[00:00:05] Hello. Welcome to Rogue Startups. I'm your host, Craig Hewitt, here. Each episode I'm going to be sharing a nugget and a piece of wisdom that I'm learning from growing my business Castos from seven to eight figures and hopefully beyond. You know, business is tough. There's no easy button to push to take all the right answers and the shortcut to guaranteed success. But I truly believe that the collective wisdom we have from this tech community, we really can do better and easier than we could know. I'm basing a lot of this on an amazing amount of help and feedback I've gotten from other podcasts and other founders and other YouTube channels. And this is my attempt to give back a little bit to the community to help you grow your business more sanely, to a higher level, more profitably, to where you're having a better experience in this journey. I sincerely hope you like the new format here. You want to connect with me? Head over to Twitter. I'm at the Craig Hewitt and for Show Notes for this and every episode. Roguestarups.com, let me know what you think.
[00:01:00] Hey there. Welcome back to Rogue startups. I'm Craig Hewitt, your host. I first of all, am terribly sorry for the huge delay between last episode and now all on me, all my faults and all, frankly, because I didn't want to record this episode. I'll tell you, there is nothing harder in content creation than staring into this camera and talking to this microphone by myself.
[00:01:24] Dave and I had this podcast running for 280 episodes. I think in large part because of the energy that we were able to bounce off each other and kind of go back and forth on. And while I have about half the episodes here are going to be interviews, the rest are just going to be me talking. And I knew that that was really hard. And turns out over the last three weeks, I've been procrastinating putting recording this off because it's so hard.
[00:01:50] I think it's so hard one, because it's just hard, right? Talking just by myself into this microphone and into this camera is really intimidating because there's no feedback right? When you're talking, even on something like Zoom or Squadcast or Riverside, there's another person there that's nodding their head or you just hear what they're saying and it's going back and forth, me talking into this. I don't really know what's going on, whether this is working or not. Even though I've gotten people reaching out to me on social media and email saying, craig, I really enjoy the reboot of the podcast and the new format. Keep it going.
[00:02:26] It's just really hard sometimes to know, like, okay, I can turn this on and maybe not have a perfect idea of what I'm going to say, not have perfectly scripted kind of organization to the content and maybe not even know what the heck I'm going to talk about. Which is exactly why I turned the camera on today. I was just motivated and encouraged by a conversation I had as a guest on another show. And I was like, fuck it, man. I'm going to turn this on and I'm going to talk, and I'm just going to tell you what's been going on in my world for the last kind of three weeks and the stuff I've been learning, because that's what the show is all about. And I'm sure it's going to suck in parts, and I'm sure it's going to be okay in parts. And I hope that you enjoy that because I think that's why folks listen to the show is because they just want to hear about the stuff that's going on in my business life. And so here you go. And here you go. And I can promise that I will do this on a more regular basis because I've kind of just taken some pressure off of myself to know that this medium, this kind of solo monologue thing is really hard. But that the reason I want to do them is because I have shit I want to say. And I want to say it just me. I don't want to say it. Weaving this narrative into an interview somehow and creatively coming up with a way to express what I want to get across. But I just want to say it, and I want to say it here plainly. And so here it goes. So to be honest, it's not been a great few weeks. And I think that's part of why I didn't want to record an episode. Because when I have good shit to talk about, I want to talk about all the time. And when business is growing and we're hiring and all this kind of stuff is happening, it's really easy to talk and boast about how good we are. I think I talked about this a couple of episodes ago about how we all talk about the good stuff that's happening in our lives and our work lives, and we don't talk about the bad stuff. And so I'm as guilty as anyone else in that, that I didn't record an episode for three weeks because I didn't have a lot of great shit to talk about. And that's lame, right? And that's me being disingenuous. And so I'm sorry, but I'm going to talk about what's been going on and some things I've learned, maybe to turn the not so great into learning lessons so you can avoid those same kind of pitfalls. The first one is with our Castos production service. We were going gangbusters for the early summer, so May, and into June, we were closing several new customers a month and really looking at getting into this concept that we were selling, which is not just like a podcast editing service, but what I consider a media brand. I think about Castos as a pretty good media brand, right? We have a YouTube channel. We have several podcasts under a network even, that we call Castos originals. We have social media, we have website, we have email, all this kind of stuff. We touch all the boxes, right? Tick all the boxes. There are other personal brands, right? You think about someone like Alex Hormosi or whoever, right? These are media brands. So a media brand can be a company or it can be a Is. I was like, hey, this is what we need to sell. Not a podcast editing service, because that's the what you do. I want to sell, like the dream outcome way over here. And if you're watching on YouTube, my right hand is way up here off the screen. Not just the kind of input that we give, but the result that we have for a customer in creating a media brand for their company or for them as a person.
[00:05:43] So worked with a copywriter, love the copywriter, really good copy, launched the page and fucking crickets, right? Went from a handful of booked calls a week to zero and went from closing a couple of customers a month to not closing any customers for the last like two months.
