Mark Asquith - Co-Founder of Captivate Speaks on The Evolution of Podcasting

Welcome back to the Casey Adams Show. Today I am joined by Mark Asquith. I am very excited to have this conversation today. He is the co founder of Captivate fm, a podcasting industry icon, in my opinion. And I'm super excited to have this conversation today. Thank you so much for coming the show, Mark.

Oh, it's very kind, Casey. Yeah, no, I appreciate it. It's. It's a cracking show you've got and yeah, good to see your growth and everything that you do, man.

Thank you so much, man. So, you know, I, we were just touching base a little bit before we're getting on here, and I've been a podcaster for over five and a half years. Like this industry as a whole has been such an important part of my life and my business and just everything that I do, it's more so like the backbone of, of my career thus far. I would love to take, take us back to how did you even get into the podcasting industry? You've had shows, you've worked with, brands you've. You've built incredible product used by thousands of podcasters. Like, how did the podcasting industry come into your life and where did this journey begin?

You have been in this space now for 10, coming up 11 years, which is fascinating. It wasn't even an industry when I got into it. I've got like the toxic trait of everything I'm interested in I want to turn into a business. I'm like that guy. Much less now. Now I'm a bit older, but certainly when I was in my 20s and 30s. Now I'm like 41. I just rather do other stuff. But I'm fortunate to have landed on a business and a. On a career that I love. Like, I love been in podcasting. It's mega. But I got into it, so it was sort of a funny one, really. I got into it at a time that was sort of pivotal for me. So I was an agency owner. I'd run a digital agency for years. It was successful out the north of England, worked with brands, built a lot of software, a lot of tech. And, you know, we worked with anyone, anyone and everyone that you can think of. We've done a lot of work and I was getting a little bit bored of it. I was sort of getting into that. What's the, what's the point in continuing to pitch for work all the time? Like, this is a pain in my ass. I can't be bothered with this. It's a lot, you know, I go and pitch a software solution to Someone that's asked me to pitch a software solution, and then I've got to get past the IT manager that wants to prove he knows about ssl. Like, it's. It was just painful every single time. I just thought, this is crazy. So I was. I was sort of doing that. I was getting into that mindset. I was also getting into more content creation and public speaking. And then at the same time as that was going on, I sort of got more. I got back into pop culture stuff. So anyone that if we're doing any kind of video clips of this. This episode, I'm not recording Riverside at the minute. So, like, you can see I'm into Batman. Like, the 89, batwing into music. I've got a photo with you and McGregor and Hayden Christensen for Star Wars. Like, I'm a. I'm a huge Star wars and DC nerd. That is me. And. And.

And.

And music nerd. So I was. Yeah, it's. It's fun, man, and I love it. And it was. So I was getting into wanting a creative outlet or at the same time as I'm running this. This agency. So I started a blog called Two Shots to the Head, which my partner Gaz, let the domain go for a few years ago, which I'm absolutely livid about, because I would. I would. I would still.

There's a whole story there.

Oh, man. We still work together. He's. He's the head designer at Captivate. I'm like, dude, I'm gonna get that domain back and we're gonna start doing that again. I gotta get that. So he said to me, this is like, 2012, 2013. We should do a podcast. And I just said, shut up, dude. This is ridiculous. Like, what? No one's watching Lost in their boxer shorts in their mum's basement anymore, mate. Who the. Who the hell wants to podcast? This is silly. Yeah.

And this is 2012. Right? 2012. Just to interject real quickly, like, were you listening to podcasts back then? Like, the medium in and of itself? Like, how did you even think about it when you guys were having this conversation?

Well, so there were two parts to it. There was him saying we should start a podcast and me saying, that's ridiculous. And then me. So I'm a, like, I said, Huge D.C. guy getting into a lot of the Kevin Smith runs that he did for dc. So the Green Arrow run it. Did the Batman run, the Widest Gyre and a few of the others. I think he did something on Flash. And then certainly a couple of years later, he did the Flash TV show as well. It was a great Speed Force episode. So I was sort of getting back into Kevin Smith via the reading that I was doing in comics. He had probably the biggest DC fandom podcast out there at the time. And I was like, I should listen to this. So I got into it because of that. I got into. I thought, well, we shock it. Fine. I'll get a mic and we'll podcast about this stuff. In fact, the microphone that got me into podcasting is that microphone right there. That little blue snowball.

I love that.

