Latest / Content, Briefly / Podia: Benyamin Elias on the creator economy opportunity

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Podia: Benyamin Elias on the creator economy opportunity · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [on-hold music] It just should be part of all the marketing we do. We know that people wanna see what people like them are doing with the platform.
• 0:10
  We know that people think, "Well, if it works for them, it works for me." And just having a testimonial is not nearly as effective as showing as much as we can.
• 0:17
  [on-hold music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today, we're talking to my friend Benjamin Elias, the VP of marketing at Podia. Podia is a SaaS tool for creators.
• 0:30
  It includes a course-making feature, email newsletters, ways for folks to sell digital downloads, among many other things.
• 0:36
  I really appreciate Benjamin's perspective as a VP of marketing because he thinks of content as one of many tools in his toolbox.
• 0:43
  We talk quite a bit about how he showcases his customers' work in almost all of the marketing we do.
• 0:48
  We talk also about how he's leveraging creators' networks and skills and audiences for his own marketing, and we brainstorm some ways that other companies can be doing some of the same.
• 0:58
  Also, just a quick disclosure that I am both a Podia customer and shareholder, so I very much believe in what they're doing and am supportive of all their work. With that said, hope you enjoy this episode. Take care.
• 1:11
  One last thing before we jump into this episode. I have three quick favors to ask.
• 1:15
  The first, if you're enjoying this podcast, we would really love it if you wouldn't mind leaving a rating or review in whatever podcast app you use. Two, we are currently running our annual salary survey.
• 1:26
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• 1:36
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• 1:47
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• 2:03
  You get a discount if you sign up annually. You can learn more about that at superpath.co/community. [on-hold music] Hey, everybody.
• 2:13
  Jimmy from Superpath here today with my friend Benjamin Elias, VP of marketing at Podia.
• 2:18
  I was just looking at your LinkedIn a few minutes ago, Benjamin, and you haven't had the word "content" in your title for a long time, so maybe I've booked this one by mistake. No, I'm just kidding.
• 2:27
  Could you give an intro to yourself? You're a longtime content marketer. Obviously, content is kind of core part of what you do at Podia.
• 2:33
  But maybe for folks who don't already know you, could you talk a little bit about yourself and some things you've been working on the past few years? Yeah, absolutely.
• 2:39
  So as you said, I haven't been a content marketer for about three years now.
• 2:45
  I was a content marketer at ActiveCampaign, and then content manager at ActiveCampaign, and then director of content at ActiveCampaign, and then I switched over and was director of growth.
• 2:53
  When I hopped over to Podia, I was also director of growth, and now VP of marketing.
• 2:57
  And the reason for that switch, I think, was really that content is really powerful, and I still believe that that's the case, even as the field is rapidly changing, and parts of the industry are changing more quickly than others.
• 3:10
  But I don't think that a lot of the role of content fits under the umbrella of content marketing. Ooh.
• 3:17
  My question is always, and has always been: What is the best way to grow a business or this business, the one that I happen to be working on? Or how does this business grow?
• 3:25
  I think that's a Reforge question also, if you, uh, are fans of those folks. And it's a great question.
• 3:31
  You really need the answer to that question because it's what lets you focus on the things that actually have an impact and prioritize among the incredibly long list of things that any team could be working on at any given time, what you wanna work on.
• 3:43
  So I still think content is very important, and I think the landscape is shifting, and my career has shifted from thinking, "How do I build a content marketing program?"
• 3:52
  to, "What is the role of content or any of these other relevant channels or mediums, media, if you, uh, wanna get into semantics, in actually growing this business?" And that's more of what I'm thinking about now.
• 4:04
  Um, we have many examples of things like that at Podia that I'm sure we're gonna talk about momentarily. Yeah, definitely. And actually, that's a good segue. Can you talk about Podia? What is Podia? Who is Podia?
• 4:13
  Just give us kind of an overview of the company, kinda where it is in its life cycle, and then kinda any, like, relevant details you can share on who the customers are, team size, things like that. Yeah.
• 4:22
  So Podia is a platform that lets you run your entire online business in one place. It let-- gives you a website builder.
• 4:29
  It's a place for you to sell digital products and online courses, lets you run an online community, and you can run your email marketing through Podia as well.
• 4:37
  And it has shifted a lot in the almost three years that I've been here, but also in the, you know, almost decade of its existence.
• 4:44
  So in November of 2014, Podia was established as a company called Coach, and it was aimed mostly at online tutors.
• 4:50
  It was rebranded to Podia a few years later as Spencer, our CEO, realized that the market was not quite what he thought it was, and he-- we were seeing a lot of non-tutors sign up for the platform to do other stuff, and we sort of focused more on other types of creators, specifically online courses.
• 5:08
  That was sort of the hot area in late 2016, early 2017, and that's when we, we rebranded to Podia, which is the plural of podium. [chuckles] I don't think I ever realized that. Yeah, there you go. It's actually funny.
