P stands for Pivot: Growing a startup from the ground up

We work with Fortune 1000 brands to launch

their branded podcast,

and then we own Co host,

which is a hosting and data audience

insights platform for brands

who are podcasting.

And that's my day job.

So Quill started first

and then came the co host.

Yeah, I started quill first, because.

There.

Were two reasons I wanted to be

in the trenches with our customers,

understanding the pain

points of podcasting.

And I think the only way that you can do

that is if you actually create

podcasts for customers.

So I launched a service out

of the business because of that.

I also knew that I wanted to launch

a product, but I didn't want

any investors on my cap table.

So I knew that if I launched an agency

first, it could fund the product

side of the business.

And that's exactly what we're doing today.

We have zero investors.

It was completely bootstrapped,

but the services side of the business.

Yeah.

Thank you.

It was not an easy task, but we made it.

And the idea about Cohost was actually

originated as a problem to solve at Quill.

Yeah, it was the problem we

were solving for our agency.

And so we found that about 90%

of the hosting platforms that we were

using, which were simplecast megaphone,

Omni Studios, they weren't really giving

us the data that we needed for our brands

to understand the ROI of their podcast.

They were looking for additional insights,

more information on their listeners, and

how they're responding to the content.

We were just having a really hard time

on the production side of the business,

collecting all the data and analytics

and compiling reports

that were actually meaningful.

And so, ultimately,

we decided that we were going

to launch a product for ourselves.

Like, the agency was the case study,

and it worked really well.

So then we opened it up to the world.

Cool.

And how do you look at ROI?

What is your ROI in podcasting?

Oh, my goodness.

I could talk about ROI

of podcasting forever.

There's so many ways to measure ROI,

and I think it really depends on what KPIs

are important to the brand

that is working on the show.

But ultimately,

I don't necessarily just look at ROI as.

How many downloads and listeners

do you have for your podcast?

We really try to utilize tracking links

to see where downloads are coming in

from what locations, provinces, cities.

Engagement is a really

big ROI metric for us.

So loyal listeners, retention,

new listeners, people who are staying

on for future content,

and then psychographic information.

So, age, gender, household income.

What brands are listening to your podcast?

I think not enough people place

an emphasis on the cost per

minute of human attention.

Yeah.

So that's a really big one for us, is,

like, the cost per minute of how

engaged somebody is in your content.

And audio has about a 94% completion rate.

If there's a 30 minutes audio clip,

it typically has a 94% completion rate,

whereas a 30 minutes video only has

about a 12% to 20% completion rate.

And so those are really the metrics we're

focusing on to help brands understand

how their show is impacting their brand.

And bottom line.

Okay, how often does it happen?

Actually, the metrics suggest tweaking,

changing Pivoting, the thing, the content.

Often.

Yeah, very often.

We're actually working on a topic

analysis tool right now.

It's a feature that will go live in 2023,

but it shows you what concepts and content

topics brought in the most downloads

and listeners and how engaged they were.

So then essentially, when you're coming up

with new ideas, you can base

it on quantitative stats.

We use our platform a lot to figure out

what's working, what's not working,

what marketing channels are working

which aren't, and where we

should be prioritizing our time.

Cool.

Any use case for Chat GPT and podcasting?

We love chat GPT like love.

I use it for all of my life problems.

I'm always on it, always

asking how to do things.

I'm wondering when the rest

of the world is going to catch up.

Yeah.

Any use case for podcasting or

just for running the business?

I would definitely say there are use cases

for running a podcast as

well as the business.

We have so many clients that we've turned

into case studies and we've seen a direct

correlation with being

on our hosting platform.

And then there are content

ranking on search engines.

So, for example, we do automatic

transcriptions and cohost.

Everything you put out is automatically

transcribed and formatted for SEO.

We're directly starting to see

that content rank on Google and lists.

And so we are doing a lot of case studies

on the clients who are on our platform

and then the impact they're having

on audience growth, audience insights,

discoverability for their podcast,

and more importantly, justifying

the creation of new production budgets.

Does it happen?

