How you can get paid to listen to podcasts, with TrueFans CEO Sam Sethi.

It's brand new. People are still not aware of it, but this is the way that not just for podcasting, but for all creators across the web. We're going to be able to monetize directly from listener to creator.

My guest today is an entrepreneur who's revolutionizing the way that listeners can reward the podcast hosts that they love. We're joined today by Sam Sethi, who is the founder and CEO of a company called True Fans fm. Sam, welcome to the show.

Hey, thank you very much, Jim.

It's lovely to have you here. And you can tell that Sam's in podcasting because he has amazing sound quality coming through. Sam, I've enjoyed listening to you and James Cridland talking about podcasting. And we're going to talk later on about how you've been building your own personal brand through your involvement in an industry standard newsletter and also through industry standards. But first of all, let's look at True Fans, the problem you're trying to solve, and how you are really looking to cross the chasm because you're changing the way that listeners can engage with hosts. So tell us what you're doing and how it's going to make everybody's life better.

Thanks, Jim. Yeah, look, True Fans is a podcasting app, but it's a little bit more than that, and I'll explain that shortly. What's the problem I'm trying to fix? The problem actually goes back to the beginning of the web. I was the product manager at Netscape for the early days, the early browser, and my boss, Marc Andreessen, invented a lot of crazy cool new tech. But what he didn't invent was a micropayment system, a method for online payments in the web. So where did we head in Web2? We headed to sentiment back to the creators. So we said, oh, look, I really love to give Jim some feedback. And all we could do is give you a thumbs up, a heart, a like, or a tweet with a thumbs up, you know? So, long story short, those sentiments were lovely. Back to the creator. It was a dopamine hit, but what it wasn't was a monetary hit. So you couldn't take a thousand thumbs up to your bank manager and go, can I have a mortgage or can I buy a new car? It was irrelevant. And that micro payment system didn't exist. So we tried very hard with credit card payment systems, but the amount that they would take in fees meant it was preclusive. If you wanted to do a small amount, I just want to give Jim a pound. Or I want to give him 50p. That didn't work either. So in the absence of all of those methods, we came up with advertising as the only monetization method that we could give back to creators. And, and that is very frustrating to the listener. But we know that we don't want advertising. We fast forward through advertising in podcasts. We fast forward it on our TVs. Very rarely will we stop to listen to an ad. So we know that the ads aren't the means of entertaining the listener, but they are the means of monetizing for the creator. So fast forward to true fans. What we've tried to do and what we're implementing is a new way of, of using small micro payments. You might be 1p, 10p, 50p a pound, whatever you want it to be. And I can say I want to give that to my favorite creator from my wallet, directly to their wallet to peer to peer system, not through a third party like Stripe or PayPal or credit card systems. So that peer to peer system was what was missing from Web 1.0. And here we are at Web 3.0, for want of a better word, and we now have that payment system. It's brand new. People are still not aware of it, but this is the way that not just for podcasting, but for all creators across the web, we're going to be able to monetize directly from listener to creator.

Sam, you're going to help creators of all shapes and sizes to get a better relationship and get rewarded by the people who've enjoyed what they create. And I'm sure people would love to understand how it works, but not necessarily too great a level.

And a micropayment is called a sat or a satoshi, which is a 100 millionth of a bitcoin. That's all you need to understand, right? Think of them as fairground tokens. Think of them as funny money. Now, what you do with true fans is you join true fans. You get given 5,000 of these funny tokens for completing various learning tasks. So we have gamification built into the system. So as you learn how to find a podcast or learn how to play your first podcast, or give some comment to a podcast, we give you some money so that you go, oh, I've earned something from my activity. So we're rewarding you for learning how to use Trufans. So you get some money in your wallet even before you have to do anything else. One click, and then we put the equivalent amount of tokens, sats, into your wallet. For £5 or £10. So you're not going to break the bank. What you've now got is a large pool of SATs. You can then go, oh, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to listen to Jim show, he said something really amazing. I'm now going to leave a comment with a payment and that's called a boost. And I'm just going to leave that and say, thank you, Jim, I love what you just said. Here's a hundred sats. Jim can then get that in his wallet and as he accumulates that value, he might then convert that value back to a fiat currency and say, oh Look, I've made £100 from that episode through the aggregated payments from all of my listeners. So that's the way it works. You converting fiat money to a token called a SAT that you can then generously give either as a one off payment a boost or you can pay it all the way through the show. So you might say, I'm going to stream value on 100sats per minute for the length of this show. So you might say, I'm willing to give 3,000 sats for the value I'm receiving from Jim. And that goes in his wallet.