• 5:19
  We were at one of our retreats, and our team name for bar trivia was a plural of podium, and the emcee was like, "I think that's just Podia." And we were all cheering. It was great. Oh, that's funny. Yeah.
• 5:30
  So he was, uh... He knew his Latin roots. [chuckles] In 2022, we shifted over to have a free plan, and that was the first really big recent shift in the business.
• 5:42
  So on the free plan for Podia, we have a website builder that you can build an entire website on. You can start selling a digital product. You can sell online coaching sessions.
• 5:51
  You can start an online community, and you can start sending emails up to a, a certain threshold of subscribers. And that was really important for us. That came out of customer research.
• 5:59
  We might talk about that in a little bit. We might not. We have a lot of ground to cover.
• 6:03
  But it helped us capture this huge segment of the market that was not ready to go from 14-day trial to $39 a month plan.In 2023, which it still is as we're recording this, we added an email marketing product to our offerings.
• 6:20
  So Podia had had very lightweight email marketing, text-based only, really not anything in the way of customization or segmentation.
• 6:29
  And we spent a long time developing that and doing the customer research to make this a really competitive product in the rest of the market.
• 6:36
  And because it is completely in the same place as where people sell their digital products, you don't have to, like, use Zapier or use integrations that don't quite work the way you want them to.
• 6:45
  Plus, there are some things that you don't really ever get in other email tools because you have to pass the information across, and they just don't. That's native in Podia.
• 6:54
  So with that launch, Podia is a multi-product company.
• 6:57
  You can buy a base Podia plan, or you can buy a Podia email plan that comes at a price that scales with your number of subscribers, much in the way that a lot of the market does, although we price to be, we hope, the most affordable option for individual businesses on the market.
• 7:13
  That then leads us to literally today, as we are recording, there is a new plan of Podia on the market. Oh, really? Yeah. Literally today. It just launched this morning. Uh, [laughs]
• 7:24
  and that is a nine dollar plan or four dollars a month billed annually, and that is really designed to target those people who want a website builder primarily. So this has been in the works for a while.
• 7:37
  This was out of the customer research that we did in twenty twenty-one. It was part of the shift to freemium in twenty twenty-two.
• 7:42
  We knew that email was gonna be a big part of this because it really, A, is a very sticky market, and then, B, is a market that gives you expansion revenue pretty naturally because you-- there's a very natural value metric for your pricing.
• 7:53
  And today, we are not quite all the way to where we wanna be, but we're, we're going further in that you can now sign up for Podia explicitly to use it as a website builder and connect a custom domain and still start selling products and all that type of stuff.
• 8:05
  But that's where we're going as a business.
• 8:07
  We think that the course market is a little bit saturated, is also not the biggest market out there, and is not really-- Again, from our customer research, it's not really how creators tend to think of their own work.
• 8:18
  They don't think, "I'm a course creator." We don't wanna be, like, some tool that people use on the side, that they figure out how to connect with everything else.
• 8:23
  We hear from our customers, "I really wanna have everything in one place."
• 8:28
  And from our customer research, we heard this cycle of, well, first they start making content online, then they start putting up a website, then maybe they do coaching sessions or sell a digital product.
• 8:38
  And it's only after, you know, two years or more of being an online content creator that they actually will make an online course. So we're shifting markets. We're expanding markets into the website and email markets.
• 8:49
  And that, I think, is the summary of Podia's history. Yeah, that's very helpful.
• 8:53
  You know, I don't typically ask folks on this podcast about the industry in which they operate, but I feel like it's actually quite relevant in this case.
• 9:02
  There's a few, like, kinda like terms rattling around in my brain. One is creator economy. Do you associate with that term any longer?
• 9:09
  You know, I think for a while there was, at least in my mind, I w-- I thought of, like, people making online courses about how to make online courses, and it's evolved so much from there.
• 9:20
  The creator economy is like a proper industry now. It's not just the bleeding edge any longer. Could you just give us an update? Where is the creator industry, if you even associate with that term anymore?
• 9:32
  What an easy question. You love asking the easy ones, huh? [laughs] No, that's a tricky one because I think there are so many different types of creators.
• 9:39
  They have so many different ways that they monetize, and we have definitely come up against that as we try to make our product, where when the news covers the creator economy, they are talking primarily about Instagram, TikTok, YouTuber, Twitch streamer, that type of person.
• 9:58
  And those are some of our customers, definitely. We certainly have customers that fit into those categories.
• 10:04
  It wasn't really who was making online courses for a while, and it wasn't really the, the majority of our customer base. We tended to have people...
• 10:11
  And you saw a lot of our competitors' message on this, um, like, "Turn your expertise into income," or something like that. That was never really what we wanted to message on.
• 10:20
  It didn't really match what we were seeing in the market. But we did see this trend where, one, those people needed to do more audience building.
• 10:27
  For people with a ton of expertise and the ability to sell that expertise in higher-ticket courses, their big problem was, "Well, I need people to find out about this because it's a high-ticket product."
