Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Chad Reid - Jotform

In the latest podcast episode, Mike sits down with Chad Reid, VP of Marketing at Jotform, an online form builder offering a suite of productivity tools.

Chad discusses what makes Jotform stand out amongst its competitors, shares which marketing tactics have proven to be the most successful and offers some top tips on how to maximise form conversions, as well as how to approach a marketing strategy when marketing to a broad audience.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

Transcript: Interview with Chad Reid – Jotform

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Chad Reid

Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing b2b Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in b2b marketing today.

Welcome to marketing b2b technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I'm joined by Chad Reed. Chad is the Vice President of Marketing Communications at Jotform. Welcome to the podcast, Chad.

Chad: Thanks, Mike. Glad to be here.

Mike: It's great to have you on. So I mean, we always ask people at the start of the podcast, how did they end up in the current row? So can you give us a bit of history of your, your career and how you ended up marketing a job form?

Chad: Yeah, for sure. You know, it's funny I, my career follows a similar arc in some ways to previous guests I think you had with with Sprout Social, where I graduated into the recession in 2009, I had a journalism degree. And I kind of didn't know what to do with it after I graduated. And once I ended up in the San Francisco Bay area, I just sort of was blindly sending my resume all over all over the place for people who were looking for writing skills. And that kind of landed me in marketing. And of course, it took to it down a long, long, dark and winding path and sort of worked my way up and to into job form. And I've been a job forum for the past eight years, it's been a really remarkable journey. I joined in 2014, when we were just opening a San Francisco office. And now I lead our marketing efforts, which is again, housed in San Francisco. So it's been, yeah, it's been been an awesome ride.

Mike: I love those kinds of accidental careers where, you know, you end up in San Francisco look for a job and ultimately leads to running marketing, communications, and interesting marketing technology company.

Chad: Yeah, I remind myself very regularly how how lucky and fortunate I am. And we just moved into a awesome new office in San Francisco and overlooks the bay and the Ferry Building and the Bay Bridge. And I have regularly have these like, pinch myself moments like I cannot honestly, you know, 22 year old Chad would have never, ever envisioned this. And, yeah, I'm very, very grateful, very grateful.

Mike: So I would have it cheeky here. Would 22 year old Chad have dreamt of promoting software that creates forms on the web? I mean, do we need another form software company?

Chad: Do we need another? You know? No, we don't. I'll phrase that in a way that Jotform has been around since 2006. So we were one of the one of the if not the first, What You See Is What You Get Form Builder software's at the time. Interestingly enough, two of our primary competitors also launched in 2006. It was kind of the year of the form, if you will, but you know, we've been a market leader for a long time. And I feel like we're really carrying a lot of momentum. So I would say no, we don't need another additional form software in addition to Jotform. But, of course, it's not going to stop new competitors, and everything else. But we're really well situated. I like to use the term that we're emote business and a lot of ways because 16 years of developing Jotform means we put a lot of resources into new feature developments and integrations and just a laundry list of product improvements that that really separate us so but it's the size of the pie is going to going to continue to grow. And it's not really about our competitors, so much as I think as it is people still using legacy, very outdated systems and pen and paper and printing things out and writing them by hand. And we're, that's that's our opportunity. So that's a long, long, long and winding answer to your question, but for in a good spot.

Mike:  And so I'm really interested because, you know, obviously, foams are pretty mature in terms of technology. Now 16 years in internet years is a long time. Are there things you do that you think are particularly cool or different to other form providers?

Chad: Yeah, you know, for job form, it's the suite of products. It's not just our forms, obviously, forms are bread and butter. It's in our name. But we offer document automation and payment collections. So we integrate with more than 30 different payment processor options, the process 10s And millions in payments, we handle that for our users. And that's something that's really unique about Jotform. And kind of maybe something that people aren't expecting that, you know, it's an easy way to get paid. But we have a an amazing database slash spreadsheet hybrid product that we launched a year and a half ago called Jotform tables that's been really popular. We have an app builder, so people you know, a small business can launch their throne app really quickly, just a very expansive and growing list of new products that are kind of into this suite of productivity and automation and all the things that we're allowing our customers to do so. Yeah, you know, it's not just about forms anymore, and Honzik still kind of at the the centrepiece of what we're allowing people to do. But it's, it's so much more.

Mike: And that's really interesting that, that you've really looked at adding automations, as well as presumably integrating with with other systems. I mean, I'm guessing you have a pretty long list of integrations as well.

Chad: I personally believe that, you know, a forum company is really only as strong as their integrations, that has, you know, been the case for withdrawal form, I think, in the past, until we started creating things that users could basically do with their data and stay within jot form, but for a long time, you know, forms are just an entry point, right? You know, you're not creating a form to have a form, you're creating a form to get the information, what do you want to do with that information, maybe it's sync it with a project management software, or a CRM, or email marketing software, or whatever, you know, if get a notification in Slack. So integrations have been really kind of a lifeblood, and they ultimately creates great partnership opportunities with these other companies, but also stickier users. They're providing a lot of value and, and ultimately, those users are less likely to leave off on the future. So the integrations are a big, big part of what we do. And we've, we've had a very long list of Direct integrations, and we're still continuing to add.

Mike:  And so you know, one of the things I'm interested in, you've got some automation capabilities yourself, you know, are there any really cool applications where people have used Jotform in a marketing context, that you're aware of that maybe use the database or use the payments, you know, some examples of how people have taken jot form and almost built a mini application out of it, because I think that's, that's the exciting thing about Jotform is you can almost build an application, out of the capabilities.

Chad: You can do anything with draft form, that's kind of the beauty of it, it's it's a touch point that can put the information that you want, just about anywhere. From a marketing perspective, I can talk a little bit how our marketing department uses it. And I think it's it's kind of a broad use case. But we funnel a lot of requests, we get requests from internally or externally. And just managing that from placing it to the correct team and putting it in syncing it with Project boards that where people can get their work started and organised. That's a big way that marketing teams all across the country and all across the world use it. And certainly how we do it at Jotform. And it's a big productivity saver, right, just funnelling information that you need, exactly the information that you need, and putting it where you need it is a big value add. Conventionally speaking forms, I think most marketers think about forms from a lead generation perspective, and then getting the correct customer information and making sure that's highly visible and a big touchpoint for acquiring new business. So that's, that's a, that's always a big, big drop from use cases, especially for for job or, you know, for marketers everywhere.

Mike: Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, talking about forms for lead gen. I mean, it's one of the marketers, you know, biggest concerns. I mean, what can marketers do to increase those form conversion rates, because that's always a big metric. For us.

Chad: It is, and I think the biggest mistake is, when they just think having a form is enough, and not not thinking about the aesthetic of the form, or the design, the layout, the flow, the conversation, that you're, you're initiating with your customer, when you have it on there. So you can always tell it's really plainly obvious when someone just, you know, a company is dropping a form on there, it does not match the the aesthetics, or the brand of the site, and it just looks like a completely different experience. But you know, that's something that even without a great design, eye or capability, you can always do the little things, right, you know, you can always get that the hex colour code and match the fonts. And and these are things that you can do within job form without even needing a technical expertise, you know, we have a Form Designer feature that kind of lets you lets you manipulate that. So just doing the bare minimums of making it look, at least like your site is giving a signalling trust, you know, with with your potential customers, and that's, that's huge. And then also just don't over ask, you know, I think that a lot of lead generation forms, in particular, think about questions to ask their potential customers that they don't need, but they want but that might be killing your conversions, you know, so I think really just boiling down to the information you precisely need. And then sticking just to that, especially as an initial touch point. Those are two things that will go a long way. I would say one, one final tip is the submit button by default, any form builder software, especially with job form, it's going to say a submit on it, and that's what we think about, but think about in terms of the, again, the conversation you're having with your customer and just tweaking the language on the best CTA it's, it's something that's a little bit more personalised. interaction item, you know, even if it's just request to speak with someone or send your information or whatever, whatever language you that makes sense for your business, injecting it into that, that standard Submit button to make it a little bit more of a personalised experience. All these are very small things, but they make a big difference when you're, you're looking for a high performing lead gen form.

Mike: And how much it is around experimentation? Do you see some things work for for some applications? And then then you'll have another customer who actually, you know, something different is driving the conversion rate?

Chad: Completely Yeah, every business is different for sure. Yeah, there's not like a one one size fits all. But if you do have the capability to do any kind of AV testing, certainly within Jotform, where there's some analytics, and you can check the forum conversion, Google will track that you'll be able to track the views to your form, you know, who's who's filling it out from, from which device type that kind of thing? Because that's certainly helpful. But it's, it's great to measure these things, you know, and just just kind of see for yourself, because, yeah, I, of course, the I think the the tips I just gave her broadly applied, but it might not for your business. So see what's working. And yeah, you know, it's if you're going to test anything, for sure to test your form.

Mike: That's great advice. I think it's really good. I'm interested as well, you mentioned something earlier about your automation capabilities around documents now. I mean, clearly, it's obvious why you'd move into a database and start offering that where people can collect data and store it. Can you talk a little about what you're doing in terms of document automation?

Chad: Yeah, you know, we're, we're just to kind of at the tip of the iceberg, I think With Jotform. But basically, at the moment, you can have your form submission, through a standard online form, spit out a beautifully designed PDF, there are a number of broad use cases, I guess, where that's going to make sense for someone. But if you need the submission to turn into a polished, professional PDF, that's something that you can do with jot form. And that's really, that's been a great feature. It's called a PDF editor. It's something we launched a number of years ago. Like I said, we're still refining even just PDF capabilities in general. But that's, that's been something that's been a fun, a fun value add and kind of an extension of what you can do with online forms again, sort of being the centrepiece of a lot of different capabilities yet.

Mike: So if you were organising an event, for example, it could spit out a person's I guess, the gender and and ticket. Yeah, rather, that's awesome. That's really cool.

Chad: Yeah, that's a great honestly, that's a great example. Because I think, you know, people are looking for something a little more tangible when they fill in something related to an event. And then you can have something that's custom branded and ready to go and that can be sent automatically to the person who just submitted it, as well as the, you know, the the form Creator as well. So it's, it kind of goes both ways.

Mike:  This sounds like a really interesting feature. Actually, it's not something you see with with other form builders, but I can see a lot of applications, you know, where people do want something customised in terms of PDF, particularly around events or webinars or something like that. For sure, yeah. That's, that's awesome. Love that feature?

Chad: Yeah, yeah. It's been great. Definitely. Great.

Mike: So, I mean, we've talked a little bit about Jotform, we talked about some of the features, is this an expensive, you know, sort of large enterprise kind of product, I mean, well, the sort of cost involved to get started with Jotform,

You can use Jotform, for free, that's kind of the beauty of it, we're a freemium service, where the lion's share of our of our users to this day are still still free, and, and we love them all the same, you know, and we offer a pretty robust offering for our free products, you get up to 100 form submissions per month. So if you need 50 form submissions a month, and you're fine with that, it's great. We've had users on the platform for years for free. And you get the full suite of our features and products, even at the free plan. So we're not locking any features behind behind paid tiers, with the exception of HIPAA compliance. We locked that under our silver plan, just because of the the additional costs and resources that that runs.

But yeah, so it's, it's, it works great for that and but we do have, you know, free which has kind of its own set of users all the way up to major enterprises that have 100 plus paid users on administered under a single accounts, you know, so it's, it's the types of businesses that need forms are every type of business right it's every every single organisation on the planet needs a way to collect some kind of information. So that's been sort of the beauty of working at Jotform from a marketing perspective. And also the challenge is, who are our customers? You know, it's it's the bakery down the street who needs to collect custom cake order forms, but it's also the major university who's doing scholarship applications or fortune five hundreds or major governments on the state and federal and county level and it's, and it's everyone in between. So it's always fascinated me looking at who's using jot form and why. But like I said, it's also a challenge, right? Like, who exactly are we speaking to when we're when we're marketing forms? Because it's utility service? That's great for everyone. You know,

Mike: I think that's a that's a really interesting point. You know, when you look at your audience, it's almost any organisation that's online, is really relevant to the job. I mean, how do you deal with such a broad audience? When you're trying to plan out your marketing strategy? Do you have, you know, personas you target? Or what's your approach

Chad: To to an extent we do, you know, we have great information on our highest value industries, and what times during the year, they're, they're most likely to activate or become paid users these types of things. But I've found it's actually more helpful to think about the use case, and not necessarily the persona, or the type of form that they're creating, and not necessarily the industry or the the person doing it. So we'll do you know, a bit of marketing around promoting application forms or registration forms or donation forms, which I guess is more industry specific. We're thinking about schools and nonprofits at that point, but because for the most part, those are used across different verticals, but the you know, that we're still identifying how they're using it, we have a lot of a lot of information on that, you know, and we've we've fortunately been, well, not fortunately, very deliberately, then dedicated some SEO into that. So we're, if you look for registration form, we want you to find us, if you look for application form, we want you to find us feedback form, we want you to find us and on and on. So that's been a big, big engine for us. And, and that's ultimately how we get a lot of a lot of new users.

