The World’s First B2B Podcasting Platform—Lindsay Tjepkema—Casted

Richard Jacobs: Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the future tech podcast. I have Lindsay Tjepkema. She’s working on a startup in Indianapolis or the High Alpha venture studio. And she is working on the first B2B podcast and platform itself, which we’ll get into. So, Lindsey, thanks for coming.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Richard Jacobs: So as I understand that you are building a platform to better serve people that we’re going to do podcasting.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. So as you mentioned, we have built truly launched just a couple weeks ago the B2B podcasting platform. And really what we’re doing is we’re helping brands embrace podcasts as one of the foundational pieces of their marketing strategy and helping them to get even more out of conversations like you and I are having right now.

Richard Jacobs: See that the top podcasts are doing right. And what are all the struggling non-top podcasts doing wrong or missing?

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah, well I think, so my background is as a marketer specifically more recently as a content marketer. So I think twofold. One is that if you look back to blogging, not all that long ago, it started as something that hobbyists were doing. Kind of an online journal if your web blog is how I’d even got the name. And slowly over time that turned into something that brands started to do and then everybody started to do. And now everybody has a podcast. And the ones that really stand out are those that are creating really, really good content and that are using it as part of a fully integrated content marketing program, right, to really reach and resonate with their audiences and really deliver value in ways that are meaningful. And so we are in the midst of that next movement with podcasting. So podcasts just like blogs started as something that hobbyists would do more than 10 years ago, almost 15 years now. The first podcasts came out and since then it’s been something that people kind of do on their own time because they want to. And over the last few years, brands have started to pick up on that. And now, depending on where you look and what your perspective is, it certainly feels like everybody’s starting to get a podcast. And just like with blogging and email before that. And so it’s true today. Those that stand out are the ones that are doing it well, that are creating really, really great content, not just doing a podcast for podcast sake that are doing it with the audience in mind with storytelling in meaningful value-rich content and that are really leveraging that podcast in ways far beyond just hitting publish and sharing a little bit on, on social media, but really going and saying, what else can we do with this? How else can we leverage it? So those are the ones that are really standing out today.

Richard Jacobs: Well, that’s the big question. So everyone’s learning our, I do a podcast, obviously, you get good guests as good questions and then published it on a million different places, but then what? How you get attention to it. How do you grow it? How do you leverage it from there?

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah, exactly. Well, and that’s exactly the question that we are working to answer, which is then what? Right. So speaking from experience in my past life before I started casted as I mentioned before, I was a B2B marketer and I had podcasts and we worked really hard. I had the luxury of having a really talented team and some great agencies to work with and we worked really hard to create great content and to publish it and to share it on social media. But we were so future-oriented, so constantly under the gun to meet that next deadline on yes, more podcasts but also blog posts, white papers, web content, case studies, all of the other content that we were responsible for. We were constantly thinking about the next thing that it’s difficult to pause and to manually go back into that show that you created and say, what else can we do with it? How can we extract more value? How can we get more out of it? How can we pull clips and really, really drive more and more value and leverage this show for all that it’s worth? So with Casted, that’s what we’re doing. We’re making it easier for marketers to do that and have it not be so manual so that they can get into those shows, get into those conversations like you and I are having right now and say, okay, what clips can we pull? How can we highlight certain areas? How can we leverage the transcript version of this show to create written content? How can we use this conversation in myriad ways to just really ring out all of the value possible from the starting point?

Richard Jacobs: Okay. So any specific examples or case studies, you can generate a transcript. Again, you can two clips from a podcast with a great guest, but again, what do you do with them? It sounds from what saying each podcast ideally needs to be barcoded and broke it up into pieces and it you need to market to get to people. People listen to, let’s say each podcast itself. But again, what’s an example of doing that well?