• 10:36
  But then on the other side, you totally, completely saw the YouTubers, the Instagram influencers, the TikTok influencers, little bit less the streamers, but still it existed.
• 10:47
  You also started to see them looking for other ways to monetize because they don't want to be super platform dependent, because, you know, YouTube demonetizes people on a whim, because Twitch bans people all the time, because Instagram monetization isn't great.
• 10:59
  Like, all of those things.
• 11:00
  And we have, I think, seen those two sides of the market come a little bit closer together over the course of the last five years or so, along with people are less skeptical about selling digital products or buying digital products than they used to be.
• 11:12
  Yes, definitely. Yeah. I know that the first time I bought a digital product, I was like, "This looks weird. It feels weird. Are they gonna take my credit card? I don't have that much money, so I really hope they don't."
• 11:22
  And that fear is a, is a lot less present, partially because it's normal and there are way more people doing it, and partially because the platforms have become much more developed and feel more sophisticated in terms of their checkout and everything like that.
• 11:34
  Yeah. So interesting. I mean, I remember buying stuff online probably fifteen years ago, things like a marathon training plan- Yeah... that type of thing. [laughs] And it was really janky.
• 11:44
  Not so long ago, my wife and I bought a sleep course for newborns. It was amazing. Yeah. [laughs] The whole experience. I think it was on Podia. It was amazing. Really professional video.
• 11:55
  Came with worksheets and templates that we printed out and filled in. It was an amazing experience. And honestly, because I kind of am in tune with what's going on, at least to some degree, I was like, "This is awesome."
• 12:05
  It kinda opened my eyes, like, wow, you really could sell a lot of things. Really interesting.
• 12:10
  I do wanna ask you too about where this all fits into all the other things happening in B2B right now in terms of influencers, where creators sort of fit into the B2B SaaS environment, but I might hold off on those for just a minute.
• 12:22
  Sure. Because I wanna ask you some questions about how Podia goes about doing its own marketing, content or otherwise, because your customers are-B2B-ish. Maybe they're prosumers.
• 12:34
  I don't know exactly what term you might use for the folks that you're trying to reach, but I assume you can't run or you choose not to run kind of the standard B2B playbook of, like, one to two blog posts a week, a guide here and there, some case studies.
• 12:46
  Like, it just doesn't, I would imagine, I don't wanna assume too much. I would-- But it probably just doesn't really work for Podia. Yeah. It doesn't seem like it makes a lot of sense for us.
• 12:53
  I think, you know, we have a much lower ACV than most-- than really a true B2B business would have, and that is a really important part of what marketing makes sense for you.
• 13:03
  You know, if you can get ten downloads on a piece of gated content, but one of them turns into a hundred thousand dollar contract, that's, you know- It's great. Yeah. [chuckles] That's the ballgame. Yeah.
• 13:12
  [chuckles] We don't have that, and we probably never will have that, and it's not really something that we're going for. As you said, we really have people who are individual purchasers of Podia. They run businesses.
• 13:23
  They buy it for their business, but they are almost entirely independent business owners with a couple of business partners or a few smaller teams. I talk to our customers and find the most interesting businesses.
• 13:36
  You know, I talked to one who was a theater company that goes in and does workshops for kids, and they use Podia to sell, like, a packaged version of those workshops for schools to run on their own. Cool.
• 13:46
  Which, hey, that's really cool. It's not probably the use case that we were thinking of when we built it, but it does work for that. But yeah. So mostly, it's individual business owners.
• 13:56
  So what makes sense if you're reaching individual business owners?
• 14:00
  We think a lot about the scale that we need to reach, and we think in some ways similarly to B2B in that we have a little bit of a land and expand motion now that we have- Mm... an email product.
• 14:12
  That's where we're starting to focus our attention now. So in the early days of Podia, content was the big focus.
• 14:18
  There are still many blog posts and, you know, a five-figure monthly traffic number that goes to those blog posts.
• 14:25
  We still have thirty thousand subscribers on our YouTube channel, and that's thanks to the team in those 2017 to 2020 years that really cranked out a lot of content that performed pretty well in search and on YouTube.
• 14:39
  And for the stage that the business was at at the time, that made a lot of sense. We were selling really to anyone who would buy a course platform because it's small. That's what startups are like, right?
• 14:49
  You have to get business anywhere that you can find business, and the content was a huge part of us getting a foothold in the market.
• 14:55
  But as the market started to change, we had to start thinking about other paths to growth.
• 15:01
  And one of the really challenging things about expanding the market was and is and will always continue to be that these people don't, like, hang out in any particular place in the way that they might in a B2B setting.
• 15:14
  If you sell a CRM product, you can go find salespeople in a particular place or you can go hunt down a really narrow ICP and sell into that base.
• 15:24
  And if we're talking about website builders, a lot of people need websites. It's everybody, basically. Yeah. It's everybody, basically, and we're not targeting everybody at first.
