Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
This is a podcast with Craig Hewitt, CEO and founder of Kastos. And I should say that this is probably one of my favorite episodes we've ever recorded. Craig just brings a ton of business and life wisdom to the show, and I'm excited for you to hear his answers, how he grew Castos and how he's differentiating it from the market. Enjoy.
So, Craig, super excited to have you on the show. Really interested to hear your history as far as Kassos, how you guys got started, where the idea came from, and sort of where you're at right now.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. So I've been in podcasting like, 10 years. Got started with a product I service, so, you know, an agency kind of thing where you do the same thing every time for every customer doing podcast editing. We called that podcast Motor. Allowed me to kind of quit my job. We moved to France, you know, raised the kids there for, like, almost six years. And about a year into being there, I got an email from one of my customers who was like, hey, I know you're doing this thing, the service thing, but you've always kind of wanted to get into SaaS. I got a buddy who's selling this WordPress plugin called seriously Simple Podcasting. You know, maybe let you get into the software space in the podcasting kind of ecosystem. And so, you know, talk to the guy. Ended up buying the plugin for not a lot of money. Like, a very. Not a lot of money, which turns out, like, one of the smartest things I've ever done. Just pure coincidence, because it allowed us to acquire a customer acquisition channel. Right? Like, we got a whole bunch of free users and, like, a lot of, you know, kind of deal flow there. We built the Castos platform to interface initially only with WordPress. About eight or nine months later, open it up to where now about half our customers use WordPress, half don't. And so, like, we can talk about podcast hosting as a market and what makes us different stuff. Like, there's a lot to that, and there's a lot of challenges to that, frankly. Um, but. But, like, WordPress is definitely one of those things, and that's less cool these days than it was, you know, six or eight months ago before all the kind of drama. But, yeah, so. So that's how we got started. We joined Tiny Seed, you know, much like Turnkey in the inaugural batch, so 2019, and raised some money there, raised some money afterwards about 2021, 2020, maybe about 750,000. And at this point are, you know, profitable and growing and kind of self sufficient. So that's the short version.
[00:02:16] Speaker A: Nice. That's a sweet place to be. It's like we call it in turnkey default alive, where you don't need the funding to continue to survive. So that's awesome. I'm really interested in one thing you said there, where you kind of went from like service to SaaS. Actually this was my journey as well. I started in an SEO service business and then actually like hopped over into SaaS on my end. I almost feel like that's been a bit of a superpower because I think in the service business like you have to talk to customers and I think in SaaS there's like almost as like aversion to customers sometimes where it's like I don't really want to talk to my customers, like I just want to build stuff.
Do you feel like it's been helpful for you to make that jump from like services to SaaS or if you could go back, would you just like immediately jump into SaaS?
[00:02:55] Speaker B: A bit of both, I guess. Like, you know, hindsight's 20 20. I think the good thing about what we did is it allowed us to self fund, right? We didn't have to join Tiny Seeder, we were going to die. We didn't have to raise more money or anything because the services as you know, it's like great cash. The problem is it doesn't scale really well. Like past, past kind of the point we're at like we do say like half million dollars a year in services.
That's kind of the limit. Like you can have one account manager can manage all the accounts and you got a bunch of people who fulfill the services and stuff like that. But if we're like, oh, we want to do $2 million in this and then it's like two more layers of stuff, right? Which I just like, I don't know. That might be the answer to how we grow from here, I don't know. But I think two things I guess. One like Rob Walling, person we both know and respect, talks about kind of the stair step approach. I think a productized service is a really good first or second step because pretty simple, it costs absolutely nothing. It just your, your talent and skills and SEO or podcast editing. Literally I was editing the podcast at the very beginning. You need a website and a stripe account and that's it. And so like somebody looking to get started, it's a hundred percent the best way to get going. And it can scale because it's productized, it's the same stuff. You just create the playbooks and then hire people to fill the, you know, deliverables. I think the challenge is, I'd love to hear how you transitioned out of it into SaaS, because we still do both. And so, like, you go to castos.com and you see SaaS. SaaS, SaaS, SaaS,. And you see this one page or two pages for our Castos production service. So, you know, that's what we was previously called Podcast Motors. We call it Castos Productions now. And so we have two ICPs and we have two business units and we have kind of two teams and two. Everything to where, like, if I, in hindsight, what I should have done and I was very close a couple times is like, sell or spin off or just shut down the services so I can focus all on SaaS. At this point, that ship has sailed. I see. I see the services as being really important to us now. Like, they provide really great cash flow. They let us reinvest into software from, you know, some of those profits on that side of the business. So, yeah, it's. But. But it's, you know, it's almost two companies, so it's, it's more difficult than just doing one thing.
