Subscribe & Download

Guest: Craig Hewitt

​Company / Business name: ​​​​​​ ​​​Podcast Motor

Craig Hewitt is the Founder of PodcastMotor, a productized service which offers done-for-you podcast editing and production. Podcast Motor has a team of 15 remote members spread across 4 continents and are responsible for around 40 podcasts on a regular basis.

Craig is also the founder of Castos podcast hosting and analytics with a to enable everyone to create their own podcast and share their voice with the world. Castos just celebrated it’s 2nd birthday and more than 1,000 customers are on the platform.

Tools / Books / Resources mentioned:

Books: Profit First by Mike Michalowicz, Traction by Gino Wickman.

Show Notes:

01:32 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: If there is no solution for a problem you are facing, most likely other people are struggling too. Solve that problem and you have a business. 

Craig starts off by talking about how he stumbled his way into starting podcast motor when he actually started his own podcast but found it cumbersome to get it edited and published. He calls it ‘scratch your own itch’ way of starting a business where you solve your own problem and in the process build a business to start similar problems.

04:52 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Figure out your calling in life and focus on what you can accomplish. 

Craig calls himself a hopeless entrepreneur who is practically unemployable in a corporate world. Instead of spinning wheels in a corporate world, Craig really wanted to accomplish meaningful things by being on his own. Even though he started by selling capital equipment to hospitals, Craig is now in a 3rd iteration of his entrepreneurial journey.

06:47 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Be agile and nimble in starting your business.

Craig is a big believer in productized service business and a prime example of get started quickly. He went from an idea to a paying customer in 3 weeks and a monthly revenue of $5,000 in 2 months. Start with a problem you can solve for customers and find a way to do it soup-to-nuts for them. Then you can keep pivoting from there.

08:30 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: If there is no solution for a problem you are facing, most likely other people are struggling too. Solve that problem and you have a business. 

Craig gives examples of where his friend Justin McGill started a challenge to start a business in 24 hours and his SAS business lead fuse did exactly that. In this segment, Craig also talks about building a customer pipeline with a combination of organic traffic (70%) and paid traffic (30%).

15:04 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: There are always multiple sources of motivation: personal and professional. Find yours.

Craig talks about the motivation needed to build his business. (1) He wanted to quit his full-time job and the side business he started seemed like the path (2) And the pipeline of customers who needed him provided him the additional motivation.

17:37 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Read the following books if you can: The Profit First and Traction.

Craig mentions two books that were instrumental in shaping him and his business. The first is ‘Profit First’ by Mike Michalowicz which talks about paying yourself first from the profits. The second book is ‘Traction’ by Gino Wickman which is kind of a blueprint for running a business. Craig also mentions Dave Ramsey’s thinking on how you need to tell the money what to do.

21:12 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: If there is no solution for a problem you are facing, most likely other people are struggling too. Solve that problem and you have a business. 

Craig gives few pieces of wisdom from his experience in this section. Even though Craig believes in everyone starting their own business, he says that a corporate experience is key for every would be entrepreneur to understand the inner workings of a business. Craig is a big believer in productized service business and he believes that instead of banging your head against trying to test every other business model, just focus on productized service business for quick cashflow. Lastly, he advises on having enough of a cushion with finances to tide over hard times.

00:03

Ramesh: Hello everyone, welcome to the agile entrepreneur podcast. This is your host Ramesh Dontha. This podcast is about starting and building your own business with purpose, passion, perseverance and possibilities. Today our guest is Craig Hewitt. Craig is the founder of podcast motor, a productized service which offers done-for-you podcast editing and production. They have a team of fifteen remote members spread across four continents and they're also responsible for about 40 podcasts on a regular basis. In addition to podcast motor, Craig is also the founder of Castro's podcast hosting and analytics and their goal there is to enable everyone to create their own podcast and share their voice with the world. Castro’s just celebrated second birthday and more than 1,000 customers are on the platform. Hey Craig welcome.

01:06

Craig: Hey Ramesh thanks so much for having me.

01:08

Ramesh: So just a clarification, the Castro’s was your first company and then you started a podcast or is it the other way around?

01:14

Craig: Other way around. Yep so podcast Motor was my first business and it's just over four years old, maybe four and a half years old almost. Castro’s yeah just celebrating our second anniversary you know pretty much right now here in May of 2019.


