Why the First Thing My Tech Startup did was Start a Podcast
Counter-Intuitive thoughts on Startup beginnings
Imagine you’re pre-revenue. Pre-product. Pre… Everything. But you have an idea. A BIG idea.
The natural next step is to start making it. Build it lean and get it out there, so people can react.
But so far, that’s not what I’ve done. I decided before I build my product, to start a podcast.
Since I come from an advertising background, it’d be easy to write that decision off as a flashy waste of time from a fluff-obsessed industry.
However, I like to think it’s a little more calculated than that.
The Founder’s Challenge
Think about what consumes most of the time and energy of early-stage founders. An obvious one is pitching investors. Founders who have passion and energy behind an idea that they want to bring to market find their attention diverted to the pursuit of that pesky necessity — money.
As a result, much of the attention they would be spending on their product, their idea, and their company, is siphoned off to an onslaught of meetings, negotiations, and travel.
Another of the biggest challenges a startup faces is hiring. Everyone who’s ever encountered a business article knows that your team is everything. Great people make a great company. But as a small, unknown player with limited capital and a dream, it can be hard to get the talent you need in a sea of startups and while competing with the already established big boys.
In comes the podcast. As entrepreneurs, our job is to root out the inefficiencies of the status quo, rethink the way the world works, and make a change for the better.
And yet these core problems of finding investors and great early employees are still met much the same way as they have been for decades.
It’s All About the Story
I view the podcast my company is starting as a way of utilizing the tools the digital age has given us to vastly simplify one of the most important and consuming tasks that a startup is faced with — telling their story, whether it be to investors, talent, or in my case, with a consumer product, potential users.
Once recorded, your story can be told countless times, while you’re asleep, on the bus, or prototyping out your product.
The context is infinitely more favorable. When given the chance to give an elevator pitch on the street or a phone call, the investor is thinking of every flaw that your potential business might have.
When consuming your content as entertainment, you are now the protagonist in a story, which makes you the guy to root for.
Every startup has the job of telling its story and telling it well, but if you can turn it into consumable content, you can have a prototype for people to react to well before you invest resources in making anything. If people aren’t responding to your podcast, there’s one of three things you need to fix.
Either Way You Win
Either you’re not telling your story well, you’re not promoting it well, or your idea just isn’t resonating with people.
Any of these factors would be extremely helpful to understand. You can try telling your story better, and if met with success, you’ve found your market.
Without people to engage with it, any company will fail, so if you can’t promote the podcast to the audience you’re trying to reach, you may well struggle to promote the product, so this will be a valuable learning experience.
And finally, if all attempts at promotion and enhanced storytelling fail, it may be that you just saved yourself from investing resources in a doomed product.
I believe in my idea, and I believe that will come across in my podcast. But even if it doesn’t, that is just the beginning of my journey, and I’ll have a lot to learn from there.
And if the podcast does resonate, then an audience engaged with the story of my company is just the thing I need to get it off the ground.
