377: Scaling Podcasts: Insights from Podglomerate's Jeff Umbro

Jeff Umbro 00:00:00:

It will pull these based on that demographic data and the metadata and the keywords and everything. And then I can upload four or five different pitches that I've written or that ChatGPT has written or whatever for like why I would be a good guest on that show. And then it will actually, you know, tweak those pitches based on what it finds to be effective. It will send them via like a B tests to make sure it's understanding like what is the most impactful actually getting responses. And then it will track what kind of response rates it's getting and actually respond to those emails to try and book you via like SavvyCal or something.

Harry Duran 00:00:36:

So. Jeff Ambro, CEO of the Podglomerate, thank you so much for joining me on Podcast Junkies.

Jeff Umbro 00:00:41:

Yeah, thank you. I've been a fan forever, so I'm glad to be a guest. Longtime listener, first time caller that probably dates you too.

Harry Duran 00:00:47:

That phrase, I don't know that people who didn't grow up on radio would even understand what you just meant there.

Jeff Umbro 00:00:52:

It's one of those phrases that should die, but I don't think has yet.

Harry Duran 00:00:56:

Yeah, well, I mean, kids, millennials, I don't know what the proper term is nowadays. It was just like, they're like, what do you mean by that? I don't understand, like, you know, radio stations and people would call in and the best thing, like in the early days of podcasting, I'd hear like someone like Dave Jackson give me a shout out on his show or something like that from the school of podcasting and immediately reminded me of those days when I'd call into the radio station and be like, hey, can you play Duran? And they're like, Harry from Yonkers wants to hear Hungry like the Wolf. And they're like, yes.

Jeff Umbro 00:01:24:

It's so funny because it's. That probably mostly predates me as well. I'm 37, so like I did grow up with the radio and. But it was mostly like sports talk like wbdi and, and it's funny because a lot of my siblings are still listening to that every day. I have multiple family members that have never hit play on a podcast. And. But my mom, I grew up listening to my mom listen to, listening to Delilah. And that was very much a call in show, but a very different kind of call in show from like, you know, sports talk. So I don't know, it's funny, I recently read up on her and she's still like the number four or five, like most popular radio show in the world. Which is crazy to me.

Harry Duran 00:02:04:

So it seems like you've been on digital marketing for a while. When did you first get out the podcasting book?

Jeff Umbro 00:02:10:

Yeah, so I first podcast in 2014. First time I listened to a podcast, I was in high school. I was 16 and a friend of mine gave me a burned CD with like 5 episodes of this American Life on it.

Harry Duran 00:02:22:

Oh, that's funny.

Jeff Umbro 00:02:23:

So I don't know if that counts as a podcast, but I count it as a podcast. And then it's funny, I was never really like a huge listener. And then probably around the time of Serial. I mean, definitely a little bit before that, like when Another Round was out there and WTF with Marc Maron and this American Life. And you know, I always was aware and often listened, but I was never like a super fan. Fast forward to 2014. I decided to launch a podcast called Writers who Don't Write where I would interview authors. I was a book publicist at the time, so I was able to like kind of flex a creative muscle that I wasn't using very often as like a publicist writing, you know, press releases. And I fell in love. It became kind of my whole identity and all I wanted to do. And I did it with a friend, so it was a great excuse to just like spend a lot of time with him and with these authors that I admired. And then fast forward. I made it my full time career in 2016 and never looked back.

Harry Duran 00:03:16:

When you talk about like writing press releases, the thing that comes to mind immediately is this. It's like one of many jobs that I think are like either going to dramatically change or go away in the age of AI because I think of myself of like tools I'm using on a regular basis, like ChatGPT. I'm even testing out other models for different things. I'm in a Claude code rabbit hole right now. How did I get here? And it's just like, it's. But it's interesting how quickly you pick up concepts, you know, but there's things that you just took for granted like show notes and all this, you know, summaries and repurposing into blog posts and writing press releases. And you know, I'm just curious, you know, I figured we'd get into this at some point, but it's just top of mind for me right now, like, sure, what your take is on this AI landscape now. It's affecting this industry and also people who had things as a job that, you know, might not be needed anymore.

Jeff Umbro 00:04:10:

I have a really boring answer to this question. I view AI as a tool the same way I would view Muckrack or podchaser or Megaphone as a tool. It allows you to do things easier, hopefully better, and hopefully quicker. And. But it still requires a lot of, like, strategic thinking where you need to actually come up with a plan and you have to set goals and you have to actually kind of understand what you're trying to achieve. And I'm not saying that AI is not going to continue to become better and better at what it does, and eventually there's probably going to be some kind of agent that can do all of this while we all sleep. But I can tell you that, like, of the tools that I've used historically, they all require, like, a human hand to make them better. If you're writing show notes, like most listeners know, if it's written by AI, or at least the savvy ones, and it'll get you like a B plus, but, you know, you need a person, in my opinion, to get an A. We use AI in a lot of our editing tools to, like, speed things up, but it still requires a lot of human direction. There's an AI tool that I'll walk you through that I actually think is a really good illustration of this. There are a couple guys in New York that created a company called Pod Pitch, POD P I T C H. And it's actually remarkable at what it does. And so basically, it has created a database of all of the different podcasts out there, and it pulls the transcripts and figures out kind of who is listening to these shows based on demographic data and keywords and all this stuff. So you can actually get into this system and you can say, I would like to pitch myself, Jeff Umbro, to a bunch of medical podcasts. It will pull a list daily of. Of however many shows you set the constraint for. So, like, I could say I want 30 shows a day that I'm going to be pitched for. It will pull these based on that demographic data and the metadata and the keywords and everything. And then I can upload four or five different pitches that I've written or that ChatGPT has written or whatever for, like, why I would be a good guest on that show. And then it will actually, you know, tweak those pitches based on what it finds to be effective. It will send them via, like, a B tests to make sure it's understanding, like, what is the most impactful actually getting responses. And then it will track what kind of response rates it's getting and actually respond to those emails to try and book you via, like, Savvycal or something. So you can kind of remove humans from that equation altogether if you're using the software. And I don't know what they're charging, but what I was paying, it was in beta at the time, was like 300 bucks a month or something. Yeah. And so, you know, you can imagine a world where that's, like, amazing at doing, you know, press pitching for individuals in order to get them, like, more opportunities. And it worked, which was the crazy part. Like, I was getting responses every day from people who wanted to talk to me. What I will say about it is that it was basically zero for a thousand when it came to getting actual quality interviews on bigger shows. It was never going to get me on, like, this is a silly example, but it was never going to get me on the Joe Rogan experience.