01:27

Ramesh: So how did you stumble your way into podcasts and podcast motor?

01:32

Craig: Yeah, it's a funny story. So, I think that a lot of the most successful businesses that you hear about are someone that you know the term is like scratch their own itch right. Someone who had first-hand experience of a problem and said, hey if I create a solution for this problem you know it would be valuable for people. Because they have really in-depth the detailed knowledge of exactly what the problem is and that was the case for me with podcasting and podcast motor. I started my own podcast, I guess like four and a half years ago and saw really quickly that wow this is a pain in the neck and takes a lot of time and expertise and skill that I frankly didn't have and I saw that like you know the hours I would spend editing the audio for my podcast probably could be used in a better way doing something else and if that was true for me, as like fledgling entrepreneur at the time, I thought yeah this definitely will be the case for you know folks like yourself and for all of our customers now who are you know successful business people that value their time a lot more than you know whatever company like podcast motor would charge to do all of that work for them to where all they have to do is sit and record an episode like we're doing here today. And stick those files in Dropbox and then magically you know the podcast episode appears in iTunes the next week.

02:55

Ramesh: Honestly that's a fantastic service that you guys are doing for would-be podcasters and then podcasters is like me. I mean it takes so much; it saves us so much time.

03:07

Craig: That's great to hear.

03:08

Ramesh: So, it looks like I have to really start much earlier to understand your entrepreneurial journey. So, you were doing a podcast before you founded podcast motor. Why did you start a podcast? What were you doing at that time?

03:23

Craig: Yeah so, my podcast is called rogue startups and you know it really started just as a way for me to meet people and talk about online business. I didn't have the business at a time really. But was a part of some of these you know online communities that we're talking about all sorts of different entrepreneurship and online business and started interviewing some of these people and that's kind of where the podcast came from and yeah I mean it's, I have to say podcasting, I don't sell you on it, I don't think. But for anyone out there like podcasting is a fantastic way to network. It's a fantastic way to market yourself and your brand and your content and kind of tell people what you're up to and share your expertise. But for a lot of people I think it's even better for networking. Because you know you send me an email, Craig I'd love to have you on my podcast. I'm instantly like blushing. I'm like oh that's so great, Ramesh wants to have me on his podcast. I'm so honored. Like that's a very rare sentiment for a lot of busy businesspeople and you get that pretty much every time when you invite someone on your podcast.

04:34

Ramesh: Not only that, actually I personally learn a lot from these conversations, number one. Number two and then these relationships you know as a networking right, I mean they last long. So, you always had the itch, the entrepreneurial itch can you talk a little bit about it?

04:52

Craig: Yeah, I know absolutely. I'm a hopeless entrepreneur. I think at this point very much unemployable. But this is my third different entrepreneurial venture and I think it really comes from the innate knowledge. But in the back of my head knowing that my time working for a big business is kind of wasted and like my talents and drive and creativity and all those kind of stuff in the context of a big like fortune 100 business where I was working before, just is not the best use of like my time and skill and effort and now I totally see it. You know we have two successful businesses I think and see exactly that like when I put in a unit of effort, a unit of result comes out the other end. Whereas I mean a lot of folks who listen to this podcast or you know I’ve been in the corporate world know that like, you can just spin your wheels and some of these businesses and just get nothing done and get incredibly frustrated and it sucks the life out of you and I just wasn't going to have that happen.

06:02

Ramesh: Exactly I mean in my past life I was talking to engineers, they worked for four years on multiple products and they didn't see a single product out the door. You know it's just very frustrating. That's a killer. So, if you don't mind me asking, what was your background? What were you doing when you were not working for yourself?

06:23

Craig: Yeah totally unrelated to anything that I do now. I was in sales for a medical device company. So, I sold capital equipment, like big equipment to hospitals.

06:35

Ramesh: Oh, I see, okay so that's totally unrelated. All right, so how long did it take for you to actually start the business and then feel comfortable that yes, I can do it.

06:47

Craig: Yeah so, I think that this is suddenly I don't know how much people appreciate the power of the product I service business model. I don't know if you've had anyone else on this show that has talked about it. But in terms of like time to impact and like that the whole concept of like being agile and moving quickly and breaking stuff and figuring out what works, I think the you know productize consulting or productized service whatever you want to call it, may be the best way to go to market quickly, see if there's a need and the traction and you can solve the problem and start making pretty decent money. So, we went from like an idea to our first customer in about three weeks and we were doing like $5,000 of MOR within the first couple of months.

