Profitable Founder
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Profitable Founder
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For you as a founder, there's this massive opportunity. Like if you go and create a show about your industry and then you host other experts that are in your field, you can basically create this content that's incredibly valuable to the audience that you're trying to sell to.
SPEAKER_00This is Cody. He built more than 20 profitable businesses generating millions in revenue. I invited him today to talk about the best distribution channel you can build in 2026. A podcast. So as a founder, tell me why I should actually follow this path and start a podcast.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, totally. Um so I think that just to kind of like break some of the myths around this, because a lot of the times like I get so much like heat from this, uh like belief, um, which is hilarious to me because I'm like, please keep alleviating that because I'll just keep doing it and it'll keep working. Um But uh the the angle here is like people think that like podcasts are saturated. In reality, that that's not the case whatsoever. Um, there's tons of generic podcasts that don't go deep on specific industries. Um everybody that's in a in an in an industry is looking for somebody uh and some show that has deep technical knowledge about whatever it is that they're, you know, for example, if you're in the oil or gas industry, there's these shows where maybe they get, you know, 200 downloads per episode. Um, but the buying power of those 200 people that are listening to that show is like, you know, in the hundreds of millions of dollars because it's deep technical information that's related to that industry. Um, so for you as a founder, there's this massive opportunity. Like if you go and create a show about your industry and then you host uh, you know, other experts that are in your field or whatever it is that you're working on, host them on the show, talk about that deep knowledge, that deep technical knowledge that they have. You can basically create this content that's incredibly valuable to the audience that you're trying to sell to. And so that's kind of like the foundation, you know, you know, foundational idea or principle around this. Um, so to break down like the actual process or like what, you know, why this works, um, and like why why you should why you should even think about doing this. Like um, you you have a show, uh, you know the day, the data on how many people like listen to you on a weekly cadence. I know my own like personal data as well for this. I I have a show and that is literally just you know, this and it's an excuse for me to talk to people about their expertise. Like, for example, I just had my friend on. He gave basically a one-hour fireside chat of like exactly how they're running a webinar funnel that uh you know in the last like six months hasn't created a uh a million and a half in ARR, right? Uh like alone just to that single channel. Um, but the idea here is that as a founder, if you have a hundred people show up and they listen to you talk for an hour each week, and if they do that over a 90-day, you know, period, right? So you basically have whatever that is, 12 12 hours that they spent with you. By the time they show up to a sales call um or like inbound to you, they are so deeply like their the trust that you cultivated with them is so deep that they're already buyer ready. And like I literally go through these sales cycles, right? Where it's like, but the the time we even get on the call, they've already like they believe my principles, they like understand how I think about it, they understand the approach, they understand, you know, the beliefs, the thesis, et cetera. They're bought into the idea, they're now just ready to go and execute it. So it's way there, that sale process, it just decreases that time. And this is what really good marketing actually is in B2B. There's a lot of this chatter around it, they call it account-based marketing. It's it's such a dumb name. It's the same, it's basically just content marketing. It's always been content marketing, like every type of marketing for you know, B2B sales has always been content marketing. And the idea is you're trying to educate your audience that's shown that domain expertise, talk to the pain points that they have, talk to the outcomes that they want, and then you build content around that, right? And then figure out how do I basically inject my own, you know, product within this. So um, that's kind of the high level on the actual practical side. So for a show, like to break down that whole process. Okay, you start a show, you know, how do you build a newsletter around it? How do you actually like create clips or social? So it all plays together. Um, so how you do this uh on the show side is basically like pick an industry or niche that you're specializing in. Um, if you don't know what industry or niche that you're specializing in, you don't you shouldn't even start a podcast full stop. Um, that is like not the purpose of it. It is a marketing activity that you're doing. Um, and then uh unless you're trying to be like a content creator, but then the the unit economics of this are way different, right? I'm specifically talking to, hey, I'm trying to build this as a go-to-market motion for my business, right? Like a podcast is a go-to-market vehicle for my company. Um, so once you've done that, uh, you can go and just cold email people um or cold DM them, be like, hey, name, uh, love the content that you're posting on LinkedIn. Um, can I host you on X Show? Um, it gets downloaded or it gets emailed out to 5,000 people and I'll give you clips for social interested. Um, with that exact like template that I just described, um, we'll often see like a 10% 10 to 20% response rate, right? Depending on like how big the person is that you're reaching out to. Um, why does this work? Um, it's because the person that you're contacting, you're coming to them not empty-handed. You're like, cool, I have this thing that's valuable to you, which is PR. I'm basically offering you a free PR placement. Um, and then also you're giving them clips for their social. So it's like, cool, here's you know, eight to ten clips that I pull out that are highlights from the episode. You can go now go and post these on social. They also get to be like, oh, I went on this podcast, they share that with their team internally. Suddenly they know who you are and who the company is because of that internal uh share that has occurred. Okay. Um, so this will work. Like, I just anecdotally, uh I have an example of this. Like uh friends company I did this for, uh, you know, about it would have been about a year and a half ago now, um, or maybe two years. Um, they uh had been trying to get in a relationship with the CTO to like do work for him. They're basically like a product studio company. Uh he had sent him like 11, you know, DMs on LinkedIn over the last whatever it was, 18 months, trying to like open a conversation with him. Um, sends that exact DM that I just described, like inviting him on the show. Within seven minutes, he responds, Yes, I'd love to, I'd be super interested in coming on. Uh, you know, when can we have a uh like a discovery call to talk about it? So there's so people are they they want to do this, right? Because it's like an ego stroking activity for them. They want to talk about themselves and their knowledge, right? They want to show that expertise. So when you capture that, what you're doing is you're basically positioning yourself as a thought leader within the industry by talking to these individuals. And you're also then able to use that media and repurpose it into other forms of media. So that long form piece of content, that single podcast, that can be pulled out. You know, you can use uh transcription shot software to go and uh uh extract the transcript from that transcript. Uh, you can write email newsletters, you can write blog posts, you can write uh, you know, long form LinkedIn content, Twitter threads, whatever that is that you can imagine. The core, the best way to do that is you basically are trying to pull out the insights from the episodes and then just like turn those into those their own pieces of content. Um, the other thing that you can do is that long form. You can also go turn that into an ebook, and this is the way to basically like grow that email newsletter. Um, so basically you offer this as a digital download. It's like I sat down with X, we had a talk about why, and I learned one, two, three, four, five things. If you want the full PDF link below or comment, you know, access for this. Um, you put it behind a tally form and they give you their email, you send them the download, and then now you've just built your email newsletter. So it's got the splywheel component. So the transcript turns into the posts that you're scheduling. Again, you have that call out to join the email newsletter. Um, and then also these clips can be distributed across social as well or used as uh like a remarketing tool for your company. So if you have a person that you're talking to uh that is like talking to a specific pain point that's industry specific that your company solves, you basically take that clip and then you like use that as the hook to then pitch whatever your product is on the paid ad side. So it's like, you know, say somebody's talking about um, for example, I'll just use my my company Graft as an example. Um, like it's uh their challenge is that they're uh having trouble basically setting up a data pipeline in a data warehouse for their marketing team, right? Uh they don't want to have to go hire a data engineer and you're talking through that pain. I could take that clip, that hook of like, yeah, it's actually a map, we've been doing this recently. It's been a massive pain setting up a data pipeline in a data warehouse, right? Take that clip and then right after it I'd be like, it has been a massive pain until this thing came out, graph.com, blah, blah, blah, do the pitch. And so it gives you these, it gives you the source material from and that is exact language of how your target customer will talk that you can use within your paid ad strategies as well. It's almost like doing like, you know, the the the old adage is talk to talk to your customers, right? This is a way to talk to your customers in a totally different setting that's way more approachable and way less um, you know, it's it's hard to get people to talk to you, right? It's hard to get people to give you their honest opinions. Uh, this environment creates a setting that's very uh open that people are willing to share like their kind of like raw ideas. And so because of that, you can just create the most valuable content. Also, if you like don't want to start a show, this is a very easy way for you, like whoever's listening to this to go and you're trying to create a content flywheel for your company. Uh, just go and find content in your industry that's going viral on YouTube. It's very easy to scrape. Pull out the transcripts, pull out the core ideas, remix those core ideas over and over again. Uh, we're starting, we're like literally running an experiment with this right now with like Twitter bots, where we're basically just like scouring YouTube for the viral content from the previous week within a category at like, you know, basically like how-to's of clawed code related to marketing, et cetera. We're pulling out the core ideas and then we turn that into like, you know, like content that's gets scheduled out to these uh social channels. And I think that this is like the thing that people don't realize. Like, if you have entertaining and educational content like that intersection, and you just you can make unlimited social accounts for free. And if the content is good, they'll give you free distribution. You just have to have like good content. And this is the easiest way that I found to create good content at scale. Um, takes about, you know, if you have a team behind you, which is like how I do it, um, I have like an editing team behind me. It takes about an hour and a half of my mental energy on a weekly cadence. I hand it off to the team, they handle all the scheduling, everything else. Um, I pay that the salary of the team, I think it's it's like, you know, it's one person, so it's sixteen hundred dollars a month, and like that whole plan gets executed, right? Um, but you can do this for way cheaper too. Like you could do this solo with like a riverside subscription, you know, a description subscription. And like, you know, I think that would come in to be $80 a month and basically have this whole marketing flywheel that you could build on top of that. So yeah, questions about that I can try to answer how do you dive deeper on anything?
