Dan Benjamin Built Something Different With Fireside.FM - The Podcast Report

The services side of the podcast industry needs new thinking, and Dan Benjamin is doing just that. It's the podcast report episode 118 show notes, links, conversation and more@the podcastreport.com 118 we are getting there. Libsyn just launched their new webpage builder that is definitely a step in the right direction. Apple announced that they are, quote unquote working on new features for podcasts. It may be a decade too late on this, but this is happening. I've got links to both of these issues at the Show Notes for this episode. Thepodcastreport.com 118 if you look at the hosting platforms, and I've never meant this show to be a hosting platform or microphone or technology shootout, but the hosting platforms, that's part of the game. That's part of what we have to do in the business of podcasting. The hosting platforms and services, they seem to offer different bits and pieces, different things that we want. I like this from this and this from that, but they all kind of have this old paradigm. The new paradigm that I'm introducing in today's episode is, well, new. It's from a podcaster that I respect. See, it's not someone who's jumped into the industry without an understanding of the industry and says, I'm going to make some money by providing from services. This is a podcaster who's been podcasting for the decade, who realizes that we need some new things and actually went out and built it. Now, at the same time, I do get frustrated, really frustrated with those in the podcasting space who assume that all podcasters are nerds that enjoy WordPress plugins and enjoy XML schemas and that kind of thing. Don't worry, that's not today's interview either. Is Dan platformer, everyone? No, but he's thinking outside of the box, which I really appreciate. And what he's got is some nice features and some things to think about and things that not only you should consider, but the other hosts should consider as well, this interview gives you a peek into the other side of podcast creation that is definitely worth your time. Now, again, I don't want this to be a hosting platform shootout or microphone shootout or anything like that. This is a look at someone seriously thinking outside of the box, and I could not be more thrilled to give it to you today. This episode is brought to you by Dial Talk. Done. Who else wants podcasting as easy as Dial Talk? Done. Get on the early access list by visiting dialtalkdone.com today or texting dialtalkdone all one word to 678-506-7543. The phone number and the link will be in the show notes. You can check it out on your podcatcher or obviously everything is@thepodcastreport.com 118 Today's interview is with Dan Benjamin from Fireside FM, a new podcast hosting company. You'll notice in the first part of this interview he was a bit surprised because I did not introduce him as Dan Benjamin. So of the Podcast Method. The Podcast method is a great show and I will definitely link to it in the show notes for this episode. But Dan has been doing a show for a while called Back to Work. That to me is the epitome of the power of podcasting. It is one of the shows that I just don't miss any given week. There are a lot of podcasts out there that I'll pick based on who the interviewee is or who the topic is. But there's something special at Back to Work and by not missing any episode of Back to Work, I've gotten to know Dan. It's one of the powers of podcasting. I've got to know who he is, what he represents, and when he announced that he was launching a new podcast platform, I knew it would be interesting. I've got links to both of his shows@thepodcastreport.com 118Now he's created a podcasting platform for podcasters and having been a podcaster for so long, and being a nerd for so long and being in computers for so long, he has a unique angle worth considering and examining even if you never jump onto his platform. It's an interesting machine. I've poked around it, I played with it, I did an import from Libsyn. Everything's pretty seamless and if you wanted to play a try, there's a seven day trial that you can do without, you know, paying him anything at the end. He does give a discount code for anyone who wants to try it. This is not a recommendation. This is just an opportunity for you. Dan did a great job of repping the service, what it brings to the game. I asked him questions. He definitely says what it is, what it is. But more importantly than a checklist of features is a guy who has responded to what podcasting means, what podcasting represents, and built a service around it. We have a lot to learn from that. I want to end this episode on the last words of Dan because they're good. So I want to encourage you if you want to reach out. I am@social thepodcastreport.com Twitter, thepodcastreport.com Facebook, all the good ones. If you'd like to subscribe to the show, we'd love to have you get every episode when it comes out. ThePodcastReport.com iTunes, ThePodcastReport.com Stitcher, etc. Hey, Paul, if there's one of those links you didn't mention or channel, good that it's there. Yes, it is. This is the podcast report, and I've got Dan Benjamin on the line. So let's get to it. Dan, how are you doing today, sir?

Hey, I'm doing well. How are you doing?

