Ellie Puckett - CEO @ Resonate & Acquisition Entrepreneur

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom podcast. We have Ellie Puckett with us today. Ellie's a CEO at ResNet. She's an acquisition entrepreneur. She acquired a podcast company not so long ago, so I had interesting convos with her. Last time we spoke in Louisville, Kentucky. Ellie, welcome to the podcast. Tell us a bit more about yourself, ResNet, and Renegade.

Awesome. Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Like I said, my name is Ellie. I am the co-owner and CEO at Resonate Recordings. We are a remote-first, full-service podcast production agency and hosting software. And so we help our audience, our clients get to their target audiences through the power of podcasting. So a lot of times that looks like B2B space, corporations, Fortune 500s, nonprofits, but that can also mean creators. And Resonate actually got its start in the true crime space with making several very famous true crime shows, a few of which we owned. And in 2023, we sold off Culpable and Undetermined to Tenderfoot. And about the same time is when I stepped in and took over as CEO, as the podcast landscape has been shifting into more of a business-first landscape. So I had been on a journey from the technology startup world to the acquisition world, and I was actively looking for something to buy when I met the other owners of and founders at Resonate and, um, ended up buying a portion of the company and stepping in as the, uh, operating owner and CEO.

Interesting. Yeah, the true crime fever, right? Like, is that fever still going? Because there's been like so many competing shows as of late. Uh, also, where did that fever started, right? Why are people obsessed in like finding out how this fucking psychopath killed this, uh, other person?

Well, what's surprising is like the majority like of listeners in true crime are actually women. So the, the psychological part of this is that women seemingly believe if they know all the ways they can be murdered, they are more prepared to not get murdered. So it's, it's a funny thing that goes on, but like the vast majority of true crime podcast listeners are actually women, adult women.

Um, and I can just picture women that's like super fucking paranoid and just a guy saying hi to her and like, don't talk to me. Yeah, kicking him in the nuts or something.

One of the first things that resonates— I'm actually not a true crime fan at all, and, uh, but One of the very first weeks we were working on a show and there was something wrong with an edit. And so I was listening to it in the middle of like traveling down to a place I play beach volleyball, which is in a rougher part of Louisville. And it was night. And so it was dark and I was listening to this show and I'm not a true crime listener. And it was like this brutal murder rape situation. And I was like, I think I'm going to have to work on this tomorrow. I cannot listen to this in the middle of downtown at at night. Like, this is not okay.

Yeah, it's the same with horror movies, right? Like, I'm a pretty fearless guy, and I think one of the reasons for that is that I don't put like toxic garbage in my mind, right? So yes, when it's dark at night and it's like, I don't get these— I, I don't have these ideas introduced my mind and invent shit because the brain's really good at that, right? It will always try to flag that, yeah, there's a predator around the corner and whatever, right? Yeah, I agree with you.

I, I've I feel like my real life is, uh, stressful enough being the person that's in charge of so many employees and their livelihoods and their income that I don't need external stress. So I keep my listening more in the, like, um, business and finance and other type of genre, as well as then my pleasure being audiobooks and, like, the whole Romantasy thing. I'm here for it, but it's all happy.

Yeah, I think it's also— it's more than just, like, preparing their survival, but that's a pretty good one. I haven't thought about that one. It's certainly like iceberg, right? Like everything we do as humans, like to survive. Another one is like adrenaline, right? It's like stimulate their brain that is dulled by 9 to 5 and just like a very boring general life, right? It's just like take their brains into different situations that they wouldn't find themselves into, but it's like life is so boring, like you're surviving and thriving so much nowadays that you need like some kind of spice to, to put your brain in shambles and cause adaptation or whatever.

Yeah, the, the— if you're living kind of in the like monotony, it can give you maybe that spike of adrenaline. But I get it in real life, so I don't need it in my podcast.

And it's very profitable, like, uh, people love it. I guess that's the main point. What kind of ads you put on these true crime podcasts? Like 'Hey, go buy this non-alcoholic beer.' Uh, it's like, what kind of ads do you—

