037: Dan Radin - Making podcasting simple for the masses
Auxbus Founder Talks Spoken-Word Audio, Leadership, and Powerlifting
Dan Radin is building the future of audio creation at Auxbus. Never content to accept the challenges, roadblocks, and difficulties suffered by people who want to create and enjoy audio, Dan has devoted his entire career to enabling others to enjoy the magic only sound can deliver.
Dan created a podcast in 2017 while starting a drum company, and immediately discovered the fragmented state of difficult tools for podcasting, which was challenging to navigate for even a career audio technologist.
Dan founded Auxbus to create the missing end-to-end platform to guide audio novices through planning and creating podcasts, handling time-consuming production and distribution tasks to save them time.
Dan holds a Bachelor of Music degree in Music Business and Management from Berklee College of Music and an M.B.A. from Loyola Marymount University, half of which he completed as a visiting student at Fordham University.
Exclusively for you, Dan is offering 50% off the first 3 months of any Auxbus plan with promo code: gabe
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TRANSCRIPT
037_ Dan Radin - Making Podcasting Simple for the Masses
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[00:00:00] Hi and welcome. The Artful Podcast is an interview show where you'll get to know the people behind the creative brands we love. These open, casual, and candid conversations will shed a light on what it's really like to reach your true potential with joy, fulfillment, and freedom. Presented by Artful and hosted by Gabe Ratliff, an award-winning artist, entrepreneur, and coach. Are you ready to create your artful life? If so, then tune in, turn up, and listen hard.
[00:01:05] Dan, thank you so much for being on the episode. I'm so excited to have you here today. Great
[00:01:10] to be here, Gabe, thanks so much for the opportunity.
[00:01:12] Where is the best place to begin
[00:01:14] your story? Well, that's an interesting question. I don't think I've had it asked that way. I guess the best place to start my story is at age two and a half.
[00:01:23] And I wanna start there because there are notorious cassette tapes that have been lost to time of me as a two and a half year old tiny child singing show tunes in very high pitch, two and a half year old Dan Raden voice. And I think that was the first moment when my parents realized that this music and audio and sound thing was in me.
[00:01:43] You know, I was very precocious in terms of my level of ability to capture melodies quickly and learn words quickly. And I had a really special relationship early on with my, my dad's sister, my aunt, who is a professional flutist. And I think that I grew up around music. and it just was something that felt like me when I wasn't a super athletic kid and I wasn't the most intellectually advanced kid, you know, I was maybe smarter than average, but certainly not.
[00:02:13] Taking AP classes and, and going to Harvard. But music was something that always felt like home to me. And you go through middle school playing brass instruments, high school, playing percussion, and basically my entire teenage years being all about playing the drums. Music was just how I defined myself.
[00:02:30] And then getting into the business world, I really found that not just performing music and not just being around music, but making tools that enable people to make music was really, again, something that just felt like me, felt naturally and authentic like me. And that's, that's how my career got started.
[00:02:47] I was building tools and instruments for musicians, starting with Sennheiser, which is a German microphone, headphone, and wireless systems company that makes some of the world's best studio microphones. Moved on to a company called In Music, which. The parent for brands like Eliss, which I was the product manager for, making electronic drums and recording equipment and working on new types of music, making, like working with iPads and iPhones and things like that.
[00:03:15] And then later in my career, moving on to consumption of music and audio. First with a gaming peripherals company, steel series making headsets for gamers. And then most recently in my corporate career, working for one of the world's largest audio manufacturers, Harmon, which is now part of Samsung Harmon's, a house of brands with 35 different brands.
[00:03:36] So after I finished my corporate career with Harmon, I went to start a business of my own. And being a drummer, I had always wanted to contribute to musical instruments around drums. And I started looking around what opportunities could be available to me. And as I looked around, I didn't quite see the thing jumping out at me.
[00:03:55] So I started to think about how do I build a brand for myself as somebody who is. Respected and trusted and knowledgeable in drum equipment while I tried to figure out what I was gonna make. And one of the things that I started to do around building my brand in drums was a podcast about drum gear.
[00:04:11] Because going back all the way to the beginning, drums were one of the things that I really loved. And the art of percussion equipment, whether it is drums, whether it's symbols, whether it's percussion, or whether it's even just the hardware or the sticks or the cases. I was just totally enamored with all of the tools that drummers use to express themselves.
[00:04:32] And I knew that there was gonna be something if I just sort of talked to my network and talked to my friends in podcast form, and I'd never done a podcast before. . And what I found was I was thinking to myself, well, I spent my whole last 15 years developing audio technology. This will be easy. What I found was podcasting is not easy because there are lots of different tools and solutions out there that are either designed for professional engineers to use, so they're not simple and easy and guided.
[00:04:58] Or there are tools and solutions that only address a really small slice of making a podcast, whether it's things like post-processing, your audio or remote interviews, but nobody really seemed to be taking an all in one guided approach that not only made it all in one place where you could do one thing instead of having to use six or eight pieces of software, but also guided somebody through the experience of, what do I do next?
[00:05:27] I don't know what to do next, so I want the software to tell me. And that's really what birthed the idea for ox Buss, seeing that people need very simple guided. Intuitive tools and one of the stories I love to tell is with Under Armor we would get support emails. People would get headphones and after Christmas people get a lot of headphones For Christmas, we would get a spike in activity.
[00:05:52] And a lot of it was, I just got these headphones as a gift, how do I turn them on? And that was what led me to understanding the level of simplicity that regular people who are not audio insiders need. If podcasting is gonna become a mainstream medium, in the same way that Microsoft Word made it so that everybody could publish on their desktop with words, we needed to have something that makes it super, super easy and guided.
[00:06:18] And the right answer is there for you when you, before you to anticipate the question that you might have. So that's really what Ox Plus is about. It makes it easy for people who have no audio experience to plan, record automatically post produce things like music and putting segments together, and then instantly distribute.
[00:06:35] Professional quality podcasts with no audio experience required. I
[00:06:39] love everything that you're doing and I've shared that with you repeatedly, but I just, I absolutely ad adore where you're coming from with this service. I mean, obviously podcasting isn't going away. It's not a trend. .
[00:06:55] Mm-hmm. . Yeah, totally.
[00:06:56] I think that, for me, I had always wanted to start a business on my own, and I felt like I needed some apprenticeship, and that's the reason that I felt like I needed to spend a decade, 15 years working for other companies and getting my M mba. I felt like for me, business is about people, and part of getting the MBA was about being able to take care of the people that work for me.
[00:07:19] You know, whether it. Feeling confident them, their ability to feel confident that I understand the financials of the business, that I understand how not to get us in trouble legally. That's, that's really what grad school was about for me. But I think that the values that I tried to incorporate into the company were really what was behind the need to build the company of my own for many years.
[00:07:41] You know, I worked for small companies, large companies, privately held, private equity backed, publicly traded, and I found it very difficult to find the values, the sort of respect and support of the individual and the importance of integrity. It was hard to find some of those things in certain organizations that I've worked for.
[00:08:02] So in the end, those values of respecting the individual, extend not only to the people that I work with, but also the customers that we serve. And for. The reason that I've spent my entire career in audio is because I'm trying to make regular people have great audio experiences, whether that is making or consuming audio, and it's sort of that love of the customer, the, the desire to make their life better.