I'm doing well. I've got Dan Benjamin from Back to Work on the Line, man. I'm a big fan of his. I like what he's done, both in show and in tech, and now I get to ask him a couple of questions. So it's a good day for me. Hope it's a good day for you. Back to Work.

Yeah. You know, I've never been introduced as Dan Benjamin from Back to Work before. I kind of like it.

Well, I speak to Back to Work a lot because one of the things that I like about Back to Work is Back to Work is one of, as I truly believe it's a true podcast. You know, it wouldn't work as a radio show. It wouldn't work as a CD of the month club.

Right, right.

The continuity is there. You know, there are some shows where the bantering before the content is just annoying, you know, And I'm hitting the skip one minute, skip one minute, skip one minute. There are some shows that I look at the, you know, I look at the description to decide whether or not I want to listen to this one. But I can honestly say I haven't missed a show.

That's really nice to say.

Some are better than others, but that's life, you know, and that's kind of what the show's about. You know, sometimes you get it out of the park, sometimes you don't. And it's been. It's been a fun little journey. And, you know, so you've done that. You've produced a great show. Ringling in Merlin, I think, is probably just a great feat of psychological mastery. I'm not quite sure how you pulled that off, but what's interesting is not only have you pulled off this great show, but you've also got the 5x5 network, which is in some ways a computer nerd network. Like there are about 1800 of them. But there's somehow a level of professionalism, there's somehow a level of quality, there's somehow a level of stick to itness that I don't see in a lot of the others. You know, I sleep on a Casper mattress because your show mentioned it and I'm happy with it. And, you know, I have bought products and services, I've examined products and services. You know, whereas all these other sites like, you know, I've been an audible member for longer than you've been alive, kid. You know, this one isn't going to matter. This or this. But, you know, I've tried this stuff because of what you've done, your system works. And I've jumped over to quit and I've jumped over to a couple other shows. You know, Roderick, I think is the Roderick, I think is today's modern philosopher king.

Yeah, that's for sure.

I'll take him when I can, but not every week. It's just too much for me.

But.

So you got the 5x5 network and you've shared over the years glimpses of offices and technology and learning. You dipped your toe into the video podcasting water for a while. You've done these different things. And in the back of my mind for the last several years, and it has been several years with you guys, you've been chatting about this thing you're going to build, this podcast network you're going to build and you're going to open it up to the public. And I was excited by that. And I've got some issues with people who build new tech for podcasting because a, we need it. We need it badly. We're still running on tech that's 10 years old. In many ways, that's just not good for anybody. Imagine if we were still on our iPhone once. But unfortunately, a lot of the people who build the tech tend to have no idea what tech they're building. I Talked to the CEO of a company, Dan, highlighted by TechCrunch, who asked me, and I quote, and by the way, he was mentioned in TechCrunch as a podcasting company. He asked me, well, how really important is an itunes feedback?

Oh, wow.

You know.

Really? Yes.

We were both.

Oh my gosh, did you just end the interview? And.

Well, it wasn't an interview. It was more. I'd actually said something about him on an episode and he'd followed up. And I kind of suggest that maybe they had no clue. And the thing was, I appreciated his earnestness in calling me and following up. But just the fact that you launch a company with the word podcast and you're not quite sure what role itunes plays into it, Right?

Yeah, exactly.

That terrifies me. I was at an industry event. You were at the same event. There was a company that was selling an all in one package. They were there, they were sponsoring. I went up to them, I used the product before so I could speak from experience. And I said, hey, I like what you're doing. The theory is great, the people are great behind you, the reputation solid. But I was just kind of curious that, you know, here you are selling podcasting space, but you don't have a podcasting template. It was a cms, Right. And the guy looks at me and says, and I quote, Dan, he says, well, do you think we need one?

I mean, yeah, there's a lot of people, Paul, as I think you're leading up to, not to steal your thunder, I think there's a lot of people providing services or creating software or hosting or whatever for the podcast industry who really don't know anything about podcasting.

Yeah.

