From Big Podcasts to Business Growth: What Most Podcasters Get Wrong

What happens when you leave massive podcasts behind and start helping small business owners build shows from scratch?

In this episode, Andrew Zaragoza from Pursue Podcasting breaks down what actually matters in podcast growth, why chasing algorithms is hurting creators, and how podcasting can become one of the most powerful business development tools available today.

We talk about:

• Why downloads and views are often vanity metrics
• The real ROI of podcasting for business owners
• How podcasts build trust faster than short-form content
• Why many podcasters fail by chasing trends
• What successful creators do behind the scenes
• The balance between great production and overthinking
• How businesses are using podcasts internally for training and culture
• Why consistency and delegation matter more than perfection

If you're a business owner, marketer, or podcaster trying to use podcasting for marketing, brand building, or client attraction, this conversation is packed with practical insights.

Podcasting is no longer just content creation. It’s relationship building at scale.

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Transcript

0:00

What happens when you go from working on giant, really famous podcasts to helping podcasts that don't exist yet? That is what we're going to talk about this week. Stay tuned. Andrew, thanks for coming on. So you spent years in the trenches. You've built like some iconic podcasts with no formal media education, which is just awesome. You walked away from big shows and you launched Pursue Podcasting, which is your podcast production company. How does like, how like going from big shows to a smaller company, like grassroots bootstrapped company? Like how does the learn by doing? Let's just figure this out. I hate to build the airplane in the air analogy, but I'm going to use it here. How like, how does that happen? Yeah, I, I built the airplane while it was in the air, and then I decided to jump out that damn thing. Um, it, um, man, you know what? A lot of this, this whole journey from day one, and I mean, literally day one, like as a baby has just been trial and error. Like in high school, I tried it, I hated it didn't work out college. Same thing working eight to five. Like there's got to be something else out there other than this, right? Like there's just no way I was meant like I was put on this earth just to clock in and out and do the minimum and not get fired. Um, so I picked up a camera and that's when things really started to jump off. But to answer the original question, I essentially got a really crystal clear preview of what life looked like if I didn't have any big shows, I was literally left with essentially nothing overnight. And I can get into that if you want. But like, I basically had my biggest show completely wiped off of YouTube where the main host still had multiple businesses. The co-host was super established in the fitness industry and had his own company, like kind of on the rise. And then the guy that was spending one hundred percent of his time building out this podcast had nothing to show for it. So that's when I really decided to say, hey, you know what? I love what I do, but I seriously need to start building something of my own. And that's when we decided to jump out that airplane. That's amazing. And to me, it plays into this something that, like I preach about podcasting all the time because we've got this ability to kind of control our platform to a little bit. I mean, granted, Spotify, Apple, all of them could go away. All of them can dump us, but we still have these assets that we've built. Whereas I've heard of people getting like kicked off of any meta platform and they're screwed. Um, when TikTok went to shut down, like there was a lot of people that were freaking out because yeah, that was yeah. Wow. That being so, you go from this working with established people that are building something to working with, let's call this much less established people that are still trying to build something. Um, but you're going from adding on the fancy porch onto the house to now building things foundationally like, uh, did you have to shift in your mindset for that? Yeah. Well, I mean, right out the gate, the, the, the education or knowledge acquisition, like went through the roof because I was like working with one show and I'll say building vertically, right? Like, how do we get this one show to do better? But you have only so many opportunities to do that, right? Your record once a day, we'll just say once a day and you publish once a day if you're a maniac, which is what we did for a while, where we were publishing five full length episodes every day, which took years off my life because we record today and I'd get it all ready to publish tomorrow because we wanted to be fresh and we wanted things to be brand new. Don't recommend that for anybody, ever. And I genuinely feel like hard pass. Yeah, I probably lost a couple of years of life by doing that. But you know, again, you get thrown right in the fire and you figure your way out. Um, so again, like I said, right out the gate now I had multiple opportunities, right? So we went from, you