Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Building a successful SaaS company while navigating the fast changing world of podcasting is no easy feat. In this episode, Craig Hewitt, founder of Kastos, pulls back the curtain on his entrepreneurial journey. From the struggles of being a solo founder to the game changing impact of personal branding. We talk about what it takes to scale a business, generate leads in an AI driven world, and why podcasting is more valuable than ever. If you're looking for real world business lessons and leadership insights, then this is the episode for you.
Craig. Welcome to Cultural Leadership Podcast, mate. How are you going?
[00:00:38] Speaker B: Hey, doing good. Thanks for having me. This is going to be fun.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: It's a pleasure, mate. We have been looking forward to this for a while. You were very accommodating. Had to postpone a couple of weeks back, but it's been a little bit in the making. So you're a fellow. Well, you're been a prolific podcaster for many years. So how about you tell us a little bit about, about who you are, what you're about, a little bit about Castos as well. So let's get under the hood of Craig Hewitt, who is this fellow.
[00:01:03] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's something we could talk about. Like who, who I am and what Castos is are two different things hopefully.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: Right?
[00:01:08] Speaker B: I mean like as entrepreneurs, not, not always, but, but I think that should be the goal. So like maybe we could talk about that. But. So I'm.
[00:01:17] Speaker A: One of the questions I did have down for you as well, that difference between Castos and personal brands. So we're definitely going to unpack a bit of that.
[00:01:23] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So I'm Craig Hewitts. I am the founder of Cast Us. We're a podcast hosting and analytics platform. We are the host of this podcast along with about 60,000 others and we've been doing this about eight years. I'm also a husband, a father to two amazing kids, a dog and a cat. I live in Rhode island in the U.S. i used to live in France for about five years, which I think Brendan is where we met originally when we were living there and we've been living back here in the States for a couple of years.
And yeah, loving, loving the journey with Castos. You know, it's, it's interesting being in a business this long. We've, we've seen a lot, right, of kind of these ebbs and flows of, of just business and the market and interest rates and, and even the popularity of podcasting. I think that's a, maybe an interesting business dynamics to have. What started out as a really trendy thing is now really firmly in the kind of popular media marketing content kind of sphere. I actually think podcasting is just on the uptick of its third big wave right now.
The second of which was kind of during COVID probably. But yeah, that's who I am and what I'm up to right now.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: Yeah, I always, like, actually when I listen to a little bit of US politics is so fascinating at the moment. It doesn't matter where you sit in life. But I really like that Carolyn Levitt and just how she throws it to the media. I love how they're calling it legacy media and then the new media, which is sort of podcast hosts and all that sort of stuff. So they're really distinguishing the two types of medium, aren't they? And it is like you say, I mean, that had podcasts, from what they've reported, had a massive influence in the US Election.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And again, whichever way you go, you can't argue with Trump was direct to the people and Kamala wasn't. And you know, if that won or lost the election, I don't know entirely. But sure enough, that had an impact on it. And then you see from here out, some of the biggest influences in our lives, certainly our kids lives. We were joking. You know, what are your kids doing? Like, my son's on the couch, like, watching. Watching YouTube. Like, as. As parents and as a society, we need to be really aware of the power of independent creators on platforms like podcasts and YouTube and social. So a whole nother thing. But yeah, I mean, you know, if you don't know what your kids are doing on these devices and in these platforms, you should.
And then just as us. Right. As like, what? So here's a question, Brendan. Where do you get your news from?
[00:04:02] Speaker A: My wife, generally.
[00:04:03] Speaker B: Okay, good. That's very healthy, probably.
[00:04:06] Speaker A: Well, you know, do you know what? I've taken the approach for some years of. I got away from the whole standard sort of news reporting and stuff like that, and it's actually quite an efficient process for me. I ask my wife generally, like, what's happening in news, and she gives me a bit of an update, and I can talk to people just at a high level about what might. What might be going on. But where she gets that and probably to the point you're getting to, is very much podcasts. She gets a lot of news from her podcast. Watching or listening?
[00:04:33] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely right. It's. It's like I get a fair amount from social media. I try to have a healthy usage and appreciation for social media. But. But sure enough, like, if you want to get the latest on something, it's on Twitter or LinkedIn or Instagram or something, it comes to YouTube and podcasting later, and then it's, you know, on CNN or BBC or whatever the next day a lot of times. And so that's just like, we are all in a really cool place that it's been democratized this much. Just like you're saying, right? Like, owned new media is. Is a fantastic place for us all to. To be. And then opportunity. And I know we'll talk about, you know, brand in a little bit, but, wow, what an opportunity for this to be 100% available to anyone in the world for almost no money. It's pretty amazing.
[00:05:22] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And look, I know this is a topic that you could, again, you've got massive experience you could talk about for a long time, but actually, what I wanted to talk to you about, what we agree was that it's really focusing about your journey with Castos as the founder. And, you know, there's the trials, tribulations, the support, lack of support, lonely places are founder, all those sorts of things. So we want to get under the hood around that for, you know, for business owners and the primary. Primary audience that we have of cultural leadership. So just tell us a little bit about the starting point of Cast. Like, where did. Where was Casto's birth? This idea. Figment of the imagination that turned into a reality.
[00:05:59] Speaker B: I was talking to a very good friend earlier today about. We catch up every couple months and just chat about business. And we were commenting on how difficult it must be to. For people to start businesses in industries in which they don't have firsthand experience.