And I think there are a whole lot of people who see it as a business opportunity. They don't see it as a community. They don't see it as something really cool. They don't see it as a. I mean, maybe they see it as those things, but that's secondary to, I can make some money here. This is a place I can go to make some money, maybe some really good money. And you know what they don't have? They don't have this. They need that. That's what they need. But they're not saying this is what they need from the inside. They're saying this is what they need from the outside, from looking in, without that kind of deep understanding of the medium of what exactly it is that's going on. And that's what's missing in so many of these. I mean, some of the services, I'm not here to bash our community or the companies that help support it, but so many of those companies that are here, the ones that I hear about, I would say the large majority of people are using to host their podcast. A lot of those were. Are things that, again, they might. They might not have been built by podcasters or they might have been built by people who, who came from another industry and said, I know, I know what we need here. I'm going to build something that's great. And so you have, but you have kind of these holes in, In. In these solutions where one might have. Might Create pretty websites, but it's not really that configurable. You can't do any of the advanced things that you might want to do, and you can't really control what's going on behind the scenes. And in fact, that can be harmful to you once you get past the five episode point or when you want to expand, when you want to do other things. And then you have other systems that might be really, really good at serving the files, but they look like they were built in 1990 and there's no improvement there. And the websites they generate can't even be called websites and there's no customization. And, you know, so I mean, I found lots and bits of pieces of things. Things were kind of all over the place. And what I found was that most of the people that I talked to or that wrote into podcast method to touch the. Since you didn't mention, that's the show I do helping podcasters, you know, people would write in to that and say, okay, so I'm using this place to host my files.

Yeah.

And then I'm going over here to, you know, I have a website on Squarespace. That's where I do the. Then I generate the RSS feed actually over here with this other tool that I use by hand. And so I upload the file here first and then I write the post over here and I link to the file in that player and then I upload it here and that makes the itunes. And I'm using feedburner because I don't trust any of these other services. And what if I want to move later and.

Right. And I'm exhausted and my wife has divorced me because I spent so much time. And this is only episode one.

Right, right. They spend an hour recording and then they spend, you know, an hour editing, and then they spend three hours in post production trying to post the thing and manually adding the chapter markers, manually adding artwork to it, and itunes exporting the file back out. I mean, it's just like the stuff that people were doing was just maddening. And I have this strong philosophy as a guy who I spent most of my career in software and computers and things like that, that if there's something that you can use a computer to do, but by all means let the computer do that. If there's something that you're going to be doing that's essentially the same and you're going to be doing it every day or over and over and over again, take some time and teach the computer to do that thing. And then you will never have to do it again. So a perfect example is. And most podcast hosting things will do this, but very often people are adding their own show art to their MP3 file manually, and that's one of the basic things that most podcast CMSs will now do for you. But there was a time when they didn't do that and people are still doing it manually. And it's crazy that you would have to do that on your own when it's super easy to just have a system do that for you. So that's one of many examples. But these little bits and pieces, this one system does this, but it doesn't do this. So I've got another thing to do this. And then they'll look at a solution like the one I built, and they'll say, oh, well, it's too expensive. I'll say, okay, well, you know, like, I understand that everyone has a budget. They'll be like, yeah, because I'm already paying for, you know, 10 bucks a month for my Squarespace, right?

Yep, yep.

Like, well, you won't. You wouldn't need that anymore. Oh, well, you know, but then I would have my files hosted over here on this thing. Right, but you wouldn't need that anymore. Oh, when we also upload to SoundCloud and get a paper. Well, you wouldn't need to upload to SoundCloud. So, you know.

Yep, yep. No, no, I know. And so you launch. And I always look at two things when I. When I see a launch. Number one, are they going to lock me in? And number two is the pricing realistic. Because one of the things that's really funny is when the industry started, there was this concept that a podcaster shouldn't be. Shouldn't have to pay if they were famous. And I love that concept. And what podcaster 10 years ago didn't want to be famous? But here's the thing. Bandwidth costs money. And if you have a business built on the more successful your client is, the more money you lose. It's not a good plan. I don't care who you are. So, number one, I look at, is there any longevity? Number two, I look at, honestly, is there an escape route? Some companies that should have lasted didn't. Some companies that should not have lasted didn't, you know. So is there a way to escape? Is there a way to get out? So when you first launched, your pricing was. And well, I won't even say that during the beta process, you know, you floated some different pricing and you had some download minimums and that kind of stuff. And I said, okay, I get what he's doing because bandwidth costs. And you were actually doing premium bandwidth. And we can chat about that a little bit if you want, you know, but. But I knew the, The. The crowds would go. But I get unlimited bandwidth over at X, Y, and Z.