so I think that the, the, the podcasting space is kind of broken up. And so the— there has been a trajectory that's taken over, which is that these true crime shows are actually really expensive to make. They take a lot of research, they take a lot of time. And so they're not being made at production agencies like mine as much anymore. That doesn't mean we don't have some. That doesn't mean that it's not still a part of what we do, but they take a different type of effort, research, and amount of like pre-production work. So that, those, those types of shows tend to be, end up being made in networks that have a lot of other shows. And that's an ad play revenue situation, which is different than a business who is podcasting for awareness marketing, content creation and generation. And so those two models of podcasting are actually very different. And Resonate isn't typically placing ads. We, in the sense that we aren't finding the ad, so we will put it in the edit, but we're not sourcing it. That is actually a whole nother faction of the business model, um, which tends to either happen at the network or at the host level, whereas we're really about helping you create a show that is targeted at your goals and the ROI you're coming for, and not necessarily targeted at how do I make a show that reaches hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people so it can make enough money off of ad revenue. And so Resonate has previously done that and done it successfully, But it is a different business model and a riskier one because this show might make it and make a couple hundred thousand, um, dollars of revenue per season. And therefore the math works, but the very next one you had to put in over $100,000, if not $200,000 of revenue or of, of expenses before you know it, you made it. Because the research comes first.

Yes, yes, yes. No, I understand everything you're saying, but where does AI come in, right? Because maybe I told you this, and that's the advertisement to this podcast, right? Like The Greats, uh, that's a channel I launched fully with AI. It's faceless, um, it's not like attention porn like the, the crime. I wouldn't do that, right? It's like, I don't think I would add value to humanity at making humanity more anxious, right? Uh, and glorifying killers, which is absurd.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I glorify— I mean, some people would say I'm doing something different, uh, but similar, right? I glorify like outliers, right? Like billionaires and super athletes, right? Like people that have known an outsized amount of success in their own field, right? Maybe a MotoGP racer like Marc Márquez, for example, or I don't know, uh, Sara Blakely from Spanx, right?

Yeah.

Um, it's fully done with AI, right? Uh, even in the research part, I don't outsource. I mean, I do ask my AI who would be good next, but it's mostly me on that. She's like, who would be a next great person? And ironically, it comes from a conversation with people like you, or, uh, by listening to some of the podcasts that AI made that names another, like, high performer, right? What do you think about that model? Do you have— do you think it has um, some kind of sense. I mean, I target CEOs and founders and investors, right? So it's a very specific audience, and I do get negative comments on YouTube saying, oh, it's AI slop. Yeah, from NPC people. Yeah, I know that's AI, obviously it's AI, right? But doesn't mean that there's no good information for CEO brain to reproduce and, and bring value to them and scale their business, right? So what do you think about the model itself?

Do you think it has legs and arms, or Yeah, I think just like, um, I am not anti-AI. I think that there, with anything, you have to understand it and then find out where like ethics and morality and the middle lies. And so from an AI standpoint, like I'm pretty pro-AI in how it supports, um, me as a business owner and founder and how it improves our operations and allows me as a small business owner to try to compete. And to make a margin in a very harsh economic landscape. And so I'm not anti it. Where I get more nervous is when it is replacing the creativity and brain of humans. But I don't even mean in content creation. So I'm okay with utilizing it when I am generating the authentic truth creativity out of myself and then directing how it brings those ideas to life because I am not a trained graphic designer. I will use it all day to make it give me what my brain can see but cannot make. And so that's not really much different than being trained as a graphic designer, in my opinion. Now, there— I think when it comes to like fully AI-generated podcasts, there is a boundary I have, which is I would like to advocate to the platforms Spotify podcast, whatever, that there was at least some sort of delineation or marker if it's 100% AI-generated. And I think that there is absolutely a place for 100% AI-generated in education, that when we're trying to learn something specific, it's really easy if I can consume it in an audio format for that learning. But if we are entertaining, if we are creating, if we are building trust, authenticity, authority, then I do think that that needs to be generated from the human heart and soul, even if they use AI to get the job done. So it's like there's a boundary there. Does that make sense?

Yes. Um, guess it depends on one's mission, right? Like me, my full mission is I'm a fucking missionary and I want to convert everyone into founders. Like, yeah, and I— there's some selfish goals in there, but I also think that thesis is AGI and superintelligence resistance, right? Like, I think The future is 100% entrepreneurial, and entrepreneur is fully aligned with human nature and evolution. We've always been entrepreneurial, uh, we've always been gritty as well, but that sort of got lost with the 9-to-5 corporation era, right?

Fully agree, 100% agree on that.

That lobotomized pretty much everyone. It's like, oh, nice salary, just do as you're told, you know, and fucking go to university and have your brain indoctrinated, uh, at starting at primary school, right?

And yeah, I mean, we literally— the corporations changed it. Like, it was like 19— I want to say '78 that corporations lobbied for changes in the education system so that they made better employees. So like, they took away our agency. Yes.