SPEAKER_00Man, I love it. Like I invited you for two reasons. First, I'm doing that right now. So I don't have the product, but I created the podcast and this like format of like having the podcast, cutting that into clips, uh, having the newsletter, using um kind of the script to create an ebook, to get the email, everything works. Like my clips are doing hundreds thousand of views on X, um, ten thousand of views on Instagram. I get leads uh from uh exactly what we're gonna do in this podcast. By the way, if you go in the description, there will be probably the list, uh the link of the playbook of Cody. So all that thing on the content side works. And then the second reason is that I have friends here in Bali that have a B2B agency and they are starting a podcast themselves. They are uh targeting a specific uh kind of people that are pretty hard to get content-wise. So, what they do, they will just like invite uh authorities in this uh field and talk to them every single week. There are two co-founders and they will just talk to them every single week. And I think this is the best thing because if they do that, as you say, they get like authority in their niche, and second, they get free content that they can post and post and post and use it as an ad. So, next, I would like you to maybe um uh going back a little bit and tell me how you built your actual podcast and how you built your content wheel from the beginning and approximately how long it took for you to get results and to yeah, actually get sell for your own tools.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, totally. Happily happy to lay out the like proper playbook from zero to one. Um, just one thing before we jump into that. I just want to give this as like a thought to the audience. Um, sometimes the clips from the podcast, like the idea that's in the podcast is very good, like the insight. Um, but the clip isn't perfect, like it doesn't have a good hook and then like um um like basically you know, insight structure. That's the best form of content. It's like I'm basically hooking you with like some promise and then I'm delivering on that promise after I hook you, right? Um if you see that where it's like this is a really good idea, but the uh the format of the like clip that I created is wrong, just re-record it. Just like literally be like, here's the insight. Go to Claude and be like, I'd found, you know, I drop the whole transcript in, be like list 10 insights related to, you know, whatever it is the topic that you're talking about. I talked about, you know, growth marketing. So I'm like list 10 insights related to growth marketing, it lists the insights, and then I say, hey, write a hook insight format so um for all of these 10 insights, it writes the scripts, and then you just literally go and record yourself doing those, like doing those hooks with script uh with the with the insights. So this is just like again, making derivative content off of the good ideas that occurred within it within the within the show. So um to take a step back to the actual like process, like the beginning of this, um, podcasting is a super long form commitment, right? If you look at the podcasters that have gotten huge, they've been doing this for five years. That's the only way that it's like possible. With that said, there's a bunch of levers that you can pull to um speed up this process. Um and uh I'll just talk through like all those that you you can do basically. So the first one is building the show with a name that people would go and search for on uh um uh uh uh like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. So people like use those as search engines to discover content. People don't think about this a lot. Um, but this is like one of the easiest ways. So if you go and you search uh the uh biotech startups, um, you're gonna see a podcast come up called the Biotech Startups Podcast as a friends company who I've helped um to name the show specifically biotech startups podcast because they wanted to show up for biotech and biotech startups and startups within Apple Podcasts. So, how do you show up with an Apple Podcast? You just have to get downloads. Downloads is the only thing that matters to like game the algorithm within the search results. Uh, they call it um podcast SEO um within Apple and Spotify. So um I it basically if you just get downloads and the keywords are within the title of the show, the description of the show, and then the show notes of the show episodes, you'll be able to rank it incredibly well within the platform. Um, so how do you get those initial downloads? Again, that exact process that we talked about, just going through that cycle. Um, build an email newsletter about uh like just offer free guides, man. I can't tell you, like it's so stupid, but just like offering free stuff that's behind an email wall, like it is the simplest thing that you can do to like grow an email list incredibly quickly. Um, specific strategies that you can use to actually promote that is just have a call to action after every tweet for that free guide. So this is something I did. I did a test of for for this. I was just curious, like I was like, all right, how quick could I grow an email newsletter on the back of Twitter? Um, this would have been probably 18 months ago. I think at the time I had, I don't know, it would have been around like 7,000 followers there. So just to give kind of people the scale that it was at. Um, all I did was after every tweet, so I had, you know, wrote a tweet. Um, after every tweet, uh I an hour later, uh a thread would be posted to that tweet. And it would basically be like, uh, if you want uh to download my ex, for example, I think it was like my 2025 uh you know uh um AI uh for content marketing guide. Uh click the link below. So it takes them to a form. They saw they you know download the the guide and then they get added to an email newsletter. I did that for 30 days. I think I grew the email subscribers by like 3,500 in the first month, right? That's entirely just with like free social media traffic on a super small account. It's this isn't complicated. I think the hard thing that people get stuck on is they they they overcomplicate these things. Um, simplicity wins. And what matters more is just like, can I do this, you know, continuously in the for the next, you know, 24 months, right? And for a lot of people, like they don't think about content marketing as I I how I try to describe it is like it's a lifestyle choice. It's just like eating healthy and like working out. It's like I'm deciding to do this thing. I wake up each day and I do this thing. And the easiest way to make content is like just publish a lot of it, look at what's working. Like you literally just like sort, for example, whether it's your tweets or your LinkedIn posts or whatever it is that you're making. Hey, this is the same strategy with like paid ads. Like sort what is working, look at the trends, like what are the common ideas between the things that are working? How do I remix those and say more, like talk more about those winning ideas? And then I repeat that cycle over and over again. So just to give like context to this, like I I schedule out 70 tweets a week, right? Um, and I think now we're doing five LinkedIn posts a day. Um, uh, and so basically the whole strategy there is like I'm trying to post a ridiculous amount of content because that's going to give me more surface area to find what people are interested in. Once I identify what people are interested in, then I can go and make more content in like the winning content, and then it creates this like virtuous cycle from a flywheel standpoint. Is and as long as I can get the attention, I can always like get them deeper into a funnel. But the strategy here is you have to get basically like get them, you know, look what's the low, what's the lowest commitment thing that they can do, and then just get them to go deeper and deeper into that purchasing decision. Again, I'm coming from probably a perspective of like I'm trying to sell a product at the end, not like build a media company. But the media company is the same strategy. Um, I would say this for anybody that's going to do this, and if you're trying to build a media company, like the podcast is a vehicle for the email newsletter. Like you don't even give a fuck about the podcast. It's the people that like the the the ret the the ad dollars that are available to sponsor email newsletters versus the ad dollars that are available to sponsor podcasts, it's like a hundred X bigger for email newsletters. Why is that? It's because there's a quantifiable like numbers, like they see open rates, they see clicks, they can track the clicks that are directly coming from the email newsletter to their site. And so you need to pair, if you pair these things together, like hey, I'll sell you an ad slot on the email newsletter in the podcast. That's where you're gonna make the most revenue. You almost get the podcast as like a kicker where it's like cool, like you sponsor the email newsletter, it's 3k a month, whatever. Uh, and also we'll like publish at the beginning of the episode. This episode is brought to you by X Company. They specialize in Y Sing. If you're a Z type of person, they're gonna help you do, you know, one, two, and three. Go to their link in the description to learn more. But the majority of that traffic and that revenue as like a media company is going to come from the email newsletter. The podcast is just a vehicle for the email newsletter, it's just source material for the email newsletter.
