step and increasing those stair stepping up my trial count, if you will. And so we are going to be starting a whole series of webinars on different topics around marketing automation, so keep your eyes peeled if you’re interested in stuff about marketing automation or e-mail marketing, come to getdrip.com and you can sign up for the list there and we’ll be letting folks on that list know when we launch.

Mike [05:40]: Cool. So what’s on agenda for today? Podcast, right?

Rob [05:42]: Indeed it is. For startup founders specifically. We last discuss this topic 2-1/2 years ago, it was episode 104, came out in November of 2012. At this point, I subscribe to 47 podcasts, and what I wanted to do is narrow it down to kind of my top 20 recommended podcasts for startup founders. And as we did in the episode a few years ago, we are going to classify them. We have tactical, we have motivational, we have entertainment, and we have exposure to new thoughts and ideas. So those are the kind of the four categories and some podcast fall into multiple categories, if you think about Mixergy it’s both tactical and motivational. I would tend to think of our podcast here as a similar thing. But what’s interesting is, I started with the list that we had 2-1/2 years ago, and shocked by the number of podcasts that are just no longer around or that became so infrequent that I unsubscribe from them, it was maybe 50%-60% of them were just gone.

Mike [06:41]: That’s kind of crazy. I’ve heard from a lot of people that it’s surprising how long ‘Startups For The Rest Of Us’ has stuck around and how we are still going after five years.

Rob [06:51]: Yeah. I think the average lifetime of a podcast must be- I’m sure if you take all podcast, [and you averaged it?] it’s probably like two months because there are so many podcasts that do three or four episodes and then die. But even with things that make a pass the first few months, I don’t think it’s much more than a year or two, that most podcasts that I listen to last, which tends to be a bummer if it’s the stuff that I really enjoy.

Mike [07:10]: If it’s coming out every week, that’s still like 50 episodes.

Rob [07:13]: That’s true.

Mike [07:14]: If you’re talking a half hour episode, that’s still 25 hours worth of content.

Rob [07:18]: Right.

Mike [07:19]: It’s surprising but it’s not. I mean I kind of lose a sense of time after a while, so I don’t know, I think it’s the kids eating away my brain.

Rob [07:26]: Sure, indeed. And so this time, I wanted to narrow it down to a tighter list of 20. There are several podcasts that I do listen to, obviously there’s another 27 that aren’t on this list and there are shows like the ‘Daily Tech News Show’ with Tom Merritt that I really enjoy. Tim Ferriss Show is pretty good. He interviews folks. I really like 99% invisible and Planet Money, even Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History. But, since those aren’t super startup specific and I don’t necessarily think it’s going to help you expand your mind or push you forward in your startup, we left them off for today, but I did want to give them kind of an honorable mention.

Mike [08:02]: So I have a question for you here. Because you said you have 47 podcasts that you are subscribed to, I’m subscribed to 21 and I cannot keep up with them, so I think we should talk about this for a couple of minutes. How is it that you are able to go through those and what’s your process for filtering some of these out? We will talk about this for a second and I’ll let you know what I do, but I want to hear how you do that.

Rob [08:24]: Sure. So there’s a couple of things that I do. One, I listen everything on 1-1/ 2 speed, sometimes 2 speed but most often 1-1/2 so I can burn through a 30-minute show in 20 minutes. So twice a week, I have a 15-minute drive to my office, where I also drop my son off at his school, and I can take care of a couple of podcasts during that time because also I typically skip intros. I typically and before the outro starts, so you might get another minute or two off of the podcast. I also filter fairly heavily where if I see an episode come up that is about something that I’m not doing right now, I will delete it. There’s a lot of interview shows that interview folks maybe about social media or Facebook ads or how to do something on Instagram or how to do something on YouTube. And since we are not doing YouTube ads right now, I just won’t listen to that episode. And the one other thing I do is, let’s say I’m going to go travel, from the time that I step in my car and leave my house, I have an earbud in. So I drive to the airport with an earbud in. I get out, I check in, I go through security, all with an earbud in. I wait and I get on the plane, and on the plane, maybe I’ll watch a movie, but if I’m going to try to sleep, typically I’ll listen to podcast. So there is like hours on both ends of a flight as an example. I can churn through 30 podcast episodes as long as I delete some, I’ll skip a few or I’llskip around, that kind of stuff. I also have an earbud in when I’m making breakfast in the morning. I have one when I’m making dinner in the evening, when I’m doing dishes, when I’m out doing yard work, when I’m taking out the trash. Like most of my off time, when I’m not with my kids and when I’m kind of doing manual tasks. Even if it’s like five minutes of manual tasks, I can crank through stuff. So that’s kind of my process. How about you?