And just to be clear, yeah, we're not talking about the Italian car brands, don't worry. This is your currency of choice. And by converting into the satoshis, you have a universal currency that can cross borders as well. So there's no currency exchange gains or losses. So you can have a unitary currency inside the system. But also what I like is that you said we can take it back out and put it into whatever currency that we might need to spend in the real world. And you're up against some very large players, obviously in the players space in terms of Spotify and Apple and so on. Do you want to just take us through how have you been getting the brand of Trufans FM noticed.

So, so let's start off with why was it called True Fans? It comes from Kevin Kelly's seminal blog post called A Thousand True Fans. And that was the deep thinking that I had a long time ago. I've been a massive advocate of paying people for their time and attention, rewarding people. So Kevin Kelly said, when everyone was chasing a million likes and a million follows, he said, no, no, no, no, stop. A Thousand True Fans is all you need. Who will willingly pay you $10 a month. There's your $100,000 business. That was what he said was, stop trying to chase the bigger number focus on the immediate number of people who follow you. Podcasting is a perfect example of that. In the long tail, Joe Rogan's got hundreds of millions of fans, and he's got sponsors and he's got advertising. He is not my perfect example of a user that I want on the platform or creator. Yes, of course I'd love Joe Rogan, but the reality is he's not going to come. The perfect example is the podcast with 50 or 100 or 200 people who regularly listen to that podcast, who love that podcaster, who would fear pod fade on that podcaster. They go, oh, you know, I've done 100 episodes. I'm not making any money on this. I can't get advertising. I don't quite hit the bar for it. Nobody wants to sponsor me. I'm at this point of frustration. I spend three or four hours a week on this thing. I give up. And there's 100 people sat there going, no, no, don't, please don't give up. I just don't know how to pay you. I just don't know how to give you value so that you consistently continue to give me value and continue to produce episodes. And so you're sat there going, well, there is a mechanism now, and this is the mechanism. And in the long tail, a thousand true fans is how you look at it. And a thousand being what Kevin Kelly wrote. But 100 true fans works exactly the same. True fans is basically fundamentally trying to achieve that goal. Now, where we started off was, yes, you're right, Spotify and Apple. I'm crazy trying to go up against them. They've got pockets deeper than I will ever have. But I fundamentally believe the way that you take on people is not to go head on with them, is to go and give them a different alternative. And I still believe that the basis of being able to pay people for their time and attention is the underlying difference between what we do and what Spotify and Apple do. So what we have now is a model that says, okay, you come onto the platform, you find the podcast you love, you become a fan of those podcasts, you listen to them, maybe you don't pay them to begin with, and then eventually start giving them some comments, some feedback, some interactivity, and you leave a little bit of micro payment, the creator mentions you in the next show. Oh, thanks, Sam, for that payment. Really love the fact that you thought this about the show. That gives the creator some incentive to keep going. And then suddenly, you know, actually, I'm going to Go a little further. I'm going to give you more value by streaming some sats for the whole show.

Let's look at how you're building the brand because with any platform you have to get users and consumers right. You need to get the shows on there and then you get the people to buy the satoshi. So Sam, how are you getting over that challenge?

So there's three ways of doing that. First of all, with users we have to make a value proposition. We have to find a reason for them to try us and come to us. And we think that not having an advertising driven model, not having a subscription based model, but a pay as you go model, so pay what you want model, even is the third new way. The second part is we're going to creators and saying, hey look, we can give you better analytics, better data. So one of the things the industry is working on now is that downloads don't really count for anything. You can have 10,000 downloads, but how many people actually listen to your show? Those two metrics are much more important than a download. So we now give you first party data. As a creator, we'll tell you who listened to your show, how long they listened to your show, and those metrics then can be aggregated up so you then can see percent completed where you've dropped off, where people did.

So we get much more transparency, plus the opportunity to monetize our show in a way that is not just advertising inserted actually where we may or may not even want it. What about for the consumer? Because ultimately we've got to get 100 or a thousand listeners onto trufans so that they can complete the commercial cycle. How are you going about that, Sam?

So I need to explain a couple of things. On the platform, what we do is we use something called activity streams. We measure your activity as a user. So we to get that first party data. How long did you listen? Who did you follow? When did you leave a boost? But what we've also built with micropayments because it's programmable money. That's the critical part of it is the ability for creators to pay listeners. Did you say I can get paid to listen to a podcast? Now that's interesting. Lean forward because you might have a trailer. You've got a brand new podcast. You've got 4 million podcasts out there in the market. How'd you get yours heard? Well, actually one way might be to actually pay people to listen to your 3 minute trailer. You might pay them just 10 sats per minute. Now the flow of money goes from my wallet as the creator to the listener's wallet. And that's basically saying, I value your time and attention. I'm asking you to give me three minutes of your time, and as you do, I'm going to give you some value in the form of sats. And that's what we do. So as a creator, you can flow the money that way. And so because the money can flow both ways, it makes for interesting incentives. So we've just launched an album with Ainsley Costello. We do audiobooks, we do films, we do courses with the album. What we did was they had 12 trailers in the album, and in between each trailer, they spoke about the track. And then you sample the trailer, and you were paid to listen to the trailer, and that gave you the option of saying, you know what? I love it. If you looked at Radio Detox. So what you've got there is the ability for Ainsley to talk to an interviewee about what was the thinking behind this song, what was the inspiration? And while you're listening, you're getting paid. But later on, when the full track is released, because of technology, we update that same podcast with a fresh full track, and now you pay to listen to the full track so you can see how money's flows. This is a new way of making sure that people, both listeners and creators, are being incentivized for their time and attention and the value they give.

