Castos Helps Podcasters Distribute Content, $480k in ARR
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What investment strategy did Castos use to grow?
We took a small amount of investment and joined the Tiny Seat Accelerator about just over a year ago. So we were part of the first patch there. So we got a little bit of money there, but otherwise have been bootstrapped.
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We've got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years.
Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker CEO Frank Bean before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion.
We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that.
If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com. There, you'll find a private RSS feed that you can add to your favorite podcast listening tool, along with other subscriber-only content. Now look, I never want money to be the reason you can't listen to episodes. On the checkout page, you'll see an option to request free access. I grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Craig Hewitt. He's the founder of Castos, a full remote team remaking how podcasters create great shows, grow their audiences, and further their brands. Craig, you ready to take us to the top? Yep, I'm ready. So what came first for you? Were you a technology guy that got into podcasting or a podcasting guy that wanted to scratch his own itch and learn the tech?
Yeah, definitely the second. I kind of got into podcasting a roundabout way and kind of the business side of it. And yeah, it's been just over three years since I've been running Castos and it's been a lot of fun. Very cool. Okay, so for folks that have not heard of it, what does Castos do? Yeah, so we're a podcast hosting and analytics provider that also has a built-in production service. So for shows like this, for folks who want to kind of host their podcast, distribute it to places like Apple Podcasts and Spotify, that's what we do, provide analytics around that, and then have kind of a done-for-you service arm that takes care of all the editing and show notes and publishing. So we're kind of your built-in podcast producer.
So would you categorize this more as pure software running the show, or is it really software plus humans and professional services built in? Yeah, we're software with a service. Yeah. Okay, interesting. So just so we understand sort of the split, and this will kind of guide my questioning. If you look at your total revenue over the past 12 months, what percent would you say is software-requiring revenue versus setup fees, professional services? Yeah, like 70-30? 70 SaaS? 70 SaaS, yeah. Okay, so let's focus on that for a second, then we'll circle back to professional services. If people pay you just for what you offer on a SaaS basis, what would they be getting?
So you get hosting and analytics. So we host your audio files, help you manage RSS feed, which is kind of the thing that podcasts are. And then we give analytics about, you know, where folks are listening and how many downloads your shows get.
So very similar to like Libsyn or other players like hosting platforms like this.
Yeah, at its core. We've done a lot to expand. No, because I think that's the easy analogy. But I think what we've done is expand the idea of that a lot. So we have things to repurpose and extend the content that you create. So we have things like automated transcriptions. We have automatic republishing of your content to YouTube. So for folks who aren't recording video like this, They just want to do audio because they don't want to get all pretty for the camera and stuff like that. We can give them a way to have a presence on YouTube where they don't have to record native video content.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What investment strategy did Castos use to grow?
0:00–5:54
2
What services does Castos provide for podcasters?
5:54–9:07
3
How does Castos balance software and human services?
9:07–14:21
4
What pricing model does Castos use for its services?
14:21–15:11
5
What tactics does Castos use to upgrade customers?
15:11–16:00