[00:08:28] That's really what drives everything that I've done throughout my career. I
[00:08:31] completely get that, especially coming from coaching clients around podcasting, you know, cuz a lot of the time you run into the tech gets in the way or mm-hmm. , you know, just the steps of, I, I just had a client launch a new show last week and it was extremely successful and so proud of him, and it's called the Prosperous Yoga Teacher and he's helping yoga teachers to uplevel their business.
[00:09:00] Nice. . I, you know, one of the things for him was just that when we got to the tech part, you know, and it was getting to the editing and the post work mm-hmm. . Yeah. He was just like, that's not my thing. , I'm, I'm focused on my business and my clients, and I just want to be, you know, hitting record doing the work.
[00:09:16] And that was one of the things I was talking about him with Ox Buss. I'm like, man, you gotta see this product. I've been just such an ambassador for you because I, I love this, this space that you've tapped into because it allows people to just get their voice out and to be heard, but to do it in a way that can work in their, in their workflow and not have to be this like arduous technical.
[00:09:40] Yeah. We've spent our lives in audio mm-hmm. , and, and then also having this background of video production, completely understanding how these steps work around producing. But a lot of people don't, you know, and especially a lot of people that are wanting to have a podcast, don't, and. This is something that I just think is just outstanding to be able to cater to that need, but to allow people to kind of understand the process at, like you said, with it being a guided situation, similar to, you know, akin to like Turbo TurboTax or something like that, where it's like, , this doesn't have to be hard.
[00:10:15] Just go through these steps. Yeah, and you can get
[00:10:18] this thing out. This is my first software project. If you think through my career, it's pretty heavily on hardware and where I built software, it was an accessory to the hardware. So for example, I did software that would allow you to load presets onto a musical instrument or software that would allow you to change the sound characteristic of a headphone or something like that.
[00:10:39] But it never was. The software was the product. And with Ox Buss, this was the first time that I really was building software as the product. And what I learned is, Everything in software is about user experience and user research because you're able to be so agile because you're able to test things in a really, really granular, fine, inexpensive and instant way.
[00:11:02] You really have to bake the voice of the customer and and what you learn about the customer into everything that you do. And I have a fantastic partner in the business, Megan Bas, who's our head of operations, and she has a master's in information architecture. And the first thing she said to me was, we need to do some user research so that we know that the problem.
[00:11:23] Problem we're solving are the problems that people have. And that was a different approach to product management than I had spent my career doing. And I'm really thankful that she pushed us in that direction because I'm constantly referring back to the research that we did. We talked to business people who were kind of our target audience, and in some cases they were people who currently were podcasting.
[00:11:43] In some cases, they were people who expressed that they wanted to start podcasting but hadn't for a particular reason, too expensive, too time consuming, too difficult. Or people who had podcasted but stopped. And doing that research really helped us understand and build the product for a customer that we really could identify in a really detailed, rich way.
[00:12:06] So as you're talking about removing tech barriers, administrative barriers, that's, that's the picture that we were able to paint for ourselves, but only because we talked to lots and lots of people who were in our target audience. And that really was something that, it, it was not my natural way of, of operating in the hardware world because things are slower and more time consuming and you kind of just have to take certain risks and then show them to people.
[00:12:30] Yeah. Technical and, and administrative tasks are not the reason that people get into podcasting. It's about getting their message out there. So our job in de in developing the software was to make the technology go away. The more people talk about us as a tech company, the less they. What we've done, and the less we've done a good job, the more they talk about how easy it is for them and how it helps them get their message out there, that's when we know we're onto something.
[00:12:54] Good. I'm
[00:12:55] just curious, how are you managing that as the leader of this ship and when you're, you know, when you're getting all of these feature set requests and things like that, as you're seeing podcasting itself as an industry shift and change and
[00:13:09] evolve. If I'm doing my job right, I'm spending. A significant percentage of my day talking to users every day.
[00:13:17] Whether it's somebody who's thinking about becoming an Ox Buss customer, whether it's somebody who currently is using it and has some problems, or somebody who has a suggestion for us. I'm always doing user research. I've got this enormous ongoing spreadsheet that I'm always adding to comments that people have made in certain areas, things they're asking for, and that gives us a really good level of statistical significance that if we've talked to 30 people and 20 of them have said, I wish it did, you know, export a 32nd clip for Instagram.
[00:13:51] I take that very seriously, and our team does too, that there's some level of reliability once you get to a certain number of people asking for the same thing. Now, there's sort of the two sides of the coin. One is people will ask for things that they want. Yes. But then there, the other side of it is if people had asked.
[00:14:09] Apple for what they wanted. Apple would've made a much better blackberry as opposed to an iPhone. So there's a a balance between knowing your customer yourself and being able to advocate for what they don't know that they want versus the things that they're literally asking for in the moment. So here's a great example when we talk about editing features, what we found was lots of our customers, virtually all of our customers, wanted their podcast to sound edited, but virtually none of our customers actually wanted to edit audio
[00:14:44] So the challenge is how do we help our users sound like they have an edited podcast without requiring them to edit audio? And that's what led to. Having this planning module in the process where the more of that planning that you do before you press record, the less post-production that you'll actually need to do.
[00:15:00] And what we actually launched with is Ox Buss doesn't have any editing features in the platform. And we know that that's not gonna be a long-term solution where people are downloading things they've recorded and then editing them in GarageBand or Audacity. But the vast majority of the podcasts that have been created and published with Ox Buss don't have any editing to them.
[00:15:19] And we really found that if people do their planning ahead of time, that there's less need for them to do editing after the fact. What we also found was that there's new types of technologies that are making it so that you don't necessarily need to be looking at a waveform to edit audio. And there are companies that.
[00:15:38] Are taking transcripts of audio. So we've got machine learning databases that are publicly available from Google and other companies like that that can take audio that's been recorded, turn it into a transcript in an automated way with really good accuracy, not a hundred percent, but better than 80%, and then link that transcript to audio.
[00:15:59] So as you edit the transcript, you can actually edit the audio just like it's a word doc and you, you know, delete words, delete sentences, cut and paste, move things around. So that's the style of editing that we're actually working on, and we hope to launch early in 2020. In fact, by the time this podcast comes out, this may actually be in ox buss already.
[00:16:17] So this is a great example to sort of illustrate your, your question, if we'd given people editing features that would've been giving them what they said they want. But if we really look at what they. Wanted in the big picture. It wasn't to spend more time editing audio, it was to be able to get their message out there the way they want their message out there for it to sound, edit.
[00:16:41] but they have zero desire to look at waveforms and chop up audio in the way that professional editors do. So I think we've landed on a great solution where we have them plan before they record and give them really agile, modern approaches to editing that will enable them to do edits if necessary, and save them time regardless.
[00:17:03] That's.
[00:17:05] That's awesome. Oh my gosh, that's, that's what I'm talking about. I love it. Wow. Please, and thank you, .
[00:17:15] Hopefully, hopefully by the time this podcast comes out, that will be something that we are already offering to. To ox buss podcasters. So, fingers crossed. I'm
[00:17:25] wondering, you know, when you're speaking to people, do you have a, I mean, I, I, I hear a trend of who this is kind of leaning towards, but do you have a target audience or like a perfect fit for this?
