Transform Your Podcast Into a Brand Powerhouse with Alex Sanfilippo

Welcome to profits through podcasting, where we help health focused entrepreneurs generate leads and revenue for their businesses through podcasting. I’m your host Joel Oliver’s CEO of east coast studio. And if you’ve been listening to this show for awhile, you’ve heard about the importance and benefits of both appearing on other podcasts as a guest and having guests on your show.

It’s great for making connections and growing your following. And today’s guest knows a lot about podcast guesting as the founder of pod match.com. A beautiful platform that automatically connects podcast hosts and guests for interviews. His name is Alex Sanfilippo and he’s got a long history with podcasting. He’s well connected in the podcast industry. And today we’re going to spend some time with him that is sure to be valuable and help you. Up-level your podcast. ALex has even built an essentially fully outsourced podcast, which is very unique and an interesting concept.

So we’re going to chat about that too. He’s a firm believer in the merits of podcasting and aims to help independent voices serve the world. So let’s bring them on.

All right. Hey, Alex, welcome in.

Joel, thank you so much for having me. I’m honored to be here.

So you’re a wealth of knowledge when it comes to podcasting. So having you on today, I want to let you share as much as possible about some different aspects of podcasting. First, let’s chat about your current podcast. It’s called Podcasting Made Simple. You’re at nearly 300 episodes at this point. It was started in 2019.

Is that right?

Yeah, it sounds right. The dates get fuzzy, but I’m pretty sure I’m pretty sure it was like the end of June, 2019.

Now I want to talk about in a moment, how this fits into your marketing funnel. But first, since it is such a unique format, you’ve essentially outsourced even the content creation, share a bit about that with us. So we have an idea how that podcast works.

Cause you’re not even really the one hosting it most of the time. And that’s something that that’s like the one thing that we would all think you have to do as a podcaster. So tell us how that works.

Yeah. Thanks for asking this. , I never had the opportunity to talk about this, so it’s truly a gift. So thank you for that. When I started that podcast, same feed, if you go to the hundred, the first 158 episodes, and again, the numbers get a little fuzzy, but I believe that’s it.

It’s actually called creating a brand. It started as an entrepreneurship podcast. And over the course of time, I decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur in podcasting. And I kind of hit this point where I realized my listeners, when I was like polling them, talking to them, they were all podcasters, they were all using my software.

And I realized that they had like follow up questions. Like, well, how would this relate to me as a podcaster? Right. And I’m like, oh man, I sat down with my wife, uh, who’s one of my business partners and then our third partner in this space. And I just told them like, I think it’s time to like, Sunset this show or at least rebrand it to be about podcasting.

And we kind of like sat through like, okay, what does this really look like? And again, I just did a lot of talking to people that were listening to the show to figure out what they wanted. And it’s funny, Joel, the number one thing I heard from podcasters is I don’t have time to listen to podcasts.

And I was like, huh? Okay. I’m like, so that tells me it needs to be short, shorter than it is. Cause that’s the point. It was like 35 minute, uh, interview episodes every week. And so we decided to keep it one episode per week. Cause at first I was like, do we move it to daily? Like, what do we do? We decided to move it down really short and make it more like a Ted talk because of what I kept on hearing podcasters tell me is when they are looking up content, they really liked.

That format, like really quick, really pointed. It just gives them exactly what they need and they can be done with it. Right. It was a little bit like an ego hit to take myself out of most of the episodes. I do two interviews a quarter and one solo episode a quarter. And the rest is all other people that are truly a better expert in what they’re talking about than I am.

So we decided to really turn it into the educational wing of what we do. Within pod match our software. And it was just, all it is is responses to the questions were asked a lot. And I don’t want to pretend to be the guy who has all the answers.

I I’ll just be real. I’m not, but I’m like, man, someone like Joel understands like turning listeners into customers better than I do. So Joel needs to come on and talk about that. And then we can get this in front of our, our members, our audience. And that was kind of the whole idea of it. We’ve just gotten better and better at doing it.

And yes, I’ll be the first to admit it’s a very unique format, but the response has been really great. I don’t recommend people doing it like this. Uh, It’s unique to us because we do have the software component of it as well.