Still got it. And I just got obsessed with it. I just got obsessed with it. I was like, holy crap, look at this. People listen to me talk about Kyle Rayner and why he's the better Green Lantern and all that sort of fun stuff. And then, like I said, you know, my toxic trait is to build a business out of everything. So I. I had this digital agency. I was loving podcasting. I started a business podcast called Excellence, which is based on a paraphrased Steve Jobs quote, which is. Not many people are used to working in an environment where excellence is expected. And the logic was that if you're a business person or an entrepreneur, you always want to deliver, like, 150, 160% output. And even. Even if you deliver 80% of your output, you're annoyed with yourself, but you're still delivering 120% of everyone else's. So it's this. You expect yourself to be better. It's just always how we work. So I'd put all that together and realized it was really difficult to get podcasts onto your website and, you know, all that sort of stuff. So we built a platform called Podcast Websites that we still run today. It was the world's only, and still is the world's only fully managed WordPress platform for podcasters. We're 10 years into it. We still run it. And that had a hosting platform component to it as well. So we could host your audio, build your RSS feeds out, and so on and so forth. And that led to Captivate. But the cool thing was I was doing public speaking. I was. I spoke every podcasting event that there has probably ever been. You know, is it the.

The.

One of the earliest podcast movements, the earliest pod fests and. And so on. So it was. That's how I got into it, man. And it's. It's. I'm a quite outspoken person.

I love that. And I know we talked about, you know, the story of Captivate for those that are out there. Maybe they're not in the podcasting space. Maybe they want to start a podcast. Like, what is Captivate? And why did you decide to launch it when you did? After having all this experience and, you know, going down the path of loving podcasting?

I think it's because I love podcasting that I launched it. The so Captivate is a hosting, distribution, monetization platform for podcasters. We allow you to upload your episodes, distribute them wherever you want to distribute them. Apple, Spotify, Global Player, get all the analytics back, insert advertisements. We've got a lot of unique tools that no one else has. Things like the integrated guest booking platform, or we've got the dynamic show notes builder. We've got the episode research planning tool. And so it's a. It's a. It's a great tool. The reason that we launched it was that. So it's a software as a service platform. So SaaS is a specific monthly, recurring, annual, recurring revenue type of business. It's great. You know, we like it, we enjoy doing it. It's a fantastic platform. And we launched it because what we were seeing was that there were. There were only two types of SaaS platform out there for podcasters. The incumbent platforms that were charging you for, like, charging you for things that didn't cost them money. And that annoyed me. Like, file storage is pennies. Like, I've got a five terabyte hard drive here that costs like 30 bucks. You know, it costs nothing. Storage is nothing these days. It's the other costs come into play later. And I was like, oh, why are people charging for this? And then the other thing that they were doing was other hosting companies were like, trying to attract everyone. So they were saying, you know, if you're a new podcaster, where the best for you. And it was just because they had a cleaner ui, the features weren't very good. Everything was just average in the space. So we launched Captivate with a very specific mission, which was, we don't want to work with every podcaster. We won't charge you for things like storage. We'll just charge you for the things that cost us money, which is bandwidth. The transfer of an MP3 file from the Casey Adams show to Mark Ascosia. You know, that's the bandwidth transfer. That's the thing that costs us money. So that's the thing that you pay for. That's cool. And in particular, what we did was we said to ourselves, we only want to build podcasting tools for those that are serious about growing a genuine audience. So, like, if You're a hobby podcaster and you sort of dip in your toe in. That's cool.

Yeah.

But, you know, use one of the other ones that have got like a free trial or give you an Amazon gift card to join them. Give them like three quid a month or give them, you know, give them your email address for free when you've decided if you're serious and if you are, will hook you up with everything else, because that's when you're in our wheelhouse. And it was, it was, it's, it was a fun model to launch, you know, from an entrepreneurial perspective. We came out and said with a world's only growth focused podcast hosting platform and all the others kicked off. You know, I know all the hosting platforms very well and personally, they're all, they're all, we're all, you know, we're all pretty, pretty friendly. And you know, I've drunk with them, I've eaten with them, and they said to me, what are you doing? You know, this. Are you saying that we don't care about growth for our audience? And I said, well, look, you got to build stuff that proves that you care.

Yeah.

You know, so it is, it's been an interesting ride because it's captivated, revolution, revolutionized a lot of the way that certainly the incumbents do business. And we've seen a lot of people doing some of the things that we've done even in the new startup space. And it's, I'm not saying that we, we created any of these things. What I'm saying is that we brought a lot of the ideas and the elements into podcasting. Um, so things like, even silly things like we adopted like the Apple mantra of releasing product, you know, it will, it will be a great product, but the release of it will be an event. And now every host is, every host is doing it. And that's cool.

How have you guys gone about doing that? This idea of releasing products and taking that Apple approach to it. I'd love to just hear some examples and stories there because I think it's, it's important from a launch strategy and just. I think founders can learn from that as well.

Yeah, I think it's important as well. So the, the, the, the, the big thing is make good product that doesn't, that doesn't always do what the user think they wants, what thinks they want. The, the customer. This, this is, you know, the old trope. The customer is barely right. And it's not because they, they don't know what they want. Or what they want is wrong. It's because that they're rarely build tech, so they don't know what's possible.

Yeah.