Right.

And there are several people who provide that. And you jumped and said, all right, fine, unlimited bandwidth. Now, I noticed MP3 bandwidth, not MP4 bandwidth. So I appreciate that. But still, somebody comes in, somebody can run up a lot more than $19 a month in bandwidth.

Yeah, they could, sure.

So tell me about why you think it's okay for people to leave and explain a little bit about that. You set that up. And then I want to talk about the bandwidth issue, because that's the one question I've got. And then I want to hear about the future, because I think that's where the bandwidth issue gets answered. But go ahead.

Well, I mean, what's your. Where do I start? I mean, you asked a lot of questions. I want to make sure I answer them all. Where do you want me to start with that?

Let's start with bandwidth. I mean, potentially, and I understand the marketplace, for lack of a better term, has forced you to offer unlimited bandwidth, but I always get nervous with that one.

So you're concerned that because I'm offering unlimited bandwidth, at some point I'm going to have to start charging for that?

No, I'm concerned that if you offer unlimited bandwidth and enough people are successful with you, you're not going to make any money.

Yeah, I mean, there's the risk of that, but there are. See what people don't understand?

Good.

When the typical podcaster out there, they're going to go looking for something and they're going to find a solution that's not going to charge them based on bandwidth or downloads or something like that. And the traditional ways that bandwidth is calculated and metered, especially if people are familiar with something like Amazon S3, for example. I think it's 3 cents average, 3 or 4 cents a gigabyte in transfer over there. And you say, well, that's not. I'm not doing that much. Well, if you start doing tens of thousands of downloads per month, then that definitely does start to add up. And bandwidth is one of those things that if you're serving a lot of content, if you're serving that content, somebody has to pay. Somebody's paying for that somewhere. But bandwidth is getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper all the time. And the same way that bandwidth is getting cheaper, I Think people are starting to understand that the only way that things make sense is if they're not having to pay for it. Just last month, I went over a little bit on my bandwidth usage for my phone. We've got four phones on the plan now. And so we went over and it says, well, we're going to charge you another 15 bucks or something like that. You know, like that's reasonable. I used it. But it also seems dumb. It seems dumb and it seems petty in a way. And there's just, sometimes there's just no way around it. Like I'm using the bandwidth, so I've got to pay for it. Well, most podcasters aren't going to get anywhere near. And this is, this is the fact, Paul, this is the fact of the matter. Most podcasters are not getting hundreds of thousands of downloads a month. Really, they're just not. Really, they are just not. And probably most people listening to even your show are probably not getting hundreds of thousands of downloads per month. I can tell you that out of all of the shows that I do, only one gets hundreds of thousands of downloads per month. And the rest of all of the other shows on five by five added up don't, you know, wouldn't come close to that one. Or maybe, maybe total, they would. So the actual cost of bandwidth is a bit less than you might imagine it would be. And also, there are a whole lot of ways to make that really, really efficient. So, for example, you can use. There are lots of CDNs out there that are very cost effective. You can also build your own. If you happen to be like, I am like a network administrator, sysadmin type guy who's been working in data centers for 20 years. You know, how to set up caching and bandwidth in a very effective way so that you can, you can essentially create additional layers of CDN that, that help offset that cost. Now, if somebody like, you know, you know, everyone talks about a Marc Maron or Serial or one of, you know, Radiolab, or if one of those folks signed up and they're doing millions of downloads a month, well, of course, the completely different story, but we're not interesting to those people. We're not geared toward those kind of people. We're not geared toward kinds of podcasts. And that's intentional. That's not the part of the community that I'm interested in serving, and that's not the part of the community that I'm interested in supporting. I'm trying to support regular people with regular shows, not the, you know, not the rock star podcast of the universe. That's not for us. And I shouldn't be. They should use a completely different platform. Sure. They could use Fireside, no problem. They could. There'd be nothing to prevent them from doing that. But if they're that big of a deal and they're getting that many downloads, they're also making a ton of money and they're probably going to want to go with some kind of completely custom solution, some full on. And that's what every, in my case, with 5x5 shows, that's what I always did. Now I'm slowly moving things to Fireside, but they have a completely different mentality than. Because they're in this sort of up. They're the people who want no green MMs, that kind of thing. And so I'm not concerned about that. But you're talking about collectively. What if everybody does pretty well? Let's say everybody does moderately well. What happens? How do I make money? The answer is I'll still make money. I might make less, but that's okay because I'm doing something that's really good for the community. I've built a system that, that's really helpful, that helps people podcast. And the fact of the matter is, for every person that does get 100,000 downloads a month, there's 100 people who get 500 downloads a month. And yet they still want a reliable place to host their shows, a beautiful website, a feed. They want all those things and they want it to be easy. They want it to be easy to use. They want it to be straightforward, they want it to be nice, they want to have fun when they're doing it. And they don't want any obstacles. So they're willing to pay 15, 20 bucks a month to get that on. The person who's paying 20 bucks a month and they have, you know, 100,000 downloads, you say, well, they're cheating the system, they're using too much bandwidth. Well, no, it's, you know, that's built in. So that's. You've run the approach. Oh yeah.