Lindsay Tjepkema:   Yeah, so I can tell you a use case, right? Kind of a before and after. So what I would have done before is have this conversation. I would record this podcast and I would go on and I would let’s say I was the host. So I’d record this show and I would go and I’d get to my team and we would edit it and we would produce it and we would publish it and we would promote it on social media and then we’d be onto the next thing, right? And then now with casted, I can instead record this conversation, make it into a great podcast episode and then it gets pulled into casted and I can immediately get a transcript that I can go into and much easier, much faster, much more efficiently pull written content. So I can pull the content that’s already transcribed from that interview to as starter copy for blog posts, for show notes, for additional supplemental content for BDR cadences and I can take that transcript and clean it up and I can have it be a Q&A series. That transcript becomes part of a searchable database that I can go back to and much more easily reach back in time and grab content that already exists to repurpose it, to remix it, to resurface it and use it for future campaigns. I’m also able to pull clips. So that I can get into this conversation that we had and I can highlight certain areas that I think that my audience is really going to resonate with. And I can use those clips on social media. I can use them in that blog post that I created to make it much more interactive and more interesting. I can put it into my BDR cadences and inside sales emails to make those much more engaging. And instead of sharing the whole episode, I can share a clip that I really want to make sure that you hear. And then I can get much more from the analytics that we’re creating. I can get more value out of how are people engaging with this? Did they listen to that clip? Did they go on to listen to some of the other clips that I shared? Did they listen to the whole episode? Did they go on and interact with some of the other resources and content that I provided to them when I sent that clip? So it’s taking really a top of the funnel. One way conversation where I record a podcast and I’m kind of talking at you while you listen to it and turning it into something that pulls people down into the funnel more and makes it more of an engaging two-way conversation.

Richard Jacobs: What is the BDR cadence by the way?

Lindsay Tjepkema: I’m getting into industry jargon. So inside sales, BDR would be business development representative, SDR would be sales about representative, all the same individual who spends their days in like a B2B organization doing outreach. So reaching out to people outside the organization trying to say, Hey, here’s this information that I have, can I set up a meeting? And quite often companies will set them up with cadences and marketing will work with them to have email campaigns and nurture streams to help them reach out to these people with information that’s really valuable. So content like this would get shared in those email campaigns to help resonate with people that they’re trying to reach out to.

Richard Jacobs: Well backing up a little bit. So your system automatically creates the transcripts or who is transcribing given podcasts?

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah, so every time you publish a podcast the RSS feed is automatically pulled into casted once you sign up and once you get into it and then yeah, every time you publish a show it’s pulled in and automatically transcribed.

Richard Jacobs: By AI or by a human?

Lindsay Tjepkema: By AI, it’s an API. Google transcribe API.

Richard Jacobs: Okay. Is Google transcribe good enough for the podcast to make sense or is it still have trouble with some?

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah, it’s pretty great. I mean it’s not 100%. It’s not quite where it would be if you and I sat there and listened to the whole thing and transcribed it by hand, but it’s pretty darn close. And so for me, the use case that I recommend is saying, hey, start with it as a foundation and then go through and, don’t copy and paste the whole thing and use it as your blog post, but pull copy that content and use it as a starter to mold it, to build from there to refine it and it makes the job of the copywriter much easier and much more efficient as opposed to starting from just straight-up audio content.

Richard Jacobs: All right. What’s the typical publishing pace for a podcast shows that you interacted with it? One a week, more or less?

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. It’s interesting. I’ve seen some trends emerge and a couple of years ago when I started in podcasting, I feel like there was kind of an expectation that you would do a weekly show. There’s one show a week, every single week. Develop that consistency and that rhythm. But lately, as podcasts have become more popular, more and more and more popular, I feel like there’s more of a trend towards seasons or series binge-worthy content if you will. So where you’ll have a series of five or maybe 10, somewhere in there, episodes chunked together around a given topic. And let’s say you did a series of podcasts, right, and you could do a few shows around that and then take a little break and then do another series on something else. That all falls under an umbrella that makes sense for your brand. The startup does this really well. Alex Bloomberg of Gimlet has his series called startup where they will do a series on different startups. He started with his own with the actual formation of a gimlet. And then from there, he’s kind of followed different startups as they get started and get going, but it all falls under the same theme of startups. So that’s a theme or a format that I really like because I think as a podcast it gives you some flexibility to take a break when you need to and to think in more finite chunks as opposed to always and always forever and ever once a week I’m going to do this show. So that’s a need I’ve seen, but certainly you have to do what works best for your brand and what’s going to be best for you and the kind of time that you have to allocate towards it.

Richard Jacobs: Yeah. I’ve done a long series on particular topics. I made one or two of them into books, but I guess I’m just making this up. You could do, I guess I would call it a master cast. Where you take clips from, let’s say you did 20 interviews on snoring and you took all the clips of the best things that were said about snoring from all these scientists and made a master cast with them all in there. Do you think that’d be a good idea for promotion?