So, you know, let's. So a great example of that would be we released our episode planning and research links tool. So what this allows you to like, I'm a lazy podcaster. I must have produced 14, 1500 podcast episodes in the last 10 years. All right? And I'm lazy. Done a lot of them. So when it comes to my planning, I used to use something like Notes or Evernote or whatever. I'd write all my, you know, my research down for an episode. I'd find all the links that I wanted, I'd stick them in the document, and then I'd have to get them into my show notes for later.

Yeah.

So I said, we've got to build an episode research tool and planning tool. So I can go to Captivate, I can click create a new episode idea, and it's like, okay, here's me, Casey interview Mark Askwith. Here are my production notes that are private to me, and I can send them to Mark if I want. But here's another section that's like basically sort of the show notes, if you like. And here's a Chrome plugin that when I research Mark, I can just add links to this Chrome plugin and they get sent to Captivate. And guess what? I can attach those links to an episode idea. So when we were building that, I thought, well, this is great. We can build some buzz around this. We can say, you know, when we save people tons of time. I have just done an episode, literally, I published it three minutes before you and I came on using this tool. It was quick, but so we built this launch event around it. I said, you know, we're going to save you time, we're going to save you money. And that's the mantra for Captivate. We'll save you time, we'll save you money so that you can put both of those things into your audience growth. And what happened was. And this is a. This is the trick of great software is that good software does what it sets out to do. Fine.

Yeah.

It does its job. Greatest Software at the 11th hour will take some small element and will make that the killer feature. And I'll give you another example in a minute with this one. We got to the 11th hour and I said, you know what? This is ridiculous. I've got. So let me get this straight. Captivate will do my guest booking. So I've got your details. Ksa as a Guest got your bio, I've got your picture, I've got all your LinkedIn details, I've got all your social handles, I've got everything that I need. I've done the episode research in Captivate, so I've got my production notes which I needed to do anyway because I was doing it. And I've put all these links in Captivate which I've attached to an episode. Why do we not just build the show notes for people? So we, the last thing that we did was we said, well actually the last 11th hour addition to this is a dynamic show notes builder. So now you set a show notes template up and you say to it, if this episode has a guest, put all the guest details in the show notes. If the episode has research links, put all the research links in bullet points. And as soon as I hit publish, convert the idea to an episode, upload my MP3 file, I've got like a thousand word show notes. So it's sort of a no brainer. But people don't think like that. You know, a lot of people in SAS will think what's the basic version of a thing of a feature that we can do that will give us just enough to put it on our feature list and then let's move on to the next thing that gives us a tick box on a feature list. We did it with, we just launched the ability for people to sell content memberships and accept listener support through tipping and you know, by buying me a beer sort of thing on capture.

That's great.

Again, 11th hour stuff was like, wait a second, I can accept, I can sell memberships to early access content or exclusive content, but what's to stop me selling other stuff? So as an example, literally the 11th hour, the last 5% that turned it from good to great was that we added the ability to limit the number of people that could buy a specific thing. Because what you can then do as Casey Adams is you can say I have got one $5000 per month pre roll advertisement slot that you can pay me directly on card with today. And it's once it's gone, once it's sold, it's sold. And then when that person cancels, if they do, we'll open the slot back up. So it's, I think that it's an ethos, it's a mindset of going that extra 5% but taking, taking what users think they want and understanding actually they're not, they're not telling you what they want, they're telling you that under the skin There's a, there's a problem that you've got to understand and then it's up to you, up to us, to actually think of a solution, you know, that's powerful.

And just hearing the way you think about that, Mark, is incredible. And even too, just for context, my last software company is product called mediakits.com it was the easiest way for creators to create a media kit with real time data and analytics. You connect all your social platforms initially for social media creators led in the podcasters and just like focusing on like doing one thing great allowed us to not only build the product at tens of thousands of users, but eventually led to an acquisition last year. And I think just your journey in podcasting, building incredible tech, doing launches, the way you've done, has led to an acquisition. And I would love to take us, take the, not only the listeners through that journey, but hear about your experience of building a product, getting acquired and what that process looked like for you.

I mean, you know what it's like when you go through the acquisition process. There's a lot of horror stories out there. So we got acquired by Global, which is one of the UK's biggest media brands. You know, multi billion pound company, massive, massive multimedia company as well. You know, we're on outdoor advertising, a lot of live events, all sorts of different things.

Global's huge, huge company.

Yeah, yeah. A lot of stakes in the US as well, in certain media outlets. And the acquisition was sort of funny. You know, you stand a much better chance of getting acquired if you're not that bothered about getting acquired. A lot of people in particular startups, I do a lot of startup mentoring. I work a lot in London on, on the startup scene and a little bit less since COVID But I used to do, certainly used to do a lot of that. A lot of people get into something, loving the solution because they think that it will get them an acquisition. Whereas the people that generally get acquired love the problem, don't care about the acquisition as long as they can pay their rent.