Is it the case that some of the podcasts,

when you launch, they are like

out of the bed,

outperforming other podcasts in terms

of metrics, or basically you can easily

spot something really hot, that is

something that is reengaging, et cetera?

Or is it in 90% of cases it's it's

Tweaking, Tweaking, Tweaking and Pivoting.

Yeah, that's a good question.

Podcasting is a marathon,

it's not a sprint.

And oftentimes when you look at the best

podcasters today,

the number one thing that they all

have in common is they continue going.

It's momentum.

Like you're in it for the long haul,

you're in it for the long term.

And tweaking is really important.

I will say very rarely do

podcasts become viral overnight.

It's like you have to keep going,

you have to keep publishing new episodes.

I mean, one example that I

always use is Joe Rogan.

I think that his who's like,

wow, oh my goodness, Joe Rogan.

I think his show is terrible and I think

his content is terrible,

and I don't think he's interesting

or smart or any of those things.

But his podcast has done so well because

he was podcasting before it was even

a thing, before anyone knew what

a podcast was, he was doing it.

And he's been around for so long

by default that he's like one

of the industry leaders today.

But there's so many better shows and so

many better hosts and so much

better content out there.

But the difference is that he kept going.

Okay,

so his case is that he has this huge

audience and whatever he throws

at them is getting traction.

Or is it the way he's running the show?

You just said it's imperfect

or far from perfect.

But what is it about him specifically,

other than what did doing it for so long?

What's the reason why he's successful?

Yeah, I think it was just a culmination

of, like, years and years of putting

out content and slowly building up.

His follower built momentum over time.

Eventually, it snowballed into his

audience today, and he was

very frequent in his content

and sometimes controversial.

And I think he resonates with a very

specific and niche part of the market,

which is typically middle aged white men.

And if that listens to Joe Rogan.

I mean, I'm not listening to Joe Rogan.

I'm not the right audience for it.

It's like, typically he has

a very specific audience.

And you know what?

Actually, that's probably really helped

him because in podcasting, I always say,

don't try to be something for everyone.

It's better to be something for someone

than everything to everyone.

The more niche you are in podcasting,

the more successful you're going to be,

because let's just say you're putting out

a podcast on business success stories.

You're competing with how I built.

This is of the world.

The NPR productions.

If you're putting out a cybersecurity

podcast, you're competing

with the Reply Alls of the world.

So you really want to think about how you

can attract a natural community

for something that's not already there.

I think the goal should always be

the first Sebast or different.

And Joe Rogan did a really good job

at this because he was like,

this is the audience that I'm going

to resonate with and tailor my content to,

and I'm going to continue putting out

content addressing this

one very specific market.

And his audience loves him because if

you're a Trump supporter,

you'll love Joe Rogan.

It's like apples to apples.

You can connect the dots.

Even though he says he's not supporting.

Anyone, I think he was

in the early days, though.

He might have changed his tune over time,

but I think in the early days,

he was, like, a very vocal supporter.

Just one more podcaster that I like

to ask you about is Lex Friedman.

What are your thoughts on this guy?

Lex Friedman is also a very sort

of controversial, I would say, podcaster.

Either people love him or they hate him.

Personally, I don't really listen to his

show, so I feel like I'm not a novice

expert opinion on the type

of content he's putting out.

Who are you listening to these days?

So I listen to Jack Shepard's

show 10% happier.

That's a new one that I'm listening to.

I listen to a podcast called Gay Future,

which is like a satire comedy

podcast, which I really love.

I honestly try not to listen to the shows

that are like the big production

agencies or the big networks.

I try to support more

local content creators.

So if it's a Gimlet show, an NPR show,

it really has to make top headlines

for me to want to tune in.

I like listening to shows like We Regret

to Inform You, which is like a local CBC

production, which I obviously want

to support Canadian, more Canadian shows.

There's a podcast called It's

on the Crypto Ponzi scheme

that I'm listening to right now.

That's another one.

Crypto Ponzi scheme.

I love that.

Yeah.

So I don't know, I guess it's just I don't

really have I listen to about

ten podcasts a week.

I have like a rotating show.

I just listened to the new serial episode

that was dropped after Don's

conviction was overturned.

That was amazing.

Such a historical moment.