• 15:32
  You don't go up against WordPress or Squarespace and say, "Yes. We're going to go buy our Super Bowl ad also- [chuckles]... and that's how we're gonna get in here."
• 15:40
  [chuckles] So we are carving out segments of those markets to focus on.
• 15:44
  But even when we were-- before we were focused as strongly on website builders, we had this problem that a creator can appear anywhere, and they don't seem to do a lot of searching.
• 15:56
  They don't seem to be that embedded in the market. They don't seem to have a whole lot of names that come to mind when they think about a tool that they're planning to buy.
• 16:04
  We would talk to people shortly after they signed up. We would schedule calls with them. We did a whole research process.
• 16:09
  Again, customer research is a really big focus for us, and we would pretty consistently find that they would say, "Someone told me about Kajabi, and then I looked at how expensive it was, and I looked for alternatives, and that's how I found Podia."
• 16:21
  Oh, I bet they found your page. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Your alternative pages are really good. [chuckles] So we would hear that from a lot of people. We would also hear...
• 16:27
  I, you know, I would speak to people who's like, "Yeah. I was thinking of, like, do I hire a developer to build me a website for this?"
• 16:33
  And I think that's actually more true in B2B markets than people give it credit for also. But the way that people made buying decisions was so distributed and so long tail. There wasn't a platform everyone knows.
• 16:46
  There wasn't a place where everyone hangs out, and that meant that we had to be thinking about that long tail also.
• 16:51
  So as we go into our new markets, as we go into the next year, as we have a new plan launching today, we have a, a number of things that we're thinking about. Three of the big ones... The three big ones, I would say.
• 17:05
  One is we are starting to allocate more marketing spend towards sponsorships of content creators, and we did some of that this year, and we saw some really interesting things come out of that, and we have more of it allocated for next year, and we can talk more about some details there.
• 17:22
  Two is affiliates are important in this type of space.
• 17:26
  I-in a space where people are not going to a singular source, they are searching around, they don't have a single name in mind for some of these things, or actually in the website market, if thinking Squarespace, we have to have our platform spread through a, a really wide network, again, that long tail.
• 17:44
  And there are a few different ways we're thinking about approaching that. You know, there are scaled approaches to that. There are, um, sort of creative approaches that maybe won't reveal publicly.
• 17:53
  And then there are other creative approaches that I'm happy to talk about that have a little bit more in common with ABM, but targeting some of the higher ticket influencers.
• 18:01
  And the third thing is more traditional product led growth, and that's simpler things like growth experiments in the product and even simple things like Powered by Podia that you'll see on Podia websites and in Podia email.
• 18:13
  You know, we launched Podia Email as a product, and one of the things that we probably could have realized in advance but didn't is that suddenly, Powered by Podia links in emails started driving 140% more traffic because more people were using them and not turning off the Powered by links.
• 18:30
  There are other opportunities to do that. We're launchingYeah, sure. I'll say it. [laughs] Uh, it's not really a secret. Early next year, maybe I won't commit a date. Fair enough. Fair enough.
• 18:39
  But early next year, we're launching a blogging platform on Podia. Ooh. Oh, that's interesting.
• 18:44
  Yeah, one of the last major pieces of a website builder that we don't really have yet, and that again, really opens up opportunity for people to publish public-facing stuff on their Podia websites that says it has Podia on it, and those are the types of scaled growth mechanisms that we're looking at also.
• 19:00
  Man, okay. Super cool. A lot there that I wanna dig into. Maybe could we zoom in a little on the process of sponsoring creators, how you identify creators that have a relevant audience for Podia?
• 19:13
  Without revealing too much, like, how do you work out a deal with them? Are there platforms available for that, or is it early enough days where you're just hitting them up?
• 19:22
  We are just hitting them up for the most part, yeah. Yeah, there's no, like, marketplace for this yet, or maybe there is. There are some things that exist. We've looked into them.
• 19:29
  I could not tell you their names off the top of my head 'cause we dismissed them pretty quickly, and the reason we dismissed them pretty quickly is because it's almost a Moneyball thing.
• 19:37
  I watched this movie recently for the, like, fifth time or something, so it's in my head.
• 19:41
  But if we go after these people in the same place everyone goes after them, we're just gonna get a market rate and a market rate product, and I'm not really interested in that.
• 19:49
  I'm interested in the type of stuff that either we are seeing some sort of outsized return on the spend that we get in that we are not spending as much, or we are getting an outsized return in that the deliverable is somehow more interesting or more effective than a stock like AdRead.
• 20:04
  So we actually started this out this year. Every month this year, we ran a fellowship that was by... for application for our customers, so you could apply to win.
• 20:13
  The prizes varied a little bit, but for the most part, it was a $2,000 grand prize. And we used this for a lot of reasons. We used it to do customer research and have people fill out a survey.
• 20:23
  We used it to collect applications for other things, and in this case, we used it to collect applications for sponsorships.