All right.

And that's the main thing. And that's why, that's why investors, we didn't have any investors. I'm not a huge fan of seeking investment. It's just not for me personally. But that's why a lot of people who do take investment will find that investors will say, give yourself a good salary. Because if you're worried about money, how can you focus on the job? So that's a, it's a lesson. So what, what we focused on was just Building good product, being very genuine, great customer service. That was everything, you know, customer service was and is still everything. I still do customer support, because I think it's. How can I. How can I not? How the heck do I know what to build or what people think of our product if I don't, if I'm not there? So I think that's vital. The acquisition came around just, Just, frankly, just because of a fit. You know, we're both UK companies. They needed what we had. We were very comfortable because when we knew Global, they were great people. We still, I mean, this is nearly two years in, 18 months in, it's been great. We love being part of it and it's just the right fit. We turned a lot of acquisitions down because the fit wasn't there, but the beauty of it was. And this is sort of a lesson imparted by my old granddad, actually. He always used to say that if you're gonna. If you're gonna win something, you've got to be willing to lose something. You know, if you're going to turn up to a football game, you got to understand that you might lose this thing and you give everything, but you do not want to lose. But you have to accept that it's all right to walk away from something or to say no to something or to lose something. And that's not, you know, to quote Ted Lasso, you know, you just be the goldfish. You just move on. And that the beauty of things from our perspective, and I think a big lesson that a lot of startup founders should learn is that the power is in being able to say no. We turn a lot of acquisitions down. We weren't seeking acquisition. And then the right acquisition came along because we'd, we'd done our diligence, we ran a good business, had a good product, we'd done everything properly, so the product didn't cut any corners. Everything that we did, we did to a very high standard. We ran a tight ship. Our projections were genuine, our bookkeeping was on point. The basics that no one wants to do. Everything was done. We got the acquisition done from first conversation to signing the deal within five and a half, six weeks, at Christmas, towards holidays, too.

That's a caveat. Wow, that's incredible.

It was crazy. And it was, it was, it was all down to all of that, that stuff that I just mentioned, and I think it was the, the interesting thing from our side as well, was a lot of people said to us, what are you going to do now? Are you gonna. Is that it, are you done? And I was like, are you kidding me? I, I, I'm just about to have a little girl. We had a little girl two months after the acquisition, almost to the day. And I said, are you kidding me? Like, what am I gonna do? I'll still love the business, but what it means is that I can, I can work, you know, an 8 till 5 day instead of a 7am until a 10pm doing calls with people in Hawaii that might want to use Captivate.

Yeah.

You know, because it allows you to achieve balance. And I think there's a, there's certainly, there's a point that you get to where you need as an entrepreneur, as a business person, you've got to realize that there's no point doing any of this stuff unless you can do the things that you enjoy. Now a lot of people just enjoy that kind of, you know, the grind of being an entrepreneur. I love that. But it doesn't necessarily define me. Like, I just want to be a good dad. That's it. I'm just going to be there for that. So there's, there's no point working to do something that you hate. Like imagine, imagine someone says to you, why did you become an entrepreneur? Why do you've not got a 9 to 5? No one answers that question by saying, well, I became an entrepreneur so I could do something that I hated for longer hours and less money. I get silly. So you've got to be realistic about your goals, you know?

Yeah, no 100 and so when, when it comes to the acquisition, when did that take place?

So it got finalized on the 20th of December, 2021. So yeah, we're 18 months in as we're recording this.

That's incredible, man. Just to pivot the conversation a little bit, I know you recently put out a podcast all about recapping the podcast show London. I would love to just talk about all things podcasting industry. Right. Like here in the U.S. you know, I know. I saw recently that, you know, Spotify laid off a large amount of their team that it's in the podcasting division in terms of like podcasts and all these different entities. I would love to just hear your thoughts and you know, through the ability to be at these events and be in the industry so deeply as you are, like, what are your thoughts on all things podcasting? Whether that's tech, whether that's, you know, shows just the medium as a whole. Advertisers would love to hear your thoughts and really dive into it.