Right. Yes, this is, it’s a very interesting thing to get you thinking outside of the box of what is possible, but probably not a fit for most people. It’s a great fit for what you’re doing. So really neat that you came to that conclusion and an interesting thing as well. Like you talked about having the, the previous name and having to have a chat with business partners and decide, make that decision that, Hey, We’re going to make this big shift because that’s a common thing with podcasters to our entrepreneurs specifically, that rebrand, you see it a lot and I’ve seen it a lot with clients over the years.

And sometimes I think, wow, is that really necessary? But the more that I’ve learned about branding, I realized, yeah, you’re constantly looking at this and sometimes you do have to make those shifts. So you did it and things have been going well. And you’ve got quite an audience built up now at this point.

So. I imagine this has to be a great tool for you both when it comes to marketing Podmatch and also making great connections within the industry. Can you tell us a bit about how this podcast is fitting into your overall marketing funnel, like how you’re actually leveraging the podcast to create new business for Podmatch and any other benefits that you’re achieving from it?

Yeah, for sure. And really at the end of the day, we call it the introduction to our funnel. Like it’s not even on top of our funnel. It’s like the introduction to like, here’s what Alex does. Here’s what pod match does. Right. That’s kind of the idea behind it. And it’s done very well for us in a few ways.

We use it. Number one, we, we put the content in our courses. So we have like premium education that we just offered anyone who’s using pod match. And we have those videos inside of it. So it’s a link to the podcast technically, right? It’s like, here’s the video version. Here’s the audio version. Here’s the written version.

Check out whichever you want. Right. And it’s like one of the lessons inside of our course. So we get people that use pod match, checking out those specific lessons and diving deep into it. And of course we always say like, and here’s the person who spoke it. If you have more questions on this, don’t ask Alex, ask Joel, right?

Like if you have more questions, that’s like, go here. Here’s where you can find out more, which, so our guests, That have been on the show of all reported. Like, man, I get a lot of great leads from this podcast episode, ongoing basis, because it’s not just hitting a feed and dying after a few weeks. Right. I say dying, but like not getting listened to as much.

There’s old episodes are still very hot. People listen to them on a going basis because they’re going through that section. Of a course that we have. So that’s the first thing. But the other thing we do is when someone’s like, man, I’m really struggling.

To market my podcast. Well, what we do is we have a canned response. So it’s me or it’s Alicia sending that, right? And it’s like, here, this is an episode where so and so talked about that in depth, check it out and see if you enjoy it. And so we’re, we’re using it to again, introduce people to educate them.

It’s our educational wing, which is. My favorite part about what I get to do is educate and serve the next generation of podcasters. And yes, I talk about podcasters. My customers are podcasters technically, right? The members, the community I serve, they’re that group of people. So it sounds a little bit meta for some people may be listening.

Right. But like that, that’s exactly what I’m, what I’m doing. So anyway, like it’s worked really well from both those things, from the core side, from us just using it with, with cold outreach or just ways that we can show up and serve and comments on social media. And this is an important point that again, I don’t really get to talk about much. But I want to share it here because I think it’s really valuable the way that we actually turn business with it with our podcast is we use what’s called dynamic insertion. I happen to use buzzsprout and buzzsprout has an option for dynamic insertion just means like your podcast backlog.

So for me, around 300 episodes at time of recording this, I can push a button and add more audio to the beginning, somewhere in the middle or the end of it. And once a month we do is we put something at the very beginning of it to talk to people, right. podcast about what we have going on at that time.

The reason I like this is because if you’re a regular listener of podcasting made simple, you’re used to the little intro jingle. Right. You’re listening to podcasting. It’s simple, a little bit of music before it. Right. And if out of nowhere, you hear something different in the way that we do it is there’s no real editing in it.

It’s just me. And it says, Hey, Alex here. And then I dive into about 15 seconds of whatever it is that we’re wanting people to do at that time. And the reason I like it is because so many of us are conditioned by what we hear on repeat to maybe tune it out a little bit, like it’s just kind of how our brains work, right?

But now let’s tell somebody who’s new to my podcast that wait a minute. This is different. The intro starts after something that’s being said, that means it’s important. And we’ve seen that do really well for conversion and the things we put the beginning of the actual episode is when we release a big upgrade on pod match.

