The Bootstrapped Founder

Hey. It's Arvid, and you're listening to the Bootstrap founder. Big shout out to Paddle for sponsoring this episode. I just got an email from them this morning and they're telling me that I'm 23% ahead of my monthly revenue goal and that's most welcome and it definitely beats the email that I occasionally still get where I'm a few percentage points behind, but hey, that's business. And Pedal keeps track of all these numbers for me, which is really appreciated.

In fact, they acquired ProfitWell last year or like a year and a half ago, and I talked to Patrick Campbell, who sold that business to Paddle for $200,000,000 all the way back in episode 178 of this podcast. I have to say, ProfitWell has gotten even better and is now integrated more deeply and effectively into the platform. I use it quite a lot to just track my numbers, see what's happening, check my cohorts, all my customers and that stuff. So I highly recommend you checking out Paddle, paddle.com. It will have a big impact on how easy it is for you to charge your customers.

It's funny that I would start this episode talking about a central solution for a problem, a gateway of sorts because I really wanna talk about gatekeeping today. The more I work in the world of podcasting, watching the crazy amount of content that people produce every single day, the more convinced I become that we are living in a time where the age of the gatekeeper, the institutional gatekeeper, the editorial, the preselection, pre filtering by somebody else is over. Working with my customers at PodScan has given me this front row seat to this transformation, and I think the implications are fascinating. There's a movement in the entrepreneurial world to fill a gap here, and I believe that it's a very profitable opportunity. Remember when TV stations decided what you would watch and when you would watch it, you would have like a couple channels, maybe a couple dozen channels if you have satellite and stuff and whenever you would turn it on, you would see what they wanted you to see or even further back, I guess when video stores existed, they had shelf space and that limited the movie choices that you had, whatever VHS they could fit on that shelf was one that you could pick and if somebody had picked it before you, well, it was gone for a week.

Now that world is completely gone. It's vanishing as well. Between YouTube's infinite scroll, like the infinite amount of videos all linked with each other and let's say Netflix's endless catalog of movies might be changing over time, but it's still effectively endless. We have moved from scarcity to abundance in just a couple of years, right? It didn't take that long to flip the script from like these video stores to Netflix and Netflix started out as a DVD delivery company.

They would give you the movie you wanna watch in the mail and turns out that there's a better business model that allows way more people to watch way more stuff That's streaming. The gatekeepers of old, the publishers, the editors, the curators have been replaced by algorithms, really, and I think more importantly, by ourselves. This shift becomes very clear in my daily work. There's like 2,500,000 podcasts out there, English speaking podcasts. There's another 2,000,000 and some international ones, if you want to call them that.

And thousands of these podcasts are dedicated to single sports teams. I see this in the stream that I have on my monitoring screens here that of a new episode of every new podcast is shown and when I just see them float by, I see sports teams names all the time and there are podcasts that are dissecting every single game of 1 team, they're discussing coaching decisions of that one team and they're debating player traits who should come to the team, who should leave the team, they're doing this for hours every week and here's the kicker, most of these shows only have a couple 1,000 listeners. I have that insight as well. And that's different, right? It's not just the one big game being played on TV and everybody watches it.

It is all these individual shows that some people may watch. And this, I think, is Seth Godin's long tail in action, not the 10 big shows about this topic, but the 10,000 niche podcasts that speak to specific audiences in specific ways. And each of them wants to be found by the people it was made for. And that's the problem. There's, like, years worth of YouTube content uploaded every hour.

Discovery has become the new frontier, Finding the thing or being found as the thing is the problem, and it's a problem that I wrestle with daily in POT scan too. How do I help the right people with the right content find the right audience for that content when there's simply too much of everything. I see this challenge in my own life too, particularly when I'm trying to cook something, when I'm looking for recipes. Sometimes I'll wade through these SEO optimized articles with their mandatory life stories and I just try to find one thing that does the job well enough. And other times I'm hunting for that perfect recipe that matches my exact ingredients and my preferred cooking method.

And it takes me a while because there's just so much out there. The old world of cookbooks gave you one definite recipe and that was it, right? If you open a cookbook, there's usually one recipe for a meal, a particular kind of meal. They'll have 1 burger in there and one way to cook a chicken and that's it. The digital age gives you infinite variations, a lot of similar ones and a lot of different ones, it's up to you to find them.

And in that moment, whenever I try to search for something, I realized that YouTube is both the best and the worst source of information at the same time. There's really no one out there who I can rely on to just show me the good parts. They will always show me what they think I like, not what I actually like, or at the very least, things have changed a lot when it comes to this kind of recommendation. What is fascinating to me is how we've started replacing institutional gatekeepers, like publicly trusted gatekeepers, editorial tastemakers, newspaper critics, that kind of stuff with trusted individuals, often peers. Take those celebrity chefs who've replaced these nameless cookbook publishers, their influence doesn't come from institutional authority.

Well, maybe Michelin Stars but even that is not important for most people, most people who wanna cook, wanna cook something good, not something that is perceived as critically acclaimed. The influence of these people doesn't come from authority, it comes from personal connections with their audience. And when I want a good barbecue recipe, for example, which I've done over this year, I tend to ask a brother-in-law or friend who they recommend for me to check out, whose recipes I should check out. I don't go to a publisher and ask them, oh, dear publisher, please tell me who I should look at, right? That's not how it works anymore.