[00:06:01] Gave this a good amount of time to kind of marinate. We split, tested a little bit, and I think what ended up happening and the lesson I'm taking away from this is we were too far ahead of where customers were thinking because somebody would come to our page, probably because they were searching podcast editing service. And we rank pretty well and we're in a bunch of listicles around that. And they wanted podcast editing service. And then they get on this page that's talking about media brand and YouTube and funnels and stuff, and they're like, the fuck. Just like I think there was a misalignment of intent between what they searched for and they landed on a page. And they're like, none of the stuff that I want is represented on this page, so I'm going to bounce. Even though the page was really good, really good copy for what I want to sell. But it wasn't the people that we were getting on the page. And so I think it's just a lesson, like really crappy lesson that our growth there kind of slowed because we created this misalignment of intent and traffic and people in the house, as you might say, to the thing that we're selling. So even though arguably the page was a way better page, way better copy, really beautiful, ripped it out, reverted it back to the old one, and are getting opportunities and schedule calls and contacts and stuff like that now. So I think just a kind of lesson for me that what you want to sell may not be what you're getting people visiting your site about right now, and you want to make sure those are aligned. That's the lesson that I learned here. So while the new version of our page was in all accounts, like way better. It performed poorer because the people that were getting to come in there were not expecting that and they got there and they were probably like, the fuck, this is not what I want. So that's kind of one lesson. And the other lesson is kind of more around the hosting side of our business at Castus, which is we have spent a lot of our marketing energy on content marketing and I'll use the umbrella of on site written SEO inbound marketing content as the definition for this for now, for a long time, right? All the way back to the podcast motor days. And now Castos like writing content that has high search intent for ideally problems that podcasters have and best how we as the software tool can solve it. Right? That's the absolute best super bottom of funnel and super high buyer intent. And I think we just have done that. That's just kind of where I am. It's like there's only so much that you can write about on a topic before. The stuff that you write about has less impact on the business. So I'll give a specific, for example and then you can kind of translate this into your world maybe. We're a podcast hosting platform so we write about things like how you can get your podcast on YouTube. Our software does that. People that get there say, oh cool, Castos can help me get my podcast on YouTube. Great, I'm going to sign up. Same for Spotify, right? Castos helps you automatically connect your podcast to Spotify if you're just starting a podcast, you know, Spotify now is the biggest listening platform out there. Cool, great.
[00:09:20] We've written all those, right? And a lot of those rank really well because we've spent a lot of time and energy on them. At this point we're kind of hmm there's not a lot of other opportunities for us to write really bottom of funnel, really high buyer intent pieces. So we're kind of saying like, okay, we can go like one concentric circle out from there and maybe talk about YouTube. For example, best video setup for YouTube, best light setup for YouTube, best thumbnail design, best practices for YouTube because our customers probably benefit from that because everyone should be doing their podcast on YouTube. Please shake your head right now. If you're a podcaster, your podcast has to be on YouTube. If you don't, then just stop doing a podcast. There's no reason to do it. So a lot of our customers believe that too. And so we write stuff about YouTube. But we're not a YouTube tool and there's no tool for YouTube really. It's just fucking do it and do a really good job. YouTube is the tool and the platform and the hosting and the distribution, the monetization. That's why it's so great.
[00:10:20] But that's just an example. It's like we have talked about everything we want to talk about with content marketing that's really highly impactful and highly practical. And so we had a decision. It's like, hey, do we go way outside that now and start talking about ancillary stuff that maybe doesn't apply so much just to get traffic, but probably not much of it's going to convert? Or do we say why are we going to roll up our sleeves and kind of like find a whole new customer acquisition motion? Hey, it's Craig here. While I love podcasting and long form conversations like this, also really love writing and really love email newsletters. I have a newsletter called Founder Insights where every Saturday morning I share something I'm learning in my business that I think could help you grow your business, sustainably insanely and profitably as you go along this journey. If you're interested, head over to Craighewitt Me join to get Founder Insights, my newsletter, along with your cup of coffee this Saturday morning. See you there.
[00:11:19] And the answer is, we pretty much are doing that. We're pretty much saying we for the moment, have kind of done what we can in SEO. We're still writing more content. We're still doing a lot of guest posting and link building and things like that. But we're not like investing new energy into this to develop this as a medium.
[00:11:40] So that leaves like, okay, to increase the number of new trials that we get, we have to do something else. And what is that? And to be honest, this is a question I've been grappling with for probably a year.