know, potentially like two episodes a week to like damn near sixty a month, right? Because I had multiple clients at that point. But yeah, it was a lot of fun. And I genuinely do mean that like, of course, there's days where like, you know, you're texting, well, I'm texting my wife and I'm saying, hey, sorry, it's going to be a long night. Go ahead and go to bed. Because like, I just, I have to get like, the show must go on for, for me, I'm sitting back looking like, okay, we have like five shows we got to get ready. But for my one client, they're like, my one show has to go up tomorrow no matter what. Like my show is more important than anything. And they're that's absolutely true. Um, so again, the learning got like way, way, way faster, way bigger way more knowledge acquisition. But I had to try different things with each one, which again drove the education up higher because I couldn't be the one trick pony anymore. So like I, I built the name for myself inside, like the fitness industry. So fitness stuff worked inside that industry. Well, now I'm in like home service industries, like now I'm in the finance world and I'm like, okay, shoot, we can't just go on Instagram and find a trending topic and give our two cents about it. Not only did we not have the name now, but we also just like those things don't exist in those very niche markets. So I had to look at it from the like the different approach of like, we can't just like throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. How about like, I start actually hitting this with some science and figuring out, okay, what's going to drive somebody to come back to this podcast? And then the bigger question, what the heck does that podcast actually want? Meaning what does that podcast host like? What's their true success metric? Because if it's views and downloads, like, well, Josh, like if that's all we want, like, hey, let's just turn that on and, you know, we'll pay YouTube, we'll pay whoever the heck hits us up on LinkedIn that swears that they're going to get us twenty thousand downloads a month. Like we can do that, but it's not going to do anything for your bottom line, right? So figuring out like, okay, this podcast, yeah, we want to grow, we want more views, downloads because we have sponsorships and stuff that we need to like pimp out those promo codes, right? That's how we make money here, which is an insanely awesome model, but it's going to be dead very soon. And then, yeah, and then for this other person, oh, maybe they just want to get more leads for their, you know, for their non-profit program or whatever they got going on. Okay. That's what we need to focus on. Not so much the downloads and the views, although I'm always going to try to get as much of that as possible. Right. Like for, for this conversation, I'm going to do whatever the heck I can to make sure as many people see it as possible. But what I would consider a win is if you and I today convinced one person to start their podcast, or if we got somebody interested in hiring you to produce their show. Like to me, that's a win. I'd rather have that than like a million downloads like, and I don't care what anybody says, because that's more important for the bottom line. And it also is just like likes and views are cool, but like I can't pay my mortgage with likes and views, unfortunately. I've tried. Yeah, no I've tried and it does not work. And plus I always like to. I always like to talk about bots from that aspect because I have seen the influx of bots. Um, and I, I say this in jest, but the way I figured out the bots was on my personal TikTok, which is essentially I'm an old man falling off of a dirt bike and there was a bunch of very young, very attractive women following me. And I realized, this is not these are bots. These are not they are fishing for my attention. These are bots. These are not because the last time I checked, as I was riding one of my motorcycle, my crappy old motorcycles down the road, women were not throwing themselves at me. I, it just it was not happening. Um, my wife was not worried about that happening either is by any stretch of the imagination. So I joke, is seeing the number of bots with that. That being said. Excellent segue into kind of like the growth phase of things here, because we both talk to a lot of people that they get frustrated by the stagnant download numbers or things of that nature. What like, and a lot of them, they start to chase algorithms. What, what do you tell them to say to start building the show rather than chasing the algorithm or that trending topic? Because that's what Garyvee told him to do. Oh man, I love Garyvee. But dude, I have so many issues correcting some of the things that he has said in the past, that one hundred percent that yes. Yeah dude. So I, I'll have to send it to you, but I just, I published a video not too long ago of basically garyvee submitting to YouTube. So in an, another interview, you know, like they set up these things where like, you can pay to go interview garyvee. and all of a sudden he's publishing like thirty new podcasts that all look the same from different people though. No hate dude, I love Garyvee. If he puts out another book, I'll be first in line to buy it because I've