[00:05:07] Speaker A: Are they like two companies in your mind? Like, do you have high cost of task switching between those two?
[00:05:13] Speaker B: No, I'm not like a huge task switching. Like, I don't get all. I don't get all finicky about it.
I know a lot of our developers and folks are like, I'm going to go do this thing for four hours and then I'm going to go to this other thing and I'm like, I got 87 tabs open and I'm just a maniac all day.
I actually kind of thrive in that, like, in that chaos. So. So I don't, I don't optimize for that, like, at all. I think the challenge is maybe this is kind of what you're getting at is like staying focused. Right. Like, we're like, hey, for the next quarter or the next six months, we're going to do this thing. And then I get pulled in this other direction. Not, not from like a practical. Like, I'm going to do this thing today, but, like, my 80% of my effort is going into this bit. Well, it can't really, because it's got to go into this other stuff too. Yeah. So maybe focus more than, like, to me, task switching is like, you know, how kind of effective am I at, you know, spending this hour Nuance, maybe.
[00:06:06] Speaker A: Gotcha. Yeah, See, I have. I have this sort of opposite experience. For me, task switching on anything has a really high cost. So, like, it is extremely difficult for me to focus on two things at a time. I joke with my parents. Like, I even eat food one thing at a time. Like, little mix. Like, it's one section at a time, you know? So that's pretty, pretty interesting to hear. I didn't realize that CASA still had like, a very, like, labor intensive service side. I thought it was mostly SaaS. You know, I think I told you before the podcast that we host this podcast on Castos, we just use the SaaS side. If you don't mind me asking, kind of how much of the business is divided into SaaS versus service? And if you don't want me to. If you don't answer that, that's fine.
[00:06:42] Speaker B: No, it's okay. So between like a quarter and a third is the services from a revenue perspective. Okay, well, cool.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: I'd like to kind of move on to talking about sort of your customers. And one thing I mentioned before the show is like, I could see some podcasters being fairly difficult to sell to on a consistent basis. Like, in my mind, I have this idea of like, oh, yeah, you know, every business has a podcast. Like, every newsletter has a podcast. Like, every group of friends has a podcast. Like, everyone and their mom's got a podcast. And it's really interesting to me, sort of picking that demographic and having really solid metrics as far as, like, customer acquisition to lifetime value or like just a high life in value or low churn. You know, all of these metrics that all the SaaS guys are like, oh, you need to pay attention to all this stuff, especially churn. What's that experience been like selling to podcasters and even sort of like filtering out, like, oh, a guy and his brother want to have like a podcast about a crime show or something like that. Like, do you do any filtering there as far as, like, picking your customers, or do you just take sort of everyone all at once?
[00:07:41] Speaker B: Yeah, so there's a lot to this.
[00:07:45] Speaker A: So I was.
[00:07:46] Speaker B: I was doing a podcast yesterday with another customer, and, you know, he's a friend now, and he was asking, like, who's your icp? And I was like, I. You know, like, we're on the fence about that right now, to be honest, you know, and I'll just share, like, transparently. There's kind of two camps that we talk about. One is, you know, Castos helps you make money. Right. So the podcaster who wants to monetize their content like that. That's pretty straightforward. There's a lot of. A lot of value, a lot of stickiness probably, to that. The other one is you, right? A brand, be it a personal brand or a company who wants to use podcasting as a form of marketing to grow their business. I don't know which one's better, and that's probably why we haven't. Haven't decided. But we look at either of those as, like, slightly better than the guy and his friend in his basement talking about the Green Bay packers, because there's, like, really something in it for them.
There's like, they gotta keep podcasting if. Even if they're. And this is the kind of beauty of our business model is even if they stop podcasting, they keep paying us because if you don't, like, your podcast goes away. So I think that's something for folks who are, like, considering the kind of perfect business model. I've talked about this quite a bit on my podcast, but, like, if you deliver value and then the customer stops getting value if they're not doing a thing, that's really tough from a Churn perspective. And so another company in the podcasting space, well, like Riverside. We're recording this on Riverside. If you're like, cool subscription heroes is going on hiatus for six months, you're going to cancel Riverside because you don't need to pay them 50, 50 bucks or 20 bucks a month to record podcasts, but you got to pay us or whoever you host your podcast with to keep your podcast alive in that term. So, like, I think that's one thing we have going for us that was not intentional, but, like, come to realize, like, that's one thing we have extremely low churn for the kind of business we are, but we're kind of unique in the space. And I know that because I just know some companies in our space and their Churn numbers, and they're like three or four times as high as ours.
