#111: Content | Podcasting Strategy for B2B - Do podcasts work? How do you measure ROI? (with Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios)

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One, two, three, four.

Exit, exit, exit. All right, Ian, you're here. I'm here. We've been talking about podcasting. You obviously run a podcast company now. When did you get into this medium?

So I got out of the army in 2014 and I worked for a media company and then I started like a conference and then I co founded a media company. And so we were the largest publication on medium. And so we're doing like 2 million uniques a month and decided to sort of build out a podcast network. And so that's right.

Okay. I got so many things. So you did. You started the Mission.

Yeah, so I co founded the Mission.

Yeah, the mission was like when I was at Drift. I don't know how familiar you are with my backstory, so I'm happy to share.

No, I know. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. So I was like marketing manager at this Company drift. And when I started, they weren't ready to push the product yet, but they had well known founders and David, who's a CEO, was like, had a pretty big following on Twitter and other places. And we went hard on Medium, like because Medium was plugged into your Twitter account. And so he had like 50,000 followers on Medium built in. And he was always ranting about product management and SaaS stuff. It was like a big deal to like write an article. So I would like, either he would write it or I would ghostwrite or we would. I would interview him on audio and then ghost write it and turn into something. And it was like a big deal if you got your post accepted into the mission. That drove a shitload of traffic. And it was like, that was such a play back then. And I remember that when I reached out to you, I remember seeing that on your LinkedIn and I was like, I gotta remember to ask you that.

It was a crazy time. And it's like one of those, the classic sort of marketing lessons that you learn, which is if you have a bunch of followers on a platform that if that platform changes anything, that it can change your entire business. And so it's pretty crazy for us back then because Medium had brought on the Ringer. They had originally launched on Medium.

That's right, the ringer. When they launched, yeah, they went from like Grantland to the Ringer and they did that whole thing on Medium.

That's right, yeah. And so and for us, like we were the biggest publication on Medium. We were doing like 2 million uniques a month. We had all this stuff. And then Medium started making all these changes and you basically couldn't really do a lot of stuff. And they basically deprioritized essentially publishers, for lack of a better term. So we built a podcast network. And so I hosted the show Marketing Trends, a bunch of other shows for a long time for. So I'd probably done over like 1500 podcasts. But in my time there, then I started Caspian Studios in February of 2020 to be sort of podcast as a service and then video podcast as a service because so many of my friends were B2B Tech CMOs and were like, hey, this is all great, but like, can you just do it for us? And I sort of was like, hey, I should probably just do the whole see give podcast as service a shot and sort of build new natively for B2B companies. Try to connect to revenue rather than just sort of like kind of creating art projects, which is what we love to do.

Sometime your first foray into podcasting was around the time of the mission, like 2017 to 2020ish.

Yeah, I think it was 2016 that we started building out the podcast network. I was doing five shows with Salesforce and we had a bunch of other stuff. But yeah, so that was the first time getting into it. And coincidentally is the first time working with a list celebrities as well, because we did a few different series back then that were narrative nonfiction with Alec Baldwin and Jeffrey Wright and a few others. And so that was my first foray into that world as well, which was very informative to, like, what we're building now.

We'll talk about that too. But you did narrative nonfiction, but were you also hosting a bunch of content?

I hosted probably like 1500 episodes. We had a daily show. We had twice a week marketing show, twice a week IT show, and then a bunch of other stuff. We did a veteran entrepreneurship podcast because I'm a vet. And so we did all sorts of different stuff there.

You ever get burnt out hosting a podcast?

No, I love it. I mean, what I tell my company is I do five things. I talk to a customer. I talk to an employee. I talk to, like, a prospect or a potential partner. I talk into my microphone, or hopefully I'm not talking at all. If I kind of can structure things that way, it ends up working a little bit better. It energizes me. Like, I think it's like, it's how I started my career was listening to podcasts. I think a lot of us started our careers at this point is like listening to experts in the space like you. So, yeah, fires me up.

I started a podcast in 2014 called Tech in Boston, where I was like, just a junior level, like, employee working at a startup in Boston. And I was listening to this week in startups all the time as I was starting to get into the startup scene. And I was like, oh, I'm in this Boston startup scene. There's like a ton of people that are interested in this. There's all these meetups and events, and there's like a very vibrant thing here. Why does nobody have a podcast focus on Boston startups? And I mentioned it to or I tweeted it out, and the CEO of the company that I was at at the time, Ben Jabowie, who's the CEO of Privy, I tweeted like, why is there no Boston startup podcast? And he was like, you should start one. I was like, yeah, no, no.

Like, I don't.

Who am I to do that? I Don't know. He pushed me to start it. And that was the first thing that I did that was my own and that was a side project. And I give that thing like a lot of credit for helping me build my career because it was like, I gotta figure this thing out. And I would literally put my laptop and microphone in my backpack and go all around Boston and go to VC's offices and interview CEOs and it was like nobody was doing it. And so I got Access. As a 24 year old kid, I'm sitting down with like the top CEOs and VCs in Boston interviewing them for the podcast because nobody else was doing that. It was like incredible advantage.

I did the same thing in my time at Mission. We had an audio engineer with all of our gear and we were going over to like every single tech company in the Bay Area, all sorts of like awesome founders and VCs and all these people. And I think that that same magic, I think people underestimate that magic, that it still exists. I think that people think that everyone has a podcast, it's oversaturated and there's all these things. And I think that's like a pretty big loser's mindset. And like we try to operate with like a creator's mindset because if you believe that, then why are we even going to make another blog post or another webinar or another piece of art? It's like, aren't there enough paintings? Like, aren't there enough movies? Like we should just close up shop. But like, that's not how sort of like humans work and it's not how we're wired. And there's always new things to be discovered and there's always new people that are trying to discover them in new creative ways. So I still feel like it's not inning one of sort of the audio genre, but I think it's always inning one every year. Like AI, right? Nobody was talking about AI eight years ago and now everybody wants to talk about AI. So there's always an appetite for what's next and to look at like our past mistakes and failures and things like that, to learn from it.