• 20:30
  Said, "Hey, you can apply to win a Podia sponsorship this month in September, and we have actually have more than $2,000 to spend on it this time, and more people are gonna win."
• 20:40
  So we saw a good number of applications, and we saw a lot of very interesting applications.
• 20:43
  And we started with this group of people, and not everyone can do this, unfortunately, but our audience makes a lot of content, so it made a lot of sense for us to go to our audience and say, "We wanna sponsor you to do the stuff that you already do."
• 20:57
  [laughs] That made sense for us for a few reasons. One, we knew we would get really genuine ad reads out of this.
• 21:03
  Two, we would be a lot of people's first sponsor, and that meant that we would be able to work with them a little bit more directly, both on things like pricing, but also on just what the actual content that they made was and have it be a little bit more interesting than, "Yeah, Podia is great, and they're paying me to say that they're great."
• 21:22
  And really, I would say three is that again, and I can give a few examples of things that we had that I don't think we would've gotten otherwise. You know, we have a baker on Podia who made a Podia purple cake.
• 21:34
  That's awesome.
• 21:34
  And it said Podia on it in purple lettering, and it got a ton of traction on Instagram, tons of comments, ton-tons of engagement, all that kind of stuff, with her saying all the things that she liked about Podia while she was making it.
• 21:47
  We had [laughs] a biking, like, tricking... I don't know what this field is. Like, they do tricks on bicycles. Content creator play like horse, like the game, but it was like, "Okay, you do a trick, and then the other...
• 22:01
  the second person has to copy the trick," and if you lost, you got the letters of Podia, P-O-D-I-A. Oh, that's funny. That's good. With each trick was a little bit more about Podia.
• 22:10
  So they would do P, and then they would say a thing about Podia, and they would do O, and they would say a thing about Podia.
• 22:15
  That's so much more interesting, and people are gonna pay more attention to it, especially because it's seeded throughout all the content. It's not just a skippable segment, then someone just doing a normal ad read.
• 22:25
  Numbers on all of this are still coming in, although, again, this is not the type of channel that lends itself well to direct response measurement.
• 22:31
  But we started with this approach because we're really interested in ad reads that are memorable and not gonna get skipped,
• 22:42
  and I'm not so confident that we'd get that from going to a marketplace, and I think we can find much more interesting opportunities by reaching out to people individually. We're gonna reuse this stuff also.
• 22:53
  This is the type of UGC that is gonna be useful for our, our paid ads. Some of it is useful for onboarding materials or testimonials or things like that.
• 23:02
  Like, it's just interesting and things that people wanna watch, so that's where we're headed right now when it comes to sponsoring influencers.
• 23:09
  What you just described gives me quite a bit of empathy for you as a marketer.
• 23:12
  [laughs] Because having your personas be a baker, someone who makes theater programs, uh, people do bike trick, I mean, that's like, how do you... But you touched on something else, user-generated content. Oh, yeah.
• 23:23
  And I would imagine that Podia's ability to showcase what customers do, how they leverage the product to do those things, can provide inspiration across the board, regardless of what vertical the other creators or potential creators operate in.
• 23:39
  I mean, it's all probably... It's fairly easy for, like, someone in the baking space to look at a bike trick video and extrapolate some of the things that that creator has done to further their own business, you know?
• 23:48
  So obviously, that fits into some of the sponsorship stuff. Do you have other ways that Podia showcases what customers do as a means of, like, just providing inspiration for other customers or potential customers?
• 24:00
  Yeah, definitely. We have a few things that we have done and have been doing for a while, and we have a few things that we're starting up in a more structured kind of way, and I can talk about both of them.
• 24:10
  And actually, before I do either of those, I'll back up and say that was one of the things that was very alarming, panicking- [laughs]... when I first joined Podia was...
• 24:18
  The first thing I did when I joined Podia, Len, who we both know probably still remembers, I put together a whole doc of customer research I wanted to do, and I reached out to a bunch of people.
• 24:27
  I scheduled a bunch of calls, and [laughs] I did, like, 20 of these calls, a-and at the end of it, I was like, "I don't think any of those people did the same thing as any of those other-"... people.
• 24:39
  [laughs] That's, that's crazy. They were all different businesses or different markets. If you were asking, like, "Which industry are you in?" you would've gotten 20 different answers.
• 24:49
  But there was a really common customer journey across them in terms of how they went about building their audience, what challenge they faced as they were building that audience, what happened when they started to monetize, that type of thing.
• 25:01
  So it is indicative of that long tail where there's not, like, a place where these people are hanging out because it's not like, "Okay, I wanna go after all the baker creators," "I wanna go after all the yoga instructors," "I wanna go after all the bike trekking people," "I'm gonna go after the...
• 25:13
  all the plant-based food people."
• 25:15
  It doesn't really make sense to do that in our market, but there is an underlying structure to how those people grow their businesses, and we can talk about that or build for that, as the case may be.
