Our 200th Episode of B2B Vault!

Yo, what's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2B Vault, the biz to biz podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by this guy, the Bill Cowherd of payment processing himself, Allen Kopelman. And we'll be providing you educational information about fintech, payment processing, small business, and the technology businesses use in the world today. And in today's podcast, we're going to be celebrating our 200th episode, man. That's crazy to say out loud. Yeah, I mean, give or take, it's been a— we did a couple of live episodes. There's been— but there's 200 episodes of when I could say we finally got our shit together.

Anyway, man, podcasting is not easy.

No.

And there's not like— it's funny, like we started doing it right, and then you get like all these people that declare themselves a podcast expert or these people who have podcast training schools and things like that. But, you know, it's not— there's not like a big— you know, I think that you can take two approaches to your podcast. You can either—

and you jumped right into it.

Yeah, whatever, we're getting into it. We can either—

two approaches.

Okay, yeah, the one is just record it and go for it and then don't cut it up. Or some people like totally, you know, overproduce their— it's overproduced.

I think at that point it's like not even a podcast, it's more of a like a TV show. Um, we struggle with that a lot, you know, you and I, we go back and forth because the content that you want to, to, to, to publish, I don't always, you know, agree with, right? It's like not It's not— this is like what we're doing right now is typically what you would— it's like podcast format where we're having a conversation about just whatever. We're shooting the dice or whatever.

Exactly.

But like, you know, like it is— it's funny to like think about as far as like where we came, how far we've come.

Oh yeah. The first few podcasts were horrible because it was just—

it was—

it would—

I wasn't on the camera and it was more like a webinar.

Yeah, well, we didn't know what we were doing. We never made a podcast.

We didn't. I wouldn't— I didn't want to be on a podcast yet. You didn't have me. I was not sold. I was not— I wasn't. Yeah, I just wasn't ready.

Yeah, we did have a few people in there and you would like contribute a little bit and people were like, hey, he should be contributing more, get him on camera.

That's right, you did have a couple of guests. We tried having guests in the back. Yeah, that was a long time ago.

Yeah, but we also had like a few people contact us and say how that they like the podcast and you should be closer to the microphone, and they gave us some tips and pointers, you know. But I see people like doing these podcasts, like there's one that dropped today. I was a guest on this thing called Tech Brains. I don't— I never saw the guy's thing before, and whatever, it's just him asking me he put— he shows his picture up there, then he asks me a question, and then I'm talking. And I don't know, he interviewed me for about 40 minutes one day, and it's a 12-minute video.

That's nice.

So he got what he, you know, he put it— he edited it all together. Was a couple weeks ago.

And I mean, when we're saying like, you don't edit, we edit the podcast. I mean, you know, there's—

yeah, but it's not highly edited.

I mean, it's edited.

One thing I will say Like me and Justin went to a trade show, we're walking around and then Justin is surprised because I mean, I'm known in the business 'cause I've been doing it a long time. But people were seeing Justin and they were like, "Hey, that's the dudes from LinkedIn.

Hey, that's the podcast guys." That was when we went to the—

SEA.

SEA, yeah, yeah. We did, yeah, I mean, people listen to the podcast, you know, like, We in the office, we talk about it, you know, it's like sometimes we're wondering like, you know, who's really listening to the podcast? Is, you know, is this not like a waste of time? Because regardless, people are listening to the podcast.

You get customers from it.

Yeah, that too.

And the other thing is we have definitely inspired other people in the payment processing industry to start podcasts because a whole slew of people have started podcasts.

I would say that you're a driving factor in the fact that people from the payment industry are on podcasts for sure.

No, no, but like they started one, like they got my, one of my, whatever it's called, friend, colleague, James Uber is an attorney. He started a podcast.

In the 2 years we've done it. Yeah. I mean, you could just—

Yeah, there's probably about 4 or 5 people.