And I think, like, I'm sure it applies to you, but, like, I had firsthand experience as a podcaster when I started this business, and that's really where it started. Yes. Like, where did it start? I was in a day job that I didn't like. I was traveling a bunch. My youngest child had just been born. I was traveling. I was missing a lot of their time, you know, growing up. And then, like, the. I was like, okay, this is. This is lame. There has to be a better way than this. And I started what we previously called Podcast Motor, which we now call Castos Productions, which is kind of full service podcast editing and production service, while I had a day job. So it was kind of nights and weekends on Podcast Motor for about two years. Allowed me to quit. My job, went full time. We moved to Europe one of our customers there emailed me one day. It was like, hey, I know you're in the podcasting world, you're looking to get into SaaS. A friend of mine is selling this WordPress plugin called Seriously Simple Podcasting. Know you guys should talk. And so anybody who kind of like doesn't know the WordPress world. WordPress is kind of the biggest website building software in the world, powers like a third of the Internet and has a vast ecosystem of free and paid plugins and themes. Plugins kind of make WordPress do more stuff. Themes kind of make it look nice. And so this guy was selling this free plugin and so we bought it. So we acquired a piece of technology which in hindsight, man, was this probably the single best decision I made in business. Because what we did is we acquired a customer acquisition channel.
And so it's not free, right, because we to this day support it and support the free users there. And we have a bunch of kind of like sunk cost, but, but we also have a really, really great marketing channel that's like built in. So then we built the Castos platform initially as a podcast hosting platform, initially just to interface with WordPress and about like nine months later opened it up to everybody where like you now people use Castos by itself and don't integrate it to their website or whatever. And so about half our customers use WordPress and about half don't. And so that whole journey is right at 10 years right now. So kind of 10 years in the podcasting space, all as a solo founder and for the last eight with Kastos as a non technical founder of a SaaS product, which we can definitely talk about when you talk about playing on hard mode and, and kind of being, being, being lonely but also being kind of exposed in a, in an interesting way where you know, it, it, it's getting outside of that, that sphere of competence. I talked about the very beginning, right. Like if you're gonna go into business, you, you better know the thing that you're going into business about. And like, topically I do, but almost like functionally with software, I'm not a developer. So it's been a massive learning curve to learn how to run a SaaS business.
[00:09:10] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm sure. What was the, maybe the top one or two greatest struggles you had in those early days as a founder of this business? And we'll talk about what that dream might have looked like.
[00:09:22] Speaker B: Yeah, so the biggest challenge by far, that's an easy one, is how to talk to developers. And so developers Listening probably will not like, oh my gosh, I had this boss or this PM or something who couldn't.
[00:09:35] Speaker A: That's amazing.
[00:09:41] Speaker B: But it's the same. It's the same in any business, right? It's like, how do you get the vision that's in a founder's head into a product or service is really what it's about. But with software the idea is like, hey, we're going to build this once and it's just going to be done and it's going to sit there and people are going to use it and love it.
With a service you change it every week or every month and every customer maybe, so you get to iterate on it a lot. But what I found is our very first developer, Jonathan, Jonathan Bosinger, absolutely fantastic dude. Still in really close touch with him to this day.
I would say, hey Jonathan, I want to build this thing. Generally this is what I want it to look like.
He would hear that and he'd go build the thing and he'd come back and be like, hey, this is it, we're ready to go.
And I'd be like, this is not anything near what I meant. Like well you know, this button needs to be over here and this report needs to do this thing. And, and it's not that he's like a bad developer or a bad person or doesn't understand, it's just like I was not communicating in a clear enough way the specifications and the vision that I had. And so like by far, and to this day that is, I think that is the biggest challenge of most SaaS products is we call this customer product feedback loop, right? So like you build a thing and you put it in front of customers and they interact with it and they give feedback to your customer support or success team. How does that group then come back to product and development to fix it, improve it, kill the feature, build another one kind of like it, that solves a different problem.
And early on it's just one person, right, or a person a developer. But now we're eight people.
Like gosh, like eight people is a lot of people to make decisions on what are kind of small nuances. And so that is by far the biggest challenge in SaaS is like how do you confidently and concisely make those decisions with the right data?
[00:11:51] Speaker A: In the hybrid working world, I've seen too many business owners and their businesses suffer because of poor performing employees leading to below average results. If you want to improve your employees performance to deliver consistent results for your business, you have to master One on one meetings. The doors to our Master one on one meetings training program are opening soon. I'll teach you how to improve employee performance and deliver consistent results using one on one meetings. To be one of the first people notified when the doors open, go to leaderbydesign AU waitlist. Don't wait. Sign up now, mate. I feel you're. I've never run a SaaS business like yours, but for one of my sins in corporate life, I spent life as a bit of a business analyst, business improvement. You know, spend a fair bit of time in there, actually. And I was that sort of conduit between the business. What the business sort of that business analysis side conduit between the business and conduit between the developer or the IT team. And I'll tell you what, it was literally one of the hardest roles, but probably one of the most satisfying and the one where I could really start to improve my communication and particularly on that questioning and listening and really getting to the heart of like, what do you mean by this? Because it is another speak when it goes. It's that Chinese Whispers game and it's that when it moves from here to here, it's like vastly different.
