Beyond the Mic: How Zencastr is Changing the Podcasting Game for Creators

Auto-generated transcript. Speaker names, spelling, and punctuation may be slightly off.

Mark Evans: Five years ago, I worked with a consultant, Julie Zuzic, who was totally into podcast. She loved doing them and encouraged me to start a podcast. I bought to the time because it seemed like there's a lot of work preparing for interviews, conducting the interviews, editing the podcast, and then promoting them. It was overwhelming. But as the barriers to entry disappeared, I jumped on the podcast bandwagon. To be honest, it's one of the best professional decisions that I've ever made. The ability to reach out to smart people and get them to answer questions for thirty to forty minutes is amazing. It's like free consulting and great material to create content. It goes without saying that I'm a huge advocate for podcasting. On today's podcast, I'm excited to talk to one of the key players in the podcast industry, Josh Nielsen, who is the cofounder and CEO of Zencastr, a platform for recording, editing, and hosting podcasts. As a disclaimer, I've been a Zencastr customer for three years and have been impressed with its customer service and platform. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Josh.

Guest: Hey, everybody. Hey, Mark. Thank you for having me. I appreciate the invite.

Mark Evans: Let's start the interview with the Zencastr one zero one. Tell me about the history of the company, what you were doing before Zencastr, and what prompted you to jump on the Pontask bandwagon?

Guest: I started my career as a software engineer. Very quickly out of university, got into startup companies, and really developed a a passion for that space. It was exciting. I wanted to do something like that myself someday. I ended up going to working for a few startups, and then I ended up joining up with Techstars Boulder community and got hired there as a developer in residence to help their companies get their products ready for demo day. I really learned a lot more about just the startup ecosystem. Got to know a lot of founders, a lot of investors and mentors, and just a really fun community there in Boulder and Techstars thing. After I left that, then I went to I decided to start a company called excuse me. I'm recovering. I'm good, but I'm No worries. Okay. Decided to try my hand at starting my own business, Started a company with a couple of friends of mine called Soundkeep, and the idea was to help electronic we were all musicians and just had we were following our passions, I guess, you could say. Learned later on that that's a very common starting and ending point for companies. And but had a lot of fun. We were trying to help electronic musicians collaborate together online, swap files, and create music together. Didn't end up working out in the end, but I learned a lot about the capabilities that browsers had around working with audio and that these were increasing month by month. They were shipping a lot of new stuff that let you get access to the microphone and pipe the audio around, save it, and store it. And that was when as I was out pitching that company, somebody said, I don't know about musicians, but podcasters have this problem getting their audio files back and forth or something. I knew about podcasts. I was interested in them, but we were already on we had a one track mind, and we just put that idea on the side. And it wasn't until later after that that whole company went by the wayside that I came back to that idea. I was like, hey. Notes. Maybe I can use the skills that I learned, these new features that are launching in the browsers and build something towards that podcasting idea. So I went and interviewed a lot of podcasters. At the time, they're all using Skype. And they were if you recorded a Skype call, especially back then with the way bandwidth was, it was almost always gonna be poor quality. At best, it was highly compressed. At worst, there's dropouts, robotic sounds. And you could actually see this on Twitter when these guys would ship an episode that their audience would attack them. Oh, this is horrible. I can't listen to this. Like, you sound fine, but your guest sounds horrible, and it's messing with my head. And as a podcaster, that's the exact opposite response you want from watching an episode. You wanna grow your audience, not have people saying they're gonna unsubscribe. That's a pretty major need in the market for a solution to that. And I was able to cobble something together in about six months. I thought it would take me, like, six weeks, but you know how that goes. And launched an MVP, and it really met that need and hit product market fit out of the gate and grew from there. And we got our first customers by going on to Twitter and saying, hey. We see you're having problems with the audio. We solved it. Come check it out. So that was the impetus and the MVP launch.

Mark Evans: I'm curious to get your take on the state of the podcast industry right now. Compared to five years ago, it's coming off a long way. Podcasts are clearly a part of the marketing landscape, and they're growing by leaps and bounds, and lots of companies are starting podcasts. Many of those podcasts don't last very long, if truth be told. Where do you think the podcast industry is right now economically, both in terms of how it's being embraced by companies as a sales and marketing tool? What do you see as some of the things that you're excited about? And conversely, what do you see as the challenges for the podcast industry going forward?