Mike [10:14]: I don’t do it nearly to that extent. Just to be clear on this, do you have one earbud in or two?

Rob [10:19]: One.

Mike [10:21]: Okay. So you’re kind of half listening to the episode and you are also kind of watching what’s going on around you, right?

Rob [10:28]: Yeah. Well, I’m fully listening to the episode. Just because it’s in one ear, I can fully hear it, but I have the other one in case some kids start screaming in the other room that I can hear them. But I’m not listening while I’m talking to my kids or while I’m watching TV. I’m not multitasking in that respect. I’m multitasking the podcast with doing the dishes which, since it so manual, it’s not like it’s taking any mental energy.

Mike [10:50]: Got it. I kind of get that. We have a dishwasher, so I don’t really bother with that kind of stuff.

Rob [10:55]: We do too, I just mean like cleaning up or clearing the table, wiping, you know. I mean it’s 10 minutes to kind of get everything clear and there are certain things we hand wash because we have really nice – [crosstalk]

Mike [11:03]: – So you’re exaggerating the level of dishes that you do it’s what you’re saying.

Rob [11:06]: Yeah, exactly. I always do that. Don’t you do that? Don’t you tell your wife you do an hour of dishes a night?

Mike [11:10]: No. I cannot get away with that. Yeah, I use Cast so I get the ability to listen to podcasts at a higher speed and you can set it at these in between stages, so it’s like 1.5 or 1.7 or 1.8 speed. Some podcasts I can listen to at, close to 2.0 or even some of them a little bit over, and then there’s other ones I have to do it like 1.6 or 1.7. It’s kind of depends on which podcast. But other than that, I just listen in the car when I’m travelling different places but I try to avoid when I’m sitting down at my desk and doing work. But other than that, I really don’t get too many opportunities except when I’m mowing the lawn or something like that or weed whacking out on the back hill. Those are the times when I get to do that.

Rob [11:51]: Sure. Yeah. I never listen when I’m working because I cannot, because then you background it, right? You’re not actually listening to it.

Mike [11:57]: Right.

Rob [11:57]: I wouldn’t do that.

Mike [11:58]: Got it.

Rob [11:59]: The other thing to keep in mind is, although I have 47 of them, many of them are, I think there is only one that’s once a day, there is a handful that are once a week, and then there is a bunch that are like once a month. I mean that just kind of naturally happens, so they are not necessarily things that are spitting out episodes all the time.

Mike [12:17]: Yeah. See what I did is I setup a couple of different what are called episode filters inside of my podcast app and one of them is my top podcast. So anything that I will listen to just about every single episode, goes in there and then everything else goes all into the unplayed area, where if I get a chance to listen to it, I will. And then there are certain podcasts where I will basically just make an arbitrary decision that says, “If this gets to have a queue of more than 10, just start deleting old episodes,” because if I haven’t gotten to it, then I’m probably not going to at any time in the near future, and at that point, it becomes a list of things for me to do, and I just don’t want to do that. I don’t need more things to do, so just get rid of it.

Rob [13:00]: I think that’s a nice filtering scheme, that’s actually really good.

Mike [13:03]: So it seems to work for me, I mean at one point. Before I did that, I had, it was like 200 different podcast episodes and it wasn’t working for me.

Rob [13:11]: Yeah. Once you get to that point, it’s ridiculous. You’re just not keeping up. It’s like your having 50 articles in your read later queue. It’s like you’re never going to get to those. You’re just creating work for yourself.