[00:09:40] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:09:40] Speaker B: Yeah. The only thing I can figure is they're attracting a different type of customer than ours. Again, going back to icp, you know, if they're very low price, are they attack, you know, attracting these kind of hobbyists, people that aren't as committed as, like, we're towards the end of the price scale on the high end, most of the people that we attract are quite dedicated. I think our WordPress integration really helps there because, like, folks using WordPress just aren't going to stop, probably. But yeah, like, if I had to design the perfect business. It is not this, you know, but just because, like we have very low pricing power. You know, we're $19 a month. I wouldn't start again for less than 50 and ideally a hundred. Just because like it's, you know, we have almost 4,000 customers. It's tough to, it's tough to grow.
[00:10:30] Speaker A: So let's talk about that like I'm an idiot. So what's kind of your rationale for if you could pick a different business, you'd pick a higher price point. And what constraints are the low price putting on growth?
[00:10:43] Speaker B: So for the second one, the constraints that low price are putting on growth is being able to spend money to acquire customers. So we do a bit of paid acquisition. It's our big initiative right now. And we're looking at cost to start a trial of 50 bucks. If you figure half of them convert, that's kind of reasonable. I think you're paying $100 to acquire a customer. That's five months of somebody paying us that. That's like at the upper end of what a bootstrapped, you know, kind of self sufficient company should pay. And we think we're doing pretty good. So it's like, gosh, like, how can we really, you know, put gas on that? Like, gosh, it's got to get better. Like we can't just spend more money because usually it gets worse right. Over time. So I think that's the biggest one is like sales team, cold email conferences. You know, all these things that companies maybe like yours that are, that are getting two or three hundred dollars a month from a customer can afford to do are just out the window. So we're left with like content marketing and SEO, which is in the dumpster these days. Right.
Other other media, podcasting and YouTube, which we definitely do. Affiliates and partners and then like a little bit of paid. So. So I think your options are just so much less at a, at a lower price point type product. That was one of your questions and I forgot the other part of it. Sorry.
[00:11:58] Speaker A: Yeah, I did too. But now, now I mentioned on this other aspect. So I'm really curious as what kind of internal conversations you guys have had as far as. Because I'm sure there's been some. Something going on where it's like, hey, if we added these features, we could raise the price.
[00:12:12] Speaker B: Yeah, that rarely works out, I think. Like, do you guys see that? Like, hey, we added this feature and we can charge 20% more.
[00:12:20] Speaker A: My experience has been varied. So, okay. My last business was sort of at a credit, credit space, AI company. And when they added new features, in general, they could charge more just because they could charge based off, like, what exactly you were doing. So if you were doing sort of the bread and butter thing plus the new thing, then they could charge more. I think their biggest challenge was finding a market for the new features. So when someone wanted the new features, it was very easy to charge for them. And when someone didn't, then it was harder, which I guess is kind of the most obvious thing hopefully I will ever say. Yeah, I think here at Turnkey, the experience has been somewhat different. I think. So Just be really transparent. I was a customer of Turnkey before I worked here. And I worked here because it was just. I wanted to work here because it was just so amazing as a customer like it, I was basically the retention manager for a company. So churn was my whole gig. It was. That was the only metric I was graded on. And Turnkey just like, sort of made me the hero. And then when they added more features, I was like, not only willing, but excited to pay them more for it. That's cool because I knew that I would make more money. So I think my experience has been varied, but I would say probably if I could give it like A grade, like 75% of the time, three quarters of the time, adding more features resulted in either me paying more or being willing to pay more or seeing that reflecting customer basis.
[00:13:37] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, the way that we approach it, I think part of it is the. Is the market, right? Like, our customers are pretty price sensitive. I think the. There's a couple things to it. One is most of our customers only need a very basic thing, right? They need you to store the files and send them out. Like y'all, like y'all. You store the files, send them out. Give me some analytics.
[00:13:54] Speaker A: Cool.