Mike: So you mentioned SEO, though, that's interesting. I'm intrigued to know, what are the best channels or best approaches to actually driving both new users who might be free, but also particularly some of the bigger users as well? Are there particular channels that work better than others?

Chad:  You know, for bigger users, for the most part, in Jotform’s case, certainly, they started out as small users, you know, it's so our pipeline for our, our enterprise product was really the same as it was for free and our bronze, silver gold, which is our kind of base subscription package. But usually someone starts even if with their within a larger organisation, they they take a liking the job form, and, you know, maybe that's they want broader access, or they've introduced it to someone else. And then all of a sudden that, you know, there's a IT professional who says that this needs to be centralised, and then they've reached out for an enterprise account at that point. So the pipeline started the same, you know, they discovered off on the same way, you know, they needed, they had the same need, they had a registration form, and that they needed or they had an application form that they needed a contact form that they needed. So it's still kind of funnelled into the same into the same system. And then, of course, they discovered that we had more offering within an enterprise product than it did a standard. So realistically, we approach marketing from a initiation standpoint, similarly, regardless of the of the company size. That being said, we do, of course, have dedicated enterprise level marketing once, particularly once they've become a user, we have a lot of thought leadership around that we have a lot of more technical content that sort of resonates with that audience. But yeah, you know, from from what's effective, it's almost the same, it's almost the same whether it's a one person company or a 10,000 person company.

Mike: So your little like Dropbox almost in the way that you're getting individuals to bring the technology into a company rather than a three selling to a big decision making unit?

Chad: Absolutely, yeah. I think that's a good example.

Mike: So so I'm really interested in that as a marketing challenge, because in some ways, the easy bit is getting someone who loves the product to actually use it or work. The difficult bit is then getting the organisation to adopt it. And you mentioned needing some enterprise marketing content. What is it you're you really have to do with that content? Is it about convincing the IT department that you're enterprise ready? Or is it much more about, you know, convincing people that you're scalable? I mean, where do you find the the issues that you have to address?

Chad: I think it's, I think it's the former and that's really where the value add is, is if an individual within a large company is using Jotform. There is no administrative oversight. There's, it's not running through the channels that they're it your security team probably wants, it's not scalable, you know, and if that person leaves the organisation, then that information is gone right or that account is gone and are very difficult to read. We retrieve and it has to, it's a pain in the neck to go through our support channels. But having that control from an administrative or, you know, a broader enterprise level, it makes it much easier to handle. And, of course, it comes with additional touch points with our security and customer support, and you just kind of getting kind of getting more of everything. So that's that's the sell job form is compelling. From an individual level, we don't need to convince someone who's already using job form that, you know, they need an enterprise plan. But we do need to convince the IT department for sure.

Mike:  That's that's, I mean, like, what we're hearing is a lot of companies trying to get individuals bring yourself into a company then face the the difficulty of, of getting the IT department to accept it and roll it out globally. And it sounds like, you know, having had all this experience in the industry, that track record must really put you in a good state with the IT department.

Chad: Yeah, and sometimes the case is very easy. You know, we there are major companies, I won't say names of companies that we've all heard of that have 25 plus paid Jotform accounts, just sprawling throughout their organisation, and it creates a mess, you know, that it's much it's much better for the organisation so centralise that, put it through the same one billing, you know, easier to track. And of course, like I said, when someone leaves the organisation, just not having to deal with the mess of, of what what you're doing with these forms, right, because sometimes a form is deployed on a website, and you can't make a change if if that if that account holder left the organisation or so yeah, it's it's super, it's a big value add, and particularly when when Jotform is already already widely used within a company. So it's, we've seen a lot of success in that too

Mike: One of the things I'm interested in, you know, as somebody, you know, running marketing for, for an organisation, how do you measure the success of your campaigns? Is it just really easy it's number of new users? Or do you apply other metrics to get a bit more insight into the quality of those users?

Chad: Yeah, great question. And it might even depend on who you ask within within the company, I mean, paid users are always going to be the paid pay the bills, obviously, but we get a lot of free users per day, it's in the 1000s. It's, and that's something that we, we actively monitor, and we want to be to be healthy, because those turn into paid users, you know, knew someone who's just signing up for Jotform, today, most likely isn't whipping out their credit card, they come in with a typically with a single need. And, and, you know, that's something that they're relying on, but within time, they're likely to become a paid user. So we, we have some internal metrics that we kind of monitor, like how likely they are to converts how likely a channel is to convert a user to a paid user, within 30 days. So we call those p 30s. That's kind of something that we look at. And then if that if that's a healthy channel, and we're getting a lot of pee 30s from a particular landing page or referral traffic on a particular campaigns and advertising, whatever it is, then we'll double down on that and make sure that it's working well. But you know, it needs to needs to be good. And if if we're only getting free users from something that's not turning into paid, you know, we kind of we have that information, too, and we'll be able to make a good decision. And, yeah, that that tends to be that tends to be good, active users. I mean, you know, that's as any SaaS company is going to be monitoring or any software company at all. That's something that we watch, watch regularly. And to have any of the previously mentioned metrics working. Well, you need, you need active users. So yeah, those are all those are all things we yeah, we look for whenever we we initiate any campaign for sure.

Mike:  So in terms of getting those active and paid users, are there any campaigns you've run that, that have really stood out as generating? You know, particularly good results?

Chad: Not short term, but long term channels that have worked really? Well? Absolutely, I would say that the bulk of our new users are coming in via SEO or paid targeting AdWords. And that's, that's no accident. You know, we've put a lot of a lot of work into our, into our SEO, we have an enormous content marketing engine that fuels that we have a team full of SEO and content strategists who are helping identify new use cases that we can promote and things that are gonna be valuable. And we've worked with outside agencies for both the content production side of things and the SEO side of things and SEO. People think it's well known people don't think it is but it feels like it's going to be the low cost, the free version, you know, it's not it's it's a resource. It's a huge resource investment to do it. Well. And that's, that's something that we've obviously done but yeah, you know, I think from a from an individual campaign, I'm trying to think of a good example. You know, we'll we'll go after a particular industry and From time to time, and we have a new feature that that makes sense for health care or something like that, or summer camps, we've had very targeted campaigns where we've partnered with major summer camp associations and got promoted content through their channels and, you know, showed up at events and kind of doubled down and over over a particular time period are found partner companies to also promote Jotform through their channels regarding, you know, this specific industry, we've had some we've had some various success, but even even those nothing quite moves the needle, like our ongoing search from both a paid and organic standpoint, we need multiple sources of users, for sure, not saying that we're not trying other things, but the bread and butter is always going to be the organic.

Mike: think that's interesting, because, you know, a good organic campaign is, is one that actually gets spreads over several years. It's lots and lots of pieces of content, rather than one piece of content, something that builds rather than a particular one item of content typically.

Chad: Oh, yeah, I mean, Mike, we, we, we are currently producing, and we have been producing 100,000 words of written content per month. And for prospective, that's about a 400 page book, worth of content that we're producing predominantly on our blog, but also, this counts, our support pages and template descriptions, things like that, longer guides, white papers, things like that, every single month, and it starts slow, you know, you're not gonna see a return on that after the first month that you that you do it. But over time, you know, some of these pieces that we're writing six, nine months ago start to be crawled better, or all of a sudden, it's become a hotter topic, and more people are searching for it and the volume increases, and then all of a sudden, we have a healthy content channel. And it, it takes a very long time to scale that up. To even get to that point, from an infrastructure level, it took a full year of hiring writers and finding freelancers that we trust, and that we want to continue working with and hiring a full time editor. And now we have multiple full time editors just to make sure everything is running smoothly. And, you know, managing the flow from a project standpoint is huge. And then we have SEOs and strategists and the whole bit. So it's it's a lot of a lot of build up and you know, something that, you know, we we didn't take lightly, it wasn't just a single blog we threw out there. We don't do it randomly. We've poured a lot of a lot of time and energy, making sure it it's something that works for us.

Mike: I think that's very typical in most SEO projects, and sort of the multi year overnight successes. You know, people think it must be magic, but there's a lot of hard work.

Chad: Yeah, a lot, a lot, a lot of planning. You know, I made a mistake early on, I have to say to, you know, our CEO, when he was giving the greenlight for content, he's like, let's scale this thing, right. And it was exciting. To me that thought, Oh, we just need people who can write in the people who can write will also come up with the ideas. Not true. You know, I mean, great, great, great if they can, but they're a completely different skill sets to be able to have sort of a strategic awareness and research and SEO knowledge of what will work and how it will work, versus executing a really well written guide. So at the end of the day, it takes a pretty large team to even have a blog that will be effective.

Mike: So awesome. It's been really interesting talking to you. Now, I really appreciate all these insights. Chad, is there anything you feel we should have covered about Jotform? Or about some of your marketing activities I've missed?

Chad: Yeah, it's been a great, I would say one thing, just as sort of an extension of content that's worked really well for us. And I think I've seen it work well, for other b2b brands is in video, you know, I think people are consuming more and more video content. YouTube is the second largest search engine for a reason. And I think the ways that people are consuming or in taking information works really well for videos, anything that you can say on your site, and your blog, and your social can also be said in video. And it's actually not that large of an investment. If you have an iPhone, and you want to get started. You know, it's as easy as that, frankly, you know, if you want to put more more investment into it, that that works to at scale as well. So yeah, just put a plug plug in for video. If you need ideas on that, feel free to visit the Jotform YouTube channel where we're pumping out a lot of videos every day, I think we're close to 25,000 subscribers for we're seeing a lot of new new users on that channel as well. So recommend it for anyone.

Mike: So awesome. I really appreciate your time. If people want to get a trial of Java, a free pre licence, as you say people start a free theory rather than any sort of trust. Do they just go to the website?

Chad: Yep, jotform.com. It'll take you less than 10 seconds to get signed up and just you know, sign up with Gmail or whatever else and then it immediately drops you in our form builder and you can create another form and in 30 seconds or less and you'll you'll be on your way.

Mike: That's amazing. I'm sure a lot would people want to try it? And if anyone's got any questions about, you know what you've talked about, particularly some of the marketing campaigns or maybe wants to know a bit more about video, what's the best place to get ahold of you?

Chad: Yeah, chad@Jotform.com Feel free to drop me an email. Also, feel free to find me on LinkedIn. There's a lot of Chad Reids out there. But I think I'm popping up first, first or second in the search results and on LinkedIn. So yeah, I'd love it. If you're, if anyone follow me or add me on LinkedIn, that's great. I'm also on all over the Jotform blog says java.com/blog. And you can find my author profile and contact form there as well.

Mike:  So awesome. Thank you so much for your time and all your insights, Chad. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Mike.

Chad: It's been a pleasure.

Mike:  Thank you.

Thanks so much for listening to marketing b2b Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier b2b dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Zachariah Moreno - SquadCast

In this podcast episode, we interview Zachariah Moreno, Co-Founder and CEO of SquadCast, a cloud recording studio platform.

Zachariah discusses his mission to cultivate creative collaboration and how his journey from a podcast listener to an aspiring podcast creator led him to becoming to a software creator.

He also shares his insights into what B2B businesses need to consider when launching their own podcasts, and how SquadCast’s unique development enables creators to overcome internet struggles and achieve good recording quality anywhere around the world.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

Transcript: Interview with Zachariah Moreno - SquadCast

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Zachariah Moreno

Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.

