Latest / Beyond Fulfillment Podcast / Leveraging AI and Credibility Marketing: Nathan Gwilliam Talks Podcasting Innovations

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Leveraging AI and Credibility Marketing: Nathan Gwilliam Talks Podcasting Innovations · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:00
  Nathan Gwilliam is the founder and CEO of Pod up.
• 0:06
  Nathan is a serial entrepreneur who has built and sold three different businesses.
• 0:12
  His latest venture, Potup, was born out of frustration with the fragmented podcasting tools, and it's poised to revolutionize the industry with its all in one platform designed to streamline the process of podcast creation, growth and monetization.
• 0:30
  In this episode, Nathan dives into his entrepreneurial journey, the driving vision behind pot up, and the innovative strategies used to bring this groundbreaking platform to life.
• 0:43
  He also discusses the powerful tectonic shifts in the market such as credibility, marketing, AI, and the importance of owning your platform.
• 0:53
  Additionally, Nathan provides valuable insights into leveraging podcasting as an effective tool for business growth, especially for time strapped CEO's.
• 1:04
  Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur or an established business owner, you won't want to miss Nathan's compelling insights and the incredible story of pot Up's evolution.
• 1:15
  Tune in to learn about overcoming challenges, realizing visionary ideas, and staying ahead in a rapidly changing digital landscape.
• 1:25
  As always, if you found value from this content, please like and subscribe.
• 1:31
  And now, here's my conversation with Nathan Gwilliam.
• 1:34
  Enjoy.
• 1:35
  Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Beyond Fulfillment podcast.
• 1:40
  I'm your host, Dave Gulas.
• 1:42
  This week, my guest is the founder and the CEO of Pod Up, Nathan William.
• 1:50
  Welcome, Nathan.
• 1:51
  Thank you so much for having me on the show.
• 1:53
  Yeah, thanks so much for being here.
• 1:56
  If you would, for everyone, can you tell us what Potup is and how it got started?
• 2:01
  Yeah, sure.
• 2:03
  So I'm a serial entrepreneur.
• 2:05
  I've built and sold three different businesses.
• 2:09
  And after I was selling that last one, I took a coaching program with Russell Brunson, paid him a bunch of money, and one of the first things that he taught us was publisher perish and made us a challenge.
• 2:24
  He said, if you, if you publish every day for a year, you'll be financially free.
• 2:30
  So I decided to do that, and I started a show and I published on digital monetization for a year.
• 2:38
  And I got about three months into my show and I realized that I needed more than 30 different technologies.
• 2:47
  And I realized that those technologies cost almost $2,000 a month and that they weren't integrated hardly at all together.
• 2:57
  They were missing a lot of the features that I needed, and they just took way too much time.
• 3:01
  I remember after I recorded and edited my episodes, I still was paying someone 4 hours every day just to syndicate my content.
• 3:09
  And one day, in frustration, I just, I was sitting out with one of my coworkers and I said, okay, somebody's got to build the all in one podcasting platform that has all of these different tools integrated together for
• 3:21
  one reasonable price, one.
• 3:23
  One login.
• 3:25
  And that was my aha moment.
• 3:29
  I realized that someone's going to make a billion dollar opportunity out of that.
• 3:34
  And so I hired a bunch of talented developers, and we've been building it for four years now, and it's an all in one platform with 50 different tools to help people create, grow, and monetize a venture around a
• 3:48
  podcast.
• 3:49
  And I'm sorry, I stuffed up right now.
• 3:52
  I actually have Covid.
• 3:53
  Right now.
• 3:53
  I'm in isolation for Covid, and.
• 3:55
  And I've been blowing my nose all day today, but I've not been able to get rid of this.
• 4:01
  Wow.
• 4:02
  Well, a true professional.
• 4:04
  The show must go on.
• 4:05
  So you honored your appointment, and you appeared on the show, so we appreciate that.
• 4:12
  Okay, so pot up was born out of this frustration of not having synergy within all the tools.
• 4:21
  You need to really publish it every day and have that work seamlessly.
• 4:27
  Right.
• 4:27
  So that was the.
• 4:28
  That frustration led you to create this platform.
