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MDH 78 | Ideal Target Audience

MDH 78 | Ideal Target Audience

 

Identifying your ideal target audience is critical to the success of your business. Bigger isn’t always better. In today’s episode, Victoria Wieck explains why niching down your business and trimming down how you define your market is key to earning more. If you do this right, you can achieve greater returns even without doing advertising. Tune in as she shares essential tips on determining your niche and adding the best value for your customers.

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How To Niche Down And Identify Your Ideal Target Audience

I’m so excited to get into this session. This is part of the multi-week series of the Do It Now System that I wrote a book about. The book is titled Million Dollar Passion: How to Turn an Idea into a Multimillion-Dollar Business. I speak from my heart and from my own experience. I broke it down to very few bite-sized information so that you can follow along my journey.

This is week five. If you have not read weeks 1 through 4, I highly suggest that you do that because you can take your passion into a profitable business. You can start that business with no experience, no money, no outside capital, and no real connections of any kind. I can tell you I did it and did it in a very big way. Read the other four weeks.

Before I get into this, if you find this information interesting or you found other episodes interesting, please go ahead and subscribe. Share any of my episodes with at least one friend so we can amplify and elevate the topic here. Without further ado, let’s go get into the target market and target your audience. If I can think of one thing other than your product or service itself, it is critical that you understand who your target market is. It’s important.

I’m going to try to make it as simple as possible. There are masterminds on this topic. There are courses being taught on this topic but I’m going to try to break it down to a twenty-minute segment so that you can get the basics of it and understand it. Understanding the target market is directly related to how successful you are going to be and how fast you can achieve that success.

Make It As Small A Niche As Possible

Let’s get into this. The first thing is to try to make it as small of a niche as possible. I didn’t originate this saying. I don’t know who originally came up with that, but a lot of people would agree with me, “The riches are in the niches.” Make sure that you break it down to as small of a niche as possible. Whatever you are doing, try to find the first 200 people that are going to buy your product. Not the first 20. That first 20s are your friends, family, and the people who are obligated to buy something from you but the first 200 or 400 are critical because you have to understand who they are, what they are buying, what their needs are, and how you can provide solutions to their life.

If you have not read the first four weeks, you are going to see a common theme there in everything I do, which is the only way you make money as an entrepreneur is if you learn how to add value to other people’s lives. People don’t pay for information anymore. It’s all free on Google. People don’t pay for frivolous things that they don’t need. They usually try and return it. You have to learn how to add value to other people’s lives. For you to do that, you have to understand who they are. There was a saying that if you try to be everything to everybody, you are nothing to no one but if you try to be everything to just a few people or if you try to be everything within a topic, you can be that.

The only way you make money as an entrepreneur is if you learn how to add value to other people’s lives.

Enough with the general. I want to give you an example. For example, I turned my passion for jewelry into a multimillion-dollar business. I’ve done nine figures in this space. I could say that jewelry is for everyone. This is the number one mistake people make. They define their target market as too big. I could say that women love jewelry. People get married. Men love jewelry some men jewelry for themselves. Most men have a mother, sister, wife, daughter, female friends or grandmothers. You can think about how you can justify, “Maybe I should target the men who buy the jewelry for the women in their life.”

You can see how I could sit there and say, “I could design jewelry for all women and most men.” It is everybody. Men who are older or younger love jewelry. This isn’t an heirloom piece. They all love it. If you were to identify your market as that, how would you design for that market? How would your jewelry be different than everything else out there on the market? I’m going to get back to that in a little bit. If you identify your target market correctly, you can almost build a business without any advertising or any outside influences. I will show you how you can do that with my jewelry. Keep that in mind.

Let Them Know, Trust, and Like You

Also, remember that before people buy anything of significance, whether it’s a course or jewelry they are going to wear to a sorority party, a high school reunion or maybe for them to get married, they still have to like you. They have to trust you. They have to know that it’s going to be good for them. If I come across on TV or on my mailers that I’m not a likable person because I come across as braggadocious or a very loud person who talks about herself all the time, they are probably not going to want to deal with me for their intimately and emotionally connected purchase.

If they like you, they still have to trust you. They have to trust that you are the best jeweler they could find. They also have to trust that you probably aren’t going to screw them over. Those are the two factors of trust there. They have to trust you as an expert that you know what you are talking about and bringing real value to their life. They also have to trust that you are not going to overcharge them and the information you are giving them is true. They will ask, “Is this going to be good for me?”