Welcome to marketing B2B technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I'm joined by Zach Moreno. Now Zach is the co-founder and CEO of SquadCast, which is the tool that we're recording the podcast on today. Welcome to the show, Zack.

Zachariah: Mike, appreciate you having me on. It's an honour to be here.

Mike: It's great. So, one of the first things you were obviously really smart when you started podcasts. About six years ago, you realised that podcasting was going to be big? I mean, what made you realise that podcasting was going to grow as quickly as it has done?

Zachariah: Yeah, I wish that I could kind of predict the future and see what was coming. That'd be great. From like a startup perspective, were more so for us came out of solving some of the challenges that we experienced firsthand when we tried to do not a startup but a creative side project in creating a very creative podcast, we want to do like a science fiction, audio drama, which has a lot of production workflow involved, big, you know, bigger teams like production value on and on, the catch for us was that we were a remote team spread out across California. And we had a lot of skills that would help somebody who creating a science fiction, audio drama, I still think we underestimated the amount of work respect to anybody who's producing a science fiction, audio drama podcast, it is incredible.

But what we did was we set out to create this ambitious show, and quickly found that the quality of our vocals weren't there compared to the rest of the production value, the rest of the sound design that you really need with something like a drama of a fictional podcast to kind of full immersion, right, that is what you're trying to get with that sort of form of storytelling. But if the people sounded like they were recorded over the internet or over the phone, it sounds like it's you're not fooling anybody, right? You're not You're not fooling anybody that these people are actually in these scenarios and experiencing these things. So that was a real bummer for us. And it kind of stopped us in our tracks.

And a week or two later, we pivoted from doing the science fiction audio drama podcast to seeing if we could create some software that would allow people to kind of have their cake and eat it too, when it comes to getting that very high quality audio recordings for multiple people, without needing to be in the same physical recording studio. So we were really stoked on on podcasting, as like listeners, and my co founder rock introduced me to podcasting as a listener more on the nonfiction side of things, right, more and more traditional podcasts. Because I love learning. And it's a very quick way to learn. So that's kind of how I was a user of podcasts, through college and the end of high school. So that love really translated into jumping from being a listener to wanting to be a creator, to creating software that it helped other podcasters create.

And that's really what SquadCast has become, yeah, now six years later, and we really sit at the intersection of, you know, to your point of your question, podcasting, but also this kind of trend of remote work, not needing to be in the same physical space to create quality content and grow an audience. So that's really where SquadCast helps creators is that that added constraint of not being able to get in the same physical studio, like Mike, you're on another continent from me right now. And yet, we're going to sound like we're having this conversation in the same room in the same studio. So that's really the vision that we set out to do. And we've learned a lot along the way, because we're really big on community. And in an industry full of people who speak for a living, our focus is listening, and listening to what the creators that we serve, are telling us that they need and want from a platform like SquadCast, a cloud recording studio is the category that we've set out to define. And we try to get out of the way as much as possible and build what people need. And that's been that's been a fun journey thus far.

Mike: So awesome. So I'm interested in you know, came from a problem, but it sounds like actually, in terms of your career, you've actually got a background in software talking about development, how do you build your career up to to end up founding and running a really cool company like SquadCast

Zachariah: Not a traditional path into startup land, I can say that for sure. I have a background kind of in fine art and going to art school, and then learning software engineering. I did an internship on the Chrome team at Google. And that's really where I got kind of exposed and learned and indoctrinated to how Google builds software at scale for like, especially what's important to me like my mission is to cultivate creative collaboration and technology on The Web especially, can do that in really magical ways like these very real time experiences where we're collaborating with each other more in line with like, what you would expect from like a multiplayer video game, but applied to, you know, technology, B2B technology, SAS. And you get things like SquadCast, you get things like figma, or, you know, slack like these very real time, lots of people engaging with each other. And that's really what I saw being built at Google and was something that was like very inspiring to me. Because I had experienced as like in my fine art career or any of the kind of phases in my career, I had experienced creativity being amplified and enhanced when multiple people collaborated with each other, like pair programming as a software engineer, or collaborating on a painting together, like John Michel Basquiat, and Andy Warhol did for like 200 paintings, right? Like, their creativity was amplified by each other. And you don't really know where the creation is going to end up. At the end from when you start, you don't know what the start what it's going to end up like, because there's this element of improv to it. Right. And that leads to very interesting places. So that's my personal mission. And you can kind of see how that's applied in SquadCast of creating quality audio and video content together with other people anywhere in the world.

While my background is less traditional, I come from, yeah, not really any, you know, middle class background, nobody in my family had ever really done a tech startup or anything like that there's, you know, I don't have like a dad or a grandma, who was like a venture capitalist or something. There needs to be more grandma, venture capitalists that just occurred to me right now. Yeah, there's nothing like in my background, that would have said, Okay, this is an on ramp into startup land, other than I went to art school and studied design and user computer interaction, and then how advanced technology could bring new designs and new experiences to life. Just always try to stay at the bleeding edge of technology.

And that has really, you know, led to this place where if you had tried to create, if I had tried to create SquadCast, even a year before we did in 2016, let's say 2015, or 2014, or something like that, we would have failed because the web platform and the web standards and the cloud and a bunch of these, like interdependent technologies just weren't there. And that's where the founders of Twitter originally founded a company called audio. And audio had an element of kind of SquadCast, it was I think it was solo recording, but and it was all flash based. So I mean, it was kind of bound to fail. But that's how long ago people were, you know, been trying to figure out how to record remotely and have podcasts kind of be a first class citizen on the web. That's how I look at my podcast is that it's the internet of audio. And we can consume podcasts all day online. But how do you create a podcast online? It's fairly easy to do if you're solo, once you add a second, or a fifth person, how do you do that? Right? Like the internet kind of breaks down at a point, right? Where it's just like, okay, I can consume, I think a lot about creation and consumption and the balance between the two and people's lives, and you can consume all day. But creating is a different story, or at least it was before squat cast. So that's where we're trying to balance that out, make it as accessible to create this content as it is to consume this content.

Mike: I mean, that's fascinating. Obviously, you do something quite different to say a zoom or teams in the, irrespective of internet quality, as far as I can tell, you get great quality recording. So can you explain that what SquadCast does differently and why it's so much better for podcasts? Well, first,

Zachariah: Thank you for saying that. That's, that's really awesome to hear. That was totally, totally Our goal was to I mentioned kind of having our cake and eating it too. That's exactly what we're talking about is before SquadCast, the quality of the audio, let's just keep it fairly simple. For audio. We do it with video and screen and stuff now too. Which is more complex, we can get into that if you like. But when it comes to audio, we just asked ourselves like where is it being degraded if I record a conversation with you over Skype was kind of the the one everybody used back when we got started. Now it's more like zoom, stuff like that. Or phone like we just asked ourselves Where is the quality being degraded? Because if I stand with both people, if I'm sitting right next to you while you're having a phone call, you sound perfectly fine to me, right? You sound as high quality as my ears can can hear. But if I listened to that same phone call, have you it's way less than that. Why is that? Right? So we just tried to work our way backwards and say, Where's the quality being degraded? How can we preserve that there are clearly choices that these engineers and designers are making behind the scenes of Skype or Zoom They're clearly choices they're making, that don't preserve the quality. Sometimes it's good quality, but we just kind of embraced reality and tried to work backwards. So the reality is, is the solution to this problem is not a better internet connection, right? Like, that's just not what SquadCast is not an Internet service provider, I can't like write any code that's going to make your internet connection or my internet connection, or rather, your internet service provider give you what you're paying for. I have a lot of thoughts around internet service providers and stuff. But I encourage people to do their research and check that they're getting what they're paying for their. Anyway, that's not kind of the space that we can solve things in, right? We're not going to go and create a new global infrastructure of copper wire or satellites or something like that. That's cool if other people want to do that. Fantastic. But we thought we could just make different design choices, different engineering choices, all through this lens of this is a studio, this isn't not a conversation.

So you can think about SquadCast as the exact opposite of an approach like Skype or zoom, where Skype and zoom, they're focused on empowering, connecting you to have a conversation. That's why they exist. And then there is a feature of recording that somebody added at some point. SquadCast is the other way around, we are a recording studio, that just so happens to have a feature of remote conversation. It's a complete figure ground reversal. And what you get is much higher quality recording because all of our design decisions along the way, we are asking ourselves, does this raise or lower quality? Does this affect quality? Does this affect quality? And yeah, after a couple years of building and a couple of patents later, we've innovated and created technology that preserves the quality, yes, but then also addresses some of the challenges that come from quality files are bigger file sizes, they take up more space, right? They take longer to upload and download on our less than consistent network connections. So how do you do that reliably? Right? Like I could record for you, Mike, the highest quality audio file, but if it takes all day to upload doesn't matter. It's like the file never existed, right? It's just like, it's often the ether somewhere trying to do this task that it'll never finish. And that's that's a real shame.

So our founding adviser Harry Duran asked the question, Well, do you really need to wait to upload until the files like complete? Like at the end? When you click stop? That was a really good question. And I still think about it today. Because we did not have an answer to it. It was like, it's one of those things. That's kind of obvious in hindsight. But before that, it's like, well, of course, you can't start uploading the file until you have a file. Right? That's just what everything and all of my computer science classes have ever told me. But that's not how inventions get invented. Right? That type of thinking is not how patents get written. So what what that led to is, you know, some unique technology to SquadCast that we have since patented, that is our recording engine, that's what we call it now. And that features progressive upload, it also features cloud recordings as kind of like this layers of redundancy. And what that adds up for for SquadCasters and their guests is that what you said, whatever your internet connection is like today or during our conversation is not going to affect the quality.

So what we do is we actually separate those out if anybody is like a nerdy audio engineer, these are two independent signal chains from one another. So one stream of audio does not affect the other stream of audio. So we have the real time conversation you and I are experiencing right now. That's going to fluctuate with the weather with my kids streaming twitch in the other room that's going to fluctuate or a better example would be like my neighbour, right, like we are kind of interdependent in our connections to the internet. Things that are completely outside of my control shouldn't affect my quality, right, they shouldn't affect my audience's experience of consuming my content. So that's really where SquadCast, we just separate those two things out, we embrace that the conversation will fluctuate. Like, you know, people might get disconnected. And let's try to reduce that down to as close to zero as we can. But let's make sure people succeed no matter what even if the power goes out. Even if like, you know, things get unplugged, the network goes down. There's a coronal mass ejection and all the satellites go down, right like anything, any disaster, we should be able to still succeed, even in those situations. And that's really what you get is our recording engine that kind of gets you the quality but also very highly reliable in these less than reliable situations. Let's say

Mike:  No, it's amazing. And it's incredible how you know SquadCast is recording on your computer, not in the cloud, but it's uploading all the time and magically when you finish it seems to be there like you was yeah, it was always recorded in the cloud.

Zachariah: It's there's another, there's a, thank you. There's a bunch of benefits to it, a lot of what I've spoken about, but it's also super fast. Like, because it's already up in the cloud, you don't need to wait around your guests doesn't need to leave their tab open for like an hour, right, which is a huge security issue. And I don't know who can do that. Because you have another meeting, right? You have more to go on with your day. That's not how SquadCast works SquadCast, you can just hit stop bounce, you can, you can bounce, like close the tab kill the computer. And we'll have up to when you left in the source quality, in addition to the cloud quality, so what you said about cloud versus local, we do both. So SquadCast does both. And that's where it's like, okay, if you like zoom, fine. Those are like what our cloud record that's like our cloud recordings. So you'll always have those no matter what. But the local primaries show up 99 point something percent of the time, and what you're saying very quickly.

So whatever your workflow is, if your producers on the other side of the world, right? What if you had to download that and then re upload it, or past attempts at Cloud recording that no longer exist anymore? Like, you'd actually, they didn't have any upload component at the end, you asked your guest, hey, put this into my Dropbox or email it to me or whatever, you know, whatever kind of kludgy ways people glue together. So we think that like a guest on your show, should be like a guest at a dinner party, you don't like ask them to like help you with the dishes, unless they liked doing dishes or cooking or something like that. They're your guest. They shouldn't have to, like, become a podcaster and figure out all this weird technology just to have an impact for your audience. So that's really where the speed comes in, in addition to the reliability because yeah, we're not waiting for anything to upload. It's already in the cloud, where we can control the environment and give it as much horsepower as it needs to render that. Yeah, three hour long audio file for you and 10 other people in like, a few seconds.