Mike [13:20]: Yeah.

Rob [13:20]: Cool. So let’s dive into these. So we have our classifications of tactical, motivational, entertainment and exposure and then I also have categories of bootstrapping, mastermind, startup interview, that kind of stuff. The first podcast, and this is in alphabetical order within the categories, so it’s in no particular order. The first one is Bootstrapped Web, it’s with Jordan Gal and Brian Castle and we classify this one as motivational and tactical. The podcast started out with just Brian and he later brought Jordan on and that’s when I think they really hit their stride. It has a similar format to ours, they do some updates on products, they do interviews every now and then, and they often have like tactical things that they are sharing about what they are doing. So I’m a fan. I’ve been listening to this for quite some time.

Mike [14:02]: The next one on the list is Bootstrapped with Kids and this is with Scott Yewell and Brecht Palombo, and Brecht is travelling the country right now in air-stream, I believe it is, I know he’ll like the shout-out for that.

Rob [14:15]: His trailer.

Mike [14:17]: Yeah. Well, however you want to put it, but he is basically travelling the country and Scott has recently acquired, I don’t know how recently is recently, but he acquired Blackfin Media, which is a web development firm. So the two of them talk about how they are bootstrapping their businesses and running it with kids and a lot of the different business challenges that they come across. And some of it, I don’t know, I think I’d throw a little bit more entertainment into this one as well, because they are pretty entertaining to listen to. But you get a lot of motivation and a few tactics here and there in the podcast.

Rob [14:47]: Next one, I actually just started listening to about a week ago, it’s called Founder’s Journey and it’s by Josh Pigford of Baremetrics, and it’s essentially Josh talking through the blog post that he releases on the Baremetrics blog. I typically do not like single person podcasts, but this one has been an exception. He does a pretty good job of keeping the episode short and since he is pretty funny and entertaining to talk to, the podcast just kind of feels like you are hanging out with him. And what I like is that I don’t tend to read blogs very much any more and I feel like I do miss out on some good information especially the Baremetrics blog where Josh blogs some solid stuff there. And so it’s my way of being able to consume his content via audio.

Mike [15:28]: The next one on the list is Product People and that one is run by Justin Jackson and you can find that over at productpeople.tv. And this one, I don’t want to say it’s fallen off the wagon or anything, but it definitely comes out a lot less frequently than it has in the past. So last year, I think it was going pretty strong and Justin has kind of shifted his focus a little bit over into some other things that he has been working on this year. So building launch.net I believe is the website where he is doing a lot of his work now. But Product People came out with another episode last month and it looks like he might be doing some more stuff with it, but I’m not really sure. It is a pretty solid podcast and then he has a lot of different guests on there talking about various things, talks about the different things that he is working. I like Justin’s take on a lot of things because he has much more the mind of an internet marketer than he does a developer, so he has a lot of insights and good case studies and things like that that most developers are probably not going to see and Justin is able to put them out there as things that people can try, and present them in a way developers don’t see them as slimy or skivvy.

Rob [16:29]: I should take this time to point out that there are some podcasts that I didn’t put on this list because they are so infrequent. I mean there are some solid podcasts, but if they come out every two months, I didn’t really feel like it was applicable to this list. And Product People, I think just made the cut on that because you’re right, he has put out one about every month for a little while. I think if he drifts off, I would probably remove it from this list if we revise, but if he keeps going, he can stay on this list. The other thing I wanted to say, and I meant to say this at the beginning is, the reason that I do listen to so many podcasts is because I need new stimulation and new ideas for all of the stuff that I’m doing. It’s both for the marketing that I’m doing on all of my apps and it’s for the content that I create. Now I have ‘Startups For The Rest Of Us’ with you, I’m writing talks, I’m working on revising my book, and I have the ZenFounder podcast. And in order to be able to put out new stuff and new thoughts, I have to constantly have this incoming exposure to new ideas and it really helps me be able to create content that isn’t redundant and isn’t kind of stuck in the mud. I find it when I don’t consume new media for a long time, my thought patterns become the same thing and I’m saying the same thing over and over. So I just wanted to throw that in here because I forgot to put it at the beginning. Next podcast is Rogue Startups, it’s Dave Rodenbaugh and Craig Hewitt, I have classified this under motivational and tactical, and it’s also similar format to ‘Startups For The Rest Of Us’. It’s two guys chatting about their projects and doing an interview here and there and being fairly tactical along the way.