So I hear that all the time. And we should keep going down this path. Since you brought it up. It is something that everybody says, and especially the audience of this podcast is going to be people that work in, in marketing and B2B. And everybody says that you can't do this format. The one that I have, which is the interview podcast, right? That format is dead. If you're a new company, a new startup, don't go launch that format. What's your reaction to that? And let's talk about what should you do? The B2B marketing teams out there that want to get into podcasting this year, what should the approach be then?

So I think I am not like draconian to the idea that every single company should have a podcast or anything like that. I think that first off, it's a very loaded term to say podcast. Like, what I think about is serialized content is building series. You build series that someone can subscribe to that they can make part of their life, whether it's once or twice or binge it or something that they can listen to consistently. But I think it's about making audio series, video series, short form series, but things that people actually subscribe to and that they would actually enjoy. And I think that where people get, I think, in trouble, or a written series, which is like a newsletter, and I think where people get in trouble is that they're trying to make a podcast for podcast sake or make a blog for blog's sake, or webinars are a good example of just like, hey, we're just going to keep trotting out webinars that stink. Rather than say, like, hey, let's relook at this and think of how do we build a series of. For this webinar that it is something consistent and repeatable and we deliver on this promise every time. And like, we talk about that a lot at Caspian Studios, which is what is the promise to the listener, right? If you go and watch Jeopardy, you know that there's going to be, you know, questions in the form of answers, right? And you're going to get 30 minutes of it and there's three rounds. You know exactly what you're going to get. If you do watch 60 Minutes, it's the same thing. Like if you watch Eastbound and Down, like there's a certain thing that you're looking for there that you're going to deliver on the promise or the Kardashians or whatever. And I think so often in B2B, we don't ever think audience first like that. And so the first thing you have to do is sort of think audience first, Persona first, like, who is this for? And then figure out how do we make a series that they could subscribe to or binge in their own way. So, like, whether or not it's, I mean, there's no name for this thing. I call it like a B2B series or a video Podcast. There's no like, good name for this thing, but. But that's the way that I think about it. Rather than like, should we start a podcast? Cause I hear a lot of people are like, well, I don't listen to podcasts. So you go talk to like a CFO and they're like, well, I don't listen to a podcast. I'm like, well, what do you listen to or what do you watch?

How do I download this thing? What does that mean? Download this podcast? What does that mean?

Well, yeah, and it's like a silly thing to be like, well, I don't pay attention to TikTok. And it's like hundreds of million people on it. So, like, you should pay attention to it whether or not you want to, like, use it as a daily user. So that's like part of it. The other part of it is that like, what we have seen, what the data shows is that building a B2B series is great for pipeline acceleration. It's great for pipeline creation. It is great for the 95% of time that people are not buying your stuff. And I think that most marketers don't do enough stuff in the 95% of time that people aren't buying. And they focus too much on the 5% of time that people are buying. And I think that if you want to get in front of someone a year and a half before they're ready to buy, then you need to create a series that they can be a part of. Your company newsletter, ain't it? And like your webinars aren't it like, that's just a very different type of a thing. Because at the end of the day, I listen to a podcast because I want to be anonymous, because I want to do it, listen to it on the go however I choose and not get bombarded by sales reps. Could you.

Imagine if you listen, you're out on a run and you listen to a podcast episode and like four hours later you get a call from a bdr.

Could I imagine even just getting a call from a BDR in general? And like, that's the sort of thing that I think people don't realize is that podcast equals pipeline. And that's going to be one of our big pushes for next year. And obviously it's self serving, but there's tons and tons and tons of companies that are building a portfolio of series that drive revenue. We just pretend like that's not the case or something. I don't know.

Yeah, I think your point about the long term approach is a good one, especially the 95 and five thing, because to me, the ROI of podcasting becomes obvious the longer you do it. You just know. Like, I, we've generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue in the last year from sponsorships. People email me all the time about, oh, I connected with this person because of your podcast. Or they tell us, I think, like, 50% of the people that sign up for the Exit 5 community do it because they heard about Exit 5 first on the podcast. And. And I run the company, so I don't have to justify the ROI of it. But even back in the days of drift, we had this podcast, David and I, who's a CEO, it was called Seeking Wisdom.

And.

And we had this running joke between us that people would email us all the time. They would write reviews, or they'd tweet at us, or they'd. We'd be walking through a mall in Boston, they'd be like, Seeking Wisdom. They'd see us and they'd yell, we had this joke internally. We'd be like, how are we ever going to measure the ROI of this podcast? And we would screenshot all these comments and put them in. In Slack. And we created this culture of, like, everyone knew that. Or sales reps would do demos about our B2B software, and they'd be like, oh, by the way, I'm. I'm a huge Seeking Wisdom fan, and that's why I'm taking this call. Right? So often for so many people, they. They obsess over the measurement before even starting the podcast. And then like three weeks in or three months in, they're like, we haven't booked a single demo from this podcast. And it's like, well, no shit. Because that's not the goal of why you're creating this. But if you do it for a year and a half now, all of a sudden you notice that, hey, this person built a relationship with us because we. We listened to the show. I think you had some really good stuff in there that's really valuable. But I look at your company, I look at Caspian, and you're working with companies like Snowflake, Zoom, Slack, Okta, Oracle. What are they coming to you to do? What type of shows are they creating? How are they thinking about creating these types of podcasts? Easy for me to be like, yeah, just be scrappy. Set up Zoom and interview a bunch of people in your network. It's kind of like the Gary Vee approach, but you've taken a different approach, and it's really caught on with a bunch of B2B companies. I'd love to hear some of those examples.