learned a lot from him. But in this video, he admits, like, yeah, I, I've tried to break YouTube and it has looked me in the face and said, no, that's not going to work here. He says, YouTube proper. Like, I can't just throw everything at it and expect it to work. But business owners, podcasters, content creators, they're like, no, Garyvee says, just document, don't create, just throw everything and something's going to work. Like, no, no, it's not not. It's absolutely not. Because if you chase all these rabbits, you're going to end up with negative, you know, like so, so the, the, the thing that I try my hardest and you already know this even before I'm going to explain this, but like, if somebody comes in and they are in the fitness niche, they are in the finance niche or they're in, you know, home service or whatever. Like we're not going to then talk about something in a completely different niche because it is trending. We're not going to chase those views because if we do, let's let's pretend. Okay. We talk about, I don't know, some something political here. That's a good one because that will get everybody riled up. And then the very next episode, you're, you're talking about how to get managers to have hard conversations with some, like a troubled employee. Who the heck is going to come back for that? No one. Nobody's coming back for that. So it goes back to that success metric. Okay. Like, is your goal to try to get trending topics and be like a, like a tabloid podcast, like, all right. Cool. Have fun with that. But good luck turning that into anything substantial for your business. And that's the other thing too, like I had to switch from working with like a content creator mindset or even a a podcast only mindset and starting to work with business owners. Because when I got into like the production side, I'm like, all right, Josh, here's what we're going to do. We're going to have the sickest thumbnails. You're gonna have the dopest intros, your thumb, your YouTube titles are going to be so solid, you're gonna have all the coolest tags and blah, blah, blah. I didn't really pay attention or I didn't really understand that a business owner is like, dude, I don't care. Like, is this going to make me more money? Is this going to get me more attention? When people come to my field, are they going to see me as the go to expert? Like, all right, okay, cool. That's what we're going to work on. Screw all this. Like, you know, the sales pitch of like thumbnails, like, no, nobody cares about that, right? At least like a, some, a business minded person's not going to genuinely care. They're just like, hey, I recorded my thing. Is it working? Yes or no? And then they don't like being sugarcoated either, right? So yeah, that's kind of a long, long winded answer. Uh, you know, for, for you there. No, I love it. And it's funny that you mentioned like the, the thumbnails and the stuff like that because so often we see people that are like, like we find they're either one way or the other. They have the absolute worst thumbnail on the planet. And we're like, hey, look, we can, we can help you with this. We're going to make this look like your, your, your, your ten year old niece didn't we're look, it currently looks like your ten year old niece did it. We're going to make it look better. Um, that's the one thing that we want to do. But then we get the other ones that get so in the weeds about it that are like, no, no, no, no move that just a couple of pixels over and we're like, no one like both people that are going to see this, that's not going to be the difference why they clicked on it. I get we want to make sure it's done at a very high level, and we want to make sure of that. Um, but in the same sense, we don't want to like, I don't want to spend six hours on a thumbnail because once again, the overall ROI on it, it's not the same ROI as it is for you as it is for MrBeast. Yeah. So it's different. Yeah. I do want to clarify. So like I, I do spend, I don't spend six hours, but I do spend a lot of the, the, the packaging. I don't like calling it packaging, but everybody can understand what I mean there. Right. Um, so I do pay attention to that. I pay attention to the title and the thumbnail, you know, again, for majority of the packaging production and stuff, but you're absolutely right. I'll drop a name. So somebody that I do know and communicate with Chris Williamson, he has one of the biggest shows ever, right? He I mean, he's on planes, right? He you go to um, I forgot where, but like he's on like big screens in the middle of a city. Like he's everywhere. He's huge. So maybe I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, but he will show like a Google drive and he'll show me like fifty thumbnails and they all almost look identical. And he's like, ah. He's like, I told them to move this one over. I like this one. And so he's in literally the minutia of all of it. And I'm like, oh, shoot, I, I want to be very successful, but I don't know if I can spend weeks on thumbnails like that. But, but I think for him, right. But, but for him, it does make sense because now we're talking about multi-millions from podcasts, right? Episodes, right? We're not talking about, you know, downloads