• 4:32
  And so many businesses are born that way when an entrepreneur sees a problem and is determined to fix it.
• 4:38
  So when that started, like, what was that process?
• 4:42
  Like, say, okay, I know I need all these different tools, and they're fragmented all over the place, and I want to combine them.
• 4:49
  Like, what was that like in terms of starting to put that puzzle together?
• 4:53
  Yeah.
• 4:55
  First of all was trying to come up with what the vision for what it was.
• 4:58
  And the best analogy I can give was we were trying to become Shopify for podcasting.
• 5:07
  Right.
• 5:08
  You look at Shopify, they weren't the first e commerce platform.
• 5:12
  They're not the best e commerce platform, but they were the first one to bring all the pieces together, and they're now valued at, I think, $98 billion.
• 5:22
  They've done a really good job just bringing all those tools into.
• 5:25
  Into one place.
• 5:26
  And so I think the first step in starting off creating something really big like this is, is having the vision, being able to understand what you're doing different that is going to differentiate yourself.
• 5:41
  We had.
• 5:41
  We had a variety of competitors when we started this, but they all seemed.
• 5:46
  Almost all of them seemed to be doing just a small set of features, and.
• 5:50
  And we realized that if we went and did those, you know, first five features that everybody else had, we would be stuck in a red ocean, you know, the red ocean where the sharks are eating you alive.
• 6:02
  And.
• 6:03
  And if we had done that, we would have been one of numerous other people that had a lot more budget and been doing it a lot longer than us.
• 6:11
  And we.
• 6:11
  We had to find a way to differentiate ourselves and kind of this all in one concept is.
• 6:17
  Is what differentiated us.
• 6:19
  Okay.
• 6:20
  So in terms of the, you know, getting that and then growing it and launching it, like, how long did it take you to put all these pieces together?
• 6:32
  More than just the first five kind of basic.
• 6:34
  Yeah, but, like, you have 35, right?
• 6:37
  35 different.
• 6:38
  We have 50 now.
• 6:39
  Oh, wow.
• 6:40
  50.
• 6:40
  Okay.
• 6:42
  Yeah.
• 6:42
  So once we had the vision, we had to hire a talented team to do it, and we hired a bunch of developers and started the work.
• 6:54
  I have some relationships in India where I've been doing work in India for decades now.
• 7:00
  I have one guy that works with me that's been working with me for about 19 years now.
• 7:05
  And so we could hire maybe four or five developers in India, great developers in India, for the cost of one average developer in the United States.
• 7:18
  And so we went to India and we did our team there.
• 7:22
  Instead of having five developers or.
• 7:24
  Sorry, instead of having three or four developers here, you can have 14 or 15 developers there.
• 7:30
  It's just a lot easier to pull it off when you can have that kind of scale.
• 7:34
  And we needed to find the right designer to help us create it, and we needed to find the right manager to lead the team over there, kind of get the right people would be.
• 7:45
  Once you have the vision right, then you kind of got to get the people.
• 7:49
  And we had to do some fundraising, and we're very grateful for some investors that put money behind us and help us put this together.
• 8:07
  Put the product together, and then in terms of marketing that and selling it to this, this massive network of podcasters, I mean, you would know the stats better than me.
• 8:19
  I mean, there's.
• 8:20
  How many podcasts are there currently?
• 8:22
  Yeah, there's 5 million podcasts currently, and it's growing rapidly every single month.
• 8:28
  Wow.
• 8:29
  Okay.
• 8:30
  So what's that process been like in terms of marketing and getting this, this suite of tools out?
• 8:38
  Yeah, that's a great question.
• 8:40
  And we're still in process with that.
• 8:42
  We spent three and a half years just building it before we were really able to market it.
• 8:48
  Last year, we brought on some friends and family beta customers, but this year has been the first year that we've really been able to dive into the marketing.
• 8:59
  Well, one of the, when you're an early software company like ours and you're building something big with a lot of functionality, you kind of get to a spot where you need to stop building what you think people want.
• 9:19
  And you've got to get real people in the software so they can tell you what they really want.
• 9:25
  And so that's what last year was about.