It’s when our new industry report comes out. It’s when we have some sort of service that we’re adding that we want to help other people with as well. Hey, go check this thing out. Right. And we found that by doing dynamic insertion verse actually putting it in the episode content, we’re able to. Uh, permanently, it does way better because we can mention it when we want to, and we can remove it when we’re ready to as well.

So that’s been like a really huge boost for us as well.

Now, obviously to do all this, we need the audience. You mentioned back when you shifted brands, you talk to your listeners and you got an idea from them, what they needed and what kind of format it should be, that would obviously be one.

element to the success of the show is, is serving the listeners and what they’re looking for. What else would you say would be something you could like, what would you attribute to the show’s success and growth? You’ve been doing it a long time. That’s a big thing as well. You’ve been consistent, but actually growing the podcast?

What have you done to make that happen?

Yeah. The biggest thing is it’s got to be in alignment with what you do. I find a lot of people, they build a podcast and they make it completely siloed for anything else they do. Like no overlap at all. And it’s like, man, if you really want to grow it, it’s got to really be an extension of you and your existing brand.

And if you don’t have that fine, but you need to align yourself with it. Right. If all I’m posting on social media or emailing my list about is golf, but my podcast about surfing, it’s like, hold on now, like, which are you? Right. And I think that this is really tough for people because many of us now are multifaceted.

We like a bunch of different things. And so maybe we’re like, okay, then I’ll make a really general podcast. I can cover all the things I love. But the reality is we have to be willing to say, this is what I’m gonna be known for. This is what I’m going to do. And in your personal life, fine, go do whatever it is that you love.

Right? Like I have a bunch of hobbies outside of podcasting, believe it or not. Right. But I’ve just committed to the fact that this is the alignment that I need, my business, my podcast, and anything I post on social media has to somehow incorporate podcasting. And if it doesn’t, I don’t share it. I mean, I, I love working out.

I love playing soccer. I love playing ukulele. I have one on the wall right here. I don’t post about these things at all because I can’t really connect it with podcasting too much. So many of us, we have to really pull ourselves out of the equation a little bit and say, this is the thing I want to be known for.

 We have to stand back and say, okay, my brand is going to be around this thing. I find when you do that really well, it helps. That’s one of the, the few big things I say, because then people are not like, oh, it’s this Alex guy. He’s like into all kinds of things.

No, if anyone meets me, they’re like, oh, you’re that podcasting guy. And I am very good with hearing that because it means everyone knows, okay. This is what he does. This is what he knows. Right. And so that’s one of the biggest things I would contribute to, to podcast growth is you, the host really being in alignment with what it is that you’re talking about.

Right. So really identifying who the audience is that you want to be speaking to and then consistently creating that content that’s targeted to them. That makes a lot of sense. I feel that as well. And like you were just saying, you probably felt this where let’s say we’re talking to entrepreneurs with podcasts.

Well, it’s easy to say, well, this is useful to entrepreneurs and this is, and this is, and about your taxes, but you have to say, no, no, not my realm. Somebody else exists to serve them. You don’t need to be everything to this audience. You need to be talking about what you’re good at.

Yeah. You know, it’s funny you mentioned that I’ll go back to the days of having the entrepreneurship show your data you can learn from. So I was able to see like which episodes were hot and which ones weren’t my two least popular episodes of entrepreneurship. One was about taxes. The other was about the legal side of business.

And they’re both extremely important for entrepreneurship, right? If you’re an entrepreneur business owner, like those are two of the like top topics, people were not coming to my show to learn about taxes or to learn about the legal side of things. To me, I was like, these are super important episodes. We got to get them in the queue.

And people just didn’t resonate with them. Many people didn’t listen. They dropped off. They left. They came back the following week because they’re like, yeah, that’s not why I’m here. And so you bring up such a good point, Joel, like we have to be in alignment with also who our audience is.

And so for me, I’ve, I’ve mentioned already, but talking to the people that you say you serve is so important to know how you actually serve them. You will never be their holistic solution for all things. There’s a small niche. There’s a, there’s something that you can fill and help them with. And sometimes the only way to know that is to actually have conversations with them.

So for me, the data spoke for them and told me they are not interested in this. So I didn’t bring a tax expert back and I didn’t bring a lawyer back on, right? I decided, okay, that’s not the stories that they want me to capture anymore. So again, I say all I just to reinforce that super insightful that we.