SPEAKER_00So and let's say like I'm a B2B SaaS founder, I have a product that I sell to hospital, um, like a software that helps them manage the hospital. Oh, like start a podcast. Like, for example, who should I invite and what kind of topic should I make?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, healthcare is super hard. Um, especially if it's in like old traditional medical systems, they're like very just cagey about what information. Um, the only reason I say that, I I I worked at a startup called Rupa Health. Um, employee nine or ten there, I can't remember. Um, but uh this was like uh who we were selling to as practitioners. Um we kind of had a different um uh they were focused on like functional medicine and like a lot of like holistic medicines. So more open to talking on like these types of shows. But um the the thing that I would say is like you need to think about the content that who you're selling to is going to find valuable. So to use your grupa as an example, when we first started the podcast, we did like a bunch of different combinations of of um of show types. So we did a bit like people talking about protocols that they were using to like do pre-treat patients, patients, people talking about the business side, like how do they get more customers, etc. Uh, people talking about um, you know, the industry, like industry news. And then we looked at all these different content types, and what we found is that from a consumption standpoint, the only thing that other practitioners cared about, who is who we were trying to sell to, was the protocols that other practitioners were using. Like that's why they got into medicine, right? It's like because they want to help people and they care about patient outcomes. That's what they're interested in. They didn't give a fuck about the business, they didn't care about like, you know, uh anything else besides basically the protocols that would that were um, you know, uh other practitioners were using. So once you identify that content type, and you don't know this until you start, but once you see that within your data, then it's like, cool, I have a content format that I just make repeatable. And then now, you know, from that moment on at Rupa, all we did was protocols. We're just like, cool, person comes on, they talk about how do you treat uh SIBO, they talk about how do you treat IBS, they talk about how do you treat uh you know uh chronic eczema, they talk about whatever that is, but we knew that that is what the user wanted to consume. And so then that is the type of content that we created for them. Um I think. So often people try to like treat a podcast like it's like a sales motion. And that's not the case, right? Like it's like it's entertainment. It's entertainment with a cross-section of education. And then like it's like this like soft sell that's occurring at the same time, right? You're you're you're building media and media is entertainment at its core. Um, you can like do sales and marketing through media. Like Red Bull is a prime example of a company that does this. Um, like but in and when you get down to the core, the foundation of it, uh, if you're trying, like if you're trying to push content on an audience that's not receptive to it, of course it's not working, right? Like it's just like very simple like psychology. And I think that this is something I see a lot of companies really like just absolutely you know, fumble the ball on, is they they try to force the media onto the audience. And in a different way to say this is like imagine trying to get like a four-year-page algorithm to show content that it doesn't think that like nobody's engaging with, right? Like that happens all the time, right? That like people are like, oh, I don't why am I not getting reached on Twitter? Why am I not getting reach on LinkedIn? Why am I not getting reached on YouTube? Why am I not getting reached on TikTok? It's not it's it's because the content type isn't like the the algorithm is so smart now, like it knows what people want to consume, it it knows the people that want to consume that content too. All you have to do is just make the content that the algorithm will show. So it it just do you're you're a vessel for that type of content. It's like another way to think about it. Like remove all ego and you just make the thing that people want to consume.
SPEAKER_00It's exactly what said um uh Rob Hofman in the podcast like uh a week ago. He said that he said, like the day he removed his ego and he wasn't talking about him, but he started to make content for the people, it's when it started to actually work. So for you, the podcast is the top of the funnel. It has to be entertainment to bring people to your newsletter, and in the newsletter that's where you sell, usually, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I would sell in the newsletter. Um, and like I'm just trying to get them deeper and deeper into like I call digital gravity. Like I'm trying to create like so much digital mass on the internet that they just get into like rotation around the company and the brand, right? I want them to like rabbit hole down into my my my my company and learn everything that they can about that. I want them to see me everywhere. So, like a great example, like if you're starting a comp, you know, a software company or like even an agency, like they go they hit the site. As soon as they hit the site, I'm pixeling them everywhere. I'm pixeling them. I'm on Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, you know, Tabula, uh, you know, any place that you can imagine. I'm trying to basically take that contact. And then the next time that they show up on Instagram, the next time they show up on Reddit, the next time they show up anywhere online, I want to be in, you know, in front of them, constantly trying to give them different perspectives or get them to start to believe or think in the way that like I do, or I'm trying to can say, hey, I hear like I recognize your problem, like calling out directly their problem and then giving them a solution, or saying, Hey, here's this outcome you want. Like we help you get this outcome. Here's this like bridge to get you the outcome that you're looking for.