And so like, cookie cutter everything, right? And I'm strongly against that. So With that being said, I'm leveraging AI to add value to founders. And if you have a job like, or if you are lobotomized in a 9-to-5, my videos won't make any sense to you. You will just be like, oh, this is AI, goodbye. No, the point is like, who cares if it's AI? I'm telling a compelling story. It's pretty good. There's lessons in there as founders. So me, I'm my own audience as well, and I'm very difficult with the content that I consume. Even podcasts like Founders by Devin Senra didn't check all my boxes, or Acquired, which is just too long, right? It's like 4 hours on Coca-Cola. Dude, just give me the 40-minute version of the full story of Coca-Cola. I don't give a fuck how their formula was made or whatever, right? Like, just give me the lessons, the painful lessons that the founders learned, right? And what they learned along the way. Tell me about their struggle, right? Because we know that entrepreneurship is so hard and we always paint a false picture of like, oh, it's overnight success. No, that never happened. There's always been a struggle, right? So me and my podcast was just like, feed my methodology and my story framework to an AI. The AI will scrape and research like the full spectrum on Coca-Cola and will find out like obscure stuff about it., and it'll package it in a story with NotebookLM, which you probably know, right? It's like, yeah, yeah, two hosts talking to each other, which is cool. It's like a conversation format, which I think is amazing. And I'm the number one listener to my podcast, and if I still find value in it, why would I stop making it, right?

It's like, well, exactly. And it's education. Like, you are using it to make yourself better as a founder. You used AI to help you be a better founder. You used it in your business to grow something that is valuable to you, your employees, your family, whatever. And all of those are good, in my opinion, uses of it. My only line like that I would even draw in the podcasting space is for my— the creators that I serve, which is really a simple request from like Apple and Spotify to have a— just a delineation or a note of like this disclosure.

YouTube has it already, by the way, right? You've— they— you know that YouTube has that. So, uh, Spotify and Apple Pods don't have that?

Uh, not surprisingly, not wildly. Yeah, it's not there yet. And so, and I think it should be clear that like there's AI slop, absolutely, but there's also really good application of AI, and there's really good human application And there is human slop. Like, we have all become prey to the download that was the person who was taught by the person who was taught that by the person who was taught, and they actually know nothing. And so like, that's a real thing too.

It is everything actually. AI is smarter than 99% humans, I believe, right now. So it's like, people that call on AI slop are like very low thinkers, in my opinion. Most of them are are sloppy themselves in, in telling an AI that it's sloppy. Uh, most of our thoughts are sloppy as well as humans, and AI is reflecting the human mind, right? So in my opinion, what is AI slump is like, it's zones in which AIs are like 7s out of 10, right? If you ask an AI, I don't know, like, what's the best supplement for me, right? It's going to give you a very broad reply, right? But probably better than a dietitian, in my opinion.

It's like, well, and it's like iteration is a major part. Like, what you, what you put in is what you get out. Learning how to be good at prompting, learning what the boundaries of this tool or that tool is, it is a process to be learned. Um, and so, you know, if all you're using is like the free version of ChatGPT and you're putting in really basic plots, uh, uh, prompts, you're probably getting a sloppy response, right? Like, and that, but that doesn't mean that. So we are all seeing sloppy responses. Like we got an email from a customer the other day saying that they were good to go on something and then they weren't actually good to go. And then they were mad and it was like, oh, I used my AI responder and didn't proofread it. Well, that's on you, right? You click that button, like. So that it, we're all capable of making that mistake. I'm not even really judgmental of it, but that is AI slap if you're on, if you're using it to completely replace your brain. Iteration is still a part of the process. It's just allowing us to iterate a lot faster and to get to a better product faster. And it's allowing people who are less, um, like you don't have to be a graphic designer and a coder. And, uh, whatever, to get there, you have to understand principles of like what makes a good product and then understand how to work with the AI to get there. But you no longer need to know how to do, you know, SQL.

Yeah, it's funny that these AI responders, right? Um, I've used them a couple of times, but then it was like, I think people respect more a human response, even if it's lower cap and it's like 5 words, by the way, which is my style. It's like very succinct. Sank and clear, right? It's like no bullshit, no 5 lines to tell one fucking idea, right? Like just 5 words. Yes, okay, I got it. It's like super simple and clear and energy efficient. That's my brand, right? And I think people have a respect for non-AI emails because I just read right before that show like an email of a client that said that he wants to work with us, right? And it's like first 2 paragraphs is like, um, trying to be like, hey, thank you so much, guys, I'm so excited about what— it's like, are you, or is your AI writing this, right? And then it's like 5 paragraphs to say one thing. And I was like, dude, isn't it better if you just reply like in lower caps? Like, who cares, right? So I guess humans are catching up to that. They want something to— they want very high-level thinkers that want to speak to other high-level thinkers. They don't want a fucking ChatGPT answer, right? So, um, hey, I want to talk to your business because We're already like 20 minutes in. What do you acquire nowadays? Like, what's your thesis? It's pretty unique as well. People that start with an acquisition mindset, which I think is a mindset everyone should have. Everyone sucks at finance, right? And, you know, we talked about people that start a business rather than acquiring one. Why is your brain built that way? And yeah, what have you acquired so far? What will you acquire in the next couple of years?