But I get asked this question a lot and I

actually have a list

on my phone of top podcast.

And maybe I should look at this list

because it keeps growing longer

and longer every the Epstein podcast.

I don't know if you listen to that

history of the 90s.

If you're 90s, baby,

anything to do with the history

of the 90s, I'm like so into

the Missing Crypto Queen is the name

of the podcast about the Ponzi scheme

in the Crypto space,

which is such a good show.

We Crashed is about the WeWork Fall,

which is really interesting if

you're in the funding space.

And then

Coffee Break Spanish is another really

good show for like day

to day bite size content.

So those are the main ones,

the mainstream ones.

I love Akimbo by Seth Godin and I also

love the Daily, just because it's like

good daily news bite size content.

And I also really like How I Built this

by Guy Raz, even though it cringes me

to say that because everybody

listens to how I built this.

But it's just a really good show.

Cool.

Thank you for that recommendations.

I didn't do my notes, but it's recorded,

so I'm going to catch up.

Perfect.

Yeah, one more thing.

I hope it's not generic and I think

you might have been asked that,

but that's on my list and that's

interesting for me, hopefully the audience

as well, which is why

podcasting of all things.

Well, it's a great question.

People ask me all the time,

why did I launch Quill?

Like, what happened for you

to get into this space?

And before Quill, I ran another marketing

agency called 88 and we focused on PR

and content campaigns for Fortune

500 brands and tech companies.

And when I was in that line of work,

I noticed that more and more people

were moving into the audio space.

Not as much as there are today,

but it was definitely something

that people were interested in.

We didn't call them podcast back then

because 2014 Cereal just made podcasts

a household name,

but we were already dabbling in audio

content, webinars live lectures,

podcasting, Instagram lives.

And I thought that there was a really

interesting opportunity for brands

to reach their audience globally

in a format that's never been done before,

a format that's not available

to other advertisers.

So you've you can be driving to work

and listening to a podcast, but you can't

be watching a video or a Netflix show.

You can be walking your dog or washing

your dishes and listening to a podcast.

You can't be reading a blog or an article.

It's like the one medium where you can be

actively engaged in another

activity whilst.

Still being increasing engagement,

bringing increased engagement.

So I thought it was interesting.

I kind of wanted to test it out as

a platform and I was

gathering freelancers to launch audio

shows and eventually I saw that there are

a lot of marketing agencies doing PR

and content, but no agencies that were

specializing in podcast production

and podcast marketing.

And so I decided to take a risk.

And at the time it was a risk because this

was right before the Pandemic and videos,

YouTube channels, content,

blogs were still the main source

and podcasting wasn't here to stay.

It was a tactic that was starting to grow

but not solidified in the market.

And then the pandemic happened right as I

launched my company and we just saw

a huge intake in audio consumption.

So part of it is I wish that the business

success is 80% Prosperation

in our hard work and 20% luck.

We were in the right

place at the right time.

The market, if not more.

Yeah, if not more.

Exactly.

Like, this is a question that Guy Raz asks

every entrepreneur on his show and how I

built this, which is how much do you

attribute your business success to luck?

And a huge part of it should be attributed

to luck because I know that there's so

many people that have tried to launch

radio channels and audio content agencies,

and we just happened to be

in a place when the world was shutting

down and brands were forced to move

from in person conferences and in person

events to well, we need to engage people.

How do we do it?

Audio was the only format,

so it worked really well for us.

So it spiked at the time when you were

lunching quail and were you ready

for that amount of interest?

Yeah.

Or is it overwhelming?

Yeah, I mean, listen,

being an entrepreneur

is always overwhelming.

It doesn't matter what seasonal business

you might have, but we didn't anticipate

the kind of growth that we saw and you

know, what, we scaled

for it really quickly.

We're a high growth startup.

Sometimes people are surprised to see

where we're at when we're such a like,

we've only been around for a few years,

but we saw a gap in the market and we

capitalized on the opportunity

and ultimately it led to us

innovating in this space.

So yeah, we're growing really quickly,

but we also are innovating.

We didn't just stick to the agency,

we launched a product.

And the product is a huge capital

suck and drain on resources.