Yeah, I think it's, I Think it's all related. I think it's gone through its dot com boom over the last three years. I think it's, I think it's, it's. I don't want to say it's slowed down. It hasn't slowed down. People becoming more purposeful about what they do with their money within the space. You know, we've gone from a, a rapid, rapid, rapid growth in MRGs, minimum revenue guarantees for high tier talent to a place where minimum revenue guarantees on signing talent is becoming much more challenging to present a business case for because of listener behaviors, because of advertiser brand safety and so on and so forth. So there's been a, there's been a huge shift. You know, we've seen the number of acquisitions. Someone asked me this at an event. I was speaking at an event in Manchester. I've just put an, that's the episode I put out today, the recap of that event. And someone asked me that. One of the founders, Sam Seti, said to me, do you think the acquisition of space has slowed down in the industry? I said, yeah, of course he has. Because if I'm a VC firm or if I'm a seed fund or whatever and I come into the space three years ago, it's the wild west. Five years ago, wild west. Now it's sort of the gold rush is a little bit quieter and it's not a gold rush. It's more like the people who rushed in and now sort of sifting through to try and find the gold. Because, you know, not every show is going to be a hit, not every advertiser is going to stick around. The CPMs aren't going to always be as high as you want them to be. Direct selling host reds aren't going to be fantastic all the time. People are not going to renew their advertising campaigns as readily because before it was just we have a budget to test podcasting. Now it's like, well, all right, we're sat in this multimedia marketing meeting where we've got a cross channel strategy to, to, to, to sell these new cars or this new model of something. What's the podcasting channel looking like as opposed to the social branding channel or to the video channel or to the short form channel like a tik tok or whatever. How is it's no longer the test now it's a channel that has to stand up and perform. There's been a lot in the tech space. I mean, my word, you know, the podcasting just acts like every space. You know, there was an SEO boom. In 05208, maybe 2010, everyone was SEO experts. Oh, eight to 2018, everyone was a social media expert. 2018 onwards, everyone became blockchain experts. You know, everyone's selling an nft and I don't mind any of that. That's cool to get into it, but, you know, be careful not to build a business teaching people that they should do all that stuff when you're still not entirely sure about it. Yeah, AI is the thing now. And podcasting is going through all that stuff. It was, everything was, you know, we're gonna use, we're gonna use this thing to create the next social podcasting platform. That was five, six years ago. Everything was that then it was, you know, why are you not doing NFTs for your podcast? Why are you not, why are you not making an NFT out of your audio? Okay, why'd you cover art for each episode? Not an nft? Because it's not. Because it's crap. And now it's the same with AI. You know, everyone's, everyone's releasing AI products. They all do the same. And I got, again, I got asked about this will captivate get into AI, probably. But when we do, it's not going to be the same old stuff. I wouldn't have thought. It's, you know, it's, oh, we'll write your show notes for you, we'll write your titles for you. When has anything being built? Well, by, by trying to do it quickly. All right, if I, I very much doubt that the designers at Apple are using chat GPT to give them a brief on the next iPhone. You know, so it's, that's what's happened in podcasting tech. I mean, we've seen a lot of democratization of podcasting tech, which I think has been really good. There were one or two, three or four incumbent hosting platforms, for example. They were, they were just. All right, yeah, you know, they were just. But no one challenged them. And it's the same in any kind of industry. It's grown up, it's become a genuine industry. It has become an industry that, that the VCs flocked to, backed off from. There's a lot of people that were like, you know, why is, why is Apple not putting piles of money into it? Like, well, it's, until three years ago, it wasn't even a billion dollar business. Like, that's what, three days of Apple's revenue, A billion dollars? Why the hell would they, you know, now we saw it, you know, advertising this year is going to hit 2 billion. Cool. It's amazing. That's a great industry. But let's be honest, that's what, five days of Apple revenue. So it's, we've got to think, a context in the industry. And I think the other thing just to kind of finish up on that one, is that podcast in the industry wasn't an industry. It was made up of suppliers that supplied the creator economy with tools to create things that they loved. And that's cool. That was a business. But a hosting platform wasn't in necessarily the podcasting industry. It was in a software industry that supplied podcasting. Now it is an industry because guess what? Media has joined the. The story. Wondery Parkast. All these pineapple studios. You know, anyone and everyone that you can get think is getting into IP creation. So then you've got this splinter form and you've got open podcasting, you know, delivered via rss. Open and democratic. Everyone gets a say. But yet you've still got these people. Well, I suppose, like organizations cropping up to even govern open podcasting, which is sort of a misnomer. So you've got that open element to it. And then you've got media like Spotify and the production companies that, like, we don't care whether it's delivered via rss. All we want is really good audio that my mum can listen to that's going to give me consistent downloads every week to sell advertising on. And we'll cast a voice cast that if it gets turned into a movie, they can play the same characters. That is that podcasting? Well, it is in its most traditional sense. And, you know, it's on demand audio. As my friend James Kridland mentioned from POD News, it's on demand audio. That's cool. Do they care whether it's podcasting or not? Probably not. It's just audio. Spotify doesn't care whether we call it podcast or not. They just want reliable downloads across their inventory because it's a business. So you've got. You're starting to get that split as well there, which is quite fascinating. And it's. I think my. My stance on it all is always that of balance. And I've always been that kind of. I've always tried to be that fair voice. Even when we started as a hosting company, as a bit of an upstart and people, you know, some of the incumbents gave us a bit of grief. And my approach was always to welcome them and to be friends with them. And they are now people that I would have dinner with and you know, they're genuinely friends. And I'm taking the same approach to all of this, which is balance. All right. You know, the Spotify is not a villain in podcasting. YouTube's not a villain in podcasting. Even though there's a debate about whether it should rehost the content. That should be a big no, no. But it's sort of getting a bit of a pass because it's YouTube and creators won't reach. But that's for another. That's for another chat.