07:37

Ramesh: That's incredible. Actually, that is the whole purpose of my agile an entrepreneur podcast is about making things quicker. You break and then learn and then iterate and keep moving.

07:48

Craig: Yeah, yeah I mean it's like anything that, if you can provide a service, find people that have the problem and you know solve the problem entirely for them, soup-to-nuts where they don't have to do anything is I think like the best business model out there. And you can pivot from there, you can pivot into SAS or you can pivot into consulting or courses or whatever. But all of those things take a ton of time. You know like a service business just doesn't take that much time.

08:16

Ramesh: Yeah very true. So, looking at the other aspects of starting a business, financing you know did you reach out for other external sources for money or did you put your own funds?

08:30

Craig: Yeah, we did. I used my own funds. But it really wasn't very, I didn't need very much at all. I mean you think about to this day podcast motor runs on a single WordPress site with a couple of plugins to handle things like payments. We pay for Dropbox. We pay a lot for Dropbox actually. That’s our biggest expense, because we have tons of files in there at this point. But that's it, so you're like all in where our infrastructure costs are a couple hundred dollars a month and it was less than that when we started. Because we're a little more bare-bones and you can start with just yeah a crappy shared hosting WordPress site and a couple of plugins let you accept payments through stripe and that's all you need and then you can scale up and get fancier from there. But yeah, the idea of like needing funding and stuff like that, now that I'm in a SAS world as well with Castos, I could get that. Like if you really really really want to go mm-hmm all out with a SAS business, just the time and resources that it needs to get like to escape velocity is where things like venture capital come in and make more sense. Just because to build a really good software product these days takes, you might not like this, it takes a year yeah and a ton of people hours and to do that or finance that yourself is risky and scary and I think for some people things like venture capital or some of these alternative financing sources out there makes sense. But for a product I service business, I mean you can do it in a day. I have a buddy Justin McGill from lead fuse, lead fuse is a SAS application now. But it started as a product I service and he had this like 24 hour challenge to go from the idea to having the website done and taking payments and stuff and he did it in 24 hours and so that's just the power of like the product and service model.

10:26

Ramesh: Well that is phenomenal. So yeah actually that's, I think these times are getting shorter with each of the business models. So, from a customer pipeline perspective, do you actively bill your prospect pipeline? How does that work?

10:44

Craig: Yeah so, we are, we're fortunate to have a fair amount of inbound inquiries to the business and so we rely on that a fair amount to grow and maintain our customer base. We also used some paid acquisition strategies to kind of supplement that. But I would say it's more like 70% organic inquiries and 30% paid at this point.

11:10

Ramesh: Okay and then now from a value proposition perspective and how we are differentiating yourself from other competitors, what are your thoughts on that?

11:22

Craig: Yeah this is definitely gotten harder in the last couple of years. I think there's a lot of people that have seen, honestly seen businesses like ours. Because I'm pretty vocal and open about what our business does and how it's doing and you know people probably came in and said, well geez if it doesn't take a lot of time or money, which is fine and so it's taken a bit too to stand out from the crowd now and where we try to sit is to say, we're not the cheapest, we are not the fastest, but we are the best and we're the easiest to work with for you as a business person and so that instantly stratifies out you know tire kickers and people that are just looking for a great deal. Because we charge yeah, I think a very fair amount, but for a really high-quality product that we deliver, we charge like a fair amount. But to you know somebody who has a podcast just talking about like their favorite sports team, that doesn't have sponsors or there's not a business behind it, they would look at you know $500 a month and say you're crazy and that's appropriate. Because they're not like our ideal customer and we're not their ideal solution. So we kind of say like setting price properly automatically kind of eliminates a bunch of bad leads for us and then from there really just try to hone our messaging and the product that we deliver to kind of align with the fact that we are like a pretty premium solution and that's meant for a very like b2b type relationship.

12:59

Ramesh: Yeah that's true. I mean if they don't have a business behind it, probably they can do it themselves and yeah so, they'll price themselves out. Which is probably the right thing for you. In some ways you're firing the bad customers without even getting them on and then having to manage in a different way.