Let’s say you are teaching an online course on how to do digital marketing, and you are charging them $5,000. They have to know, “Is this personal likable? I’m going to be Zooming with that person for the next twelve weeks.” If you find that person is always about talking about himself or herself and less about the content, you may not want to spend the money.

Provided that they trust you, they still have to know, “Is this going to work for me? Do I have the type of business that can benefit from the type of online course that this person is teaching? Do I have the infrastructure for that? Do I have all the other stuff? Can I get the same information from a person who is more experienced for less money?” That’s when pricing comes in.

MDH 78 | Ideal Target Audience

Ideal Target Audience: Understanding the target market is directly related to how successful you’re going to be and how fast you can achieve that success.

 

Pricing only matters after they find out that they love you, like you, fall in love with your story or journey, you have some expertise that they can trust, and you have their interests at heart. They are going to be like, “It’s good for me. It happens to be an amazing price.” That is the perfect formula for that. Instead of all these generals, I’m going to tell you a little bit about my personal journey.

Identify Your Target Audience

My personal journey happens to be in jewelry design, which is a huge market. It is a multibillion-dollar industry worldwide. It is one of the oldest industries worldwide. It also happens to be the most competitive industry anywhere in the world. Many of you know that I’ve traveled extensively around the world. I have been to some countries that most people didn’t even know existed.

In every country you go to, from South Africa, Kenya, Dubai, all over Europe to all of a sudden, Latin America, in any little port or airport when you go to any shopping environment, there is a jewelry store every few blocks. It’s not as quite as many as Starbucks but it has a lot of jewelry stores all over the world. It’s one of the most competitive businesses. It’s also a business that’s known for having the good old boys around the world owning 80% to 90% of their business.

In that environment, I started a small company targeting a very specific small group of women. Remember, I said that in jewelry, I could have identified my market as all women who love jewelry, even if that’s generalistic. Most women who get married want to have some ring that says, “I’m married.” Your tastes may differ. That’s a piece of jewelry. If you think about the choices women make, in a christening, bar mitzvah, and all these events, they are wearing jewelry. Maybe it’s the heirloom piece that was given, you inherited, and was passed down.

You could say, “My target is all women and most of the men who buy for their wives, significant other, friends, mothers or sisters.” If you do that and say, “My jewelry caters to all women. I’m going to design for all women,” Let’s say you somehow can do that. You understand what women want. If you were going to create a Facebook ad, what would that ad say? “I design beautiful pieces of jewelry. I have a whole collection for you. I understand that you are a woman. All women have jewelry. I have a large selection of jewelry. It is very inexpensive. I’m 25% lower than your local department store. We are having a sale here. Come to come to my store.”

That’s pretty much what you could say because you can’t talk to every woman. When you talk to every woman, it sounds that way. You are not talking to that woman. How I did it, though, is when I was starting my company, I found that most of the jewelry was sold that way by the major department and jewelry stores. They talk to every woman like, “We have bridal. We have this. We have that. We have all the things that you all love. Women love jewelry. We have what women want. We are the cheapest.” The precise language is different than what I said but that’s genetically what most of the ad said.

If you try to be everything to everybody, you are nothing to no one. But if you try to be everything to just a few people, you can be that.

Some of them had better models or different styles but the messaging was the same. “Women have jewelry. I know you love jewelry. We have high-quality jewelry, and our prices are the best. Our jewelry is routinely sold at 70% off,” which also was a lie. They would jack up the price so that they could take the 70% off, which then became the regular price.

In fact, many jewelry stores and department stores were sued by the FTC about that. If they say that every two weeks, you can take the 70% discount, then that discounted price is a retail price. They’ve gone through lawsuits but I digressed on that. What happened was when I came to this country, I realized that in South Korea, most of the jewelry was heirloom pieces. They were 24 karat gold pieces that were given to a child as their future inheritance. It was more of a monetary value.

The heirloom pieces that they wanted to hand out to the next generation were highly personalized. They were mostly custom-made pieces by a local jeweler for their family. They might even have a family emblem. Some of them might have their favorite gemstones as opposed to diamonds. For example, if a region was known for fishing, it might have little fisherman knots embedded into it. If they lived on a farm, they might have little wheat patterns.

When I came to America, I was astonished at the lack of selection. It was mostly sold on snob appeal. I was mostly sold on, “I have a 2 karat diamond from Tiffany’s or I have a 1 karat diamond from whatever store.” It has a little bit of a snob appeal but it was a stone set in four prong setting with the bond. That was what it was. I saw a huge opportunity to speak to different women. When I say different women, they were women who had different emotional needs for reasons why they bought jewelry.