Mike: Awesome. No, this was great. I mean, one of the things you've said a couple of times is you've called Scott Kosta recording platform rather than a podcasting platform. Can you talk about some of the other uses people put SquadCast to rather than just your classic podcast?

Zachariah: Yeah, yeah, it totally is. And this surprised us because we were very like podcast. And still, the vast majority of the creators that we serve today are professional podcasters. But we also listen, and that brings to light use cases of the platform that any technology, you don't know how people are going to use it, right, there's kind of the intended use case. But then there's a whole bunch of other stuff, right that people do with things.

So one example is our largest customer by recording time, like just like a physical studio. That's how our pricing works on SquadCast is recording hours, it's just way cheaper, is an audiobook production company. So they produce at a scale that would be very difficult or even maybe impossible in a physical studio, in one city, they can produce lots of hours of audiobooks. In parallel daily, they have, they can scale their business because they can work with voice actors who are around the world, not just in their city, they can work with authors around the world, not just in their city, they can work with producers around the world, not just in their city, and be very efficient and high quality at that. So SquadCast, because our emphasis on audio quality is there it's above the standards that something like Audible would require that you upload the audio that then people purchase and download on the audible platform. So Penguin Random House and auto VITA is the customer I just mentioned, that is you know, our largest customer by recording hours.

And then video is the other one that comes to mind is has been always kind of a force of nature online, right with YouTube. And and people prefer to consume video content. I think that data is clear. depends on the context, though. Because sometimes audio right, you don't have your eyes while you're driving, for instance, or something like that.

So that's where we were surprised how many podcasters how many of our customers were asking us for video recordings, our most requested feature by far like to a painful degree. And what we were trying to figure out was like, should we even do this? Like, this doesn't seem like why we got into this business, but that's fine. You know, we're open to learning and new opportunities, so that that answer became quick to answer but like, how are podcasters going to use this house as part of their workflow? Do they really know what's all involved like with lighting and camera and it's a whole another degree of like file storage, the size of the files, all that stuff? Right? So we were just trying to figure out okay, does our approach to our recording engine that we were just discussing, does that work for video too? And I think it inspired a lot of people because SquadCast was even in our beta from day one. SquadCast has had video for the real time conversation so that we have body language and eye contact That is something like 70% of human communication is nonverbal. So we knew from like really early on that, even if it's just for communication, that's, that's going to be better for the conversation for the final product. If we can see each other. If we want to, of course, you can turn it off, and it can feel more like a phone call. That's cool, too. There's other features you can like, hide yourself. And there's there's a bunch of options there. But like, video was an interesting one to us. And yeah, now people record lots of videos like on the SquadCast platform, and I think in the next version of SquadCast, video recording will even be more accessible to the creators that that we have the privilege to serve.

So so how people are using those videos is for a lot of marketing purposes, like to tease the episode to have content to share on social media, maybe in advance of the full on conversation being released on the podcast. So you can think of it kind of like a funnel, right? Where those clips are easier to digest in places and expose them to people in more places on social and elsewhere. And that's kind of like the appetiser, right and then the podcast is like the full the full entree, you might have bonus content. And that would be like the dessert. I guess it'd be another way to, to say it. Yeah.

So that's a lot of the use cases that we see there are more, but I think those are the big ones in addition to podcasting, and podcasters overall, have been embracing video a lot lately. And there's a lot of conversation around a Spotify, launching video podcast, YouTube, embracing podcasting more, we'll just more broadly Google with Google podcasts. And then a lot of YouTubers, instead of saying on my YouTube channel, they say my podcast and I find that interesting, because it's purely semantics. But it seems like that's kind of a trend that I don't think anybody could have predicted. But SquadCast, we don't have opinions about where the content that you record with us ends up. It's up to you. It's just audio and video content. So anywhere you want to create and publish audio and video content, we've had it end up in lots of places that we're very proud to serve those creators.

Mike: I love that concept of really, like trying to serve every place. I mean, I guess one, one sort of content that, you know, seems to be gaining momentum, particularly amongst podcasters is streaming. Is that something you've looked at offering as part of SquadCast? Yeah,

Zachariah: Yeah. It's fascinating. I mean, a bit of a different workflow, a bit of a wild ride to be on, you know, some live streams, you got to keep it you got to keep it moving. There's a lot of vamping, right, there's a lot of like, interesting dynamics that come with live. So we've been paying attention to live for a while now and talking to our creators to have that opportunity to listen, you know, is that something that you're finding traction with? You're growing your audience? Does it fit into your workflow? Is it sustainable, it can demand a lot of us to show up at the same bat time, the same bet our whatever that saying is I just butchered so like, that's where I think we're in the Listening phases. And then in the next major version of SquadCast, you'll see kind of our take on that. I think we don't ever want to just add things because others are we want to find opportunities to do things different and innovate. We didn't get into this business to just build something that already existed. That's a waste of everybody's time.

Mike: That's awesome and exciting. I'd be interested to see what will the new version of SquadCast looks like? guess one of the things for the listeners here is, you know, the listeners that typically from the B2B side, which can be quite hard with very small, very focused audiences. I mean, do you have tips for people working in B2B in terms of how they can develop and grow their podcast audience?

Zachariah: I do. And it's a category that we've been seeing grow and gain traction in interesting ways. So there's like, internal podcasts that companies have been embracing, especially through the pandemic, like when your team is fully remote? How do you do corporate communications? How do you continue to keep everybody moving in the same direction? Podcasts and recording those long form conversations are great for teams that find themselves in that situation. And I know everybody's mind probably jumps to the pandemic. And that was a window of time.

But I would submit to you that like, organisations like ESPN and Google, and like global organisations, they have lots of offices all over the world. And sure those people were not working from home. But a co worker who works in a different office in a different city than you is also relatively remote, right. So this problem existed for a long time did not just happen because of the pandemic. And a lot of those companies we've had the privilege of working with before the pandemic like ESPN has been doing their daily show with us for years now. Records lots of content with us and they have like ESPN support this In Mexico, they have their offices up in Seattle, even if everybody's in office that they're still remote from each other, how do producers and talent collaborate with each other from from those places.

So that's really interesting to us and is a use case for for businesses, that is less talked about SquadCast, we serve professional content creators. And one of the first things that we observed was, people immediately think of like, oh, the content is the product and the content is monetized. And that is how you are making money. That's why you're a business, and therefore a professional, but businesses that podcast for their marketing, and don't don't monetize the content itself, but they have another business model that the podcast feeds into. Right. So more traditionally, kind of part of content marketing, to feed into your business. So if you're a dentist, you have your dental practice, that's how you monetize, that's your product. But then it's a different question, how do I get customers into my business? And how can a podcast serve my content strategy there, and it can in lots of ways, so I think that the nature of long form conversations and really getting to know people, is something that people audiences are very hungry for in a world where everything is shifting in the opposite direction where everything is short form, and very surface level and paper thin. Podcasting stands in stark contrast to that and offers this three hour long conversations where you can really get to know people and have deep conversations. And in that process, demonstrate a level of expertise, and insight and consideration, where you can grow relationships with people who may be already our current customers nurturing the relationship with current customers, so that they're more familiar with your story, like, do you know your dentist founding story? I don't. Right, but like, I might trust them a little bit more with my teeth if I did.

Right. So that's kind of kind of one example. And it gives you a place to have conversations with other people to lend their expertise as well. And that leads to authority building, and can be a differentiator in your marketing strategy compared to other people in your space. So we see companies embracing podcasting, generally in those two, those two ways. But there's also the emergence of companies that content is their product. And, and that's fascinating to us, as well. So lots of ways that companies can embrace podcasting, a lot has been said, if you if you Google, like companies, podcast marketing, you're gonna very quickly find this word repeated over and over and over again, intimacy, podcasting gives you intimacy, you're, you have full access to the hearing sensory experience of your audience for as long as they're listening to you. And therefore it is intimate. I don't think so there's a lot of research that shows that, like USC is the study that that I'll cite more, more explicitly that the audience directly correlates the quality of the content that they're consuming with the credibility of the people that they're listening to. So if the whole goal here is to build authority and relationships with customers and you know, have this intimacy, but we're not focusing on our quality, you're actually degrade and you're losing credibility. It's like, you're you're trying to build it in all these ways. But then you have this, this hole in your bucket. Right. So that's really where the quality and a recording platform like SquadCast can help you scale that quality and not need to travel and things like that, to get your production out on the cadence that your audience comes to expect it weekly, or bi weekly, or whatever your cadence is. So I think that intimacy is just doesn't come for free, we have to cultivate it, right? We have to make sure that we are upholding that quality. And that's going to lead to the intimacy of having these long form conversations.

Mike: That's fascinating that the importance of quality, I think, is something you can't underestimate with podcasts. One thing a lot of people might be wondering, listening is, you know, perhaps they listen to podcasts, they'd like to launch a podcast for their company. It's really easy to do I mean, you put your email address in SquadCast, and you can pretty much go but what are the mistakes people are going to make? If they don't think about it? What are the things that they should have?

Zachariah: There are a lot it is easy to your point to get going which is fantastic. And you know, proud that we've played a part in that I'm proud to know a lot of people and get to work with a lot of people like the description the captivates and Buzzsprout of the world who are making it more approachable, right? That's fantastic because that was not always the case. If you look at the birth of podcasting, it was very, very nerdy, very like old white guy in the basement internet pirate radio right and could figure out and glue together all these technologies. I I used to hand code my RSS feed, like, cool, man. What did that do for anybody? Yeah. So that's really where things have evolved, right? Where people in my family can just on their phone, start a podcast, solo with other people narrative drama, whatever. The problem is that you quickly realised that podcasting is actually if you want to take it seriously, and you want to be a professional.

If the word monetization ever flows through your head, I think you should consider yourself a professional. And then ask yourself, what is my business, then you're basically a if you don't see it as a hobby, and it's totally fine to be a hobby, I'm not knocking it, I've started a hobby podcast. I know a bunch of people who do, that's totally fine. But don't worry about monetization. If it happens, fantastic. Great. But like, that's not why you're doing it, right. But if you are trying to monetize your podcast, which a lot of people are, you're running a media startup, not a podcast, a podcast is how you actually distribute your product, your product is the content that you're creating audio, maybe video as well. And then is that content so valuable, that people are going to pay you for it, sometimes probably, we can get it there.

There's a bunch of strategy to do that. But this is less and less sounding like putting audio up on the internet and more and more like running a SaaS business, right. And especially with the monetization options that Apple and Spotify have contributed somewhat recently with, like premium subscriptions, right, you can pay a creator monthly to get access to a private feed that is not public. And you get access to that premium content, in addition to whatever they put out for free, which again, is starting to sound like a funnel, right? So that's where we see creators embracing these new technologies, experimenting with it in service of their monetization journey. But this is you're running a SaaS business at that point, your products, just not software, it's content. And what about churn and what about B, and like, all these other ways that people talk about subscription business models, those apply to you. And I know, we want to create, right, that's why we got into this, I'm a creator, I wish I could just like paint all day, or do sculpture or whatever. But that's not monetization, nobody's necessarily gonna, like pay me for my painting that I just spent a week doing. That's a really hard problem to solve. And just because we have audio on the internet now doesn't mean that that age old problem of artists figuring out how to get paid, has been solved magically by the Internet gods, right? It's the same work. It's the same challenge. And you quickly realise that talking into a microphone and publishing it on an RSS feed and talking to your listeners on a slack or discord. That's part of the job. There's a bunch of jobs, right? You got to market that podcast, you got to get guests on your show, are you going to do ad deals? What about the technology needed to like do that premium subscription feed that I mentioned, or your Patreon? Who is going to create that premium content? Right? This is a company there are lots of, there are lots of roles, and one person can do a company startups do that all the time.

So I'm not trying to discourage anybody from doing it. I did that right. That's how SquadCast started was a side project as a startup. So there's a tonne of parallels that I've talked about a lot, both here today. And in other podcasts that I've done, what's the parallels between running a startup and doing a podcast are many, and I would encourage people if they're interested in monetization, to think about it in those ways.