The growth of fintech podcasts has been exponential. We recently just got a notification from Spotify that they're gonna start recommending our latest episodes to everyone, so that's cool. That was a, you know, I never, you know, like I was, I was saying, like, you know, it's not like a joke enough, it's like, who's listening to the podcast? But we want to know who listens to the podcast so we can like get the, you know, target, you know, the the content better, you know, like curate the content better for, for—

like, ask us more questions.

Yeah, I would love to hear, you know, like what people's thoughts are, you know. I mean, because I'm, you know, I'm not an expert in podcasting, but I, you know, I am an expert in WordPress. But we don't really talk about WordPress a lot, you know what I mean? We talk about the payment industry.

And the other thing with podcasts is, is a lot of podcasts are not consistent. So I was reading an article and it talks about how there's about, I don't know, there's about 5 million podcasts on the podcast networks. But out of those 5 million podcasts, there's less than 250,000 that post an episode at least once a month. And the numbers go way down from that.

Oh yeah. I mean, when we got our, you know, program in line, you know, like, okay, we're posting on— well, we were going crazy when we were posting Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. That was just a lot of pressure.

Yeah.

So when we cut that back, listeners dropped a little bit. But, you know, we're, we're posting twice a week, you know, right? For sure. 30-minute episodes twice a week.

And the amount of people who are doing 2 episodes a week is a very low number.

Oh, absolutely.

It's not even 100,000. Yeah, it's under that, right? But because a lot of podcasts, they only post once a month. A lot.

I mean, I don't, I don't know. Well, I'm just saying, you know, like, it really depends on like what, what type of podcast you're listening to because You know, I don't, being that I shoot a podcast, I don't necessarily, I don't listen to anybody's podcast, honestly. I guess I've, in the morning time, I, yeah, I've cut that out.

You know? So what a lot of people do now is like, I noticed I was talking to my daughter, you know, she's on TV doing her meteorology thing. And she was telling me, she goes, oh, the guys who do the sports, they started taking the, the, you know, the sports segment that they have on, uh, TV, you know, because they'll do it— they do like a sports segment, you know, on the news, and then they have like a little thing where they do 30-minute sports segment on local. They turn that into a podcast.

That's smart. Now, are they monetizing them?

Not yet. They just started doing it, putting it on YouTube and all that. You know, I was telling my daughter, I said, you know, you should, you should do the same thing.

Well, she's definitely not camera shy, but yeah, I mean, shooting this podcast, I've, I guess I've learned a lot about myself of like, you know, having more self-confidence about myself. Not that I was ever really camera shy. I didn't, I just didn't care. Like I was before we started shooting, I was talking about like, when I recorded music, you know, in my earlier days, like, I really enjoyed, like, we would go to the studio, the process, right? The process of it, of recording, coming up with the ideas, brainstorming, you know, just having that, you know, we would call it a cypher, you know. And, but when we would get to like the part of like performing it, it'd be cool until I got, it was my turn.

Right.

Right. And I would just like— it wasn't stage fright either, right? Like, I just, you know, I come into myself now, like I'm 43 years old. It was, you know, it was social anxiety, really, what I was suffering from. Like, I just didn't want to be in front of all those people. I didn't— I loved being with my people, but I was afraid of being in front of other people, right?

Yeah.

And But, but if you put me in front of a camera, I was animated. I was always like, I was Jay, I was me, you know, myself, like I was always a character. And so that part wasn't hard. But like, I guess like really having a voice in the podcast is still something that I work on. Because like I said, we don't have the— it's not like it's one-sided, right? But you're the host of the show. And so I try to like piggyback off what you're doing a lot, you know what I mean? And, and so like, you know, sometimes I'm just sitting here listening, right? Because you have a lot to offer to people in regards to knowledge of the payment processing industry. And, you know, for the listeners that do listen, I think that that's why they listen. You know, the YouTube views don't show us like, okay, like people are watching us on the videos. You know, but people, the data and the analytics do show that people do listen to the spot, to the, to the actual podcast audio, you know what I mean? So there is value there.