1989, which is when I started my company, was a time when many women in America were going to work outside their homes. It was the first time in history that most of these women went outside their homes to work. I say that because taking care of your children at home is a full-time job. They went outside their homes to work. They had titles like marketing director, vice president of something or senior manager of something. They had managerial positions for the first time. They were making decent money. There were still huge inequities in salaries but they were still making good money.

They went to work looking like miniature men. I was one of those women. I had to wear button-down cotton shirts. I had a business suit in gray, navy, and black. They didn’t have jewelry at that point. They had jewelry but were nighttime jewelry. They were very fancy. You don’t want to go to work looking like you are a show-off. These women had a need. They needed to look polished. They needed to look intelligent, sophisticated but understated.

MDH 78 | Ideal Target Audience

Ideal Target Audience: If you identify your target market correctly, you can almost build a business without any advertising, without any outside influences.

 

At that time, in the marketplace, they had junk jewelry. They were plastic. They were brassy. They clinked and made all these sounds. It looked like a tortoise. They had animal prints on them. They looked cheap and junky. You could go buy the expensive jewelry that had the snob appeal. You would to these places to pay $10,000, $15,000 or $20,000 for once-in-a-lifetime jewelry and wore until you die.

I designed jewelry that was much more for daytime to go to work. It looked understated, fun, and beautiful but had a little sparkle or a little metal. They also had little florals. They had ways that were still timeless but very classic. They had florals or little critters like ladybugs. They had a little accent here and there. It didn’t look like it was wild but it had interesting topics that you can talk about. People are curious. Other women are complimenting you. You stood out as somebody who takes care of herself and is successful.

I sold high-quality jewelry at lower prices that were emotionally connecting and personality reflective jewelry. I catered to the professional working woman who made a ton of money for the first time. Before our generation, men went to work. The money was tight, so she didn’t go outside the home. She didn’t need daytime jewelry. I was defining my target market as professional working women in a professional environment. It is only that woman.

My Facebook ad would say something to the effect of, “Come and experience sophisticated, understated jewelry that you can wear to work, semi-formal or a cocktail party. You can save all this money. You can stand out for all the right reasons. Someday in the future, your daughters or granddaughters can inherit this because these are very high-quality products. They are custom designed for you.” They were just for a few people because I didn’t have a huge distribution. I would also say, “For the next two weeks, you could have it at a 25% off discount.”

Luckily for me, there was nobody doing that. I ended up with a huge market share. This is how I sold over ten million pieces of jewelry in America. This is the power of understanding who your target market is, providing products for your target market, and messaging that in a way that you can connect with them emotionally. All your marketing message needs to sound like you are speaking to that person alone.

I understand that most of you are not going to be in the jewelry space. For example, if you are a real estate broker, you can’t go and say, “I’m a real estate broker. I specialize in Beverly Hills to Compton, to Newport Beach or to San Diego.” Nobody is going to believe you. A lot of entry-level home markets are catered to younger families that want great schools. They want a place that has great little parks around, and that’s safe. Your messaging will be different than if you were selling a $3 million to $10 million property. They are looking for something completely different than entry-level homes. You can’t be a specialist at both ends.

All your marketing message needs to sound like you are speaking to that person alone.

Maybe you are in the vacation home market. Maybe you are in Palm Springs or places where older retirees buy their retirement homes or vacation home. They have very different needs. Make sure that you understand who you are talking to. If you need Lasik surgery for your eyes, you are not going to go to a general practitioner for your eye surgery. You are going to go to the best Lasik surgeon.

I went to a Lasik surgeon several years ago. She had done 7,000 Lasik surgeries. Most of them were successful but 1% of the people ended up with dry eye or something like that. I chose to go to her for the reason that she did nothing but that. She does not do cataract surgery. She doesn’t do anything else. This is the woman that does nothing but this one thing.

If you are a pain management expert, you help people manage pain. If you specialize in Olympic athletes, tennis professionals or high school athletes that need to fix up, be at peak performance every day, are healthy otherwise and are watching their body for every single little joint, that’s a different market than senior citizens who are in chronic pain that is on Medicare or Medicaid.

I’m giving you two very extreme examples of how a generalist can’t survive in either of those places. If you say, “I’m a pain management specialist. No matter what your pain is, I can help you,” and you don’t explain exactly why you are best for that person, you are not going to get the high school athletes. They are going to look for athletic physios and athletic professionals.

I’m going to give you the most extreme example of a restaurant in Los Angeles. I lived in LA for 40 years. It’s funny. Across from my office, there was a fish restaurant that stayed there. They were there for 30 years. Before I was even in that office space, this was an iconic restaurant. For some reason, this family decided to close up several years ago. Every six months, it seemed like there was a new restaurant that came in. None of them made it.