Make sure we understand and know who it is we serve and how we actually serve them.

Absolutely. Yeah. Huge importance. And one of those things we learn along the way, I think if you take a look back at the early days of any of our podcasts, you’ll see mistakes like that, or we’ve rebranded or we’re doing things back then that we wouldn’t do now, and that’s just part of it.

, so you’ve been going quite a while, as we mentioned with your podcast, not everyone is going to have the luxury of outsourcing the hosting portion like you, but we do know that delegating and streamlining workflows are a huge help when it comes to longevity of a podcast and ensuring that we can actually keep it going for a long time because it’s not weighing on us too much.

So how can we be thinking about that and making? The production process as easy as possible. Let’s say a person who’s a solopreneur or it’s them and they’ve got an assistant. They’re doing perhaps a mix of solo and interview episodes. How can we make that workflow as frictionless as possible?

It all begins with, you determining what matters for your podcast. And there’s three things I like to filter every process within my podcast through. It’s like the lens for it all. It’s automate, delegate, eliminate. You want to step back and look at it all and say, can I automate any portion of this?

Is there a tool that exists on this? Part of the process I spent a lot of time doing, right? Can I delegate this? Can I hire a virtual assistant? Is there a team member to take this on? Can my spouse help me? Right? Like, is there someone in business who would actually be better at this than I am?

And last thing is to eliminate. So automate delegate, eliminate, eliminate. I find to be the most difficult. And an example of this is for me personally, my least favorite social media platform is, is Instagram. I know it’s like counterculture and Instagram has power. So I’m not saying that it’s not valuable for me.

I don’t enjoy being on it. I don’t enjoy posting on it and I’ve never really been able to get much traction on that. Yes, I could probably figure it out and meet with an expert, hire a coach. I could probably do it. But the reality is I’ve never had that desire, but I was for a long time making really high quality, or so I thought high quality content for Instagram specifically, and just burning myself out.

And I was working with a team with it and stuff like that. And finally, I was just like, you know what, can we just stop? And someone’s like, no, there’s so many people who use Instagram. You can’t do that. You can’t do that. You can’t do that. Right. We stopped. And with all the time you’re using on Instagram, we went into LinkedIn, which is my favorite platform.

So we went into LinkedIn and started doing it. And our podcast grew exponentially after doing that. And people still, as they are like, man, you’re missing a huge opportunity. Maybe, but at some point we have to start saying no to opportunities because we’ve already got something that we’re doing. Right.

And so the LinkedIn method has worked really well for us. And so as Facebook now, but Instagram just doesn’t interest me. And so we’ve kind of said, we’re going to eliminate that. And something that you mentioned yes, I have a team that helps me with all this, but I’m very, very involved in most of the tasks actually fall on me.

Yeah. And that’s by design. I’m serving independent podcasters. I want to operate as one myself. So I delegate a few of the administrative tasks, my wife, and then I have a video editor and an audio editor. I’ve learned those things because I wanted to see how it works.

So again, I can put myself in the shoes of an independent podcaster, but I’m not great at it and I turned into a bit of perfectionist and I don’t want that showing up in my brand because that’s just not the way I like to show up. I like to show up that we, we do things with excellence, but not with perfection.

And so I’m very involved in this process. So for me, the automate delegate eliminate. It’s something that every quarter, so we kind of like behind the scenes, do things in 13 week batches, every quarter, I’m going back through everything we do saying, is there anything else we can get rid of? Is there anything else that I can delegate or someone that team can delegate?

Is there any new automation that came out that can make this process easier? And we’re always looking to do less, not more. We want to do less with more excellence, because that’s what really, at the end of the day has proven to serve our listeners and also grow our audience.

Love it. So excellence, not perfection. That’s what you say. Yeah. I like that. That’s saying, because we can get hung up on this tiny little percentage to get things just perfect. And it really didn’t make a difference. I see that issue as well, where people are trying to take on more work or trying to save money or something when it’s kind of backwards thinking you should be, you know, Trying to find those ways, like you said, constantly reassessing, what else can we delegate or eliminate?

And an interesting point about the eliminate step two, that’s a great one because we don’t always understand what could be eliminated. Like you mentioned, Instagram just happened to be something you didn’t need to be on. It’s easy to think, well, we have to be on there or in, in our case, for example, we started doing social media content.

