Why these four startup founders launched a podcast

The popularity of podcasts has skyrocketed in recent years as more and more entrepreneurs incorporate them into their marketing strategy to connect with their audience, personalize their brand, and grow their business.

The decision to launch a podcast should not be taken lightly. It requires a lot of planning and preparation, and the necessary time and effort can detract from business operations. It should also come from a passion to defend an issue and give value to your audience. When that aligns with a company’s marketing goals, a podcast can bring huge benefits to the company.

Redefining Recruitment

Recruitment Subscription Service Talented was launched in 2015 as a disruptive recruiting solution for the tech industry. It arose from founders Chris Abbass and Phil Blaydes recognizing the widespread need for a scalable, in-house recruiting solution that works on a subscription basis rather than the commission-based pricing model preferred by other recruiting service providers.

Talentful launched its Hiring On All Cylinders podcast earlier this year and discusses a wide range of topics from remote working to complex strategic planning, examining how leaders are redefining the role of talent acquisition within corporate leadership and repositioning talent at the forefront of the business. success of their organization.

Finding and retaining guests was the biggest challenge, explains CEO Abass. “In the initial phase, without the guarantee of a massive audience and a track record, there was a reliance on the goodwill and openness of guests,” he says. “This is where tailoring guests to your podcast’s themes and topics is so important. If they believe in the subject, they can be confident that the public will come.”

To other entrepreneurs considering a podcast, Abass recommends building a support network around them to share the workload. “I’ve been able to rely on Talentful’s marketing team for editing support, as well as our partnership team and my own EA for input on branding, production, editing, and scheduling.”

Collaboration and community

DagsHub is a place where data scientists can host their machine learning projects, including code, data, models, experiments, etc., and collaborate effectively on them based on open source tools. The company was launched in January 2021, followed by: The MLops podcast three months later.

Co-founder and CEO Dean Pleban says, “There’s content about machine learning, mostly focused on the research side, but less on model production, and some great lessons that aren’t documented anywhere and could be useful to the community. To create a successful business in this field, start with the community and the individual data scientists by creating interesting content. That’s why we started our podcast.”

Finding podcast guests is one of the biggest challenges podcasters mention. Pleban, however, found it easier than expected. “Some people are hard to get hold of, but most are open to conversation as long as it’s authentic and the topic interests them,” he says.

Scheduling is another challenge, because podcasters by definition work around different people’s schedules. “One option is to record many episodes and release them over a longer period of time,” Pleban says. “Another is having ‘wild card’ guests. If you think you won’t make a new episode in time, they are willing to join at the last minute and their ideas are still interesting to the community.”

The podcast has increased Dagshub’s recognition as a brand and thought leader and allowed the team to more easily connect with industry experts and thought leaders.

Visibility for validation

Sports technical matters Sports BUFFs podcast, Game aheadfeatures famous faces from the sports and broadcast industry and has become a vehicle for the specialist on screen gamification and engagement to promote its product in a space visible to investors, competitors, colleagues and partners.

Founder Benn Achilleas says: “This visibility gives us a validation that is important for such an innovative solution. It has led to leads and exposure to guest networks and has given us a voice in the busy, often misunderstood topic of fan engagement. It also provides great content for our Twitch channel, our website, and our social channels.”

The challenges of producing such content in such a busy startup are a shortage of time and resources as creating the podcasts takes the staff away from their day to day responsibilities. A trade-off has to be made between advantages and disadvantages for business. “Booking guests, scripting interesting content and questions, etc. are all standard issues when running any kind of publication or podcast, but they are amplified when creating the podcast isn’t the most important part of your business,” adds Achilles.

Attract investment

Tom Fairey, founder of gaming startup effortstarted his podcast, The Back Yourself Show, not as a mechanism to grow his business directly, but to meet investors. The company launched in April 2019 and the podcast followed two months later.

“It didn’t take me long to realize my network was abysmal,” Fairey says. “I dove in the community, attending conferences, accelerators and slack groups all the time to get an understanding of what people were talking about. And I found that the biggest voices were investors.”

The podcast strategy proved successful. Stakester has raised over £6 million, including over £500,000 from people who have appeared on or listened to on the show. “In addition, those who have been on the show have referred me to investors who have investors. I didn’t have this network before, and now I would say my network is strong. From a credibility perspective, it makes a positive difference if you can reference relationships with remarkable people within a community.”