• 9:30
  And we're still working hard on that this year as we're getting customers in.
• 9:34
  So we have not done mass market advertising or promotion really much at all for this product.
• 9:43
  And we tried some different niches and we found one niche that that tends, that seems to be doing the best for us.
• 9:52
  And it's our.
• 9:55
  Where we get the best return on ad spend.
• 9:58
  And in this niche, we think we're the best in the world.
• 10:02
  We think it.
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  We think our software product and the services we bundle with it are better than anyone.
• 10:08
  That niche that we found was it's a CEO, someone who owns a business, who knows they need a podcast, but they don't have time.
• 10:19
  And so they can record the episode and we use our software, but then our team can do essentially everything else for them.
• 10:27
  All the dirty work to produce and market that podcast.
• 10:32
  And we found a really a fertile market for that and not a lot of other companies that because we put millions and millions of dollars into the software, we can do things that nobody else can do and for
• 10:45
  a cost that nobody else can do.
• 10:47
  And so we found one niche that gave us the best return.
• 10:54
  And right now we're just doubling and tripling down on that.
• 10:58
  One niche is our primary focus.
• 11:00
  We're doing some other advertising, but primarily we're just focusing on that one niche.
• 11:04
  And we're trying to ride that niche to profitability right now.
• 11:08
  And we're doing it with a smaller market because every month as people are using it, they're giving us more feature requests and they're finding more bugs and, and we're fixing them as fast as we can.
• 11:20
  And our software is just getting better and better every single week.
• 11:24
  And so we're getting to a spot where we'll be, be ready for that, that mass rollout.
• 11:29
  But hopefully we also are hitting profitability at the same time.
• 11:33
  Okay.
• 11:34
  Okay, got it.
• 11:35
  And, you know, you mentioned that that niche of like, CEO's, right, who want to use a podcast to market their business and they know it's something they should be doing.
• 11:46
  But of course, time is always a factor at the executive level, right?
• 11:50
  And you would know better than anyone in terms of what it takes to run a podcast and how challenging and time consuming it can be.
• 11:59
  But just speaking to the other entrepreneurs out there, why is podcasting such an effective tool to grow a business?
• 12:08
  Yeah, that's a great question.
• 12:14
  So I've built and sold three ventures.
• 12:17
  This is number four.
• 12:18
  And when I start my ventures or I help other people do it, I like to build businesses around what I call tectonic shifts.
• 12:27
  So think of, think of the tectonic shifts.
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  The most successful businesses of our career.
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  Think of the most successful businesses of our lifetimes.
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  Youve got Netflix.
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  And they were the first one to really effectively leverage the streaming tectonic shift.
• 12:48
  Or you look at Uber and they were the first one to really effectively leverage the mobile phone niche for the taxi industry.
• 12:56
  These companies have just found these niches and the tectonic shifts that change those niches and then they leverage them to leapfrog their competitors.
• 13:08
  When I started this business, I started off saying, okay, which tectonic shifts do I want to leverage?
• 13:15
  And the first one that I found, we think is the biggest tectonic shift of our generation.
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  And we call it credibility marketing.
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  And 77% of people don't trust essentially anything businesses say about themselves.
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  96% of people don't trust ads.
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  And businesses are having to find much more credible ways to market to their customers.
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  For example, they do influencer marketing or they do reviews marketing.
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  And so having a show, having a podcast is a great way to make yourself be a thought leader and build that credibility.
• 13:54
  So that was tectonic shift number one.
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  Tectonic shift number two is AI.
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  It's $196 billion industry projected to grow seven x over the next six years.
• 14:05
  We wanted to leverage that.
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  Podcasting is so amazing because it can leverage dozens and dozens of different types of AI to grow your business.
• 14:16
  The third one is owning your own platform.
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  A lot of businesses have made the mistake of building themselves dependent upon third party platforms like Facebook or Amazon or YouTube.
• 14:32
  And then those platforms change the rules and people get deplatformed and they lose their following and lose their ability to contact people.
• 14:39
  And a lot of companies have gone out of business because they built essentially a skyscraper on land they didn't own.
• 14:46
  And there's a huge trend of people that have moved towards owning their own platforms.