[00:13:18] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, how many customers want this thing?
How much do they want it? Are they willing to pay more money for it?
Are they the right kind of customers? Right, because we got a whole bunch of customers, we love them all, but we have one icp, right? We have one ideal customer profile and ideally, everything we do should be oriented towards them. And then, sure, a whole bunch of other people are going to become our customers, but we really build everything for one person.
Every company should, ideally. So, yeah, super hard.
[00:13:50] Speaker A: Just quickly, what is that ideal customer for Castos nowadays? Because I feel like I'm still with Kastos. Fantastic company. Love what you do, love you as a person.
But I've sort of seen the journey because I've been with you some time, not the whole 10 years. But what does that ideal customer look like now for Kastos?
[00:14:09] Speaker B: It's evolving, you know, it's evolving and I think, I think that's healthy. I think, like, if we, if we still were wanting to attract the same people as, you know, maybe when you got started, that would be weird as a company. Like, I want us to keep reinventing ourselves, to be honest. This is something we talk about a lot and I'm going to answer your question, but like, we talk about it a lot because, like, we. I think we are going through a. A metamorphosis or we should be, you know, pretty soon. And so the decision we have to make is. Is two things. One, we're a podcast hosting who for people who want to make money from their podcast. So ads, subscriptions, donations, commerce, you know, selling stuff with your podcast, private podcasts, subscriptions, all that kind of stuff. The other is kind of where I lean, which is for brands. And that can be a company brand or a personal brand who use podcasting to grow their presence and attract their ideal customers.
And I'll just be honest. We don't know. We don't know. We don't know which one we we want to build for because they're. They're quite different in a lot of ways. The. The things we build, the things we built already, the market size, the pricing, power and ability of those two things all. All kind of have their pluses and minuses. And so currently, what the website says is, you know, kind of like turning listeners into revenue or something like that, which, like, I quite like. I quite like the monetization side of things. The challenge of that is, like, it's really hard to make a lot of money from your podcast. It's very much the 1%.
[00:15:51] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:15:52] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:15:55] Speaker A: I've always treated my podcast as. Or the podcasts I do as a. As a marketing arm. Like, I don't. I don't put sponsorship into various things. It's just like, I put a little bit of money into the podcast. If I get a little bit back, fine. But I do create trust, which is all about podcasting. Like, trust. You build a community that values your input. If they don't, they turn off quickly. And some of those come into the client base, which is awesome. And it is just about adding value to community, I think, which is important. And everyone can do that now and take that on board. But what I'd like to ask, just on that sort of, you know, the ideal customer and, you know, it's always moving and definitely a key thing. What's the. How do you work through challenges like that? Is that as a founder, you just take all those. Those things on yourself? Or do you engage the team now or do you engage all of that team of eight? How does it work?
[00:16:51] Speaker B: Yeah, most of it's just me. Most of it's just me. And I think it's where it has to be, right? It can be advisors, and if you have a board or a coach or a mentor or something like. Like that, that's probably the first place I would look externally, I think inside the company, the Thing that I always try to remember is everybody has their lens through which they see the world, right? And their job is no different.
And so if I go ask this team member, that team member, that team member about this thing, they're going to give me an answer from their perspective, right through their lens. And that could be, you know, I'm very conservative or I'm very liberal, I'm very wealthy or I'm not, I, I crave security or I'm a risk taker, all these things. And so like, I almost think like, yeah, a team of eight small, you probably would never ask much bigger a group than that. That would be like your core leadership in a larger team.
But I think that like asking that question too openly is a recipe to get more data than you know what to do with is, is kind of how I view it. So yeah, I ask, I ask a little bit, but ultimately it's, it's 100% up to me.
[00:18:06] Speaker A: So how do you, how do you get your ideas? Like if you, well actually before going into that point, you know, you've talked a bit about, you know, founders being, it can be a lonely world, sort of running a business. So it sort of feels like to me if you're not, if you're not sort of not necessarily asking the team, but are you, are you putting brick wall around yourself? Are you making it more lonely than what it needs to be?
[00:18:34] Speaker B: I don't know. I guess it's like the short answer. I think I definitely involve the team in a lot of what we do. I had a call with our head of product earlier today just because I wanted to talk through some ads that we were creating and, and like, you know, we didn't really get a lot done on the call other than I felt good talking, talking about stuff and he, you know, very smart guy, gave, gave a few good ideas and kind of helped guide me down the right path just by, you know, being a person to talk to. And I do that a lot with, you know, kind of every functional group of the company.
But this is something that you hear every founder talk about is that it's lonely even, even co founder groups because maybe that's even worse. Like, because then you have a person that you should be able to talk about everything with but you can't quite talk about everything with them because they, they are the source of tension sometimes. Like I've, I've had a co founder in a previous entrepreneurial venture and like, sure enough, like we, we're not still in business. So that ended Right. So I had this super, super, super sensitive thing that I should have been able to talk to David about my, my partner at the time, but. But I couldn't because it was about him. Right. So that's like the most lonely thing.
Yeah, I don't know. I talk. I have a business coach, so. So that's like really important. I talk to my wife quite a bit. I have a pretty large group of founders that I can call up.
But yeah, at the end of the day, it is just you.
And I think that's.