Yeah, I mean, I think first off, it starts with a phrase that we talk about a lot at Caspian, which is, there's no traffic on the extra mile. And, like, when we sit down with a company to make a series, there are so many people out there that want to say, hey, let's just like, record on Zoom and we'll sort of figure it out. And I'm like, I hear that. And actually, I have a gripe with you, Dave, because you made a post. I haven't told you this.

Bring it. I'm ready. I'm ready.

You made a post years ago, and I remember it to the day, and you made a post that you were like, hey, the idea that anyone can create a podcast, anyone can do it. It's that easy. Just get started. Sort of a thing. I've like, used that as I've talked to people. I'm like, well, Dave said this, but he's wrong. And the reason why I think that's wrong is not because you can do it. I think anyone can do it. But anyone can write a book. All you need is a pen. And how many people actually write a book? And I think that anyone can write a marathon, but you got to get in shape. And I think what so many people miss about building a series that compounds over time, that drives tons and tons of revenue and engagement in the audience, which is, like, more important than the first factor there, is that it is a marathon. And, like, we are obsessed in B2B about a launch, about a product launch. How did this launch do? How did this launch? Podcasts are the exact opposite of that, right? The launch is the first hundred yards of the marathon. And, like, can you show up at mile three? Can you show up at mile five? Can you show up at mile 20? And I think if you look at, like, what Snowflake's podcast, the Data Cloud podcast, what they've done and what we've been able to do with them over time, is a consistent, repeatable, extremely high quality podcast that interviews experts in the space. And it comes out consistently, repeatedly, and it's very high quality, and the conversations are good. And I think that the same quality that we would put into that show is the same quality you would put into your user conference. It's the same. It is what, like, I think is enterprise quality. And I think what a lot of people get wrong is, yeah, you can do the scrappy stuff. That's not the issue. The Issue is that they have no form or focus or structure. There's no actual hook to the audience. B2B marketers were very bad at stories and were very bad at hooks in our content of, like, why should I keep listening? Or is it just someone talking for 45 minutes? It could be an incredible conversation for 45 minutes, and it works for DG, but that doesn't mean it's going to work for everyone.

It's been great having you. Maybe we'll have you back on another episode at some point. You're exactly right. And this is something that I've grown to learn over time. I think that anybody can start it, meaning that the tools are there, the running shoes are there. You can go to Reddit and get the Hal Higdon, like, novice marathon training plan, and you can follow that and go get your ass off the couch and go run a marathon.

Right.

But I think what I've learned now is people tell me that I'm good at this, which is, like, a douchey thing to say. But there's at this point Now, I've done 500 of these interviews, and I've done this in a niche that I've worked in for 10 years. And so I think I'm good at interviewing people. I'm good at getting these stories out. I can do this format, I think. Yes. Our CFO wants to start a podcast. Let's turn the ring light on, get the mic on, and have her go rip it on. Zoom is probably not going to be a good combination. Like, they're not going to be set up for success there. And so it's almost like I used to underrate copywriting. For me, as a business skill. I'd be like, oh, the real business skills you need are, like, math. And. And when I was at a Drift with David, he's like, no. He's like, dude, you have a. A special ability to, like, communicate via the written word and write copy. He's like, that is your thing. Like, channel that, own that. And I was like, oh, I used to, like, underrate that and undersell it. And I think there's something to be. There's a natural ability that you can have as a host to have these conversations. It's the same reason why, like, I love when we used to do these big events at Drift and stuff, and I did this even at HubSpot. I love being the interviewer, like, on stage, like, hey, we want you to host a Fireside chat with so and so. Like, I love being the person that's doing that. It totally is a skill and I'm, I'm glad to hear you say that. It also diminishes, like, yeah, anybody can do it. I get what you're saying a hundred percent.

And like, anyone can. And like that's part of the thing is like, that's okay to say that. So what we focus on is all of the little things. And I think that people are enamored with sort of like getting started. Could you get a name of a podcast and get it onto Spotify and do that stuff and like, yeah, for sure. Could you publish three episodes? Well, 80% of public of podcasts don't get past episode seven. 80%, right. And if you were to take corporate podcasts and how many don't make it there? And the reason why is because productions are incredibly complex. And like, one of the things that like we talk about a lot is why you would go with someone like Caspian is because at 3 o' clock when you get the email from the PR person that says, hey, the guest that you just got on just got fired. We need to go pull that episode right now. I mean, that happens every week to us across like all the shows that we produce.

I can imagine you work with the big enterprise level companies. I have a friend who's a big time VP at one of those top five cloud companies and I had them on my podcast and it was awesome. And then they emailed me like one day later and I was like, I actually just realized, like, I can't say half of the things that I said and can we edit it all out? And I was like, no, we have to scrap the episode. It's not going to be a six minute podcast episode. So that's a whole different beast that you're talking about.

Yeah, for sure. And it's like all those different things that sort of happen and it's like, you think of how complex like an event is. It's the same way with a production. There's a reason why all of Hollywood and all of these things, like, they all exist now. And then you see all these YouTubers, all these other people will like, like, well, they can do it all. Well, it's like, yeah, they don't have a PR team that you can get put in jail if you say something wrong. Those are the stakes.

I would be in jail so quickly.

Oh my gosh.

You'd be like, where'd Dave go? He's in jail. He said 15 wrong things in the first 10 minutes of the episode.