And people catch a lot of the clips that we post.

So yeah, you know, social media, you know, with the Shorts and stuff like that, you know, but I'm talking in general, the content, I think that we, you, you in general have come a long way as well. Like 'Cause you're like a, I don't know, it's not like a substitute teacher, but like, you know what I mean? Like you come in and it's like, this is what it is. You've been doing it this long. You know, you have just a lot of knowledge. And I think that sometimes it kind of gets muddled, muddied into the, you know, 'cause your message doesn't come across. You know what I mean? And you're getting way better at that. You're getting way better.

That's how you improve. You know what inspired me to do the podcast? You know, I was listening, I was thinking about doing the podcast, and then I was— I follow this one guy, Noah, the creator of AppSumo. And, oh yeah, and he was talking about that guy a lot. And he was— well, you know, I mean, yeah. So he was— and he, and he actually had a contest, and I won the contest, and that's how I ended up buying the first microphone. And the first camera that we used, and they're still in the studio. Shout out to Noah from AppSumo.

We still use it.

We're using it right now. We still use it.

We use it. It's all the backup, the stuff that we had. Right. It's the backup equipment. Man, I remember when I got here and I was in like, within 2 weeks, like, you ready to start shooting the podcast, right? And I'm like, uh, I was kind of dreading it, but that's because I just, I've used cameras before and I've set up equipment. Like, none of that was like— I was like, you know, it was just like, man, what the— podcast. All right. So then we had— all it was was a webcam, external mic, and a laptop. And now it's 1, 2, 3 cameras. We got lighting, we got a neon light mics and soundproof wall soundproofing for the echo in the room. Yeah, man, it's, uh, yeah, we had that backdrop. Remember the backdrop? That was terrible.

Yeah, that was terrible. We had a couple of backdrops, they were horrible.

That was buggy.

Yeah, whatever, we tried. Listen, we were starting out and, you know, you try.

Are you happy with where it's— what it— like, where it's come? Like, is this what you have envisioned the podcast to be when you When— well, because I wasn't, uh, I didn't have a vision.

I was like, okay, we're gonna start doing it. And like, the guy knows, man, I wasn't even working here. I know, but I envisioned like having a podcast and having somebody to talk to. You know, one thing that I thought was going to be easier was like getting guests, but like the guests that want to come on are like competitors to my company, so we're not going to have competitors on the podcast. And then we've had a few people come on the a podcast.

It would be interesting to have, you know, a competitor just to— just one time or something.

Well, as long as it's a conversation that's not going to be like— it can't be like—

but you gotta do that too though. What? You can't be like, it's already a commercial because you got Nationwide Payment Systems.

I'm just saying, it's my podcast, not their podcast, and he's your guest.

But anyway, man, no, but we have something really difficult to get guests like—

but organizing it, like we invited somebody who owns a franchise and we're trying to get them to schedule time time to come on the podcast. There's a guy who just gave us information who's an entrepreneur.

Like, the guests that hit me up, like, it's not a fit, right? Like, it's not a—

yeah, they're in another country. No, like, we had some in another country.

Well, that too. Yeah. Um, I wouldn't even— the logistics of trying to do that, I wouldn't even— it's too much.

Yeah.

But yeah, like, it's, it's like What are you— you're gonna— I don't know, it's not gonna work, you know what I mean? It just didn't— wouldn't make sense.

So we're gonna try now to, to try to incorporate some more guests onto the podcast. But exciting stuff that's happened over the last year is like I became part of the Forbes Business Council, and having the podcast I think made that more legitimate to get invited to be on there because you have to be invited. And I had my first article published, and then I was quoted in 3 other articles. There you go, man. So that was kind of cool with the Forbes. And then, you know, I've been writing articles for the Green Sheet for a while, maybe a year or so. There you go. And so they invited me to have a, um, a thing that goes in the Green Sheet every 2 weeks called Street Smarts. And that's like giving advice to people in the business, right? And talking about business trends and things like that. So they invited me, and I think that starts March in 2024. So they invited me to be the, uh, the, the, uh, the guest, the, the person, the Street Smarts guy.

