#18 - From Podcasting to A Tool for Podcasters
Tiago Ferreira - Co-Founder of Podsqueeze
I got a chance to meet with Tiago on Twitter and his story immediately affected me. This is a genuine story that I totally want to see from other software developers and builders around.
He had a podcast where he hosted other bootstrappers and because of the amount he earned in a month which is like almost 600$, he decided to make a bold move and focus on tools that he might generate more.
With his co-founder, they started to try new products and found one which made them excited. And this is the product that solved the problem of Tiago once he was doing podcasts.
Amazing interview that everyone should take a glance as it has parts for everyone.
Updates From My Side:
Some of you may remember that I have 8+ years of experience that I helped two companies to reach their first $1M ARR.
And now, I plan to share what I learned with a bootcamp mainly for early-stage SaaS companies.
It will include sessions related to positioning, high qualified lead generation and sales process optimization.
If it grabs your attention, let me know and send me a message through LinkedIn or email. So, I can give more details.
So Tiago, thanks for accepting my, let's say request on Twitter. Actually, I have been following your journey for a while and, uh, you did a great thing with that podcasting tool and you had also a community in that space because you have been podcasting today.
I would like to get more details about your background first. How did you start that? How did you start the community?
Tiago:
So I started my journey as an entrepreneur about two years and a half ago. So I am a software engineer.
I was working for multiple companies. I worked for a startup. I worked for a bigger company. But I think I've always been an entrepreneur at heart and I've always tried building my own projects. And I always thought, okay, what if I would go full time? Is that even a possibility? Is this a real profession?
So, more or less during COVID times. I decided to take the leap. So I left my nine to five job that was paying well to basically focus 100 percent on my projects. So, there was kind of the path. And then since then I've been building different things and learning a lot about entrepreneurship, just try to figure out, you know, how can I sustain this for the rest of my life?
At that time, I guess, there wasn't that AI hype, what type of companies you tried?
Tiago:
Two years and a half ago, there was other hypes, I guess, not so positive ones in my opinion, like the NFT hype and then crypto and stuff like that.
But I didn't start anything with that. Fortunately, it's been kind of a chain of events. So I started, I was working in a nap for climate change to help people fight climate change called change it. But then at the same time, when I went full full time entrepreneur, I was not making any money, obviously.
So I got a lot of anxiety and a lot of stress. It was like, what have I done? So I decided to start my own podcast as a kind of therapy for myself and a way for me to narrate my own journey and take notes. And since then, it's been a succession of events that led to Pod Squeeze, which is quite funny, but back then I didn't know.
So I started my podcast named Wanna Be Entrepreneur which is about bootstrapping a company and I started just recording first to my phone. Then I kind of upgraded my setup and because of the podcast, because I got some people interested in that, I decided to start this community, as a way to sustain the podcast. So I thought, okay, if you're paying.
And I have my own journey where I narrate, I am really open about everything that's going on with me, both in the business and mentally.
And then I also interview other bootstrappers. I interviewed more than 60 different bootstrappers. Some of them are making a lot of money. Some of them are not, but I wanted to really understand what was really like to, to bootstrap a company like this and in this way without the VC.
So without the VC part, like, is this really possible? Because of that, I created this community and this community became a product of its own because people really enjoyed it. So I decided to start charging for to join the community. And, it grew up to, I think $600 MRR. And I was really invested in that.
But then I kind of realized that yeah, the growth was not sustaining my lifestyle. Of course, 600 is not, it's far from being. So then I decided, okay, it was a hard decision, probably one of the hardest decisions of my professional career which was okay, I need to drop the community and start over after two years of failing.
I still haven't done it, but I still, I need to start over and start you know exploring other projects.
And after two years you decided to focus on Podsqueeze, right? I guess you build Podsqueeze after the AI thing. And I guess from your Twitter, it's like four or six months.
Please let me know if I am mistaken. And, I guess it's going well at the moment. You have a co founder and your competitors also started to run ads for your name on Google ads and other stuff. So how's it going? And how did you start focusing on pod squeeze and how did it start?
Tiago:
So podsqueeze started, because I met this guy who is also an entrepreneur for more like more than 10 years.
And I have been helping him with his projects. He has been helping me with my projects, but we never actually worked together in something. But he is more like design background, marketing background. And I'm more from tech side. And we said like, okay, let's join forces and let's try to build something.
And, Podsquueze is not the first product we built. We built something else. called Indie Lottery, like a product to help kind of a product hunt competitor. And, we decided, okay, we are going to give it. Maybe one, two weeks or maybe a month and let's see if it doesn't work, we kill it right away. We are not going to waste much time and we go to the next one.