The last one that I remember was called Global Cuisine. Their menu had Salvadoran food, halal food, sushi, and vegan food. The owner was very proud of the fact that he had a very large family. He had a son who married an Israeli girl that moved to Israel and spoke Hebrew. He also had one of his daughters marry somebody in Japan. He was very proud of the fact that his family is so diverse, and they eat this food all the time.

MDH 78 | Ideal Target Audience

Ideal Target Audience: Getting your target audience nailed down helps you attract new customers at a much faster rate than if you try to broaden it.

 

He opened a restaurant called Global Cuisine. If you wanted to have pizza and pasta for lunch, would you go to a global cuisine like this, where they serve everything under the sun? If you are a sushi connoisseur, would you go to a restaurant that serves vegan or El Salvadoran? You would probably go to a sushi restaurant that has nothing but sushi. This family did not last either. They didn’t last even six months. It was a tough sell. Nobody wanted to go in there. They were curious. It was a neighborhood joke but nobody ate anything that I knew other than his own family. It didn’t work out.

Remember, getting your target audience nailed down helps you attract new customers at a much faster rate than if you try to broaden it. I know it’s very counterintuitive to think that you have to make the target market so small as opposed to bigger but trust me on this one. You do have to make sure that your target market might get as small of a niche as possible. Once you start to achieve some success, you can then branch out into other things.

For example, my target market for the longest time was professional working women. They grew older with me. I was in my twenties when I started my business. I’m not even going to tell you how old I am because I have been through so many decades where a lot of my customers are ages 45 to 65, and some of them are even older. I thought, “I can help Millennial woman navigate their bridal things,” so I created a separate company that deals with Millennial bridles who want great choices and custom-made jewelry. That’s doing well. I figured it out but I don’t mix those two.

My Millennial bridal site is called RachelAndVictoria.com. You should check that out. It’s a beautiful site. All the model pictures are actual pictures of my daughter, Rachel, who is partnering with me on this. The messaging is very different. The Millennials want choice. They want to experience. They want uniqueness. They don’t want anything that’s mass-produced. They don’t want to buy things at a department store. They want things that are made for them and only for them. They are very concerned about ecology and what their footprint is in the world in terms of their carbon footprint, climate change, and all that.

On that site, we spell out our philosophy. All the metals that we use, gold and silver, are all recycled. We don’t do any Earth-mined gemstones. It means that anything that we have to dig deep through the Earth, we don’t deal with that. All the diamonds are lab-grown or above Earth. All our packaging is recycled paper. For the women that are aged 45 to 65, they understand my philosophy is the same but it’s not a huge deciding factor. It’s a plus factor. They like the fact that I am very conscious about saving the planet Earth but it’s not the determinant factor for them. Your messaging, products, and price point changes based on who your target market is.

Determine How You Add Value

Lastly, once you clearly identify your target market like this person with pain points who’s a pain expert remember, the only way you make money is if you add value to somebody else’s life consistently as an entrepreneur. That means, how do you add value to somebody else’s life? Does your product help them save money? Does it help them save time?

Messaging changes based on who your target market is.

Does it help them right social wrongs? Does that help them prevent a problem in the future? If you are selling alarms, security systems, vitamins or insurance, does it help people feel significantly better emotionally? You might be selling entertainment. You might be selling them how you connect with your customers if you are business-to-business.

There’s a whole other list I can give you but I’m trying to keep this very simple and short. If you can help them save money and time and prevent a future disaster from happening, these are great. You got to check at least one off of this. If you can’t, you must keep working on your target market, products, and how you can solve their problems or add value to their lives. You will see a huge difference in how you start your business. You can see why you can start your business with no money and no expertise. It’s simple, basic common sense.

Thank you for tuning in to this lesson. I love this topic. I may revisit this topic at the end of the series because it is such a critical topic. It’s a topic that’s counter-intuitive to most entrepreneurs and needs a little bit of getting used to. Thank you, again, for tuning in. Until next time, please stay healthy and happy. Remember, happiness is your choice. Also, if you can rate and review the show, I would be ever so grateful.

 

Important Links

MDH 54 | Amplify Your Brand

MDH 54 | Amplify Your Brand

Your brand is the epitome of your business. It is what makes you unique and what attracts people to your product. So, what can you do to attract people? How do you amplify your brand? Victoria Wieck discusses this and more with the founder of PodMatch, Alex Sanfilippo. Alex discusses his early forays into entrepreneurship, keeping a day one mentality, and creating solutions for customer problems. Learn more about amplifying your brand and how the popular platform is connecting podcast host and guests.