Yeah, but anyways, so there's all sorts of stuff there that I think. But most of all, most of all, most of all is that people need to get off features and benefits and they need to get off the Future of Work podcast that interviews every single CIO in the C suite. And like that. That's the problem is like when we sit down with a company, there are so many brilliant marketers and there is this inability in rigidity sometimes to just make a show for a specific Persona, a niche Persona where you can deliver value specifically to them. What always happens. I have been pitched a Future of Work podcast that interviews CMOs and CIOs and CDOs and everyone in the C suite. I mean more times than I can count. And I say, do you know that there's a bunch of those out there? And they're like, whoa. And do you ever listen to those? I'm like, they might not be good, but have you ever like tuned in like, no. I'm like, that's because nobody wants that content. CIOs and CFOs don't read the same stuff. They don't listen to the same people. They don't even care about what each other has to say most of the time. You need to create it for the hyper specific Personas that you really want to like, find that and you need to find like a unique hook that is something that that audience really wants and deliver it to them.

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I love that this is already shaping up to be one of my, and this is my favorite topic of mine. I knew this would be this way. I could ask you this right now, but I want to save it. We're going to talk about murder in a little bit because you've come up with a unique way to deliver on this and to not do the future of work show.

Right.

But you mentioned Snowflakes, the data cloud podcast where you're, you're interviewing experts in the industry. That does sound like that type of thing. Right. And so like you said, this high quality and you're, what does that version of that show look like? How do you do the data cloud podcast with Snowflake? That's a level up and feels like a bigger deal than just Dave showing up on a zoom call and interviewing somebody for 40 minutes and hanging up.

Yeah, I would say a lot of, a lot of things in life where you see the final product and you don't know what happened on the cutting room floor. It's kind of like every show is like that where there's a lot of shows that we create that you just don't see the stuff that gets removed. And that's like, sort of the beauty of the types of things that we're creating, where there's a lot of stuff that gets omitted from the discussion, which is like, not just in the individual episodes, but in the thematic parts of telling the story in the. In these types of episodes, which is like, are we going to do a segment about this? Why would we do a segment about this? What is the utility to the listener? Is this something that we can pull and do pull quotes later on? So there's like, that sort of stuff that in content, there's the actual production side, which is like, how do we book guests for these shows and prepare the guests to be good? What does the prep look like for these guests? What does it look like for their PR teams?

Stop on that for a second. Because that's the biggest barrier that I have. Even after having done this for a long time. It's like, you and I, like, have similar circles. You run a podcasting business. I knew that it would be no problem talking to you. Right. But one out of every five people that I book for the podcast, I'm like, either they're really nervous or like, we have a great chitchat before, but then, like, once we start recording, they shifted to like, yes, Ian, absolutely right. That. That's a great question. And it's really hard to build that rapport with a stranger, especially remotely. That's a huge, huge, huge roadblock that I think about all the time.

Yeah, for sure.

People are.

This is why Howard Stern keeps the mics rolling. Right. Because the pre interview is often more interesting than the actual interview. I mean, there's a bunch of things there, and there's a bunch of personal preference for the hosts and things like that. We have some hosts who do zero prep, where we just have the producer prep with the actual guests, talk through what they want to talk about, and then that way it's all very fresh and new to the host. We have other hosts who do, like, a ton of prep. So there's a million different ways to do this. And I think on the exterior, it all just looks sort of the same, but there's all sorts of different ways to prep. In that way, you can over prep a guest. You need to have a host who's flexible. We do a lot of host coaching, so we coach every single one of the hosts for every one of our series in some form or fashion, Whether it's like Async or actually Getting on there with them. We have a lot of amateur hosts who have never hosted anything that work at those companies that we train up to teach them how to do this stuff, which is hard. It's really hard to be able to do this. You need to have questions in your back pocket that you know how to ask. You need to know how to get to the second and third order stuff. You need to know how to get off script a little bit so that PR doesn't get mad at you. We give everyone a final cut on all of our shows. I always like, we're not in media. We're not trying to break news. This is content marketing where we're trying to help these people tell their stories better and whatever makes them feel more comfortable and you feel more comfortable if you get final cut. It's just the end of the day. Again, this isn't business. People can get literally put in jail for saying wrong stuff. So I believe a lot of that stuff. We work a lot with PR teams to make sure that they trust that stuff. A thing that people really overlook is launching a show. Right. You do the first 10 episodes of a show, the PR team is like, absolutely not. It's a show with zero listeners.

It's the hardest thing. I'm dealing with this right now. Yeah.

And so we do that. You know, we launch new shows every couple weeks. But because we have relationships with all of these PR people and they know that Caspian does a great job. They know that they're going to be prepped well. They know the guest experience is going to be phenomenal. And they know that we put a marketing budget into every single episode so it will find an audience. It will get in front of people again. It's all the little things that add up to a premium production. If I have a premium production, my show is called remarkable. I would never do it sort of without Caspian or without a partner that can do it for me. And just because this is a specialized thing that like it matters if you've built 50 of these because you're just better at it.

You mentioned host coaching. What are the typical things that you would cover in there or common mistakes that you see most first time hosts make or what could you coach people up on that you want that's worth knowing.

Yeah. One thing is just like hard cut transitions. Like do. You don't need to connect every single thing there. Like just get right into the next question. Just ask it. So that's one, Pete. Like a lot of amateur interviewers don't really do like if you listen to Barbara Walters. Right. She just cuts right to the next question.

She's a savage.

Yeah, exactly.

If you're listening Barbara, I meant that in the kindest way possible.

That's right. I think she's the listener. So that's one thing that people do. They. People rarely ask for examples. Give me an example of this. It's like, always need to have that question chamber.

So true.