Mike [18:01]: It seems odd to mention our own startup in here but it is in alphabetical order, so ‘Startups For The Rest Of Us’ is next on the list and hopefully you’ve been with us for a while but we’ve gone past five years at this point. So I don’t know whether that makes us old timers or just experts on this particular arena but I lean more towards old timers, I think.

Rob [18:17]: Indeed. Speaking of old timers, Tropical MBA podcast, it’s been around I think maybe a little longer than ours.

Mike [18:24]: I think so.

Rob [18:25]: Yeah.

Mike [18:26]: I think they’ve been around just as long if not longer, because it used to be called something else.

Rob [18:30]: Lifestyle Business podcast.

Mike [18:31]: Lifestyle Business podcast, yep.

Rob [18:33]: And then they merged with Tropical Talk radio, they had two podcasts. What I like about Dan and Ian, the hosts here is that they are all about bootstrapping like us but it’s not necessarily limited to software. And so they have folks in their audience who talk about info products and e-commerce and prioritize consulting and all kinds of stuff. And their hook, what brings everybody together is being a digital nomad, right, so it’s getting location independence and being able to travel the world. So there is a nice mix of new thoughts and experiences on that podcast. I’ve been a fan for a long time.

Mike [19:06]: And the last one in our bootstrapping category is ZenFounder, and this is one that you run with your wife, Sherry, and I listen to this, and it’s funny because I hear a lot of people who are not necessarily in the technology space that are listening to ZenFounder as well. My wife listens to it for example and a couple of her friends that she knows listens to it as well. It’s interesting to see that it kind of goes beyond just the founder’s aspect, it is also kind of people who are related in some way to founders or who relate to them in some ways, so spouses, significant others, things like that. And I like listening to this podcast because it definitely gives you different perspective on the things that are going on and making sure that you’re staying mentally healthy while you are working on all the different things and making sure that you’re giving other people in your life the things that they need to thrive is definitely helpful. Because it gives you that outside perspective that, if you’re so focused on your own activities, you might not necessarily think about and it’s important to keep those people involved and keep them happy as well as yourself.

Rob [20:07]: Yeah. That’s been a pleasant surprise. We find that a lot of founders are listening to it with their spouse. There are several reviews and comments in iTunes that say, “This is the only podcast I listen to. I’m the wife of a founder. I’m a the wife of an aspiring founder and hear my thoughts.” That was kind of cool. We also keep hearing the comment, “It’s good to hear that there are other people out there are going through the same stuff that we are.” It’s like no one has been talking about this specific topic, this startup family in life, kind of putting it all in perspective. For our next category, we have what I’ve called mastermind podcasts, and these are basically podcasts that allow you to peer in on a couple of people bootstrapping something. And again in alphabetical order, the first one is called Entreprogrammers and there are typically four or five folks in this one, so you might need to listen to it a few times to get your bearings. It’s a long podcast. It’s about two hours per episode and it comes out every week or so. So it’s one that you either committed to or you’re not, but definitely I want to mention it because it’s in my podcast list, but I’ve kind of classified it under M, which is motivational. And the other two are Nights and Weekends, which is Craig Hewitt and Ken Wallace and they are both Founder café members and there is Zero to Scale with Greg Hickman and Justin McGill. Zero to Scale, I just started listening to three or four episodes ago and it’s solid. It’s polished, it’s well put together, fairly short episodes. They’ve interviewed some pretty cool people. Definitely recommended. And then Nights and Weekends, I enjoy being able to peer in on what Craig and Ken Wallace are doing. Ken Wallace is doing MastermindJam, which you’ve mentioned here several times and Craig is doing Podcast Motor, which is a productised service, we’ve also mentioned. So these are neat if you want to travel through journey with someone else. There are definitely more motivational. There is a little bit of tactics thrown in but it’s kind of hearing what someone else is trying and what’s working and hearing what’s going on in their mind. I think it’s that whole thing of, there is someone else out there doing what I’m doing and it’s nice to hear that.