• 25:26
  But to go back to the question, how do we showcase this stuff? So of course, we have customer stories the way that, uh, most businesses now do. We share those in some of our onboarding materials.
• 25:36
  But really, the thing that we've noticed is people want to see examples. They wanna see the real live stuff.
• 25:44
  We have had an examples page on our website for a very long time, um, it lets, lets people see what their Podia site could look like by looking at what real people have done with their Podia sites.
• 25:55
  And earlier this year, it's hard to exactly peg down when we did this, but we added, um, verticalized pages for them, so it's...
• 26:03
  And now you can see examples of online coaches who have done it or artists who have done it and that type of thing.
• 26:09
  That will be especially relevant as we add some of the features that are coming to the website builder next year. Not blogging, although also blogging.
• 26:17
  But we saw traffic to those pages immediately, both from search and from navigating on our website. And we use them, again, in our onboarding materials. It's stuff that people always wanna see.
• 26:28
  We even moved it out of the main nav. It used to be, like, one of the main things, and now it's in a dropdown. Didn't see a traffic hit at all. People hunt it down. Wow. Yeah, they really wanna see examples.
• 26:38
  As we launched the email product, we broke it out into email examples also and templates that people have made.
• 26:44
  We keep adding new templates into the platform informed by what some of our customers have made, that type of thing. So there's that aspect of things. It's like we wanna show people literally what you can make in Podia.
• 26:53
  We also built a whole demo site, demo.podia.com, on the platform that is a little meta, but shows, "This is this type of section. This is what a course would look like.
• 27:03
  This is how you might sell a download," that type of thing. And we see some pretty good numbers there also.
• 27:08
  And then more recently, we have gone about doing this across all of our, what B2B people would probably call product marketing materials.
• 27:18
  So that means on our website pages, we added a ton of pages because we realized we just really weren't selling the features that we had effectively enough.
• 27:26
  So I lost business from an influencer who said, "Ugh, I would've loved to use Podia. I was checking it out. I heard about it from this other affiliate," who was also an influencer.
• 27:34
  Like, the whole system had worked to get him to our door, and then he said, "But I wish I could add multiple types of files to a single lesson in a course." Like, hang on a second. You can, right?
• 27:46
  Or, um, he didn't say this exactly, but we've had other people say it like, "Oh, I don't want... I have my link-in-bio tool already. I don't need my Podia website" or something. We have a link-in-bio thing.
• 27:56
  These are things that we have and we just weren't selling. "Oh, can I use Podia for my landing pages?" What do you mean? You can make a whole website.
• 28:02
  Yeah, but you don't have a page that says landing pages on it, so we have to sell that specifically as a feature. And as we built out all of those pages, we started to pull in way more customer examples also.
• 28:11
  And that, I think, is just good practice, especially when you have a visual product.
• 28:15
  But it's something that I think is easy to have slip through the cracks when you're doing a lot of this work, especially 'cause copywriting is hard and it's hard to add 20 pages to a website in a month and a half the way that we did.
• 28:25
  There are other pieces of this, like when we do our product announcements now, we are announcing a lot of features, including relatively small ones, because we consistently get the feedback that people love to see the progress happening in the product.
• 28:36
  And with that, we're gonna be showcasing things that real creators or our Podia Pros say about how they've had success using the product. We have feedback forms that we use to collect that stuff.
• 28:48
  We can do outreach, again, to those Podia Pros as a relatively smaller network of people. We even had one of them make a video that we put on our website to show, like, how he made his link-in-bio page on Podia.
• 28:59
  There's a lot of stuff there. It just should be part of all the marketing we do. We know that people wanna see what people like them are doing with the platform.
• 29:09
  We know that people think, "Well, if it works for them, it works for me." And just having a testimonial is not nearly as effective as showing as much as we can. There are challenges with that.
• 29:17
  It's hard to show people an online course that's not public, things like that. It's why we make a demo site and have other ways to work around it.
• 29:22
  And of course, we're a small team, so we are a little bit resource limited in some of these things, but we do what we can, and we try to really hold that standard of, let's get customers into all the marketing that we do.
• 29:32
  Yeah. That's really cool. You know, the creator space is interesting because there's 20 different elements of it: coaching, consulting, affiliate, social, digital downloads, and all these other things.
• 29:42
  And then for each individual creator, they kind of pull the handful of things that make the most sense for them, which kind of to your point means you have 1,000 people, each with a completely unique way of going about it.
• 29:52
  Really cool, though. I just find this space to be so... It's exciting. Something about it just feels good because your customers, by using the product, are empowered.
• 30:02
  I would imagine for a lot of the people that ultimately become a Podia customer, launch courses, do consulting, or any number of other things, that they're tapping into a desire they've had for a really long time to turn their own ideas into revenue or turn their audience into revenue, and that's a very empowering thing.
• 30:20
  And so it just feels a little better than a lot of other SaaS products out there, which are maybe a little bit more transactional in nature, you know?