You've run the numbers. Good. Of course, now you're letting people leave. You've got an exit, you know, if somebody decides, I don't want to use you anymore, and they want to move their feed to another location, you're making that possible. Why are you doing that? That's a leading question, obviously, but, but go ahead.

Yeah, I mean, because. Well, I mean, that's a, that's just part of the software. Like you'd have to. You have to be able to do that. If you can't do that, then why would anyone ever sign up?

Well, there are several systems I've worked with and there are several clients I have had who have been with systems where that was not possible and sad.

Yeah, but that's horrible. I can't even, I can't even think like that.

Well, I appreciate that, but I think it needs to be spoken and I think it needs to be said because many of you listening to this show have signed up with shiny people in the past who it's been impossible to get up and leave.

I just can't imagine that. And that's because you always want to go somewhere. But it's simple. It's simple to do that. It's just a reader act. It's one time redirect, you know? Yeah. As long as you want that redirect going, you're going to have to like pay because you have to keep the redirect going. But you know, like that, that doesn't take very long.

Right.

You know, and then, and so like one of the things I'll be doing eventually, I haven't built it yet, but is like having a little like redirect plan that you can set up and that just redirects you forever so that you basically pay like a few bucks a year and it just. The redirector stays there, you know? Yeah, you got to be able to move, you got to be able to get out of there.

What's coming in the future other than the things.

One of the big things that we've been working on is, you know, there's a lot of the companies out there, they all, they're, they're all talking the big, the big buzzword out there now in podcasting is ad insertion. Because everybody's coming to this medium thinking, I gotta make money, I'm gonna make money. How are we gonna make money? It's ads. Okay. How are we gonna make money with ads? Well, here's how we're gonna make money with ads. And again, that's the wrong approach. It's the wrong way to think about it. That's the wrong way to go into this.

But such a great buzzword, Dan.

Yeah, I don't like it. I just don't like the way that people think about this as an opportunity to just make money. So they come into it and they say ad insertion. So what does that mean? That means that there's some third party, some invisible third party potentially that will sell ad spots for your show and you'll say, okay, there's an ad spot at 20 minutes and 10 seconds. There's an ad spot at 42 minutes and 18 seconds. And just ads will just be inserted dynamically into your show. You don't know what they are. They're not in your voice. They're commercials. And those things will just show up in your show. You'll have no say, input, or control over what they really sound like. Maybe you will have some and these things will go out and they'll be. Sometimes it's dynamic ad insertion, so that if you're in one region, an ad for that region will go into the show. If you're in another region, a different ad will go into the show. And maybe these ads are changing all the time. So if somebody downloads your show in October, they hear one ad and in November, they hear another ad. But the thing is, these are not good ads. These are not the kinds of ads anyone wants to listen to. And these are not the kind of ads anyone wants to have in their own podcast. I don't want to. Any ad that was dynamically inserted, I guarantee you, Paul, I don't want to hear it. If it was dynamically inserted, I'm fast forwarding through it. I'm skipping 30 seconds, and I'm skipping 30 seconds. I promise you. And I promise you, that's what everybody's going to do. Very different from, like me and Merlin talking about how much we like our Casper mattresses, and you go in to buy one. Very different. And, you know, so that's not something that I'm focusing on because what I see a big part of the future, I see. I still think ads will play a role, but I think there's two other aspects that will come into the space in podcasting. One of them is member support. More and more, I see people who are making a living doing shows that exist because their members are supporting them, they are donating, whether it's a dollar, $10, $20 a month, whatever.