We had the podcast. I was doing some spending some time doing dedicated reels and things like that for Instagram, which it sounds like you probably were as well. But at the same time, if you have a podcast, you can get outsourced clips for Instagram. Like you can have your team make those.

So we’re doing those. And I was spending a lot of time on say a single reel, like producing them just for Instagram. And we thought, you know, I don’t think we’re really getting a big ROI. On these ones that I spent an hour on versus the ones I spent zero minutes on because they just came from the podcast.

So maybe let’s just eliminate those completely. So that’s the type of thing that you’re talking about, right? Is just assessing what do I actually need to be doing here? And you don’t need to be on all the social platforms.

Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, that’s, that’s exactly what I’m sharing. And that’s a great case study. And in the day, like we don’t need all the listeners. We don’t need everyone to plan to be listening to us. And many of that type of thing is more of like a, I’m not downplaying it. If you have capacity, if you’re listening to this and you’re like, I like this stuff, though, it, it’s a creative outlet for me.

It, people respond well to it then by all means do it. But if it’s draining, you don’t like it, then, then stop because it’s kind of this spray and pray method of like more people will find my podcast. But, Who is more people, right? Is that really somebody that you serve? And I think on one of your episodes, Joel of profits through podcasting, you had Adam on the show, monetization strategies and something he said, and you reinforced was that both of you would be excited to be in a room with 50 people in it.

So why aren’t we excited? We have 50 people listening to a podcast. So at the day, if you’re like, I need more, I need more, I need more. Maybe you don’t, maybe that 50 people in the room with you go deeper with them. Go further with them. Maybe like, here’s the thing. Like most people I know that are entrepreneurs that are running like these, these six and seven figure businesses, they don’t need a thousand new clients.

They need 10 new clients. So it’s like, why do you need 10, 000 people listening? Right? Just find the right people and go deeper with them. And they’re the ones ultimately like, man, Joel has helped me so much. Joel is hired. Right. And so I think we also have to have the mentality of like, sometimes less is more because we have the opportunity to be a little bit more intimate with those individuals as well.

A common question that we hear a lot is, is it too late to start a podcast?

There’s so many of them out there now. I don’t want to ask that because we already know the answer. No, it’s not too late. Everybody is unique, but it can be intimidating whether it is podcasting or social media like we’re just talking about here or anything business related when you are putting yourself out there. So a common fear with, with that kind of stuff is I’m just blending in. I’ve got nothing different to offer.

So why even start? So That said, given your experience doing many different podcast interviews, seeing many different podcasts on your platform, connecting with podcasters virtually and at events, what would you say are some ways we can think about standing out, whether it be as a podcaster or a guest or both?

Yeah,

out. You have to stand for something. That’s always where I started the days of saying I have a business marketing entrepreneurship show. I believe are sort of behind us. There, there are a lot of those, and some of them have done very well because they got in at the right time. We’re at a time in the world now where the.

The algorithms are getting really smart. Even in podcasting, the search functionality is getting really smart and people are looking for exactly. What they’re looking for. So when they type in on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Google, YouTube, any of these places, they’re not saying business and marketing podcast, they’re saying, podcast to help me go from seven to eight figures or from six to seven figures, right?

Specifically with a small team, that’s what they’re looking for. So when we want to stand out, we have to first say we’re standing for something. And what that means is saying, okay, you know what? The way I know I show up to help is I help someone who has a six figure business who feels stuck in that.

Understand the sales and marketing levers that they need to go from that six figure to that seven figure a year. And then you find a way to just articulate that in a way that someone’s actually searching for it, right? Like the, the listener is looking for that content. They want to find it. If you position yourself as the person that can speak to that problem.

And you offer the solution to it through your podcast. You can still do really well in this space. The temptation though, exists because of some of the, the people that have been in podcasting for a while, they can kind of do whatever they want. A great example, this is Jordan Harbinger. He’s a podcaster. I love and respect so much.

When he got started, he had a very narrow focus, very specific. Now, years later, when he has tens of millions of people listening to his podcast every month, he literally says, I’ll talk about whatever I want, because I’ve already done the hard work of earning trust with an audience. But so many of us are like, I’m just going to do that.