anymore. Right now we're talking about like generational wealth coming from this show. I, again, I don't know what the perfect answer is, but I do know that you can't have your niece doing it. And then you also can't have that be the thing that deters you from just putting out more content. I wholeheartedly agree, and it's funny, it's that point of diminishing returns, which changes depending on where you're at on that scale. If this is your second podcast and your mom is both of the downloads that you have, then sure, the thumbnail is not going to matter. Those those first ones aren't going to matter as much. The. But when you're at Chris's spot, who I, I listen to him a fair bit once again, that that minutia on that does matter to an extent. Um, that could be a, I mean, that going right or wrong could be a ten thousand dollars difference. Yeah. Going right or wrong on your twenty download podcast is going to be a seven or eight dollars difference, depending on like, if you're paying the person that's creating the thumbnail by the hour or not. Right. Yeah. And that's, so that's the other thing too, though, is like, okay, at that level, like, just, just hire a world class thumbnail designer and call it a day and move on to the next thing. But yeah, when you're not at that level, it's the equivalent of like Getting so crazy into like the ingredients on like food where you're like, oh, no, it's, it's got a little bit of soy soybean oil. That's I'm out. That's it. I'm like, yeah, dude. But I think also, you still eating donuts every night. It's probably not the best move either. So like pick and choose your battles, right? Like have a little bit of soy oil if it's going to mean you're going to, you know, get in a little bit better shape, right? Sorry. That's just because again, I come from the fitness realm and I see this all day long where it's like, you're not totally getting bodybuilding shows because you had a little bit of soy. Okay. That's not the, that's not the big problem. The big problem. You know, the podcast still sucks, right? Right. That being said, and preventing podcasts from sucking. Yeah. Let's talk about like the business, the business impact of it. So I mean, you work with clients and I mean, you talk to them about how to attract new people, how to attract clients, the right people without being salesy. I like how do you like when you talk about the return on investment of a podcast? And it's something that we talk about with people all the time is what's the return on investment? Because this is not a spend the spend the upfront money on a podcast and instantly that money comes back two or three fold. This is a long burn. But like, how do you, how do you work with them on making sure that they see that there's a return on investment on that, and also making sure that they aren't looking at just the download numbers as the that, that like, I'm not Joe Rogan, I'm not Chris Williams. And like, I'm not there. No kidding. Um, how do you distract them from that or get them pointed in a better direction? I guess I should say. Yeah, I say the word that you almost just said and it's like, hey, let's not, let's not pay attention to these vanity metrics because again, a lot of people, they want to follow garyvee and they're like, hey, you know, let's, let's make like a hundred clips per episode and throw those up on social media because they get views. And I'm like, sick. No one's ever going to hire you from a thirty second video, but they might from a thirty minute video like that's now where we're like trying to get towards. So the, I guess the easiest way for somebody to understand this concept about the know, like, and trust factor is, okay, I don't know how long we've been running for, but let's say ten minutes ago, if you've been listening this whole time, you had no clue who I was, what I was about, what my voice sounded like, what I looked like. If you're watching on video now, you know what I kind of find funny. Now you know what my voice sounds like. Now you know that like, hey, on a a really big production, I might show up in a black hoodie and a black hat because I like to keep things a little bit more chill. Plus, I love hip hop. So like it's always going to kind of make its way into whatever I do, although I'm trying to get better, you know, at least shave today, but you now know a little bit more about me. So now let's take somebody that you don't know, but you're looking for a podcast producer right now. Who do you want to have a conversation with more? Somebody that has, we'll just say the exact same numbers that you've never spoken to, that you've never heard from, that you have no clue what they're all about. That person or me. And that sounded extremely arrogant didn't mean for that to happen. No, no, no, it's not because it is. It's you've built that relationship, right? So that's what I try to that message I try to convey to other podcasters is like, hey, dude, like, again, like what I say on my show, if this video gets one hundred views, I'm gonna celebrate like nobody's business because honestly, like my stuff shouldn't even hit that much, right? But if I can get somebody to just feel a little bit closer to me to where when they do decide to, you know, pull