Yeah. What do you mean by that? Like you're saying, because I know that YouTube's having that big push into podcasting. Video podcasts.

Yeah.

As a hosting platform. That's been talked about for them.

Yeah. So what they've said is that they will take content from an RSS feed, then rehost that audio on their servers so they'll. They'll analytics within their ecosystem. They. They've not announced yet whether they will or not, whether they'll do pass through back to the hosting platforms for aggregate analytics. The big thing with that is that every other company that said that they will do that has got battered. Himalaya tried it and they said they were going to rehost the files. And everyone in the industry battered them, rightly so, because podcasting is open. But that's the point, you know, does everyone need it to stay open? Does everyone want it to stay open? Does YouTube want it to stay open? Well, who knows? Does Spotify want it to stay open? We can infer the ad answer to that. And that's where the fracture is and where the industry is interested in. And again, back to that sort of balance thing, my approach is this.

We.

We have to respect open podcasting and we have to respect what other people are trying to do, regardless of whether we agree with it or disagree with it. Because if we don't, if we dismiss it, like a lot of the incumbents, people that you will talk to in industry, in the podcast industry will decide, forget YouTube, because you know, that's not podcast and it's not delivered by rss. And one day their businesses will struggle because someone like you to just crept up behind them and took their user base and they won't see it coming because they're too worried about. That's not the traditional definition of a podcast. As a founder, as an entrepreneur, as a business person, you have got to have balance. You can't hide from anything. You've got to form an opinion and trust yourself that you know what you're doing in Your industry, that's. That, that's a huge thing that people don't do.

Yeah, no, I, everything you're saying is very, very spot on. And you know, when I'm thinking about not only podcasting, but your entrepreneurial journey, it's so cool to see how you've just continued to not only dominate, but just to shift and grow within the industry. I'd love to take a moment to take us back to. I know that just when it comes to your journey back in 2001, delivering pizza, going through that early stage journey, what have been some of the mentors in your life as an entrepreneur and some guiding principles that you've applied into business now that maybe you learned back in those early days?

Yeah, good question. So I did a TEDx talk called Choose Happiness, Choose Control that sums all of this up and it's an interesting watch, like a 20 minute thing. And to summarize it, you know, I've gone from like a pretty poor childhood, a mining community in the north of England, didn't really have much, you know, left school at 16 with just the GCSEs, which is the kind of high school grade qualifications, didn't do college, didn't university and you know, got a job pretty early on, always worked pretty well, always had two jobs as a kid, you know, delivering pizza while I was, you know, apprentice electrician. I got my first office job and was still delivering pizza. Then I quit like a 20 grand job and got a 200 grand contracting position at like 21, 22, 23. I was like, this is ridiculous. This money is brilliant. And then I gave that up because people were still telling me where I needed to be. And I thought to myself, this is crap. Why do I need to spend eight hours in this place when there's no work for me? I know I'm getting paid for it, but what a waste of life. So I went back to having no money and started a digital business up and, and, and that's where I started to meet a lot of the mentors that, that formed non familial kind of mentorship relationships with me. So my grand, my grandfather was a big influence on me. He was a big mentor all the way through my life. And then I started an agency with, when I was 26, 27ish, started a business with a guy called don who was 61, been there, seen everything, you know, really staid guy, really solid guy, a lot of patience. You know, I'm a classic adhd, hyperactive, you know, brains everywhere. That's what's got me to where I am, but I'm, I'm slowing down a lot more now and I can see myself becoming a lot more like him. He taught me a lot about how the subconscious works when it comes to solving problems and solutions. He was a huge, huge mentor. And I, I often now, I just did it earlier on today, you know, thought what would, what would he do and what would he like, you know, I was messing around with chat GPT earlier and some of the plugins and just thinking, he would have loved this. I would have loved this sort of thing. He would have. Even at 70 years old as he would have be, or 73 now, as he would be, he would have loved this. So he was, he was a, he was a massive mentor. He was such a good guy. But the biggest lesson is that, you know, we, we generally, I think a lot of people seek money and financial freedom. Like, I hate that word, financial freedom. It's become this thing that entrepreneurs put in books to try and sell books and a lot of those guys don't have financial freedom that I genuinely know. Entrepreneurs that sell books and courses about how to make money who cannot pay for the software that they're using to build their business. You know, I've seen it with membership communities and they're using things like Kajabi and whatever and I know that they can't pay for them. I know they can't because I've seen them at events and I've spoken to them and they don't tell people that. So I worry about things like, you know, anyone that's doing that sort of thing, you've got to do your due diligence and that's the key thing. Anyone that's generally selling the solution to a money problem is probably not selling you the right thing and you're probably seeking the wrong thing. So a big guiding principle for me is if you choose happiness and you choose control, I control my days, I control my time, I control how I make my money. I don't let any bad money. I've got this concept in my mind about bad money which comes from various different places. If I choose happiness, I choose control. The money will come and the happiness will come because, you know, it's, it's, it's again, about the balance. Am I going to look back on my deathbed and wish I had more money? Probably. But not because I want more money. Because I could have took my kid to different places, I could have taken her through school, I could have given her dance lessons, I Could have spent more time with her instead of working because I more money. So will I wish I had more money. Maybe. But it's what the control and the happiness it will afford you is, that, is the, is, is the thing that a lot of people genuinely want. And I think people, people forget that. So that's, that's a huge guiding principle. And then the other guiding principle is don't let any bad money into your business or your life. Bad money. All right, that can be bad investors, that can be bad clients. If someone ever says to you, or if someone says to you, you know, well, you can work for exposure, tell them to get lost. That's, you know, if what, you can put this on your portfolio, that's cool. I don't wanna, you know, what's the point? It's a waste of time. And the, the other thing is, when it comes to the bad money, like back to that question from earlier. Why did you become a business person? Why did you come an entrepreneur? You know, you never say it's because I, I, I wanted to hate what I do, but you never answer by saying, oh, it's so I could work for 10 clients that make me dread my emails on the morning or that phone me up after hours or that never pay me on time. Bad clients equals bad money.