Harry Duran 00:07:18:

Sure.

Jeff Umbro 00:07:19:

It was going to get me on, you know, a podcast that had 300 listens in Indonesia or something. And for some people, that's all that they need. You know, they're just doing it because they want to farm, like, backlinks to their website or something, or get experience and media training by doing these interviews. But I think the big differentiator with most of these AI tools is like, is this going to achieve my goals or is this just going to be checking a lot of boxes?

Harry Duran 00:07:44: That makes a lot of sense.

Jeff Umbro 00:07:46: Yeah. So I don't know. Jury's out, obviously. And, like, we use AI in. In most of what we do, but is never going to be the thing that is, like, getting the final draft of what we're working on and, you know, and bringing it back to where it started. Like, I view it as a tool that it should be helpful for what we're trying to do, but I don't really see a world currently where it's going to replace what we actually do.

Harry Duran 00:08:09:

I just took a quick look while you were chatting, and they've got this bot that shows up like, someone just pitched. Someone from Iowa just pitched the Tim Dillon Show. That's a good. It looks flashy, but, yeah, the chances from whoever it is from Iowa getting on the Tim Dillon show is probably zero.

Jeff Umbro 00:08:24:

So it is a phenomenal tool. I will give them, you know, credit where credit is due. Yeah, it is a very smart thing that they've built, but it's very smart for a certain kind of audience.

Harry Duran 00:08:34:

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

Jeff Umbro 00:08:36:

Yeah.

Harry Duran 00:08:36:

So I couldn't help but notice. And for those that are just listening on the video, I can See Jeff's guitar. I can see a piano there. So this must be your jam out.

Jeff Umbro 00:08:44:

My search engine shirt.

Harry Duran 00:08:45:

What search engine?

Jeff Umbro 00:08:46:

It's PJ Vogt's new show. He was one of the hosts of Reply All. Okay, so I almost changed because I didn't want to wear a T shirt on this interview, but I figured it's fine. I'm representing podcast world.

Harry Duran 00:08:57:

Yeah, yeah. It's. Anything goes on these shows, but I love. I kind of love when things fall slightly off the rail. Not completely off the rails, but in these conversations, like, a dog comes in, or someone opens the door, or the truck or the garbage truck is, like, decided that today's the pickup day. Because just doing this since 2014, 11 years, it's like I'd kind of seen and heard everything and what I. Because it's a podcast about the podcasting world, I want to keep reminding everyone that's engaging with us that we're not npr. And things happen, and, like, real life takes over. Sometimes your mic cuts out for no apparent reason. The video crashes or something.

Jeff Umbro 00:09:33:

And that even happens with NPR sometimes.

Harry Duran 00:09:35:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Except you don't see it. I keep reminding. I keep thinking about that BBC clip. This is pre before everything went zoom and everything, where he's, like, all prim and proper, and it's like his kid came in the background, and then the nanny's just like. And he's just still have to pretend like nothing's happening and stuff like that, so.

Jeff Umbro 00:09:52:

Oh, it's the best.

Harry Duran 00:09:54:

So talk to me about the origin story of podglomerate.

Jeff Umbro 00:09:57:

Sure. So that podcast that I was telling you about, writers who don't write, I was doing that for two years at the genesis of Poglomerate. And I just kept on seeing these signs out there, and this was, you know, a different. This was a decade ago. It was a different time in podcasting. But I was making a show. I was getting emails from listeners who seemed to be very engaged. I remember one woman emailed me something about her, like, listening to the show while she milked her cow in Scotland or something. And I'm just like, this is my favorite email of all time. Just, you know, there's no farce to it. It's just this woman heard an interview that she liked, and she wanted to let me know that she was a fan. And it, like, really made me all warm and fuzzy inside and gave me a lot of energy to keep going and. But I was seeing things like this, and then at the same time, the show was getting more Popular. So I was getting people from big networks that you have heard of who would reach out to me and say, like, hey, we found out about the show. We'd like to talk to you about ad sales representation. And then we would get two or three conversations into this and they would see that we didn't have that many listeners at that point. I think we're getting about 10,000 listens a month. And they would say, thank you so much, like come back to us when you're a little bit larger. And I had these conversations half a dozen times. But I knew because of those emails and because of the interest from these ad companies that people were really interested in what I was doing. So I thought for better or worse that like there is a world where there's probably hundreds of shows just like mine that had this kind of engagement and were really interested in trying to make a little bit of cash so that they could like do more and do better. So I decided to find a dozen of these shows, put them all together under a network umbrella and try my luck at selling advertising to these brands with a collection of these smaller shows at like a bundled rate to see if that would like work in order to put some money in these folks pocket.