13:16

Craig: Yeah.

13:17

Ramesh: So, on your journey Craig what are the challenges you faced and then how you overcame those challenges?

13:26

Craig: Yeah, I think you know specific to scaling up podcast motor as a privatized service, the most difficult thing was to offload all of the work from my plate. Because at first it was just me. You know I was support and I was the audio editor and I was the show note writer and I posted things to know WordPress. And bit by bit we took and hired people for all of those different roles and that’s the hard part I think of like transitioning the scope and the workflow of a productized service. If you start out doing it all at yourself, it’s great. Because then you know every nook and cranny of the business. The hard part is then you have to go hire and train and create processes and procedures for all of those people to do it, without all of the knowledge you have. Because you're never going to transfer all of the knowledge in your head to anybody else. So, you have to say like we're going to do it this this and this way and this has to be something that basically anyone can follow and so I struggled a lot with that. Because I’m, hate to admit it, I'm not an organized person. So, to get like reall organized about every particular detail is just against my nature. So as by far the hardest thing.

14:48

Ramesh: I mean specially to overcome those challenges you need innate motivation and inspiration. So, what was driving you? Is yourself driving or some other external books or some other people gave you the motivation?

15:04

Craig: Yeah, I think it was really two things. One was I wanted to quit my job and I knew that to quit my job like the business had to get to a certain point to provide for myself and my family. Because I'm not you know this 20-year-old person that goes wants to go live in Bali or something like that. Life and like we you know we need kind of decent money to live on. But the other thing was kind of a serendipitous I guess is that we were growing, and it was a pretty successful business. Almost in spite of me being unorganized and stuff. So, like we had customers coming in and I had to figure it out. Because I didn't want to let my customers down and you know we figured it out. But it was a bit forced in that way that I didn't have an option to say like oh I’ll just offload this when I get a chance. It was like you know we have 15 customers now, can't possibly do all this myself. You know we need product you know different teams on you know groups on the team and delegation and workflow and project management, stuff like that. So, it was a little bit by necessity.

16:12

Ramesh: Okay so I mean you talked about the WordPress and the tools to manage the WordPress and that business aspect of it. But how you as a businessperson, what other tools do you use to manage your life and then maybe work-life balance and manage the business?

16:31

Craig: Yeah, I think, so I’ll take work/life balance first. Because I think it's an interesting concept. I don't, this may be controversial. I know there's some people that to say the same thing. I don't believe in work-life balance as an entrepreneur. Especially a remote online business entrepreneur where you literally can work anywhere. I think you have to just accept the fact that unless you are very diligent about it, your kind of just working all the time and I'm okay with that and my family is okay with that. It's currently 7:50 on a Friday night and we're podcasting and it's cool. My kids are downstairs watching a movie with my wife and I'm up here podcasting with you, which is awesome. Because like this afternoon we went and bought my kids a trampoline and I spent two hours putting the trampoline together. So, it's like if you take a little bit from here you got to give it there and so we have come to be peaceful with that lack of balance.

17:35

Ramesh: That’s is very refreshing Craig.

17:37

Craig: But balance in a way right. I mean it's we make the balance but know that you can't, you can never say like I'm going to work from 9:00 to 4:00 today. Because it's just not feasible, for me at least. Because I'm unorganized or whatever. But I just say I'm going to work like 35 hours this week, I don't really know when it's going to be, but I'm going to get it done and it might be at nights. It might be early in the morning and it might be just during the week like regular work hours like some people. But I don't try to force work-life balance a lot. I just got to do the work when I can and need to and then the life is there around it. So that's like the work-life balance stuff and as far as you know tools and best practices, I’ll talk about two books that I’ve read that had a really big impact on me. One is called profit first, by Mike Michalowicz. But just Google profit first on Amazon or you know entry on Amazon it's the first one to come up. It's absolutely fantastic and the idea is basically like pay yourself first, before you pay your business and take the profit first basically is to say like if you wait for your business to pay you, it will never pay you and streaming podcast motor was a successful business for years before I took any money out of it and that's my fault. Because I didn't say you know like what is Dave Ramsey says like tell your money what to do, don't let you know don't do it the other way around and this is kind of the same type of deal is like and if you make ten thousand dollars, you take five thousand dollars out of that or whatever that number is. So it's probably the first absolution every entrepreneur, every business owner should read it and the other is Traction by Gino Wickman and it is you know he kind of espouses this entrepreneurs operating system idea and is basically like this is how you should run a business and it's not a lot of fluff, it's a really dense book. It's not something you'll read in a day or a week even. But it's the kind of book where like you read a chapter and you set it down and you print the worksheets and you do them and then you implement it and then you read the next chapter and you print out the worksheets and you implement at your business and it's really you know, he's been a business owner, now he's been a consultant for a long time and he knows how kind of small and medium-sized growing businesses should run and it's helped us a lot in how we communicate and set goals and have meetings and all this kind of stuff, it just really, I say it makes me a very grown-up business owner. Because it really is, it runs a business like a business should be run and I think a lot of us entrepreneurs think that, oh man I'm an entrepreneur, I'm going to wear flip-flops and never have meetings and that's cool if you want to have you know kind of a lifestyle business. Which is perfectly fine. But if you want to have like a high growth business, you got to get everybody on the same page, thinking the same way, going towards the same goal and to do that you have to have like effective and efficient communication and this book is really that's what it's all about.