So Patreon is the existing big name in that space right now.

They're the only name really, I think Memberful. Some people have customized Memberful, and I know the guy who built Memberful. It's a lot more work. Patreon's easy to just take people's money, but there's nothing that there's not a deep enough integration. And to have really deep integration, the kind of integration where you can say, okay, this episode I'm putting out right here, you know what, Release it to my supporting members for a week. And then release it to the rest of the world. And then you don't have to do anything else, it just does that or giving a special feed, custom feed for every single supporting member so they get different things based on their level. And if they stop supporting you, the feed stops working. Things like that, little things like that. I think that's pretty cool. I think something like that is a game changer for a lot of people. And then I'm also interested in the idea of people paying for content, paying for the kinds of content that they want. I'm not sure what that's going to look like, but I pay for Netflix and I pay for HBO Go and YouTube, Red and Spotify. And that's because I like the content that's coming out of those places and I want to get that content and I want to support directly the content that's coming out of them. I think there's something interesting there. I don't know exactly what that looks like, but as far as specific features, people have asked about multi user stuff. They want to be able to have a producer log in and co host login. So obviously we're doing that kind of stuff that's in the very near future. There's a whole lot that we're working on and I share this a lot with the people who are customers in the Slack. So I'm in Slack all day so people can come in and talk to me, ask me questions or tell me what they want. Someone today suggested that there's multiple kinds of file uploads so that they can upload. They want to be able to upload an image and that shows up on their page in addition to the header image and the artwork. So we'll work something like that. People have had great suggestions like they want a transcript, so now we allow for the uploading of transcripts. I try really hard to respond to what people are asking me for. I try to listen hard to the problems that they might be having or the wishes that they have and try to respond to that.

Is there a decision? You spoke earlier to people who are going, oh, there's good money in this podcasting space. I'm going to get into some of that. Is there a decision at this point, Patreon take the action? I don't know if Memberful does. I'm not familiar enough with them, but that seems to be the model for a lot of people. Other hosting companies in the podcasting space who have premium opportunities charge up to 50% for that. Do you have a model how you're going to play there. Are you still examining it? What's your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I'm still looking at that. I'm still experimenting. I pay attention to everything, I look around at everything. And so certainly again, I'm interested to hear what the existing users like and what the existing users are wanting to do because they're helping build this too. And I don't want to waste my time trying to build something that no one's interested in or that no one's going to use. And I definitely don't have that philosophy of well, I'm going to tell them what they want. I mean, in some cases I do know pretty well what what people want or what they're going to need. But a lot of the time I spend just listening and seeing where the pain points are for people or what the features are that people want. And then typically what people want is pretty easy and I can just go and add it. A lot of the features that we have really did just come out of people in the chat room talking.

So what's the staying power? Why is this one going to survive?

It's hard to answer a question like that, Paul. But what I think is, you know, from my standpoint, I've been doing this now full part time since 2006, full time since 2009. And at five by five over the years we've had many, many shows. You know, probably we do, yeah, we probably do about 20, 20, 25 shows right now. We're working with a lot of different hosts and I've built 5 by 5 cms from the ground up and use that as the basis to start building Fireside. And all of this came from my own experience and what to do. And one of the things that I learned in many years in working in system administration and building data centers and things like that is how to scale something. The way that this system works, the way that it's designed is it costs less if I have few customers and costs more if I have more customers. But what that basically means is that our cost to run it is always less than cost or how much we're charging. In other words, so there's a built in ability to make profit, which is important as a business, but it's designed in such a way so that we will never have more costs or expenses than we have income. And what that means is it's always going to be something that can exist financially. If we only had five customers, our bill would be very, very low and we' be able to run fine with just five customers.

What about paying all the VCs, all the people who invested money into this, the obligation to the shareholders?