Mike [22:05]: So the next category is startup interviews, and I think the one that should probably be at the top of this list is Mixergy just because it’s been so prolific in interviewing founders and people who are in startups or are building their own businesses, and Andrew Warner spoke at the first MicroConf, and his talk was basically about all the different interviews that he had run through to that point. And obviously, this is four or five years later, and he is still going strong and he has got a massive community that he has put together mainly because of the fact that he has been interviewing all of these founders and founders are listening in to hear stories of other founders and what they are going through and how they overcame different challenges. So some of the different interviews that Andrew has done, they are really just fascinating because he doesn’t pull any punches. He really just dives straight into the things that people want to hear about, and he is not going to shy away from questions that other people wouldn’t ask.

Rob [22:54]: Next one is called the Rocketship. And I put this under motivational and tactical. What I like about the Rocketship is that it’s an interview podcast with three hosts and they keep it very short. It’s between 20 and 25 minutes, so they typically tackle a single topic. They have short intro, then they interview something about an area of expertise for them, so this one has definitely been in my podcast feed for the last year or two.

Mike [23:19]: Next we have Seth Godin’s Startup School, and this is another one I think that, we made sure that we put it on the list partially because it’s so good. The fact is that when Seth put this out there, it was intended to be something that ran through a series of episodes and then stop. So it wasn’t as if they decided to run a bunch of episodes and then got bored or weren’t sure what to do with it. It was intended to end at some point. But if you go through and listen to the startup school podcast, it is extremely good, and Seth has some extremely insightful things that he says, talking to different founders who are going through the startup school and brings out, I’d say, some pretty brilliant points along the way. So it’s definitely worth listening to, probably at less than 1-1/2 speed because you are probably going to want to take a lot of notes when you’re going through it.

Rob [24:03]: Our next one is called StartUp, it’s by Alex Blumberg who used to work for This American Life and then also worked on Planet Money. I like this podcast purely for entertainment, I classified it under entertainment. What I don’t like about it is it’s only presenting the use case of raising a bunch of funding, right, it’s the same funding meme that we hear everywhere else but it’s so exquisitely produced and the stories are amazing. The first season of StartUp, followed Alex as he started up is podcasting company called Gimlet. The second season follows a Y Combinator company that raise funding to start essentially a dating mobile app/website, and it’s just entertaining every time. So I recommend it if you want to kind of hear inside a funded startup trying to get off the ground. If that doesn’t particularly appeal to you, then you may want to skip this one.

Mike [24:51]: And rounding up this list is This Week in Startups by Jason Calacanis, and I think this one is interesting partially because it’s been on for so long but also because Jason has a knack for getting in front of founders or getting founders on the show who you might not have heard of or you have heard of and you want to hear more about them. So generally, he is able to get in front of some pretty famous people. I’ve heard, for example, Tim Ferriss has been on there before and just loads of other founders from various companies. And because he funds a bunch of different companies, he works in the VC area, this might not necessarily be appealing to you just because many of the people that he talks to are venture funded or angel funded. So if you’re looking for actionable bootstrap tips you are probably not going to find them nearly as much. But if you’re looking for, not necessarily the next big idea, but things where you can look ahead out to people for inspiration about how do you grow a company and get it extremely large. He is talking to the founders who are doing it today.