So I started in the technology startup world. I preached startup and how to start a business and was the queen of how to start. And it had never even occurred to me to buy a business. And I think that I was extremely frustrated when it all clicked for me because I had a degree in entrepreneurship. I was literally Little Miss Startup and No one had ever like just said, hey, if you want to be an entrepreneur and you're not one and you don't have the idea, why not buy something? And when that hit me, it was in a podcast episode with Money with Katie and maybe even a social media post. Money with Katie is a fantastic money podcast. And this was years and years ago, but it it was like I didn't— it never even occurred to me how the math about buying worked. I had watched some other people acquire, but they were acquiring in like the $13+ million range, which still seemed so far out of my reach. And so I bought Resonate in October of 2023. It was a seller note. And that journey took me a year and a half to 2 years once I figured out that that was something I was interested in. Was learning and then looking and finding is really difficult. I had made an offer on a bounce house company. I had looked at 2 or 3 different types of businesses. I had looked at franchises and really realized that, like, my startup founder mentality was not going to fit a franchise well. Like, I could be an investor in one, but it was not going to be my good— I'm not going to follow a rulebook very well. So I went and when I met Resonate, I acquired it. My thesis on it at the time was I needed to replace my income. So I needed it to make at least $250,000 of EBITDA every year. And then it do about be up for sale if it was in total up for sale from anywhere from $500,000 to $900,000, because I knew what I could come up with roughly was around $50,000 to $60,000. Down. And so the— I backed into my math and there's a book from Walker Deibel that is called Buy Then Build, and it's fantastic and it can walk anybody through this process. And I really backed into what I wanted based on what I could afford and realizing like I may be a little more white collar than I am blue collar, maybe a little more whatever. And then I just kept looking and that was really hard. I just was very loud about it. I started a podcast. I told all of my network and I was pretty well networked until this came about. I ended up only buying a portion for many reasons. And since then, I've— we bought out one of the original founders completely. I own like actually only 37.5% or something like that. And so that makes it even more attainable and affordable for people. If you don't think in like, I need to buy 100% of a business, the hardest part is finding. Since I bought Resonate, we have tried to acquire a production company, another competitor, and that was a really hard journey. They were in a different country. I had to work with a, you know, within a different legal system, within a different banking system. And it was a really cool experience, but it ultimately failed and fell apart. Um, and so I am on the, uh, the light hunt. Um, but I could see us acquiring something maybe in 2027. Um, and I'm always kind of ears out. We are in the podcast production space, so something that fits well within that, that has our similar customers would be great. Other things that would be awesome are in the like PR social media space, um, because we don't provide those services after the podcast ends. So we create some content, but we don't post for them. We don't do other adjacent services. So I could see having a kind of a suite of services where I can pass referrals back and forth, and that those would be what I would be looking for right now.

And have you got to return on your investment yet with the acquisition? What's the typical time? Is it 5, 10 years, or—

I think it depends. If we look like specifically at the amount of money that I paid versus the amount of money that I have received, I have paid myself more than what I paid for buying, but I still owe what I, uh, money on what I used to buy it. So I have made— I have brought more money in. Um, so I paid $120,000 for my 20%. I've been pretty honest and transparent about that. And, um, and I make more than that a year. I've been here for 2 and a half years. My husband also worked here, so we have brought back home more money than what we paid for the original 20%. But that doesn't mean I've paid off what I owe. That's probably going to take me 5 to 10 years to pay all the way off.

Yeah, there you go. Well, Ellie, thanks for being on the podcast. Where can people find out more about you?

Um, LinkedIn is the best place. That's where I'm most active. Um, and it's Ellie Puckett. Uh, so just your LinkedIn, Ellie-Puckett is my handle. I'm also renegade.ellie on Instagram and TikTok, but I'm far, by far most active there. And if you're looking for podcast services or anything about acquisition, um, my podcast is Renegade Ventures Podcast. Um, and I hope you reach out to me.

That was Ellie and Charles Cormier for another founder