Running a $200k per month running a podcast growth agency

Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?

Hi there, I am Tom, 34 years old from London, England!

Fame is the name of the biz, we start and grow the world's most profitable podcasts.

We have a team of 65 people full-time, spread out all around the world. The business is fully bootstrapped :)

How did you start this business? Take us through the process.

🤓 I used to be Head Of Marketing at Ebsta (B2B SaaS in sales space), we started the Sales Ops Demystified podcast as I identified a new customer persona: sales ops professionals

🎤 The podcast started well: our ideal customer persona was coming to our office to be interviewed, instead of ignoring my cold emails!

🕵️‍♂️ We also started generating some inbound organic traffic as all the content was published on our blog and we started generating some social engagement from video clips. But then something magical happened...

😱 The VP of Sales Operations from a B2B SaaS company (that you probably know!), came on the show, did a great interview, and then randomly started chatting with our CEO on LinkedIn... and four months later ended up buying our sales software for all 183 of their salespeople

💰 This generated a 9-10x ROI on all the time and money we spent on the podcast

🏆 I felt like I had discovered the holy grail of B2B marketing: short-term, attributable ROI with long-term value add, branding building, SEO and social benefits compounding over time

🤝 So I left Ebsta... they became Fame's first client, and still are a client! The show now has over 200 episodes, is the most downloaded podcast in sales/rev ops and is now generating a significant ROI for Ebsta through SEO value, social engagement, positioning and also customers/partners generated through relationships with guests

📈 We have taken this process, make incremental improvements each month improve and now implement it for 70 other B2B businesses in different niches for a pretty reasonable monthly subscription

🥇 The basic approach is to choose a sub-niche within your market that is underserved and then become the #1 most downloaded podcast in that sub-niche within 6 months

👌 If we do that, we should be able to generate a significant ROI from SEO value, social exposure and in particular... the relationships built with guests

At Fame, we have taken this process, make tiny improvements each week and implement it for over 80 B2B businesses, including:

👉 IDEO
👉 Workday
👉 HighRadius
👉 People.ai
👉 Challenger
👉 Bevy
👉 Circle
👉 Suzy
👉 Mazars
👉 LeanData
👉 Personiv
👉 Ramp
👉 User Interviews
👉 Signify
👉 ValueSelling Associates

How did you get your first initial customers?

Our first customer was my previous employer... this is a BIG hack for anyone looking to start a B2B business: do really well at one thing in your job, package that up, and sell it back to your employer as a freelancer.

Then just copy and paste that thing to other companies like your employer ;)

We got our first few clients like that... then we started investing in Google Organic, and then I started to build up my personal LinkedIn presence. This is super important in B2B.

Since launch, what are your marketing strategies or channels to get new customers?

Right now we have:

- Google organic
- Referrals/word of mouth (the most important!)
- LinkedIn organic, mainly through my profile
- My podcast: Confessions of a B2B Marketer

Fame, just like any business, is a collection of processes.

Processes need to be created, and processes need to be implemented.

Typically, process creators are more expensive to employ than process implementors.

E.g. creating an outbound sales process for a Series A stage B2B SaaS business is a HARD task, and will need to be created by someone who has experience, and is expensive.

However, if you or someone in your team creates the process, you can hire someone cheaper (but still good) to implement this process.

For example, I’ve run 2-300 inbound sales calls whilst creating the inbound sales process for Fame, so is now fully tested/documented so I can now hire a process implementor to execute.

For each role you hire for, know the difference, and assess your candidates appropriately.

How do your business make money?

- We charge a monthly subscription to our clients

- It costs between $2,000 to $5,000 depending on what we are doing and how frequent the podcast is

Currently, the business makes over $200k in monthly recurring revenue.

Take us through a typical day in your life running the business as a solo founder

Right now I work at home in my bedroom ;) My day to day is working on a few select clients, hiring, managing, leading and creating content for LinkedIn and my podcast.

I also spend time iterating and improving our process to ensure we stay competitive and continue to generate clients through word of mouth and referrals.

Andrew Wilkinson once said on a podcast interview that his secret to success was that he’s lazy, he’s like teflon for tasks, they slip off him.

My end of year goal is to be completely removed from day to day operations.

Free-ing myself up to focus on higher leverage tasks: process innovation and talent development.

Before you go, what advice would you give to another who wants to start a business like yours?

- Get a job
- Do something REALLY well
- E.g. do that thing for at least a year so you get really good at it
- Leave the job and ask your employer if they would want to pay you to do it freelance
- Deliver awesome results and get a case study
- Start to sell that thing to companies like your employer
- Continue delivering awesome results!