Rob [25:49]: I’ve become a fan of This Week in Startups. When I first listen to it, I thought Jason was a little over bearing and a little annoying, but pretty quickly I realize that the guy is super smart and he is committed to being a journalist in the space where few other people are willing to say and do the things he is. So I’ve come to like his interviewing style and really respect him as a startup journalist and as a startup founder now. He has founded several media startups, he has been kicked in the teeth a few times and he is the first one to say that and I appreciate kind of his honest appraisal of situations whether it’s his own situation or of external things like that Facebook or Google are doing. He doesn’t hold back and I appreciate that as kind of a fresh voice in the space. I use this more to stay up-to-date on startup news and also some tech news and to hear other folks bandy this stuff about. But it’s like you said you’re not going to pick up tactics to help you grow your startup from here. Next category is on-line marketing, and what’s interesting is, a couple of years ago this one had six or eight podcasts in it, it only has two now. A lot of those have shut down or I’ve stopped listening to them. Really the only two podcasts that I have in on-line marketing are The Art of Paid Traffic, which is ultra tactical, and ConversionCast, which is LeadPages podcast, it’s also ultra tactical. And if you want some tactical in-depth looks at how to market a startup, not even a startup, just how to do online marketing well, these are the only two podcasts I listen to really in this genre any more.

Mike [27:19]: I started listening to ConversionCast a while back, and then I stopped because it seemed like all they had on there was this fascinating story of somebody who did something that was incredibly great and was an overnight success. Well at least it made it seem that way. It didn’t feel like it gave enough details about how those journeys came about to make it useful.

Rob [27:41]: I can see that. I haven’t listened to an episode in a week or two because they come up and they don’t seem interesting or it doesn’t seem like something I’m going to apply, I tent to skip on them, that’s how I do tactical podcasts. Again, if I’m not going to run Facebook ads next week or I’m not going to run YouTube retargeting then I’ll kind of file it away and say, “When I do, I’m going to come back and listen.” But I agree with you, it’s a tough balance when you’re being so ultra tactical and I think that’s one of the reasons that we try to not be so ultra tactical on this podcast because there is no story behind, often it doesn’t resonate with people on a personal level, and if they are not using it right now, then it’s not that interesting. And it also goes stale a few months down the road because tactics tend to change pretty frequently. And then finally we have business paradigms and there’s only two podcasts in this area, and these are both categorized as exposure podcasts, so it’s kind of exposing you to do business paradigms and new thought processes. The first one is a16z, it’s the Andreessen Horowitz podcast, and I have a kind of mixed relationship with this one. I listen to maybe every second or third episode. I find it captivating to hear really smart people, especially people who are betting hundreds of millions of dollars on technology and they are talking about different spaces about mobile, about bitcoin or about SaaS, and that kind of stuff. So I like to hear their thoughts on it. It is very high level and it’s all about venture funded stuff. The other one is Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders, and these are lecturers, folks who come back to Stanford University, typically Stanford alum who are talking in a business class to Stanford students. And this one, similar, I’ll listen to every maybe third or fourth episode. It’s a little longer. I don’t have to make it through the entire episode, but I do find that this at least keeps it on my radar of, “what are people talking about? What are people thinking about?” It’s interesting smart people who are moving money around and kind of doing things in this technology space. This is how I keep my pulse on that without being too involved or trying to reinvent your voice and end mashable every day.

Mike [29:36]: One podcast that is not on this list is The Kalzumeus Podcast and that’s put together by Patrick McKenzie and Keith Perhac. And I’m not sure exactly where I would put this under. I think that it would probably be under bootstrapping. I like listening to the podcast. Every single time that there is a podcast episode out I’ll listen to it, but it comes out very infrequently. I think that’s probably the only bad thing I could possibly say about the podcast is that I wish there was more of it.

Rob [30:00]: And that’s the only reason I didn’t include it on this list because it comes out every few months I think. I had several like that that I enjoy when they come out but I wanted to give recommendations since I only had 20, I wanted to give recommendations of more recurring podcasts. If you have a podcast that you think should be added to this list, come to startupsfortherestofus.com, look for episode 240 and add it in the comments. If you have a question for us, you can call our voice-mail number at 888-801-9690 or e-mail us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We‘re Out of Control” by Moot, used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening, and we‘ll see you next time.

Episode 240 | Podcasts for Startup Founders

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