Harry Duran 00:12:01:

What was the criteria for deciding what the collection of the shows would be?

Jeff Umbro 00:12:05:

I mean, to be totally honest, if I could redo it, I would. But it was everyone who said yes. Yeah, we had six shows that we started with. One was mine, writers who don't write. One was a show about immigration. It was a really, really well done show called Status. And a guy had married an immigrant from Colombia, I believe, and he was just like shocked at every all the hoops that his partner had to jump through. So he made a whole podcast about it. There was a show called the Sex Wrap, which was two sex education instructors at universities in Florida that started putting this together based on the questions that they were getting in class. There's a show called Future Tense which was exploring technology and all the rapid changes that were happening. And so it was kind of a mishmash. It was like, you know, the outcasts of the time. And it worked very well. And it also didn't. I learned very quickly why these big networks were saying no to shows with 10,000 downloads. There's an operational issue there. It is a ton of work to book these advertisements, to coordinate these ads across multiple shows, and to do it for just a few hundred bucks. So. And nowadays, like folks can do it because we have really fancy software that allows them to do it. But it was too late for me. I had already gotten the bug. I had already quit my job. I had already decided that this was what I was going to pursue. So I'll fast forward the genesis story a little bit. But the long and short of it was that I started producing shows for hire because that's what I loved doing. And I started doing marketing for shows for hire because that's what I had done for the book world. And it's actually very similar to podcasting in a lot of ways. So, you know, fast forward to today and podglomerate does three things. We still sell ads. We're much better and more efficient at that. And we have a lot of bigger shows. We also run marketing campaigns for third parties, which I'm happy to get into if you're interested, but it's focused on audience development and growth based on the client's goals and criteria. And then we produce shows for universities, think tanks, media companies. So we do all three of these things. We treat them all as separate business lines. Some of our clients come to us for one of these things, some of our clients come to us for two or three of these things. And it's really exciting. We're a team of nine full time folks now and it is a far cry from when I started this back in, you know, 2014 for writers who don't write. 2016 for poglomerate. And you know, I'm really proud of what myself and the rest of the team has built and I can't wait to see what we do in the next 10 years because I think the company will probably look very different than it does today.

Harry Duran 00:14:38:

Thanks for sharing that. That's a very inspiring origin story. And I don't know if it's something that you imagined when you first got started with your.

Jeff Umbro 00:14:45:

It is absolutely not what I imagined. So. And you know, and frankly, like, going through that journey taught me most of what I know today because, you know, you grow a lot in 10 years. And like, I didn't have the skill sets that I do today and luckily I had enough of them that I, you know, could pay my rent for a couple years while I figured it out. But yeah, it took a turn. Mostly good in some, like, tough lessons.

Harry Duran 00:15:07:

What's a one of the tough lessons that comes to mind that stands out for you?

Jeff Umbro 00:15:11:

Oh, geez, put me on the spot. One of them was what I just mentioned on the ad side. You know, I had this like, grand unifying theory that just didn't work and I was forced Pretty quickly to figure out a way to like, make money. Another was just like some of the mechanics of just running a business, you know, there's growth. But then also we started doing audience development work back in 2017, and I used to charge like it depended on the show, but it was like a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month. And I was doing this work on a handful of shows. And I remember there was this window from probably 2018 through, like, to be honest, until like a couple years ago. Yeah. Where every conversation I had with somebody, I just increased the number by a few bucks. And like, for like six years, there was not a single person that told me that I was charging too much money. And so I realized that, like, I had just been charging dramatically too little initially. And now I think maybe we're at the point where we've either found that we have more flexibility with what we charge nowadays because we kind of did find that ceiling. And frankly, like, sometimes there are folks that should be paying us like a more modest fee based on what they're asking for. But I mentioned that as a mistake because. Or like an educational moment, rather. Because it was just one of those things in business that you don't totally realize until you're actually in the midst of it. But there's a lot of flexibility with how you can actually structure a campaign, whether that's like the scope of work, what you're charging, how you staff that campaign, like how you're structuring the goals that are associated there. So I guess just, you know, I had a lot of. Maybe I'll take back the comment where it's like, I made a lot of mistakes, although I'm sure I have many times over, over the years and reframe that. To say that, like, I've had a lot of learning moments over time.

Harry Duran 00:16:59:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Jeff Umbro 00:17:00:

Yeah.

Harry Duran 00:17:01:

So I guess the criteria for what makes a show good and something that people want to listen to has probably changed over the years. And I know a lot of people are riding that serial wave for a while and the interview based shows. So what are you seeing now? Because I'm sure there's people that come to you and maybe want their help in producing a show. Are there instances where you see something and realize that they probably need to refine their idea a bit more? Or is it.

Jeff Umbro 00:17:27:

Oh, yeah, you know.

Harry Duran 00:17:27:

Yeah, talk to me a little bit about what. What works now in 2025.