SPEAKER_00So how would you compare um this type of marketing compared to a direct response like ads or called outreach?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think that like people start podcasting like, okay, we did it a month and nothing happened, right? It's like it doesn't work like that at full stop. Again, there's ways that you can like jumpstart these things. Um, and like I've talked about them. So it's some like another strategy that you can use. Like Twitter right now, you can get incredibly cheap traffic that you can send to YouTube channels to jumpstart the initial growth of a YouTube channel. So uh basically what you do is you target all of the US or sorry, you target all the world, um, and then you put the CPC max bid at one uh one cent. Um and then you run it from a uh a Twitter account um that looks like a um like a like a normie profile, right? Like it looks like a real person rather than like a brand. And then you just say you all all you have to have in the ad, right? Is like take a screenshot of the YouTube video and be like, just watched X podcast, learned Y thing, uh crazy TBH. So it looks like it's like an organic post that's happening on platform. Um, what you'll see and what we like have done and like it continue to do is you can run these types of ads. You can get it, you can get it, you'll get like link clicks at like 0.003 cents, right? So it's like less than a cent. This traffic is really shit. Like it is terrible, but it's so cheap that the percentage of people that end up clicking from like the US and Commonwealth countries, right, and Europe is high enough that you're basically going to get subscribers at a cost that's like incredibly cheap. So you can basically jumpstart an account from like zero to a thousand subscribers doing this process. So for a podcast, if you're doing it, podcasts aren't built for YouTube's algorithm. You have to train YouTube for the types of people that are going to be interested in that long form style of content. And this is a way to jumpstart that process. Um, this off-platform traffic can basically jumpstart this like YouTube channel. You can do this with news too. We've done it with news, news, pod news YouTube channels as well. Um, but it works most effectively on the podcast side. But there are these letters that you can pull. Um, but it's like, again, this is like a long-term investment that you're basically committing to, you know, for a long period. How I always describe it to people is like the first 90 days, you feel nothing. And day 90, you're like, oh yeah, I'm starting to feel a little bit of motion. At six months, you're like, oh yeah, this is definitely working. At nine months, you're like, I absolutely feel this. And then at 12 months, you're like, fuck, I wish I started this, you know, like two years ago. And then as you just it all this just compounds, right? It just continues to grow. Um, and what happens is you have like just the more content you make, the more surface area you have for discovery. They listen to one episode and then they go and they binge all 52 of the episodes that you filmed over the last year. Suddenly they've spent 52 hours with you, and now they're they they think like you think, right? They already know they like have basically ingested everything that there is to know about you and about like what your beliefs are, what your product is, etc. So um, in contrast to paid ads, um, which are like transactional, um, those are gonna be way more uh um like immediate impact, right? So podcast, a long-term investment. If you're like, yo, I need customers tomorrow, Facebook ads, Google ads, uh like do cold DMs and do like cold email, right? Um, I think I see this so often, especially with indie hackers, man, they go and they do SEO to begin with. And like that is typically not the best investment. I I guarantee it. Like, if I was to start over again, you know, I've been doing this 10 years now. Um, if I was to start over again, I would basically go and I would do consulting in an industry. And all I basically I would just be like, what could I sell to any industry? Right. And then once I figured out, okay, I could solve these problems, and I had a couple customers, you're gonna start to see natural trends that happen across all the customers, the same problem that they're facing. And then I would go and build a single product or a product that has a single um like feature, one feature products are like the best way to go about like building your first company. And then you just basically go and and because you understand how to talk to the problem and you've built a solution for the problem, like if you do paid ads or cold DMs or cold email, like you're gonna get your first whatever customers to become profitable, like RAM and profitability. Um, and I again I think there's so often like they people like build these things that like nobody actually wants to buy um because they don't actually know the problems that people are facing. And and AI is incredibly good at this now, more and more. Like you can go and scrape Reddit using perplexity, and the amount of information that you can pull out on a target audience is incredible, right? Um, like all of the ad research that I do is literally that. Um it but the the thing that you know, uh for again, first-time founders, the best thing that you can do, especially if you're like, yo, I need revenue tomorrow so that I can have runway for my life and like, you know, feed myself and pay the mortgage and pay my health insurance. The best way to do that is like figuring out what is some type of service offering I can offer to an industry. Once I've been working in that industry, I'm gonna see a natural problem. I build a software, I sell that software back to those customers that I already have, and then I go and sell it to the rest of the industry. And that that agency cash flow is the product. Now, there's people that are you know savants and they can go straight to to product, um, but they typically have already done some type of business format. I'm talking about somebody that's like, you know, never done business before, trying to figure out how do I get my my first step you know in the direction that it uh you know to owning a company.
SPEAKER_00So uh basically, if I'm a funder now, I should first use direct response or find a way to uh get a sale the faster possible, and then when I start to have an MRR, I can start thinking long term and start a podcast. You will not start a podcast today to get your first customer.
SPEAKER_01100% no. Yeah, I would I wouldn't I I would not do that. Um, I I would depends on the company type. But if I was an agency, I would do work for people and I would talk about it in public and be like, I helped X company do Y thing. Like I helped X company get Y outcome that like everybody else, you know, all other companies in this industry want. The easiest business that you can start tomorrow is literally to go to Google Maps or go to Thumbtack and look at the categories and be like, cool, auto body shops. We now, I now do like Google ads only for auto body shops. You go spin up a YouTube channel, and it's literally just you doing a tutorial of like, here's how to do ads for auto body shops. And it's just you talking through the exact process. Well, people are gonna like people that own auto body shops, they're gonna watch that video. They're gonna be like, shit, this looks like a lot of work. And then you're gonna be like, hey, if you want me to do this for you, like click the link below to schedule a discovery call and you will naturally get inbound leads. I cannot express to you how powerful a YouTube video that has deep knowledge and maybe it only has like 300 views. I guarantee you that that video is creating leads for the person that has made made that video. And then what you'll see is you're like, okay, cool. Auto body shops have the same problem that people like miss their meetings and then try to reschedule. Well, can I make an autumn, you know, an AI agent that automatically does like meeting rescheduling so that when somebody misses, like they can just over text, basically like reschedule. Awesome. You now have a product, you now already have a relationship with auto body shops. Like you can go and sell that basically. But I want to build a podcast. Maybe you get to like once you get to sustainability, then you can start. So so why do you why do we do content marketing, right? Like as a like to zoom out. It the reason for it is because the the the cost of CP, the cost of ads over time increases as the market becomes more sophisticated. So the a great example of this is like any any any space that has VC money going into it, you'll just see the CPCs overnight spike, like ridiculous numbers. Like, for example, like every AI S you know software right now, like the CPCs around them is like $16. It's absolutely ridiculous. Okay. Um, why is that happening? It's be it. They there's um there's a book, um, it's called The Cold Star Problem. Strongly would suggest reading it. Uh it's by Andrew Chen. He has this theory, they calls it the law of shitty click-throughs. The idea is basically that over time the CPC will increase in an industry because other people see the arbitrage from that. Like they see, oh, when I run ads, you know, to this audience selling X, you know, this product, I can get in front of them and sell this. And so more people enter the market. And it's just a sublime demand problem. There's only so much inventory that you can buy as more money comes into it, it raises the CPC price. So why do we make content? We make content because we know that that CPC is going to increase over time. And so we're trying to reduce the cost of the acquisition of the customer or keep it constant by making more content surface area, which allows for more top of funnel, more branded search to occur, more people to find us through water mouth to come in organically through the site. So as the CPC of paid ads and uh, you know, all the direct response increases over time, because in every industry it does, it always does. You are also combating that with this content marketing strategy, uh, so that people are directly like, you know, going to your brand rather than having to fight for generic keywords, right? Um, a great way to think about this is like, you know, it's uh I could go and I could bid on, for example, for graft. I could go and I could bid on um AI business intelligence software, right? The CPC on that's like $11. Absolutely crazy how competitive it is. There's no way I can keep compete in that, right? Um, but the it didn't used to be that way, right? It didn't used to be like that large, but it's it's because there's so much money that's like going into it. You you you uh you see that that increase that's occurring. But I to just again to reiterate and take a step back. The the point of why you're doing this is because it makes revenue tomorrow. It doesn't make revenue 12 months from now. Like you don't even know if you're gonna be here 12 months from now. So don't do activities that will pay off 12 months from now. Do activities that may you know will make revenue tomorrow or this week. And that is again why you're doing that that direct response style of marketing.