There you go, man.

So that's pretty cool, and we might incorporate a little bit of that into the podcast.

I'm not doing that.

What the street? You can ask the questions.

We're not biting someone else's stuff. We're not going to piggyback off.

Well, it's not going to be that, but we're going to have some— there's going to be some video content that I'm going to produce as part of Sharks Over Here, man.

I don't bite other people's stuff.

No, but I'm saying I'm going to be making like some videos for that.

Well, there you go. Well, you can make Street Smarts on Allen Kopelman Show.

Yeah, it'll be on the Allen Kopelman YouTube channel.

Allen has his own You know, he's too big for the both of us now. So, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if he runs out of time for doing B2B Vault in the next couple of months. No, it's just going to be the Allen Kopelman Show. No. Yes, sure. Whatever. Anyway, man, I digress. No, that's just for the topics.

You don't get the topics that are more— No one approaches me, man. Am I that unapproachable? No. Well, I don't know. What, who, you want someone to— no, no one approaches me.

Like, I don't, uh, I mean, I do get like— that's not true, I shouldn't say that. People do talk to me about the podcast. They, you know, in my— that are in my circle, right?

Produce a blog post about, uh, about WordPress.

Produce a blog post?

Yeah, write a blog post.

What does the blog post have to do with the podcast?

They can make an episode about WordPress.

No, WordPress. I mean, I'm not a— why do I want to— I don't want to sit down and talk about WordPress. I do— all I do is work on WordPress all day and digital marketing. And what— I'm not trying— I don't— yeah, that's why when— that's the thing, like, it's hard for me to come up, like, as a co-host, right? Like, I'm, I'm just, you know, I'm, I'm not— I don't want to use the word sidekick because I'm not a sidekick. I'm like an anti-hero.

No, but we are trying to come up with some content that's more like— we've done some really good content, like we did the Experience Economy, the Subscription Economy, Can You Be a Salesperson and Still Be Shy? So we're talking about other things other than payments now because we changed it from B2B Vault, the payment technology podcast, to B2B Vault, the biz-to-biz podcast.

Right. And we started— you know, we should talk about that anyway. Real quick. The reason of that is because, you know, we— I, I had realized a while ago, like, that calling it the Payment Technology Podcast was a bit of a force because I was like, it was keywords, right? So I'm like, in the digital marketing, the SEO in me was like, all right, we're doing this podcast for sales, right? Like, in my head, that's how I first started it out, right? Was to make money. Um, And so like, I knew that because we didn't just talk about payment technology. We talked about everything. So I was, you know, when Sean, the new social media guy started, I shouldn't call him the social media guy. That's messed up. Sean, he's a human. He does the social media marketing for Nationwide Payments. When he started, Allen Kopelman, he, you know, we all had this conversation and, you know, he came up with the idea of changing it to Biz to Biz and we all agreed because it just made sense, right?

Yeah.

So we dropped the payment technology and, you know, it's the Biz to Biz podcast. We talk about business to business stuff. You know, we don't talk about consumers very much like we do kind of relate as a consumer. I try to, right? Like, I try to pull you back down to earth because you Well, we want to relate— Go off on a tangent.

We want to relate to consumers. You know, I always say this about any product that we have that merchants, business owners use. It needs to be consumer-friendly because if, you know, when you have products like in our business, I'll give you some examples of product debit. When they first introduced the PIN pad, banks were really promoting, oh, use your debit card. It's so secure. You put in your PIN number, right?

Right.