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  You look at Oprah Winfrey.
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  She used to be on CB's.
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  She went to her own platform.
• 14:56
  You look at Glenn Beck used to be on Fox.
• 14:58
  He has his own platform.
• 14:59
  There's a lot of people that have done that.
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  You look at Elon Musk.
• 15:02
  He built Tesla with essentially no advertising on the back of X.
• 15:08
  And so that was so important to his business.
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  He went and bought the platform so he could own it.
• 15:14
  So anyways, we focused on, on helping people leverage these tectonic shifts.
• 15:21
  And that's why podcasting is so cool, is it can help you build your credibility and thought leadership.
• 15:27
  It can help you own your own platform, it can help you leverage AI, and it can help you do so many other cool things.
• 15:33
  For example, every CEO wants to work with more influencers, but then the influencers don't want to work with them.
• 15:41
  Well, one of the best ways to work with influencers is you invite those influencers on your show.
• 15:46
  Those influencers get to know you, like you, and trust you, and then.
• 15:52
  And then you can be a guest on their show, just like you and me, right?
• 15:55
  You were a guest on my show, and now I'm a guest on your show, right?
• 15:58
  You build that relationship.
• 15:59
  One of the best ways to work with influencers is have a podcast.
• 16:03
  So lots, lots of advantages.
• 16:05
  Build your.
• 16:06
  Build your.
• 16:08
  Your reach.
• 16:09
  Get people to know you like you and trust you.
• 16:11
  And then once you have that, it's almost like you can prescribe instead of just having to sell to people once they trust you.
• 16:20
  It's kind of like a doctor, right?
• 16:21
  It gives you a prescription.
• 16:22
  You just take the prescription because you trust it.
• 16:25
  A podcast can help you get to that same point of trust.
• 16:30
  Yeah.
• 16:30
  Well said.
• 16:31
  Well said.
• 16:32
  I mean, other people say it, too, like a digital handshake where you can start to let people get to know you and build that, like, and trust before you ever meet them or do any type of interaction.
• 16:43
  And then people start to see ahead of time who you are as a person.
• 16:46
  So, yeah, great, great way to do that.
• 16:50
  Okay.
• 16:50
  And just to go back within your entrepreneurial journey a little bit.
• 16:54
  So you built and sold three companies, and your first one was something that came right out of.
• 17:01
  Right out of college when you're a BYU, and that was adoption.com, is that right?
• 17:05
  I.
• 17:06
  Yeah, that's correct.
• 17:08
  Tell us, what was the motivation to start that?
• 17:15
  I was a missionary in Brazil, spent a couple of years down there, and fell in love with those street kids.
• 17:21
  And when I came back, I vowed to do something to make a lasting difference in their lives.
• 17:27
  And before my missionary service, I had never even heard of the Internet.
• 17:33
  While I was gone in Brazil, the Internet took off and I came back, and the Internet was the huge thing.
• 17:39
  Felt like the land rush, where people could kind of pick any piece of land they wanted back in the old west and just homestead it and own that piece of land.
• 17:49
  And so I decided I was going to own my piece of land and start my business.
• 17:55
  And my father had been an adoption attorney.
• 17:58
  I had some experience, a little bit of experience in adoption, and.
• 18:04
  And so I decided to create adoption.com.
• 18:07
  ended up winning a couple of business plan competitions and got started with that.
• 18:12
  Okay.
• 18:12
  And that was the largest adoption site in the world, is that right?
• 18:17
  Yeah.
• 18:17
  The most used adoption site in the world.
• 18:19
  I guess it's probably the largest as far as, like, most content and most visited.
• 18:24
  There's lots of different metrics you could use to measure it.
• 18:31
  In my world, a personal brand is invaluable.
• 18:35
  A year ago, EZ DC was brand new with just a couple of customers and no online presence.
• 18:40
  Then I found Hicks marketing.
• 18:42
  They helped me amplify my personal brand, build a solid content strategy, publish my podcast, and ten x the number of customers we serve, all in less than one year.
• 18:53
  Do you need a marketing partner who gets you and cares about your success?
• 18:57
  Reach out to aliciaicksmarketing.com for more info.