Guest: The idea started, like, ten years ago, and I think we launched the actual paid plan. So we've seen a lot of that history. When I started working on this, podcasting was not a hot market or an interesting space for a venture funded company. And that also wasn't the goal in the beginning. That was fine. But as I was building it, then some events happened like Serial, This American Life, started getting millions of downloads per episode. That just ushered in a whole new wave of interest into the space when people saw, hey. You can really do something big and successful with podcasts and make an impact and make a lot of money potentially. That was one major shift that I wasn't expecting and really just we got caught on I wouldn't say we caught the wave. I think the wave caught us, but that was a big boon to the ecosystem. Now I think we're definitely seeing the space is maturing. I do not think it's mature. I do not think I've even seen the nearly the end of the interest in podcasting and podcast creation. We got a big bump over COVID, and some of that has tapered off, but the longer term growth trend is still pretty strong. One of the reasons why I think that there's still so much room left in this market because a lot of people say, oh, I missed the I missed it. Is it too late to start a podcast now or whatever? If you look at the ratio of consumers to creators in the podcasting space versus that ratio on Twitter or that ratio on Instagram or TikTok, Wildly different. I think x and TikTok have creator to consumer ratios in, like, the 30 to 40% or something like that. Double digit numbers. And podcasting has, like, well under 1% of creators to consumers. And why is that? As you already alluded to, it's a lot easier to make a tweet than it is to make a podcast. Mhmm. There's a lot of people just hitting those barriers to entry even though they have an idea for podcasts, wanna do it, as you mentioned, then they try and they even burn out because it's they realize how much work is involved. That's a big part of our effort from the very beginning is we need to make this totally frictionless as easy as possible, and there's still a lot of room left. We've done a lot of that work to make it easier, but there's still a a lot of room left to make it way easier. And I think AI is definitely coming in and lifting some of that weight. It's already happening in the space, the AI impact, and that's gonna continue to continue to grow.

Mark Evans: I'm glad you mentioned AI. When I look at the impact of that technology along with machine learning and the flurry of podcast services that have emerged around editing and sound quality and arranging interviews and recording interviews, how much of an impact that had so far on the industry? It feels like we're in the beginning stages where people are playing with AI, but they may not be leveraging it in wonderful or amazing ways. And at the same time, what is Zencatcher's approach to AI and machine learning when it comes to improving the platform?

Guest: We're already seeing a major impact with AI. You're seeing all the major players, including ourselves, are picking this up. We've had a machine learning team for two or three years already because we've had a need for a long time to cost effectively transcribe the content accurately and then to open up the content so that it can be searchable and findable on search engines and that sort of thing. We've just launched several months ago an AI powered clipping tool where it takes the transcript and we say, find us the funniest part of this content for the TikTok audience or find us the most interesting part of this show for dentists or whatever the content is. With a thirty, forty minute recording, you can expect to get maybe, like, 20 clips out of that. That's gonna be able to power your social media just from that one episode. You can post daily every weekday for a month off of that if you're doing four episodes a week. And this ties back into one of one of the real big problems outside in podcasting. Probably the biggest problem outside of the barriers of entry for creation is a ton of work to even get to that point. Podcasting doesn't have a built in growth algorithm like it would be if you posted a tweet or a TikTok. It will go out and find other people on the platform who they think are gonna be an audience for you and show it to them. Podcasting, that doesn't happen inherently. So you have to figure out how do I take my content, format it in the right format for each of these different platforms that do have these growth algorithms, and then get them on there. Helping people find and grow the audience AI and that clipping tool is a really big part of that and is the goal is to solve the really, biggest problem in podcasting was how do I find my audience? How do I grow my audience? And potentially then monetize, but the growth has to come first.

Mark Evans: Aside from the mechanics of podcasting, showing people how easy it is to record podcasts, what is nCaster doing to support the success of the podcast community? Promotion and distribution is a huge challenge. Editing stops a lot of people from continuing with podcasting because they recognize that it is so much effort. The clipping videos for social media to drive streams or subscribers or downloads, how much does Zencastr lean into education to help their podcast community be more successful and continue to keep them excited about podcasting?