And, now I really believe that this is the best way to start a bootstrap business. You just give it one, one month and you see if you have like some huge traction, something that you've never seen before. If you don't have distraction, kill it, start, start something new, until you get distraction.
Then we were kind of brainstorming and we're thinking, okay, what can we do? There's this, new technology is now called chat GPT. They have an API. What can we do with this? Because this is mind blowing. This is amazing. We were brainstorming. And because I have my podcast, I know that it's a pain to create show notes and descriptions and all the assets and repurposing the content.
It's super annoying. And I thought, okay, now with this technology. Maybe we can do something. Maybe you can save tons of time from this podcast because I would use it myself. And that's also, by the way, another lesson.
And, you know, as someone that loves building products, there's no easy way than building a product for yourself.
You know, solving your own problem. So I was solving my own problem. I pitched this idea together with other ideas to João and we decided to go with this one and in one week we built the first MVP. So it was just one week build it. And then every week we were analyzing and saying, okay, do we want to continue?
So every week we would reach the end of the week and say, does it make sense to continue? Okay. It does give it one more week. So first week we build it. We shared it with a few friends and they said it was interesting. And some of them were quite excited about it. So in the next week we decided to build the monetization.
So stripe integration. So in two weeks we built something that people could actually buy and use and then relaunch it.
And when did you launch it?
Tiago:
We launched it at the end of February, so it's going to be a year soon. So it was the end of February, beginning of March is when we actually launched the product.
And now, you have been generating 14K MRR. As far as I see on Twitter. And how did you reach that number, Tiago? I know many companies like three years, four years, not in that space.
Some of them are VC backed. Some of them are bootstrapping. So what did you do differently? Or is this something related to AI? I mean, how is your opinions regarding to that?
Tiago:
My opinion, and also based on the people I've interviewed on my podcast is that most the products that have a lot of success, most of them have this kind of traction, right from the start.
So that's why I recommend everyone to try to find something like this. If you want to go full time with your indie career. It's really important to understand that your biggest asset is not money. It's time. So every bet you make, let's say spending six months to a year in one project, just to make sure if it works, if it eventually pay the bills, it's one year that you're spending of your life, right?
And if it doesn't work, then you have to start all over. And if you give, how many years do you have to actually start something, right? So it's much better to do smaller bets, right? Like a month. So in a year you have 12 months. So 12 different products that you can get, that you can try. So my, and of course that there's no one truth, right?
So you always need to adapt to your market, to your personality, to your everything. But what I recommend everyone is. Try something until you get distraction. You need to share it and people must be excited. They must be throwing their passwords at you, throwing their money at you, throwing their passwords and saying like, okay, let's fix it.
Because that's what we found at first. When we first launched it, funny enough, we didn't get a paid customers in the first week right away. We got one. But we had a lot of people excited. They were like, this is not working and they would stay with us. In the chats and we're like, because they really wanted it to work.
So most other products, they would just, okay, not working. I will just close it but not with this product. They were really excited. They wanted us to fix it. And of course we had a lot of bugs, right? Tons of bugs, a lot of things that were not working, but they were patient.
And then we fixed a few critical bugs. We reduced a bit the prices because the prices were a bit too high. And from like the third week on. We started getting people coming to the web, customers. And then the growth. And of course that is also related to the AI trend because it was a new product and podcasters were amazed with this and now it's not the same, of course, because there's a lot of competitors and they already know, but we got this AI trend and we reached 5k MRR in about like three months.
And about six months we reached 10k MRR. So it's been a huge growth. And then we actually plateaued. So that’s the next challenge.
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Before sharing about your journey after 10K, I'm just wondering about, what did you do to reach 10K? You mentioned that it's something AI hype, but I guess you did something right there. Did you reach out to forums, Reddit, Twitter, or Outreach, anything that you might share?
Tiago:
Yeah, I'll tell you everything we did.
So basically when we first launched, Reddit and we launched on my Twitter base. I have like around 4, 000 followers. We tried to like spread everywhere. Just to get some initial traction and see if people would be interested. When we saw that they were interested, we started also doing email marketing.
So we found a bunch of emails from podcasters and we started like emailing them heavily and try to get them. And they were also very excited. So that worked really well, email marketing and still works really well for us. And of course, then a lot of word of mouth, people talking.
And then we did a product hunt launch that was really good. We got second place and that brought us a lot of traffic and a lot of customers.
And since then, for the following months until around September, it was just growth based on the email marketing, based on the trend that AI was generating and based on the product launch. So those were the only means of marketing.