SPEAKER_00There's also one thing I want to add is like I used to have an info product, and in my um sales funnel, I was doing ads, so it was like code leads, like wheelie leads that were not ready to buy, and in my um email sequence, I will send them to podcasts that I did, like on certain topics, exactly like you say, like if in a a podcast I talk about a certain pain point that my ICP have, he will just go watch the podcast and then he will spend an hour with me, then maybe watch another podcast. And what I saw often is that on the sale call, they will say, Yeah, I watch a few of your podcasts and I really I'm really aligned with the way you think, or I like the way you are, or whatever, but they spent a lot of time with me, so then they trust me to actually buy the product. So even without waiting for the 12 months to be an authority in your niche, I think that straight away it can help you in your sales funnel, whatever you sell, if it's a B2B product, uh it can just help you straight away to increase your conversion, I think. Uh for a lot of people, at least it will work.
SPEAKER_01Totally. Especially if it is that thing that, like, for example, like an info product or it's uh you know something that has a higher ticket sale, right? Like if you're in the range of whatever it's 3,000 to $5,000 plus dollars, right? Um, that has like a longer sales cycle, it's a bigger commitment. Um, I I'm on the direct response, I'm talking more to like honestly, Facebook ads full stop probably won't work for like an agency. It just like won't. Unless you're doing like a really sophisticated webinar funnel, which is like possible. Um, or you're doing like you know, some type of lead gen and then leaning them down and you know, like going, having them go deeper and deeper into a webinar funnel or some like you know, email course. But in reality, like what I'm talking about for um that direct response is like, oh, I have a you know a software that I'm selling for $39 a month or something like that. I podcast is not going to be the vehicle for that. For higher ticket, absolutely, for info, absolutely. Um, but it it's it's again, it's these are just like how I think about it is it. It's just plays in the playbook that are like, you know, if you play basketball or soccer or football or any of these things, right? It's like there's plays that you can run that are good at certain situations in time in the game. And there's other times when like you shouldn't run those because it's a bad thing to, you know, it's a bad play to run. That doesn't mean that it's intrinsically bad, it just means that in the moment in time it's bad. And this is the same way to think about distribution. There's certain levers that are more effective to pull at certain periods of time.
SPEAKER_00So amazing. Well, I have a few questions, pretty selfish actually, but I will ask you that. First, how did you get invited uh to Greg Eisenberg? That's just an example in the whole thing. But like for me, it's like you probably use a strategy to get access to some people, and that's was probably one of your strategies to also grow you grow your channel. And I would like to know like how you did that to maybe help other people get into that as well.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I so honestly, like Grav and I like became just like internet friends to begin with, right? Um, and that was like solely it. Like, I just thought he thought in a really unique way and was interesting to me. And then like it was just mutual, basically. And I think that this is the thing that people like there, there's so much of life is like everybody thinks it's very tactical, and like I'm trying to figure out like you know, these ways into like or how do I open these doors? So you know, I I in my experience, you can get so much more impact by just like providing value to the world, and then like every, you know, just to put money on it, every dollar of value you provide to the world, like ten dollars will come back to you in value, like that from other people, like either trying to pay you or like just like sharing information with you. Like, for example, as I I I talk about growth strategies, and it's like literally like here are the things that I'm using right now that are working for me. Like one I just did recently was like, here's literally my stack that I'm using in Claude Code. Like I built this automation that's using, you know, basically I take a LinkedIn pro or LinkedIn post that people commented and liked on. I scrape it, use it phantom using Phantom Buster. I find the emails of those people of those LinkedIn profiles using the Apollo API. I validate those emails with million verifier, and then I put those into instantly AI to do cold email to them. Um, I just put that in public. I'm like, this is you know, here's this thing for anybody to do. I got DM'd so many like responses that were like, hey, this is great. I did this already. Here's an even better solution for what you just shared. And then they give me an outcome that will like be per even more highly performant than the one that I just share. And in life is like that. It's like it's it's way more just like, here are, you know, the things that I think are interesting. I'm just talking about them in public. And then naturally, what happens? A great, a great way to think like read about the or like understand this is read the the book, The Big Short. And there's a specific section where they're talking about Michael Burry. And he's like, I'm just literally was putting like my stock picks on the internet and like what I was, you know, basically like picking within my portfolio and the results I was getting, and then publishing them then to like a blog, right? And this is the early days of the internet, and literally like he raised his fund to which ended up being Scion Capital, which you know basically did one of the biggest, like you know, huge trade uh during the financial crisis of 07-08. And it was purely off of the back of like him doing things and then just like sharing those things that he's doing in public, and then people naturally will gravitate to that, um, like whatever it is that you're talking about. So I think I think you know, I don't really have like a specific answer of like you're trying to get in, you know, to meet specific people or get through the doors in specific things. What I've always found is just like try to be valuable, and I know this is like the same. I I remember listening to content like this when I was like 22, and I'm like, you know, I would be like, shut the fuck up. Like it's it's way harder than that. And I'm like, I I I I think about you know, I I've listened to people say exactly what I'm saying, and I didn't believe it. And then you start doing it and you start practicing it, and you're like, oh yeah, this is actually how easy it is. It is this simple. It's like literally do cool stuff and talk about it on the internet, and things just start happening, like gears start turning, motion starts happening, and then doors will just start opening to you because like other people will find it interesting that you're doing, like they will find you know what you're doing if you're talking about it. So um tactically, though, like if you're trying to actually like go and reach out to people, um, I I think there's something to be said of just like being like, hey, I find what you just said about X is interesting. Like, I want to meet you. And like honestly, what probably was the catalyst is like um like I Greg changed the name of the podcast to the Startup Ideas podcast. I thought that was brilliant. I thought he could rank for startup ideas. Um, I did a whole breakdown on like why like literally everything we just talked about from like naming and like the whole purpose behind it and why it's a bigger audience and like how it actually taps into entrepreneurs, which is a way larger body than of people than like uh you know, people that are actually running businesses. It was just like a great move. Broke that down. And then from that, he was like, Oh, this is super interesting. Like I hadn't thought about it in this way. I did think about it in this way. And like from that, you know, naturally turns into a conversation. But like that, that can be how it is. It's just like there's no underlying purpose. It's just like, what do I find interesting? You know, write things that you think are novel about it. And also, this is like a muscle that you flex, right? Like I was talking to a friend and he's like, How many, like, how much content do you make on a weekly basis? And I'm like, I don't know, probably like 150 pieces of unique content a week go out that are like from accounts that I own, right? And it's like he's like he runs a content agency for like founders where like literally all they do is like make LinkedIn content for them. He's like, dude, I can't get these people to do like a post a week, yeah. Sorry, a post a post a day, you know, like on on their on their on their like their media. And it and and again, this is like you know, if I if you told me, Cody, you know, again, three years ago, go and start making 150 pieces of content a week, I'd be like, no, like that would be I I didn't I didn't have the strength to probably do that. This is something you build up into. It's like, you know, everything within business is this. It's like you I it's so funny. I saw this Alex Romosi like post that it's like it's like solve rich people problems because like they'll you know they'll pay more for it. And I'm just over here and I'm thinking to myself, like, yeah, I don't think that people that are just starting out like know how to talk to or actually solve rich people problems. Yeah, like you have to build up the understanding to be able to like operate at that level. And like again, just to use a sports analogy, it's like you start with like you know, playing when you're like a you know a kid, then you move up into your teens, and then maybe you pay like semi pro and then you play pro. If you just go straight to Pro Ball and you're a toddler, like you're gonna fail. There's no way. You're going to be able to like dunk on LeBron, right? But in contrast, like for some reason, people don't think about business in the same way where it's like, oh, these are these stepping stones that I do to climb the ladder to these larger places. They also just like don't want to go through the process of that. You can speedrun that process. Like I know people that have speedrun that process that like from the ages of whatever 17 to 23 have like ran that whole thing that normally takes people 20 years. And but in reality, you still have to go through the motions because you just it's just like muscle memory that you have to build around all of this. And you just won't understand it unless you have that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, everyone knows that you will make big money if you run an investment fund for billionaires. You know, like I know I will be which but I would not do that tomorrow.