that lever of a podcast or like, hey, like we're actually getting some traction, but like, we're not sure what to do next. Maybe I'll get a consult call with Andrew. If that's what it can do, then that's amazing. But again, it goes back to that success metric. What would you consider a successful podcast? Because I get asked that a lot too. Like when does this thing become a success? I don't know, man. It's different for everybody. And I will give a very, very unique way that a podcast became successful. Uh, we did a three part series with an Hvac sales legend. Like this dude dropped so much knowledge. Um, for me as somebody that is not in that industry, I was like, oh my gosh, I'm going to implement all of this. It was really, really good. So the, the company that runs the podcast said, hey, we're actually not just going to like turn this into or we're not just going to be thankful for this really cool podcast. We're going to turn this into an entire training like regimen or whatever you want to call it, like a whole protocol. And so they took, they took this three part series episode and made like a week's worth of training. They implemented everything that they learned from this podcast. They measured their numbers from November of twenty twenty four and like, whatever, they just started tracking them back then. And then they started in November twenty twenty five in fifty days, utilizing everything that they learned from that podcast series. They generated over a million dollars in revenue. Now, again, that is very unique. That is not something by saying, oh, this podcast generated a million dollars from promo codes or from downloads or whatever. Like, no, that's not it. But would you say that this company would call their podcast a success? Yeah, I think they would. Right? Yeah. Because they implemented what they learned from their own podcast into their own business and generated over a million dollars. And what was cool is, um, so an Hvac, uh, if you have good weather, nobody's calling the company to fix anything, right? So they actually had less calls and they were down ten percent from where they were the year prior, implemented all this new training or whatever you want to call it. And now they like, like, oh my God, this is amazing. We're going to just keep doing that. So again, their success metric was literally just, hey, we want to educate our team members. They don't care about going viral. They don't care about, uh, you know, any of it. They just like, hey, we just want to meet our team members where they are. And we just happen to know that they listen to podcasts. So instead of giving them like another training that they're going to ignore or a PDF download that they're never going to, they're never going to look at. How about instead we just, hey, if you're in a truck, throw on this podcast because we think it's going to help. And boom, it's like, oh my gosh, that was huge. So yeah, they would consider that a success. Uh, it's so funny because we even work, we've worked with a couple of CEOs that were, they're doing internal podcasts and it's just I'm like, I've, I've made an example with this one CEO. I introduced him to one of his employees and the employee had no idea who he was. And he looked at me like just ashamed afterwards. And I said, yeah, this guy could recognize your voice if he'd ever heard it before. And so we've worked on, say, same idea once again, it's a short podcast. It doesn't take much. And it doesn't necessarily say, hey, look, this is going out and going to get us a big sponsorship deal. But if it gets half a percent out of each and every single one of your employees, right, well, that's a pretty good deal. Um, yeah. Yeah, the ROI on that is going to be huge. Um, with that, you've worked with some interesting people. If I, if my notes are correct, like Stone Cold Steve Austin, um, like, and you mentioned Chris and people like that. This is the question that I've been so like, so excited to ask you about this. Is there a behind the scenes trait or habit that you see with between some of these, like high level people that when the mics are off or the mics are on that there's this one thing that there's this thread in between them that someone could use in their podcasting. I don't want to say their podcast program, their podcast presentation, their podcast antics, like however you want to word it. Yeah, man, that is actually a really tough question to answer. Um, we'll exclude Chris Williamson out of it because again, like I said, he's like really deep into everything. Yes. Um, but someone like Stone cold. So I was showing him what a Zoom H4 recorder was like. He was like, what the heck is that thing? And I'm like, put the microphones and you hit record. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. Um, knobs and buttons. Yeah. He's like, whatever, dude. I just, you know, I, whenever I sit down and somebody else pushes the buttons for me, um, my buddy Mark Bell. So he's the one that I basically, I started Mark Bell's power project with and, you know, grew that to being the monster that it is. He doesn't know how to use a laptop. He walks in and I made the studio so he can just walk in and then just speak and then walk out and then just he doesn't know what happens after that. He doesn't even know if any of them ever get published. Um, so what, what I do see with the Uber successful people, um, Bedros um, you know, uh, yeah, stone cold. I'm kind of drawing a blank on other people here. They, they are not the ones that are also executing everything. Their genius comes from what they currently do. It's not from like, hounding their thumbnail designer. Right? Like. They will bring someone in that knows what the heck they're doing and then say, hey, you're going to do it better than I ever will. So I'm not even going to bug you about it because I've seen the opposite where somebody will, um, you know, kind of be the person that like, like, okay, cool, this episode's done. All right. It doesn't get published for another two weeks. So I'm going to give you some feedback that needs to be changed. Same person. Oh, it goes up tomorrow. Hey, this is really good. Let's publish it. Like they just want their two cents thrown in just to be thrown in. The ones that just let other people cook and just do their thing happened to be a little bit more successful than the ones that are trying to, like, manipulate and give their two cents every single step of the way. Um, and again, I think those are the, again, at the, like the top where they have that ability to sort of delegate and, um, not, not that cost is ever like a non like non-factor, right? But they have the resources to hire out. So I think the more that they are able to just say like, hey, like you're going to do better than me and, you know, go for it. Those ones seem to be a lot more successful, I guess for someone like me, if I was to like kind of try to drop it down a little bit, it's sort of being okay with like eighty percent of what I would do, right? So like when I hire somebody on my team or your, your audio engineer, okay, one hundred percent is what I would do. Can you get me eighty, eighty five percent? Like, ah, like, I really don't like that plosive, but this is not worth it. I'll let you like you're good. Thank you so much for that edit. You're the freaking best at it. So being able to let go of some of those slightly imperfections just to keep moving forward, that's kind of always been my thing too, is like, let's not move backwards. Just always move forward. That thumbnail kind of sucked, but hey, the next one, let's just do better because, okay, Monday's episode kind of flopped. Like, well, we got one coming out tomorrow, like Wednesday. Like, just forget about it. Let's just keep moving forward. And then if something catches, we can go back. But, um, long winded way of answering it, I would just say they let experts do what, you know, what they're good at. And they try not to just like manipulate every tiny little aspect of every single second of every episode. And they just focus on their craft and they focus on delivering their message and they just keep moving forward. I truly love that answer because it's something that we talk about all the time is I, in fact, I've presented to companies on this saying, um, we, we were, we were looking at, uh, working as a, basically a fractional marketing company for someone. And I said, great. I said, we've got people in place to do all these jobs. Do you want to hire one generalist or would you rather hire eight specialists? And they kind of looked at me and they're like, um, okay, so it changes that equation. And I love how you put that because yeah, it's letting people do their thing that, that they're an expert in. Um, the, the next one, as we start to kind of close out here, the, the future for like, I, I ask a lot of people, like, what do they see for future plans or what do they see for the future of podcasting? I like in looking at your history and everything like that, I want to go a different direction because you truly love the craft. Um, you, you like the conversations. You, you like just the, the, the aura of podcasting and what it can do and like the tool that it is. Like, what do you like? How are you evolving to make sure that you stay in that we've talked, I mean, we briefly ahead of time talked about some AI tools that we both use and share and things of that nature. As I as AI does more things, creeps into more areas like what are you doing to stay connected and loving the craft. Yeah. Oh dude. I do genuinely love podcasting when I discovered them. I don't even know what year, but like, it was actually, uh, the Sklar brothers. I don't know if you remember them. They. Yeah, dude. So Earwolf and all those comedians back in the day, like when I discovered like that, there were like these, like, I'll say factions almost, but they were like these, you know, uh, publishing houses or whatever you want to call them for, for podcasts. I was like, oh my God, this is the coolest thing I've ever like, this is amazing. So like, I basically turned on a podcast one day and haven't turned them off since. So I love the art, the craft, all of it. It is amazing. I love having the free flowing conversations, although if you want to have that and then also question why it's not converting for your business, like you can't have the two like, right? Like if, if you want to help a certain demographic of people talk to that person, not