Businesses all want to debit, customers want debit. That makes for a win-win on the product, right? It's a winner product. Today, do people use debit as much as they did when the pin pad was first introduced? The answer is no, they don't. They don't use it. I think basically like kind of tap and pay kind of took that away because during the pandemic, I think made a big change and people didn't want to touch the pin pad and put in their PIN number. So PIN debit kind of slid off a slope. But here I'll tell you about it. So when I first started in the business, one of the biggest pain in the butts to us was Telecheck, right? People would walk into businesses and they had a paper check and Telecheck was this company owned by First Data, which doesn't even exist anymore now called Fiserv. Telecheck had this machine and people could put the check in there and get it, pay with a check. All right, that's—

dude, you're talking about some ancient— that's like dusting off, right? So I'm just saying, like, today, Scrolls of the Red Sea or something, you wouldn't have—

you couldn't sell a check reader to somebody if your life depended on it. Okay, right. That's what I'm talking about. So it's a loser product now, but it's, you know, that's how products are. I remember when the pandemic started, everybody was calling me, oh, do I have Apple Pay and Google Pay on my machine? Yeah, everybody. Yeah, it was built into the machines in 2015. You know, just wave your card very close to the machine. It's not going to work from 5 feet away.

Right. So what do you think? What are your thoughts on the podcast, man? What do you want to— what's your ultimate goal here?

Well, I'd like to have this for the next year, for 2024. Listen, we're going to keep the podcast going. We'd like to have more guests, have interviews, some business owners that want to talk about their business, or people come in, people come on that work in a startup community.

We want to hear the story of— I don't want to hear an infomercial of you talking. I want to hear what you offer, right? I want to hear why you started your business. I want to hear the pain points of your business. I want to hear the struggle of work life. I don't want to hear you talking about, unfortunately, Nationwide Payment Systems all the whole podcast, right? That's where me and you argue about, like we talk about, like, sometimes it just turns into a product demo, like you're talking about bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, and I'm ready to not fall asleep because I'm already knowing what you're talking about. So it's like, I understand it's important, but when we talk to like, like when we're asking these guests, right? Like, we don't want you to be on the— I think that people really misunderstand what it is to be on a podcast.

We want to hear about your business. Why did you start your business? Right? What makes it unique? What problem do you solve? What are you— who are you helping? I know what my business— listen, I started my business. I worked for somebody. They didn't want— we had customers asking us for Authorize.net and asking us to hook up a POS system. And they didn't want to do it. They all— they weren't interested in doing this on a credit card box. So I started the company. I said, no, we're going to be more focused on all this other technology.

And that's the type of stories that we want to hear. We want to hear your stories, not, you know, like just the— I don't know, like a commercial.

Like, we have a customer, they started a swim school franchise, right? And then he goes—

and here he goes into the customer, into the commercial, as we're supposed to be talking about the podcast.

No, no, I'm just saying I'm just saying, like, we want to hear the story why you started the franchise, why people should buy the—

but Mindy was supposed to be on the podcast, right?

So we're trying to get Mindy to come on.

And you don't like— so like, I think that, you know, we record the podcast, but if you just want to be on the audio version, that's fine too. We don't have to— it's not— we don't have to publish a video of the video of you being on a podcast, you know what I mean? If that's what's stopping from— because that is a Like I was saying, like, it's not that I'm afraid of being on the camera, I just didn't want to be on the camera, you know what I mean?

And some people have said that, oh, I don't want to be on camera.

Okay, well, we can, we can edit it, and it makes sense because some of these people we know are in that, you know, they're successful people, right?

Yeah.

And, you know, you don't want to make those people into targets. Maybe they, they're, they're like keeping their success to themselves, and they don't— their family members don't know that they're successful as they are, right? You know, there's a lot of variables into it. And I was like, one of my homies, he's like not— I wouldn't call him super rich, but, you know, he's in the real estate. And he's like, honestly, man, I just don't want to get on there and, like, give my business out to the world, right?