But the product is what's going to move

the industry forward in terms of giving

people the data they need

to continue podcasting successfully.

I love the fact that you have both

an agency and a product and it's

somewhat separate but somewhat

overlapped and cool.

I love that approach.

I want to step back from podcasting and

this is interesting for me personally.

I've seen you've started being a lecturer,

a professor at the University of Toronto,

and my question is,

what was it like to get back

from business and do this teaching thing?

I would say that public speaking

is definitely not new to me.

So I'm a member

of the National Speakers Bureau,

and I've been speaking for over a decade,

keynoting at conferences

and on live stages.

But

when I got approached by the university

a few years ago to start teaching

in one of their sort of institutes as

a podcast, one of the first podcast

lecturers, I thought it was a really

interesting opportunity because, one,

nobody teaches podcasts at university.

It was like, when I was in university,

nobody was teaching

entrepreneurship or sales.

That just wasn't a degree.

I wish it was, I would have taken it,

but it wasn't a degree.

Like, there's business degrees,

but business degrees don't really

include entrepreneurship degrees.

And I thought it was really innovative

of U of T, University of Toronto,

to actually think about offering a degree

or a certificate in podcasting so

that people could go out

and launch their own shows.

I thought it was important

for a number of reasons.

One, they were moving with the Times,

but also I think it's important

to remember that to do a podcast well,

it takes a lot of work and it takes

a lot of capital and resources.

Most people who have budget will go work

with an agency like Quail,

or go work with a network, or like an NPR,

a Gimlet, a New York Times.

Not everybody can afford that,

but still want to put out content.

And podcasting should be democratized.

If you have a phone and Internet

connection headphones,

you should be able to put out

content and reach a global audience.

And so I really wanted people who didn't

necessarily have the budgets

for production agencies and wanted to do

it themselves, to have the skills

in order to launch a show.

And so that's the first curriculum that I

launched at UT, which is how

to build your own podcast.

Whether it's for yourself,

for your company,

for a company that you're working at,

you should be able to do it yourself,

because right now,

there's a lot of resources,

but they're all paid,

and there's not a lot of information

online on how to do it.

And so I really enjoy it.

I love working with adults.

They're not students that are young,

so you're not like, chasing after them for

homework assignments and final

assessments and showing up to class.

Like, adults love learning,

and they're paying for it out of their

pocket so you know that they're

taking it seriously.

They show up to class, they're so

engaged, they ask the questions.

And actually, a lot of my students have

then gone on to win big awards

and podcasting and ranked top

five on Apple podcast globally.

And it's so nice to see the impact.

Thank you.

Congrats to them.

They've done the work.

But it's nice to see, like,

you can teach someone how to do a podcast

properly because right now there's

a lot of people doing it not properly.

You're using Riverside and I love that.

But the amount of people who use Zoom or

Skype or Anchor to record their podcast,

it physically hurts me.

Happy that you like Riverside.

So what is 2023 in podcasting

going to look like?

Is it more democratization,

more tools, more content?

What are we looking at in 2023?

I would say that the priority is giving

podcasters the data that's theirs

and rightfully belongs to them,

democratizing the industry.

I think that more and more people need

to go away from listening to the top five

podcasts that belong to the big networks

and start seeking out content that is

a little bit more niche created

by production agencies

and indie content creators.

And I think that the analytics space is

really going to change in podcasting.

So I think that people are going to stop

focusing on how many downloads do I have

and start focusing on how engaged is

my audience, getting feedback from them,

getting reviews,

thinking of ways to boost their shows,

discoverability, like tracking links.

Those are, I think, the future of tomorrow

and maybe realizing that the more niche

that you go and podcasting,

the more successful you can be.

How much are you engaged and sort of put

this vision into building the product.

At Cohost,

how much of your time is actually

the product work of the platform?

We have two separate teams,

so we have a whole team

dedicated 100% to co host a lot.

I would say half of our business

is dedicated to the product.

So the team is comprised of our CTO,

we have a CPO, we have product designers,

we have a development team and then

marketers who are 100%

dedicated to the business.

And I would say now we're at a point where

50% of the team is agency and 50% co host.