[00:13:55] Speaker B: I'm good. Just don't mess it up. And so I think that's a thing, right? But like, we are approaching this. Like, hey, I mean, we've been feature complete for a while. Like, how do we keep adding things to. To. To change the business? And I think that's, you know, there's three things you could do. Like, one is improve retention. It's already really good, but, like, what could we do there? Most of that is around monetization, right? Because, like, if we start paying people, they're going to stay forever and that. That makes it really sticky. I think. Two is how can we increase ARPU or arpa, right? Like, so, so, like, can some of those folks ESCALATE to a bigger plan based on like usage or some kind of like limit. And then three is like add ons or some sort of metering, which is what we're looking at now with some AI stuff. Like, hey, if we bolt AI onto this, makes total sense, right? Like it's a podcast. Hey, what if I give you titles and show notes and descriptions and tweets and all that kind of stuff? Would you pay five or ten bucks a month more for that? I would, yeah. Yeah, that's the hypothesis, yes. Is really our best customers probably would do that and I think that's probably 20% would pay a bit more to make their life easier. But it goes all the way to the icp and the direction of the company is like, what do we want to be? Because we're in this for the long run. What do we want to be in five years? Gosh, that's a really long time to think about building product and marketing and positioning and copy and all this kind of stuff. But sure enough, the decisions we make today should put us and keep us on that road. And so they're, they're, they're kind of big decisions because if we go spend six months building this feature that's not aligned with the vision that we want to have in two years, then it's literally just wasted time at best.
[00:15:39] Speaker A: Have you considered selling or sacred about to kill someone's sacred cow?
Just like letting the business run.
[00:15:48] Speaker B: Yeah. So I'm eight years into Castos and so sure enough, like the seven year itch they talk about with marriage, you know, it's like after you've been married seven years, it's like, gosh, like, what about this? What about this? I'm extremely happily married. 15 years, 16 years. So it's amazing. But yeah, I think I hear John Warrilow talk about your life in kind of buckets of 10 years. And yeah, I think that lines up really well for me. I think there's a few options for anyone in a position like this, which is like, you start, you grow. 10 years for a bootstrappy kind of company isn't that long. You hear, oh, I started and 18 months later I sold. That's the exception. I think this kind of five to eight years is probably where most folks land. I would regret selling, I think more than feel really good about it, just because there's so much opportunity. We're in a, as of today, at least, AI defensible market, which is a big consideration that we didn't all have to make two years ago. Like, AI ain't gonna replace Kastos, it's not gonna replace podcasting. If anything, it'll make it more popular. I think the two things I think about are, yeah, like it's a mature business. I don't have to be that involved. Like all of my involvement is pretty elective to kind of sales and marketing. So like I would just do that or hire somebody to do that. That would be cool. Or the thing that I like that I haven't seen anybody do is bring someone in as a late stage partner to grow the business.
And I don't even know how this would work, but you can just imagine someone in the podcasting or influencer B2B world come in, buy in for a percentage of the company to run it and grow it. That would be pretty cool. So if you're that person and you're listening, you want to take a podcast company to the next level, let's talk. That seems like the most interesting thing to me.
[00:17:44] Speaker A: That's very interesting. So be it. To hear this. That's roughly how I got my start.
[00:17:49] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:17:49] Speaker A: It was a much smaller company, it wasn't caster size, they were well under a million. And I didn't buy my way in, but I basically had a conversation with the owner. I was like, hey, I will take this over for you. I'll run it, I'll grow it. Like you just pay me, give me the opportunity and then I work with you.
[00:18:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:05] Speaker A: And yeah, that was the service based business. And then from there, and with that kind of connection, I was able to meet some people from there. I was able to hop into SaaS. So and I think I was like 22, which is pretty wild to be like 22. I never went to college and was like in charge of a company that had like seven figure valuation, you know, like that was pretty crazy.
[00:18:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:25] Speaker A: So yeah, if, if anyone is interested.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: In that, I think it could be a win for everybody. Like you said, it's a great opportunity to work right next to a CEO who like, not the two minor, like I know quite a bit of stuff, right? Like really help that person level up quite a bit. And then that person just brings a ton of energy and drive and fresh ideas. Maybe talking to a younger, younger generation. I'm 44, so like, you know, how can we talk to 25 year old podcasters? I don't know, I have teenagers, so we have like this gap from a demographic perspective in my house. But that would be the thing I'm most excited about, right? Either selling or just running the business and cash flowing and letting it die over the next five years. Both kind of sound lame, but that would be the most exciting. But that's also, like, gosh, that's a gigantic relationship you're getting into. So, like, how to manage that would be something that would take a lot of time.