Jeff Umbro 00:17:34:

So I guess the first thing is just like, what are people hoping for out of the show. If somebody wants to create a content funnel for their business or find leads for, like, their next client, or monetize the show based on scale, or if they just want to have fun with it, I'm going to have a very different answer to that question for each of those people. So step one is really just like answering that question, which, you know, I'm sure you know Harry, but, like, that's hard for a lot of people to do. Some people, you know, when they're shooting out some emails to folks like us, like, they haven't thought about that. So that's always the first thing that I do. I sit down and I really kind of walk them through that. And sometimes it's pretty clear that it's not a fit because the goals are not aligned to, like, either what we can do or what they can do based on their resources. When those goals are aligned, then the framework of the show is going to change based on kind of who you're trying to reach and like the message that you're trying to get across. I know that I'm oversimplifying this, but, like, I look at most podcasts in three different structures. One is just a talking head interview show. One is what I call a narrative interview show. So it may be like, more educational. It's a one to one or like a, you know, multiple person interview format where the host can have like interstitials and voiceovers that go throughout the episode, kind of explaining some of the concepts that are being discussed. And three would be a narrative show, which is like the magazine style, NPR style stuff that most people love. And I think it's become very clear over the years, for better or worse, that most casual listeners are going to like all of these formats. But, like, you have the most ability to grow a very large audience with either a chat show that like, really strikes a chord with the right audience or with like a narrative show that's just super well done. However, narrative shows are way more difficult to make money on because you need to have some kind of baseline for what the advertiser can anticipate for audience because, you know, that's what they're paying for. They don't really. Most folks don't really care about the content of the show. They care about who they're reaching. And so, you know, if your goal is to grow a big thing and monetize it, then, like, you know, you're going to want to look into kind of building a show around those structures. But if your goal is to, like, find a Very specific type of audience, or to, like, you know, talk to CMOs so that you can drive new business for your company or something, you're going to structure a really different show. So I don't know if that's a good answer to your question, but the short version is really just like, determining what you're hoping to achieve and then making sure that the structure of the show fits that model based on time, resources, money, and everything else in between.

Harry Duran 00:20:12:

It's very helpful. And we work with a handful of clients at my agency, and it's always interesting to have those conversations because I think it's really managing expectations and, you know, realistically about what's happening. And I think when they see and they expect these downloads that they see, and they were like, I just want to get a sponsor for my show. And I'm like, well, would a sponsor want to pay for your show?

Jeff Umbro 00:20:33:

Like, exactly.

Harry Duran 00:20:34:

I have a second show I started called the Vertical Farming Podcast. Incredibly niche.

Jeff Umbro 00:20:38:

Yeah.

Harry Duran 00:20:38:

I happened to do it in 2020, and there was a boom in the industry, and I just said, I'm going to interview CEOs and founders specifically because I call it the most obviously impossible Vertical Farming podcast. The dot com was available, and I was able to secure a sponsor for 9,000 before I even launched a show, because it was like. I was like, how much are you paying for these booths at these conferences? Covid had hit. It was 2020. And he's like, it's 20,000 for a booth. I was like, well, for 9,000, you could sponsor the show. It's just CEOs and founders in this industry. He thought about it. He said, yes, well, and that's an episode. So it was like the light bulb went off. I used to work in corporate marketing at E Trade, and I was like, oh, marketing departments. Think like a marketing department.

Jeff Umbro 00:21:18:

It's very smart. And it's. And like, the pitch there or what they heard probably is just like, who cares if anyone's listening? Like, we're going to get in front of these 12 CEOs that could hire us, you know?

Harry Duran 00:21:27:

Yeah, yeah. And since then, the show generated over a hundred thousand in sponsorship. My sponsors flew me to a conference in Dubai, an indoor farming conference. It's amazing. The following year, one in Germany, and I've actually taken the podcast and merged it with a agtech website called IGROW News, and we created the AgTech Media Group. And so that kind of just got spun off into a separate company and we're starting a greenhouse podcast. All this to say Like I'd never in my mind thought I'd be like working in like agtech media in 2020 when I was just starting a podcast on the whim.

Jeff Umbro 00:21:59:

Podcasting makes people's dreams come true. And you see it so frequently. And it's so funny because frankly, it's like almost never in the way that people imagine.

Harry Duran 00:22:08:

Yeah, yeah.

Jeff Umbro 00:22:09:

And I imagine when you launch a show it's just because like you were very interested in the subject.

Harry Duran 00:22:15:

Correct, I was interested in the subject, but I did come from a marketing background. I was like, well, if I'm gonna put the time and effort into this, let me at least do it. I looked at Crunchbase, I did some research, I saw the VC money coming in. VC money typically means marketing spend when they get funded. So I kind of like did the work and I said it has to be high visibility because no one knows who I am in this space. So I was starting from zero. But I said if I do see you. And I felt confident with long form interviews on a topic I knew nothing about because of podcast junkies, you know, because I've been doing it since 20, so I can hold my own on a topic because you just have to be naturally curious, ask open ended questions. And a lot of times the CEOs were more nervous than I was.

Jeff Umbro 00:22:53:

Yeah, I'm sure they don't get interviewed very often.

Harry Duran 00:22:55:

Yeah. So it kind of. But I did, you know, I was strategic in it and I tell people like, if this is something that you want to do to attract a sponsor, make something that a sponsor like would be interested in hearing about or at least being a part of.

Jeff Umbro 00:23:08:

I love that. And it's interesting to hear that you kind of reverse engineered that because you hear these stories sometimes. I think there was a really popular thing that got cited quite a bit before where it's like some guy had like a Legos podcast or something that was just like incredibly niche. But for like the thousand Lego lovers out there, like it became their gospel.

Harry Duran 00:23:29:

Yeah.

Jeff Umbro 00:23:31:

But more often you hear about people who kind of stumble into that as opposed to like, you know, really proactively try and get into that space. So I love hearing that you've been like, you know, more direct about that.