Guest: It's theoretically hard to wrap your head around how podcasting works if you haven't done it before. And so, a, just helping people onboard and really understand how to use the tool and not really just giving them tools to that can do the job, but telling them what job they should do with the tools and walk them through all of that. But we're definitely that's an initiative that we've got right now is really fine tuning the onboarding process, and that equal that also includes education, things like webinars, and also just being we don't have this yet, but would love to have a a platform agnostic sort of podcasting university piece of content, but and it's always hard to prioritize on that on top of just all the other stuff that's gotta get done to to build the product and what's needed next. So we tend to follow our noses as far as what the creators are asking for. That is one of the things we've we have a pretty good idea of where what barriers are hitting and what speed bumps just through our customer support. Like, we don't really have to ask for feedback. Like, we we get it pretty regularly, and it's really just a matter of figuring out how to prioritize, not knowing what we should do, but in what order we should do those things.

Mark Evans: So based on that, what are customers asking for? When you look at the product road map for Zencastr and you're getting a lot of feedback from users, what is high priority for Zencastr in 2024?

Guest: All sorts of things depending on the type of creator because we have podcasters, then we have other niche type of creators. But I would say the biggest things you hear most often is the growth side. That's number one. They're like, hey. I've published, and I'm just getting crickets. I need to figure out how do I actually get people listening to this or knowing if I'm saying the right thing, getting that some of that first validation, which can be hard. I think they want connection. We hear a lot more from the hosts because they're directly using our platform, but the audience members as well. The audience wants to connect with the host wants to connect more seamlessly with the audience. They generally are entrepreneurial in effect in some way. They're trying to monetize the audience or drive into a sales funnel, or sometimes they're just they are just trying to share some idea. And that's what's led us to offering monetization options as well. Again, this is where it comes into the order. Right? Hey. These guys are entrepreneurial. They wanna make money. So we have a monetization suite. You can do programmatic ads and paid guest spots and that sort of a thing. But we found for the vast that's great for the ones who've already figured out the growth side, but the vast majority of our creators have not. We've come back around and said, okay. Now that we've got some of that monetization stuff, now we need to make it so that you're big enough to actually have that monetization move the needle for you. And that's where the clipping, cross promotion, I think networking our creators together. Right now, if you use Zencastr, it's I wouldn't say solitary because you bring your guests and maybe your cohost, but it's a siloed experience. And there's a big opportunity to open that up on Zencastr so that you could, for instance, search the network for someone who might be a great guest on your next episode or find another podcaster on the network that has a similar content. You guys either be a guest on each other's show or do ad swaps or things like this. Again, so you just overcome that problem that podcasting has without where it doesn't have that built in algorithmic audience growth feature.

Mark Evans: People talk about the power of community. And if you listen to a lot of b to b SaaS marketers, community seems to be one of the major themes for 2024. So I'm all for connecting podcasters and making it easier for podcasters to get guest opportunities and to find guests. That's great. The other tool that I wanted to ask you about is the ability to take a podcast and run it through AI to get show notes and tweets and, blog posts and LinkedIn posts. There are services like Summarize and PodSqueeze that do that. They're definitely using the Is this something that Zencastr, is thinking about offering as well?

Guest: We're already seeing, as you mentioned, services pop up with that. Makes perfect sense. Saves a lot of time for the creator. It's just not right on top of the pile for us. Our current initiative right now that we're launching is some more advanced editing tools. Right now, we can help you remove ums and ahs and long pauses. But if you want to, like, delete sections of content or add your intro and outro, it's not so straightforward. Our goal is you should be able to come to Zencastr, hit record, hit produce, hit publish, and have everything templated up the way that you want it and go back to running your business instead of the podcast taking all of that time. And that right now, people who wanna do some of that more advanced setting, they have to record, and then they have to download it, do it in their own software suite, and then bring it back online. A lot of people are still gonna wanna do that if they have that process in place. But for the new podcast creators coming on board, they don't want to and are probably not gonna learn how to use even Audacity or what even some of the easiest and free tools out there are very hard to understand how to use. Even, like, even, like, Apple's movie, they're supposed to be, like, the easier ones, like iMovie or whatever it's called, is not very straightforward and is not custom fit for the podcasting use case, making it so that you can truly come to our platform and not have to leave and still get a really great professional output. Let me ask you