Big caveat, though, we just talked about companies that podcast and have a separate business model, right? They're already running a business. So the podcast is additive to that, right? They can think of it as another marketing channel. A couple of differences, though, they own it. It's not like Facebook, where somebody else owns it, you own it. And there's no kind of like censorship, at least today, there's a couple of different characteristics to it that are different than other forms of media, right? Like a YouTube channel can be removed from the platform, a podcast can't, it just can't because it's decentralised from any one platform provider. So that's why it may be attractive to businesses. And in their case, they probably already have a team and already a business model and stuff like that. Right. So the podcast is more just about like the workflow and how does it fit into a sustainable marketing cadence?

Mike: That's amazing. I mean, Zack, this has been brilliant. I really appreciate it. If anybody is interested in having a go at podcasting, I strongly recommend they go to SquadCast.fm where they can go try SquadCast and start recording, or indeed, if they've got other projects. Zach, it's been amazing.

Zachariah: It's been a fun conversation. And as you said, we'd love to support and create creators at any phase of their journey, whether that's just you know, learning from the content or webinars or podcasts that we do. Free for the community. We invest in the community in a bunch of different ways and We're very accessible to continue helping in that effort. And yeah, if you're recording remotely, we'd love to support you and help you with a cloud recording studio that's going to serve you in the ways that we've discussed today.

Mike:  Thank you, Zach. Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Shannon Martin - Podbean

In this podcast episode, we interview Shannon Martin, Director of Communications at Podbean, a podcast publishing solution.

Shannon shares what B2B businesses need to consider when starting a podcast, the vital role that podcast hosting platforms play in distributing across different platforms, and how to understand the download metrics of a podcast episode.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

Transcript: Interview with Shannon Martin – Podbean

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Shannon Martin

Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing b2b Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in b2b marketing today. Welcome to marketing b2b technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I'm joined by Shannon Martin Shannon is the director of communications for pod bean. Welcome to the podcast, Shannon.

Shannon: Thank you glad to be here today.

Mike: It's great to have you on. And it's really interesting to have someone who actually works for a company that helps make podcasts easier to do. And actually, one of the things I can tell people listening to podcast, is the reason you're able to download it is because we're actually a pod bean customer. So I'm a huge fan of the product. Thank you. That's great. I mean, to start off with, though, why don't you give us a little bit of background about your career and how you ended up helping people do podcasts?

Shannon: Yeah, I actually come from a sort of a marketing and communications background, and did that I had a totally different sort of specialty, originally, as many people's careers take these winding paths, but I was a huge podcast fan. So I sort of came across this opportunity at pod Bean, and not really looking to necessarily get into podcasting. But I really loved podcasts as a fan. So it was kind of a perfect way to take the skills but also put it to use in an industry that I, I had been listening to podcasts since pretty much the start of podcasting. So it was really exciting for me.

Mike: That's awesome. I think a lot of people listening, obviously, like listening to podcasts, but maybe thinking about launching their own and haven't ever recorded or published a podcast. So I mean, do you want to explain how do people create and publish a podcast? How complicated is it?

Shannon: It can be relatively simple. And I think, you know, obviously, the things that you need to do, or I mean, first of all, know why you're doing it and what you're going to be talking about and what kind of format you're going to have, there's a lot of that kind of planning. But as far as the actual recording and getting it out there, you have to record somehow. And there are lots of tools for that everything from the pod bean app has a recorder on it, that's a free tool to a lot of podcast specialists recording tools, you know, to people repurpose other other things. So you have to obviously get an audio recording or an audio and video. And then in order to get it out all those places that we might listen to a podcast, you need a podcast host, which is what pod mean is, there's also ways that you can do that on your own if you're good with programming and a lot of things like that. But, but I would say 99% of podcasts out there choose to use a podcast hosting company to do that. And it provides a feed, which then goes out to all of those places, because we all listen to podcasts, different places.

So pod bean actually is also a listening destination, we have an app, but we make sure that the podcast gets distributed out to Spotify and Apple podcasts and any of those apps where people might listen. So you kind of basically have to record know why why you're recording what you plan to do, get it set up on a podcast hosting company and get it distributed out and then determine what your ongoing plan is with a series or a schedule from there. And obviously, depending on the type of podcast, there may be tasks, like booking guests or coordinating other things, but you know, it's some are scripted, so then they have to write a script. So it just kind of varies on the type of podcast.

Mike:  That's really interesting. I think there's a lot of really good information there about planning the podcast. And probably that's something for another show. In terms of the technology. You also talked a lot about different things there. And you explain that pod bean is a podcast host. I mean, I think most people be familiar with the recording tools need to record the podcast. But am I right? You can't actually just upload a podcast to Apple podcasts. And it's magically there. Is that correct?

Shannon: Yes, you don't upload directly to the places where people listen. So you need a host or, again, there's ways you can do it kind of through your own website and through different tools. But then you really have to know programming and bandwidth and a lot of different factors. So companies like pod Bean, and some of our friendly competitors. You know, that's kind of what our goal is. And then a lot of us that do podcast hosting, there's a lot of ancillary tools that go along with that to do everything from potentially recording that might be built in to getting a little more sophisticated with what's out there for the podcasting, automate some automated marketing monetization. So a lot of us do more than just have that hosting component. But that's really something that people before they get into podcasting don't understand. They think that they do upload directly to those directories. And thank goodness you don't because there are a lot of those. So just uploading to one place. There's a little setup up front, but the nice thing is you then just upload upon being and The feed gets it out. So you're not having to go and determine do I want to be on Apple or Spotify or this one or that put that work in every time I do an episode.

Mike: So that's really important. So what you're doing is a podcast host, as well as storing the podcast file that people download. You're actually telling all these different places people go to listen that there's a new episode, is that really the role of what you're doing?

Shannon: Yeah, so it uses the RSS feed kind of technology that blogging was built on. So it's kind of a broadcasting type of thing. And then those directories pull from that the new episodes, and then magically, the person that uses Apple podcasts and subscribe to your podcast gets those new episodes and gets a notification. And it makes it really easy to have one place that you go to do the back end. And then on the front end, the listeners get the podcast episodes.

Mike:   So those platforms obviously very important. I mean, you need to be listed on all the big ones, Spotify and Apple. And so how complicated is that? Are you going to have to manually connect pod bean to each of those platforms? Or is that sort of handled for you in the popping app?

Shannon: Yeah, it there is some initial setup, and we've tried to make it as easy as possible. While there is, you know, sort of like, for example, with Apple, there's an approval process, it's that you, so you do have to set up an account there and all that. So it takes a little bit up front. But we also have a lot of directories that we have a direct. They have API's, for example, so we have a direct connection with so in our back end, as a podcaster, you have your account, and there's a distribution section. And under that it covers all the major directories. And it says, here's the one step or the two steps that you need to do. And then we also have a more extensive article that goes into every possible thing that's out there. But all the major ones are covered directly in the pod bean tools. So yeah, it takes I would say, if you want to get a podcast out there, and you have in mind, you want it to be out there this weekend, you need to think about it a little further in advance, because you can't control you know, for example, how long Apple takes to approve it. But the work that will go into it will be fairly, fairly minimal and fairly quick to get it set up.

Mike: That's awesome. And then presumably, people are trying to get on as many platforms as possible to get as big an audience. But do you still see things like Apple podcasts being the biggest platform? Or Are things getting a bit more equal?

Shannon: Now, Apple and Spotify sort of vie for that at the moment, and it depends a lot to on the geography of the listeners, because certain countries are more apple centric and certain are more Android centric. So you'll see some variety in there. So yeah, there's definitely we hit in that account, we hit in the major directories that we definitely encourage you to be a part of. And then the reality is that a lot of smaller apps pull from Apple podcast directory. So once you're in Apple, for example, you get into some of these smaller podcast apps and that kind of thing. And then if a listener asks, Hey, I use a certain app, and I don't see you there, then that's also you can go in and quickly check what their process is.

Mike: Awesome. That makes it sound so much easier. I know when we set up, it was remarkably easy to get listed on a whole range of different platforms. So that was great. To me, though, one of the interesting things I'm seeing in podcasting is the emergence of people trying to do live streaming. So their live stream or podcast and then make it available on the platforms is that something you're seeing is becoming more important?

Shannon: Yeah, we actually started an integrated live streaming tool within the podbean app back in the autumn of 2019. So which was interesting, because then in early 2020, sort of pandemic driven, I guess, or you know, that that became, there were a lot of new players, everybody wanted to get into live streaming and stuff. So I guess we were thinking in the right direction. So we do see a lot of that, I think, especially we see people doing podcasts that have other ideas of what they might want to do something a little different, or an every now and then live stream to connect with their audience. But then also new people getting into podcasting that get in through the live streaming, and realise they can repurpose it as an on demand podcasts. So it plays different roles in different podcasts situations. But it's definitely becoming more popular, I would say.

Mike: Interesting. I mean, I've seen a similar thing with people who start live streaming on LinkedIn, and then realise that actually, that's great content for a podcast. So that kind of reflects your, your view that livestream isn't necessarily the second step for a podcast actually, it could be the intro in that's, that's fascinating.

Shannon: Yeah, it goes it goes both ways. Definitely. We see it so I think it's it's nice if someone's doing an existing podcast, and they're thinking about different audience engagement options, then that's one way to go. And then yeah, a lot of people do a live stream and realise, wait a minute, I have this record. What can I do with this recording? What are other ways I can get it out there? It's perfect for a podcast.

Mike: Awesome. I mean, I guess the other trend is where Oh we're seeing is video podcasts were currently audio only should we be moving to video?

Shannon: It really depends I we do see a lot more video podcasting. I think it what's interesting is pod bean has had video, the ability to watch video podcasts in our app since the start, and have has supported video and hosting in the hosting plans as well, since since the beginning, but those were people listening primarily on podcast apps, it's really evolved more to be related to YouTube. So our podcasters have the option to get sort of a static video they can use for YouTube. But those obviously aren't as YouTube doesn't like those as much they weren't true video. So some people are moving on to recording the video and using that, and a lot of them the focus is YouTube, but then they can get it out other places too. So yeah, it's supposedly YouTube is perhaps now the most popular place for people to, quote unquote, listen to podcasts or consume podcasts. So it's definitely changing. But it really depends. You know, I personally, as a listener, listen, while I'm not in a position to watch videos a lot. So there's still a certain magic to that audio on demand format that we can consume hours while we're out being healthy taking a walk or something like that. That's what a lot of people think of as a podcast. So it's, it really kind of depends on your situation and your podcast and your goals.

Mike: So it really is a matter of finding out what your listeners one, I think from what you're saying,

Shannon: yeah, it probably wouldn't hurt and could give you more exposure to have both of those options out there for different people. But also, what is the benefit of the video, I think about that, and the bandwidth. And I don't, I mean, actual bandwidth. But I also mean your personal bandwidth, and the comfort of guests. And you know what it takes to that mean? Video obviously takes more bandwidth to both record and get good quality. It's tougher to edit. I certainly and it requires more bandwidth when it's getting played as well. So those are the potential challenges of it.

Mike: Right. So if you're trying to understand your audience, I guess one of the things people really care about is reporting knowing when the podcast is doing well. I mean, what stats the podcasters wants to know about their podcasts and where do they get them from?