even the people talk to that one person. Yep. Um, sorry to get sidetracked, but no, you're good. For for me, with the AI stuff like you and I just talked about, like, I love it. I use it every day. I try to get my daughter to use it. She's about to graduate high school. And this conversation has like, it started with like, hey, like, how often are you using AI? And she's like, what is AI? I'm like, you're seventeen years old. And like, if I was your age in high school, I would never be doing my homework and I'd be charging my friends to do their homework because I would never touch it. But side tangent there. Same. Yeah, I love AI too. I think it's, I know it gets a lot of hate for all the environmental stuff, but my thing that where I plan or where I think all of this is going to evolve with the introduction of AI and AI getting a lot easier for everybody to use. One is what we're doing right now, having a real conversation, but then doing that in person. Um, I love virtual podcasting. I'm going to do that for the rest of my life, but I'm also going to then try my hardest to get up on stages and meet people and talk face to face, shake hands, um, do all the stuff that introverted Andrew does not love to do because I love hanging out in my studio. I'm like a little hermit crab. I don't come out very often. Um, I enjoy doing what I love to do, right? Like this is, this is incredible that you're in Ohio. I'm in Sacramento, California. Like we get to hang out today, but how much cooler would it be if we were both going to something where we get to hang out in person? Or you and I both hold a keynote, you know, on stage together, answering questions, that sort of thing, because it's a skill to be able to hold a conversation. Having the attention span to hang out with somebody for an hour is unfortunately a skill these days. With the with the rise of short form content, which I freaking hate and I wish it would go away. YouTube shorts is the worst thing that's ever happened to humanity. Um, I would say developing the skill to be able to communicate in person is going to be the thing that separates you from the rest of the world, which is great because a lot of business owners and CEOs and those, those types, they already have that they just don't have the ability to do what we're doing right now. But if I can get good at that, because what I would hate is if somebody listens to this, they talk to me in person and like, I just, I'm, I'm awkward. I can't communicate very well. You know, I'm like, like, I would never want that person to walk away from a conversation to say, wow, he was, he was really different in person, you know, on camera. He's so active, he's so lively, but in person, he was kind of like a bag of marbles, like, I don't want that. So for me, where I think this is going to evolve into is, you know, you already see companies saying like, hey, look at our behind the scenes, we don't use AI because now that's like a promotional piece. So I think being able to prove, you know, what the hell you're talking about without the use of AI is going to go a long way. So that's where I'm kind of like hedging my bets is not anti AI, but just having the ability to do both and do it in person. So that's kind of where like I'm hoping things get to. I, I love it and I feel the same way because yes, this is this one on one conversation. And I agree, like the two of us sitting in one of our studios would be amazing because we would just first off, it would be a seven and a half hour podcast. Yeah. But yeah, no second off. I mean, the fact that technology has done this so we can have a good conversation. And the fact that, I mean, this has been a great conversation And opposite ends of the country, for all intents and purposes. But we're able to we're able to connect and do this. Um, that being said, last question, I always like to ask if you can give one piece of advice to a business owner or a marketer or just anyone that's involved in like our, like their podcast has to, has to have an ROI. What's that one piece of advice you're going to give them? Focus on the podcast. A lot of people will love to publish pieces of content and then say, oh my gosh, look at all the cool stuff we can do with this piece of content. We're going to publish this on social media. We're going to post this on Instagram, TikTok, and all these other things. Like, okay, cool. Do that if you want to boost up your social media. If you want to boost your business and your podcast, focus on your podcast. As stupid as that sounds. what a lot of people do is they get distracted. They want to turn their podcast into a library of assets instead of treating their podcast as their number one marketing asset, because that's exactly what it is. So if you want to learn how to do that more, hit up Josh or me and we'll tell you how to do that. I was just about to say that this has been awesome. Like, where can people find you if they want to talk to you? Where can people find you? Yeah. So, uh, at pursue podcasting dot com is probably like the cleanest, easiest way if you are on social, the ugly way. Social media, uh, at I am Andrew Z on everything. I just started LinkedIn. Um, I, I don't know what the heck I'm doing there, but I'm on