• 19:00
  And teller Dave Gula sent you.
• 19:03
  What happened next?
• 19:05
  Yeah, I wrote.
• 19:08
  I was working on my thesis.
• 19:10
  I was in a program that required a large paper that had to be written.
• 19:15
  And because I was in the entrepreneurship program, I wrote my thesis as a business plan, and I wrote a business plan on how to use the Internet to help children through adoption.
• 19:30
  And that thesis ended up winning the university business plan competition, and I raised some capital, and we got started.
• 19:39
  Jeff.
• 19:39
  Wow.
• 19:40
  Wow.
• 19:40
  Okay.
• 19:41
  So that's.
• 19:41
  That's quite a fast track to being an entrepreneur.
• 19:45
  Right?
• 19:45
  You're in.
• 19:47
  You're in the MBA program, you submit the plan and win the contest, and then you get your first experience raising funding, and away you go.
• 20:00
  Yeah, it was.
• 20:01
  It was a fun first experience.
• 20:03
  I felt very blessed.
• 20:06
  And let me ask you, because so many times, too, and I speak to so many entrepreneurs now with the show, and, you know, I'm sure with the challenges and all the things that can go wrong and all the
• 20:18
  Yddev, the kind of the dark times within entrepreneurship, being that your first business was so mission driven, literally.
• 20:27
  I mean, how important was that to you to kind of keep going and sustain yourself through the inevitable challenges that you face when growing a business?
• 20:36
  Yeah, I think the most important part of that is I felt like we had God's help because we picked something that was doing good and helping children and families.
• 20:45
  It felt like we had more divine help than what we probably deserved or what we.
• 20:50
  We definitely could have done on our own.
• 20:53
  So I was very grateful to have that.
• 20:57
  Okay.
• 20:59
  And then what was, you know, after, you know, starting something from scratch and.
• 21:04
  And going through the process of building it and growing it over, like, a decade plus.
• 21:09
  What was it like exiting that company?
• 21:14
  Yeah.
• 21:14
  So I had a business partner who passed away unexpectedly, and we kind of decided, we felt that it was in the best interest of his family that we sell that company.
• 21:33
  And so we hired a broker and put it up for sale.
• 21:40
  I'm kind of a person that likes doing things myself.
• 21:43
  Right.
• 21:43
  When I sold my house last, I just sold it myself, and I kind of felt that I could market my house better than a realtor could market my house.
• 21:51
  And so I kind of felt that same way about my own business.
• 21:55
  I've sold companies before, but adoption.com was one because of my investors that I hired a broker, and I got the broker to help us sell the business and find the opportunity.
• 22:08
  So if you haven't sold a business before, it's probably a good idea to find a good broker that can help you.
• 22:13
  They'll probably know of people that are looking to buy businesses, be able to help you market it in a way that you probably don't know how to do on your own.
• 22:24
  And I was grateful that we did it that way.
• 22:27
  And being with your current company now, being so heavily focused on tech, how important do you think that the experience was as growing an early Internet company and basically be involved in, really, a tech company through that whole
• 22:46
  past decade?
• 22:47
  How important do you think that experience was to what you're doing now?
• 22:50
  Yeah.
• 22:51
  Everything that we've done over the last 20 plus years is built up to give us the knowledge, the experience to be able to do what we're doing today.
• 23:01
  We've worked with India.
• 23:03
  We've worked managing India development teams for about two decades.
• 23:08
  And so now it's a lot easier to run our India development team.
• 23:11
  Right.
• 23:12
  We have options and abilities and expertise.
• 23:15
  We've made mistakes and learned from those mistakes, so we don't have to make those again.
• 23:21
  We could quickly know a lot of those decisions that we need to make.
• 23:25
  Okay.
• 23:26
  And you bring up such a great point there, too.
• 23:28
  And maybe you could just expand on that topic, too.
• 23:31
  For people that are out there starting a business or early stages or growing, you know, one thing that we hear so much is, you know, how valuable mistakes are, and failure is a learning experience.
• 23:43
  And just going for it in terms of, you know, in trying to, I guess, fail forward and fail fast.