[00:17:35] What we really found was underserved was the entrepreneur market, and I think that's something that you speak to into your business too. There are great solutions out there for large brands, for celebrities, for people who have a lot of budget to throw at a professional production team, and that's not taking anything away from the amazing work that full-time dedicated human producers do.
[00:18:00] There's no doubt that Gimlet Creative or Pineapple Street makes great podcasts, however, If you don't have six figures to spend on podcasting, that may be out of reach for you on annual basis as part of your, your marketing budget. There are also some good tools out there for amateur people who just wanna be able to say to their friends, as a hobby, I have a podcast.
[00:18:21] Now come listen to it. Or Tell me what you think. Or be a, a guest on my Dungeons and Dragons podcast, they have no ambition to sound professional or to monetize it or to use it to drive business. It's purely a hobby. The same way that lots and lots of people used to have blogs. Lots and lots of people use social media and they're not looking to make money by social media Inc.
[00:18:41] Or blogging. There's a middle tier that I saw was underserved, and this came again from our research. Small businesses, entrepreneurs, side hustlers, internet business. People wanted to use podcasting as part of their content marketing portfolio. Again, social media, blogging, video. Those all have pros and cons in terms of their portability, their authenticity, their depth of, of detail, and we found that there were business people starting to use podcasting as a compliment to social media because you know, you can only read 280 characters in a tweet, but you can click the link and listen to the full discussion in the podcast, or you can watch the video on YouTube, which can be very well produced and very polished.
[00:19:28] But it may not be as authentic as a conversation on a podcast might be. So there, these are nice compliments to each other. You can write a really nice blog post and get in great detail and be a great writer, but you can't read a blog post while you're driving to work or while you're on the treadmill at the gym.
[00:19:43] So again, podcasts are a great way to make blogs portable. So we saw that business people wanted to do that, but they really just didn't have the tools and solutions available to make it easy, fast, and affordable for people who didn't have any audio background. So we found the kinds of people that.
[00:20:00] Podcasting for small businesses and for startups were people like yourself who had some audio or video production background or experience. The kinds of people that have Final Cut or Adobe audition on their computer, those are the kinds of people that could probably get a podcast out. But for the vast majority of the 60 million small to medium sized businesses in the us, there really wasn't a good solution.
[00:20:22] So that's really how. Architected and engineered ox buss is to be something that makes it so that you don't need any audio background or experience. And we tried to take away everything except the being the subject matter expert portion of podcasting. A lot of people think about podcasting and what they envision in their minds is what you and I are doing right now, which is the talking into the microphone part.
[00:20:44] But you and I both know the reality of the way podcasts are done. If you think about how much time is spent on the average podcast, which might be eight to 12 hours, only one of those eight to 12 hours is actually spent doing the talking into the microphone portion, and we wanted to take away the other seven to 11 hours.
[00:21:01] So I'm wondering, for someone who's interested in learning about ox buss, how, how does it work? Like what, what do they do? Where, where do they do it? Is, is it an app, is it a browser? You know, how do, how do people find it and, and what's the experience gonna be like for them?
[00:21:16] Ox buss is web software, so it works in your Chrome browser.
[00:21:18] It works to a lesser extent in some other browsers like Safari and Edge. But for the best experience, we do recommend Chrome. And there's nothing to download. There's nothing to install, there's nothing to update. That's why we like web software, and you can try it for free@oxbuss.com. That's aux b u s.com.
[00:21:36] We do three episodes for free, which is, you are guided through literally every step of developing your show, planning your content, recording it, automatically producing it, and setting up distribution the first time so that every episode after that first time is literally a one button publish and you're done.
[00:21:55] So we tried to make everything about podcasting an order. Clean guided process so you don't have to worry about what do I do next? That's really kind of our guide. Our guiding principle in designing ox buss was you never wanna have to ask the question, what's next? Because that's what we found really was overwhelming for a lot of people.
[00:22:17] There's just so many things you need to do, and ordering them, sequencing them, figuring out how to link them together was a really big problem that we saw through our research. Through Ox Buss. You go to ox buss.com, you create a free account. You plug in literally any microphone. It could be a professional microphone, could be a U SB microphone.
[00:22:34] Could be the microphone that's on your headphone cable. As long as you have a microphone, you're good and you're ready to go, you're ready to start podcasting. It'll take you through a series of steps to set up your show, create your first episode, record it, assemble it, and publish it. I
[00:22:48] watched your demo video and I was just like, you gotta be kidding me.
[00:22:52] Thank you. So I'm curious about when you publish and that goes off to the pod catchers out there. Who, what, who all does that go to? What, what can people expect as far as like, you know, cuz some people want it to go to Spotify, some want to go to iTunes, some want it to go to Stitcher. Where all does it go?
[00:23:09] The vast
[00:23:09] majority of podcasts listening in. Is done on Apple, Spotify, and Google. And then there are a handful of smaller apps. The majority of those smaller apps are actually fed by Apple podcasts. So what we have you do is set up your one-time distribution connections to Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, which is a single button press, and Spotify, which is pretty much a single button press.
[00:23:33] So we've tried to make that one time. Distribution link process as simple as possible. And once those links are done the first time, you never really need to do them again. So to answer your question, apple, Google, Spotify, as well as all of the smaller apps that are fed by Apple podcasts such as Overcast, PocketCasts, and a few others.
[00:23:54] We also can help you with Stitcher, we can help you with TuneIn, we can help you with Pandora. But as standard, we make it really easy to go Apple, Google, Spotify, because that's probably 85% or maybe even 90% of all US podcast listening. So how much
[00:24:08] does it cost for somebody who's. Trying to figure out what's, which one to choose or what option's gonna be best for them.
[00:24:14] Well, ox Buss
[00:24:15] is free to try for your first three episodes, we want you to have the full experience. The only thing that we do in those free episodes is we insert an ad for Ox Buss because we're giving you those three free episodes. So we want you to promote our service. And that ad is done by our chief ambassador, John Lee Dumas, founder and host of Entrepreneurs on Fire, which is one of the best listened to entrepreneurial podcasts in history.
[00:24:38] Mm-hmm. . We add an ox buss sound mark at the end that just identifies that it was made with ox buss. And we add the words made with ox buss. In your episode notes, when you're ready to upgrade from free to paid, we offer 34 99 and 39.99. Options, 34 99 gets you an episode a week and 39.99 gets you unlimited episodes.
[00:24:59] So if you're doing more than four episodes a month, if you're doing a daily show, if you're doing multiple episodes a week, that's a great option. There's no additional charges beyond that. We also offer those two plans on annual bases with two free months. So they are 3 49 and 3 99 a year, and that 3 99 a year includes a free microphone that we ship you within the us.
[00:25:20] So it's everything you need to get started pretty affordably. I was also wondering
[00:25:24] about, say, You wanna launch a second podcast, you know once, once you get a taste for it.