Mark Evans: about the competitive landscape. Because if you Google search for podcast recording or podcast hope, there are hundreds of companies out there that offer similar services. The question that I would pose to you is how does Zencastr stand apart? It's a very fragmented market. Choice is often a really good thing, but it can also can be very confusing. How do you view the competitive market? And what does Zencastr do from a marketing perspective to wave the flag to say to people who are trying to get into podcasting or are already podcasting? We're one of the platforms that you need to consider because we've got all these features. We got all these great tools, and we should be one of the obvious choices out there.

Guest: That's been an interesting journey because when we first launched, we were the only real option as far as something that you didn't there were other options where you had to download an app or download a desktop a app, but that's hard to get one off guests to do. It's definitely gotten more competitive over time. I think our strategy to combat that is to not stay stagnant in one place because the if you just say, hey. I'm a remote double ended remote recording tool, that used to be harder to make. Now you can download some libraries on GitHub and get something going pretty fast. But what is what we saw was that's just the beginning of the process. And our goal is to really be a kind of all in one and opinionated platform that says, hey. You have a voice. You want something to say. Don't worry about learning all the mechanics and all the technicalities of podcasting in order to do that. We'll take that all off the table so you can just be a great host, find great guests, and we'll do the rest. What that means is we have to have editing. We have to have production tools. We have to have hosting service built in and then all of the other growth and monetization stuff on top of that. And if you say, hey. Let's compare us to all of the remote recording platforms. There's lots of them. Say, hey. Let's compare us to all of the all in one podcasting platforms that handle every step of the way to help you find the success that you're after. There's maybe two or three options out there for that. I think we're the best of those options if you look at the comparisons of not only the tool chain on paper, but the workflow that you're getting out of it. I think that's how we combat that. On the marketing side, part of why we're doing these podcast tours. We know a lot of podcasters. Why don't we get out there and just talk to whoever will have us on and spread the word?

Mark Evans: Question I ask a lot of entrepreneurs, and it's either an easy or difficult question depending on how you come at it. But what company or companies keep you up at night?

Guest: That's an interesting question because that's evolved over time. I remember when the very first competitor to Zencastr like, we really were, like, the only tool like ours that existed at one time. And then I remember the first competitor that I knew of launched their platform. And they came out of the gate, and they had editing and hosting and or or they had some editing tool and some hosting tool. And I was just like, oh, man. I I really lost I was like, that panicked me. I was like, I gotta work double time. These guys are trying to eat our lunch. Like, we gotta figure this out. And at least at that point in time, there was enough space in the market that didn't really have a significant effect on us, and I really over thought it and was overly worried about it. And I've more now adopted a strategy of certainly don't ignore your competitors, but don't fixate on them either, especially if you're in a a market leading position. If you're watch if you're paying too close attention to what everyone else is doing, you're not paying attention to what you need to do next. And then people are just copying you and catching up with you while you're looking backwards. And definitely pay attention. Pull the good things out there. That's another thing that's good about competition is all these other companies are trying things. And you can see, okay. That worked for them. That worked for these guys. Let's take those ideas, iterate that into the next part of the product so you don't have to go through that that validation cycle yourself. But, yeah, it's tough because Spotify is a competitor of ours. They have spot they bought Anchor. They have Spotify for podcasting. They, on paper, have all the different pieces. They have the monetization options. And so that can be harrowing saying, like, we're up against companies that are billion dollar companies and multibillion dollars. Even count Apple. You've got trillion dollar companies that are interested in the space and getting in on different sides. And I guess I don't lose as much sleep about competition anymore. Maybe I should. I think more in terms of are we really carving out the path that we see from listening to our users, and we're doing that fast enough. And you do think are is somebody else doing it faster than us? Are they on the right thread? But so far, I've tended to see that all these different companies tend to have, like, their own thesis that they're chasing. And while they may be iterating faster or slower, they're maybe not really headed in the same direction that we're going and in the same way. And, yeah, that's a long winded answer to say there's there's competition out there. There's some really huge ones that, like, you could lose sleep over, but I have more worry about if we're really meeting like I said, we get tons of feedback from users, and it's all great. And are we actually executing on that fast enough is is I think the the bigger worry.

