Transcript of He Built a Startup That Books 5% of All Podcast Interviews—With No Code. | Ep. 275 with Parker Olson Co-Founder of Podpitch

Parker, man, it's good to have you today because you and I had a really fun conversation last time. This time we started off with dreams and how you're taking magnesium now and your dreams have just been crazy off the wall. You gave me one. It sounded like a movie. But I think something that I'm really interested to talk with you is, I've always dreamt about creating an app, creating software, it always failed. At the same time, I use your app and software pod pitch on a daily basis. I wanted to see from you the whole entire process as if somebody like myself, I want to solve a problem, I know a software I want to build, but I don't know the zero to 100, I'm confused, I don't know what to do. I'd love to go through with you this whole process. Can you go back to the beginning stage of how did you come up with the problem to solve?

Absolutely, yeah. So the first place I think is worthwhile starting is a lot of people want to start with the end in mind, right? How can I get to $100 million? The reality is, I think up front, being curious is stage number one. So Rewind, two, three years ago, was working with a VA at the time, and she was doing influencer outreach for us. And all of a sudden, she was able to reach custom messaging to influencers on TikTok at like 3 or four hundred, like an hour. And I was like, What are you doing? And she's like, Oh, I found this cool new tool. It's called Bardeen. It's a web scraping tool. It allows me to basically code it without actually coding. It's a code-free tool where it scrapes all the data off of TikTok off of search results, and it pulls it into the spreadsheet, and I can super quickly automate the outreach. And I'm like, Damn, that's super cool. And around that same time, I had been invited on some podcasts and it had brought some interesting traction to my old company that I used to run. It's called Forage. And some people had listened to it and reached out and wanted to carry...

It was a food product in their grocery stores. And so in my mind, my problem statement was like, Okay, cool. I want to go on more podcasts. And how can I do that? I was going the traditional route that a lot of people still do today, which is I was manually looking up podcasts. I was trying to find them, trying to find their content information, listen to a bit of an episode, and send an email. I'm like, damn, this sucks. I'm not going to do this for a long time. I can guarantee that. And then I was just hanging out in this other tool that I was loving. I was just like, I want to dig into this other tool. It feels like there's something really powerful here. How could I use it to perform a fun project that would be meaningful for our business? And what I thought about was, why can't I use this to help pull in a bunch of information about relevant podcasts and then help me scale the research, identification, and outreach process to these podcasts? I think early on, it was just this natural curious intuition that, whoa, this tool could be really powerful.

What's the current problem I have today that this could help solve? And part of it was just playing around. I would just get on there and play around and mess around in this tool. It was called Bardeen, still around, so it works really well. I always think step number one is figure out and go out and play with some of these code-free tools Another great tool that I think is a lovely example is Clay. Clay is just like, there's so much power there. You can pull in data sources, you can transform data sources with LLMs really easily, and you can create output, and it's all code-free. So does that help set the scene in terms of... I'm thinking day one, if you want to build a software, get onto some of these tools that are code-free and can help transform data and create an output that can potentially solve a problem.

Yeah. I When I built some softwares before, I think the problem, looking back, was I was trying to solve a problem that I didn't really have. So I didn't necessarily... I wasn't so bought into it because I wouldn't use it myself. And I was more replicating what I knew was on the market. I worked with something and I knew, okay, I'm going to replicate this because it came out first. I'm going to be second to market, but I never would even use it. And then a lot of issues came because it was first, I didn't anticipate. I love your idea of you build something that you use, and then if you use it, then you know other people will definitely have the same problem and use it, too. You built it. I love what you're saying around, you can create an MVP now without any knowledge, which is insane. It's insanity, how the times we're living in. You build this app, you get this data, you put it together. Then how do you actually get traction? Because I think that's the other piece that people are like, Okay, I build something, but it's not easy to get significant traction.