The Alex Sanfilippo show starts tomorrow. Right? And the thing is, I know we think that we’re doing well by wanting to serve everybody, but the reality is it takes courage. Being afraid than doing what you have to do anyway, to say, you know what? I’m putting myself on the line. The only thing I help someone do is go from six to seven figures through sales and marketing funnels that they’ve maybe not explored before.

And that’s exactly how I show up. And if you say, you know what, I want to get into podcasting, then really sit down and think about the unique perspective you can bring to podcasting.

And go really, really narrow with it. And I find that those are the people now that do the best in podcasting, keeping in mind, you may never have millions of people listening, but in the day, isn’t it worth it? Like if it just reaches and serves one or two people or a couple hundred people, we have to really think about it from this perspective.

And it sounds scary, but I always tell people like, like I just said, courage means being afraid than doing what you have to do anyway. If you feel you have on your heart or your business is telling you, you need to do this and then step up, take courage, get out there and put yourself out there through a podcast.

And I think it’s a beautiful medium to develop that no like and trust with a listener base.

that’s a great point. What you’re saying there, that is where a lot of success comes from that niche where people aren’t just seeing, like, here is the page of a marketing agency. It’s like, here’s the marketing agency that works for this type of person with this type of business and makes you go, wow, that is exactly what I needed.

That is me. And you can’t get that reaction from people if you’re just going to be generic in, in broad in that sense. So we’re getting towards the end here. I want to touch on something entrepreneurial. So you are a serious entrepreneur. You’ve been on quite the journey.

You’ve started a number of businesses and, the podcasts, you’ve also had some other things that you’ve been folding into pod match now at this point, but along the way, as you’ve gone through this, how are you able to learn? And decide when a project was worth pursuing or when it was time to either stop it or change the focus.

Cause you know, we touched on branding already and those shifts and realizing I’m going to shift or I’m not. And it’s a difficult decision and you’ve experienced a lot of it. So how have you done that and got to where you are now?

Uh, Joel, I’m, I’m still in the middle of learning all of this myself. I tend to. Enjoy new things, which I think is quite common for people that are entrepreneurs or business owners. There’s opportunity everywhere. The further along I get though, I, I’ve, I’ve just learned to realize that opportunity doesn’t actually lead to success, fulfillment, and sometimes opportunity can be the biggest killer of your business because if we go through every open door, eventually we’re gonna get lost.

We’re not going to remember where we came from. We’re not going to be able to backtrack. And for me, I’ve had to learn many of that, that the hard way for me, I was like, man, let’s get into podcasting. Okay. Let’s, let’s start like a podcast about podcasting, which has been a great piece of it. Right. Let’s start a blog.

Let’s start some other software companies as well. The inside of pockets. And let’s just build out this huge ecosystem. And the reality is like, I didn’t do that with ill intent of like building this big podcast. Like this big organization or building next meta to, to Facebook, to, to Instagram and all that, right.

Or to alphabet to Google and all their thousands of products. But I just saw that and I was like, Oh, that’s probably the right thing to do. And here I am now on the other side of that saying it’s not the right thing to do. What I did is what I just said not to do, which is standing for something. I cause confusion.

And anytime I get on a podcast, it’d be like, Alex, you do like, Everything in podcasting. And it always made me upset to hear that. I wasn’t ever like rude. I’m like, don’t, don’t say that. Right. But in my mind, I’m like, Oh, why do you think I’m everything? I’m not, I’m just trying to help, but I was trying to help everybody.

And it’s just, the reality is I can only help a segment of people that happens to be interview based podcast host and guests who want to be interviewed. That’s who I serve at the independent level. Right? Like I’m not even looking for like any top shows. Right. And I’ve had to learn that and I’ll be real, like the way I like to say this, this is an old quote, but every yes has to be protected by a thousand nos. I have had to learn how to say no, which for me has been just a very difficult lesson to learn. And Joel, as you mentioned, like on social media, I try to be very transparent. So I’ve been posting that we’ve been incorporating everything we have into podmatch. We only have one thing left. That’s not in podmatch.

It’s good. It was a heavier lift. We decided to do an upgrade with it. Probably by the time people were listening to this, we only have podmatch. com and everything will be in the navigation. It’ll be in the footer. It’ll be incorporated in some way. One login, one place to go and already I’ve seen just in the last six months of, of starting this shift people are now like, Oh Alex, you’re the pod match guy.