• 23:50
  Right.
• 23:50
  Is common advice that we hear for entrepreneurs.
• 23:54
  How important would you say that is in terms of, of just, you know, that approach?
• 24:00
  Well, I don't know if I completely agree with it because I'd rather succeed fast instead of fail fast.
• 24:09
  The goal isn't to fail.
• 24:10
  The goal is to succeed.
• 24:14
  But.
• 24:15
  But when you're.
• 24:17
  And sometimes, too, the goal isn't.
• 24:21
  Isn't to quit and give up as quickly as you can.
• 24:24
  Sometimes you just have to.
• 24:27
  You just have to figure a way to get through something.
• 24:32
  I was off the record.
• 24:37
  What's that song by Saya?
• 24:39
  I'm unstoppable?
• 24:41
  Is that the one?
• 24:42
  Yep.
• 24:42
  Yeah.
• 24:43
  So last night, I just heard that song.
• 24:46
  It was on something that I was doing, and it just.
• 24:48
  It really resonated with me as an entrepreneur.
• 24:51
  Like, you've got to get into that mindset of, and I'm unstoppable.
• 24:55
  Like, I can figure this out.
• 24:57
  Like, with God's help and with a talented team.
• 25:01
  Like, even if we have to go periods of time without paychecks, even if we have to pay a heavy price, we're going to get through this.
• 25:09
  And I think a lot of the most successful entrepreneurs are on the other side of those kind of really difficult situations.
• 25:19
  And I think if we focus on failing really fast, I think sometimes we miss the opportunity to go through the trial that we have to go through to find our success.
• 25:39
  I watched a video yesterday of one of the founders of Canva.
• 25:43
  They're a company that we idolize and their business model.
• 25:46
  We love how they do things.
• 25:49
  And this founder was telling the story of, she went to Silicon Valley and she tried to hire people, and she got rejected and tried to get funding, and she got rejected, and it took her three years of working
• 26:00
  on it before she was able to get her seed round.
• 26:04
  And if your goal is to fail fast, canva never would have made it, right?
• 26:10
  She only made it because she chose not to fail fast.
• 26:13
  She chose to be unstoppable, chose to figure it out.
• 26:19
  Ah, okay.
• 26:20
  So in terms of perseverance, too, right?
• 26:22
  It's not.
• 26:23
  I guess that that would be the other.
• 26:25
  The flip side of that, too, is it's not just about, uh, you know, failing.
• 26:30
  And, uh, she could have very easily.
• 26:33
  Said, okay, nobody's going to fund this.
• 26:34
  Nobody's going to work for this business.
• 26:36
  And she could have moved on.
• 26:37
  She could have said, let's cut my losses as fast as we can here.
• 26:41
  But instead, she kept working the venture without getting it funded for three years.
• 26:46
  And then she was finally able to get her funding because she had worked through it.
• 26:50
  She had grown the big business enough to get where she needed to be.
• 26:57
  All right.
• 26:58
  All right.
• 26:59
  And, Nathan, so current company is pot up, and then, of course, you've got the podcast as well.
• 27:04
  Podcasting secrets.
• 27:07
  If people want to get in touch with you and learn more about, you know, pot up and what could do for their podcast, or check out the your podcast itself, what's the best way people can reach out to
• 27:17
  you?
• 27:17
  Yeah, you can go to potup.com and, and see my show there, see the recent episodes about how to create, grow, and monetize a podcast.
• 27:27
  You can also go to Pottup.com and get a free trial of of our software, 50 integrated tools to create, grow, monetize a podcast.
• 27:36
  You can also go to podcasting secrets or sorry, excuse me.
• 27:40
  You can also go to podcasting challenge.com and sign up for a 14 day challenge course that can help you record and edit and publish and syndicate your first episode.
• 27:54
  All right, we'll link all that in the show notes for everyone.
• 27:58
  All right, well, Nathan, thank you so much for being here and taking the time.
• 28:01
  Really appreciate this and really enjoyed our conversation.
• 28:04
  Thanks for having me on today.
• 28:05
  All right.
• 28:06
  And that is all the time we have for now.
• 28:08
  We will see you next time.