Totally, yeah. Just one last point on that, and then we'll go to traction. I also think a lot of people who are non-technical get caught up and like to spend time on the visual component or the user interface or the front-end component. And it's like, Oh, I'm going to build wireframes in Claude. And that's all great. That can be helpful. But I would say really focus on getting a concrete, something that's actually being created or happening. My general mental framework is transforming data to create an output that has value to some audience. Now, to your point, actually gaining traction, way harder than everybody thinks. Everybody thinks, Oh, I'm going to build a great product, and then I'm just going to sell it, and then I'm going to be a millionaire. The reality is great companies die every single day because they can't find customers and or communicate to potential customers in a really effective way and put together a good offer or a good price that makes it easy for a customer to say yes. And growth and demand generation is really challenging. This took us about, man, six months to even crack. And what I'll say is, and I come back to this, if I was going to start another company tomorrow, I would start here, honestly, is find the person who's willing to actually give you money for whatever you're building.

And And of course, that sounds somewhat intuitive, but the important part here is give you money. Like, actually exchange dollars, right? It's very easy for somebody to say, Oh, this tool is really cool. Great job. Wow. Yeah, this would solve a lot of our problems. Wow. Yes, this is so great. But if they're not giving you money, then it's really not great. And so what I used to do, and I think this is a super easy playbook, I actually I met a woman who's working on a software here locally in Brooklyn at a party, and she's running this playbook right which I'm pretending is awesome, is, okay, let's say you think you've built something that creates value or solves a problem, but you don't know how to find people, you don't know how to sell it. If I were to go back again, I would run the same playbook. I would first theorize, okay, who has this problem? Where does this problem exist? And then I would go on to LinkedIn and I would spend 50 to 80 bucks a month to create a LinkedIn outreach automation to this audience and say, Hey, I think I solved this problem.

I have no experience. Do you have 10 minutes for feedback? And I like to play the card of being like, I'm helpless. I don't know, but I think I can solve your problem. People like to help other people. And we ran that. And I was getting on the phone with people in public relations who we thought was maybe our primary use case of our tool. I'd maybe get on the phone with 5-10 people in PR a week. And I was really not there to sell, but of course, you're there to sell. It's a fine line. And what I would show them is I would show them the product and what we're building and how it looks and what it does. And they're like, Yeah, wow, that solves a lot of... That solves a big problem for us. Doing media outreach is really time consuming and challenging, and finding podcasts is hard. And I'm like, Okay, cool. Awesome. And what we realized is over time for three months, everybody was giving great feedback, but nobody was like, I want to pay for this right now. And so we changed our strategy where what we would do is I would tell people, I'd be like, Look, at the end of this call, I'm going to ask you an uncomfortable conversation.

And I would lead with that, and they're like, Oh, okay. And we go through it and they'd be like, Wow, this is so cool. And I'd be like, Okay, so I have to ask, for the sake of our company, why will you not pay for this right now? $10. Why wouldn't you give me $10 for this right now? I could accept your money over this phone. And tell me why. And that's where people are like, oh, and that's where they give you the real feedback. They're like, I can't spend money on anything. That's my boss's decision. Or they're like, Oh, well, we actually have this other tool. It already does the same thing, but your tool could be better. But teaching my team the tool would be really painful. We're really busy. And you're like, Okay, so it's not that relevant, right? Or in our case, which I think is a natural progression, it finally got to the point where the woman was like, I would give you money right now if it could do this one additional other thing. And in my mind, we had already built that. We just weren't showing it because all the positive feedback we were getting wasn't about that little small other thing.

And when we finally added that small little thing in, and literally what happened, I said, Okay, I'm going to come back on the phone with you in three hours. Give me three hours. Went back, put it together, came back on the phone, showed her that it worked. And she goes, here, pulls out her credit card. And she paid us on the spot. And that was the product that ended up scaling. And that was the first unlock where we're like, this is actually something that this type of customer is willing to give us money for. But I think that subtlety of like, Oh, let me get feedback. Everybody says it's great, which means it's going to sell is not the reality. Everybody's nice. Everybody gives good feedback. Once you can find people who are really actually willing to give you a dollar or $2 or real money, that's how you know you're on to something.

That's how we got started, if you think of you and I, because I was like, Hey, I got this email and it says this one and you're like, Oh, wow. Okay, let me fix that. And you're like, Okay, fixed. But you bring up something really interesting, many things, something I want to go back to because this happened to me, too, is originally I thought I was going to be serving more of a certain B2C customer. But when I found out that I can actually help businesses who are serving those people, it actually allowed me to lead Gen at basically almost a free rate because they were referring me to other people, referring me to other people. Also, I barely had to do any sales because I knew they needed it, where if I have to sell direct to B2C, I have to do a lot of the selling. The process is longer, even though our margin would be higher, but still in the end, they're going to churn faster. When I found, okay, I can actually help agencies, that was an unlock for us in terms of a significant growth growth trajectory while at the same time, the slower the B2C style.