SPEAKER_01Like, yeah, solve rich people problems. Okay. Like, what are those? You have no idea. And the only way that you identify what the idea is, is you have to like get into that level or into that status, right? That like can understand, oh, I have I see these problems, right? I I can even identify them. And this is like the thing that I think a lot of people don't realize is like asking the right question is actually the hardest thing to do, right? This is what I see with AI all the time. It's like people try to use AI to make content, it's just garbage. And they're like, oh, AI is terrible at making content. But I see this with SEO in particular all the time. It's so funny to me. They're like, AI content doesn't rank. I'm like, bullshit. It's like totally like that's cope. It's user error. Like you can absolutely make AI content work, but you're not using the tool in a way that is like like you're not getting it to do. So just to give an example with this, like AI is trained is trained to the average. So if I'm like write a blog post about X keyword, it's gonna write a really average blog post. So I have to like basically you know massage it to like write in a top 10% of content. And there's things that you can do for that. How I do it is I go and I scrape what's ranking on page one of Google currently for the target keyword phrase that I'm trying to rank for. I put that into context. I then also record a transcript of me talking about the industry. So for example, I would talk about you know with Graft, um, what how AI is changing data analytics for companies, right? You then use those twos at the source material, and you say, okay, AI, here's the source content to work from, here's the tone of voice to work from with like my own insights. I want you to combine that into an output and then use something like a Claude or a Gemini, you know, 2.5 flash, and you're gonna get an outcome that is like incredibly good content that 99% of people are gonna land on and they're gonna be like, shit, that provided value to me. And that's all that Google cares about because they're not bouncing from the website that they go to. It's like they're going to it and they're seeing, oh, this is like, you know, the it's answering the question that I have a query about so much of life is that.
SPEAKER_00So anyway, yeah, 100% agree. Uh, another selfish question how do I monetize my podcast? I remember you talk with Greg actually about this like uh YouTube uh influencer flywheel. So basically, like as a B2B SaaS or as a B2C SaaS, you try to get influencers on YouTube or people who create content to get them to make content about your brand, and then you create this flywheel of getting like 100 influencers every single month to that talk about your product. I'm on the other side. I'm the content creator now. I have a podcast. How will I get the best sponsors for the content I do?
SPEAKER_01So to monetize the podcast, what you're gonna focus on is like people that are already sponsoring podcasts, that's who you're gonna want to go after. Um, so they already have dedicated budget that they'll allocate towards sponsoring podcasts. Um, it's way harder to get a company that does already doesn't have budget and that podcasts like aren't working for them uh to get them to be like, hey, spend money with me. So the best way to do it is like go find shows that are similar in your industry and you look at the sponsors that are on those shows if you can find them and then reach out. There's gonna be somebody that's called like a media buyer. That's gonna be like, you know, it's gonna be a job title in that vicinity. You'd be like, hey, I have a show like X. I or saw you sponsoring X, I have a show like it. Um, you know, here's the stats. Can I send over? Like, I I have ad slots that are available. Can I send over a media kit for you to take a look at? Um, that's how I would go about that process. Um, and then the other thing I would do is just like grow the email newsletter, man. Like you'll just get so much more money. The amount of money you'll be able to spend the the because it's like you're driving clicks directly from the email newsletter to their site, and then that's UTM tag, right? So you can like see who converts into like the product. Like you like you you can drive directly attributable revenue, right? Um, I I there that's like the best way to do this in in in my opinion, is like the combination of those two together. But again, same strategy. It's like cool. What are the so if you do the email newsletter side, same idea. Like go find brands that are like advertising in email newsletters. There's tons of aggregators that do this. Like if you just go to Perplexity and search like um like directory websites of brands that are uh sponsoring email newsletters. You'll like find websites that basically scrape all of the email newsletters, find the brands that are sponsoring them, and then you know, basically we'll find their contact information for you. And then they they basically charge you on like the contact information that you could pull out. You don't need to pay for them. You could just like literally like find the brands, go find their websites and like you know, go find the person that you need to reach out to. Like that whole flow could be automated, right? Um, but I that that would be the process that I would go through to for the monetization. Um, it's gonna be way easier to do that um than like going and finding companies that you know trying to make budget is way different than trying to like get a portion of budget. Way harder to make budget. It's just way more of a big lip. Another thing you could do too is like uh Passion Fruit. Um they're uh they're a startup, uh, but they uh do basically they like work with brands to do influencer campaigns. Um, like for example, like Replit, this is how a lot of their YouTube content is made, is they do like bounties for like we want you to make a video that involves you building something with Replit, and then they pay out based on that. Um, so there's always brands that are looking to uh that that like are you know looking for specific ad units and then passion fruit is basically the bridge between creators and those ad units. So another way to do it, I honestly, if like you know, for anybody who's listening, I think there's way more money probably and just doing tutorial videos and just like having brands sponsor for those videos. Like I know Replit, for example, they'll pay you 2,500 like for a single video if your like YouTube channel you know gets 10,000 views and has like 20,000 subs. Um, it's kind of ridiculous how much money is being thrown around right now because like this is how people discover products now is through social. Um, and with YouTube in particular, brands really like it because it's directly trackable as well. Like, if you're like, you know, click the link below to sign up and then it's a you know it's an affiliate link, they can see, you know, X person drove Y revenue. We paid that person, you know, whatever, like whatever amount. And then they can start to look at their payback period of like, okay, cool. Like the CAC from that was, you know, this number, and we know that we're gonna have a payback period of three months, and the customer lifetime value of that person is 10x what we paid for it. Cool, let's do more work with that influencer. Um, so or that YouTube specific influencer. So um, I I know people that this is like a literally all they do is they do YouTube videos talking about software within their category, and then they sell some type of info product in relationship to it. Um, this is really huge in like the um like the print on demands category on uh uh uh on YouTube. So if like people who like use like printify to go and sell products on whatever it is, like Amazon or you know, Etsy, etc. Um, this is like the entire playbook. And you make great money, man. You can make like 400k to half a million a year doing just literally that process, being an affiliate, doing these types of content videos, and you know, doing some type of um uh of an info product.