[00:25:30] Interesting question. So this is a question that comes up fairly regularly for me because I'm the one who's doing customer support here,
[00:25:38] So the answer that I usually give to that question is, are you sure you can handle two podcasts? Because that is a lot of work. Even with Ox Buss doing the social media response and participating in your communities and writing the content and the show notes, it's still a lot of work. So make sure you really can handle two shows because that is a lot to more directly answer your question.
[00:25:59] The way we built Ox Buss, each account is tied to one show, and the reason we did it that way is each show has a feed. We use a technology in podcasting called r s s or really simple syndication, and this is the same technology that makes so that you can subscribe to a blog and then just get the new articles from that blog either in an r s s reader.
[00:26:20] Or in email and podcasts, use the same base technology so you can subscribe to a podcast and just get the new episodes in your podcast player app. And because there's one R s s feed per podcast show, we've tied one Ox Buss account to one r s s feed. So if you wanna have a second show, you need another ox buss account.
[00:26:42] Again, that second account is free to get started for the first three episodes. And if people are doing multiple shows, just email me, just click the support link and we'll work out a special price for you. If you're doing two page shows, we wanna make sure that price is not something that keeps anybody from being able to do all the podcasts they wanna do.
[00:26:59] Awesome.
[00:26:59] That's great. So I was curious about challenges. You're now a leader, right? And you were talking about this earlier around what you gained from getting your M B A and with the work that you've been doing the last 15 years in audio and technology. What are some challenges that you've faced as you've been growing ox buss and you know, stepped into this role as a leader, creating your own
[00:27:24] product?
[00:27:25] Man, that's a great question, and I could talk for hours about this, but I think the topic that is the most poignant, or the one that is most of the top of my mind is funding the thing. Because building software as a service means that you've gotta invest significantly on building the thing before you.
[00:27:44] Get people to pay for it. And in our case, that meant that it took us about a year from initially starting to develop ox buss to the point where we launched it publicly and could take credit cards. So there's this, this latency, I guess, between the product being ready for people to pay for it and the time where it actually you can make a living from it.
[00:28:05] So what that typically means to most entrepreneurs is you raise outside capital, whether that is from angel investors, whether it's from friends and family, or if you're in Silicon Valley or really good, you raise venture capital. And each of those. Ways of raising money has pros and cons, but bank loans and other traditional forms of financing aren't typically available to tech company founders.
[00:28:29] So these types of ways of capitalizing your company can be very time consuming and very difficult, particularly again, if you're not in Silicon Valley. From everything that I've read and been told by fellow founders, it's just a totally different culture in Silicon Valley. So discount everything that I'm saying if you're there, because it may be totally different for you, but for the rest of us who are not there, this could take up 80% of your time.
[00:28:53] Literally finding, building a network, getting meetings, pitching, traveling to pitches, preparing for pitches, coaching, getting coaching on your pitch. It is incredibly time consuming and one of the things that probably syncs the most startups is not being able to capitalize themselves. If you're fortunate to be a developer yourself, or you have a co-founder who's a developer, then you may be able to bootstrap, meaning not take outside capital for longer.
[00:29:21] In our case, I'm not a developer, I'm a marketer, a product developer, so I didn't have those skills, and that meant that I needed to pay my chief engineer and pay our UX researcher and marketing lead salaries while we built ox buss, and that meant that we didn't have the cash. Coming in from the business to pay for them.
[00:29:42] That meant that we needed to raise outside money, and that has been a constant struggle. We've been fortunate that we did raise some money early on and, and I don't wanna discount how fortunate we are to have done that because there's a huge percentage of startups, I think something in the mid nineties percentage of startups that attempt to raise capital and are unsuccessful ever raising any capital.
[00:30:02] It's a, it's a really painful struggle because really when you start a business, you don't start a business in the same way we talked about. You don't start a podcast to edit audio. You don't start a company to raise capital, but the reality is many founders of tech companies become professional fundraisers, and it's very sad the percentage of the time that you actually get to spend doing the things that you love, whether in, in my case, it's product and marketing.
[00:30:27] In some other cases it might be coding. You really just end up spending a huge percentage of your time just trying to keep the company in business because. Again, you're not able to bring in money until you launch. You've gotta build the product before you launch. So the default state of your company, if you are pre breakeven, is out of business until you've got enough business being generated by the company to, to take care of expenses.
[00:30:54] Your default state for the company is outta business. And I take that very, very seriously and that is one of the things that weighs the most heavily on me as a founder, is just having enough cash in the bank to pay the bills. You know, with all
[00:31:06] of this that you have to juggle, do you do anything like a think week like Bill Gates or, or do you have any kind of a way that you have established to be able to kind of step back and really kind of have that time for yourself as a leader?
[00:31:20] You know,
[00:31:20] I think one of the things that has really helped. Work-life balance is kind of a myth for a founder. I, I don't, I don't think that that's the reality. Or if you have it, you're probably not working hard enough. I hate to say because I'm somebody that really has preached the gospel of work-life balance and being a well-rounded person, , but as a founder work-life balance hasn't really been something that I've had to the extent that, that I would like.
[00:31:45] I schedule everything. If it's not on my calendar, it's not happening because your time is so precious. It's the only resource you can't get more of. So everything is on my calendar and if you look at my, my calendar, every hour pretty much has something on it. Whether it is reading email, whether it is working on a proposal, whether it is preparing for a pitch, whether it is answering customer service emails there, there's very little that is just in the moment.
[00:32:10] Free association, what I wanna do, right? That's good and bad. But one of the things that I've learned to do is a schedule my workouts, because they're really important to me in terms of just staying healthy, having some time where I'm not working on my calendar, and b, scheduling think time. So every Friday from one to 3:00 PM there's a two hour block of think time where I don't use any devices.
[00:32:36] I only have pen and paper, and I just let my mind do what it wants to do. And. And scribble, sketch, whatever comes to mind is, is is super important to me. Just to be able to have some time to make connections and process and assimilate things that I've been exposed to over the last week. And some of that also comes from travel and reading and exposing myself to culture.
[00:32:57] So having a diversity of inputs is super crucial, along with some time scheduled for me to be not working on tactical things and just some time for the brain to make the connections it wants to make. It's very popular in our culture today to. Talk about meditation, and meditation is great for some people.
[00:33:17] There are different kinds of meditation, but I think more important than meditation is some mindfulness time. That could be as simple as a couple of really slow breaths. It could be a more formal type of meditation, but I think giving yourself permission and, and making maybe some accountability for yourself around doing it.
[00:33:36] Just giving yourself some time where you are not consuming any content, where you are not receiving any information, where you're not looking at a screen. I, I think that that is one of the most valuable practices that I have been fortunate. To build. I'm not a great meditator. I'm not gonna sit in a room cross-legged for an hour on a regular basis.
[00:33:57] I might once in a while, but I do every single morning do 10 really slow, long, deep breaths in the shower. And some people are probably gonna say, well, that's a lot of wasted water. But , it's one time where there, if there nothing can distract me unless my wife comes in and starts using a hair dryer, right?
[00:34:15] Or something like that. But it's just that one time every single day that is ritualized where I can't be distracted. There's no Twitter in the shower, and it's just a time where I can start the day off. On a mindful note, one of the things that has. Contributed the most to my happiness as an entrepreneur, has been taking the gym really seriously.