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Amplify Your Brand With PodMatch With Alex Sanfilippo

I have Alex Sanfilippo, who started the PodMatch. It’s the service that I often use to find you these amazing guests. Once I started PodMatch, I’ve got addicted to it. I’m so excited to be interviewing Alex because, as crazy as it sounds, he’s built a whole platform. His backstory, how he came about creating PodMatch, and all that you are going to find that interesting, informative and encouraging. Without further ado, I would like to welcome Alex.

Alex, welcome to the show.

Victoria, thank you so much for having me here. I appreciate it.

In your bio, there’s something I didn’t think about before. You started your business at age ten. The entrepreneurship desire or blood runs through your veins. Tell me a little bit about your backstory. What did you do in your childhood? A lot of times, your early years shaped what you do later on in life. Do you want to share a little bit about yourself?

I completely agree with that statement. At one point in my life, I did some reflecting back to my childhood to rediscover who I was but that’s an important practice for anybody to do. For me, at ten years old and most people hear this, they were like, “What on Earth was this guy doing at ten?” I was selling used golf balls.

Across the street from the house that I grew up in, there was a golf course. What I did was I started collecting golf balls and selling them. It was interesting, though, because at ten years old, I was a very self-aware child, which may be strange for a ten-year-old. I had three younger brothers, and we had a bunch of neighborhood friends. A lot of them are good at sports and others are good at school. They are very smart. Most of them were good at video games at that point.

All these different kids were good at these different things. I realized that I wasn’t good at those things. It didn’t necessarily depress me. It made me wonder where I fit in. That’s super weird for a ten-year-old kid to be that self-aware but that’s how I felt. The first time I picked up a golf ball and a golfer offered to buy it from me for $3, it was Titleist Pro V1, which is an expensive ball. I’m not a golfer myself. I knew how to sell used golf balls as a kid. As soon as I did that, I realized, “Maybe I should find more of these.” What I realized I enjoyed wasn’t even making the money. It was the art of building some system that drives a profit.

I started recruiting my brothers and some of the friends in the neighborhood, saying, “Let’s go through the lakes, get some guys to clean the golf balls, get some to organize them into different bins, and then set up a time and day that we can sell these things back to the golfers.” That’s what I did for a couple of years, from 10 to 12. For the first time in my life, I know it was very young, I discovered something that I was good at. It was the art of business.

Blogging doesn’t capture the same essence as a podcast.

In that ten-year-old mind, you were doing what a modern entrepreneur has to do, which is find a product that has that in demand, figure out the price and find a bunch of people that’s going to help you. You were like a little boss of that thing that was going on. You were the CEO of the ten-year-old crowds. That’s astonishing.

In our schools, unfortunately, we teach Math, Science and all these things that have numbers. We don’t teach Entrepreneurship or relationship to money, Finances, and how much you have to work to buy something. I wish somebody would go and teach that in school. Fast forward a little bit. You are a ten-year-old child selling Titleist Pro V1 for $3. $3 to a 10-year-old kid is a lot of money. Once you get a little taste of that, you want to multiply that. You then found different systems in your life. Tell us what happened after that. What was your second venture?

You can only sell golf balls that are used back to the golfers that hit them in the lakes for so long until you are not cute anymore that they want to punch you for taking their golf ball to the lake. From about 10 to 12, I was doing that. The truth is some guy came through on his golf cart. He liked the collection of golf balls we had so much. He said he would buy them all if we would go ahead and close down. At that point, we had 600 or 700 golf balls. At the end of the day, he finished his round of golf. He came, picked them all up, paid me and the neighborhood guys for them. At that point, we were like, “It’s a good time to stop. We were done.” That was my first and only successful exit.

I was getting into high school or late middle school. As I’ve got into my late teens, I had an opportunity to do some work in real estate. I wasn’t good at video games but I was good at computers. There was a friend of my dad who was starting a company where they were trying to create these virtual tours of homes, which we all see them. You look home on Zillow or something like that. You can drag the mouse around, see the roof and the whole room.

We were building those tours. He brought me on as a contractor, saying, “Let’s work together.” I had my company, he had his. I started hiring photographers and editors. We started building these virtual tours for the MLS directly. We were posting on the MLS every single day because we became in high demand fast. That was a fun thing for me. I was seventeen when I started that.

It was cool because when I looked at it, I also had a remote team. None of us worked in an office like everyone worked in their places. We were using AIM back then to instant message back and forth. That’s how we were communicating throughout the day. That was another fun experience for me to learn the business and see how something could run, operate and grow. At this point, I was also paying taxes.