People are bad at stories. Some people are very bad at stories. So ahead of time, as a host, like, tell me a story. Like, I say this in almost every one of my prep interviews of like, tell me a time where your CEO was like, if you don't double sales, you're fired. What's that story look like for you? And like, not everybody has that story, but they do have some story. And getting them to tell a story is how the actual interview is going to be memorable. If we get on there and talk about platitudes and talk about strategy and all that. And I think that's super valuable. On my show Pipeline Visionaries, we go through, the reason why we built the show is to say, I want to know how CMOs spend their money. But in order to know how we spend their money, I have to know their strategy, I have to know the tactics. I have to know who their ICP is. I have to know what their team looks like. I say all that stuff to say. The host has to be able to get to that stuff, and they have to be able to know which questions to cut and not cut. What are other mistakes, though? That's a bunch of stuff. I mean, I think people are generally very nervous and they don't necessarily like to explore things with the person. Some people are very good at this.

But you said, I think just you saying examples, like, I think it's easy for somebody to listen to this. Be like, yeah, examples. That's the number one thing for me. Like, I. I often will cut a guest off and I'm like. Because I think what happens is, like, a guest will often just go and go and go, and you need to drive the show. Like, I know what I want to get. If I'm interviewing you, I know my audience very well, and I know what I want to get out of them, what I want to get out of this conversation. And I think, like, where you set examples. That's exactly. It's like you're interviewing CMO or whatever. I'm interviewing some, you know, website expert. And they're like, yeah, you know, we made a bunch of changes and we improved the landing page like 30%. And that's easy for the host to be like, oh, that's great. All right, next question. Where it's like, no, the. Wait, hold on. You improved the landing page 30 and you did a bunch of things. What were those things making them come back and listing out or on this show, for example, I make people say like, what was this specific tool that you use? Oh, you said you hit this goal. What was the goal? How did you set the goal? Like, the things that seem obvious. I talked to somebody yesterday and they had a great way of framing this. Like, we often have expert blindness, right? Like, if you're in this industry all the time, you're like, oh, yeah, everyone's gonna know that. But the little details that people want are like the. Hold on, let's pause. You said that like, well, how much did that cost and what was the deadline and how did you do that? I love pausing and making people go back and ask for examples, even at the risk of like, sorry if this feels like abrupt and direct as a host, but like, it's going to make for a much better episode when we get this content out of you on the other side of this.

And this is why structure is so important and building your show from the beginning. And like, this is one of the big things people don't understand. Right. So for like Pipeline visionaries, my show, it is a 401 level show. I am not going to ask follow up questions to explain anything. If you don't get it, like, go Google it sort of a thing. Right. It's a 401 level show. So we're going to skip past a lot of that stuff. And we made that conscious decision from episode one that we're going to make a 401 level show.

I love that because that's saying like, hey, we know the audience. This is a very clearly defined audience that we're after. If you don't know it, this show's then not for you. Yeah.

The start of the show was one of my friends just took a new CMO role and he was like, dude, could you just make a show where you just tell me how my friends spend their money? And I was like, that's a great idea. And so we sat down with the team at Qualified and we planned out this whole thing. And their CEO, Craig Swenswerd is amazing. And we sat down all this stuff and figured out all the different things that we want to ask. But that was the. The start of it was like, hey, this is what Someone actually wants to know. Tons of people want to know this. How do we make a show that delivers on that? And then how do we not ask any. What is ABM to you? You know, like, stuff like that.

If I go on somebody else's podcast, I really hate this. I struggle with, like, the very broad questions, like, what's the most important lesson you've learned about business in your career? Oh, my God.

I don't.

I don't know. Like, unless I was prepped and I wrote that down, those things are going to be hard to do on the spot.

Right? For sure. And there's a lot of stuff like that where there's a great book about interviewing candidates that's called the One question Interview that I read I don't even know a decade ago. And I've always thought about that with, like, my podcast interviews, where it's like, the one question interview is basically like, what's the hardest thing you've ever worked on? And then you ask, like, okay, who is the team? Like, how did you work together? You know, like, there's all these separate things. And I think there's. That's a style of interviewing is to, like, get to all the granular levels, to fill out the room. Room of like, what helped make this decision. If it's a candidate, you can kind of figure out how good they are at teamwork and how good they are at. At multitasking and all these other things and planning and, like, how'd you plan for it? So anyways, I always have that in the back of my mind when I'm interviewing is like, what are the other questions that can sort of, like, layer on to this, like, broader topic? So. Because there's. Oh, the other thing. And Dave, I'm sure you know this. The worst interviews are the ones where it's a super short answer. Every answer is like 38 seconds.

And you're like, I want to shake the monitor. I'm like, you came on the podcast, knew what this was. Please have a conversation with me. Please. Yeah, but anyways, yeah, I'm not doing the Snowflake level show. I'm doing a show based on. It's for this audience. I've done this for a while. Like, we're kind of drafting off of a lot of different things here. I do think a lot of the interviews would be better if we did a prep call, but I also have a hard time, like, I have a hard time getting people to do that. I guess this is the same question about people not wanting to go on the show because it has zero downloads. Even doing these enterprise level shows, are you finding that you're able to get big time air quotes, execs to do a 20 minute prep call with your producer, or are they just gonna show up and do the podcast live?