You are creating the opportunity to incentivize a trial.

Yep.

And then. So I make a little bit of money for listening. I decide I like it, and if I like it, then I buy the full track. And in effect, I'm getting a discount when I buy the full track because I've already earned some money. So what challenges are you facing in helping people to understand what is a new workflow? What is a new mindset? How are you reaching out to those people?

So. So the third part I think I need to talk to you about before I tell you how we're going to do it to try and get people to understand this new model is going to be pushing a rock up a hill for a long, long time. This is not a short win. This is not going to be next week. Next month, might not even be next year. So we have the early adopters day today. We are at the bottom of the chasm right now. We're at the early adopter phase. And to jump over to the mass market will take a lot of time and effort. But there is a third part of what I wanted to Explain to you, which is we've talked about the flows of money, fan to creator, creator to fan. What we are fixing as well is the advertising problem. So using that same ability to change the flows of money. I'm listening to your show, Jim, and then there's an advert. Now, today I have a choice. I can listen to the advert, I can skip the advertisement, but what you can't do through the metrics that you have currently available is you can't tell the advertiser, did anyone listen to the ad? How long did they listen to the ad? And so you can just give them, yes. 8,000 people downloaded this episode, Jim. But did anyone listen to my ad? I don't know. Where did they listen to it? Who are they? How long did they listen? None of that data is available to you, and therefore the advertiser has to go on a belief that somebody listened to the ad. Now I'm listening to your show and then the ad appears. Now imagine if the advertiser pays me to listen to the ad. Hang on a minute. Did you say I get paid to listen to an ad? Yeah. They value my time and attention. So now we have the ability. I'm paying Jim to listen to his show. So the flow of money is coming from my wallet to Jim's wallet. But the ad appears. Now the advertiser's wallet starts to pay both Jim and. And me. 80% might go to Jim, but because it's programmable money, we can split that value and 20% goes to the listener. This is great, but it's really a boring ad still, so I skip it. So I get to 10%. What happens? The advertiser turns off the flow of money payments so they don't waste money. They know exactly how long I listened and they only pay me for what I listen to. Now mary listens to 50% of the advertising. Excitingly, she gets paid until that point, and then Fred listens to 100%. So all of these three people now can give metrics back to the advertiser. How long did they listen to the ad? And basically at what point they stop listening, what does the marketeer get? No waste of their marketing budget because they know exactly how long you listened. And when you stop listening, you stop getting paid. So what we want to do is bring that model to market. Trufans is going to start that by going to shows like yours and other shows and say, hey, Jim, would you put a advert in for Trufans? And at the same time explain to your users if they come to Trufans, they'll get paid to listen to the adverts. And we will then put a marketing budget from our side that will pay you, the creator, and pay the listener. And it's through experiencing and learning and seeing it actually work that we think the word of mouth will grow very quickly.

Very interesting because you're introducing accountability for the advertisers. And let's face it, the cpm, the cost per thousand is so low because there isn't accountability. So if you demonstrate accountability, then the content producer can charge more, actually, because the true value has gone up, I guess why it's also called true fans, isn't it? So the true value goes up, the advertiser gets proper delivery to a proper audience. So you say three key stakeholders in that equation. But you are disrupting an industry, aren't you? In some ways, you as a brand owner, Sam, as an entrepreneur, you talked about marketing through shows. What else are you doing both with your show? For example, you're involved with James Crilland on the pod news and also in the Industry 2.0 initiative. Do you want to just share with us why do you have them as part of your branding strategy?

So the show I do with James is called Pod News Weekly. James is the go to the industry. In my opinion. He really does know his onions about what's going on in podcasting. I was very lucky to approach him and say, look, James, do you want to do a longer show with me? I was used to that interview style of podcasting and talking about technology and talking to leaders in the space. That's what Pod News Weekly was. It was a longer, extended version of that. What did it give me? Well, it gave me a reputational flow from James. As I said, he's the goat. And so I hadn't got my credentials in podcasting other than my own personal, you know, small group of people who knew me. But I wanted it to be a platform on a larger scale, and James allowed that kindly for me to be his co host. And so over the three years that we've been working, we've now got a pretty good format where we talk about the topics of the week, we analyze them, we have some interviews from people making the news that week, and then we just go through some of the technology changes that are occurring in the industry. And because we put them all into chapters, we know that some listeners like the interviews, some like the analysis, some like the technology, and they can skip the bits they don't want or listen to the whole show.