20:52

Ramesh: Well that's great. I have not come across either one of the books. I know about the profit first, only thing that I’ve not read it. Traction is something I need to look at it. Thank You Craig. So, if you were to go back and look at your journey, any things that you think you should have done differently as a piece of advice?

21:12

Craig: Yeah you know I think everyone wants to say oh I would a you know not gone to college and started doing this earlier and stuff, but I think that for me at least a lot of the pain that I saw of like working in the corporate world has formed Who I am today. I think working in the corporate world for a period of time is super helpful for entrepreneurs. Because you can take the best parts of your corporate life and implement them into your business as an entrepreneur. Because if you've never had a quote real job do you just don't know some of the things that you probably should be doing. So, I don't want to say like I wouldn't, I would just you know go right out of high school and start doing this earlier. Maybe I would have started doing this earlier, but I mean I think that it just got accessible and easy in the last five or ten years, certainly five years. Before there I mean there wasn't podcasts and there weren't blogs that we are talking about this a lot and Amazon FBA didn't exist and all kind of stuff where people are making these fantastic businesses now, this didn't exist certainly 10 years ago. The iPhone didn't exist 10 years ago. So, like I think to say I would have started this when I was 18 is kind of folly.

22:28

Ramesh: That's cool Craig. So, one of the last questions is me as an entrepreneur I want to start a business or I have a business, but I want to grow it, so what tips can you offer me? First let's start with somebody wanting to start a business. So, what are going to tell me that I should focus on?

22:48

Craig: Yeah so, I think that, I'm very biased. But I think that looking at the productized service business model as the only type of model that you'll adopt, it is a healthy way to restrict your thinking. Because like before I found podcast motor, I was into all sorts of different stuff and it's just super distracting as you listen you go listen to you know podcasts like this and you hear me on talking about product a service and you hear someone else talking about starting SAS business here, someone else talking about running course, someone else talking about Amazon FBA and you're like, I can do any of those. That's what I did for like a year and that's just like you're just going to beat your head against the wall for a year if you do that. So, I would say productized service business model is extremely fast and effective and you can make a good amount of money by yourself really really quickly. So I'd say stick to the project a service business model and then find an area of the business world that you're knowledgeable in and try to find a service that you can provide by yourself to people and just go up to that and figure out how to make that work and for people that have a business that are looking to scale it, I think it's probably like this the old salesperson in me is that like more money basically solves all of your problems. It's a little like arrogant to say maybe, but like it really does. Like if there's a problem in your business, it can be solved with more money or more people or more automation or whatever. The only headaches I’ve had with business is when business is down, and I think you know I can't provide for my family and that's really stressful. But as long as we have enough money, everything else is pretty much secondary. I agree not how to get more businesses all you need to do really.

24:43

Ramesh: Not only that if you're starting and always have more money that you think you need to actually you know have the business. So fantastic Craig, oh this is a phenomenal advice, very actionable, very practical. I cannot emphasize how much I agree with you on the productized services. The service itself can kill you in terms of the number of hours you put in. But a productized service, you can manage it. Hey Craig, thank you very much, good luck with your business and so now you can join the family and watching the movie.

25:16

Craig: Awesome, thanks very much I appreciate it.