I caught the attention of this kid who was I think 19 or 20 years old living in the UK.
03:28
He cold emailed me and said, "Hey, my name's Steven and you know, here's a little bit about me. I created this like kinda Craigslist for colleges. I really wanna come work with you. I heard you bought Bebo back. I just wanna work with you on whatever it's gonna be. I remember Bebo from when I was a kid.
03:43
" So the million dollar purchase of Bebo, really the most valuable thing was that this kid Steven comes, flies over from the UK and works for me. A lot of people will now know this guy. His name is Steven Bartlett, he's got a huge podcast called Diary of a CEO.

"Okay, you have no track record, no experience. I like the way you write." Like his writing stood out to me. Like I thought he had like some juice to him. But he had told me one other story. I was like, "What's the most impressive thing you've done?" And he's like, "Well, to promote my startup, which failed, but I did get growth initially, was I realized that there were a bunch of these like themed Instagram accounts,
06:33
or Twitter," it was Twitter accounts at the time, "Themed Twitter accounts, Twitter pages that were about random meme stuff And I reached out, I was like, oh, I follow them and so does every other kid I know. So let me ask them to promote my app. And they did and it worked. And I was able to do that for like a few hundred dollars budget 'cause I had no money.

So one was this audience and the way you talk about a product really matters. The authenticity and the nature of the conversation, the trust of that page kind of matters

Why do you think it is the hardest? I would love to like just go around the room and figure out like why is this such a hard medium to grow? - I believe there's three engines of growth.
14:26
Number one is a viral engine, and viral in a really specific definition. Viral does not mean people choose to tell their friends. It's the act of using your product naturally spreads like a contagion, like an actual virus to other people. Podcasts are not that, they're solo. Like literally you wear them in headphones when you're by yourself not talking to anybody, not doing anything.
14:49
Like they're the ultimate single player experience. It's ultimate single player experience. So like music is super viral 'cause you people play music at clubs or parties or gyms and you hear something, you say, what's that? And then the other person says, oh you gotta check this thing out. And it's like a really short thing.
15:02
It's three minutes. So it's easy for them to try and then when they try it, they play it all the time and they repeat the same thing. Music is super viral. Podcasts is a type of audio content that's the ultimate single player experience. So viral growth out the window, not gonna ha

Like you don't have the feedback of what's broken, but also you can get guests to come on your podcast even when you have like a hundred listeners.
19:27
'Cause they can't see that there's only a hundred listeners. It's like the opacity like saves you from your own judgment, but then later you want to get that feedback loop rolling