Totally depends on the person. And some people wanna do it, some people just have their PR person do it. But everybody preps. Like, everybody preps in some form or fashion. Some people prep. The way that they've prepped is they've done a thousand media interviews, so they don't need to prep for this. And they know every answer. And usually those people are probably gonna be really good interviews anyways. And then the people who are a little bit more nervous might need more prep. But you know, like, I think to your point about your show, so what my advice to you would be, like, Tom Brady had a coach. Everybody has a coach. No matter how good you are, you need a coach. Like, we all know that. And I think shows need an executive producer. You need someone who is looking at your show objectively and saying, like, this is good, this isn't good. Who has good taste. And I think one of the hard things that we've seen over the past three and a half years at Caspian is like, I feel like we have good taste. We've made a lot of these. I feel like me personally, I've done every single part of this for a long time. So I feel like I know generally these Personas and the things that we're looking for there. And you need to be able to give honest feedback to those folks. The biggest thing that big enterprise B2B companies do, the biggest mistake that they make is they just default to features and benefits, they default to talking about the product, they default to that stuff. And like, at the end of the day, like, you need to find the little nuggets. A great example that I'll give really quick. We were doing this show, the CIO Focus show, and the roadmap, the content calendar didn't have this one topic on there. And it was, how do CIOs get seats on public boards? And I was like, I talked to the guest, he gets asked this all the time. We should do an episode on this. And they were like, that doesn't fit the content calendar. And I was like, trust me, we should do it. We did an. And it was the most popular episode ever. Because that's what CIOs want. They want to know how to get seats on public boards. And this conversation with this CIO and Another CIO who's on public boards was extremely illuminating. And, like, that's the sort of stuff where, like, we as B2B marketers turn into robots to our content calendar when we just need to figure out what people actually want to know.

It's one of the most underrated things to me about podcasting. It really just. I actually. Content in general, the response on one channel, when people are telling you the same thing over and over, they're, like, literally telling you what the episodes should be about. Right now we're working on content for Exit 5 for next year, and I want to be a bit more strategic about, like, the things we write about and the things we talk about. And I was like, oh, yeah, we got to do, like, keyword research and go. And I'm like, no, no, we have. We have an engaged audience. They're already telling us, like, the most popular podcast episodes. The emails we get, the comments in the community. Like, there's 20 or 30 topics in there that people are literally saying, like, hey, go and make this content for us, please. And we're going to watch it and listen to it. It's already there. Okay, we got to change over. We got to talk about murder. So you've done something super interesting. This is actually. What. I don't know how we've never crossed paths or anything, but I see this post. I forget which company it is. Was it gympass?

Yeah. Jim Pass that.

Gym Pass does this show. It's called Murder in hr. It's been downloaded a million times. It's, like, in the top 10 of whatever category. Fiction on number one. Number one.

What category was it Fiction in all of Apple? Insane.

Insane. Number one. A SaaS company created a podcast, obviously with you, which we're going to talk about, created a podcast that was number one in the fiction category. And I'm like, what must be in the. It's like every. This is where, like, it's insane. So people may not have heard about it, but tell us about this thing for the first time, and then, like, let's talk about what you're doing from a business standpoint, I think this is really, really interesting.

There's sort of two things that I learned kind of early in my career that I think sort of have brought us to this standpoint, which is like, number one. Back in the day, we did this project with Alec Baldwin. And so as part of the project.

Maybe you've heard of him?

Yeah, Right. So I was directing him, you know, sitting across from Alec, and I was like, hey, you Know, could you do these ad reads for my show? And he's like, sure. And so he did this ad read for my show. It's like you're listening to marketing trends and the leads aren't weak. Here's your host, Ian Faison, and he like made it all French sounding, which I don't how pronounce it that way. But anyways, what the big moment to me was, I would go to conferences and people would go. The first question, how did you get Alec Baldwin? Now every single person, that's what they would say. It was that light bulb moment to me of if you have celebrities involved in your content, it is instantly the most memorable, recognizable, bridges the gap type thing you can possibly do. That is it right? And so I was like, wow, that's really interesting. So the second thing that I learned is that fiction storytelling, which nobody does in B2B, actually is the best. And the reason why is because you control the entire narrative. You control all of the different things there. People are super scared of it. And I was talking to one of my CMO pals and he was like, dude, I gotta be honest, all this stuff, all the podcast stuff, like, our team could probably figure out a way to do it. Maybe your team does it better. But no one on our team, nobody could write anything remotely close to a fiction show. We think we could, but we really couldn't. So that was another sort of light bulb for me, which is B2B marketers, generally speaking, do not have this capability yet. Yet. Which we're going to work on. And so if you marry those two things together, you could get a pretty interesting result. So what we did was we sat down and we looked at the most popular genres in podcasts, which is true crime, mysteries and comedy. They're the most popular thing. And so if you were to make a show that is a mystery, a comedy, and has a true crime element to it, it's not true crime, but it has that same structure of, like, body drops. Who's going to solve it, right? Instant hook for the listener. No matter who you are. You hear murder in hr, you know that there's a murder, you know that it's in hr, and you know that somebody's got to solve this fricking thing, right? So instantly, you know from the first second what it's going to be. What we did is we sort of like layered on the marketing world, the B2B marketing world, or in this case, the B2B HR world for this show. And we said, how many people consumed this type of content. And our hypothesis was that it's a lot. And so we talked to the team at Gympass. We're like, hey, we want to make this show called Murder in hr. It's a fiction series. It's this crazy series where there's someone on the HR team is murdered, and then the employee experience manager and the chief people officer have to solve the murder. And then there's also a really big spoiler, which I don't want to say for people who haven't listened to it, but there's a huge, huge, big twist that happens. And so this story we sat down with the team at Gympass is what we want to create. How do we integrate this into what they do? How do we integrate it into their sales process, how they think about content, their view of the world and all this stuff? And it was just like a perfect match. And so, yeah, we started working on Murder and hr. Now, we'd already had a successful show, the Hacker Chronicles, that we did with Tenable, which the season one did crazy well. Like almost a million downloads super well. And we had just started working on season two and we had got Michael C. Hall from Dexter to play the bad guy in season two. So that show is at 1.8 million listeners now. Murder in HR is already at 1.1 million listeners. And both of them have, like, crossed the chasm into consumer. Right?