Harry Duran 00:23:42:

So when someone comes to you and they're looking to establish a show and they're looking for that sponsorship, you know, what do you tell them to manage expectations, to say, hey, you'll probably need to get like X,000. What's the new number now? Is it 10,000? Is it 50,000? Just to make that CPM model work.

Jeff Umbro 00:24:00:

So the number is going to be different for whomever you ask. I can tell you what we say. And it's interesting because I really view podcast sponsorship in three different ways. One of them is direct sales, which is, you know, you just gave an example of this with the AgTech podcast. So you know, this is the LEGO podcast. Going to Lego or going to Roblox or something and saying like, hey, our listeners would be really interested in this. We can do a custom curated campaign for you. It'll have all of these elements. We'll do a 360 campaign thing with like our email newsletter and social and you guys will get a lot of benefit from this with the exact right audience. The second is what I call direct response or agency sales. So, you know, there's 10 agencies that represent like 500 podcast advertisers that most people hear every day, like Quints or Carvana or TrueNative. TrueNative. TrueNative is one of the agencies. And like BetterHelp, you know, the agencies would be TrueNative, Oxford Road, Veritone, et cetera. And they're like very much direct response advertisers. They're going to pay you a CPM. So you know, 20 to 25 bucks for every thousand downloads on your show. Multiply that by the number of downloads you see per month or per episode. Multiply that by the number of ads that you put in the show, multiply that by your consumption rate and then, you know, remove whatever commission your sales team is taking and you're going to make that much money. And then the third option is Programmatic, which could be the Spotify ad network or really any of the big hosting platforms have their own programmatic database. Simplecast has, has Adswizz, Omni has one, I don't know what it's called. R19 has one. And then there's a bunch of like vast integrations that you can plug in so you can get on soundstack, for example, and plug in advertising from some of these other SSPs. And ultimately you're getting lower CPMs, higher volume and hopefully like pretty decent quality. And you can have some kind of management expectation of like what categories are going to see on these ads. So I say all of that as kind of the precursor to what I'm about to say. We usually will not do direct sales on a show until they are Getting more than 250,000 downloads per month because it's a ton of work and you need to make sure that it's going to be valuable. The direct and agency sales, we typically will not be doing, like, organic outreach on that unless somebody is seeing 50,000 downloads a month or more, honestly, sometimes a hundred thousand downloads, depending on how saturated that genre is. Although if somebody is working with Poglomerate, like, we will include smaller shows in our RFPs, if it makes sense. And then for programmatic advertising, you can really turn that on. If you have 10 downloads, like, you know, anybody who's listening can just do that on their own. Or if you work with, you know, folks like Poglomerate, then, like, we could do that on your behalf. So. And the reason that we do that kind of goes back to, like, what I was talking about when I formed the company in the first place. Like, as much as I hate to admit it, I've become that, like, bigger organization that does have to watch, like, their administrative operative stuff. So when it comes to direct and agency sales, we do kind of have a minimum threshold in which it makes sense. But we'll work with anybody with programmatic advertising. And for some shows, like, you get 20, 30,000 downloads a month, like, you can see several hundred dollars a month from these programmatic spots. And then also for anybody who just is unaware, like, there are other ways to monetize your show, whether it's through premium subscriptions or, like, dynamic feed drops through introcast or pod roll or, you know, doing a live event. So, yeah, we do a little bit of that. We don't do a ton of it, but there's plenty of ways that folks can make money. I always point to Mark and essay from, like, 10 years ago about the eight ways that media companies can monetize. And anybody can Google that today. And it's still very relevant to podcasting and other forms of media.

Harry Duran 00:27:56:

Yeah. Make sure you send that along. I'll make sure to include it in the show notes as well.

Jeff Umbro 00:27:59:

Sure.

Harry Duran 00:28:00:

I'm curious when people come to you and if they're small business owners, sometimes, you know, they're always watching expenses. But nowadays, to get a show professionally produced, like, what type of budget should people be looking at, especially if they're not in a position to monetize from day one? So they have to do the work of, like, creating the episodes and publishing and being consistent, not pod fading, you know, just so they understand what they're getting into and what type of investment this would look like to.

Jeff Umbro 00:28:29:

Sure.

Harry Duran 00:28:29:

Because obviously you can go to Fiverr and everyone knows you can get a. Yeah, an editor for like, the 10 bucks an hour that everyone likes to brag about. But for realistically, if you want a professionally produced show nowadays, what's a reasonable expectation of how much you're going to be spending?

Jeff Umbro 00:28:44:

There's a lot of variables there, as you know well, but, you know, there's first off, your time, you know, are you going to be producing this and editing the show? Are you able to take the time to, like, research the topics the guests, book the guests, like, send those emails, coordinate the logistics, set aside the time to actually record the thing, edit, have a marketing strategy to publish the thing? So I'll ignore all of that for the moment because all of that is a real hard cost that people should consider. Then if you, you could do a full studio build out, that can be a few hundred bucks. It could be many thousands of dollars depending on, like, the quality of the equipment that you want to use. Do you need camera setups? Do you need multiple cameras? Do you want to build out your background? So again, ignoring all of that, let's assume that somebody wants to make a show kind of like what we're doing now. You know, you can get some pretty solid microphones, anywhere from like 50 to 300 bucks. You can get a nice webcam for 50 to 300 bucks. You need a computer with some decent processing speed. The software is pretty inexpensive. Riverside Squadcast Zoom. You know, it's anywhere from like 10 to like 50 bucks a month. Then there is all the editing software. We usually start in Descript and we'll do what we call a paper edit. And that's like really phenomenal. Really, anybody can figure that out with half an hour of training. And that can get you like halfway to where you need to be. And then we'll plug that into like Adobe Audition or something, or Pro Tools. And then we do like a formal mix and master and we add any sound effects or music or whatever we want to do. Sometimes you have to pay for the music and the sound effects. Like, so generally speaking, to do this on the cheap, like, your software licenses alone are probably going to cost you, you know, 20 to like $100 a month. And then you have to pay for your podcast hosting service. There are free ones out there like Spotify for podcasters, but most of the better quality ones are going to charge you like 10 to 100 bucks a month, depending on scale and bandwidth. So all this to say, like, if you want to do this independently and like, take the time to learn how to do it, the hard costs are not necessarily going to be tons of money, but it could be a few hundred or A few thousand dollars a year. If you'd like to hire someone you mentioned Fiverr, you can get a pretty decent editor for like, you know, 100 bucks an hour or a hundred bucks an episode or something. If you want to hire a service like Poglomerate or Lower street or Jar or whatever, like, you're generally looking at several thousand dollars an episode plus a development fee. But what you get with that is kind of the level of comfort of knowing that you don't really have to think about much. And, you know, the scope and the cost is going to be incredibly variable. We make some shows for like a few, like, very low thousands of dollars per episode. We make some shows that are costing like, you know, five figures per episode. So and really the variable comes in with like the amount of time that and people that we have to put behind the show.

Harry Duran 00:31:39:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That's a very helpful breakdown. I appreciate that. So then moving into the marketing aspect of it, you said, you know, maybe we could do a little bit of a deep dive there. Like, what do you, what do you think that's been helpful that you're doing? And is it all in house or using any external services? I see stuff like audience lift now and I'm wondering if that has any effect.

Jeff Umbro 00:31:57:

I have many opinions. So when we approach a podcast marketing campaign, we first go back to the goals question, because I'm going to tweak this campaign based on what you tell me, like if you're looking for scale or niche or anything in between. But very broadly speaking, we have a six tier approach. Publicity, owned marketing, cross promotion, pitching, the podcasting apps, paid acquisition and data management. There are some tools that are associated with each of these things. I'll walk through all of them. But just know that this is like kind of if you could do everything, this is what I would do. And it's still probably like not entirely inclusive of like everything you could do. So publicity is the idea of, you know, trying to get media coverage for your show. So we will draft a press kit which could include a press release, a synopsis, document, talking points, et cetera, et cetera. And we will create what we call a media pipeline. And that's a spreadsheet where we have a bunch of different tabs and each tab is a different, like, target audience. So if it's a business show, then we're going to have a tab for entrepreneurship, management, business, like the specific niche of whatever the show is. We're going to have a tab for like past coverage for recent guests or past coverage for the companies making the show. We're going to have a list of different subreddits that we want to target or substacks or whatever. And we build out this media pipeline and that's going to be like, the targets of who we're trying to reach. And then we will use software to research the contact info for these folks. We like Muckrack. There's a lot of different options out there. Scission, Meltwater, Podchaser Pro, et cetera.

Harry Duran 00:33:30:

And then that'll get you their emails?

Jeff Umbro 00:33:34:

Oftentimes, yes, not always. And then we use a combination of pitching a larger swath of folks from like, list of these people. So, for example, if we don't have relationships, we. We might send a pitch that goes out to like 50 people at once using a mail merge software. We use something called Mixmax, but for the most part, we've spent years building relationships with individuals. So if we're trying to get on, you know, the ridiculous history podcast, we know the name of the own of the producer, and we'll send like a very curated pitch to that producer as to why this is a good fit. The goal of this is to get reviews, interviews, features, lists of shows surrounding certain topics. The result of it is probably not going to drive tons and tons of download to your show unless you're getting like a big New York Times interview or something. But what it will do is drive, like, the ability for you to snowball into other opportunities, you know, like pitching Apple or something with this, like, ink feature that you just got the second bucket we call owned marketing. And that is basically the idea of taking all of your owned properties. So your website, your newsletter list, your social media, your live events, your other podcasts, whatever else is out there, your partnerships, and figuring out a strategy for how to translate followers and listeners from one platform to your podcast. And that could be, you know, just like how to craft an email to tell people that you have a new show out there or to highlight, like, a big guest. It could be helping you figure out what kind of social media assets you're going to want to publish, or doing a Reddit AMA or a Quora session. And then the second piece of that is like, how do you track attribution on all of these things? Yeah, so we have a ton of tools that we use Magellan podscribe, Swap FM Chartable that allows us to track audio to audio attribution or audio to web attribution, or, like, link attribution. So basically, like a bitly for your podcast.

Harry Duran 00:35:27:

Sure.

Jeff Umbro 00:35:27:

And we have a whole database of information that will allow us to understand kind of how successful or not our past campaigns have been based on that. And we use that to inform our future campaigns. The third bucket is cross promotions. So that could be a feed drop. So you publish an episode of your show on another show, and vice versa. It could be a collaborative episode. So Harry, you and I decide that we're going to, you know, publish this on Podcast Junkies on Podcast Perspectives, and we do part one on Podcast Perspectives and part two on Podcast Junkies. The third. Yeah, let's do it. The third could be just an interview on another show, and the fourth could be audio swaps with other shows. So, like, I record an ad for your show, you record an ad for my show, and we run it for 10,000 impressions apiece or whatever it is. You can also track attribution on all of these things using the same tools that I just mentioned. We've done this with more than 350 million impressions. Historically, we have a lot of data as to what works based on timing, copy of the cross promos, the genres that we're running it on, the length of the ad. Like, all of these things really factor into it. The fourth bucket is pitching the apps. So there are human curators at most of the big apps like Apple, Spotify, SiriusXM, iHeart, and they're looking for features based around holidays or like big commemorative months or like a big launch of a new show or whatever it is. So we can pitch those. Some of those are, you know, just build relationships. Some of those are through portals. And then there's the idea of algorithmic curation, which is essentially tweaking your metadata so that you better show up on search results. That's going to be more relevant for, like, YouTube and Spotify, but it's still relevant on all the other platforms. So, for example, two notes there. One is that the only three metadata inputs that are going to surface in search results on YouTube and I'm sorry, on Apple and Spotify are going to be the show title, the show author tag, and the episode title.