SPEAKER_00So I agree. I think podcast is like the hardest to actually sponsor, but I have a few friends like doing like uh short form video on TikTok, Instagram, they have a lot of followers, but they get paid by company that everyone knows listening now, like 30k straight away for few videos, and they get like a 15-minute call with that brand, they send a wire transfer of like 30k, and they have to make the video even they get paid even before making the video. And I think that's crazy. There is really company that are ready to spend that money in the marketing for sure.
SPEAKER_01And and the reason that they spend on that is because the CPM is cheaper than what they can get on the platform, right? So there isn't a good unit of metric to measure a podcast like cost per thousand impressions, and this is why like it's hard. Um, in contrast, like email is very, it's very established, right? And so like people know what you know, how what's the cost per thousand impressions on an email newsletter, what's the cost per clicks on an email newsletter? Like they know those metrics. Um, so that that brand, right, that's reaching out. Um, they know that the average, you know, CPM on TikTok is six dollars, right? That's what they would pay TikTok ads to like get a thousand views, right? On a video. Now, if they can go to a creator, they can be like, yo, creator, I'll fucking Venmo you 30 grand, right? Or why are you 30 grand? And what that, you know, say that person goes and they get uh we'll say a million views, right? That's cheaper than what they could get with that same 30k on the platform. And that's the whole game, that's the whole arbitrage. This is it's just a media buy that's occurring, right? They're trying to get the cheapest media that they can get in whatever format that they can get it on the platform that their their customer that they sell to is on. And so it that's like largely the reason is just because like the odd like the market isn't super sophisticated. With that said though, when you get to scale as a podcast, that's where like the money is, mate. But you have to do it like five years. Like if you can stay doing it and stay, you know, it's soluble for five years, then it's a whole, you know, it's a whole other game. Um the the challenge though is like, can you survive that long? And every everyone's like this. Like if you look at all the podcasters that are starting to pop off right now, um, it's like literally five years ago they started. Like Dwarkesh is a great one, right? Who's in the AI space? It's like five years of him just like doing fucking podcasts, right? And like in the last like whatever year, he's just like it's it's moon. And the reason for that is because it it takes that long to like build this type of pro like this type of media. Um, but once you get there, the trust is so deep, like you're never pulling a Huberman fan away from Huberman, right? Yeah, like it will be impossible to like pull them out of it. Where in contrast, like a fucking, you know, uh the short form TikToker, there is no like the the the depth of relationship is so much smaller. It's so much smaller, especially if they're doing dumb stuff like news or whatever, right? Where it's like anybody could do this. You're just like a talking head at that point. You're not you're not giving me anything that is like unique, specific value. And so anyway, I I I would I would challenge everybody that's like I want to do this media thing to think about that, like in their decision-making process. Because it's just it, it's it's you can do this like the podcast long form thing, but you have to think about okay, what are the what are the other things that I do in the short term to be able to sustain you know this long-term investment, this long-term bet.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, I agree. I think for me, I do that out of passion. I want to talk to guys like you, you know, like that's I do that twice a week. I'm the happiest. I can exchange to people I want to talk to. But if it's not something that you feel good doing for the next five years, except if like the playbook we talked about, you want to do that to sell your product, which you will make money pretty fast, then I think it's two different things. But yeah, the podcast I'm doing right now, I know I can do that for five years because I love doing it, and I think that's the big difference.
SPEAKER_01No, totally. And I as long as you can sustain, I think again, like think about it as a life trial lifestyle choice, right? Like it's like the same, you know, say you're overweight and you're like trying to get back in shape. If you go and run eight miles, like you're probably gonna hurt yourself, you know, on day one. But in contrast, if you like slowly build up into that, like you just you develop again that's that that ability to do uh everything just compounds over time, right? I there's uh I had a mentor that said this to me, and it's like my mantra that I just like patience, persistence, and compound interest. Um, that is like the thing that I've like lived by, and it's it's so true. It's like just if you show up longer than everybody and do things that compound and just like can sit in the quiet moments. Like this is the hardest thing as an entrepreneur that I don't think anybody talks about. It's like I like there's quiet moments that happen where you just have to like sit there and not do anything. Because if you go and you fuck with anything in your business, you mess up the machine. And like literally, I have a moment like that right now. Like we I've got we figured out our positioning, we figured out our motion, like we figured out like our go-to-market motion, we figured out like how to sell the product. We we have all these, and I just literally like have to like not do anything, which is like a very unnatural state for anybody that's good at you know building businesses. Um, and I think that that is like a skill that you have to learn. But again, just that reminder, last maxim that I kind of live by is like when it's working, don't touch it. Cause I see so many, so many. I've I've worked at I've worked at startups that have done this where it's like literally perfect pipeline, right? Like you could just like you put a dollar in and like six dollars of customer lifetime value is coming out, right? Uh you can't, you just like it's like the things you live for, and they're like, Well, we don't know why this is happening. Like, let's go tinker with this and see what's and then they fuck it up and they're like, Okay, let's go back. And then they try to go back and it doesn't work in the same way. And they're like, Well, what happened? It's like because you mess with the machine when it's working. Like, if it doesn't, it if it's not broke, like don't fix it. It's that simple idea, and it that applies to business as well. And I I I would love to leave people with that. Like, if you once you find the thing, like just let the thing work and get out of its way.
