One year ago I sold my podcast hosting business — here’s what I wish I knew when I started

Most startups close down within three years. We made it to four. We could’ve gone further, but I burned out. I made the right decision to sell Podiant, because I’d given it all I could, and I didn’t know how to help it fill the shoes it belonged in.

I’m proud of Podiant in a way that’s hard to put into words without coming off as conceited. I know enough about the landscape to know it was one of the best products in its class. It wasn’t flawless, but it shone — and as a mostly one-person operation, outpaced competing services built by teams of designers and developers.

I learned tonnes about what it means to scale up a web service, to solve customer challenges, and how in some cases not to make friends. Not ‘cos I’m a jerk, just because there’s still a lot of substandard work being done by people who joined after Spotify bought Anchor, and think that money buys legitimacy.

Alright, I’m gonna settle down now — that’s about as strident as I want to get. :)

So if I was so proud of Podiant, why step away from it? Because as good as the product was in features and support, those things don’t grow businesses alone. They’re vital fuel, and you shouldn’t run a service-based business without them. But they’re no substitute for knowing and caring about marketing — which simply means figuring out who your customers are, and what they need.

Scratching my own itch

Building a product to solve a problem you face is still a great way to build a SaaS business. But that’s no guarantee of success. The way you choose to tackle a problem might not be the way others want it tackled. Also don’t underestimate how tricky it might be to find the other people who have the same itch as you, because it might not be so easily defined.

In 2016, I saw companies dropping the ball in terms of user interface and innovation. This was a couple of years before the podcast bubble started to expand, so I was among a small few who were trying to bring usability to podcasting, and combine media and metadata into a simple CMS. Fireside was the closest example at the time, but now there are lots more and it’s become a commoditised market.

I had timing on my side when I announced Podiant, getting picked up by some helpful and influential people. So the service began to grow fairly rapidly, and it’s how I learned my most valuable lesson.

Pricing is a statement

The USD number you assign to your offering is more than a number — obviously more than simply “time + outgoings + markup”. It’s a measure of value, in every sense and from every angle. It’s how valuable your service is to others, how your values connect with theirs, how big their problem is and how much you’re helping them with it.

If you’re a one-person operation, that number is based on your idea of value and your history with money. I demonstrated how little confidence I had in Podiant by affixing a pay-what-you-can price tag. That’s a noble strategy in some regards, but all it really signalled is that I was not capable of valuing the time, effort, and experience that went into the product.

Imposter syndrome worms its way through as many cracks as it can find.

Development, dopamine, and me

I know coding, and I know podcasting. I’ve been making pixels dance since the early 21st century, which is also around the time I started tinkering with digital audio. I used to work at a design-focused digital agency and I have — I think — pretty good taste, so I also felt like I knew UX.

What I didn’t know much about in 2016 when I started working on Podiant, was marketing, growth, customer research and development, the true power of a niche, and the superpower of networking.

All these things were slightly dirty words to me because of how I came up, in the bit of the Venn diagram where art and engineering meet. It took a while before I realised that “marketing” is really just figuring out what people want, and finding a fair way to give it to them.

This gap in my knowledge created a lot of uncertainty. Over the last year I’ve learned that I deal with uncertainty through action — by creating things or solving problems where I can see the solution, but just need to build my way to it.

All of that process involves dopamine, the pleasure chemical. The bigger the build, the more you put into it, the longer the drip-drip-drip of dopamine, and ultimately the bigger high at the end when your solution makes its way to users’ hands.

And the bigger the crash once the dopamine wears off.

If you’re like me, during all this time of furious action, you haven’t addressed the initial uncertainty you were facing. And because you don’t even know where to begin solving it, you look for another problem you can solve. And so you build a new feature. And so the cycle continues. Repeat to fade.

Event sponsorship is about more than a clickthrough banner

I mentioned imposter syndrome earlier. One way to feel that keenly is to turn up at an event you’re sponsoring, to find you and your +1 missing from the guest list.

I’m not throwing the organisers under the bus for that one. It was an honest mistake and they were gracious about it. But it gets me into talking about event sponsorships and how, like so much with business, it’s not as simple as doing “the thing” (whatever that might be) and hoping for a return.

In this case “the thing” might be posting a logo up at an event, going on-stage to give out an award, even laying on an hour’s entertainment as part of a conference. These things make sense for a larger brand with money to spend on brand awareness — they’re not things for an early-stage startup with comparatively few customers and shallow pockets.

I wish I knew then what I know now, about the journey of consciousness that exists in marketing. I learned this in the Better Bolder Braver community, and it’s fundamental to understanding what to pitch to whom and when.

One of my biggest problems was thinking “that’s what a business does, so I should do that”, rather than “what effect am I hoping this will have?” or “who am I hoping to influence with this?”

It’s not always easy to know at the time if you’re making a bad decision, so cut yourself some slack when you look back on past screw-ups. But do take extra time to consider if what might look like an exciting opportunity to “put yourself out there” is the best use of your resources.