Of course, I bootstrapped the whole thing myself. It's all my own time and money, and there's no investment. There's nothing from. I mean, I invested a lot of time and money in it, but it's all been my own personal time and personal money from my own personal bank account to pay for the people who have helped me build it or design or whatever, and a considerable amount of my own time and tons of missed opportunities that I could have had to do shows and make money, for example, or other things. But it's something I believe in, and I'm passionate about our community. I'm passionate about building a tool and a system that's going to be around for a long time, and I'm using it and I believe in it, and it's here to stay. So that's been my biggest focus. And I appreciate all the people who have taken that leap of faith to say, I'll try it, I'll come out there. And hundreds of people are using the system. And that makes me very, very happy. And I wish to thank them publicly for that. And I want to continue to make it great, continue to listen to them and build the features that they're asking for and continue to make it better. And I think the fact that they understand very carefully what the relationship is. They understand they're paying for this service, they know exactly what they're getting. And. And it keeps things straightforward, it keeps things honest and simple, and it's something that I'm passionate about. I love writing code, I love messing around with things, building things. And I found that if I have something to work on that I enjoy that kind of desire to tinker and experiment and play. It turns into something that's more valuable to people in general. And that's my goal.

There was this moment, I don't know if you listened to startup on Gimlet, but there was a moment at the end of season one when. And I've appreciated Bloomberg's open nature to the show and whatnot, but he says, well, good news is $1.5 million in revenue, and everybody's listening. The mouth drops and everybody's excited and, wow, look at this. And then he goes, bad news is $1.6 million in expenses.

Wow.

We had to start selling T shirts and, you know, and here's a guy with 15 who can't figure out how to make that be enough, right? And I think part of, you know, you came from the world of server administration, but we have the cloud now. You know, it's not like you've got a data center here that you got to pay for anymore.

Right, Exactly.

You got to pay a little bit per person, but that's okay because that person's paying you more anyway. So you just take piece of that, which is, you know, good business.

It's. It's like Amazon S3 has been wonderful because before Amazon S3 we had to have a server in a data center and we had to have that server backed up, which of course you still have, but all those files on the server, if that server went down, you have to restore from the backup or you have to have a failover machine that's getting some kind of clutch. Amazon S3 makes it so that those files live on Amazon and we still back it up. But those files exist there in a way that's essentially indestructible. Half the Internet could go down and go away and those files still exist. So that's a wonderful thing. But there are still people who serve their files directly from S3. They don't do any kind of caching in front of it. And that's just madness because you're paying for every single transfer. See, and this is where understanding how this stuff works is much better. So here's the.

And understanding it from. From not a nerd standpoint, although you and I both embrace that quality, but you actually understand it from experience of actually doing a show that has hundreds of thousands of downloads where the bandwidth cost means something.

Right? So think of it like this. There are plenty of hosting companies out there that charge less for bandwidth than Amazon S3 does, or where they come with enough built in bandwidth that they're not going to, that it winds up being a lot cheaper. You can run what's essentially the same thing that a CDN does on a much smaller scale. You can put a server that essentially is a miniature cdn, what we call a caching server. And the way that that works is. So let's say people go to download this episode if you're serving it from S3, let's say every single person who downloads it has to Download it from S3 and S3 has to serve it every single time to those people. And you're getting charged $0.03 per gigabyte for that. Doesn't sound like a lot, but it adds up. But if you're smart, you put some kind of caching server in front of it somewhere on the Internet, where bandwidth is less expensive. And then you tell it, you give it lots of storage space, and you say, you know what? Every time that you download a file, save it and save it for 30 days. And the only time you should ever delete something is if you start to run out of disk space. But don't worry, because you've got terabytes. And if you do wind up running out of disk space, no big deal. Purge the oldest file that you have that's been the least requested. So what that means is now, instead of downloading it from Amazon S3 every time someone wants to download it, it downloads once, and then that server serves it for you. This is the principle behind a CDN everywhere. And if you have a few of those servers around the country or around the world, and you send people to the server that's geographically closest to them, which your DNS server can help them figure out, well, you've built your own cdn, haven't you? So these principles are there to help cut costs and things like that. That's the kind of thing that I really enjoy. I enjoy figuring out what's the best solution to this. How can we make this faster and easier and more fun.

You can tell that we're at the top of the hour. I gotta let you go. I actually gotta get an interview for another episode of this, but it won't.

Be as good as this one.

Oh, it won't be. It won't be. And I want. What I want everybody to take home is just simply, yep, it's another host. Yep. He's priced like everybody else.

Yep.