You know, what's interesting is I think that, like, you can view it as good or bad, right. And it is just a trade off. Like, the good of it is it's just me and like Friday I'm gonna go play golf because I can. And I've worked my butt off this week already, but I'm gonna go play golf because it's gonna be 60 degrees here. And that's amazing.
That's the good. And the bad is I gotta deal with stress and I gotta be a little lonely and I gotta know that like, the buck stops with me. So I think, I think the time when it gets lonely and frustrating is if you're working really hard and not seeing results or you don't really know what to do. But. But like, generally if like, you got money in the bank and you're growing and you feel like you have good vision and you feel like the effort you're putting in is worth it, it's pretty good.
[00:21:04] Speaker A: I guess the takeaway for me that I get from that is that again, you're the. Actually Dave Ramsey, who I'm quite a big fan of, actually. And he talks about the only ship that doesn't sail is a partnership. So I'm actually with you there. I'm not a fan of. I've had experiences. Well, I'm not a fan. I think if you can run your own race, but then you've got support networks around you, okay, Your partner. Partners are always good, aren't they, mate? They listen to your frustrations and all that sort of stuff and just hear you out. But then you've got a coach and you've got some other guidance and founder member groups and stuff like that. So I think that's the key thing, isn't it? It doesn't have to be some. There are business owners out there or founders that it is lonely. And I get that. I'm running my own business as well and I've got those support networks in place. But some also put up Those walls where they make it harder than what it needs to be. Like, it doesn't need to be lonely all the time. Yes. Sometimes you do feel isolated. You've got to make some tough decisions and all that sort of stuff. And we will go into that, because I know you've had to make some tough decisions in the growth of Kastos as well, haven't you?
[00:22:02] Speaker B: We have, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely not all sunshine and rainbows. And I think anybody who tells you that is, like, you should. You should cancel them. Because, like, I haven't ever heard of a founder who says, like, oh, yeah, you know, we launched and we raised 10 million bucks and we sold to Google, and it was just great, right? Like, it just. It just never happened.
[00:22:22] Speaker A: A black background and not sunshine and rain.
[00:22:27] Speaker B: Yeah, No, I mean, so. So our story is, you know, we. So we, you know, so we acquired the WordPress plugin called Seriously Simple Podcasting. We launched Castos, we grew. We joined an accelerator program called Tiny Seat, which was great. We got a little bit of money and a lot of mentorship and grew, you know, from there. Then we decided we were going to raise more money, and we did. And it was, like, literally the absolute best time probably in my life to raise money. And so we did. We raised a whole bunch for. For me. We raised 7, $750,000 on top of the money we raised from Tiny Seed. So, like, kind of right, At a million total.
And we're like, cool, we're going to grow. We're going to go B2B. We're going to go enterprise, all this kind of stuff, and it just didn't work out. It didn't work out because, I don't know, I'm not good enough. Like, I think ultimately is, like, right, it's your founder. Like, it's.
Somebody can make it work, probably, right?
[00:23:19] Speaker A: But.
[00:23:20] Speaker B: But I couldn't, and we had to lay folks off, and that's super hard. Talk about lonely, right? Like, that's the worst is calling someone up and saying, you know, hey, I'm sorry, we can give you a month's severance, but that's it, you know? And then they cry and they get mad and all this stuff, and as good as you try to handle it, like, it's just bad.
And that's. That's just like, I never want to do that again.
I never want to do that again. And so a lot of. A lot of what we do now is like, hey, how can we not have that stress on me? Because that's just like, ultra stressful, right? It's like, gosh, I'm about to ruin several people's months at least, you know, including mine. Like, how can we never do that again? And then, like, how can we run the business to where it is? Those things I talked about where, like, it's fun and it's satisfying and I feel like my effort and everyone's effort on the team, like, is meaningful and has impact.
But, yeah, like, it's not always been sunshine and rainbows. I. I actually consider us quite successful. You know, we're going to do, like, we did more than a million dollars the last couple years, like, for a kind of mostly bootstrap SaaS company. That's pretty good, right? We're not.
What is it, one of these, like, AI coding tools, right? We're just not.
But. But, like, for what we do in our market, like, I think we're doing okay.
[00:24:51] Speaker A: Well, I know from my side, as far as using Casto services, and I've used the whole gamut through my journey and even now the relationship you and I have, and you contacted me a little while ago and said, hey, who is that YouTube editor you're using? And I know you're doing some testing with Mervyn now. He's a great guy and he's a bit of a conduit for me just to share things. We catch up every Friday and have a bit of a chat around stuff, and he challenges me on things. I challenge him on things. But I don't use WordPress anymore. I've gone really simple with my business and gone to a sort of full hosting platform. But the plugin is absolutely fantastic. I use that for many, many years. I went right through to your full service when I was just an audio podcast, even when I was a YouTube podcast as well. The audio production team was fantastic. I can't remember the lady's name that ran that, but just the service that you guys provided and the value for money was just absolutely fantastic. So I can definitely speak firsthand. And I'm affiliate of Castos as well. Again, I love the services you guys do and the work you've done, and if anything, the journey that I've seen Kastos have and you. And as we've got to know each other, I've sort of found that inspiring because I'm going through my own journey in a whole different business and it sort of feels like there's just. It's nice to see all these struggles and again, the beauty of you and I say it Again is that you're so open and vulnerable about this stuff. It's just like, well, I don't know, I guess a different founder or a better founder could have done it differently, could have made it happen, but I wasn't good enough to that point. What did you, what was your key one or two learnings in. You never want to put yourself in that position again. And the others that obviously had an influence on their lives, not in a good way. What did you learn from it?