At ten years old, you started your company, then you had a successful exit. What I find astonishing about the whole story that you have told is the MLS having the virtual tours and all of that, we take it for granted. I sold my home in Las Vegas at a very substantial price, and the person never saw it. They felt comfortable enough. They were able to go up to the roof, do all that, and be able to see the whole house without being there.

MDH 54 | Amplify Your Brand

Amplify Your Brand: We identified the problem and decided to create a solution for it. That’s where PodMatch came from.

 

With COVID, they couldn’t travel, so they bought the house unseen. When you did that technology, the idea of touring a home at any price, $200,000, $300,000, $1 million, that would be unthinkable. You did it because you believed in it, and you felt that the world was going to have to go that way at some point. You had a pulse on what was going on, and you were a few steps ahead of the rest of the world.

That’s important. I’m going to fast forward a little bit more because you have done other things in between compared to what you are doing, which I’m excited about. I’m an avid user of PodMatch. You created a platform for podcasters. I have to tell you that the podcasting industry is exploding. Back in 1998, when HSN first called me and they said, “We are the home shopping network,” I was like, “You are what? Is that some kind of a club?” I had no clue what was going on.” Remember, in ’98, they had a 1-800 number at the catalogs. I thought that would be the next revolution.

With you, podcasting is exploding. It makes complete sense that there are more people at home listening. We all want to educate ourselves. It’s only a twenty-minute investment. Everything is free out there like most podcasts are free to listen to. If you are going to be a successful podcaster, it takes an enormous amount of time to find the right guest for your show. I know a lot of famous people but they are not necessarily right for my show.

My show is about transformation stories. A lot of times, it’s the lesser-known people that have done some extraordinary things. You created a platform, so people like us can go find somebody easily at my fingertips at night. After everybody has gone to bed, I can do this in twenty minutes at a time. Tell me a little bit about how and why you created all of this. How long did it take for you to do this?

Thank you for being a member of PodMatch. You are a great supporter. My day has been made talking to you. I appreciate that. I’ve got into podcasting years before I started PodMatch, me as an individual, with my show. I saw that was an industry that was taking off. I didn’t do it, so I could become famous or anything like that. I wanted to have conversations with people and record them somehow. Before that, I did a bit of blogging. As much as I love blogging, it didn’t capture the same essence. When you do a written interview back and forth, it’s not the same.

I was like, “This audio platform has been great for me. I have been listening for years. While I’m in the gym or running, I listen to podcasts.” I decided, “I want to start my show.” Right when I started, I noticed something interesting. People that are in podcasting are very kind. A lot of other show hosts that I meet are so nice. That made me want to get even more into the industry. When I was starting to take off, that’s when I decided, “I’m going to do anything I can to support this industry.” It’s going to grow. If there was a business starting in here, it’s not going to crash in a year or two. Someday, podcasting might be a thing of the past but it’s still on the up and up.

I made it a devotion at that point to find something that could do to help the industry. The way I did it is a simple framework. I’m passionate about podcasting. I found the people that made up the ecosystem of it. I asked the hosts, “What are you struggling with?” It can be tough going in looking for guests when you are not sure if people even want to be on shows.

It can be tough going in looking for guests when you’re not sure if people even want to be on shows.

We’ve all got a cousin or a friend that started a business that could jump on our shows, maybe but finding those people who are saying, “I’m looking for shows. I have a message that will resonate well with your listeners.” That’s not easy to find. I identified that problem and decided to create a solution for it. That’s where PodMatch came from.

Like your golf ball story, you found a need that could be in high demand and a friction point. I love PodMatch because it is so simple, the diversity of the people that are there, and the shows as well. I agree with you on the caliber of people within the podcast industry. The TV industry is completely different. It is so catty and the most cutthroat business. People always ask me, “How do you ever survive twenty years of TV?” It’s either you do not have a pulse, have to be so numb or don’t see anything.

When I’ve got into podcasting, people were so nice. They were offering me everything. My microphone was all set up by people that didn’t charge me a penny. They gave me their heart and soul. “You understand video but in audio, you’ve got to do this and that.” Everything was free. I love that community of people that give their all.

The other thing about the podcasting platform is that it’s true that video has a lot more impact. If I was watching a YouTube video, I can’t be driving. If I’m driving to San Diego, that’s 2 hours that I can listen to 4 different podcasts but I can’t watch a single video because you are going to get into a car accident if you were watching that.