[00:19:16] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, if I can encourage you, I think that's actually a really good path for someone who's an owner. So I think the owner. When I was operating the business, the owner and I had one weekly call every week, and then we had a monthly call, and that was the extent of his involvement.
It was literally like five hours a month call.
[00:19:35] Speaker B: It.
[00:19:35] Speaker A: It was really less than that. And, yeah, the business grew. He didn't do anything with it. And then I think he. I ended up leaving, but he ended up selling it, so that's cool. And we still have a great relationship years later.
[00:19:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:46] Speaker A: So if I can encourage you, then I think that's probably an excellent path.
[00:19:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. I think so.
[00:19:52] Speaker A: But I'm really interested to hear more about sort of Castos. One thing we talked about a little bit before the podcast is I think it could be challenging to almost differentiate from hosting, because it. I think from the outside, it's like, oh, hosting's hosting, Especially if you're like, you know, a guy and his brother in the basement talking about the Packers. So what have been some of your steps in differentiating Castos from others and making sure that it doesn't feel like a commodity?
[00:20:15] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, transparently, this is. This is like, our biggest challenge, because it is.
[00:20:19] Speaker A: Right.
[00:20:20] Speaker B: You know, and, like, all of my mentors are like, you have a commodity business. You got to come to grips with it. And I'm like, gosh, no, because we're amazing and all this stuff. But they're like, no, you are not. You are a good founder. Your business is a commodity. You literally do the same thing as these five other guys. For 95% of. You know, functionally. 95%, you do the same thing to 90% of your customers. Right. So, like, a very small percentage of customers really research enough even, or care to understand the difference. So I think we try to stand out in a couple of ways. One is just like. And this is really kind of how we got started and why I decided that this is, like, a reasonable idea is just like, the UI and the UX and the features and the design. It's like, if you still host with Libsyn. Right. You know that it's a pile of dog shit, right? And so you're like, gosh, do I have to log into this tool to see my podcast? Can I just please go somewhere that makes sense? And so that's, like, one thing we think is, like, the product is really great and looks good and is easy to use. That's kind of table stakes, right? And the same with support. Like, we have an amazing support team there. Like, I've never seen somebody give better support than our team. But that's kind of like you.
[00:21:27] Speaker A: That.
[00:21:28] Speaker B: That's to be expected, right? That's not a competitive. It's not a durable competitive advantage. I think the. We don't want to compete on price, so that's out. I think the. The things that we try to Compete on is WordPress, which still is like, a huge competitive advantage for us because we're one of two people that do what we do. And if you have drank the. The WordPress Koolaid and you want to manage all of your stuff from WordPress, you're going to use us or one other person who also is one of the ones that looks terrible and is 87 years old or whatever. So we're a pretty good option there. And the other that we're leaning into a lot is monetization.
The monetization Options in the WordPress or in the podcasting space are off just by the nature of podcasting and getting paid on any kind of exposure and impressions. So we're leaning into this quite a bit. We have some new tech coming out in partnerships to make this easier and more accessible. But yeah, just to be frank, like, that's one option we look at. And this goes back to the icp, right? Is like, that's one option. The other option is like, looking at expanding the company and the product either horizontally or vertically.
So vertically would be like, can we build a riverside? Can we build a descript editing kind of tool? Can we do this thing? Can we build social media management? So, like, along the journey of a podcast or a podcast episode, can we just do the whole thing? And then is there pricing power in that? So instead of 20 bucks a month, would you pay 50 bucks a month? I don't know.
And then the other one is like, so that's vertical. Horizontal would be like, we have websites already. Can we make them better to where they have blog posts and email newsletters and all these other things that people want to do, not in podcasting, but just with their brand.
And so, yeah, I mean, we're doing kind of both right now. And I don't know the best answer.
[00:23:13] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, you never do, you know? Yeah, I can say that right now. We're using. I think it's Opus clips is what it's called. Opus something. Opus something to, like, cut these up into short videos. I would love to switch. So if you guys want to do that, take.
[00:23:29] Speaker B: It's the best tool in the market. Right. Like, you talk to anybody, they're like, oh, opus is amazing. I mean, it's just hard.