[00:26:33] Speaker B: What did I learn from like kind of the business as a whole or kind of getting through the challenging, getting.
[00:26:37] Speaker A: Through the challenge of, you know, because you had, I think it was Matt, wasn't it, that was one of the guys you brought on or something. So, you know, getting through those challenges. What, what did you say? Well, I've learned from this. I'm not going to, you know, we're not going to drive that. That growth is hard. We're going to, we're going to build sustainably.
[00:26:52] Speaker B: Yeah. I think the biggest thing is we, we, we, we raised some money on a premise of a pretty small sample size. So we had a couple of enterprise customers and we were like, we'll just go get a bunch more of them. Right. Like, but, but what we didn't consider is they came inbound right from you know, based on like content marketing and stuff like that.
And it's the most difficult thing I think in business is lead generation. So finding people who are in your target market who could be your icp, who are in the, you know, it's the time to buy and they have budget and they have somebody to implement all this kind of stuff. And we overestimated our ability to do that.
And so like what I would do different and I think the mistake we made is the premise was, oh, this thing kind of happened to us. We can go do stuff to make it happen to us more. And then that's where we failed is we, you know, we have a great product. I think evidence like we have extremely low churn. We have really high customer lifetime value.
We just couldn't go find a whole bunch more of those customers. And I think that as I like I, I do quite a bit of like mentoring and advising to, to companies now too. It is the biggest, it's the biggest thing people struggle with. And then when they're successful, they figure it out.
The successful ones have figured out. So like that's the result is if you can figure out lead generation business is just not that hard. Right. Like you figure out how to Sell them a thing and then fulfill the thing and keep them around for a while. I'm simplifying, but finding people who can buy your product or service, it's really the most important thing.
And we didn't do that.
And so we kind of overextended ourselves thinking that we were going to be on this path. We're burning quite a bit of money and we grew. Right. But we just didn't grow that fast.
[00:28:55] Speaker A: How much, if any. Look, you're not an egotistical chap, but we all have ego. Right? That's what gets us through. How much of it may have also come down to ego? You know, you've just raised that 750 plus two, you know, about a million bucks and maybe feeling on top of the world and like, okay, let's go and attack the world.
[00:29:10] Speaker B: Sure, yeah, no, totally. I mean, the reason that we raised more money was to grow faster so that I could sell the business and make a whole ton of money.
Yeah, 100%. You know, I don't. There's no, there's no point in lying about that.
And that may still happen. It may just take us longer to get there. But the goal of business is to grow and to make money.
We are lucky in that we empower you and all of our customers to share their voice, which is really, really super cool. But I think any business that's saying that they're just purely altruistic is lying to you. You know, the biz. The point of a business is to grow and it should be right. Because it's. The cool thing about capitalism is like it's set up to reward the people who do that the best. And so, yeah, I was, I was over ambitious. And yeah, that costs a lot of heartache.
[00:30:16] Speaker A: Yeah, I definitely sing it from the same song sheet, mate. If you're not in business to grow, then what the hell are you doing the.
With this journey you've been on? Was there ever a time where I guess in the early stages and then at some stage through this 10 years that it clicked, hold on a minute, I'm running a real business. Did you ever feel like you weren't running a real business and you didn't have the responsibility and then all of a sudden you were. And if that was the case, like, what was it? What made it to you feel like, hold on a minute, I've got to be serious about this. This is a real thing.
[00:30:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I think there were a couple of times. One was so at the very beginning, I wasn't paying Myself, anything. And I think every founder goes through this. You're just like, oh, nights and weekends, I don't need to pay myself. I'm going to go hire people and do all this stuff. And we do that. Some people do that for way too long. That's probably one of the most common things I tell younger companies now is like, hey, man, you got to pay yourself. Because the most important thing to this business is that you show up tomorrow, you know, because, like, without you, this is not a business.
When I was able to pay myself enough for us to live was an enormous milestone because I had saved up a bunch of money before I quit my day job. And we were just burning that for a while, and that was fine. We had enough money. We're quite comfortable. Very lucky there.
But when I was able to pay myself, that was. That was a really big deal. And then. And then the other one was like, we. When we raised money and like, we joined Tiny Seed, that was a huge vote of confidence. And then we raised money and we were over subscribed in our round by, like 50%.
That was. That was a huge vote of confidence.
We. We got really lucky. Lucky.
You know, a little bit of luck, a little bit of skill. Right. It was the. It was the absolute right time. It was in the middle of COVID or just before COVID so the market was amazing. 0% interest rate. Everybody was thinking that everything was going to the moon.
And then things changed.
But, yeah, those two times were pretty special.
[00:32:31] Speaker A: Yeah, you say lucky, and again, you've got to have some skill there. You'd still done the work to put yourself in a position to be able to take that opportunity. Right. There's lots of business owners that aren't doing that. They're not thinking forward, they're not getting their business ready to be able to take those opportunities. So luck, I think luck's more of a figment of imagination most of the time, to be honest.
[00:32:51] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, definitely a bit of both.
[00:32:54] Speaker A: When you started Kastos and you talked about, you know, these are altruistic sort of views that people have, but what was your vision for Castos? You wanted to build this product because of.
