Castocity Team Size (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 is just not there to your point earlier and so software is really the best way to approach a small business market because the cost for acquisition is too high at the end of the day got it how much money of your own your own money have you put into the company so far to get towards that today not not too much probably 20 000 at the most did you raise capital or no all bootstraps no i bootstrapped it i love that yeah i programmed most of it myself i mean i i've done some programming with google before so i'm able to create it myself very quickly and we really put together the mvp in just you know less than six months why'd you leave google i mean were you like you know making a bunch of money in a rich spot of google were you one of the people that they just you know throw a bunch of leads into you're doing calls all day trying to close smbs and you know some small town in america well i wasn't i didn't work for google i was their agency partner and so there's you know roughly 10 in in the world that were agencies partners at the time us reached local some of the major players and so because of that i got i just got a business though that sounds pretty sweet why would you stop that it wasn't mine i i ran it i read the agency it was for a fortune 500 company so it was an internal and external marketing agency run by a fortune 500 company so you were i mean you were an employee at an agency that was run by fortune 500 and approved with google yeah we were their top reseller and so i got access to do a lot of things with google and learned a whole lot about small business and what works and what doesn't work and so what happened is after you know roughly 10 years of doing that i wanted to go off and start my own company and i really thought software as a service is the best way to do that i did have an agency oh how big was the agency how much revenue in 2020 yeah so we we got to a million dollars and then i recovered everything we lost you know 90 percent of our revenue so certainly 2019 you did a million in 2020 it crashed yeah yeah so this is when i decided to go and kind of do what i always wanted to do all along all along i wanted to do a software as a service and how many people are on the team now today i we went down to just me because i don't i didn't really need all the overhead and i essentially all this i can do on my own i hear you man listen we're rooting for you let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book uh probably good degree number two is there a ceo you're following or studying oh gosh you can't go far without looking at steve jobs obviously he's always the inspiration number three what's your favorite online tool for building custocity uh well believe it or not we built this whole thing up a wordpress wow that's impressive number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night i try to get seven and what's your situation married single kids i am married with six kids wow busy guy how old are you i am 46. okay take us home take us home here what's something you knew when you were 20. some something like you wishing you when you were 20. oh gosh i wish i would have uh i wish i would have got a mentor that's probably the biggest thing you can do is get someone to mentor you i wish i had quality mentors earlier earlier on as he had an agent in the podcasting space helping people get land books working with sponsors working with podcasts so it's now turning into software as a service with this company castocity.com they are pre-revenue launching payroll here shortly a hundred people on the waitlist he's put 20 000 bucks of his own money and we can see if he can make it work tony thanks for taking us to the top yeah thank you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sass we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the 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