Castocity revenue, CEO Tony Guarnaccia, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2023.

hello everyone my guest today is tony warnocchi he's grown up over 10 000 small businesses and dozens of fortune 500 companies including adp ford and autonation and became the google partner of the year later he returned to the entrepreneurship group to bring his strategy tactics and resources normally reserved for large enterprises to small businesses he's now focused on making podcasts profitable for hosts and guests with custocity all right tony raider takes the top yes absolutely all right so talk to me first about the business is this a pre-play sas company yeah it's a pure place well it's also a marketplace and so what we do is we connect uh podcasters and guests and help them uh both monetize so they both monetize differently the uh but really there's three ways in common the first way is by monetizing through direct sales that means i sell the host the house sells the guests that's the first way the second way is through joint ventures so aligning with the host or the guest to jointly promote something and then the third way is is through sponsorships and so the the platform is really focused on driving revenue through those three monetization strategies and in 2020 which of those revenue streams is the largest uh this just started we are going uh we are alpha launching literally yesterday okay so launching here in 2021 so your pre-revenue correct okay why do so many three things at once when you launch i mean there are massive companies that only do one of the three revenue streams you just mentioned yeah well the reason why is because we're targeting smaller um smaller businesses smaller podcasters so we're not going after big podcasters and usually uh the small businesses don't have a strategy across any of those three and so the goal is to make it so literally out of the gate the podcaster can break even because the average podcast doesn't last past i think the number is six episodes because they have no way to monetize it they're doing all this work getting no benefit and so what we're targeting is the smaller my heart has always been for small businesses almost like the underdog and so the thought was to use that strategy and so there's a crm component because really at the the the crux of all this is relationships so it's almost like a crm for managing relationships so if you have a thousand podcasters on your platform that get on average 200 downloads per episode what makes it worth your i mean how do you actually make money on that i mean if you have a joint venture promoter product i mean you're going to be lucky to get like one sale promoting to 200 people on a podcast yeah so uh it's a subscription model so the the levels start at seven dollars and go up to a hundred dollars a month and the idea is that they can break even right out of the gate and so the first monetization strategy is to monetize the guest that's showing up on the show and so what happens instead of the typical booking process where you might go through calendly what we do is we turn that into a shopping cart and so what happens is someone goes to book and at the end of that process they're upsold either the idea to um sponsor their own episode so me as a guest would you know throw you a hundred bucks you've already broken even and and the average podcaster has four interviews a month and so that's what i do though why would why would i go on a podcast with 200 as a guest and then also pay 100 to do it well it's interesting because there's a whole market for agencies so there's a market of people that book people i actually belong to one they book uh individuals on podcasts and they on on average charge i don't know fifteen hundred dollars a month so i'm paying 250 dollars just to get on an episode and the get and the host is making nothing so the agency's making all the money so people are doing that today actually and the idea is that if on large shows i mean i give these pitches all the time i probably get seven a day but but those agencies that charge their clients that want to be guests a 1500 retainer month they're committing to getting them on like 10 podcasts but also they're trying to quantify how many views those podcasts get see the small podcasters still get screwed that agency is not going to make their client happy if they book them on a 200 download episode podcast i don't know if that's accurate because that's not what i found because the way they pitch it is it's more about the quality of who you're being booked with and the size is there's a whole bunch of agencies that kind of move away from that model uh and the idea is that to answer your initial questions if i get booked on that that show then i have some money to actually um promote the show right so the idea that this kind of gets into the sponsorship model the sponsorship model is not to just monetize as advertising is to add value around that podcast so for instance if i'm just launching my podcast there's a certain value to the downloads but what about your email list what about your your your social media profiles so just because you're launching a podcast doesn't mean you have if don't have influence outside of that and so we are saved to page.com and thought thoughtleaders.io really dominate the email space for this exact same concept yeah i'll take a look at that but the idea is to is to uh have all that in one place where you can book with the podcast show and then they monetize it so it's only you know it starts at a hundred dollars and it goes up from there so the idea is to go after the smaller players i just think we have people listening right now that have been on other podcasts and they're listening to you pitch the idea of no now that they're not just giving an hour of their time to go be interviewed somewhere they also have to pay for it and they're going i don't i would never do that i don't like tony's business model but you say you've seen this it sounds like you've seen us in agency so just be clear you have guests that are paying you as an agency 1500 per month and they're totally cool if you just go book them on 10 podcasts that average 200 downloads each for fifteen hundred dollars yes correctly because you can still make a lot so if i'm on it's it's i've never impacted i've never seen this yeah well it's more uh based on who you're the um the guests that you are being interviewed or the host that's interviewing you because if it's an interview with someone that has influence it doesn't really matter the number one or down to 200 downloads that's obviously you just said you want to have small podcasters so we're not talking about you booking people on joe rogan here no well and i'm saying i think you're using extreme example of 200 podcasters or 200 downloads as well i'm not saying that's my target market someone's just starting i'm saying they're it's the smaller podcasts that haven't monetized yet and so what we're simply doing is giving them all what kind of podcasts are on your platform they're gonna have at least how many downloads per episode yeah i mean they're they're probably gonna have you know the ideal you really start monetizing a podcast once you get to ten thousand podca episode downloads so we're looking uh somewhere probably huge that's top one percent the average podcast download the average product is less than a hundred downloads so you're not looking for the small guy i mean you're working right no no that's my point though that's what i'm saying is the average one that not who we're targeting i'm saying the average one really starts monetizing once they get to ten thousand so we're targeting the people below that so below that somewhere between one thousand to ten thousand so we're not looking at two hundred we're looking at the thousand to the to the ten thousand got it interesting okay you've built it you've built a beta list it sounds like how many people are on this wait list a hundred hundred alpha we're in alpha right now we're in beta alpha who the hell cares right you got you got some interest early on which is great how do you build that list actually uh we're doing it through our own process of joint venturing so we have we'll launch in beta in march with at one of the largest conferences and we have roughly 100 joint venture partners okay how much when are you launching pricing and on the day you launch how many do you expect to convert to paid yeah it's a good question uh it's hard to say until we get through this alpha stage to see you know what the conversion rate but you know if we get say 10 you know that would be a good place to start and so we're looking just to see how many people because the way that it works is essentially the core part of the model is we're monetizing the booking process so just like calendly uh doesn't have a monetization strategy most people use calendly or acuity we're creating our own and the whole idea is to monetize that process and so what happens is it's kind of self-generating the lead generation is self-generating because every time someone books through the form they become a lead in our system i understand i fully understand the product i'm just trying to try and get people in it so so so you've got 100 people on the waitlist you're going to launch with joint ventures i mean isn't the right way to launch these ideas you're talking about is actually to launch an agency not a software product yeah no because why because i've done this when i work with google this is a problem google had google needed a fee on the street and so to sell small businesses very very difficult to do that as a agency because the revenue...