[00:23:34] Speaker A: Right?
[00:23:34] Speaker B: Like, they're trying to identify all this stuff and do it in a timely manner and not take a ton of AI credits. Yeah. Like, their job is pretty challenging.
[00:23:42] Speaker A: Yeah. So I don't pity you.
[00:23:44] Speaker B: As great as it is, it's garbage. Like.
[00:23:46] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Honestly, I just hate the ui, so. Really interested to hear your kind of experience as. So you're the founder, CEO. All right.
[00:23:55] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:23:56] Speaker A: How much of your time is spent in sort of the building versus the promoting dichotomy there?
[00:24:01] Speaker B: So, like, functionally, all of my time is in sales and marketing right now. Like, we. We have the other areas of the business, so product dev ops, support, success, all taken care of, which is cool. I'm a sales and marketing guy, so, like, for me to be able to do this as, like, the only time that I spend in the company is really good. How much is spent between, like, building and promoting? Probably too much in building and not enough in promoting. I would guess 70, 30.
[00:24:27] Speaker A: And that's. So when you say building, what do you mean?
[00:24:30] Speaker B: I mean, like, doing this episode or, you know, building a YouTube, you know, recording a YouTube video or doing new pages on the site for SEO or writing an email newsletter, stuff like that. I guess email newsletter would be like promotion, whereas promotions, like, social and, you know, amplifying stuff. You already have.
[00:24:50] Speaker A: Gotcha. Okay. So I think we were talking about a little bit different things. When we were talking about building, I meant sort of like building the product, like coding, which it sounds like you're not doing. Okay, nice.
[00:24:57] Speaker B: That's nice. Other than, like, strategic direction, like, what should we build next? And that's a couple hours a week maybe.
[00:25:05] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. So what's that been like, as far as hiring developers?
Challenges there, whether it's communication or hiring.
[00:25:12] Speaker B: The right people, it's very challenging. Yeah, it's very. It. Early on, it was extremely challenging. Not in hiring.
Yeah, no, in hiring. Kind of in the middle of the company thus far in its life. We struggled quite a bit with that. You know, we'd raised some money, we're doing well, and wanted to hire quite a bit and made a bunch of bad decisions. I think that's most often the case when you don't understand the space you're in, you know, and that can be like, I don't understand podcasting. What am I doing running a podcasting company? Or I don't understand SaaS. What am I doing running a SaaS company? You know, I don't understand developers. Fortunately, I knew most of what there is to know about podcasting and still do. So like that. That's good. So I'm, I am our ideal customer. I'm the subject matter expert. So like from a product and kind of strategy perspective, I feel really good there. I'd never worked with a developer before. We started this and it was by far the biggest growing pain. It's like, how do I, as a non technical person describe what I want to a developer?
[00:26:11] Speaker A: How did you end up overcoming that? I mean, that's a hard problem.
[00:26:15] Speaker B: We hired a designer, his name's Francois, and that's it. So he and I talk and then he does stuff and it's in figma and the design team implements it. But, but that gap between me just saying, you know, hey, Jonathan, our first developer, go build this thing. And he goes away for two weeks and he builds it. He comes back and he's like, hey, we're going to release it tomorrow. And I go, dude, that's like 90 degrees from where I wanted it to be.
[00:26:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:37] Speaker B: And it's because I'm just not like, I'm not that analytical, I'm not that detail oriented. So I need someone that I can talk to in plain English and they take that and translate it into concrete terms for the development team to implement just by curiosity.
[00:26:52] Speaker A: Is it Francois Brill?
[00:26:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:54] Speaker A: Oh my gosh. Amazing.
[00:26:56] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, right? I know you guys too. Yeah.
[00:27:00] Speaker A: Yeah. He does the design for Turnkey and he's like, fantastic.
[00:27:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:27:04] Speaker A: Because he's, he's not like, he's not like too nerdy, you know, but he's also like, he gets it. Like, you can just be like, francois, I want this and he'll just do it. That's amazing.
I think that's been my problem with development hires, is not the skill. Like it's. I think it's super easy to find extremely talented developers. I think it's really hard to find developers who like get it. Like, they can just like communicate like a human. Like, don't, don't hit me with these if and else statements like, just, just talk to me. Like, let's talk about a business case and then you just figure out how to do it. That's been extremely challenging.