Shannon: Yeah, so you get them from your podcast hosting company. So that's another thing that we do and a big part of the role. And the statistics in podcasting. I won't get into the weeds too much on this, but they're essentially called downloads. Now, this becomes highly confusing, because people will say often and I read constant discussions and Facebook groups with a lot of misinformation. And they'll say, but everyone tells me they stream they listen, they don't download it to their phone. So am I Where are they? I'm missing those How do I know those numbers, but in the podcast terminology, and the standards are set by a an organisation called the IAB, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, we actually are progressively or someone when they're listening is progressively downloading if they're streaming. So there's a standard standard set for an over a minutes worth of content. And it's kind of a complicated formula. But they're all called downloads. So when you see I, you know, my podcast episode, this week got 100 downloads, that can mean the person who actually downloaded it, or was streaming it and counts as this according to this metric. And then within that, we're able to also share things like the geographies where those listeners are coming from what sources so are they listening on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and all of that. And then at pod bean, we also have a specialised statistic or analytics for our business customers, and a lot of them are actually doing internal podcasting. But that actually shows in depth statistics of how the listening pattern was. And so in an episode, what people are skipping and all of that on all of the pod bean based tools, we can't tell that we don't get that information back from Apple, for example, but they are doing something similar. And I think Spotify also does. So all together, you could get a really good snapshot of that if you want. And in that particular case, too, we potentially have the ability to give individual listener data, again, with our internal podcast, these companies usually have that permission. Obviously, with data privacy, we can't give that kind of stuff for the general listener. But there's some kind of unique opportunities with statistics coming up. But yeah, the kind of who, how many are listening to popularity, and then some of that other source kind of data is what is provided and what people are looking for.

Mike: That makes sense. But obviously, one of the things you're saying is that a download is not necessarily a listen, is that right?

Shannon: Yeah, if someone listens, it will count as a download. So if they're streaming it will count as a download. But if someone actually downloads and I listened for example, Have an aeroplane later. You don't know, did I listen on the aeroplane or didn't tie it other than if we, we can find that out because we actually have a listening app or if I listen on your site, your pod bean site, we can get more of that kind of information. But generally because of the sort of democratic nature of podcasting, where there's all these different ways people listen, then some of that kind of what happens from there, we don't have and no one, no podcast host would have that information. So it's fortunately it's fairly standardised across the industry. So if you're using different podcast hosts, if they follow those standards, you'll get the same kind of information.

Mike: So everybody's equal, it's not quite perfect, but everybody's on a level playing field.

Shannon: Yeah. And right now, that's a little difficult. You know, sometimes people say, I want to know who my listeners are some of the demographic kind of stuff, there are some things developing that may be able to, you know, if you think of Nielsen and things with TV, that kind of stuff potentially, might move forward with that. But otherwise, right now, because there's a platform, and there's the server side that we see versus where people listen, those are things that aren't aren't necessarily available that way.

Mike: Perfect. Makes sense. So you mentioned something a little bit earlier, and I'd like to get back to it. You talked about internal podcasts for businesses, can you explain a little bit more about the difference between a public podcast and then something that's internal to a particular business?

Shannon: Yeah, it's one of the specialties at pod bean. And because it's internal, no one really knows about it very often, we've done case studies with a lot of the companies that are doing it, because we can't share the actual podcasts, obviously. So companies often use this for their employees, and also membership organisations and that kind of thing. So it can be the same very much as a podcast you would listen to publicly, but the purpose and how it's distributed is a bit different. So we see a lot of them being used for training, and leadership development, learning and development and corporations, messages from CEO and leadership, employee stories, these kind of all data, these kind of things. And basically, it's produced and created, and you use the pod bean platform. And then we secure it so that only the permitted users, whether it's members or employees can get it. And that's either password kind of situation, or a connected to the company's own sign in. So a lot of our companies actually do it that way. And that way, it's their own security. And it's also no extra, you know, accountant to make, since we all have 1000s of accounts nowadays. And we have a special app for that called the pro app, which is actually what a lot of companies use. And we can also develop special apps for them. But that's how the employees can access it, and have a nice podcast user experience, but not have to be concerned that it gets to competitors and things like that.

Mike: Presumably as well, they can add their own branding and make that that special out there own.

Shannon: Yeah, so we can create white label apps, which are completely separate from the pod bean names that we have several companies that have those, we have one company, it's the company name, and then on air, that's the name of their app. And the pro app is what I call a semi white label app. So when a person goes in, it's obviously it's called pod bean Pro. So that's how they download it from the store. But it's already available. We do all the development. But then as soon as they log in, it goes to a company page. So it has the logo and and everything. So it's pretty much pod bean name of front pod bean, you know, handles the load the app, but it's, you know, kind of a white label experience once they enter. So yeah, it's really a booming i We just were at a conference about a week ago, talking with a learning and development professionals and something that was very popular, they're all really considering how it can be used.

Mike: Okay, so it's a fascinating trend. And it's got to be something that's going to grow and grow because everybody's got their mobile device. It's a great way to reach people. Looking back at sort of the more standard podcasting, I mean, do you see b2b growing in terms of public podcasting, trying to reach customers and prospects?

Shannon: Tremendously? Tremendously? Yes, I think our for example, our internal podcasting business, we see it growing, but we've found that that side of our business is even more the public, the branded style podcast, the thought leadership, you know, we really see companies starting to and it's getting to that sort of tipping point starting to realise it's something that they need, like they used to realise, you know, they knew they needed a website, obviously than a blog, social media. Now there's okay, we definitely need a podcast and how can we use it best? And so yeah, and we have a lot of companies have multiple podcasts now for different different sorts of needs. So I think it's it's good I really believe in my our CEO has said this a few times that we do think at one point companies will assume that it's something they need just like a blog.

Mike: And in terms of the b2b space is that different from b2c in terms of attracting listeners and growing the audience?

Shannon: Definitely, I think even the largest companies, or the most beautifully produced interesting story branded story kind of podcasts are going to tend to have a smaller. Of course, this is very much a generalisation because even individual podcasts, some have to listeners, so, but generally, you're not going to find that you're going to turn into a Joe Rogan or a serial, you know, millions of downloads, because it's more niche. And it really has a sort of a different purpose, the purpose is not to get millions of listeners necessarily. So it's really to there's many different purposes that can be behind it. And that's the most important thing to think about when starting for b2b Did the podcast.

Mike: I mean, obviously, you really care about a certain sort of listener, in b2b, it's very specific. If you're in marketing, for example, motor drives, you care about people who are going to buy motor drives, and not about people who have no interest. So it's not it's not just vanity metrics, and

Shannon: very much yeah, the overall number of listeners is not nearly as important to that I actually, I think I heard this on a podcast originally, and then talk to this person, it was actually a production company that helps people with podcasts. And they had a company that did podcasts. And their success metric was actually achieved before they even put the podcast out into the public. And I thought this was fascinating. I said, Okay, tell me more about this. They said, because they interviewed thought leaders in their industry. And from that they got multiple million dollar sales that they couldn't have done otherwise, because they asked these people to be on their podcasts, and the people had a conversation with them. And some of them they couldn't access before, through other sort of channels. And that wasn't they weren't sort of doing that in a shady way. They were really intending to put out a podcast, but it ended up having this goal. You know, it was amazing that it achieved more than they ever thought by doing that. So obviously, that that is one potential benefit is just the guest interactions that you might have. And then obviously reaching out that niche customer, sometimes providing really sort of educational, thought leadership kind of information where they see you in that way. And also the intimacy of podcasting itself, the voice really can be come across in a way that other forms of marketing don't.

Mike: Makes a lot of sense. What's the best way to promote podcast to get more of the listeners you want? How could we, for example, grow our audience with a Napier podcast?

Shannon: I think that especially talking about b2b podcasts, it's important to know who is that audience potentially, who are you targeting, Who's your ideal listener. And to think of that, and that's kind of echoes from the very beginning of starting a podcast, because even at what kind of format you choose, and how long you make it, and a lot of those things, you might really base that on that sort of Persona and their life and their work situation. And then thinking about where to best market to those people. So a lot of b2b podcasts really, as far as social media, for example, need to focus more on LinkedIn, than Twitter or Instagram. So you may have all the social media for your podcast, but the ones that I know of the b2b podcast tend to focus on those on promoting it on LinkedIn, and particularly, maybe in groups that relate to the industry, making those kinds of connections, sort of CO marketing with guests that are big names in an industry, you know, can make a huge difference. And even sometimes some traditional PR is for any Podcasts can be really helpful. And sometimes it's overlooked. Because social media kind of you know, everything gets there's a lot of it, it gets kind of lost PR can still be very valuable, having an article written about what you're doing with the podcast. And so I think in industry related podcasts, that can be really true because someone reads the magazine or the website of an association. And that's where they go to for the information. And oh, this podcast is related to that topic. And it's a more of a fit than just trying to blast everything out there to the general public. So I think those kinds of things are really key. And, again, guest co promoting can be very useful. And similarly, one of the things we see with podcasts in general, and it can work for b2b is even just more direct kind of CO promoting on other podcasts. So if there are other related in your industry things and it may seem like oh, wait a minute, a competitor, but a lot of times, if you're in a specific industry, there's probably very little out there. If there's two podcasts, that's amazing. You may have to find something, it's more ancillary even but then talking to them about whether you can do some shared promotion kind of thing because if I'm really into technology, a specific kind of Technology and there's one podcast out there, I have space to listen to another one probably. So it's not going to your competition isn't going to take your listener away most likely.

Mike: That makes a lot of sense. So a bit of friendly cooperation, even with people who may be somewhat in competition is a good move.

Shannon: Definitely. And I think that another aspect that sometimes it depends, again on the podcast, and your and your listener, but there is there are also opportunities in in listening apps to promote. And so if you're looking at different if you're actually looking at advertising, and spending some money on promotion, and marketing, that's something to check. Because when people are in an app listening, it can if generally, for podcasts, it's a really good place to promote, because they're already ripe for adding another podcast to their subscribe lists. So there are some targeted ways you can do that within apps that might fit more to get your kind of b2b listener. But that's another thing to consider.

Mike: Perfect. I've got to ask this, are there any mistakes people make any things you should, you should avoid that perhaps if you're new to podcasting, or particularly in the b2b sector, things that you can do wrong, that aren't going to help your podcast?

Shannon: I think the first thing is to hear but thinking about it at the start, and because I'm saying, oh, a lot of people, now they're realising Oh, we just need to have a podcast. But the mistake with that can be thinking, we just need to have a podcast because it's cool. And we don't really think about the purpose, and the goals. And therefore, we are hoping to achieve something that that is unrealistic. So maybe the someone in the company, Oh, I see our competitors have podcasts. Let's get one. Let's do one. And I see that some podcasts have millions of downloads. So that's what we need to achieve. That's your KPI achieve that. And that doesn't, that's not a good idea. For a b2b podcast. Generally, those big numbers aren't necessarily your metric for success. So I think that's very important in setting things up. And knowing what your goal is, and setting everything up around that. And then I think the other thing is just taking years to do it, because you think you have to buy the most expensive equipment and spend a lot of money and that it's complicated. And, of course, in some companies, larger companies, that's also because the processes take a long time. So some of that you can't help. But if there's if there are ways to simplify it, and to get the product to market, I would say that's the way to go. Because otherwise, you'll find yourself years from now of saying we had a great idea, but it never came to fruition.

Mike: It makes a lot of sense. That's, that's great. I mean, I really appreciate everything you've shared here from the technology through to advice in terms of granulars it's been amazing conversation, is there anything else we should have covered or anything you think people should know about podcasting?

I think it's a follow on to what I just mentioned that it can be relatively easy and inexpensive to start. And there's a lot of great equipment, and great tools and things you can add on. But I'd say for most starting relatively simple, is very, very feasible with podcasting more than a lot of other mediums. So that's you can get started and get going. And if you know what your intention is behind it, then that you can have a really good quality podcast by putting out good content. And then you can always improve things and upgrade and and move up from there. But if you bring people something that's helpful or interesting to them, then you can succeed with it even without spending a lot of money or time.

Mike: That's awesome. That's great advice. If people are interested, if they want to learn more, is there a way they can contact you to find out more about podcasting or about popping in particular?

Shannon: Definitely podbean.com We have lots of ways to contact if there and I am actually I'm on LinkedIn a lot. So if people use LinkedIn, I'm Shannon Martin writes, writes like writer, Shannon Martin writes, and or just look up Shannon Martin podbean. And I'm very open to talking to people having conversations, and we have a lot of we have a million different ways that you can get pod bean information. But rather than listing all those, I'll just say the website, of course, we have all the social media, and for b2b in particular, we are we have a pretty good presence on LinkedIn. And we even have a group that's specific to corporate podcasting, both for the external and the internal purposes. And that's for people to be able to share their own experiences. So I'm glad to connect you up with that group. If you're interested.

Mike: That's amazing. I'll definitely be joining the group. I really appreciate all your time. And all your knowledge has been great. Thanks so much for being on the show.