Yeah.

You know, so just watch that concept of bad money. You know, when you earn money that comes in, well, it doesn't feel like you're earning money. It feels like you're enjoying your days and the money is just a byproduct. And I think if you can build a business in a lifestyle that is focused around, pick your own version of happiness, control how you, you get to that happiness and maintain that happiness, everything else falls into place. That is it, that is that to me, that's the, the only pursuit of. Because everything then trickles in.

Wow, those are some very powerful principles. I've actually never heard it said like that in the way you did. And, and I'll make sure to link that TED Talk down below. Mark, when it comes to, like you talking about, you know, your kids and bringing in different places, I'd love to talk about outside of the world of podcasting and everything business related, like, where do you like to spend your time and why?

Oh, I just, you know, I used to travel a hell of a lot, man. Jared Easley from Podcast Movement used to joke that I was in the US more than I was in the UK because I used to travel that much. So I was like defined by that used to Be all over. Used to love doing all that.

Where in the US I'm guessing all the.

Everywhere, man. I was in New York probably like five months of the year. A lot of places on the West Coast, Louisiana. Quite a lot. San Francisco, San Diego, a lot. Anywhere that the events went as well, you know, so anything from, like, Philly up to Chicago down to New Orleans and Dallas, we were everywhere. But now I'm like, I just want to be at home, like, spend time with my kid, be in the garden, take her on walks. You know, spend time. My wife, spend time with her. Go and just do the things that you'll remember and. And also have some personal goals. Like I said, I make a business out of everything I want to. My innate brain is. Is wanting to do that, and I've had to force myself not to do that. Like, I enjoy playing golf, I enjoy playing music, and just I. I enjoy now forcing myself not to do those for any other reason than to get good at them for me, you know, not to make money doing it. So everything's changed, you know, the last four or five years, which, which has been good. That answer would have been very different a few years ago.

Wow, that's great. Just having that perspective and that appreciation. That's awesome to hear. A couple more questions before we wrap up here, Mark, when it comes to, and I know we touched on it briefly about just your guiding principles, but there's a lot of young entrepreneurs that listen to the show. Maybe they're starting a business, they're just getting off the ground. If you were to go back in time and give your younger self a piece of business advice, whether that's more tactically or maybe it's personal advice. What would that advice be and why?

There'd be three things. There would be always, whatever you decide to do or make, do it exceptionally well. Don't do it, don't do it. Middle of the road or average. Second thing would be don't cut corners, even if it seems quicker, because that will bite you in the ass later. And then the third thing, and this applies to product, it applies to people, it applies to decision making. Only, only, only, only lean on your gut when it's strongly, strongly, strongly telling you something. We've all been there. We all know our intuition works. And it does. It works. Lean on that, you know, trust. It doesn't matter what your age, whether you're 18, whether you're 80. Your intuition's there, you know, yes, of course it's nurtured through experience, but. But it's there and it works. You know, there's. You would get intuition all over the place and we don't listen to it. So trust yourself, trust your gut, and don't let anyone tell you that age is a defining factor, because that's absolute crap. You know, as long as you work hard and you understand what you want to do and what you're good at, you'll. You'll not go far wrong. And then the other, the last piece of advice I give as well is say no to most things. You know, and, and, and, and I used to be a school of say yes and then figure it out. And that's cool. That gets you to where you are because you don't know what you're going to enjoy doing until you've said yes to a thousand things. But when you get to the point that you found that thing that you want to do and you are building a business, say no to most things because go back to that point. Right. What is my version of happiness? How do I control how I get there? All right, this is what I want to do. This is my vision. I don't focus. This is another thing. Don't focus on what you want to do. Focus on what you want to be. All right. That's a big thing.