[00:33:06] Speaker B: Why?
[00:33:06] Speaker A: Was it just to make a bunch of money and move on?
[00:33:10] Speaker B: No, I think it all first started with kind of a challenge of, I haven't done this before. I think SaaS is a really attractive business model. A lot of the people I look up to had done it, and I was like, I want to try this.
And I think it worked because I took the Opportunity, because it fulfilled that thing we very first talked about, which I knew the market really well. And then I saw, gosh, the. The tools in the market are garbage, right? Like, anybody who's been podcasting for this long knows that when they started, your options were not good. Your options are a lot better today. And Castos, hopefully is. Is one of those. But, like, man, when we got started, it was really bad. And so a bit of it was that kind of maker thing, which is like, okay, there's the business opportunity, and in podcasting in general, the only people that make money are the hosts. Now, Riverside is about the only other player I know of that makes any money in the podcasting space. So I kind of was, like, cool in podcasting at the time because we were still using Skype to record podcasts at the time. I don't know if you.
It was terrible.
[00:34:23] Speaker A: Is Skype even still around?
[00:34:25] Speaker B: I heard they were shutting it down, like, at the end of this month.
[00:34:28] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
Long live Scott.
[00:34:32] Speaker B: Right? I mean, but. But talk about transformative, right? Like, enabled global communication for a lot of us at the very beginning, it.
[00:34:40] Speaker A: Was definitely the starting point.
[00:34:42] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Now it's slack and teams and Riverside and everything. But, yeah, we kind of looked at it and was like, gosh, in this market, this is the only real opportunity at the time, because even the tech for this, like, Riverside didn't exist. I don't think.
So. There was, like, the product opportunity, there was the business opportunity, and there was that kind of special thing. Like, the special thing was us acquiring the WordPress plugin because, like, just to start from scratch, with no special advantage, we wouldn't have been able to do what we did.
[00:35:15] Speaker A: Yeah, fair point, mate. You've. You've actually alluded to it a number of times during this conversation, but again, I know it's something you're really passionate about, but as you've. As you've grown this team, you've. You've mentioned to me and you've talked generally around just the ability to. Needing to level up. You know, you've. You've engaged the team, you've been able to delegate certain things, bring them up to speed and all. All of that stuff. So what do you. What does Craig do to. To level himself up as this ongoing improving founder that you are.
[00:35:44] Speaker B: Yeah, so. So just for kind of to put it in context, the. To me, like the job of a founder, because you start and you just literally do everything right. You do everything. You do customer support and sales and marketing and ops and, you know, Whatever product, and then you make a little bit of money and you should hire somebody to do a thing. And that's either the thing you don't like doing or the thing you're not good at. Ideally both. Right? And so, like, to me, the goal of a founder should be just to keep doing that over and over and over and over and over and over to where at some point you're like, gosh, all the, like, six functional areas of the company are taken care of. I am now, like, the leader, and, like, I control the vision, I make sure there's money in the bank. I, you know, all this kind of stuff.
The challenge, the practical challenge is every time you do that, you are now spending $60,000 on this person over here to free up your time. So now you have to be $60,000 more effective in the business.
Ideally more. And. And that's really intimidating, man. Like, that. That's super intimidating. And I think AI is doing a very, like, on a global basis is going to do a very similar thing, right? It's going to take and replace the bottom third of the workforce. Right. And all of us are gonna have to figure out how to make ourselves 30% more effective and productive.
And I think that, like, talk about, like, loneliness and, like, frustration. Like, some days in my career, not today, fortunately, but some days I've wanted to be Homer Simpson and come in and push the red button 20 times. Like, I just want to do a simple freaking thing. I don't want to figure out this new, you know, paid acquisition funnel and lead magnets and all, you know, like, all that stuff is really hard. But where I am in the business at least, like, okay, we have product, we have support, we have development, we have success, we have our entire productions taken care of. I don't do anything on any of those. And so, like, sales and marketing is up to me, which is super hard, and it's never done. And so, like, that, that's really where, like, I've taken the easy things. And we have team members who are way better at me than those, and I'm left only with the hard parts. And I think that's, like, that's the hard part of being a founder is like, you. You delegate or automate or eliminate the easy bits, and then you're only left with the hard parts. Not, not to say that, like, you know, support, development and all that so isn't hard, but, like, the people in our company, and hopefully in everyone's company doing them, absolutely love it, and they're super good. At it way better than me. And I'm stuck over here figuring out all this other stuff, which, like, if you figure it out, it's great. If you don't, then you're like, gosh, like, I just keep running into this wall and I'm the only person that can do it.
[00:38:47] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I guess a few things on that. I mean, you live and die by your own sword there. But I love the. But I actually love how you frame that because the way the world's been for a long time, you can always get decent people to do stuff. You can train them in that, even if they're not trained, you can upskill them and get the production, get the customer success, get all that stuff in place. But then a lot of success. Well, in my view, I don't know what the percentages would be, but I would fair to say most successful businesses that have been sort of founder run have been successful because they've been able to attract customers, which is like you said, and I agree that one of the hardest things to do and then trying to attract the right customers, that's an even harder thing to do. So if you've created a successful business in Castos what you deem successful, then you've been able to attract customers some way. So for you to be able to do that, and rightfully, who's going to be the most passionate about what you do, isn't that going to be the founder, in my view? So, I mean, so much of sales to me is driven by passion and the belief that the person selling or adding value has in the product. So I think the structure as well. But it is hard. Absolutely. So getting to the hard point, what's Craig Hewitt doing as the sales and marketing manager of Castos to win these clients to get business? Give us your hot tips, mate.