We don't know. However, the pedigree here is definitely worth a look, and maybe for as many of you need to look at Fireside, maybe need to look at Five by five and see what's happening over there, because it's really interesting and it's been around for a while, and he's got some legs. I think we need some new thoughts. I think we need some new ideas. I've been preaching forever that this little hodgepodge, cafeteria style of podcasting is doing no one good. And Dan here has an opportunity that I'm excited by. Conceptually, it's a little while before I can embrace it fully, but on this show, this is what we talk about. And I'm thrilled to have you on here, Dan. Give us a final close. Just something to think about. Not necessarily much a sale, but it's just, who's Dan, and why is this thing so dang different?

My name is Dan Benjamin. Thanks for having me here. It's my first time on the show. No, I mean, I've been doing podcasting stuff for a long time, and this is something I care a lot about. I got into this back before itunes had podcasts in it, back before, you know, like in the odeo time period. And just doing a podcast, that was a weird thing to be doing. It was a crazy thing to be doing. But I always wanted to be in radio, you know, And I remember back when I was. I would. I would sit in junior high and high school and I had a little pocket radio, and I'd have the earphone going up inside my jacket, up into my ear, and I'd be sitting in the back of the room listening to the local talk show host. And I loved it. I knew that was what I wanted to do. But when I got into college, I was a communications major, what we used to call rtv, which is now rtf, but radio, television. And I was talking to the number one radio guy in. In the town I was going to school in. And I said, yeah, this is what I want to do. He said, listen. He said, I know you hear people like me and you think, this is awesome. I'm going to do what Phil does. But he's like, it's a miserable job. Working in a radio station is horrible. You get fired all the time, you have to quit all the time. You have to move around the country, you get terrible hours. You don't make that much money. And he's like, it kind of sucks. And I was really discouraged by that. And he's like, is there anything else you do? And I'm like, well, I do computers. I've been doing computers since I was 10 in 1982. He's like, what? I said, yeah. He's like, you're good at computers. And this is back when working a computer was like, I can work a computer. That was special. And he said, oh, my God, do that. And I took it seriously. And he wasn't the only person that was telling me that. And I said, all right, fine, I'll do that, since it's easy for me. But I never got rid of that bug of just loving the medium, loving the concept of talk radio, always wanting to do it. And so finally when I got to the point where I guess I was having a pre midlife career crisis, my dream of being CTO of a Silicon Valley startup was there. I was that, and I hated it, and I didn't like what I was doing, and I wanted to do something Else. And I remember reading an article. I've told this story many times, but I was reading an article about Leo Laporte and Twit and that they were doing $1.5 million in revenue per year. They didn't talk about profit, they just said revenue. And I thought, wow, if he can do a million and a half in revenue, I could probably pay my mortgage to a car. I could probably find a way to do that. And Leo, of course, had come broadcasting to technology, and I was coming from essentially technology to broadcasting. And I thought, okay, well, he's got the advantage because he's such a good broadcaster. But if I can be a halfway decent broadcaster and I bring this technology knowledge and all the industry contacts and the friends and the people there, why, hopefully I could be able to pay my bills. And I certainly did. And it grew into five by five. And many shows. Many of those people have gone on to do other shows. And. Yeah, so that's kind of the story. And. And here we are.

Very cool, Dan. Well, people are gonna check. I would.

Listen, I want to give you. I wanna give your listeners a discount or something.

Ooh, ooh, ooh. Go for it.

So what's. This is the podcast report, right?

Yep.

So what do you want the code to be? Podcast. Podcast report.

Sure.

Okay. One word. Podcast report. So they can go and go to. When they sign up for Fireside, they're gonna get their first week free anyway, but they'll get. How about this? 20% off for three months.

There we go.

Deal. So that's it. Podcast report.

And we'll put the links. It's gonna be the podcast report.com forward/episode118, or just the podcast report.com forward/118 for this one. By not having a network, I don't have to have the slash B2W and that type of thing. Thank you, Dan. I could go on a long time with this and maybe we'll. We'll have you here in the future. I've got another guy pinging me on Skype right now for his interview for this, but busy, busy. You represent where we need to go. And only time's going to tell whether or not if you're going to pull this one off. But I don't know. I kind of feel you're going to. And that's why I brought you on.

I have to, Paul. I have no choice. I have to. Thanks for having me.

Thanks, Dan.