I can totally see that. The other part of, like you're saying, is somebody willing to give you money? Because people are very positive on their phone. Like you said, people never want to tell you the truth. I don't know if they want to hurt your feelings or what, but I like the digging. That's like an old... That reminds me old-school sales training tactics right there where it's like the overcoming objections. If they say this, what is Zig Zigler, it was like, everyone says no. It was like, this no means this, this no means that. I forget the quote. I butchered it. But I think that I can totally relate to those things. I would imagine most apps or software, they die because of that, because they're not really focused on getting the money, which if you don't have any money or you just do it for free, how long? Unless you're raising hundreds of millions and eventually you'll run out of money. It sounds like you unlocked it, you started getting revenue, you figured out what the people really want, and then what?

Yes. Then it's pricing and scale. How do you attract this audience at scale? Pricing is really challenging. Pricing is still something we mess around with and think about all the time because it's one of those things where it's a lot of trial and error. You could think You could think about cost plus pricing. You could think about competitor-based pricing. You could think about value-creation-based pricing. There's pros and cons to all them. We've gone down a bit of a value-based pricing ethos. The reality is, you just have to try things. It's going to be super messy early, but the important thing is getting money in the door. And so what we used to do is we'd be like, Okay, cool. We're going to sell it. Well, initially off the bat, we knew that, Okay, we want to build a business model that That is reoccurring. By design, reoccurring business models are more valuable than transactional business models. And so that was a non-negotiable. The other non-negotiable is we wanted it to be a really fast sales cycle because, again, it's like, Look, if this is a 10-week sales cycle, we're not getting feedback until 10 weeks from now.

And so how do we sell something where somebody could make a decision really quickly? Again, part of it was we need to eat and live. But the other part of it is you get a lot of feedback data really fast. So we are like, okay, we need to craft an offer that is reoccurring. And so we did subscription-based pricing. And we started with, okay, we'll do maybe an intro price. And then we tested different price points. And on calls, we would literally Somebody would be sold. They'd be like, Cool, how much is this? And that's after you sold it. You know this type of person is willing to buy. This is a real problem they have. And it's just like, Cool, it's 2. 99 a month. It's 3. 99 a month. It's 5. 99 a month. It's 6. 99 a month. And you start to get a sense of where... You start to get a gage of where most people are landing. And that, I think, is a really good initial step. I think the step two of that, which I don't think we've done an excellent job at, and it's something we're working on right now, is thinking about tier pricing for the different type of customer.

Our pricing opts out certain smaller types of customers because it's too expensive for them. And then really big customers, they're like, Oh, this is nothing. And so in reality, paying attention to that over time and setting up tiers where it's like, Okay, you can get more coverage on your customer base while providing specifically to their needs, I think is that next step. But it's super trial and error off the bat and understanding, okay, what's scalable, what actually builds a good business model. So that's pricing. It's a huge challenge for everyone. There is no magic bullet. The second component is, how do you actually grow? How do you actually reach the audience? And for us, it's just like, okay, where does our audience hang out? And a lot of it, again, is trial and But what we found early on is we tried advertising, we tried doing different outreach methods. And then we partnered with a Substack newsletter that was to PR agencies. It was pretty small. They have like Maybe not even, like 500 followers. And we placed one advertisement in there and we booked 75 demos in three days. And we were like, holy shit.

Okay, clearly the messaging is hitting on a real pain point And the audience is clearly right here. And that was the start for us. But we had to do a lot of discovery and trying different things to find that type of intro or that type of spark.

So how many people do you have using it now?

I think we have over 5,000 active users. Over 5,000 active users. We're responsible for about anywhere from 4-5% of all English-speaking podcast interviews that get booked every week. Those are some of the high-level stats.

Where do you want Where do you want to take this? Like you said in the beginning, many people are like, I want to build this app because I want to be a billionaire. We already know, probably not going to happen. But where do you see the future of this? Do you want to be 35% of all podcasts?