The platform is great. As far as creating this platform, without giving away your preparatory sequence, was it hard to come up with a technology piece? You’ve got the technology piece in terms of how the software works behind the scenes. You’ve got to go find all these podcasters, and then you have to find all the potential guests. All these other pieces have to come in. How difficult was that to coordinate all that? How much time did it take? Is it 2 years, 2 months, 20 years?

The timing in business is so important. It’s the number one factor if you ask Bill Gross. He’s the unicorn billionaire. He started seven multibillion-dollar companies or something like that. He says that timing is the most important factor. We happened to be at the right time. I’m not saying we couldn’t do it again. I say we because I have a Cofounder.

For me, I am more on the sales side of things. I’m customer service. I can build systems. I understand how the industry works. I have a friend that is someone that I knew for years. He and I had always planned on working together at some point. As matter of fact, we did one other project together years prior, and it was cool. We had good synergy.

MDH 54 | Amplify Your Brand

Amplify Your Brand: We believe that podcasting is a great medium for people to get their independent voices out there. Unfortunately, 90% of podcasts don’t make it past their first year.

 

When I had this idea, it was right after PodFest 2020. It was the last in-person conference ever. I spoke at that conference, and that’s where I’ve got the idea for it. Identified the problem. I said, “I’m going to build a solution for us.” I came home that next week. On March 10th, 2020, I wrote it all out on three whiteboards. I immediately picked up my phone and called that friend. I said, “Jesse, I don’t know if you can work part-time on a project but I would love to do something with you.” It was crazy. That was a Tuesday. That Sunday night, he finished a multi-year project that he had been working on. He was like, “I’ve got capacity.”

What we did is we drafted up documentation saying we are 50/50 partners and decided to run with it. March 10th, 2020, is when we started working on it and launched an early beta on June 10th, 2020. It’s a few short months from start to finish. He is brilliant. He was able to save us a lot of money by doing that. We bootstrapped with $5,000 each of us, put $2,500 into account, and we went for it.

I wish you and your friend, Jesse, all the luck in the world. Let me give you some encouragement, not that you need it but I was at a Harvard Business School Reunion. Harvard Business School makes you go back to class once you have been there all that time. They had a panel of graduates that have been out of school for years. They talked about what are your challenges and so forth.

They had Harvard alumni from Google, Apple, Facebook, and all these different companies that are running our world seemingly. They asked them, “What keeps you up at night?” The answer was that we all work for a founder that started their company with under $5,000 in their garage. I didn’t think about it that way but it’s true. Apple started with less than $5,000 as well. You fit that bill exactly.

That’s good to know. That encouragement goes a long way. Thank you.

I thought that you might find that comparison very timely. When it comes to how you and Jesse and how you feel like you were at the right place at the right time, I also feel that way a lot of times about my little successes. Every time I hit a milestone, I would think, “I lucked out.” I like to also believe that it’s a preparation meeting opportunity because we are all here at the same time at the same place but you had the ideas, which not all of us had. You took action on that. It could be a divine alignment of some sort of a preparation meeting opportunity.

Kudos to you and Jesse. You have created a brand called Creating a Brand. You want it to make it simple. I love that you are a customer-centric company. That’s how Amazon made this very simple for their customers. You are rebranding into PodPros. It’s PodPros.com. What’s next for PodMatch and PodPros?

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

You are the first person to ever announce that company name. I have never said it to anyone other than you, so thank you for being that person. There’s something that I want to mention real quick. It goes back to something that Leonardo da Vinci said. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” It’s something that many of us need to remember because PodMatch is a complex system.

If you look through the backend code like me, it made my head explode seeing all that. In a day, we had one problem to solve, which is can we get the right guests in front of the right host and vice versa? At the end of the day, could we simply do that and continuously improve that process to make it faster and more streamlined? I look at the different things that I’m doing. I had to have a real “come to Jesus moment,” as I call it. For me, it was a time in prayer. “God, I’m doing too much. I’ve got my podcast. I have podcasts, PodMatch, and these other companies that we are reaching out and starting.”

I did that deep self-reflection and realized, “This is going to get complicated and cumbersome for other people to try to understand what I even do.” That’s why we decided to rebrand under PodPros. The idea was to bring it back to a simplistic form. What’s adding the most value to the people that we care about the most? Let’s focus on that one thing. PodcastSOP is a new company that we are launching. It’s project management software specifically for podcasters.