Yeah.

So here's the thing I want to be. Here's how I'm going to control getting there. Every decision that you make, you should only say yes to that decision if it gets you one step, perceivably closer to that destination of where you want to be and how you want to be. If it's, that would be cool. But it's a distraction. It pulls you over here. Just put it back on the shelf. Because nothing ever goes away. Everything comes back around. Just put it on the shelf until later. There's a thousand things that we've. There are things that I put on the shelf 10 years ago that I'm now just dusting off and going to get started with. Nothing goes away.

I love that concept. And I think, like my last company, Media Kids, my co founder and I, we had this idea when we were 18 years old. I was just graduating high school, I had no tech experience, was just getting my podcast off the ground, and he was starting an agency. And we ended up shelving the idea. Like, you know, it was just one of those things. I'm like, great. Like real time data and analytics for creators. It sounds awesome. But then we just didn't have the resources of the, you know, we didn't have that commitment or experience yet. And then we circled back to it in early 2020, when we really started to not only see this resurgence of the creator economy, but with platforms like TikTok taking off, and we had a couple extra years of experience and relationships, and when we went out to do it, we just took it off the shelf. And I think just hearing that from you, but also seeing it in other avenues of this entrepreneurial journey for myself and people I've interviewed, it's so important, right? Like, the timing of things. You know, you see it now with Apple launching the Vision, Apple Vision Pro, right? Like, people have built AR headsets, virtual reality headsets for years, but their timing is now like the industry has caught up. People have understood what it is, and there's, you know, there's decade, a decade plus of, you know, just behavior, of expecting what that could be. So I love how you said that, and I definitely appreciate that perspective, for sure. Last question before we wrap up here, Mark. I know for me, there's one word that I love ending with is excitement. Because I know when I was 17, embarking on this journey of podcasting, I was excited to not only have conversations, and I think excitement can drive you in many areas of life. So in this journey that you're on business, professional, personal, what are you currently excited about?

Am I. Oh, I'm just excited about my little girl. She. She just excites me every day. She just develops and just amazes me every day. And also, flushing a seven iron solidly is gets me going.

Love that.

Is it. I love it. But, no, that genuinely, the podcast industry excites me. I'll tell you a secret, actually. Last year, 2022, I was. So when we came off the back of the acquisition, I didn't. I had no idea that when we got acquired, I was burnt out. And I've been burnt out maybe twice in my life, and I didn't see the symptoms of it this time because we were so caught up in building Captivate the acquisition and getting ready for our little girl to bomb. Last year, I didn't feel like myself from an excitement about the industry perspective. I knew I was good at what I did, and I know, I knew that I knew the industry well enough to do a good job, but I. But I. I couldn't motivate myself to do anything other than a good job. And that's generally fine. You know, people are happy usually with a good job, but we aren't because we're entrepreneurs. We expect excellence. As we said earlier, this year is totally different. I've got over the burnout that rest. I needed a mental rest, you know, just working. I know it sounds silly. Working just eight hour days, not on a startup that's 12 and 16 hours, gave me the mental rest that I needed. Now I like, I'm as excited about the podcast industry as I've ever been. That's why I can do talk for nearly an hour on just random stuff, you know, it's. I am as excited about it as I've ever been with Renew, almost with renewed excitement, because we're now part of a company that touches much wider elements of podcasting and the, you know, wider broadcast media, but also now, because Captivate is more mature. We've, we've done all the things that we wanted to do to get the baseline set and now we can do the really exciting stuff. So. Yeah, man, I, I still, I still love it. Someone said to me, like I said before, like when, when you got acquired, did you not just think about stopping or doing something else? And I just thought, what? That's crazy. Why would I still love this thing? So as cliche as it sound, what I do every day does still excite me. But yeah, the kid in the 79 still probably beat it.

That is wonderful. I appreciate you sharing in. Before we wrap up, I wanted to give you the opportunity and for the listeners to also understand where is the best place for them to follow your journey, connect with you, listen to the show and stay up to date with all things Captivate and everything you have going on.

Yeah, just get me on Twitter. Just Mr. Asquith on Twitter. That's the single point of contact for everything. Yeah, you can branch out to everything from there and that's the place that I'm most active, so. @ Mr. Asquith on Twitter.

Awesome. Well, everyone listening, thank you so much for tuning in. Mark, appreciate you for coming on the show. I'll be sure to link that all down below.

Thanks, my friend. Yeah, keep up doing what you're doing. It's amazing to see your journey and as always, just whatever I could do to help, mate, keep, just keep going.