Yeah, I mean, look, I don't know. I think, yeah, it's like podcast, we love to continue to be focused. At this point, it's like, cool, we know who our customers, we'd love to continue solving problems for them and building solutions. And that also looks outside of the podcast realm. It looks at the media realm as a whole. I think really building more into this alternative media worlds, but broad media worlds as a whole. Because our problem that we're solving for podcasts, this media outreach process, exists in other channels as well. We've built a lot of infrastructure to support that. Why not solve that problem in adjacent categories as well, where our exact same customer has that exact same problem?

I like it's like this. You solve one problem and you be I am good at solving that one problem. Then once you get those people, you realize the other problems that they have that are aligned with what you're doing. Then you bring one in, you bring one in. I think sometimes I've seen people do 10 things at one time, and it's like, How do you sell all that? It's complicated. Confused minds don't buy. The other thing that my wife always told me, my wife always told me was, Be the medicine, not the supplement. I always thought-Oh, I love that.

Yeah, pain pill, not vitamin. There's a few frameworks that I hold very dearly. That was one early on. I was like, look, we cannot build a vitamin, and maybe to break it down for people. Another framework I really like, and this is from an entrepreneurship class at an undergrad, is most successful businesses operate in three realms. They either solve jobs, or remedy pain, or or create a gain. When we think across all three of those, solving a job that somebody has to complete is inherently valuable for them because they have to do it no matter what. At the end of the day, that has to get ticked. If you can solve that job really well for them, it's really valuable. Remedying a pain. Somebody is in a lot of pain. They have a horrible backache. Well, if you give them a pill and you say, Wow, you take this pill, you're going to have no pain. Super valuable. People hate pain. They'll do anything to get rid of pain. And then you have gains. Creating a gain can be valuable. Oh, I want to be hydrated right now. Okay, I could go buy some electrolyte salts.

But that is inherently a supplement, and that is not something where if I have a pain or a job to do, is going to be a priority. It's the deprioritized quadrant. Now, if you can do all three of those things, it's like fucking magic. But when thinking about the framing of what type of solution does our product provide, is it a supplement, which is the gain, or is it a pain pill, which is this job and pain concept? You definitely do not want to build a company around a vitamin. You do not want to do that.

It reminds me of those old-school copy people, like move people away from pain, don't move people to pleasure. Because if you really want to close, you got to focus on moving people away from pain because that's really what everybody wants. What is one of the craziest or stand-out stories during your whole life of entrepreneurship? Was there a moment where it was like, I'm losing everything. The high is like, I just closed a million dollar deal. And then the next five minutes, I just lost a $2 million dollar deal. What are those moments, this standout moment in your life?

Yeah, I mean, man, I feel like I've blacked them out. Probably at a company... Yeah, probably at a company. Okay, I have a few ones. So early on, I built a Twitter account to like, 700 50,000 followers. And one day it got hacked and I lost access to it for two months and then was able to regain access through this complicated Twitter process. But I remember waking up that morning and being like, oh, my God, somebody hacked. And I thought that was going to make my life. I thought my life was made. So that was maybe one. And then the other one is for my last business, Forage, which was a health food startup. Again, it was a vitamin concept. Big learnings. Cpg is really hard. I So I lived out of a tent for two years in my backyard in Seattle, and I threw up my bed and we used the bedroom as our office, which was, I think, just awesome. But probably more notably, after that stint, I moved into a pop-up camper van, and I drove around the country for about a year, and I would stop at grocery headquarters and try and sell our product in.

And I remember one day, I was carrying a lot of product in the van, but it was really hot in the south. And one day, I dropped off a ton of samples to 60 locations of stores, and they were all spoiled, had gone literally bad and were smelt like throw up. And I remember my heart sinking. And then a week later, I was at a thrift store, I bought something, and I got bed bugs in the van from this thing I thrifted. And then I got wrongfully arrested for a felony three weeks later, and I was really low, you could say. I was really a dark place.