SPEAKER_00So that's a good one. Well, I will pick up your brand for a last question. I think a lot of people want to know. If you had to start over from scratch in 2026, you built uh few successful bootstrap SaaS and company. What would be your like 8020 uh plan to go from ID to validation to building the product to distribution?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I'm obsessed with like exact match domains right now because they rank incredibly well on like Google. Um, so an example of this one I just or one I got recently, I guess it's not that recent now, but it's I picked it up because it's just an awesome domain is uh AI infographic generator. Gets about like 14,000 searches per month. Um when you look at the keyword volume. Um I haven't even like I don't even know what's on the site anymore. I don't think there's even anything up. We like validated it over a weekend and got somebody to buy an infographic. So we're like, all right, cool, this is now, but it's a thing that we'll build at some point in the future. Um, but the reason I would focus on those um is basically you want to find like a job to be done that is augmented by AI and then figure out some type of like distribution strategy that's super simple for you to go after. So like infographic generator is a very like you know, search for keyword. Um there's tons of different like uh like long tail keywords I can go after, like how uh like infographic for X industry is like one of them. And basically the strategy there, like I literally all I would do was turn on Google ads, turn on Facebook ads, and like build some backlinks to the homepage of the website. That will rank on page one. You'll naturally start to get people that are coming in from uh Instagram or sorry, from Facebook and Google Ads to actually set up that funnel to do it appropriately. If again, just for this is me talking to my younger self. Uh, create a conversion action using Google Tag Manager for the signup event and for the payment action. Um, so what you basically are doing is you're pushing event an event to the data layer for when somebody signs up and when somebody pays. And then you uh use Google Tag Manager to create a listener that sends that information back to Facebook ads and back to Google Ads so that you can actually see, okay, like I put a dollar into Google Ads and that turns into X amount of revenue. The problem with uh software companies bootstrapping them is that there's typically a payback period that is uh like longer than it takes to acquire the customer. So, as an example, like I own this software uh in the past, um, I paid $89 for a new customer. The average revenue per customer was $39, but the customer lifetime value of that individual was about $600. So I'd pay $89 to create $600 in customer lifetime value, which is great. You know, it's like a basically a 6x return on my ad spend. Um, but I would have to wait basically two months for that money to replenish back into my bank account. And so this is the challenge that we face. So the first company I like ever did that like, you know, got successful, my principal was basically 10% of whatever the revenue was that I was making from that company. I would just put that back into marketing. And then what naturally happens a lot of the times with these tools is they find a plateau, especially if they have a single product feature that they they offer. Um, and that's totally fine. Like I you can just like let this simple little app, you know, go and print. Like I have a Chrome extension as an example. It has paid my rent for the last whatever, like eight years of my life, right? Um, and you can like they can just be simple, dumb tools and make great money. They don't have to be these like massive, absolutely life-changing things. They can just be small businesses and it's just two different games that you can play, right? Um, like personally, like right now, I'm in the chapter of my life where I'm like playing like, you know, big game. I'm building a platform, it's way complicated. The product scope is huge, it's it's like a fucking pain in the ass, right? I spend all of my time trying to solve these problems that are like, you know, frontier problems with like how do I get AI agents to think? And that's very hard. Um, but in contrast, like, you know, there's been moments where it's like, hey, we're just building, like literally, I'm you know, I'm building a generator application and it does one thing well. And uh like that's all you have to do. And if you're trying to find those exact match domains, just go to SEM Rush or AHREFs, use what uh SEM rush that's called keyword magic. I think AHRFs is called keyword explorer, put in the keyword phrases AI and generator, and then you just like scour through them, like look for any that like aren't related to porn because a lot of them are, but try to find like any that look like they're business related. Again, the infographic one was like one I was like, okay, we have to buy this. Um, and then you just basically like get that domain, you go to something like instant domain search and just like you know, find 10 of them, put them into instant domain search, see if the dot com's available, only buy the dot com. Um, I got uh AI infographic generator for $10 as an example. These things still exist out there. You can find them. People act like you can't. I I like literally, there's a domain that I've been sitting on that I'm not gonna say here, but I'm probably like I need to buy because it's like literally on my to-do list, and it gets uh it gets 5,600 searches per month. And like the the search for it is like perfect as a basically like an AdSense website, right? Um, and it's like there's these things exist. You can go and you can find them. And what's why why you should buy those exact match domains is because they're extremely easy to rank. You can throw like 10 like quality backlinks at those sites, and I've like taken those sites from like non, you know, not non-existent to on page one in like 30 days when it's the exact match keyword, and then you're buying links that have that exact match keyword as the domain. So, for example, how I would do this is I would go to AI infographic generator. Uh for AI infographic generator, I would go and build like 10 links. Um, and the the uh the hypertext uh like the URL, like the actual text within the URL would be AI infographic generator. Why that works um is because the domain is an exact match domain and the keyword it like matches the exact match. You're you Google doesn't look at that as you gaming it, they just look at it as being like, oh, this is like a uh uh the this is the business name, right? Is that keyword phrase. So, anyways, uh that's how I would do it if I was starting over again. Or the other thing, last thing, is I would not even look at AI. I would go and do something that is super stupid and simple. That's basically like data extraction. Um, like those tools, you have no idea how much money is in, like, for example, one you could go build right now is basically go and build a YouTube email extractor um that basically like scrapes channel URLs and then pulls out the email addresses that are behind the captchas. You can build this literally in like probably three hours with clog code and like rapid API endpoints and like a super based connection and stripe and like have that out the door. Um, again, just these simple things. They're like the best companies to start that have extremely small product scope. Um, don't don't overcomplicate it. Just do one's thing, charge for it, and you'll find people that like find value in that.
SPEAKER_00Amazing. And if you can give an advice to Cody, who is 22 years old, listening to this podcast, and want to build something, what would it be?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think I did a lot of things that I I wasn't thinking about the longevity of the brand. Um, and I really like I learned that later. Like the value, like, for example, I was doing a lot of print on demand. That's how I like initially started my career in like e-commerce, right? Um, so like we were uh yeah, well, just for the sake of time, we'll get into it here. But um extracting a ton of data, analyzing that data, then like basically making products at scale um on the back of this. Um the the thing that I didn't think about is I wasn't investing in something that I owned. Um, like I was making great money off of these channels, but I didn't, I wasn't building a brand that like had its own value, basically. Um and this is something that I think I I would like right now. Now, as an example, like with graft.com, like all I care about is is it like my metric of success is is branded search increasing month month over month? I literally have this chart that I literally, you know, it's just a Google Search Console data source, and I'm looking at like is the impressions for keywords that contain graft increasing? And like, is clicks for the keyword that contains graft increasing? And the reason for that is like that is something that can never be taken away from me. Like if I grow this brand, like it is something that people have to come, you know, they have to like hand-to-hand combat with me to try to pry away that person that's like searching for the company. And this is something that like I wish I would have uh realized earlier on. I ended up having a uh a boss that I work for that just like you know, basically pounded this into my mind. Like the the respecting the brand is the only thing that you can do to create like value over time. Um, and also the other side of it too is that there's like certain there's certain company types that just don't scale or they have like breakpoints that they get to. Like if you're running a digital agency, it's typically three to five million for some reason. It just gets really hard to go above that scale. There's people that do it, but like you have to play at a at an at a level that's just like you know, it's it's a it's an extreme caliber, right? Um the uh if you look at like e-commerce, like it's it's very hard, you know, there's there's these thresholds that you have to like push through. And so every type of business has a different composition. Um, and then you just kind of have to like map around, you know, what what do you also differ businesses? Like, why do we get into SaaS? Right, it's because the margins on it are ridiculous. It's like, yeah, I get you know, again, I own software that is like dumb tools, and they are like 90 to you know 95% margin businesses, right? Like it's unbelievable. Like this is the dream, and like it has like one employee that works customer support. Like, are you kidding me? That's like what everybody lives for, right? Um, but I I I think that the challenge is that it's it's just it's just a hard thing to do, right? Like that's why it's it's it's like everybody wants it, but then when you actually get into it, it's way more challenging than you actually think it is. Um, so to again initiate that initial flywheel, just do the simplest thing. Um, like don't overcomplicate it, create small product scope, do one thing well, and you'll have way more people pay you than doing like a bunch of things like very like mediocre.
SPEAKER_00So amazing, Cody. Thank you for your time. Uh, I will add the link for hosting to get the playbook of Cody so I get can get your email and get some sponsors.
SPEAKER_01I love it. Yeah, and if you're listening to this and you run a uh go-to-market team, uh my company graph.com is basically an AI um uh data analyst for GTM teams. We plug in all your data sources, we build the data pipeline, the data warehouse, uh, and then also the visualization software. So we basically you know augment what a data engineer would do previously. We'd love to help you if you're facing those challenges with trying to figure out how you're getting new customers and how your company is growing. So, anyways, just throw that in there for everybody as well. Perfect.
SPEAKER_00Again, the link will be uh beautiful for graft as well. Thank you again. Thank you, brother. Appreciate it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, thanks for having me on. We'd love to come back later on in the future. Uh let me know in like, you know, whatever, six to nine months, and we can come back and talk about the new stuff that I'm seeing.
SPEAKER_00So let's do that.