Origin Story

Nathan Gwilliam: Welcome to the Podcasting Secrets show, where successful creators share their best stories, secrets, and strategies. I'm your host, Nathan Gwilliam.

Hello, my name is Nathan Gwilliam and welcome to the Podcasting Secret show. This is the first episode the origin story. I'm going to tell you a little bit more about me. And what the show is all about, a little bit more about my backstory and what brought me to do this show.

I live in rural Idaho. I used to live in I grew up in Arizona. I've spent a lot of time in Brazil as well. I'm very passionate about Brazil. Currently in Idaho, I live by Yellowstone National Park in the rural southeastern corner of Idaho.

I am a serial entrepreneur. I've built and sold three digital ventures. The most recent one was adoption. com. And after I sold adoption. com, I was looking for my next venture. And I purchased a coaching program from Russell Brunson. I believe he's the best digital marketer of our generation. And in that coaching program, the first thing that he taught us was publish or perish, and he made us a 365 day publishing challenge.

And he promised that if we published everyday for a year would be financially free. And I trusted him and I took that challenge and I created a show and it wasn't just an audio podcast, but it also had video and blog and social and some live stream and a website and a newsletter and all of that and I published everyday for a year.

And it kicked my butt. It was really hard. And after about three months, I realized that I needed more than 30 different technologies to do the show. And then those technologies cost almost $2,000 a month. And those technologies were not integrated hardly at all. And I felt like I was duct taping them together. And they were missing a lot of the a lot of the functionality that I needed.

We did it. We published everyday for a year, like I said, and we had more than 300, 000 video views and podcast downloads, audio downloads, but it was just too hard. It was too expensive. It took too much effort. It was too frustrating.

One day in, in frustration, I sat down with one of my coworkers and I just said, someone's got to create an all in one software suite, like how Shopify did that, right? They've, they created the platform and you can go in, there's hundreds of add-on modules and it's the all in one solution for e-commerce. And someone needed to do that for podcasting and no one had done it and still no one else has done it.

So three years ago, I hired a very talented team of developers. And we've spent the last three years building a software solution that we call PodUp. And about six months ago, we launched it and allowed people to, I guess it was a soft launch. We allowed people to start signing up for it and start using it. We'd gotten to a point that we needed to stop building what we thought people wanted, and we need to get real users in there and let them tell us what they really wanted.

Over the last 6 months or so, since those people have been in it, we've had more than 1300 issues reported by them, opportunities for improvement, bug fixes, and new feature requests and opportunities to fix user experience, those kinds of things. And we haven't wanted to turn on the ads or release it to a large group of people. We wanted to fail small and not have a whole bunch of users in it. And we're finally to the point that we're ready to turn on ads. And over a year ago, I ended my show. I got to a point where I needed to stop spending my time doing a daily show and I really needed to focus on the product.

And so that's what we've been doing. And now that the product is ready for a much larger group of people to go in, I'm restarting the show. The software is not perfect. But it's ready for that larger audience so we can get more feedback and continue to improve it as I'm sure we'll do for numerous years to come.

So the product is called PodUp. It's at PodUp.com. com where you can learn more about it and the show is going to be not just about PodUp, it will tell the story of PodUp and it will share with you things that we're learning as we're going through this journey of creating the world's first truly all-in-one podcasting platform.

And it's not just me. We have a very talented team of about 30 people who are working on it right now, and we've raised millions and millions of dollars that have gone into this and I'm so grateful to those investors and those team members that have helped get us to where we are over the last three years.

And this show will be about our journey and the things we've learned and the secrets and the stories and the tips and the strategies about how to create, grow, and monetize amazing and successful podcasts and how to turn those into ventures. And if you have a venture, a podcasting venture, how to grow that and monetize that.

When I talk with podcasters, those are the two things that most of them tell me are they've figured out how to produce it, but they really need help growing it and monetizing it. So we will cover a lot of that and the show, a lot of focus will be given to growth and monetization. A lot of focus will be given to helping businesses leverage a podcast to establish credibility and build followings and get people to know them like them and trust them before they even sell to them.

So as we've been working with customers on our platform, there's been a word that's really resonated. And that word is creators. Most of the people who use this pod platform look at themselves as entrepreneurs or CEOs or business owners. And they see themselves as creators of businesses. Also the podcasters who use our platforms see themselves as creators of content.

So this word creators seems to really resonate with our audience. And it's interesting because for many years on my LinkedIn platform, when I describe myself to other people, I call myself an incurable creator. And that seems to be a phrase that describes our audience, both from the entrepreneurial and business side and from the content creation side as well. So we are going to try calling our audience incurable creators and see if it sticks.

I plan to start off publishing the show once a week. We may start doing it more than once a week, but that'll be our starting point. And I plan to spend most of the episodes interviewing podcasting experts and getting them to share these stories and secrets and strategies that they've learned over their careers with you.

I'm really fascinated by learning the greatest challenges that entrepreneurs and podcasters have gone through and how they were able to overcome that so we can learn from them and leverage that to get through our challenges as well. In this show, I really want to have these experts teach us something specific and give us the tangible steps for us to be able to achieve that.

So you've learned a little bit about me. You've learned a little bit about what we're doing and building as a business. And you've learned a little bit more about the format of the show.

I invite you to join us on our journey as we interview experts and we learn the secrets and the strategies of the best podcasters and entrepreneurs that are out there. Thank you. And we wish you success in your podcasting journey and hope that we can help out a little bit in that.