Shannon: Thank you for having me.

Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing b2b Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier b2b dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast: Interview with Matt Young - UserVoice

In this podcast episode, we interview Matt Young, CEO of UserVoice, a product feedback management solution for SaaS platforms.

Matt explains how the platform captures user feedback to deliver insights into product problems and solutions and how this raw data can be used to inform marketing and sales strategies.

Matt also shares his insight into trends within the SaaS industry.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

Transcript: Interview with Matt Young – UserVoice

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Matt Young

Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing b2b Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in b2b marketing today. Welcome to marketing b2b technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by Matt young Matt is the CEO of user voice. Welcome to the podcast, Matt.

Matt: Hey, Mike, great to be here.

Mike: No, it's great to have you on. So tell me a little bit about your career. First, you know, how did you get to become CEO of user voice?

Matt: It's a weird story and not one that you would expect. Given my background. I've was born a technologist. So my dad worked for IBM, and we had an IBM PC in the 80s in the early days, and I was the kid that went and taught myself to programme.

So naturally through college and graduate school, I was a computer scientist and started out as a software developer, and was fortunate enough to start working in software development, right when the web became a thing when when web browsers were first coming out. So my entire professional career has been in the delivery of software for the web, and the web.

Over the years, you emerge from software developer to engineering, management, and engineering team leadership. And I had always assumed that I would be a vice president of engineering, getting people organised towards a particular goal as efficiently as possible. And that was actually the thing that drew me to use your voice, I came to use your voice in 2015. Because being in the position of directing a large engineering team to do a lot of work, you want to be fed the best quality information and the most valuable projects to do. And I frankly, didn't really believe that product teams I was working with, were researching the work that they wanted to do well enough.

So you know, being the recipient and being asked to build all that stuff. It didn't feel great user voice as a product, as we'll get into that that really helped solve that problem. But over the years, I became the CEO. And if this is an interesting story, we can we can get into it. But UserVoice ended up spinning off a second product that the original founder of the company was working on. And I ended up taking over the original user voice product that was started in 2008. So unexpected position for me that I picked up about three years ago and never really had Grand Designs on being a CEO. And I don't really fit the egotistic San Francisco mould of a b2b SaaS CEO. But nonetheless, here we are, and it's been a really fun ride.

Mike: But I think it's great to see engineers, you know, be able to take on that role of CEO and be successful. So for me, that's a real positive.

Matt: Yeah, it has been in it. I think it's a fairly unique perspective. I like many engineers, I'm an introvert, I am empathetic to quite a number of the different roles that we have in the organisation. And I'm really keen on making sure that we are logically delivering great value to our customer base and providing a great place to work for everyone who's on the team here.

Mike: Sounds amazing. So you had a situation where effectively the company built a second product, the CEO, presumably love that product so much. He was what he wanted to go and work in the spin off. Is that, is that how it worked? Or how did it happen?

Matt: Yeah, so the original founder UserVoice, was was born out of the need to get feedback about a product that he was working on, he was building a calendaring app. And it was really, really hard to get people's honest opinions about it. So he built user voice to solve that problem. Fast forward about 10 years later, and we feel like we need you know, the internet's evolve the way people interact with providing feedback and their expectations of companies evolved. And we as a company and UserVoice felt like we needed to become a multi product company.

So Rich, the founder of the company went off and started it took a small portion of our team and in house started operating like a second company. He didn't attend the all hands meetings, they had their own. They chose their own methodology for software development and product management. And they went through several iterations of a product and the the product turned out to be one that is really good for product managers who is our target buyer, but even better for sales, customer success and marketing. The market was much larger for that.

While this was happening, and this happened over the course of about a year. His mandate to me was like, Hey, I, I hold on to user voice too tightly. I founded it. I have certain No feelings about what can and cannot be touched. But you don't. I'm not a founder of the company. And I think we we both recognise that things had stagnated a little bit, the market had evolved, the world had evolved. And, you know, I'm willing to take a hatchet to things that I don't think are valuable anymore and take big swings and big risks, things I think, are important to change to make the product overall more valuable. And that had been going really well.

So through this really nice serendipitous moment, this was at the end of 2019. Rich decided to spin off the other product, which is called fathom that video, it's a free zoom, integrated note taking app for doing any kind of interviews, market research, product, research, sales, calls, Customer Success calls. He's like you're doing a great job making User Voice better. So why don't you just take over the whole company and run with that? So I did, and you know, naturally, less than six months later, a pandemic hits. So if you want a newly minted CEO, trial by fire, that's a good recipe for it.

Mike: I mean, that must be challenging, and other CEOs must have gone through that. I remember when I took over Napier, it happened about three weeks before the.com crash, so I can. Yeah, it's a real challenge. So you've kind of by accident, inherited user voice, and become CEO of user voice, which is a very fortuitous accident. So you've talked about it briefly. But do you want to just, you know, really go into the details of exactly what problem UserVoice is solving. You mentioned, Rich's problem with the Calendar app.

Matt: Yep. And how that's evolved over time really, you know, won't be until the company that doesn't pay attention to what their their customers and potential customers are saying. But that's easier said than done. You've got the problem of collecting all that information, you've got the problem of sharing all that information internally, you have the question of how reliable is that information. Customers don't always express their problems, they tend to speak in solutions. You know, I want you to generate this report. Or, I wish I could do this or that you've got ideas coming in from your internal teams, you've got salespeople and marketing people saying, hey, I really think the product could be better. If we're doing X, Y, or Z. Once you've gathered all that feedback, you've got the problem of deciding which of it is the most valuable, what you should pay attention to what action you should take from it. And that requires pulling in a bunch of different data sources like CRM, information, user behaviour, etc. And then once you've acted on that feedback, how do you then radiate back out to all the teams that need it like the sales team, the marketing team, the customer success team, all the why behind it, how they should present the new functionality that's coming up what problem that's really solving.

So really, User Voice is a software platform that's meant to just make it easy for you to follow the best practices of listening to customers, assessing the value and importance of one piece of feedback versus another and then helping your whole team kind of rally around what you've learned through transparency, better communication.

Mike: And you've focused on SAS as a market. Is that right?

Matt: We have Yeah, I think it it works best for SAS, because you've got a lot of individual customers and a clear communication channel available to you. It works best in b2b, it works really well in b2c. But it's a it's a slightly different problem. b2c is more of a popularity contest, or a b2b is more of a segmentation of your accounts problem. And make sure that you're looking at the things that are most desired by the market that you serve. We have had customers doing things like consumer packaged goods, or internal IT infrastructure. That stuff can work. I think it just takes a little bit more discipline on the part of the user of the software to be able to do that effectively. But we tend to orient all our software primarily around b2b SaaS, and secondarily, b2c SAS,

Mike: anytime see that expanding into more general product feedback in the future?

Matt: May maybe I will never say never, but but we're a pretty small company. So you know, to try to dilute the use cases that we're trying to solve for we're just probably make an inferior product. So even though I think that's something that we could solve, it's probably not something we're going to tackle in the next year. So

Mike: it makes sense for sure. So you mentioned quite a lot of sources of data that you're pulling together. So how do companies use uses voice to gather all this data from different places whether it's you know, user behaviour or CRM or whatever, and pull it together to make conclusions. I mean, is there a sort of process they follow?

Matt: Yeah. So we we try to be present wherever that information might show up, especially the qualitative information. So, if a marketer is doing market research are a really good easy to understand example, is a salesperson doing a demo. And they're getting feedback in real time from the person watching the demo, and they're taking notes. In Salesforce itself, if that is product features and functionality that is missing, and potentially causing the deal to be lost, the product team needs to know that to be able to do that. So user voice integrates with Salesforce, and a bunch of other CRMs and support tools like Zendesk, we have API's, we have the ability to integrate with email and any other kind of communication that you do, or even if you're using Zoom recording tools, and capturing notes that way, just to make sure all of that stuff can filter into a singular repository that gets it all, and makes it really, really easy for a salesperson to capture that stuff and be able to watch it. That wasn't the way that user voice started in.

In fact, the way it user was started was to get the feedback straight from the people using the product, they could go to a web portal and you know, vote on ideas or offer their own ideas. They could pop up a JavaScript widget within the application, we still support all of those mechanisms. We have API's for collecting feedback directly from users. But I think a lot of a lot of product teams are a little bit nervous to open up the firehose of feedback coming directly from users, if you if you think about it, it's a pretty brave thing to say, hey, tell us anything about what's not working for the product, there's going to be a stream of pretty negative information coming your way, they're not going to sing your praises, they're going to tell you all the ways they want you to be better.

So most people get started by collecting all that feedback through their trusted team, the people who are on the frontlines talking to customers. And when they realise like, Hey, this is really, really valuable information, it's helping me get visibility into what's actually in the heads of our users, I would value having that straight from customers. And then that creates the opportunity to have a much more open dialogue, it creates the ability to say that, you know, the product team is thinking about a feature, but the marketing team wants to know about how to talk about that feature. So we already know who's interested in it, we already know who'd be game to have an interview, who to connect with. So in terms of gathering all the feedback, we just tried to be wherever that feedback might show up and make sure that it's very easy to capture at any particular time.

Mike: And is there kind of a processing step where you're trying to take this big pile of feedback information and make sense of it?

Matt: There there is because there's a lot of it even for small companies, we handle companies all the way from, you know, 20 or 30 people companies all the way to like the Adobe's and very large companies in the world where the volume of feedback they're getting is, is massive. So I think it all starts with making sure that we always know who provided the feedback.

If you think about a b2b business, if an individual provides feedback, that individual needs to be associated with the account that they belong to, What business do they represent, you probably want to know what that account is worth, how long they've been a customer, what plan they're on what kind of segments they're in. Also, that you can relate that data to what your overarching goals as a company are, if you're trying to sell into a new market, you're trying to increase revenue, you're trying to drive up your ACV, or increased retention.

All those goals mean that you're gonna want to look at that data a little bit differently. So it all starts with who provided that data. And once we have that, we can pull in all kinds of information from CRM and financial systems to decorate it and make sure that you can query it the right ways. I think that's kind of a nice power user feature. A lot of us most of us are not necessarily a business analyst. So you don't necessarily know what the right question to ask is. So on top of that, we also try to throw on some automatic parsing have the information to point you to what's really the most important. We do that on very tactical levels, for example, like duplicate feedback becomes an issue for a lot of people but we use AI systems to try to suggest you how to deduplicate that automatically, all the way up to really high level roll up reports that let you say, Okay, I want to break into the Asia Pacific market. And Alright, tell me what the top ideas are that people are request stealing from a PAC and rank them by how much revenue, those companies are making us. And most of the time, I think we advise people like lean into your fans, they're the ones that kind of represent the people who are going to expand that customer base the most easily. So we can just deliver a report that is constantly updated, there's literally no work you have to do. It's just always there in real time updated for you.

Mike: That's interesting. It sounds like you're not effectively ranking how many times people ask, but you're actually looking a lot deeper. And you're looking at, you know, what the most important customers want, or, you know, what your next territory wants is that really what you're trying to do to get another level of insight,

Matt: it really depends on what a company's goals are. It's, it's not always wrong to say, how many people voted for it being a driver, if you're going for the popularity contest, if you might be going through an effort like where you want to increase CSAT. And one way to increase customer satisfaction is to look at what most people want. And that's a good way to do it. But if you're if you're looking more at strategic business growth, you might be looking at things more from a business metrics perspective instead.

Mike: So, I mean, this is interesting, can you give us some, you know, maybe some specific examples about how people have used the product to improve their SaaS products.

Matt: Let me give you two examples. The first is not going to be a SAS example. Because I think it's easy to understand and relatable. User Voice is used by a lot of gaming companies like Electronic Arts. And in that case, it is a popularity contest. They are you know, if they're producing a game, that sports game that gets iterated every year, they want to make sure that the next year's version reflects the desire of the biggest player base, so that they have the highest likelihood of selling next year's version to those people. So that just happens all the time every day.