Yeah. I mean, it's insane. And obviously there's some secret sauce to you as a company, but like, how do you get celebrities to do this? Who's writing these scripts and who's coming up with these insane plot twists? Is that just like people inside of your company? This is what you all do and what you're good at. What's the process?

Yeah, so, yeah, we write it all in house. And yeah, I mean, there's no secret sauce. It's Hollywood style storytelling for B2B. Like, that's. @ the end of the day, that's what it is. Like, I talk about this idea of like the edutainment graph, which is like educational on. On the x axis and entertaining on the Y axis. And like plot your content. If it's in the bottom left corner, you shouldn't do it. And there's nobody creating entertaining stuff in general. And so, like, I just. The goal of Caspian was I wanted to get podcasts as a service to a point where we had a really good group of shows and a really good group of customers that are making what I would like these interview style shows and these things that sort of a drumbeat content. And then so we can start making bets on fiction. Because I think that you could have. These could be moonshots was sort of our hypothesis there. And all boils down to you could create a series without talent, without a list talent, or you could create a series with a list talent. And at the end of the day, like Caspian Studios is like a super, super tiny little studio, right in the grand scheme of things. And actors want to act. They want to play roles and characters that they can research and dig into and play off each other things. They don't want to shill tech products, they don't want to do that. Right. So why even bridge that gap? Don't even try. What's the point?

You charge a company X and then you're just like, and we're going to take whatever money it is to go and see which actor that would be a good fit and hire them like as a job to do this. Is that how this works? I have no idea.

Yeah, so basically the way that it works is like we have like a portfolio of quote unquote series that we've pre written of the stories that we think will be really good for the market. We go and find partners to essentially underwrite the costs of these projects in partnership with them in a really cool and creative and integrated way. The same way that Spielberg made movies with people don't know this or don't remember ET Drinks Coors Yellow Belly in ET and then Coors ran an ad campaign saying, always phone home, don't drink and drive. Like product placement and integrations has been part of Hollywood storytelling forever. And that's how Spielberg paid for all this stuff. And so what we wanted to do is to do the same thing in B2B, which is like these really cool companies like Jim Pass who want to tell really cool stories. They just need a partner that has that ability to do the Hollywood style storytelling piece and who has relationships with Hollywood, has relationships with agents and can give a script to these actors that they want to be part of. And like, that's the most important thing is like, is this a good, a good story? Is it good writing? And that's what they care about. They care about good story, good writing that they can actually do what they love doing, which is act.

That's a super creative way to do that. I love that. That shows me like 15 levels about you in that example, which is really cool. There's also gotta be like a low budget way too. Like you have a. There's an engineer who's like very funny and very witty and is good at like acting and reading. Like you could do this whole thing in house. Right, too. Which is really cool about this. And I'm sure you've had successful examples of people that have done that.

Yeah. And like amateurs. It's like, it's all. Anyway, there's a bunch of stuff that we could go into there on another call, but the idea of like pairing actual voice actors and talent or actors with amateurs and stuff like that is a lot of stuff that we're going to be doing in future seasons. We're going to have cameos, maybe Dave coming on murder and marketing playing himself, but we're going to do lots of stuff like that. Lots of cameos, lots of bringing in the real world. We want these worlds in the, like, business murder verse, which what we're calling it, to feel like it's part of our world and then also part of this crazy, zany other type world.

So one of these shows, so the murder in HR example is a smashing success. How does a company like gympass as an example, how if it's completely murder in hr has nothing to do with the company, it's just an interesting show that lots of people who don't even work in HR are going to listen to. How does a company like Jim Pass see the ROI on this? How does it become a pipeline acceleration thing? Where does that fit in? Because it's harder, it's different. And we interview experts in the industry. It might be much smaller, it's not going to be a viral success, but it's a little bit easier for your brain to think about the connection there. How do you think about it in the murder in HR example?

Yeah. So there's two things here. Number one, people obsess about, like, audience sizes. And if you're like, well, my podcast only gets 25 listeners, it's not a success. And it's like, well, what if those 25 listeners are Fortune 500 CEOs? Then you might have the best podcast in the world. One, people obsess over that stuff. Two, when it comes to murder in HR and these like, broad hits, people I think are worried about, like, well, how much, like, waste is there in the audience. But the thing that's great about that is that at my Thanksgiving table, everyone was talking about murder in hr. And what we have heard from the audience is that people are in hr, that their husband can also watch, their wife can also or listen to the show, and that it actually creates conversation and like, spurs conversation not Just with that person and their peers in hr, which it does that too, but also with other people. Again, nobody is doing that sort of stuff. You can't talk about your work with your spouse because they don't know what the heck you're talking about. But if you're like, oh my gosh, who. Who do you think killed Larry? I don't know. Like, I think it might be Jan. That stuff is just like, it's fun and interesting. But Jim Pass did a million things to integrate this into the stuff they're doing. Their salespeople are sending it out, it's in their email signatures, they're driving leads, they're doing all sorts of cool stuff to get this story out in front of people. Because the story has all of the thematic elements that they believe wellness is super important. Toxic cultures, that there's antidotes to toxicity. And like, that's what the story is about. It's about a toxic workplace and how this HR person solves that. Now it's told through murders and all this other crazy stuff. But, like, there are ABC stories in there that are actual business stories and lessons, not just the fun stuff.

I didn't even think of that angle. Like, you can literally tell people, like, hey, we created this show, you should go listen to it. And you get the association. And it's created by Caspian Studios, but it's presented by Jim Pass. I haven't listened to it, but I'm assuming that Jim Pass is the presenter, the ad reads or whatever on the podcast. And so you do get the connection that way.