Harry Duran 00:37:22:

Yeah.

Jeff Umbro 00:37:23:

So if you put something in like your show description, that's not going to show up in search results on Apple, although they have changed recently and index transcripts. So I actually don't know if that factors into this at this point in time.

Harry Duran 00:37:35:

I did see something that insta. Well, related to visibility, that Instagram was surfacing their descriptions in their posts to Google Now. So someone highlighted how they had essentially put the show notes in the description of an Instagram post. And they showed like how it popped up on Google because it was now being indexed. So I thought that was.

Jeff Umbro 00:37:55:

I love that. That's a great idea and I'll probably try that. And then the second example would just be like, on YouTube, packaging is everything. So, you know, if you are going to put the resources into that, like, you should pay attention to the title, the description, the thumbnail, the first 60 seconds. How people engage with your show is going to impact how YouTube decides to surface your show to other potential listeners and viewers. And that matters a lot. The fifth bucket is paid acquisition. So how do you spend money in order to get the best conversion rates for your show of new listeners? So in app discovery sections, audio buys on other shows, social media buys, display ads, email newsletter buys, and then miscellaneous is what I would consider like, you know, audience lift or mopod or pod roll or whatever. And I'll skip talking about them today because it'll take me a while to really get into all the details. But ultimately with the paid spend campaign, what you're trying to do is get your best cost per acquisition. In this instance, being like one net new listener of your podcast, we at Poglomerate are able to typically see between like a 3 and $10 cost per acquisition for new listener, but it totally depends on the quality of the show. I can show you some shows that have like a sub $1 CPA and some shows that have like a $50 CPA. So like take that with a big grain of salt. But like, we are constantly trying to optimize those numbers. And then the final bucket is just data management. So we build a dashboard. We have our own bespoke dashboard. And then we also use Bumper's dashboard, which is amazing. And the combo of the two will tell us some information such as total listeners per episode or over time on a show, consumption data per episode, net new versus returning listeners, share of your per platform, total follower growth on YouTube, Apple and Spotify. And that information really informs us of two things. One is like editorially, should we change the show at all? And an example of that is, you know, if 30% of your audience falls off in the first 60 seconds, like maybe you want to change your intro. And the second thing that we use all this data for is to better understand like how our marketing initiatives are working. Like, are we actually able to drive net new listeners to the show? And if so, like, are we losing them on the second and third episode? Like, do we need to go back and look at the editorial. So in a nutshell, that's what we do at Poglomerate. And the scope can change based on all kinds of different factors. But that's what we try to do for all of our customers and clients.

Harry Duran 00:40:22:

So can someone come to you with an existing show that they need some marketing love on and engage with you with just the marketing? Yeah, we realistically, what would they, you know, in terms of budgets? Like what?

Jeff Umbro 00:40:32:

Sure.

Harry Duran 00:40:33:

Can they start at something small and then work their way up to bigger stuff?

Jeff Umbro 00:40:36:

So we have like kind of four different campaigns that we usually work on. One is what I call a launch campaign. You have a net new show you're publishing in September, you want us to help you launch it. Two is what I call a maintenance campaign. That's a pre existing show that might need a little tlc. Three is what we call a network campaign. And basically like we get flexible with the payment structure in order to work with a network so they don't have to lock in on like one individual show. They can consider hiring us for like a larger group of shows. And four is consulting basically. So, you know, the first three that I mentioned, the budgets have to be substantial. Like we do factor in all kinds of different things. Like if you're a nonprofit, you'll get a discount. If you book us for a year, you'll get a discount. If you hire us for multiple shows, you'll get a discount. But generally speaking, we're charging, you know, anywhere from like 4 or 5,000 to $9,000 a month for that work. And we do have a minimum commitment of four months because that's what we find, like we need to be really effective most of the time. And then when it comes to the like initial campaign consultation item, we're experimenting with that. But generally speaking, we will charge a few thousand dollars to kind of like build an audit for somebody walking them through like a limited version of what we would do on their behalf. And then if they choose to hire us from there, then they'll get a discount for that amount for the execution of the campaign work.

Harry Duran 00:41:59:

So, Jeff, thank you for sharing those tips. I really appreciate it. Just have a couple of questions that I like to ask us as we wrap up. What is something you've changed your mind about recently?

Jeff Umbro 00:42:09:

Oh man, so much. I'm getting married next week.

Harry Duran 00:42:12:

So congrats.

Jeff Umbro 00:42:14:

Thank you so quite a bit in that regard. Podcast related. I don't know that it's necessarily true that I've like changed my mind about it, but. But I have been embracing video as like a medium much more than historically. Like, we actually have video kind of in the DNA of Poglomerate. Like half of our production team came from the video world, which has been really convenient in the last few years. And you know, it's always been a little bit of a means to an end. And it's great because, like, I mean, to be blunt, like, we can charge clients more to do it. But I've always been a little dubious of like its ability to like retain and attract new audiences. But lately I am seeing a lot more examples of this actually being like kind of a hyper charge system in order to like grow net new audience because it exists on platforms that it didn't historically and thus finds new audiences that an RSS feed would not have historically found. Yeah, and I have half a dozen examples of where that's been like really effective, both with large audiences and with very niche audiences. So that's something I think I've changed my mind on over the last year or two.