[00:11:55] And that's really embarrassing to say because I should be smart enough and have the conviction enough to be like, fucking just like, let's go do this thing. Let's go super hard after paid ads. Let's go super hard after partnerships and affiliates. Let's go super hard after integrations. And I think the reality is, and I'm just going to make excuses here because I still don't have an answer really is all of those things probably can work, right? All of those things probably can be the thing to take us and double our new trials in the next few months. If I had the guts to say six of my 8 hours a day are focused on this thing and the rest is kind of running the business and managing the team, but I don't have the conviction for that and I'm okay, like admitting that because that's the reality. And that's the kind of show that I hope to have. Here is one where I'm just not fluffing up everything and sharing only the good stuff with you all. But I think this is probably something that a lot of folks run into chatting with some other founder friends the other day and this came up. It's like, okay, we're at this point and we know we need to do more. How do you decide and how do you convince yourself that you have the conviction that this thing that you don't know if it's going to work is the thing.
[00:13:13] And I don't have an answer for that. I think that there's definitely people smarter than me that have figured this out. I think that the few things that are important to me is traction and feedback, right? So the cool thing about something like ads is I start running Facebook or YouTube ads, and I get data today about clicks and impressions and landing page views and things like that. That's good. The bad thing is it then takes time to tweak all of the bajillion knobs in those platforms to get people seeing your stuff and engaging with it and clicking with it in the landing page and the conversion and the it's just that's so hard, as opposed to, like, content. If I was just starting content today, it wouldn't be that hard because you can go and do keyword research or hire someone like Pavel that we worked with forever over at Smashing Copy to do keyword research and create an SEO plan for you. Or Pavel would do that, and you would deliver a document to you to say, go fucking do this for the next six months, and then come back. And you would go do that. But you wouldn't have much feedback because you're not going to get data from Google in terms of search and traffic and trials in a short amount of time if you're starting from scratch. So that wasn't us. We'd been doing content and SEO for a long time, so we kind of have to say, like, okay, we have to pick from one of these other channels to supplement our inbound and content efforts with.
[00:14:38] How do I know what that should be? I talked with Rob Walling on this show, one of our first episodes after kind of the reboot, and he lays out all of them in the SaaS playbook, right?
[00:14:50] Really, really great book, by the way. If you haven't gotten it yet, go check it out. It's on Amazon.
[00:14:56] Yeah. And so it's not a mystery for a product like ours where we're a relatively low price point, self service, SaaS model. Like, things like Outbound don't work. Things like conventions probably don't work. So you're left with, like, ads, partnerships and affiliates integrations. Where are you doing content and SEO?
[00:15:16] Maybe, like, influencers. So you're only left with a few options like that.
[00:15:21] That's just really where I am, to be honest, is like, we're definitely growing, feeling really good about that, but it's never enough. And fortunately, I guess the rest of the business is pretty good. Like, the product, it's amazing. The dev team and product team, we have amazing support. Amazing. We're very fortunate to have extremely low churn in a business in an industry that typically has very high churn. So we're doing something right there. Like, I feel super good about that, but it's kind of like these few things over here are all going well, and then it just makes this thing over here that's not going as well, which is the number of new trials that we get a month has been flat for kind of a long time. And even though we have low churn, we could have some churn. And so those two numbers are not quite canceling each other out, but kind of coming close to where we're just not growing as fast as we want. And so the fact that all this other stuff is going well over here with product and support and retention puts a spotlight so much more so on the things that have room for improvement. And so that's just kind of where I am, is like the very obvious thing is we need more eyeballs on our stuff and more butts and seats and more trials. And I don't have an answer, but that's what I'm trying to figure out. And so in my extremely long hiatus, I just wanted to share with you kind of like what I've been up to, why I hadn't recorded this episode. And the answer is, like, I don't have a lot of great shit to talk about because I'm kind of just in the weeds right now with all of this and trying to develop all of this, frankly.
[00:16:53] So, yeah, that's what's going on with me taking vacation next week, which is going to be super cool. An episode will come out that I interviewed someone a few weeks ago, so Asia Arancio, and it's like, by far one of my favorite interviews of the last year. So definitely stay tuned for the episode with Asia coming out in a couple of weeks. If you don't know her, she is probably one of the top, like two or three marketing minds that I've ever talked to. And we talk a lot about customer surveys and voice of the customer and jobs to be done and things like that, which is not my cup of tea, but she had me drinking the Kool Aid if I have enough Euphemisms in here. But super amazing episode. So definitely stay tuned for that.
[00:17:42] And for me, I promise to record more updates like this because like I talked about, this is just why I wanted to do the format like I'm doing is about half my episodes. I want to go talk to my friends and super interesting people in the SaaS space. And then about half the time I want to talk to you about shit that's going on in my world and hopefully sharing things that I'm doing and learning so that as you go on in your entrepreneurial journey, you can have an easier, better time, more profitable business that grows faster. So I hope this has been helpful in at least talking through what I'm going through so that you can see it and maybe relate and take things that I'm saying and improve on them and implement them in your business. So hope this helpful as always, any super welcome Shoot Me A Message
[email protected].
[00:18:32] I am not really on Twitter these days. You can send me a message there. I am the Craig Hewitt. There LinkedIn's, the place that I'm hanging out most these days. Look me up on LinkedIn and Shoot me a message. Would love to connect.
[00:18:43] Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you next time.