• 30:28
  The great thing about talking to our customers a lot also is that you start to see them a little bit in the wild.
• 30:33
  You know, I spoke to someone when she was at, like, maybe 8,000 Instagram followers and was making some money from her courses, but, you know, not like a big fish.And she blew up.
• 30:46
  She's got over a hundred thousand Instagram followers. She had, like, a seventy K month, um [chuckles]- Dang... that I could see on our end.
• 30:52
  [laughs] That's what she processes in Podia, and it's like, oh, wow, this really took off for you, and Podia was a huge part of making that type of thing happen. And then we just see all kinds of cool businesses.
• 31:01
  You know, there's a, a sourdough academy that is on Podia. That's cool. There's a blacksmith that's on Podia. That's cool. There are all sorts of really interesting businesses.
• 31:10
  There's a family who's making, uh, an off-grid homestead in Arizona, and they're YouTubers.
• 31:16
  They have maybe, I think, a hundred thirty thousand YouTube subscribers now, and they're very smart about how they go about their YouTube content, but they use Podia to run their community and take subscription revenue instead of using something like Patreon that would take a huge transaction fee.
• 31:30
  Plus they sell digital products, so, like, they make a essentially hour-long documentary about how this guy built solar panels from scratch in the middle of the desert, and they post that video, and it's monetized on YouTube, and then they sell the wiring diagram on Podia.
• 31:43
  Wow.
• 31:44
  And they have really smart add-ons to a lot of their content, and it's just really cool to watch people who are making really cool stuff, doing really cool things, then are also being really smart about how they run the business side of their operations.
• 31:56
  Yeah. That's so cool, so inspiring. [laughs] There's one last thing I wanna ask you, and I've kinda thrown our normal questions out the window- [laughs]...
• 32:02
  'cause there's just so much to talk through here, and I feel like it would be a disservice to listeners if I just asked you, like, what metrics you care most about. Sure.
• 32:09
  [chuckles] But I do wanna ask you about, there is a thing happening right now where there's a lot of creators in the B2B space. Some are becoming kinda, like, B2B influencers. Mm-hmm.
• 32:21
  There's probably some pressure for SaaS companies to figure out ways to work with these people.
• 32:28
  Most of the creators, I would imagine, are probably better served by staying independent rather than going in-house and doing, like, creator-style marketing on behalf of a SaaS company.
• 32:37
  Also, companies, I sense, are hesitant to kind of invest marketing resources into an individual's brand. There's kind of a lot going on here.
• 32:46
  Do you have, just as someone who works in this space and probably thinks about this a lot, thoughts on healthy, cool ways for B2B SaaS companies to work with creators/influencers in a way that is pragmatic, not just doing it because it's available in a channel to test out, but, like, a way that you actually could expect a, an actual ROI on it?
• 33:09
  Yeah. It's an interesting question. I, I'll start by not answering it. [laughs] And then I'll see what I can do. My non-answer is just sort of to agree with you.
• 33:16
  Like, I think I see the landscape shifting a lot, and this has been true maybe for a while in that it's easier to be, like, a follower of an individual person than it is of a company.
• 33:28
  I even remember when I came on a past version of the podcast, it must have been in, like, twenty twenty, something like that. Yeah, yeah.
• 33:34
  We talked about it then, like, what do you think about this idea of, like, an individual content creator versus a small team or, like, do teams get less creative with good content as they get bigger?
• 33:43
  And I don't think it's an inherent thing, but I do think that the company's really rare that can create the in-house incentives to consistently put out great content over time because it's a long-term play, and you don't see the immediate effect of compromising on quality in some places.
• 33:59
  I'm hesitant to name names in some ways.
• 34:02
  Like, there, there is a company that I think had an incredible managing editor who we both know who made, like, one-of-a-kind content related to early-stage, um, startups that was very interview based.
• 34:14
  It was based on real operators and all that kind of stuff, and it was great stuff. It was industry leading at the time. That person left to do some other very exciting, very prestigious things, and they're great.
• 34:25
  The same formula kept going at the old company. They kept interviewing people, and they kept talking about early-stage startups and all that kind of stuff, but the spark was gone.
• 34:33
  Like, it was pretty clear that the insight that had been coming through and had been making it so valuable wasn't really there so much as they were following a content format.
• 34:40
  And I think that's true in a lot of contexts with individual content creators.
• 34:44
  You know, there are other people who are like, whatever, will get a hundred thousand likes on any LinkedIn post that they post, whether there's an insight or not.
• 34:51
  [laughs] That's maybe just me being a little judgmental, but yeah, those people exist too, but it's just so much more common, I think, to have a, an influencer who is consistently able to put out thoughtful, insightful content because they've already...
• 35:05
  It's like a survivorship bias to an extent, right?