Mark Evans: Yep. You've done a good job of answering my question at the same time dancing around the the question that I ask you. And as an ex reporter, hey. Listen. You didn't answer the question. I'm a Zencastr user, so, obviously, I'm very sensitive to other companies. And I talk to other podcasters, and you can avoid the fact that a company like Riverside, Descript has certainly become a lot more of an interesting player when it comes to podcasts. They start off as a a video editing platform, but podcast is certainly in their sites. There are some very interesting players out there putting aside companies like Apple and and Spotify, which is why I asked you the question about differentiation. At some point in time, there's so much competition that sometimes comes down to price, sometimes comes to features, sometimes it comes to your branding. That all leads into the competitive mix and how you stand out from the crowd. It's exciting, but it's also very daunting at the same time.

Guest: We pay attention. I I think Descript is probably one of those companies that is on a closer track to executing on what our what we're trying to do as well. Although they're more they're not really podcasting focused. They are they do have a focus on podcasting, but it's not their I don't know that that's their primary focus. They're doing interesting things, and we've been in contact with them over the years. But, yeah, I I guess I just found that I didn't find a lot of value from building up anxiety about competition as far as what that drove the business towards. And I find a lot more value in being very focused on knowing who is our core user and what is it that they need and not trying to emulate so much what other people are doing and follow our own nose.

Mark Evans: Let's shift gears a little bit. We've talked about technology, but let's focus on money. Zencastr has done some interesting things over the years when it comes to fundraising. You've raised a venture capital round, I believe, in 2021. Can you walk us through that journey? When how do you look at the fundraising landscape right now? Is StenCastro looking for money? Is it something that you need to drive growth? And what that what has that experience been like when you're out there trying to convince people to to fund your to finance your company?

Guest: Yeah. Great question. Yeah. We raised at the 2020. I think it closed in 2021, though. So right at the beginning of that year, we raised, like, 4 and a half million. And the goal of that fundraise was to because we're still just a recording platform. We had video and some other things, but we didn't have hosting any of the monetization stuff. So the goal of that fundraise was to build out the other pieces of the podcasting tool chain so that we can be the one stop shop for podcasters. We definitely got a big for better or worse, COVID helped our business because which felt weird because you're in some way profiting off of this tragedy. But there's a lot more people at home, a lot more people had time focus on the podcast that they're thinking of. So we got a really good growth bump out of that. And at the same time, we were realizing that there's lots of really well funded players in this space. And if we're not careful and we don't have the money to iterate quickly, we could just be pushed to the margins and decided to fundraise. And that was a fun experience. I hadn't done that before that period, at least not in any not to any effect. As I recall your question, like, was the how did I experience the fundraising? It was I actually enjoy fundraising. It can be a bit of a slog, but you're talking to lots of intelligent people, and it's it's a puzzle to solve. You get way more no's than you get yeses. And each time you're, okay. If they said no, why did they say no? Okay. What is it? Is it actually the our company, or is it the way we're presenting it? And oftentimes, it was we're just not saying the right things that the you have to get keyed into the things they care about. I learned very early on. Everybody loves the feel good story about, like, helping small creators. Feels good in the heart, but that's not what speaks to the the brains of the VCs as far as, like, something that they can turn around and communicate to their LPs. We invested in these guys because of x. So you have to really give them the ammunition. They may love you, but if they don't have the ammunition that they need to defend that investment to their limited partners, then it's just not gonna happen. And that's a that that was something I didn't really understand so intuitively going into it.

Mark Evans: We started our conversation when I asked you about the state of the podcast landscape right now, and it would be remiss if I didn't ask you where you see the industry going over the next two, three, four years. And how do you see Zencast are evolving as the podcast industry matures, attracts more creators, attracts more listeners, and becomes an even bigger media pillar, I guess, is the word for it.