So it's completely split down the middle.

The work that we do on the agency side

is very closely related to the product.

So,

for example,

all of our customers on the agency are

on the product and we use

the agency work to decipher.

What are the pain points?

What new features do we want to launch?

In fact, most of the features that we have

today are requests that have come

in from our existing customers.

Can you do this?

Can you do this?

This would make our lives easier.

So we have a lot of agencies

and producers who are using our product.

And I would say 2023 focus for us right

now is really

putting features in place that make it

easier for people who are working

on branded audio content.

Sure.

So more specific,

even speaking more specifically about

building the business or building product,

how do you approach setting

the goals for 2023?

Like, is it OKRs?

Let's get nerdy.

Is it OKRs, KPIs or whatever

other framework you're using?

Yeah, we use the EOS OKR framework.

So OKRs is what we're using

to set our goals for 2023.

Every year we put together a very

aggressive forecast and the forecast

includes all the product features that we

want to launch in the new year,

but also like, what our revenue

targets and our revenue goals are.

And every month we're working towards

hitting those goals and targets.

We use Notion and Asana for all of our OKR

project management

and everybody is accountable.

We have a weekly performance meeting where

we're looking at OKRs and seeing what's

worked, what hasn't worked,

how are we adjusting the forecast

and tweaking our roadmap.

So, yeah, I would say this is why it's

really important to have a CTO,

a CPO and a CMO who are all very

data driven growth marketers.

And currently you are reviewing the 2022,

or is it no, we're done.

Yes.

We've wrapped up our books for 2022

and 2023 is on the horizon.

Actually, just this week we walked

through the new OKRs for product.

Cool.

Are you doing anything

different this year?

Lessons learned, whatever applied.

There's a lot of lessons.

Every day I feel like

Node J looks the same.

And I think part of being a high growth

startup is that you need to be nimble

and assimilate and move and adapt and

are we doing anything differently?

Absolutely.

I think there's changes every day in terms

of our roadmap and how our process

and scrum and how we do things.

But also part of that process is

understanding that you

need to tweak real time.

And so we move quickly,

we pivot really quickly as an agency,

like, we've made a lot

of Pivots in the last year.

And I think that's really half of what

makes the company successful is being able

to find product market fit

through trial and error.

Sure.

Learning every day.

Just learning.

One more question regarding the leadership

thing is

how what do you look in or do you look

for in people you work with, you hire,

you sort of grow, you promote.

What are the three things

that's killer for you?

Well, I would say that for me, hiring

is probably the hardest part of my job.

I'm very, very, very slow to hire because

for me, it's like having the right team

is probably like the ultimate priority.

And nobody has left Quail yet.

Everybody that we've hired

since day one is still here.

And so retention is a really big factor

and being proactive rather than reactive.

I don't really care about the fancy

resume with bells and whistles.

I don't really care about

people's work experience.

Obviously, if I'm hiring for a developer,

you need to know how to code.

But what matters to me more is someone

who is a problem solver resourceful,

a good culture, fit,

has the right attitude, can learn

and wants to learn and grow into a role.

So, for example, we just hired

a developer this past week.

She has no formal work

experience in developing.

She is a music teacher and she

self taught herself how to code.

And we gave her a chance in the interview

process and she had the highest

score in the technical test.

And on paper, it doesn't make any sense.

I said to my CTO, how are you interviewing

somebody who's a music teacher?

Like, this makes no sense.

And she's scrappy, she's resilient, she's

resourceful, she's smart, she works hard.

Like, those are the skills that came out

in the interview and we hired

her and so far so good.

That matters more.

I like the idea that if you're sort of not

fortunate to pick the right thing as

the first thing in the first place,

like the right direction of your

development, but still

you're eager to do it

in the evening study,

you're probably much more motivated

to do that over the long run.

And that's actually

something that interesting.

We have so many cases here.

We have guys or girls

that were engaged in police.

Police were like chemistry

scientists, et cetera.

We are super fascinated

by those success stories.

And these guys actually work

really hard to get where they are.

Yeah, arguably much harder than people

who have the fancy resumes and bells

and whistles if somebody

comes for an interview.