[00:34:37] I used to be a competitive power lifter. That's the thing that is not only good for me in in a sustainable way, not necessarily in a max effort way all the time, but also it's something that is achievement oriented. And I think one of the things that makes a lot of founders really successful is the ability to break big goals down into small constituent parts.
[00:34:58] And that's really ultimately, if I've got a goal that I wanna deadlift 650 pounds, I'm not gonna go. Immediately try to deadlift 650 pounds if my deadlift today is 500 pounds. I'm gonna do that in a very long series of individual small steps to get there. And I think having something that is achievement oriented and physical in your life is really powerful.
[00:35:21] As a founder, it just reminds you of the kinds of things that are necessary to be successful in your business. I think of exercise in the day as being like clearing the cash on your computer, whether that is rebooting the computer or clearing the cash in your browser. Just everything runs smoother if you have some time to let your, your mind kind of reset.
[00:35:41] And I think that it's. Very, very important to have some non-work time in the day, every day, if you can. Could be walking the dog. It could be making lunch, like really making lunch, not just putting together a sandwich, but really making something for real if that's your thing. Or taking a step away and reading a book.
[00:35:57] I, I think some non-work time in the day just makes you better.
[00:36:01] So I, I wanna step back to that comment you made about a p power lifting. Now I read that you were a former competitive power lifter. Can you, can you share a little bit about that story?
[00:36:11] There's not too much to tell. I, I. I had never been an athletic kid.
[00:36:15] As I mentioned earlier, I wasn't really big on team sports. I played little league baseball and not much after that. I was more of a marching band kid than a football kid. at school. Same here. And, and in my mid thirties, I kind of realized, well, I've been going to the gym for a long time and I should take a step back.
[00:36:30] I lost a hundred pounds in my twenties and I've kept that off for, for 20 years. And the way that I've developed, keeping it off, has been weight training. I'd never really found a sport that I loved the way that I enjoyed working out in the gym. And that's something that's been really important for me to be able to rebuild my body because when you lose a large amount of weight, you lose a lot of muscle.
[00:36:52] So, You end up just a smaller version of the body that you didn't like to begin with. When I weighed 285 pounds, I was actually very muscular under the 285 pounds. I lost a lot of weight and I lost a lot of muscle, so I needed to rebuild that. And when I was young, when I was in my twenties, a lot of that was about vanity as well as it was about keeping the weight off, you know, wanting to be attractive to women.
[00:37:14] And now I'm 40, and in my mid thirties wasn't really. Super motivated around looking good for girls. As much as it was thinking in my head, well, I enjoy lifting weights, but what's the point? Why am I doing this? And I discovered strength training. Strength training. When I, when I say strength training, I mean power lifting, style training focused on building strength.
[00:37:34] That led me to the idea that I could compete in a power lifting event and that would give me some reason, some meaning for being in the gym. And I actually found that that was great for me. It gave me that feeling of working toward a goal, that big picture, break it down thing, the same thing that had given me so much confidence and positive feeling from losing the a hundred pounds I was able to apply to preparing for and executing my first power lifting.
[00:38:01] So it gave me a new lease on excitement about being in the gym. It helped me really go deep into the details of getting really, really good. The technique of the, the three lifts and power lifting, which are the squat, bench press, and deadlift. So you go really deep down those rabbit holes where I think the average lifter that goes to the gym kind of knows something about the form, enough not to get themselves in trouble.
[00:38:23] They probably stick around the same weight for most of their lifting career once they exhaust their natural automatic gains that you get when you do something new for the first time. But I, I really fell in love with it. It was a sport that I was built for really well. Power lifters and, and strength athletes tend to be fast twitch, fiber oriented people.
[00:38:41] And, and I think that I probably am, when I look back at sort of my genetics, my, my family coming from Eastern Europe, we were not built for marathon running. We were not built for, for long distance endurance Ironman type activities. So my body just naturally is good for short, explosive movements and powerlifting is incredibly unathletic.
[00:39:00] The only question for you to answer as a power lifter when you're on the platform is did you lift the weight? It doesn't matter how fast you do it, it doesn't matter if you, if you can do it for reps, it's purely did. Press the weight off your chest in the bench press, it's, did you squat to depth in the squat?
[00:39:17] And because it doesn't really have an athletic component, that was actually really good for me because I'm not super athletic, I'm not super sort of coordinated in the sense that if you gave me one of those football training ladders on the ground, I probably wouldn't do a great job with it. But if you ask me to pick up 500 pounds off the ground, I can do that.
[00:39:34] And, and that's just finding the right sport for your body type makes it so that exercise is not work. It's something that you're gonna actually enjoy. And now that I'm in my forties, I'm actually looking for something to compliment. Strength training because I'm not in a place because of stress from business where I can really compete in power lifting.
[00:39:51] That's a very stressful activity on the body. It's a lot of sleeping, it's a lot of eating, and those things don't sound like they'd be very stressful. But eating a lot of the right stuff is actually very tiring on the body. And making sure that you get enough sleep can be really difficult. It can be very anti-social because the only time that you're actually getting stronger really is when you're sleeping because you're repairing all of the tiny little tears in your muscles that you a accumulated through your training session, and you only train an hour or two hours a day.
[00:40:19] So you've got 22 other hours in the day where basically you're eating at sleeping . That's, that's the life of a competitive power lifter aside from work. And I don't think that that's something that I can handle on top of my business right now. So I'm looking for some other sport that I could use to compliment strength training.
[00:40:33] Maybe it's tennis, maybe it's racquetball, something like that. That's
[00:40:36] great. Thanks for sharing that. I, I wanted, I, I kind of wanted to. , get a little bit into that and learn a little bit more about that background cuz that's just fascinating to
[00:40:45] me. Power lifting is just who is the strongest person in the room at a particular weight class in age.
[00:40:51] So it is purely strength. There is actually the, the name power lifting kind of is a misnomer because it's not really a power competition the way that Olympic style weightlifting is a power activity. Power lifting is purely strength, and if you go to a power lifting meet or you watch a video of one on YouTube, you'll see there's zero power expressed in a power lifting meet.
[00:41:15] It is purely strength. It is. The bar moves very slowly at maximal effort. And you're doing a total of nine reps, three squats, three bench presses, and three deadlifts over the course of, in some cases a whole day or even two days. And, and again, there's not a lot of athleticism and there is no power involved.
[00:41:34] So I think when people think of the word power lifting, what they envision is more like Olympic weightlifting, the snatch and the clean and jerk overhead. That's not what we're doing. We're doing the squat, which is the bar on your back, and you squat down the bench press, which is laying on your back, pressing the barbell off your chest and the deadlift, which is literally picking up a loaded barbell off the ground to standing up.
[00:41:54] I wanted to ask
[00:41:54] you, are there ways that you've been able to apply this background as you know, a drummer and a competitive power lifter in your role as a leader and entrepreneur? As a
[00:42:05] drummer, your job is, Structure and order, you kind of hear drummers referred to as the bus driver of the band. So , it's about keeping everybody looking in the right direction.
[00:42:17] And I think that that probably advises to some degree, consciously or subconsciously the way that I act and communicate as a leader. Because I wanna make sure everybody understands where we're going and I wanna make sure everybody knows if there are gonna be changes. So part of what you do as a drummer is you keep time and then you also set up changes or set up fills, right?