A really good success case for us as a company called Procore. Procore is a it's a unicorn SAS company that feeds construction managers. So if a suburb is being developed with 100 houses or something like that Procore deliver software that makes sure that all the materials are arriving on the right time that every other construction is on schedule, etc. But the users of that software are men and women who are wearing hard hats, and construction boots and using an iPad, to access the software. And that's really different from most of us, what most of us think about is assess user who's sitting in front of a computer with, you know, a nice polo shirt or something like that. They're happy to use software. If you use something like user voice, you can understand really like how to really serve the needs of a very specific audience like that, like how to make it simple enough to use to understand so that they can really get to the bottom of a very specific use case, which is building houses. So Procore is a company needs to really understand the business that their customers are in. But this gives them a really iterative feedback mechanism for them to find out where they're hitting the mark and where they're off. So it's, those are kind of two extreme areas. Most people are just working on using the feedback to figure out like, what's the next sprint going to look like? What's our next quarter or six month planning going to look like? And really trying to equate that with, with what the goals of the business are?

Mike: Makes a lot of sense. So one of the things I'm interested in is marketing, make use of user feedback. And I'm thinking particularly, you know, do you get feedback about features that customers particularly like? Can you then use that in marketing? How do marketing people use the data? Yeah,

Matt: I think that we always share the feedback that we use User Voice ourselves, of course, and we always share the the raw feedback that we got from our users with marketing, because as they're crafting messaging to this to describe what we actually did, what its value is what you use it for. It always lands better. If you're using the words and the phrases that came to you in the first place. This is the way that the user of the software is actually thinking about the problem and thinking about the solution. It's just going to make it very easy for you to communicate it effectively to people when it comes to allowing marketing to lean into the most loved areas of the product. We determined through behavioural Analytics, which is something that user voice doesn't do, where people are spending the most time and all of those things.

But whenever we're researching a new product, we take the opportunity, as we're interviewing customers from a product perspective, to learn about how it fits into the big picture of their workflow. Why do they want this improvement? How does it relate to the other tasks they're doing day over day, we capture all that feedback again, back into user voice. So you might think that user voice just captures the initial idea. It does do that. But then we continually add to that as we learn more about it. As we conduct interviews, all of that information goes into user voice. So if you look at the maturation of an idea in user voice from when it first showed up, to us actually deploying a solution for it, you can see all the discussion. And that's just a goldmine, not only for marketing, but for sales. How should we demo the software? What kind of collateral should we put together as a leave behind? Or, you know, what videos should we create? And how should we narrate those videos? In the end, I'm a firm believer that all the research that any company does, whether it's product research, market research, sales research should be shared cross departmentally, because there's value in it for for everybody. That's not always easy to do. And some company organisations get protective of their their fiefdoms a little bit. But if you can share that stuff, you'll at minimum, prevent duplicate work. And at best, just create something that's just a knock it out of the park, answer to the problem from the get go.

Mike: I love the idea of sharing. And it's particularly interesting, you know, when you started talking about the benefits to departments like marketing, it's not about the features. It's about how you talk and understanding the way that goes, we think I think that's a really interesting benefit from from getting that user feedback.

Matt: Yeah, I also think that it helps the whole organisation understand how product teams make decisions about what they build. There's a lot of recency bias in market research and in what salespeople hear, you might think that just because you've heard something twice recently, that it is the best thing to do. But if someone could actually come to you and say, Hey, thanks, I got that feedback, we read it, I can definitely acknowledge that I heard what you told us. But here's the analysis that we did. And we compared it against everything else that we've heard from you from sales from the research that we've done. And we can show you that, hey, you know, our biggest opportunity really looks like it's here. And then suddenly, the marketing team who's tasked with putting forth information about new features and retaining people isn't starting from this position of like, I don't know why they did this, you know, I told them that this was the most important thing to do. And that all came from a good position, a good healthy position, but it just wasn't objectively the right thing to do at the right time. And I think that takes away a lot of these like anxieties about not necessarily believing in what the r&d team or an organisation is building.

Mike: That's great. I love that way of getting everyone you know, buying into to the same goal effectively. I mean, that's a really cool benefits.

Matt: Yeah, we, we also User Voice intentionally, we don't charge based on seats, it would be an easy way for us to make more money, but like if, if I made you pay for everyone on your support team to be able to send feedback into the system that would kind of discourage you from doing that. And we think like, the more data, the better. We also don't limit the number of people who can log in and use that data for their own purposes. So I think it would just be at odds to try to like limit access to that information for people. So it's really common for our marketing team to look in our own user voice instance, not to figure out what we should build, but to start looking for phrases and language about how we should talk about things.

Mike: That's cool. I mean, you mentioned pricing there, and you said that you deal with you know, everything from a small 20 person SAS company to you know, some of these giants. I mean, how does the pricing work then for that? That's such a range of customers?

Matt: Yeah, the the growth levers are really built based off of the coverage of your user base, how many how many unique users you actually have giving you feedback, because we did a lot of research through a third party company to get this objective feeling about where, where you feel value, and it's, it's in the diversity of perspective that you're getting. If you're doing one on one interviews right now, that's great, but it's hard to scale up to a lot of them. And you might worry that like at great, you know, I've got this person's perspective, but they're the people I always talk to, where if you've got 200 or 500 or 1000 different points of view on it, you can feel much more confident in the actionability of what's going on.

So So, we have three different tiers. And those tears just have limits in the number of people giving you feedback and the early stages of a company, you might not have a huge user base, so it cost less. When you're a very large company, and we're processing a lot of data for you, then we're saving you a lot of time by being able to deliver insights from all that stuff for you. So hopefully, it scales well with the perceived value of a product.

Mike: I love that as it was just like a really simple approach to pricing there, you know, how many users are you doing? Let's put you in tears. That's great. I mean, is it as easy to deploy? Because it sounds like you're pulling data from lots of different systems is that does that become quite a complex project?

Matt: It's not, we've spent a pretty significant amount of time making sure that all of those integrations are quite simple, selfishly, from a business perspective for us, if we can't do that, and we tell you, you're going to have have to pay us a bunch of money, and then you're going to have this project. No one wants that the goal of SAS is to like have an out of box solution for people. So historically, integrating software with Salesforce has always been a big pain in the neck. And for us it anyone can do it, and it takes about three minutes to get done. So we try to make that very, very simple.

I think the biggest effort is likely in the organisational change of making sure that people think to capture feedback when it comes in. And one thing that's that we view is our job is really important to help our customers with is to make sure that everyone in their organisation like a marketing individual understands the value of doing this, you might not see it right now. But in two months here, you've got a bunch of really useful information to help you with your job as well.

Mike: That's, that's amazing. I, you know, one thing I'm intrigued about you obviously work with a lot of leading SaaS companies. Do you see any trends in SAS, I mean, what we're going to see in SAS products in the next couple of years is going to allow us and make us excited.

Matt: Oh, my God, I see a lot of trends in SAS, I think the as a, as a CEO of a company, I could say the diplomatic thing and say that I think that competition makes all of our products better. But if I were honest, I would say oh, God, that makes your job so much harder to begin with. But the nice thing about competition is that it really drives the quality of solutions forward. Eventually, even if you there's I think we all know the expression product market fit is the product appropriate for the market that you're you're getting into. There's another phrase called purchase market fit. Where are you able to sell the product to people? Is your marketing really good? Is your sales really good. But then your attention might not be good if product market fit is not there right behind it.

So I think some of the trends I'm seeing and says is that the people who have these amazing marketing engines, but they don't have the technology chops underneath or the smarts to really solve the problems, those companies are going to fall by the wayside. And it's not enough to be flashy, it's not enough to be the cheapest, it's not enough to be the newest darling. So, because of that, I think that the biggest thing that most SaaS companies need defend against is the very easy portability of moving from vendor to vendor in the same space it's vendor lock in is not as much a thing as it as it used to be. So we all as assess business operators need to make sure that the product is really good, that our support is really good, that our ability to coach and provide best practices. And I think that that's an area where I see marketing, being a very huge help less about selling the product more about driving continual value in the product. And that's where I think a product like user voice is really important. You may achieve product market fit, but how are you going to hang on to it.

As products become easier and quicker to develop easier and quicker to market, it means you just need to keep up and keep two or three steps ahead of where the market is going. So I don't see operating SAS businesses as getting any easier. anytime soon, I think it's going to get more challenging. I see.

You know, I'm a consumer of SAS software myself, and I don't have the time to look at all the options that are out there. I don't want to talk to people about it. I really want a product lead experience where I can do a free trial on my own, decide if it's the right fit for me, I want transparency and pricing to be able to understand what this would cost and make all that evaluation when there's so many options out there. The it doesn't need to be completely self service. There can be sales involved, but you need to be able to get to a point where you understand whether it's worth investing your time really, really quickly.

So I don't think I gave you one problem. I think I gave you the Legion of SAS problems just now but it's none of it's getting any simpler. It's getting there. To give you a positive, it is easier than ever to develop software, which is good because it will lower r&d costs over time.

Mike: You know, I mean, it sounds good to us as like me. You know, science pros are just going to get better. Maybe not so good. If you're the engineer, he's got to develop all the new features. But

Matt: yeah, are the person needs to place the right bets at the right time. But then again, that's why I think that research is so important. If you discover before you've lifted a design or an engineering feature, that something will not have the market impact that you thought it would. Cool, you may be throwing out some work that you did, but you didn't go way down this path, only to discover that it feels much later.

Mike: So awesome. I mean, quite a positive view there for SAS. I mean, I'm interested in what are your ambitions? So yourself? I mean, where do you see user voice going now that that your, your CEO, and it's all down to you?

Matt: Yeah. This may sound a little unusual, I think most CEOs will tell you that they expect to be a billion dollar company. And you know, from their private islands, start seven more companies and keep going and going. User Voice doesn't want to do that. But we want to be the best at what we do. And oftentimes we get asked to do things that are kind of horizontally associated with what user voice does. Why haven't we built a general purpose survey tool for marketing or for sales, because we're in the feedback business, or why don't we also have behavioural analytics or design review tools like product managers often use.

So user voice is going to continue to be the best at making sure that we can understand product problems and product needs from people and give people the ability to understand that versus their business goals. To do that, effectively, I think it's either going to come down to partnerships or acquisition for us like we need to hold hands with other best of breed solutions that are needed to operate a successful b2b SaaS company. And we are one of several tools that you would use to communicate with your customer base. Obviously, you'd use a CRM tool, your marketing team is going to have their own tools through HubSpot, etc. Making sure that all of those can provide value across the whole organisation is really important to us. And I think for us, that's going to mean partnerships from a business perspective. And then ongoing automation, the the volume of data that we deal with is going to not decrease as long as we do our job. Well.

One thing I haven't mentioned yet is keeping customers engaged. I think all of us know how hard it is to get people's attention. It's the slew of survey requests, meeting requests that we're all getting every day. So how do I make it as easy as possible for a customer or an internal team member to share their thoughts and bring it in. And we're trying to think of ever simpler ways to make that more natural through technology so that as you're thinking of it, boom, it's there. And it's very, very low effort.

Mike: So some, and I love the focus, we're going to do what we do, and we're gonna partner and that's how we'll be successful. Yeah, it's really refreshing to hear that

Matt: I don't want to produce a watered down version of something that someone else just really really does well, like, what why bother?

Mike: So awesome. So I really appreciate your time on the podcast, man. I mean, if people have got questions, wanting to know more about User Voice, or just want to talk to you about what you've said in the podcast, what's the best way to contact you?

Matt: Sure. I always say that it would be very hypocritical for me to not want feedback about what we have to say it's our core line of business. So my email door is always open. It's Matt at user voice.com. You can find me on LinkedIn met young Matt, young User Voice is the best search term because my name is so common.

But user voice.com is where you can learn more about our products. You can do free trials of any of our products and just learn a little bit more about it. Even if you're not interested in buying it. I'd love to have people take a look at its men in especially if you're willing to share with us like what resonated with you and where you thought like, yeah, not for me. It's just basically like free customer interview for me. It's a great thing. But if we can help on on any other front, like you just something that we said was interesting, and you'd like to chat. Happy to do that, too.

Mike: Well, that's awesome. I really appreciate your time. Matt, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Matt: It was a lot of fun, Mike, thank you.

Mike: Thank you.

Thanks so much for listening to marketing b2b Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier b2b dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Natasha Websdale