And they are very senior.

I already have my walls up because I feel

like a lot of those people don't

want to get their hands dirty.

They don't want to be in the trenches,

they don't want to grind and be scrappy

and do the work because they're

so used to being the big boss.

And so I like hiring a younger team

that is willing to grow and learn

and it's worked really well for us.

So what's the actual current team size?

You said the split is just in the middle,

but what's the number of people?

We just had our holiday party

yesterday and it was 23 people.

23 people.

And are you guys

the startup thing is intense.

I've been there, done that, failed,

moderately failed, whatever you call it.

But it's super intense and it requires

a lot of collaboration and stuff.

And I was wondering how you guys

deal with that in the remote world.

Are you back to the office?

Are you fully remote?

Are you in a hybrid boat or whatever?

What's the arrangement here?

We're fully remote.

We're a completely global company.

Our employees are scattered

across the US and Canada.

So we have some people in La.

Chicago, Vancouver, Toronto, East Coast.

Like we we're completely scattered.

And our clients are also

completely scattered.

So about 75% of our

clients are across the US.

And then we have the rest

are global Europe, Asia.

And so for us,

a startup can be intense,

but I think it also just depends

on the executive leadership.

I'm not stressed.

I love my job.

And of course there are days that are

really stressful and there are days

that require some overtime,

but ultimately, I think you

really want to enjoy the journey.

And I don't work a ton of overtime.

I have almost like I was born European.

I'm not I wasn't born European,

but it's like I have a European mentality,

which is

my life is really important to me and I

want to be well rounded

and culture is important.

Vacation is important.

Evenings, weekends, I don't work.

We're shutting down today for two weeks.

We're going to start again on Jan.

9th.

And traveling is really important.

And when I think about what makes Quill

and co host successful, yes,

the revenue is important, the team is

important, the growth is important.

But being individual as like a person

means being healthy,

having a good relationship with your

partner, your friends, your family,

traveling the world,

having hobbies and a side hustle

and passion outside of your work.

I think being well rounded and not having

everything be about work makes you

a better CEO, makes you a better leader.

It makes you better and happier employee,

which is probably why people haven't left.

And retention is a very expensive mistake.

And so, yes, it's stressful,

but it's not that stressful.

It doesn't have to be.

I agree with that.

I agree with that.

I've been there, been on the intense

part too long and I sort of get it now.

Didn't get it in the beginning.

I've got one more question for you.

What is it like to work

with the big brands?

So I assume you work with the big brands,

but you also work with smaller entities

or podcasters and how flexible are they?

We work with the big brands as well.

It's a different beast

than small startups and scale ups.

And I was wondering

what's your experience of that with that?

Yeah, no, it's a good question.

I would say that it's really hard

to compare each brand apples to apples

because the DNA of each

team can be so different.

I think it's interesting because the big

brand procurement processes are really

lengthy, takes forever to be

onboarded as a vendor.

But I really like working with Fortune

1000 brands because I like doing good work

and I like not taking shortcuts on things.

And brands allow you the flexibility,

space and give you the resources

and time to do things properly.

They push you, they challenge

you to do excellent work.

Seppar isn't acceptable.

And I think when you're working

with the expedia and the PWCs

of the world,

you have to be at the top of your game.

You have to be producing excellent work.

You have to show continued success

in order for them to renew

for another season.

And it allows us to never get complacent.

We don't just turn out edits all day long.

We have to think about the strategy.

We have to think about the brand.

We have to think about

the overall content picture.

And I like working with these brands

because they keep us honest

and they keep us learning.

We're constantly learning how

to do things bigger and better.

And I feel like if I was working

with another type of clientele,

maybe the standard of excellence

wouldn't necessarily be there.

So I personally love working

for this group of people.

Cool.

Even though sometimes they are difficult.

You're right.

Yeah.

Same here.

Same here.

All right, Fatima, thank you very much.

It was really interesting.

It was super good, your insight to the

podcasting, where thank you very much.

Thank you so much for having me.

I really appreciate your time,

and congrats on all the amazing

work that you're doing.

Happy podcasting.

Thank you very much.

Thank you much.

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