Sam, you've very cleverly aligned yourself with the thought leader, and you've got your own credibility, which you bring to the show. You're both amazing in what you do, and you both bring great energy and insights. But from a marketing point of view, anyone listening? If you can find someone in the industry that you can partner with to create something, it could be an event or a show or a webinar or a book. Partnership with someone else is a really great way of building your brand. Sam, I do just want to talk about your involvement in Industry 2.0, but I'm really interested in, as an entrepreneur, why have you participated in an industry standard?

So, just to put it out the way, 2.0 is nothing. It's not a unicorn. It's just the next iteration of features and functions added to the technology called rss, which is the delivery mechanism for podcasting. So it's just a natural iteration. I got involved in it because I'm curious. I love technology and I wanted to get involved for true fans as well. So I embraced the community that is the podcasting 2.0 community. I'm very active and involved in it. I come up with some ideas, other people come up with ideas, we embrace them, we talk about it, and then we implement them through Trufans, which then brings what is a theoretical idea to an actual practical, deliverable. And so there are a symbiotic relationship where I can talk to the geeky community and we can come up with these new crazy ideas. I can physically implement it and then feedback to the community about what worked, what didn't work, and what we might change. And then I can promote that through POD News Weekly for the broader community about what these new things and features and functions are doing so that other apps and other people can implement them as well.

As an entrepreneur, let's just think about maybe one marketing mistake that you feel you might have made with Trufans.

I think the marketing mistake was believing that I could just say terminology, wallets, micropayments, sats, and people would just get it right. I really didn't understand how difficult this whole explanation and value judgment would be. This is going to be, as I said, a big rock up a big hill to get over. I understand this is one way to fix that problem, which is rewarding creators. It may not be the right way of doing it. It's the one we're trying now. Is it a mistake? I don't know. I think it's more a case of my misjudgment on how Quick, the adoption curve would be for this technology.

Sam, that's very candid of you and I think you're doing an amazing job. But I also can see that it's a very large rock. But if anyone's got the broad shoulders to carry it, but it's you, Sam. So, Sam, what about a number one tip for entrepreneurs?

Go ugly early. What I say to a lot of people is you can spend hours on spreadsheets. The reality is roll your sleeves up, get down and dirty, get in the trenches and start building it. Because then you will get real feedback from real people. You know, we sometimes become very myopic, you know, oh, eureka, I've got the idea. I know exactly how to do it. If only people would just listen and understand what I mean. And then we write these things or do these things and we go, why isn't that working? Go ugly early is my favorite mantra. The other one, just very quickly though, is complexity is fail simplicity. And I always believe that you have to keep that in mind, that as much as you understand the technology, if you can't explain it to a five year old, then you probably failed. And so, yeah, complexity is fail simplicity.

I can really see that the complexity is your problem. The simplicity is what the consumer is looking for. Sam, a book or a podcast that you'd recommend.

So a book I'm currently reading that I'm enjoying is Yuri Naval's new book called Nexus, which is Stone Age to AI the Information Technology. It's a really timely book on what is AI in terms of is it for good or is it for evil? Is it going to be helping us or is it going to be replacing us?

Like you, I'm a huge fan. It's amazing how some people manage take actually very complex subjects and he does make them very accessible. So he's a master at that, isn't he? Sam Sethi, founder and CEO of TrueFans FM. If you want to get a hold of you. Where can they do that?

Sam Sethi so you can email me@samsethi.com or Samrufans FM. So pretty much anywhere at Samsethi will find me. So my kind offer is if you sign up to Trufans, Jim will give you through me, 10,000 sats. So that's probably about a hundred pounds. If you sign up to TrueFans, what we'll do, Jim, is we'll work out how we allocate that 10,000 sats to one person as a winner.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for inviting me.

There is just something I want to say to Sam and that is happy birthday because it's two years to this week since Sam started Trufans. So happy, happy birthday to you, Sam and the team at Trufans. Well, that was just a brilliant conversation with Sam Sethi, wasn't it? And I'm just doing a post script. Do go to Trufans fm, sign up for your account and drop me a line at the same time Jim at TheUnoticed CC so that Sam and I can sync up and make sure that you get those sats that you deserve and then you can lavish those on me or any content creator that you find on Trufans. And until we meet again, I do just encourage you to keep on communicating and share this podcast with a fellow entrepreneur because you know, we don't want anyone to go unnoticed for what they do. Thank you once again for listening. And if you'd like to come on this show yourself and share your story, do just write to me Jim at TheUnnoticed CC. I look forward to hearing from you soon.