And I’m like, yes, that’s what I do. You’re right. And so I, I think some of the entrepreneurial advice that many of us need is to keep the main thing, the main thing, focus and look at it as like an acronym, follow one course until successful. When we can learn to do this and have that level of self discipline, the ability to say no, not to take every opportunity.

I mean, I think that helps us really step out in this noisy world of even entrepreneurship where it’s like, man, shiny object everywhere, new opportunity, new thing, right? It’s just saying, this is what I’m doing. I’m going to commit to it for X amount of time and give it a real shot. And the other thing with that is sometimes like you, mentioned, , Joel, like you have to sometimes say no to stuff.

There have been things that I started that just didn’t go well. And the way I position on that now is I say, Hey, you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to start really fast. We’re going to start ugly. My friend, Chris Kermit says has a book called start ugly. And the whole idea is just launch before you’re ready.

Like, don’t even make a logo. Just see if people like it. And we do that. We launch really fast. And if people don’t like it, we stop. If they like it, we start looking, working on making that an excellent service or product to really help those individuals. But it’s just a matter of testing it. And at the end of the day, we really don’t know what’s serving somebody until we put it in front of them.

That’s a long winded answer there, but you got me going on a topic that I love. And I hope that really serves somebody by hearing what I just shared.

Yeah, very helpful. I’ve definitely been in those situations, guilty of starting way too many things when there was a great idea in front of me already. I should have just been working on, so we’re gonna wrap up the show with a bit about pod match just to get a bit more about what that is. But I did have one more question.

I wanted to ask you something that I saw you post on X recently. You said basically that you believe you’re a four out of five in confidence as a podcast guest. I’m curious, what is something that you are working on personally that you feel will get you to that five in your mind, or that’s holding you back from, from being that right now, or is it even possible to reach a five?

I don’t know if it’s possible or not. It’s probably a little bit of imposter syndrome, but I do know that I, and people listen to seem to be like, yep, he’s right. I talk loud and I talk fast and maybe say too many words. So like those, and I’m not trying to be self critical. I just know when I go back and listen, I’m like, man, I didn’t, I didn’t give Joel enough room to really.

Injecting the conversation. Cause I talk loud, I talk fast and maybe not sound bite enough. So it’s like, could you even repurpose this? I don’t know. Maybe I said too many words. And so I’m a work in progress. I probably always will be. I, again, it’s a little bit of imposter syndrome, maybe, but I’m not like selling myself short.

I just want to be on this journey of 1 percent better every day. As a communicator, as somebody who shows up to serve people, I want to love really well. And I find that as long as I focus on this continuous improvement, I’m there. I will say I still got some, some room to go for sure. But yeah, I think that answers your question.

Yeah, good answer. I’m totally with you on the fast talking thing. That’s been something that has troubled me as well. But I also like listening to people who don’t talk too slow. So on that, you know,

I don’t know, man. I enjoyed, I enjoy the cadence. I’ve been listening to your podcast. It’s a great, it’s a great show. You’ve done extremely well with it. And I actually really enjoy the cadence of your voice, but maybe it’s because I talk fast, but I just feel that you speak in a cadence where I can like comprehend everything and actually like take notes and apply.

Cause you’re not just running through it all. So, I mean, I guess it’s the whole thing, imposter syndrome. We look in the mirror and we don’t see what we want to see yet. Right.

Yeah, yeah. Imposter syndrome. Sure. Something we all suffer from as podcasters, having yourself out there. Okay. So we’re, we’re towards the end here. I just want to take a couple of minutes for you to share exactly what your business offers, which, you know, Podmatch, as you just said, you’re the pod match guy.

It is, and I’m not just saying this in my opinion, the best platform when it comes to connecting guests and hosts, it just has all the features that it should. It works really well compared to some of the alternatives. So I’ve had a lot of success there. It’s a fantastic website to connect hosts and guests of podcasts for interviews.

So just give us a little pitch on what this actually is, what’s going on currently, maybe some upcoming plans.

Yeah, Joel, thank you for the opportunity. Simply put, if you’re listening to this and you’re a podcast guest or host or aspiring and you’re like, okay, what is this pod match thing? The simplest way I can say it is that it’s like a dating app, but instead of connecting for dates, it connects you for podcast interviews.