Guest: There's lots of fun and interesting shifts going on in the space right now. We already talked about sort of the AI impact. I think maybe one of the biggest trends is we're seeing a blurring of the lines between podcast podcasting used to be its own little world. What you're seeing is some people are just launching on YouTube and calling it a podcast. They're not even doing a a technically, really, a podcast. And the primary piece of consumption now for podcast audiences is becoming clips rather than full episodes. And this is a big part or the reason why we're helping people create those and share those. It seem the super fans are more the the full episodes are for the super fans, and the clips are where you're going now and getting sort of the new listeners or the people who are passive fans of yours. And to that end, I think what we're seeing is that most podcasters nowadays are probably more appropriately called content marketers who are using podcasting as one of their channels. But they're also using TikTok and Instagram and a blog and a newsletter and all of these things. And so I think because at the end, they're trying to market a message. And why use and everybody these days, you have to go multiplatform, multichannel. We see podcasting as maybe the best and easiest way to execute on that because you can have a great get a great guest, do a long form recording. Whether or not you ship that as a podcast or not, you can then clip it out, and now you've got all the content that you need for the other platforms. You could even use AI to create a newsletter post or a blog out of it that then you edit upon as well. So it's a great starting point for just a content creation engine that you're gonna be executing on all these different platforms. And that's already happening. I I see that just going to continue all along as we go. And I think also just thinking towards the future, I think we're gonna start to see more and more how do I put this? More and more healthy niche communities that are self sustaining and have monetization options that work well for them as opposed to just the top few taking all of the money. Right? That's what's happening right now. Part of that problem is advertisers a lot of these guys are still, like, coming from, like, radio the radio space. This is a problem I encountered from the beginning of the company. I was like, hey. I think we have 10,000,000 monthly downloads across all of the users on the platform. 80% of them wanna monetize, and they can't. I've went and talked to some advertisers, and they're just like I was like, hey. I've got all this inventory. Let's do some let's make some money. And they're just like, no. And I was like, oh, okay. Tell me why. There's like, these advertisers, they don't have the bandwidth to deal with hundreds or thousands of creators. They can work with a few, dozen maybe, and even that's a lot for them. And they only wanna work with because of that, they only wanna work with the biggest ones. It all just all the money goes to the top big creators and everyone else is left out. This is part of the reason why we had a machine learning department early on so that we could transcribe the content. Because their big concern outside of just the workflow issue the reason why they need to pay attention to each creator is they're worried about quality control. They don't want their ads running off of somebody who's saying racist slurs or talking about guns or whatever the sensitivity is of that certain company. They're highly tuned into that. And there was no way to say, hey. We can give you confidence to work across a thousand different creators all in this niche without them feeling like they had to listen to all of that content. With the transcripts, we can say, hey. We've transcribed it. We've understand what's in here. We've searched it for swearing or whatever. And now I can give you confidence to work across a larger group. So that's something that's gonna continue to grow. There's still a lot of progress that needs to be made there and buy in from the advertisers. But, also, I think backer programs are also a much better option for most kinda small to medium sized podcasters. Everybody's using Patreon right now, but Patreon helps you take money. It doesn't really help you provide value for that money. It's just another job that a podcaster has to load up on top of that. How do I actually then give them a route? I can take them away, but how do I get them to do it? How do get them to stay? That's pretty interesting from our perspective, how we're thinking in the future about community and networking. What if you have a backer program? I don't wanna get too into the weeds, but I think there's a lot of value you can provide by bringing the audience and the creators onto the same platform and then doing backer subscriptions and things like that.

Mark Evans: Lots of opportunities, lots of possibilities. Personally, if I was to start a podcasting related company, it would all be about distribution. Taking podcasts, putting them into video clips, automatically streaming them to different platforms. I think extracting as much value you can from a podcast for many companies is when the magic happens. Josh, thank you for your insight into Zencastr and the podcasting industry. Thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. You're a b to b or SaaS company looking for more sales and leads but struggling to do impactful marketing, we should talk. I work as a fractional CMO and strategic adviser. My services include a ninety day marketing sprint that combines strategy and tactical execution to quickly move the needle. And one more thing, I recently published the second edition of my book, Marketing Spark. It's more of a guide than a book. Features tools, templates, and worksheets to jump start your marketing. Perfect for entrepreneurs, and you can find it, of course, on Amazon. You can reach out to me by email, mark@markEvans.ca, or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.