[00:27:41] Speaker B: There are times for certain types of employees in any company. You know, there's a time for the, the developer who can, you know, it's like the story of Twitter, right? Like they put it together in like a weekend or whatever and it just is a disaster. And it was all this, you know, prototype architecture and stuff. But like that's perfect, that's what you need. And then you come back and you rip it all out and you put in go or whatever the hell they use now, right? But to have like, well, currently, like if we had our lead developer now on the product when we got started, we would have taken longer to get where we are, but it would have been better overall. We would have had less headache, but we would have been late to the market by a couple months probably, I'm guessing. But you can imagine that happening. You need the dirty kind of developer who just puts together some shit with duct tape and superglue at the beginning, knowing that you're gonna have all this technical debt you have to go, but that's the only way you learn. And so these folks that are in their basement in kind of stealth mode for two years and everything is perfect and everything is unit tested, like, come on man, you like, you don't have a chance because the only way to learn is by putting it in front of customers.
[00:28:47] Speaker A: So it sounds like you're saying that sort of at the beginning stages of a company, you're far more interested in just developing, just getting a product out, not caring so much about how beautiful the code is. And then later you switch more to sort of good coding practices but slower product development?
[00:29:01] Speaker B: Yep, yep, 100%.
[00:29:04] Speaker A: Have you had any other challenges as far as being sort of a non technical founder, building a technical product?
[00:29:08] Speaker B: I think like communicating with developers is one, hiring developers is another one. Like I still like, if we had to hire another developer right now, I'd go to our lead developer and say like, can you help me please? I don't know. I don't at this point. Like we've done it eight or 10 times. I don't feel like, like my hit rate's not great, so I wouldn't have the confidence to do it. I'd probably hire a recruiter at this point. Yeah, I think that's the biggest thing. The rest is like, it's just a business. You know, you have cogs, you have people, you have expenses, you have revenue. This is the first like you Know, kind of real business I've run. So there's been a lot of just running the business, things that, that I've had to figure out. Yeah, SaaS is tough, man, because you have all the business stuff plus quite a bit of product that, that's really involved and I mean, that's why it's great. And you have such high margins. But, but you know, for folks who are kind of earlier on, like, you only have those really good margins at pretty decent scale. Unless you're just a solo dude. Like, I do some coaching and I got one of my customers is like they're under a half a million a year and it's just them. And by a lot of, by a lot of stretches, you'd be like, you're only doing 40 or 30 grand a month. Like, that's crazy. Like, why can't you grow? And they're like, literally all goes in my pocket. At the end of the year, I have like $500 a month of expenses. And you're like, oh, okay, that's pretty awesome. But as a non technical founder, like I could never do that. Like, I have to have a developer. I have to, I have to have Francois to talk to, right? Otherwise what I say to developer, just like, I don't know that it would work. I have to have customer support because like at this point I, I don't want to go and help scout and answer support tickets all day. So yeah, it's, it's interesting, but, but I guess that's like a lot of businesses.
[00:30:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:50] Speaker B: Well, cool.
[00:30:51] Speaker A: Craig, this has been great. I think one thing kind of before we hop off. So what's next for Castos? What are you guys working on? What are you excited about?
[00:30:58] Speaker B: Yeah, so, so we really are like, we're looking at, you know, a couple of product enhancements around monetization that are, that are really exciting. And a lot of this is like monetization for everyone, right? Like anyone can come in and monetize their show really easily and really directly and own that. So we're not taking a cut of, of revenues from a lot of these things, which is really unique. So kind of putting that against Patreon and the likes.
So that's one. And the other is like, can we be the home for all of your content? So blog, website, podcast, video, and really be the place you go when you want to publish something, you come here. So we're kind of doing a bit of both of those and just a lot of enhancements to the product and to the brand for podcasters.
[00:31:43] Speaker A: Awesome. Super excited. Let me know whatever happens next, whatever you guys publish, and I'm all in. Even if I have to pay more, just. Just let me know.
[00:31:49] Speaker B: Awesome. Thank you.
[00:31:51] Speaker A: Great. Craig, thanks so much for hopping on. It's great chatting with you. If you want people to find you, where can they do that at?
[00:31:57] Speaker B: So, yeah, either Twitter or Instagram. I'm the Craig Hewitt on both places, so we'd love to connect.
[00:32:04] Speaker A: Well, cool. Thanks for hopping on, Craig, and see you guys later.
[00:32:07] Speaker B: Thanks, Brady.