A lot of new ones are using sticky notes and word documents. They are trying to keep it organized. We want to help people do that easily because I feel the same way about this. We believe that podcasting is a great medium for people to get their independent voices out there. Unfortunately, 90% of podcasts don’t make it past their first year. It’s only 10% that make it. I wanted to help and see more people through that first year, so they can continue adding that value to people’s lives. Our big focus is we continue helping more podcasters get their message out there to the world.

I’m 1 of the 50 beta testing people. Before PodMatch, I was using 4 or 5 different software. You are using scheduling software, organization software, and all of the bios. It’s a whole amount of work. A lot of podcasts start as a side hustle. They don’t start as monetizing it. Most podcasters start because they are passionate about something and want to help people. Ninety percent of them don’t make it. I’m with you on that. I like to see that percentage go higher. If you think about it, 90% is almost the same as any other small business. It takes a lot of discipline and understanding the basics, who are your target audience, and all that stuff as well.

You have been in the industry for a while, and you are also seeing some of the mistakes that podcasters make. Going back to what you, Leonardo da Vinci said about simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, I agree with that but I also want to tell you one thing. One of my favorite quotes is by Winston Churchill. He said something to the effect that, “Success is not final, and failure is not fatal.” A lot of people think that failure is not fatal is what they focus on. I like to think about success is not final because you had a very successful platform. There was nothing like PodMatch a year ago.

You continue to evolve because success is not final. A lot of times, when people are successful, they are so busy protecting that success or using that success to live their life however they want to live that they forget to evolve. One thing I noticed about PodMatch almost every time I’m on vacation or something, I come back and shut my brain off for a little bit, you have improved the site, again and again, everything from visual to how it operates, how we upload our bios and link our calendar. Since I became a PodMatch member in maybe April or May 2021, you have gone through many different upgrades already. Kudos to there as well.

MDH 54 | Amplify Your Brand

Amplify Your Brand: If you continuously have that mindset of “I’m doing this for that ideal listener,” and you find that narrow niche to really focus in, you’re going to do really well in podcasting.

 

That has been something that we wanted to always do. We asked the members that use it, “What works? What doesn’t?” We let them help us with the roadmap but the idea is to focus on continuous improvement. Jeff Bezos made this famous. We didn’t come up with it but his whole concept is, “Always day one.” We can’t ever let people decide. We can’t ever decide internally like, “We have made it. We have arrived. It’s day two.” It’s always day one, which means we are always on the ground floor getting started, and that’s always the mentality that we are going to keep.

What is your advice to a brand-new podcaster starting out facing that 90% failure rate?

The very first thing you have to do is develop a strong why for yourself. “Why are you podcasting?” If it’s something like, “I want to make money. I want 1,000 or 10 million downloads,” or whatever it might be, those reasons might be a little bit too shallow. They are not bad. They can be part of it but you need to begin with, “Who are you serving? Who’s going to be that person listening?” That comes in form of identifying what I call an avatar, which is your most ideal listener. Come up with one person. This is someone who would listen and anybody like them. Develop a strong why around that.

What I would recommend doing is if you have unspecific goals, you are going to have specific results. That has always been true. If it’s day one you are starting, determine that why. Decide what you want the avatar to have learned twelve months from now. Think 365 days in advance. Let’s say they are with you from day one until then. Where do you want them to have gone on their journey as a direct result of listening to you? If you continuously have that mindset of, “I’m doing this for that ideal listener,” and you find that narrow niche to focus in, you are going to do well in podcasting.

If people want to find you, other than PodPros.com, is there any other place that they can connect you with?

Thankfully, that’s it. I commend you for how organized you are. Another thing that helps podcasters is the organization. You are the most organized host I have ever had the opportunity to be a guest with. Also, you do a great job with the show. I’m a reader myself. You had an episode with Nathan Bynum about how to build a website to test your products. It’s a brilliant conversation. I recommend the readers go check that one out if they haven’t read it. I appreciate you having me here and what you are doing with the show.

Thank you so much. Good luck to you. If you ever need feedback from some of the podcasters, make sure to reach out to me. I’ve got a lot to say.

It’s always day one, which means we’re always on the ground floor getting started. That’s the mentality that we’re going to keep.

You’ve got very valid feedback. I appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Thank you for reading this episode. If you haven’t rated and reviewed my show, please go ahead and do so. Please stay happy, healthy. Remember, happiness is your choice. I hope you make optimistic choices.
 

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About Alex Sanfilippo

Alex Sanfilippo is the host of the top-rated entrepreneurship podcast, Creating a Brand, and the founder of two podcasting software’s, PodMatch.com, a service that matches podcast guests and hosts together for interviews and PodcastSOP, a project management software that is specifically for podcasters to help them keep episode releases on track!