Harry Duran 00:43:19:

A lot of folks who are in that space provide guidance on making sure you're hooking people in the beginning. And with YouTube you do get that those analytics of like, how much, how quickly do people drop off? So as you're doing these shows, are you conscious of like structuring in a way where you've got like a very powerful like 60 second lead in like a hook? What would traditionally be a cold open on the audio side, but something similar on video?

Jeff Umbro 00:43:43:

Yeah, and that's a very hard thing to like pinpoint, but there's a few structural things that people could do there that are just like jumping off points. Ultimately you should be trying to serve the audience that you're trying to reach. But something I've seen to be really effective is just like kind of almost making a sizzle reel to open an episode, you know, pull two or three of the best questions from the interview, make those the first thing that people hear. Maybe before like a cold open, you know, adding motion graphics and B roll, like is always really effective, kind of professionalizing the production a little bit. But yeah, ultimately, like with YouTube especially, and this applies to a smaller degree on social video clips, it's really important to really package it properly. So that's title, Description, captions, thumbnails, first 60 seconds. So those are the things that we really pay attention to.

Harry Duran 00:44:34:

What's a good duration for a sizzle reel to open out an episode?

Jeff Umbro 00:44:38:

It's going to totally depend on the show, but you know, 10 to 20 seconds.

Harry Duran 00:44:42:

Okay. So not like a one minute.

Jeff Umbro 00:44:45:

No, you're just not going to get that much of somebody's attention. Like you know, you interview somebody who just sold their company and you can do like, you know, how did it feel to earn $10 million? And then you can like, I don't know, put a blur over the response or something and that way it'll just kind of like incentivize somebody to click through and like watch more of.

Harry Duran 00:45:06:

Stephen Bartlett does a really good job of diary receiving.

Jeff Umbro 00:45:09:

Yeah. And he is like the best of the best. They just announced that they're doing like 3 million video views. This may be applied to like the whole podcast, but per day.

Harry Duran 00:45:19:

Oh geez. Wow.

Jeff Umbro 00:45:21:

Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. Just game that out for a month or a year and like just imagine.

Harry Duran 00:45:27:

I spoke to one of his co founders on this platform they're creating enough. It's launched. Yeah. They were launching a YouTube first video hosting platform that was leading with video and he's got the analytics and the deep connections into Spotify. So he was going to make that integration. I forgot what the name of it is. I'll send it to you later. But I met his co founder at the podcast movement like last year and it's something they've been working on.

Jeff Umbro 00:45:48:

I'd love to learn more. I'm not too familiar with that.

Harry Duran 00:45:50:

So, so last question. What is the most misunderstood thing about you?

Jeff Umbro 00:45:55:

About me? Yeah, it's hard because you got to look internally for that. But I don't know, I. My vantage point of this is like a lot of people I speak to think that I've started this like big massive company and like am doing amazing and love life and like whatever and all of that is, is true from one vantage point. Like you know, we have nine full time employees. Like this is something I started literally in my parents basement and like I'm very proud of everything that, that I've done and like, and yes, there's some money there but I'm not like, you know, getting rich off of this or anything. But the thing that is probably missing from what a lot of folks see externally is just like it is a lot of hard work. I can't tell you how many 80 hour weeks I've done. I'm like constantly just like, you know, trying to make everything connect and work and oftentimes that's not like exciting like celebrity interviews. It's you know, sending emails and organizing a calendar and building spreadsheets and just thinking through things. So I don't know, I guess all that to say, like, you know, genuinely love what I do and can't imagine doing anything else and hope I do it for a long time to come. But it's not always as glamorous as people initially anticipate, you know?

Harry Duran 00:47:10:

Yeah, yeah, I get the picture of the duck on the pond. Everything kind of looks calm up there, but underneath, those feet are paddling pretty.

Jeff Umbro 00:47:19:

Yeah, it's. I mentioned I'm getting married. I'm going on my longest vacation ever from Poglomerate, and I am terrified. Like, and I know it'll be great. I have an amazing team that is, like, more than equipped to handle everything. Sure. And it'll be good for me to, like, watch that. But. But, yeah, it's, you know, this is my baby, and it's really hard to, like, you know, pull away, even for just a week or two.

Harry Duran 00:47:38:

Yeah, I could totally relate to that. Well, thanks for making some time to come on. And we had to do the second take. For those that are paying attention might. Might have a different shirt than when we started this conversation. But that's the nature of podcasting, and I think I alluded to it when we started this. Like, anything and everything can happen. That can happen, Will. And this is a perfect example of that. Where's the best place for folks to connect with you and learn more about podglomerate?

Jeff Umbro 00:48:00:

First of all, thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun. Folks can check out podglomerate.com if you head to puglomber.com media. You can see a bunch of blogs and resources that we have for, you know, blooming podcasters, as well as case studies for some of the stuff that we've done. And if you want to connect with me, you can either email listen@thepoglumber.com or you can check me out. Jeff Umbro on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active over there.

Harry Duran 00:48:22:

Okay. We'll make sure all those links in the show notes as well. Thanks again, Jeff. I really appreciate it.

Jeff Umbro 00:48:26:

You got it. Thank you.