Oh, and there's product placement. So the startup uses gympass. That's amazing. And what's funny is we got a bunch of 1 stars reviews on Apple from people that are like, there's way too much, you know, whatever. There's way too much product placement in this. But it's like all the HR listeners, that's how they filled out lead forms is like, I heard Jim Pass a bunch and I wanted to check it out.

So who won? Right? Yeah. Like, if you create it not for the HR person, like, you can't always make everybody happy, clearly.

No, exactly. Like Warren Peace is like a three stars out of five or something on Goodreads or something like that. So you can't always win it all. And. And I think that at the end of the day, like, anyone in business is used to ad reads and all that stuff. We do not care at all. And if you hate it that much, you can skip it.

I love. That's my favorite Thing. Every now and then I'll get a message.

Oh, it's gross.

You have sponsors, like, well, would you.

Rather me not have a show? I could just cancel my show. Oh, you're shilling this stuff. It's like Ferris, Tim Ferriss, he interviewed his. His audience or he pulled his audience. And 80% of people don't mind the ads and. Or 90% of people don't mind the Ads. And 80% actually feel like they learn new products and services. People don't care. And the outspoken people who do care, screw them. Right?

It's a fantastic business to be in as a content creator. What's exciting to you? What are you. What are you excited about? We're recording this at the end of the year. What are you excited about? Let's wrap up and talk about what you're excited about with Caspian and just kind of what you're all working on for next year.

Yes. So we're pushing super hard into fiction and we launch what we call the business Murder Verse, which is we're going to be telling stories. So murder in marketing, murder in sales, murder in it. We're on and on from there. We have all these different Personas. We're going to launch this. We're. So we're actively looking for partners for all these different projects. People are like, why murders? Like, we have stuff that's not murders too. Like, we have all sorts of ideas there. If you look at the most popular stories that are out there right now, like, somebody usually dies, like, only murders in the building and things like that. And it's just a very popular genre. Right.

I don't love the category, but it's literally the most popular content on the planet. Whether you're talking About Dateline or 20 20, all the shows, you're smartly riding a wave to produce interesting content. You're fishing where all the fish are. It's not dumb.

And it's since the dawn of time, somebody dies, who did it, right? Like Sherlock Holmes. You go back like, it is infinite. Right. We always are interested in this and I think it's just really easy for us to understand. Like, there's a body who did it, right? So we're creating the murder verse and we're pushing hard into fiction. And I think this stuff is not for everyone. I think it's probably only for like 10% of B2B marketers who want to do this type of stuff. But the people that have reached out to us once we launched are like, this is awesome. My CEO is going to be Fired up. This is exactly the type of stuff that we want to invest in. And I think so. Some people get it and some people, it's too scary to talk to their CFO about creating murder mystery.

But sorry, what's a podcast? First explain what a podcast is and then what you want to do. A murder podcast.

Oh, can I get it on my. Do I need to have it on a website or on a phone?

Sorry. We're very stereotyping the hell out of the CFO role in my head, but I can't help myself.

All the, like, average age is like 60, 68.

It's okay. It's all right. It's all right.

I love our CFO and all of them out there. So we're going to push really hard into fiction. I think that, that no one is doing this. And one of the feedbacks that we got is like, well, how many murder mysteries can you get? I'm like, go look at Hollywood. I mean, go look at Sherlock. Go look at all these things. Like, this is what everyone is investing in, but also types of mysteries and the tenable example. Tenable made an empathetic look at how a hacker becomes a hacker. In the Hacker Chronicles, there is so much room for storytelling. They're a cyber security company because they want to show you how the threats are real.

Has the AI company reached out to you about doing an AI related show?

Yeah, we've had a couple. We have murder and AI is. Is on the. On the horizon.

So, I mean, that seems like if you just match all the trends, that seems like the natural next one.

Yeah, I'm ready if, you know someone out there, if you're ready to sponsor. We got some pitches for you. But yeah, I mean, I just think that in B2B there's so few moonshots that we actually take. And this is something that murder, like Tenable Hacker Chronicles gets listeners every day. Murder in HR gets listeners every day. It compounds, it grows. And I think that that's a type of asset that you want to have for years and years. So. And we're working on season two for Murder in hr. We have lots of fun stuff coming there, so business murder verse coming to you.

You awesome. Ian, thanks for joining us. I have a page of questions that I selfishly want to ask you. I think we're going to have to have you back on at some point. And I can just. I can fire through them. I'm not kidding. This is like, what I do is write notes the whole time. But this was awesome. I took away a lot of this from podcasting, but I think if you're a smart marketer listening to this, there's many, like, meta lessons that are just for marketing and storytelling and even the fact that, like, companies are doing these successful, like, hey, you know why this show worked? Because it's not a show about us pitching our software. Like, there's so many little threads in here that you can, can switch onto. So, Ian Faison, how do you say your last name? I'm not going to say, like, Alec Baldwin Faison.

It's just Faison.

Faison.

Yeah, you could call, you call it that, but it's Faison.

All right. Ian Faison. He's the CEO of Caspian Studios. They're producing some awesome stuff. I think, obviously, if you listen to this episode, you'll get a sense of how they're really changing the game in the B2B podcasting space. I love this topic. You're an awesome guest and I'm looking forward to following your journey, my friend.

Love the show, Dave. Thanks for, for making it. We all appreciate it.

All right. And do me a favor. If you listen to this podcast, go find Ian on LinkedIn, connect with him, send him a message, tell him that you heard about him on the Exit 5 podcast, and that would make my day. Exit.

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