Over the last decade, Leszek has developed several successful businesses, among them a software development agency that supports Fortune 500 companies. With the challenges a growing business brings, he observed that stepping out of a tech role into a leadership one brings the need for a different approach. As a host of the Better Tech Leadership podcast, Leszek is focused on bridging the gap between tech and people skills.
Fatima Zaidi is the Founder and CEO at Quill Inc., an award-winning production agency specializing in corporate audio, and CoHost, a podcast growth and analytics tool.In addition to being a commentator for BNN Bloomberg on the challenges that female and BIPOC founders face in entrepreneurship, she is a frequent contributor to publications including The Globe and Mail, and Huffington Post, and has also been featured in publications like Forbes, Inc, Business Insider and Entrepreneur
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.
Becoming a CTO is like taking a jump into the deep end of the pool. Andrei Ciobotar from relayr shares his career journey from the startup Neokami to becoming the CTO of relayr.