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah, I mean, as I said, you have to do what makes the most sense for one, for your listeners, for your audience. And there’s a reason that saying is so calming. I know your audience what are they going to listen to you? What’s going to be really interesting for them to listen to? What’s going to be engaging and a reward for them hitting play? Right. And that’s different for everyone. For some, that’s, that’s a really long podcast. For some, that’s really, really short little bursts, but you don’t really know until you try. So I think it’s important to try something that you really believe your audience is going to enjoy and not only consume for themselves, but also share. And then watch and see what your metrics say.

Richard Jacobs: Oh, there are always examples out there, people that have done this well. So do you have any examples that come to your mind? Some really fantastic things that have been done? And what did you learn from seeing those examples? Maybe one or two.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Sure. So I’ll give a couple of examples. I mean, I mentioned Alex Bloomberg and then there’s also Guy Roz, Alex Bloomberg has a startup and all of the gimlet and Gimlet media is his company. And then Guy Roz’s American life and how I built this is one of my favorites. Its story, all of those share storytelling, right? And again, thinking with your audience in mind, it’s never about what you want to say. It’s all about what your audience wants to hear. That’s paramount. Something more in the B2B podcasting space. Jay Acunzo has a show called Unthinkable, which I really liked. Jay is a good friend and shares the same perspective on podcasting and show creation that I do. And he has some really great insights on storytelling and resonating with the audience and not necessarily doing what everybody else is doing, but doing what’s right for your brand. So I’m always quick to recommend his show. He’s got some really, really great podcast content.

Richard Jacobs: So what’s the world of Casted? Is it the Mechanical Oh, easy transcription, easy part of it? Or do you have technical or marketing experts for podcasters as part of the platform? Like what’s the goal of it?

Lindsay Tjepkema: Sure. So we are a platform, so we are a software company. Right now we are not leaning into the services component, but other than supporting our existing customers and just making the most out of their platform. So basically as I mentioned that the use case before, so it’s all individuals who have a show already or who are just about to launch a show and then they leverage Casted to really ring out that content, get as much out of it as possible. So we work with B2B marketers that have a podcast and they use us to get right now as the MVP is the very first stages of the platform stands. They pull in their show, they get a transcription. That transcription goes into a searchable database. It helps them repurpose their content easier, helps them you create clips quickly without having to go back to an audio engineer or any more technical individual. The marketer themselves can just pull clips and share them in myriad ways and then start to get more visibility about engagement with their show.

Richard Jacobs: The casted, is it ready? Is it running or is it coming in the near future?

Lindsay Tjepkema:   It is here now. Yes.

Richard Jacobs: Who would be a good fit for it and who wouldn’t? Is it just for new podcasters or big ones?

Lindsay Tjepkema:   Sure. So it’s designed for the B2B marketer. And we really work with those who already have a show or who are just about to do one. Since we right now are not focused on the actual production of a show. We work as I mentioned, we work with those who already have a show or we have lots of really great agency partners that can help produce the show and then we can come alongside and help get as much value out of it as possible. The B2B marketer is typically kind of in the mid-market enterprise range size of the company who has or is about to launch a podcast.

Richard Jacobs: What about the podcast networks? When someone joins casted, they say, hey, help me. We want to grow this thing. We need expertise on how to market it and maybe we want to join a network or something. What do they do? Do you say hey, talk to so and so, do you provide any expertise like that?

Lindsay Tjepkema: Well we have some really great partners and some friends in the business who do that, who do podcast tours, who do like as I mentioned, podcast agencies who help with the production and then really hope that when you’re in casted using the platform that it helps you, as I mentioned, get as much possible, really wring all that content out of that show so that you’re getting from one episode many pieces of content that will help you really have a louder voice and reach more people and more effective ways with what, starting with that one episode. So, yeah, I mean we have our nice kind of unofficial network of partners and friends in the podcasting space. That can really help.

Richard Jacobs: Very good. What’s the best way for people to get in touch to try casted that and to ask you questions they want to?

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah, I would love that. So our website is casted.us. And you can find me on LinkedIn and my name is just kind of on kind of a tough one. Or you can look up casted on LinkedIn and yeah, that’s probably the best way to find us.

Richard Jacobs: All right. Well Lindsay, thanks for coming. I really appreciate it.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Thanks so much for having me on the show.