[00:42:38] So you, you might want to set up a figure before the figure that the other players might play. So for example, if I'm playing in a big band and all of the trumpets and trombones and saxophones are gonna come in and play a certain series of notes together as the drummer, I might play a couple of notes to help them know where their thing's gonna come.
[00:42:59] And while we're gonna play that figure together, I'm gonna set it up by giving them some indication before it happens. As a drummer, you need to know the whole composition. You need to be thinking ahead and you need to help the rest of your band get to the finish altogether intact at the same time. And I think that same skill applies to making sure your team has the same vision, understands the mission, the tactics of how we're gonna get there, and you communicate when changes are gonna happen.
[00:43:28] As a power lifter, I go back to the ability to break down big goals into their small constituent parts and being patient and taking small jumps. If you are training, again, going back to that example of if I have a 450 pound deadlift and I want a deadlift 600, I'm gonna take really small jumps. And I know that if I take 20 or 40 pound jumps from workout to workout, I'm either not gonna succeed or eventually I'm gonna get hurt because I'm trying to put on strength too quickly.
[00:43:57] So the ability to understand the big picture goal, but then break it down into a series of steps to get to where you want to go. I guess that's what you learn from, from any sport endeavor, from, from any big picture accomplishing of a goal. It's that idiom of how do you eat an elephant? Well, you eat it one bite at a time.
[00:44:15] You don't try to eat the whole elephant in in one setting because that would be too much elephant for one meal. I feel like
[00:44:21] there's a lot of knowledge and insights that can come from looking back at our past. There's just like these different levels of things throughout. Our lives and they have relevance to where we're going now and in our future.
[00:44:39] And so I, I always like taking it back and kind of revisiting how we got where we are and, and talking about these elements that
[00:44:46] helped get us there. Yeah, I like that. I think going back to initially you asked me to kind of tell my story and I think that music was always a place that felt like home, like a genuine expression of myself.
[00:45:01] And then the next step was, well, I'm in middle school and I'm playing trumpet and euphonium and these different brass instruments and I find myself looking back at the back of the band of the drummers cuz they have the coolest stuff to play with. . I wanna be a drummer. . Yeah. The drummers have the coolest toys all the time.
[00:45:18] They're always playing something different, different songs. And that felt authentic to me and I made that leap from being a brass player to being a drummer. And that felt authentically like me. And then I found myself in the marketing department at ENT Heiser and realizing what I really wanted to be doing was product management and getting to product management for the last 15 years prior to Ox Buss.
[00:45:38] That was authentically what I wanted to be doing with my career. Looking back to take your, your lead and, and expand upon it. If I look at the through line of the parts of my career and life that have been successful, it always has to do with following my gut and investing in the things that I'm genuinely curious about.
[00:45:56] And. Not trying to follow the money, not trying to follow the bubble or the trends or the market and, and just being honest and, and direct with myself about the things that get me excited because that's how you make a life of happiness as opposed to a life that's just looks good from Instagram. With
[00:46:16] that being said, what would you say is the single biggest thing that's helped you as a creative entrepreneur and leader?
[00:46:23] I guess I have to say it's mentorship, it's advisors, it's people who have done things like this before. And there's no way that I'm successful and, and I guess this is another through line or another connection I can make to something we talked about earlier, which is I'm in this for the people. I wanna make people's lives better, whether that is listening to music, whether that is making a podcast, whether that is creating some new kind of music or whether that is working for my company.
[00:46:49] It's about people. One of the things that I'm really good at, and I'm not good at everything, but one of the things I'm really good at is self-awareness and knowing where my limitations are. And that's part of why I did the M B A was to know, okay, now we're approaching the point at which I need to hire a lawyer and I can't do this myself anymore.
[00:47:06] So I think knowing your limitations, knowing yourself, being self-aware of what you don't know, which can be really hard for people, and then finding mentors and advisors who have been there before and can help you make good decisions or gather the right information that you need to make good decisions.
[00:47:22] I think that is the thing, being around people and. Learning from their mistakes, from their successes, from their experiences. That's the thing.
[00:47:31] Mentorship and coaching for me, has been massive, whether it's. Business, life, fitness, you name it. You know what I have to say is Mastermind. I think for me, and I was just sharing this at my mastermind group, I, I just feel like having that fellowship with other entrepreneurs and being able to share in the challenges and the successes, you know, you start to grow as friends and get really close.
[00:48:02] And so there's also this personal element, you know, you're, you're connected in this way of, you're all on this path, but you're all on your own path. But you get to share in those things of like, oh man, I totally know what you're talking about. I just dealt with that last week, or mm-hmm. , you know, a couple years ago.
[00:48:18] And being able to share in that with people. It's a shared mentorship, you know, and I just feel like that to me has been one of the most valuable things. As I've been growing as an entrepreneur, you know, that's part of what I love about this podcast is people can listen to your story and they can listen to us talk about where we're at, where we've been, where we're going, and connect with that and say, oh man, I totally understand that, and I'm not alone.
[00:48:45] Yeah. I think that I have never been in a mastermind group that was the right fit for me, but I do thinking about, as you described it, have this ad hoc group of myself and two other company founders here in town who are similar kind of early stage growth, high growth textile companies that are raising money and building teams, and we talk all the time.
[00:49:08] Sometimes we have dinners together. I agree with you, that is one of the things I look forward to the most, is just when I see that, that that conversation in Slack is, is lit up. I can't wait to see what we're, what we're talking about today, whether it's wives or babies, or our companies or hiring people or equity or whatever it is.
[00:49:25] So I have to totally agree with you. Even if I didn't get there, I seeking it out. It just happened to be two other guys who are company founders who I have friendships with. I just,
[00:49:33] I'm such a fan of it. I just feel like it's so helpful because that's one of the things I, I find with one, you know, once you get out of school mm-hmm.
[00:49:41] you don't really have that type of accountability. Right. And support. You don't really get that outside of that, you know, and when you're in the career environment, a lot of times you're trying to just keep a leg up, you know, and just keep moving forward. And similarly with, you know, a business, right?
[00:49:58] You're, you're trying to keep, keep that ship going forward and, you know, keep setting up your team for those changes and. You know, looking ahead and, and at the same time being present. And so a lot, there's so much for us to juggle as we talked about earlier. And I just feel like that's one of the things that's been just so helpful is having that kind of kinship and, and support and accountability that everybody's coming from a similar but unique space.
[00:50:25] Yeah, absolutely. And getting to know these other founders here in town I think has given me not. Support around building the company, but support around being a husband and soon to be a dad and fitting all those pieces together around being a founder, because that's something that, you know, you, it's hard to prepare for that because, you know, once you segment down, think of like filters on Amazon.
[00:50:50] You search for, I don't know, sneakers, and you get 17,000 products. But then you filter down, I want a men's size 10 and I want it to have a fairly neutral heel. And you end up with, you know, you do all your filters and you end up with one product or three products. And I feel like it's the same with the situation that you and I are in where.
[00:51:10] In my case, I was looking for, I think some, some mentorship or some friendship around how do I fit being a husband, being a father, and being a founder all into the same life at the same time, because that is overwhelming.