That's why I say, entrepreneurship is for the 1%. And it's not because everyone can do it, and I hope everyone can do it or does do it, because I want them to have the freedom. I want them to be able to do something meaningful without just being fired from your corporate job. But at the same time, it's a mental game that is like, every time I hear a story of this person was successful, I want to ask them, What percentage of time were you just scared, depressed, versus you got the exit or you got the whatever success, but what cost? How many relationships did you give? We've had so many billionaires on this show, and they're all divorced, and they always tell us the same thing. It always was at the cost of every relationship they ever had, whether it was their kids, their wife or husband, their spouse. It's great that you shared. I think it's always good for people to hear this. At the same time, we're going through an interesting era where AI is... For sure, AI is going to replace so many jobs. Amazon just laid 14,000 people up and even said it was partially, probably 90% due to AI.

I'm just guessing. And so these people, what are they going to do? These are people most likely making decent salaries that probably can't find the same thing very quickly at another job that's going to replace them. So I think people are going to listen to this, Parker. Parker Olson from Podpitch, co founder. People are going to listen to this, and they're going to be like, holy crap, I'm going to solve that problem because it's never been a better time to do it. And then I'm going to tell Parker about the problem I'm solving. And then I'm going to go and get pod pitch because I need to get on podcast and talk about it.

Well, just actually circling it back to the beginning, I heard this take that I really liked, which is like, there's this degrading of jobs and people who are smart. And there's a hypothesis that the explosion in solopreneurs is happening right now. People are going to be building these hyper niche, super specific softwares or companies that solve a very specific problem and live an excellent lifestyle. You don't have to build a $100 million company to win and be flexible and have a good income. You could build a $500,000 a year company and be the only employee and take home a salary of 300K and make your own hours and not work at all. That, I think, is going to be a really interesting reality for a lot of people and people who are willing and open-minded to continue to work with these tools and really see the value of them.

I think times have changed. Like you said, it used to be the only success was to do the big exit. In the US, other countries is not always the same. I know Asia, it's really about legacy. I know people that have been a part of their family business for 100 years. I don't even know anyone in the US that's been a part of a company I don't even know anyone's kids that want to take over a business. But yeah, it's like you got to sell the business, which means you got to raise a bunch of money and you got to do this. Then I know people that raise a bunch of money. It looks great, but they own 0. 01% and they exit and they make $10,000. They sold for $100 million. You're like, What the heck happened? I'm with you. Somebody told me a few years ago, a good friend of mine, after he exited, he was like, Look, I think what's going to happen is everyone's going to be on a freelance basis. Like you said, the solopreneur style. They're not going to want a job. They're not going to want to work 40, 50, 60 hours a week for one person.

They're going to take on multiple people. They're going to do different things. I think we're seeing that with younger people. They don't want to work. I don't know many people under the age of 30 that want to work 50 hours a week for one company. They know. They know it's not stable. They're seeing their parents, their older siblings getting fired, things changing. And also, I think we realized, like you said, happiness. What's the cost of the hustle? If you can be happy, you make good, decent money take home. But, Parker, this has been great. By the way, I started with CPG, so I know. When you started talking about it, I used to go to grocery stores and selling. People do not understand how hard-Don't start a CPG company. No. Inventory. Amazon, I have a story by Amazon that I can't even talk about. It was so bad. If people want to get in touch with you, Parker, they want to find out more about Podpitch, how can they do so?

Podpitch. Com or find me on LinkedIn. I'm probably I'm recently active on LinkedIn, or you can drop me an email, parker@podpitch. Com.

I got to say, I've used pretty much every single pitching. This is not just to plug or sell your software, but I've used pretty much every pitching software, and I have to say, Podpitch is by far the best I've seen, and it's pretty far ahead of any competitor that I've used. I've used pretty much all of them. We actually are... I think, how long have I been using now? Like a week? I think we've booked... I I think we booked five shows. I think we booked five shows. I think it's been a week, and we haven't even really figured out-Yeah, like dialed it in yet. Yeah, dialed in and all that. But man, thank you for today. I hope that we inspire other people to go out there, start something, and build something, and change the future, man.

Yeah, let's do it, brother. It's good to chat. And thanks for the sleep supplement recommendation, as always. Good to see you.

I know, right? I don't want to say their name because they don't sponsor us anymore. But try some Magnesium. If you're having a hard time sleeping, there's some good Magnesium out there. But Barca, this is great. Thanks for joining today. See you.