[00:40:11] Speaker B: Yeah, so, like just really practically. Well, from a high level for, you know, first, I think a lot of our lives are really different than they were two years ago. From a customer acquisition perspective. I'll just say customer acquisition, sales and marketing and all it all has to do with AI. So I am a enormous AI evangelist. I took the. Is it the blue pill or the red pill or whatever? I took the pill.
I am all in. I believe it's the future. I think it's. I think it's going to ruin the global economy in the short term and I think we'll be on the, on the better side of it in a few years. But I think the next few years are going to be really rough. I Think what's going to happen is you look at, you know, Google, 90% of revenue comes from AdWords. A whole bunch of people aren't going to Google anymore. And they're just going to see. And that's just going to trickle down, right? Like, Google's going to lay off 20% of their workforce. Those folks are making 250 grand a year, right? Like, that's a lot of economy that. That just isn't there anymore. So I think that's going to happen. I think it's going to be really rough. We've seen the very beginning of it, which is the two playbooks that a lot of us as small businesses have had to attract customers are content marketing and SEO and cold outreach. Cold email. Cold email, mostly for B2B and content marketing. SEO, both.
I don't say dead because, like, we definitely still get customers from content marketing and SEO, because we've done a ton of it for 10 years, are really, really, really different. Those are really different than they were two years ago.
And I'm getting to the answer of what I'm doing now.
But the challenge is the playbook that a lot of us have been running, the predictable revenue Aaron Ross model or SEO that a bunch of us have learned kind of just doesn't apply anymore. And so as I'm talking to new founders, they're looking at this like, hey, how do I go get more customers? They're like, gosh, I don't know, it's really hard.
And so I think a lot of us are having to reinvent what we do, which is why. And we can talk maybe about the personal brand stuff. The personal brand and writing on LinkedIn and having a podcast and all this. Like, I went to a marketing conference last week and they're like, look, cold email's dead. SEO's dead. Pay per click is more expensive than ever with less people there. We're all in on personal brand of the founder and the executive team. And these are like the people you listen to in marketing.
So. So that's what we're doing. To answer your question, I am leaning very heavily into myself as the marketing lever for the business. I. Things like this are the absolute best use of my time. I'd love if I can come on a dozen podcasts a week. That would be a huge win for me.
And then it's, you know, my own content, like social media, my podcast, my YouTube channel, and kind of like showing what we do through our software and our services, which is cool. Like, and I think these are These are the people that have the easiest job. Like, I think the easiest thing in the world is being a LinkedIn influencer who teaches people how to do LinkedIn.
Because you can just show the thing. You just show like, I have 270,000 LinkedIn followers. I don't. I have like 2,000. But like, like, yeah, like, that's the social proof right there. And so when I look at that and say, like, what's the flavor of that? For me and Kastos, it's like, I should have a strong personal brand that's aligned with creating multimedia content, podcast, YouTube, social, to have the know, like and trust factor with my audience.
And that's weird because, like, doesn't scale and it's not transferable and all this. But, like, we've kind of done everything else and not a lot of it works for us at least.
[00:44:19] Speaker A: And I know you've been working on the. Or you've been deliberate around the personal brand and how that works and aligns with Kastos and supporting the Kastos business.
Is there anything you're doing at the moment that you're seeing better returns from or better leverage from?
[00:44:41] Speaker B: I think that at like a framework level, the thing that works best is creating video first content that you can then distill down into a bunch of different formats. So if I look at like my ideal content and kind of marketing workflow, it all starts with video. Whether that's a podcast, like this, that's going to be video, or just a kind of standalone talking head or tutorial style, you know, video, YouTube, make it a podcast episode, make it a blog post, make it a bunch of social content, point to that from a bunch of different places like that. That's the thing that works well. And so you look at guys like Justin Welsh, they do this in just a different format. But, you know, the, the concept of like, I have this pillar piece of content and then I have a bunch of supports for it that works really well. Currently I'm doing that mostly for just social content though, because it's just easier because it takes 30 seconds to shoot a little reel instead of.
I mean, like a 15 minute YouTube video is like if, if I do a 15 minute YouTube video, I'm just done for the day because it's just like, it's so emotionally exhausting.
Like, I prep and I script and I get the lights, the blah, blah, blah. And it's great. Like, it's, it's great. Like, YouTube is probably the best channel for most of us to invest in. These days. But the reason is because it's so hard. It's so hard. You mentioned Mervyn and editors and gear and I mean, it's.
For me, today, I just can't. I can't do multiple episodes every week.
If I could, I would, but I just have too much other stuff.
[00:46:26] Speaker A: Yeah, it's certainly, it's, you know, if you. It's like anything, mate. If you want to succeed it, you sort of got to go all in, don't you? And YouTube certainly takes a lot of effort, but again, you can get some reasonable return from some of that effort and leverage return over long periods of time, which is great.
You've said multiple times. Again, Castos is a SaaS business, would you say? Let's say I'm a business owner who's running a small manufacturing business or something like that. Do the same rules apply? Do you think that sort of founder person in the business who's very operational focused needs to start to look at the sales and marketing side and their personal brand and how they're getting out there? Because that would be completely alien, foreign for someone in that world. I know that for a fact.