[00:51:24] Yes, and congratulations. Hey, thank you. How
[00:51:28] soon? Due in May. I'm really excited. I've wanted to be a dad since I was about 15.
[00:51:32] I was an ice cream man in college, and that was when I got the bug, and now I'm 40, so it's almost 20 years later.
[00:51:39] Wow. Oh, well, congratulations. Thanks. I love it. I wanna start going a little bit more high level here as we start to wind down. Do you have any advice for up and comers with the dreams of launching a startup or a business like
[00:51:49] yours?
[00:51:50] Don't build your first business to be predicated on outside capital. Build your first business to be cash flow positive as quickly as possible. Whether that means you build something that you can sell quickly, whether it is you buy something from a supplier and put your brand name on it, whether it is you find some way to build some software tool or some professional services.
[00:52:11] I wanna encourage any first time founder to focus on break even as quickly as possible. If your listeners listen to podcasts like How I Built This or other entrepreneurial podcasts, sometimes you hear we were profitable from the first month, and you laugh as a founder and say, that's crazy. That would never happen to me.
[00:52:28] But that's the most liberating thing that you can do for yourself because if you're profitable, you are default state in business. If you are not profitable, you are default state not in business. So you're either draining your personal reserves to finance the business, or you're depending on other people to put yourself in business.
[00:52:45] And when you're profitable, you have so much more leverage in negotiating when you do decide to take on capital. So I think that's my piece. Number one is don't push the business down the line too far and try to build something that generates revenue as quickly as possible. The other thing is, if you're a first time founder, realize that some of the sort of like in video game terms, some of the more advanced weapons get unlocked.
[00:53:09] After you've done it once. So I think that it seems like, from what I have heard, and this is my first startup, so I don't know for myself, but it seems like going back to that topic of raising money or going back to some of the other things as far as partnerships with other companies, it gets easier once you already have one under your belt.
[00:53:27] So I know it's very attractive to look at Mark Zucker Berger, Steve Jobs, and think that my first startup is gonna be a billion dollar company. Cool. But the reality is it's not, you know, your 0.0000, oh oh oh 1% that actually has that level of success on the first try. The reality is going back to weightlifting, it's about reps.
[00:53:46] You know, the first time you squat, you don't just put 500 pounds in your back and squat 500 pounds. You start out with the bar and you add five pounds, and you add five pounds, and you add five pounds, and a couple years later you have 500 pounds in your back. Not to say that you need to spend several hundred workouts getting to the place where you build something big, but I think looking back, if I was to do this again, I would build something less ambitious and more targeted.
[00:54:10] Whether that is. Script writing piece of software for podcasting or just the automation around post-production? I think the idea of building a complete platform from scratch, and that's V1 the first expression, the first opportunity for us to see if it was something that customers wanted to pay money for was something that I would do differently next time.
[00:54:29] And I think that that's why you see so much advice in startups around if you ship your first version and you're not embarrassed by it, you've waited too long to ship. I, I didn't take that advice and I regret not shipping sooner to reconnect some of the things we've talked about. Don't neglect yourself, like who you are as a person is not your business.
[00:54:50] And. Who you are might be your relationships. It might be your family, it might be your kids if you have them. It might be your hobbies, your artistic endeavors, your health, your sleep. All of those things make you better as a founder, and you can't not do those things because this is not a sprint. It's a marathon.
[00:55:09] Being as much of a well-rounded person as you possibly can be being as well, work-life balanced as possible, and realize that this is an unusual thing that may not give you the level of work-life balance that you might have had in other jobs or in a corporate job, or as a non founder member of a startup.
[00:55:26] Having more to yourself than just your work helps sustain yourself through when it's hard and when things aren't going right or when you don't feel like you have momentum. So I think having more diversity and going back to the thing about diversity of inputs with books and culture and music and art.
[00:55:44] Do all that stuff because it makes you an interesting person and it helps you have interesting ideas that you can bring into the business and those are just ways to get inspired. So, so be yourself and also be the founder of the company. Don't make being the founder of the company who you are, because that's not, it's just not
[00:56:02] enough.
[00:56:03] I wanna shift a little bit more now towards around podcasting a little bit and ask like, what would you say to someone who, they're on the fence, they're like, man, I really wanna launch a podcast. There's so many podcasts. What would you say to someone who they're like, I want to get something going in 2020, but I'm just, I'm not on, I'm not sure I'm on the
[00:56:20] fence.
[00:56:20] There has never been an easier time to start podcasting, whether you use Ox buss for free or you use other tools. You know, Spotify bought a company called Anchor, which is a free entry level, kind of my first podcast tool. That's super easy to get started with. We live in a time where our. Phones and computers have built in audio recording software.
[00:56:41] If you're on a Mac, you've got Garage Band. If you're on a Mac or an iPhone, you have voice memo apps where you can record yourself really easily. Just, just try doing some of this stuff. See what your voice sounds like, see what you wanna change, and think about what, what do you wanna talk about? If you wanna start a podcast, look at who are the competitors in the space?
[00:57:00] Who are some of the others that are doing something similar that you can learn from? What would you do differently? What would you do better? What would you not do that they're doing? And try to carve out your little piece of the podcasting world for yourself, because as you said, there's lots of podcasts out there.
[00:57:14] There's 800 and changed thousand podcasts now, but there are 5 million YouTube channels and people are starting YouTube channels all the time. So it's still early in the waves growth. Podcasting is. Early adopter, kind of getting into early majority, but definitely not mature. So it's still a great time to start a podcast, even though it feels like everybody and everybody's grandmother has a podcast.
[00:57:37] Just find the tools that are best for you, whether it's Ox Buss, it's Anchor, it's Spreaker, whether it's something that's built into your computer, whether it's downloading Audacity and doing it the traditional way that many podcasts have been started. Audacity's a free recording piece of software that's kind of a little more designed for people with audio experience, but you've got lots of tools at your disposal and there's lots of great sites that have lots of information.
[00:58:01] Again, I'll talk about ox buss.com. We think we've got some really great articles that in our blog that will help you make some good decisions. But then there are also the podcast host. Com, I think it is, has just an enormous database of information you can look at. NPR actually has a training site that teaches people how to be NPR style journalists that you can learn a lot from.
[00:58:23] There's a, an audio journalism site called transom.org, I believe it is, that has all kinds of information about equipment and software and best tools and platforms and things to use and people to hire. And then the last example I'll give is Radio Public. Radio Public is a podcast listening platform, but if you look in their support section, they have a enormous database of every piece of software, every piece of hardware, every tool, every resource.
[00:58:54] So there's lots of these kinds of collections of information to look at. What we've tried to do at Ox Buss is simplify it down to things that we know will be successful for you, but. If the way that we've simplified things down isn't the right way for you, that's okay. There's lots of other ways to get there.
[00:59:12] Yeah, those
[00:59:12] are some great resources. What do you see as the future of podcasting?
[00:59:17] I prefer to look at it as the future of spoken word audio, because I think podcasting is kind of the canary in the audio coal mine, where there's lots of attention being paid to podcasts. They're growing really fast, people are listening to them like crazy.