• 35:07
  They're the ones who survived the audience building process and it being difficult to build an audience online, and now they have one, so you can either take a very risky investment and try to accomplish the same thing with an in-house team that really, if they get really good at it, they can probably do it for themselves or for another company, and you risk them leaving and having the content quality degrade and all that kind of stuff, or you can go sponsor those people.
• 35:31
  And the way I phrased it makes it sound like it-- I come a hundred percent on one side or the other. I do think that sponsorships make a lot of sense. I do think there are a lot of other channels to invest in.
• 35:40
  If you're gonna be a media brand, you really have to be really intentional about it. But how do you work with those people? It's a good question.
• 35:47
  Podia is not, like, really a B2B company, so I, I can't give you an answer that is, like, the definitive truth. I would say similar to what we've talked about.
• 35:57
  I am most interested as a marketer in something that the people are gonna pay attention to, um, so you can work with them and get a mention at the top of their newsletter. Not that interested in that.
• 36:06
  I also think that B2B influencers tend to charge a lot more because they know that their audience is a B2B audience.
• 36:12
  So if you're going to work with them on something, personally, I think I would try to work with them something, on something that's a little more creative and a little bit more custom to you.
• 36:20
  But that's not an answer that's born of, "Hey, I ran the sponsorship process at a B2B company, and here's how I integrated it with our sales process, and here's the deals that we closed as a result of it."
• 36:28
  So I would maybe take it with a grain of salt. For sure. I sense that there's a lot here that is still to be uncovered.
• 36:34
  I do think that if we're gonna call this B2B influencer marketing, it's gonna be highly subject to the law of shitty click-throughs- Oh, yeah... to the point where- [laughs]...
• 36:44
  basically everything you do, you can do once, which is kinda cool because it does force you to use those creative muscles and means it's much harder for other people to copy too. Yeah.
• 36:53
  So you get to dream up cool ways to work with these folks over and over again, which actually sounds like a lot of fun.
• 36:57
  We were just talking, uh, before the call about a cybersecurity company that just made somePress, because they announced that they were gonna be working with influencers.
• 37:07
  And, you know, I can't speak to whether that approach is working for them or going to work or is right for them or any like- anything like that, but it's really interesting, and part of what makes it interesting in B2B is that that is a pretty defined market, and the influencers do exist in that market.
• 37:21
  Mm. There are people who bridge the, like, entertainment and education divide.
• 37:27
  I listen to a podcast, it's by the founders of Polygon, the video game website, so they talk a little bit about games and a little bit about the games industry, and they always, always, always, always have developer-related ads because these companies think developers play video games, right?
• 37:42
  These are fishing holes for these types of people and these types of companies, so if you are, if you're a cybersecurity company, do this.
• 37:48
  Uh, no, if you are a company that has a relatively well-defined pool to go fish in, and there are influencers who clearly have audiences in that pool, and third piece, it's not already flooded with influencer investments, that seems like a pretty good place to go.
• 38:05
  I...
• 38:05
  You know, that's, that's, again, someone who's not really in B2B saying that, but I would at least be running some numbers and, and looking at what kind of business you might be able to drive from those partnerships.
• 38:16
  Definitely. And also, if you wanna reach content marketers, you should come talk to Superpath about doing that. We could help you. A great example of a person who built a fishing hole in a specific market.
• 38:25
  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, I feel like we're still warming up. [laughs] Even, like, this far into the conversation, there's just so much to cover here. I'm thinking maybe we put a pin in it for today.
• 38:34
  Our episodes tend to be, like, relatively short, but I would really truly love to do this again, call it three to six months.
• 38:41
  I would love to hear a lot more about what you uncovered from the fellowships and sponsoring creators, and also just get an update on what's happening in the Podia world.
• 38:51
  Because there is so much overlap, I think, in many ways, I think that all the things happening in the creator world are gonna happen in the B2B marketing world just a few steps behind.
• 39:00
  So I feel like the things you tell us we should be paying attention to because it's kinda coming down the pipe for us, so... But thank you so much for doing this.
• 39:06
  Thank you also for allowing us to kinda break our traditional format. We'll send people obviously to the Podia site, but how about you? Like, where should we send folks to follow along with, with you personally?
• 39:15
  You can see me at, uh, on LinkedIn, Benjamin Elias. I'm probably the only one. Never met anyone else, um [chuckles] with the name.
• 39:23
  And then I write about the soft skills that people don't really learn in any sort of structured way.
• 39:30
  No one teaches you the soft skills that really probably lead to your career success, and I talk about that at diamondpencils.substack.com. But stay tuned. We'll move to Podia as Podia blogging comes out. Awesome.
• 39:42
  Okay, cool. We'll make sure to link to that for folks. Benjamin, seriously, thank you. It's great to catch up, and I will make sure, if you're open to it, that we will do it again soon. And we'll send you more swag.
• 39:51
  [laughs] I don't have any swag, so I'm very excited to get more of it. Okay, good, good. [laughs] It's coming your way. All right. Always a pleasure. [laughs] Cool. Take care. [outro music]