[00:47:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
Less so for sure. Right. Like, going back to my kind of LinkedIn example is like the, the cool thing about is like, you're on the platform showing how to do the thing to other people on the platform. Like, that's just so well aligned.
I think it makes more sense for someone like me, but. But I think it makes a lot of sense for a lot of people. You know, even this manufacturer, you know, they're the CEO of, you know, whatever old school, you know, kind of company, the leverage they get and the benefit they get from having a strong personal brand is that it kind of just makes everything easier. That that's what I would look at the upside of. It's not like, oh, I'm going to go sell this guy in my $79 course. But if you have a strong brand in your market and I would, I would maybe reframe it. Like someone who's been in this business for a while, like, has a strong network and they go to all the meetings locally and like, they have this brand already. It's just in a different place probably, and they already know the benefits of it, which are like, when I want to do a thing, I can just call Joe and like, Joe can help me do this thing or I can go, you know, stand up at church on Sunday and talk about this thing. And I have this network. And it's just the same concepts on a different scale and on a different platform. So I would say yes, maybe the goals and the kind of expected benefit is different if you have a more traditional business to build an online personal brand.
But it kind of just unlocks a lot of stuff.
[00:48:43] Speaker A: Mate, I'm with you 100%. I think that it's probably one of those factors, again, that only 1% of the founders in those markets are going to be doing it. So you want to be that 1%. You want to own the market, right. Not just be chasing all the dregs at the bottom. And to your point earlier, you know what you continually do to level yourself up. I know I'm very much in that space. I have to running my own business. If I'm not leveling up, you're going to die.
So if those business owners, those founders, those CEO types are always leveling up in their own businesses, then they're going to be looking at the next thing and they should already be playing with AI well and truly. They should be looking at their personal brand. They should be out and about and ideally building those customer connections or reinvigorating those customer connections if they lost them. So we're definitely seeing it from the same song sheet. Look, I want to wrap this up just because I'm conscious. I'm trying to actually keep these episodes to around that 45, 50 minute now. There's a lot more we can unpack, but you've given us lots of gold. The last question we want to ask all of our guests is, mate, what's helped you build a culture of leadership in your business?
[00:49:51] Speaker B: Yeah, so I heard. Gosh, who did I hear?
I heard a quote about culture in a company that was.
Culture is kind of like what happens when you've put mission and vision in place. Like, it's the. It's the result of the leadership that you've defined and. And like, we've been really intentional. It's on our website. Like our mission, vision and goals are on our website. We talk about them a lot. It's the thing that we hire against, you know, like, that's the lens through which we look at hiring. And I think that that has been the biggest kind of indicator of success for our company and the people at our company, which is all that a company is, is people, is that like, we, we're all really good people because we have the goal and the vision, right, of like, who this company is and who the people we want to work here. And frankly, it makes my job as a manager and a leader really Easy because we have awesome freaking people.
But it's not like a coincidence, right? I think we were really intentional about setting the vision for kind of the people we want here and then we do make it happen.
[00:51:09] Speaker A: Love it. Be very deliberate around that stuff. And also to the point of you attract really good people and you keep really good people, but also it weeds out the ones that might slip through the net and they stick out like a sore thumb and you can move them on very quickly. So, mate, great point to end on. Craig, I want to say thank you. Maybe just a really quick. You want to just give a quick plug of your rogue startup podcast as well, because I haven't touched on that one, but plug away.
[00:51:35] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I mean that's really where this all got started. I started a podcast as a wantrepreneur and it's still going at 340something episodes now, I think. So roguestartups.com is my podcast where I talk a lot about this stuff. I talk a lot about entrepreneurship, founders, sales, marketing. We're talking a lot about AI right now because it is the thing that most of us should be talking about. And so we have themes like that that we roll through every once in a while.
[00:52:03] Speaker A: Yeah, I love it, mate. I'm almost thinking you're like the Yoda of the podcast world. So it's fantastic to have you on. It's fantastic to have you on cocktail leadership today, mate. Thanks for being a fantastic guest.
[00:52:13] Speaker B: This is great. Thank you very much.
[00:52:17] Speaker A: These were my three key takeaways from my conversation with Craig. My first key takeaway. Confident leaders embrace personal branding as a growth tool. They recognize that trust and visibility are critical for business success.
By consistently showing up, sharing their expertise and building relationships, they position themselves as industry leaders and attract the right audience.
My second key takeaway. Confident leaders make tough decisions to ensure long term sustainability.
Whether it's raising capital, pivoting strategies or making painful layoffs, they prioritize the company's future over short term comfort. They learn from setbacks and adjust their approach to build a more resilient business.
My third key takeaway. Confident leaders surround themselves with the right people. They know they can't do everything alone, so they hire top talent, delegate effectively and seek advice from mentors and peer networks. By leveraging the strengths of their team, they free themselves to focus on higher level strategy.
So, in summary, my three key takeaways.
Confident leaders embrace personal branding as a growth tool.
Confident leaders make tough decisions to ensure long term sustainability.
And confident leaders surround themselves with the right people, you can let me know your key takeaway on YouTube or the culturalleadership.com thanks for joining me. And remember, the best outcome is another side of a genuine conversation.