[00:59:32] People are trading time spent with other media for time with spoken word audio. But when you get over about age 50, that spoken word audio, Shifts in popularity from podcasts over to audiobooks, which are another form of spoken word audio. And I often talk to writers, authors, novelists, and say to them, you are not done doing your job until it's also an audiobook, because that's a 1.5 billion market in the US already.
[01:00:01] And it's growing just as fast as podcasts are. And there's other forms of audio media that are growing in the shadows of these two stars. You know, in China, audio learning is a 7.3 billion market today, and that is people being afraid that their jobs are gonna get automated out of existence. They've gotta stay ahead of the ai.
[01:00:19] So they're always trying to learn and people don't learn as consistently or as universally in the college university style setting as you or I did when we were. There's lots of ways to continue to educate yourself, Skillshare, Coursera, and what I really think, where I think that a large opportunity is gonna emerge is audio learning in the us.
[01:00:43] I think that automation is coming to the US market. There's lots of people smarter than me from places like McKinsey that have done incredible research about what is automation in the workplace. Look. Five and 10 and 15 years from now, and there are going to be real impacts that automation and AI have on people's jobs.
[01:01:01] So we're all going to need to continue to develop the skills of tomorrow to be able to keep working in the workplace of tomorrow. So I think education's gonna be a big opportunity for audio. I think that also on demand audio that is targeted to voice assistance. So things like Alexa, apple HomePod, Google Home, those kinds of speakers.
[01:01:21] There are different kinds of spoken word audio that are appropriate for those types of devices. You know, you may not wanna listen to a three hour Joe Rogan show on your Alexa because it's not the world's best sounding speaker and it's in a room. So there's a lot of room reverberance or Echo where you don't hear that in headphones or your car because they're acoustically treated.
[01:01:39] So the types of audio. Are appropriate for those types of devices typically are short form produced differently because again, they're gonna be played back in a room. So answers to questions, trivia. And I think there's lots of different types of spoken word opportunities. There are gonna be different types of spoken word audio in the future.
[01:01:57] And podcasts are the way that a lot of people are discovering that they like listening to spoken word audio. Again, because years ago everybody listened to the radio before tv. And I think that we're in this renaissance time where spoken word audio is becoming a really huge medium as a
[01:02:13] whole. Agreed.
[01:02:14] And it's something that I speak to a lot with my clients is that there's something so beautiful about it because the barrier to entry is not as high as video. Right. Video's expensive. Mm-hmm. , it takes a larger team. Mm-hmm. . And with tools like Ox Buss. You don't have to have all those things. And like you said, all you need is a microphone in your laptop or your phone and you can just get that recorded.
[01:02:40] But the thing that's so beautiful about it is that you can get such personality and character and so many things that don't come through print or digital marketing where you can get that access to people and like what makes them tick and who they are and how they show up and their type of personality or charisma and like how those things all come together that I think is so beautiful about audio.
[01:03:06] I share that same love for music and audio that you do and just, it just is such a great way to express ourselves through audio. Similar to that, I'm curious about, What's the future of
[01:03:19] Ox Buss? That's a great question. You know, it's hard to predict the future, but we're gonna continue to add features.
[01:03:25] We're gonna continue to try to improve the way that we serve our customers and respond to the things that our customers tell us that they want, or things that we are able to figure out that they don't know that they want, but they're telling us sort of inferentially. And I think it really just comes down to we wanna build the best, most satisfying, most fun, most enjoyable software that helps you get your message out there with your voice.
[01:03:50] And whether that means that we decide that we're going to move into other forms of spoken word audio. So software for audio audiobooks, or software for Alexa skills or software for online learning. That remains to be seen, but a lot of the. Problems to be solved are consistent across different forms of spoken word audio.
[01:04:10] So that's why I think that that could be a potential area that we look at in the future. But I think we're so early on, we've been in market, we're recording this right now. We've been in market for four months. We just launched into August of 2019. We've got a lot to prove on the business side of things to ourselves, to our investors, to our customers, and to our team.
[01:04:29] We, we've gotta stay the course and just continue to build something great. We wanna make sure that we are only working on things that people really love and you can't rush that while at the same time, there's a lot of pressure in startups to move quickly. We, we do wanna make sure that we actually build something that people really, really
[01:04:45] love.
[01:04:45] Absolutely. All right, so I got just a few wrap up questions here. Sure. These are just quick and fun. What is your favorite
[01:04:53] movie? Shawshank Redemption. Ooh,
[01:04:58] brother from another mother, . What is the book or books you've given most as a gift? Oh, that's a
[01:05:04] Tim Ferris question. It is The Dip by Seth Godin.
[01:05:09] Ooh, that's a good.
[01:05:11] What obsessions do you explore on the evenings and weekends? ,
[01:05:15] we've talked about them. Drums and power lifting, cooking.
[01:05:19] Ooh, brother from
[01:05:21] another mother. Yeah. Right now we're recording this. It's Hanukkah. So my wife and I have been researching things to fry because you're supposed to eat some fried food, whether it's a potato vodka or in Israel, they like to do donuts.
[01:05:32] We spent a good chunk of our Sunday watching videos on the Bon Appetit YouTube channel around sourdough donuts and things like that.
[01:05:41] What is the number one thing that you'd like listeners to take away from this
[01:05:44] interview? Entrepreneurship is, A career choice and can be incredibly rewarding and incredibly difficult and frustrating.
[01:05:53] Don't confuse who you are with your job. Your job is part of who you are. There needs to be more to you than the work that you do.
[01:06:02] Love it. Final question, where can people find you? On the interwebs
[01:06:05] ox buss.com. That's A U X B U s.com. You can get a free account and create your first three episodes. Plan, record, auto, produce, and instantly distribute.
[01:06:15] That's ox buss.com. And then my personal site, dan raden.com. That's D A N R A D I n.com. You can see all the things that I've done in my career and some talks and some links to other podcasts have appeared on and things like that. So if anybody wants to get in touch, that's a great place to do that.
[01:06:32] And I have to say, Dan is amazing about getting in touch and.
[01:06:37] Quick to respond and is it's so nice to get direct correspondence with people cuz you never know with was as busy as you are. I was just so, honored and, and and pleased to see how quick and how often you respond to people with questions. And I was just talking to a client the other day and she was like, yeah, Dan responded to me directly and was, you know, telling me, you know, this is, this is what's up with the questions that I had.
[01:06:58] And, and I just, I love it. Well Dan, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for the work you're doing. I'm so excited to see what you guys have coming for 2020.
[01:07:08] Appreciate it Gabe. Thanks so much for having me. It's been great to talk to you and share a lot more than I expected we'd talk about. So I think this has been a great conversation and I really, really again appreciate the opportunity to speak to your audience because I know that the kinds of people that you wanna expose your audience to, you want to carefully curate that and be very thoughtful as far as the kinds of people that.
[01:07:30] Get to speak to your audience, so thanks for considering me to be somebody worthwhile to get this, this opportunity. Thank you.
[01:07:37] Well, that's it for this episode. Whether this is your first time listening or you're already a fan, thanks for being here. We -hope you enjoyed the show. All lengths and show notes for this episode can be found at theartful.co. If you haven't yet, please subscribe to the show and leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks again for listening. Until next time, keep being artful.