But it does go a step beyond that. It’s like if you were using a dating app, it also told you where to go on a date, how to schedule time there, and some things that you can talk about and all that. Right? Like it goes a step beyond that. The whole idea behind this is, can we put the right people together faster while automating as much as we can in between?

It’s just an administrative function. And so that’s what we’ve done with pod match. And we just continue to dive into that more and more. Let’s put the right guests and hosts together, let them message on our platform, let them schedule on our platform, let them get pictures of the guests, let the host figure out more details, right?

Can we remove that friction? And the whole idea, once again, it’s going to put the right people together faster, and then not have to worry about the administration. Can we streamline all that? And we just. Double down to continue getting better at that. And one of the features that this is actually my first time mentioning it.

So forgive me if I like rant a little bit on it, but I’ve, I’ve never gotten to talk about this the first place. So I’m excited to be here for that. Um, it’s an AI tool and I say that like. Hesitating a little bit because I feel like everyone’s got an AI tool. Right. But we did realize months ago, I’m like, man, we have actually a good use case for AI because the guest and host profiles we have on podmatch are extremely detailed on both sides.

Because of that, there is some information that an AI could actually. Pull from that to make something valuable. And so we have phase one of, of two out for this already. So when you match with someone on pod match, there’s an AI in there that will explain to you what it is that you all could do to add value together.

Where are you actually connect? It’s connecting the dots between your profile, which again, our whole idea of streamlining. Can we streamline some of the. The, the research that goes into it. I’ve been using it. I’m already hooked because we, we took a little bit of time. We made it smarter than me. And I’ll never forget it because one of them said that, Hey, you, and I can’t remember whose name it was.

I think it was someone named Courtney. You and Courtney are both podcast educators, but beyond that, you both have the core belief of serving people is the main priority, and I probably wouldn’t have gotten that by reading her profile, even though it did say it. I was like, Oh man, we could have a good conversation on why.

That’s at our core. So that’s phase one at phase two is going to be actually giving the host a list of questions that your audience would want you to ask that guest based off of their own expertise. And then it’ll tell the guests, you should show up in this manner for this host, because this is how they like their guests to show up.

And so again, that’s like a upcoming tool that it’s soft launch. It’s in there now. We’re not going to announce it for a while. We just want to test it and make sure we make it really good. But again, it’s all in the name of, can we streamline this process more? And so anyway, that’s what we’re doing at pod match.

I’m, I love it. I’m so excited about how we show up and serve. And at the end of the day, what it’s ultimately about is just helping podcast guests and hosts release their content in the world because that’s how the world serve. That’s how it’s made a better place. Even if that means teaching them how to turn listeners into customers, right?

Whatever it might be, it’s adding a ton of value to the world. And I just love the medium of podcasting. So I’m like thrilled to be in it and at the forefront of this thing.

That’s exciting. Yeah, I’m excited just even based on what you just said there to, to hear about then other future features that you come out with, because there’s so much potential, uh, and like I said, it’s my favorite platform for some of the reasons you mentioned there, like the fact that it does help you organize.

And I actually get to the point where I don’t want to have anything that’s outside of pod match that’s scheduled because the followup, you can set the recording link. So your guest knows where to join or vice versa, of course, when the episode is going to be published, you can just check back in and look at this whole list of what’s going on here.

What, what I have coming up in terms of interviews with hosts or guests. So great, great work on that. Is there any special link that people should go to just podmatch. com?

That’s a good spot or Hey, listen, I’m all about adding as much valuable information that I can. If you’re a guest or host or aspiring guest or host, if you go to podmatch. com forward slash free, I just share five quick ideas that will help you level up on either side of the microphone. I think you’d find very helpful.

So that’s podmatch. com forward slash free and everything else can be found from there. There’ll be like navigation links and stuff. But Joel, thank you For your kindness. Like that means a lot. And that’s exactly how I use pod match too. So it’s just great to hear another industry expert like yourself, telling me that you’re using the same way I am.

So thank you. That was a gift.

Happy to. Yeah. Okay. So podmatch. com slash free. We’ll put all of this in the show notes as well, including the link to your podcast. And it’s been a pleasure, Alex. Thank you so much for your time.

Yeah. Thanks again. I really appreciate it.