there as well. Andrew Zaragoza. I don't you found me. I don't know how to find anybody, but, um, uh, I'm trying to get better. I'm trying to put on my big boy pants, you know, and, um, be better at communicating with the people that I'm going to say need my help, but nobody needs my help. But like, I can make a big impact for a lot of business owners. And so I'm trying to be more present for them in places that they already are. So yeah, I would say, um, I mean, shoot, Andrew at pursue podcasting dot com. Um, is the, the, uh, the email address. So you can hit me up there anytime you want and then yeah, social media and all that fun stuff. Wonderful. Andrew. This has been awesome. Thank you very much. I appreciate the time. Um, for everyone else out there, uh, I'm going to take a couple of minutes. I've got, I did take notes again and I'm going to summarize this and I will be right back. Stay tuned. Andrew was super interesting to me. And when I, when we connected, we actually connected via Podmatch. And then obviously LinkedIn. And he was super interesting to me up front because of his background. I mean, he really started out in big podcasts and then he came to smaller podcasts. And what's so interesting about that? And he, I mean, he never directly said it, but he very much alluded to it. It is a very, very different game. Um, the fact that he talked about like sponsorship deals and things of that nature on these bigger podcasts, and this has to go out at this time because of this and this, we've got this commitment to this thing and that it is a very different game because once again, and this is what I mean, I'm going to go back to the episode that Dave Jackson talked about, knowing your why. Why are you doing this? If you don't have the why, then you are going to try and be like the big podcasters. And if you've got thirty downloads per episode, guess what? The things that work for the big podcasters are not going to work for you. It's just not going to work. That's why it was. He had to make that pivot to adjust for doing things as like for smaller podcasters to build them from the ground up and to realize that they had a very different why. It wasn't about the sponsorship deal. It was about trying to get four more people in their doors per week or per month, or even per year in some cases. To me, that is like the biggest shift. And the problem is, is when you listen to some of these big quote unquote influencers, they're giving you big influencer advice. I'll make an example out of this here. And this is why taking the big advice isn't always that great. I lift weights, as you can see though, I'm a pretty average sized guy. I'm also forty seven years old. If I took lifting advice from Mr. Olympia, how do you think that's going to go for me if I tried to lift their weights if I tried. It's not going to go well. I'm. I'm going to get hurt and I'm going to wonder, like, why am I doing this? Because once again, it's a different why. I'm not trying to be Mr. Olympia. I'm trying to like be able to get up off the floor when I'm sixty years old. There's that. So once again, it's making sure we're using the correct why to guide our podcast in the right direction. Your why, and therefore the things that you are going to do is going to be very, very different than someone like Gary Vee. Keep that in mind. The other thing that I want to look at too, is we talk all the time about like the, the, the Instagram and the, the Facebook and the, the reels, putting those things out like on TikTok. And that once again, with podcasting, you're building on your own platform essentially there. You're building your people with the clips in that you're building on someone else's platform. They control it. Someone else can just come along and push a button. And you never existed, at least according to them. To me, that's dangerous. Now, why do we still put the content there? Because it's visible there. Someone's going to search it there. And that's why we like, love to put out that constant contact there, that constant content there. That way when someone looks for something, you've got fresh stuff coming out, which is awesome. But just realize that if you focus on building that, that can be taken away like that. And that's something that you should be concerned about. Because let's face it, social media doesn't work the way it did seven, ten, fifteen years ago. It is a very, very different game now. So once again, use social media. Don't let it use you. You once again, it's not the same game We've got some more great guests to come. So do me a favor, make sure you subscribe if you think this conversation would be helpful to another podcast, or if there's someone that you know that's wanting to start a podcast, by all means, we would love to hear from you. Paddle sniper productions dot com. There's a contact form there. You can also sign up for a fifteen minute no pitch podcast consult where guess what? We will look at your podcast and give you good suggestions on how you can move things forward. No pitch, nothing involved like that. We just want to help. I am going to ask you to do one thing, though. Do me a favor. Take care of yourself if you can take care of someone else. Also, I will see you very, very soon.