I’m not down on the idea of sponsorships of relevant projects, especially if there’s an SEO component (getting daily links from an authoritative site in your niche is legit). But be pragmatic, and think past what it means to have your logo emblazoned somewhere.

Customer success

Through some work I did with the Happy Startup School, I came to realise how unhappy Podiant was making me.

Every morning I’d wake up, check the ticketing system for support requests, deal with them as best I could, then move on with my day.

Anyone who’s done support knows that people don’t really lodge support tickets to tell you how happy they are with a new feature, or that they’re really just having a lovely time with the product. If you’re good and lucky, they’ll do that on social media. And I was lucky, and for the most part, good, so I had plenty of public goodwill.

Support tickets are a measure of dissatisfaction, confusion, frustration, and other negativity. Customers need to tell you when stuff is broken or nonsensical. But if you’re someone given to perhaps unhealthy levels of empathy and a pathological need to please, the ticket management window becomes a box of despair.

Over the years I’d got help with the support situation, and I should stress that for 99% of the time, we had very few tickets to deal with. We’d get a spike when I broke something, but for the most part our customers went about their days.

Now, I’ve been podcasting since 2008 and editing digital audio since the late 90s, so I have a good amount of knowledge. I tried to put what knowledge I could into the platform, but I still felt vastly under-utilised. And what my work with the Happy Startup School revealed was that I wanted to be part of customers’ success stories, not just be on the hook when things went wrong (whether or not they were my fault).

I wanted to help people make better audio, so that when their files were compressed to 64kbps they didn’t sound like they were recorded underwater.

I wanted to help people focus on creating compelling content rather than promoting their Patreon before they’d published their first episode.

I wanted to help people write show notes that were actually readable and made sense to a human.

And the biggie: I wanted to work with people who felt less entitled to an audience.

Everything is just the next thing

I used to describe Podiant as “the best thing I’ve ever done”. At the time, I didn’t want to think of it as “the thing that would get me to the thing”. But in reality, everything we make is just us putting one foot in front of the other.

Poddle (my erstwhile podcast network) led me to Podiant, which led me to Podcode. Which lead me to Unmute (yay, something that doesn’t begin with “pod”).

Unmute is my group program, bringing together social entrepreneurs and change-makers, to teach them how to plan, produce, and grow a podcast to further their mission. It’s audacious work, and I can’t wait to get started.

Podiant informed so much of this work, and reflects back some of the values I demonstrated in 2016 and beyond. Just as Podiant had a community tier for those that had a vital message but couldn’t afford the fees, each Unmute cohort carries a free scholarship place for someone who isn’t in a position to pay.

But it also reflects what I’ve learned. Unmute is not a cheap program. If anything, one might describe it as costly. But I can stand behind the $1,200 price tag that comes with it. Some of that justification would mean me getting strident again, and I promised you I wouldn’t do that. :)

Every now and again I catch myself working on a quick-dopamine-release problem, rather than tackling something more important but uncertain, like building my network. But I’ve seen the long-term damage that short-term thinking can do. So while I’ll still keep falling into those traps, at least I won’t get too far down before being able to pull myself up again.

I’m excited to do work where I’m judged on my ability to teach, guide and support, not on whether an out-of-date Javascript package has caused a massive system-wide failure. Or worse still, a host-wide outage that I can’t control but yet am still on the hook for.

I don’t miss Podiant. I don’t really have the desire to run a product business again. I was overall delighted with the transition to Castos, as I was assured that my customers were going to be made whole. You’d be surprised, but that made them the outlier, and that’s why I picked them.

I was too hard on myself with Podiant, and too hard on the industry for not living up to my insanely-high standards. There might be some reading this who were Podiant customers who have a less rose-tinted memory. Don’t worry — any frustration you felt when Podiant was less than stable were felt 10x more keenly by me. Not through some sense of pride, but because I gave a huge shit what people thought, and I looked at Podiant as a reflection of myself, so when it wasn’t enough, I felt like I wasn’t enough.

That’s no fun.

In summary

Here are some of the things I wish I’d known in 2016 when I started Podiant, and I’d like anyone starting their own SaaS business to know now:

• Start with who.
• Don’t go it alone. Ask for, invite, and accept help and counsel.
• Meet your potential customers before you write a line of code.
• Ask questions of your prospective customers that pass the Mom Test.
• The biggest companies in the world are winging it.
• Find your Just Cause.
• Price high. No, higher.
• Add value to the communities you’re looking to serve.
• No, higher again.
• Check out the Happy Startup School. If you’re not aligned with their values, get better ones.
• Find podcasts about the topic areas of your business. If you can’t find a good one, start one.
• Be curious.
• Don’t buy Google Ads. You can’t compete.
• Don’t just niche. Find a niche within your niche.
• Write thank you notes.
• People are busy, but have more patience than you might expect. You can ask again.
• Don’t send spam.
• If you make a mess, don’t panic. Own it, clean it up, and before you know it, all trace will be gone.
• Whenever you’re given information or advice, consider the agenda behind it.
• You are not your output.
• You are enough.