I go to people I trust and I see the same pattern in podcasting too, where successful creators aren't just content producers, they're trusted curators of information too. We listen to them because our friends listen to them. There's a peer effect here. And this shift creates an interesting opportunity that I'm exploring with PodScan as well. Gatekeeping as a service really.

People are overwhelmed by choice and are actively seeking trusted voices to help them navigate the content ocean, and they want the cognitive load of decision making removed from their lives. They have enough stuff to work through, but, and this is crucial, they want it removed by someone they trust, not by a faceless brand or institution. And what I've noticed among my PodScan customers is that they started facilitating this for their own paid users and clients. I provide the raw data, just all the transcripts of all the podcasts everywhere, and they have started to become the theme specific gatekeeper of choice for their own audience. And maybe just think about this yourself at this point for a second.

If you have an audience of people who trust you with whatever you talk about, right, whatever specific industry thing you know a lot about and they read your articles or they listen to you on social media, there is a use case here for you to facilitate making these choices easier for your audience. You can become the influential tastemaker that used to be an industry magazine or like a conference organizer. Now you can be this as your just yourself in your niche. Just think about it. I mean, this is not an ad for PodScan, you're not supposed to necessarily wait through all the podcasts every all the articles or whatever, but there is just something here for everybody who is just a little bit more than average in terms of expertise in their community and you likely are listening to this show.

So just saying, and you don't have to do this alone. Looking ahead in the future, I'm particularly intrigued by how AI might fit into this ecosystem. I've seen people build AI enabled recommendation systems with PodScan in particular, and this has shown me the potential for AI to become this personal curator, this one on one curator for each separate client AI can make the smartest choice. It's something that understands the unique preferences and can make informed choices based on a lot of data that even a human being might not be able to do. But the question here is, will people trust AI the way that they trust human curators?

And I think that's something we're still exploring. Personally, I would certainly trust an AI that has been trained on my own consumption preferences just a little bit more than an influencer who's been chasing the next sponsoring contract of for the last years or so. That's the central issue here is always transparency, and that's the issue with trust in the first place. And I wonder how, and maybe if, that will make it into the AI recommendation process at all. What's become clear to me through the work in podcasting and all the other things that I do is that trust now flows through networks rather than down from institutions.

When I look at my customers and even outside of PodScan, my social media audience, my Twitter audience and wherever I talk to people, I see how crucial peer recommendations have become. Every interaction, every share, every recommendation out there builds or diminishes trust within these networks. It's very, very graph oriented, people are highly interconnected. And every week or so, we see some new drama rear its head on Twitter. First, it was WordPress and then boilerplate code security and every now and then Peter Level's famous single file index PHP business stuff.

People love to discuss and deconstruct choices that we make as founders and all actions are taken in public both by us as the people building things and by the people responding to it, by our audiences, by our customers and people are watching all the interactions and they're quick to judge. And this has profound implications for creators and entrepreneurs. All of a sudden, everything you share in public is a single retweet away from becoming viral for better or worse, right? It could be a big shout out that gets you a lot of customers, and it could be a destructive piece on how your business sucks and creates a lot of trouble for you in your business. At the same time, on the other side, the barriers to entry have crumbled.

You don't need a business degree or 100 of 1,000 in start up capital anymore to even get started building things that people then talk about. AI tools are democratizing production too, so it's even faster to build and anyone can create content or build products with minimal investment. But this democratization then creates its own challenges when everyone can create standing out becomes a new barrier, right? It's this whole thing about distribution that's been coming up over the last years. It's easy to build, it's easy to just create something new, super hard to put it in the hands of people.

And I've learned that success in this environment isn't about reaching everyone either, It's about being specifically valuable to someone. You don't need universal appeal, you will never find it really because people always have something to criticize and some people just don't like what you do, but you need to be trusted by the right people in the right niche. This is where monetization happens, right? In a community of people who think alike and have an affinity for what you do. What I've come to understand by just working in this space is that while the age of institutional gatekeeping might be over, the need for curation has not disappeared.

It's just changed form. The future belongs to those who can build trust, whether they are individual creators, brands or AI systems really, but trust is at the core of this. In a world without traditional gatekeepers, the path to success isn't about getting past the guards. It's about becoming a trusted guide for your specific audience. And perhaps that's a better system anyway, one where trust is earned through value and authenticity rather than being bestowed upon you by institution and tradition.

That is long gone. And that's it for today. Thank you for listening to the Bootstrap founder. You can find me on Twitter at avidkahl, a r v a d k a h l. Big shout out to Paddle for sponsoring this episode.

You will find my books in my Twitter course on Twitter as well. If you wanna support me in this show, please tell everybody you know about podscan.fm and leave a rating and a review by going to rate this podcast.com/founder. Makes a massive difference if you show up there because then the podcast will show up in other people's feeds. Any of this helps show a lot. Thank you so much for listening.

Have a wonderful day, and bye bye.