Ep. 297 How I Raised It with Arto Yeritsyan of Podcastle

Hi, guys. Welcome to the How I Raised it podcast produced by foundersuite.com and fundingstack.com this is the show. We get an inside look at how real entrepreneurs and VCs raise capital for their businesses. I'm your host, Nathan Beckert, and today's episode is with Arto Yurizian, CEO of Podcastle AI, a platform and set of tools for podcast producers. Some really cool stuff and ways they're using AI to help podcast producers. Check it out. In this episode, we talk about how he launched in Armenia, how he used ChatGPT to research investors and find the right partner, how he turned around a VC that originally said no, and much more. If you're tuning into this podcast to learn how to raise capital for your business, be sure to check out founderstreet.com if you're a startup or fundingstack.com if you're a VC or advisor. Both platforms will give you access to an awesome collection of tools for raising capital, including a massive investor database, a CRM to manage arrays, a virtual data room to run due diligence, plus pitch deck hosting, investor updates, email tools, and much more. Last but not least, if you enjoy this conversation and think someone else would too, please share it with them and hit that subscribe button to get all our latest episodes. Thank you. Now sit back and enjoy this chat with Arto.

Welcome to How I Raised it, the podcast that goes behind the scenes with entrepreneurs who've raised capital. We uncover the tips, tricks and techniques they use to get investors to write a check, strap in and turn it up.

Hi, welcome to another episode of How I Raised it, produced by foundersuite.com and funding stack.com today I have Arto Yurizian of Podcastle coming to us from Armenia. And you grew up there, right? Are you from. From Armenia or did you find.

Yeah, I. I grew up here and lived my entire life here. Of course, from time to time when doing startup, I just leave some other places, but this is kind of the home for me.

Awesome. Well, let's get right into what you do. Tell us about Podcastle. What is Podcastle?

Yeah, so before telling a little about Podcastle, let me tell you a little bit about my background, how I actually got into podcasting at Podcastle. So for the last 10 years, I was mainly in a creative space building creative tools for creators. And my last job, I was a VP of engineering at Pixart. Pretty large creative platform focused on. Focused on more like a static visual content like photos, images, like really democratizing the way you create images before you need it to be a pro, really understand the Adobe tools, be a designer to create a piece of content. And that's what we did at Pixar to really make it accessible to everyone. And, and like three years ago I started having a release on Ink podcasts and I was so excited about the long form format. You know better than me how people engage with this kind of format and I felt like this format is so amazing, I don't understand why all the creators use this. And then I started seeing actually the increase in the numbers in the consumption of the podcasts. So I thought like, I'm so excited about this content, like about deep conversations, about really like transparency, vulnerability that people talk about and really trusting these hosts and all of that things. But when I started looking like how and sure the production of this type of content happens, so it appeared to me like most of the things related to the static content and short form content, like short TikTok videos, photos, this is all like disrupted. All the tools are modern, you have all AI technologies all over the place. But with the hardest one, which is like long form content, nobody actually created an amazing product there. So I felt like I'm excited about podcasting. I have the knowledge and experience building this kind of products and why just not to go and build really great product for this type of content. So that's how we started podcastle back in the day.

Yeah.

Interesting.

So what does it do? That. That's a great backstory. It makes sense. So, and, and to be fair, Ardo did pitch me before this that we should be using podcasts for this. I was late to the game and we're not using it. But I'm very keen on this. I'm interested in this. So give me the, the sales pitch. What's. What does it do?

Yeah, so imagine basically no better than me. When you're creating a podcast, there are different types of tools that you use in, in your entire workflow and you have different people working on the things which are mostly in silos. Like for example, recording happens in the zoom, then editing happens with editor on Adobe Tools or some other products and then publishing and the hosting happens in a separate place. And then probably somebody that does your social marketing creates short content out of the long form to kind of get the reach and share it on TikTok different platforms with, to get the reach like YouTube and stuff. So imagine the product where you have everything in a single place where it starts basically with your workflow and have the depth of the experience where you record the content then after recording it you don't leave the product. You can do all the comments, markers, highlights everything that you need your editor to work on you can invite them into the product see how the editing happens do all the comments approve all the stuff that happened there then basically you invite the person who does your marketing they can publish they can get the creative assets out of it and share it across different channels and all of this happens in a single product so there are not really these silos and a lot of back and forth so the entire idea of the podcast to help people that create a long form content is like to get from idea to actual life pretty fast like it might take for a podcaster to just launch one single episode a week two weeks because of back and forth in a collaboration depending how much they edit and what we do is basically the idea you recorded it you can publish in an hour that's how easy it is because you have.