Right.

He's like, I don't know how many people— I don't care if 10 people see it or 100,000. I just not really into that, you know what I mean?

Yeah, like somebody who owns, like, a high-risk business, like CBD, you know, we would love to have you on the podcast. Yeah, tell us how, you know, why you started your business. How did you struggle?

I can just only imagine the bullshit that you go through trying to operate that business. Because I mean, Mike, our homie, you know, he has— my homie, he has the CBD company. He would do the podcast, but, you know.

No, but I helped him. Like, here, you know, he had issues. You know, I talked to him. He had issues with banking and a bank account. And the issue with—

he had an issue with the processor after processing, which is the wisdom that the knowledge that you possess, which makes it valuable for 2 years.

And then one of the names of one of the companies, I was like, you know, so we ended up using only the initials so that that company name doesn't like spook the card issuers, right, to not— because it was called highly—

and that's like a hidden gem that Allen knows about this industry, which, you know, he drops gems on the podcast on a regular. I, you know, he's getting better at, you know, getting to his point. Um, I'm getting better at redirecting him to the point. That's one of the podcasts is getting better. That's all I know. Like, the podcast is definitely better. We're on our 200th episode. Um, that's one of the things that, like, that people really don't—

that they mess up in their business when they name it. They— you—

if you—

the name is too controversial or too— let's say, you know, like, we had a guy open up a smoke shop called the Wake and Bake. We sent that to the bank. They were like— to, like, two banks. They were like, no, we're not putting some guy on with a wake and bake. But we found a place that would do it. But I'm just saying, but on the receipts, we're W&B Inc., not Wake and Bake, because that descriptor might go and somebody might say, we're not approving that transaction under Wake and Bake. So you got to know little, little, little tweaks to do or like things.

Yeah, man, that's another valid point that Allen is giving you guys. This is, this is, this is where me and Allen cross bump heads because we're supposed to be talking about it.

No, but podcasting, podcasting, if you want to do a talking about merchant services, no, but I'm saying you want to do a podcast for whatever it is you want to do a podcast about. You have your favorite TV show, The Golden Bachelor, you want to have the Golden Bachelor podcast or whatever it is that you like, sports. You just got to go for it and it's going to suck in the beginning and then it's going to get better. And you can't just look at it and go, well, oh, that sucked, I don't want to put it out. Just put it out.

You'll— yeah, you'll never not No, if you don't do it. So like, just do it.

Yeah, just put it out. Put it out there. If it sucks, it sucks. If it's— and then you'll get better at it because the guy—

or you won't, and then you realize that you were wasting your time and you'll stop doing it, right?

Right. The guy Noah said you got to make 100 videos before you start getting— before you get onto the right track. And he was right about that. After—

I mean, yeah, because after 100 hours we were sitting here like, okay, this we got to change this, this, this. We made all kinds of adjustments.

Yeah. And then you make adjustments because employees come to work for you, or, and they say, oh, let's do this, let's do that, because they have more, you know, knowledge of things that you don't have knowledge of. And it's, you know, but it's been a fun ride. Hope everybody enjoys the podcast. We enjoy doing it.

And I know there's, I know there's times I'm super grumpy on camera, man, but that's because Allen is making me mad with the infomercial.

But I'll try. I'm trying to be better. If you want to be—

I'm not trying. We are being better because we actually are utilizing the greaseboard and the whiteboard. Rather, my father calls it a greaseboard. I don't know, that's old school terminology, so it's still embedded in me. But we got the whiteboard. You know, we're collectively coming up with ideas and podcast episodes, not to keep it boring. So yeah, man, so if you want to be—

Allen, shout out to Justin. Thank you for being, uh, my partner in this whole thing. Yeah, and if you want to be on the podcast, go to b2bvault.info and there's a form there and you can apply to be a guest. Yep. And then we'll see what happens.

Thanks for watching.

Peace.