Good to hear those. And once you reach plateau, you were telling your new marketing things at the moment. I also seen that you have been talking with some SEO guys. So you have new plans regarding the marketing as far as I understand. Am I correct?
Tiago:
Yeah, correct. So now looking back, we've made a huge mistake.
Which was, we thought that the product, the trend, the AI trend by its own would just catapult the product, the pod squeeze to, you know, whatever, a million ARR or something like, we were naive. We thought that the growth, because it was growing to just continue growing, but that was a huge mistake. So, we'd neglected more sustainable sources of marketing, right?
The product hunt launch is something you can only do once. Right. You cannot do it multiple times. So once you do it, you get those customers, that's it. Around September, we started our growth. We were still growing, but with a different momentum, it was much lower growth. So we decided to start investing in something else which was SEO.
We invested in SEO, but SEO takes some time to start kicking in. And we were a bit too late. So there was what I believe to be, it's my theory that those two or three months in the end of the year, where we stopped growing also because we were like transitioning from AI generated to like SEO and other means of marketing.
And here, let me say one thing that I've learned. One of the best investments we did was hiring someone to do an audit in SEO because we could have spent months figuring that out, but then we just pay, I think a thousand bucks, which seems like a lot, like a thousand bucks to an audit.
It seems like a lot, but if you think about it, instead of us spending three, four months, we just spend it once. And someone did that in a week and in a week we learned everything we needed to know about SEO. What should be our SEO strategy? We fixed this, fix the bugs in the website to make sure it was a engine friendly.
And, and we knew what was the strategy, like our keyword strategy, and then we hired someone as well to help us. And together with my co founder, Joao, we have been like writing two, three pieces of content every week. And, and now our SEO is growing which is really nice.
And you have been generating new customers from inbound content marketing, as far as I understand, right?
Tiago:
Yeah, SEO and cold outreach.
And you also have a co-founder, how did you distribute the shares?
Tiago:
We started this together and there's also something that is really helpful. We do share 50%. If you find a co-founder, you need to share a percentage. But you know, it’s amazing, right? Like he has skills that I don't have and he has done things that I would not be able to do.
So, it's a huge resource to have someone also to share the journey with and bounce ideas. And if you are sick or if you are on holiday, you know that someone else's cares as much, you know, for the business as you is taking care of that. So yes, I recommend.
I totally agree with this and oppose solo funding. So, any plans for the future? What would you like to achieve at the end of the day in terms of pod squeeze, what would you like to do?
Would you like to reach out all of the podcasters or would you like to also do something for YouTubers as well? What are your ideas or what are your future plans?
Tiago:
The mission for podsqueeze is to be an essential tool for podcasters. So when you think about podcasting, you think about, you need a host. You need the microphone and you need pod squeeze. That's basically what you need.
It's a growing market. It's growing every year, which is really exciting. So we just want to be the tool for everyone. At the moment we are mostly focusing on podcasting or on YouTube, where it's also YouTube podcasting. But we, we also offer possibility to create clips.
So if people want to repurpose their content, their video content into clips, they can also use pod squeeze. So it's natural that eventually some podcast, some YouTubers, I mean, we'll also be using our tool, but the main goal at the moment is to be the essential tool for podcasters.
The monetary goal for this year, which is quite high but it's $100.000 MRR, I know it's really hard, it's going to be really challenging, but that's kind of what we're fighting for.
It means how many subscribers?
Tiago:
To get there, we will need around 2000.
And at the moment we have around 500.
And I'm just wondering how is their engagement and also how is their retention rate, churn rate? For most of the AI products, the churn rate is like almost 30%. How is your churn rate per month?
Tiago:
Yeah, that's something that really worries us. But it's good to hear that we are not the only one. So we have around like 10 percent churn per month. Which we thought it was terrible because it's a lot.
It's around 10%, something that we have been fighting to reduce. And we do have some ideas on how to get there.
Levent:
I guess 10 percent is not bad by the way, because I also talked to other AI founders and one of them said it's 30 and the other one said it's 20. So yours is the lowest.
Anything that you would like to add?
Tiago:
Well, I think I said most of the things that I would advise a starting bootstrapper, but just to recap, if you're new, I would say try multiple projects. And until something gains attraction that you never seen before, don't be afraid of killing it.
Just try like a week or two weeks, give it or give it a month per project. Let's say if it doesn't work, kill it. Start something new. Fix your own problem. You need to be the first user because to build a great product, you need to understand if it's actually solving a problem and if you are, it's crucial.
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