Transforming Podcast Discoverability with Lucas Dickey and Deepcast.fm

This episode explores how Lucas Dickey and his company, Deepcast.fm, are revolutionizing the way podcasts are discovered and consumed using AI-driven technology.

1. AI-driven Discovery: Deepcast.fm uses AI to revolutionize how listeners find and interact with podcasts, addressing the issue of discoverability in a saturated market.
2. Technological Shifts: The discussion highlights the shift from outdated technologies like RSS and XML to more dynamic and interconnected systems that cater to modern user needs.
3. Global Podcast Growth: Lucas discusses the explosive growth of podcast audiences worldwide, particularly in regions like Latin America and Asia, underscoring the global appeal and expanding reach of podcasting.
4. Content Accessibility: By structuring data from unstructured podcast content, Deepcast.fm makes it easier for users to find relevant content quickly, akin to searching a well-indexed database.
5. Future Trends: The conversation forecasts significant advancements in podcast technology and audience engagement, driven by AI and machine learning.

1. Introduction to Lucas Dickey and Deepcast.fm

Lucas Dickey introduces Deepcast.fm, an AI-enhanced platform for podcast discovery. The platform aims to simplify finding and selecting podcasts in a market flooded with options.

• Lucas Dickey: "Deepcast.fm thinks of itself as an AI supercharged discovery platform."

2. Challenges in Podcast Technology

Dicusses the limitations of current podcast distribution technologies and how Deepcast.fm addresses these through innovative solutions.

• Lucas Dickey: "We're still using RSS for distribution, which is a 30-year-old technology."

3. The Future of Podcast Discovery

Explores the future directions of podcasting technology, focusing on AI's role in enhancing discoverability and listener engagement.

• Lucas Dickey: "It's all about discovery, distillation, and dissemination."

4. Global Trends and Growth

Highlights the global increase in podcast consumption and the potential for future growth, especially in non-English speaking markets.

• Lucas Dickey: "Podcasting went from 7 million monthly active listeners to about 500 million."

5. Enhancing Listener Experience

Details how Deepcast.fm improves the podcast listening experience by allowing users to navigate directly to content of interest within episodes.

• Lucas Dickey: "We are aiming to deliver that with sort of just build versions of episodes."

1. Explore AI Tools for Content Discovery: Utilize AI-driven platforms like Deepcast.fm to overcome the overwhelm of too many choices.
2. Stay Updated on Tech Advances: Keep abreast of technological advancements in podcasting to leverage new tools for better content engagement.
3. Consider Global Audience Trends: Tailor content to global trends, recognizing the significant growth in podcast listenership worldwide.
4. Focus on Content Structuring: Structure podcast content to make it easily searchable and accessible, enhancing user experience.
5. Engage with Emerging Markets: Pay attention to emerging markets, especially in regions experiencing rapid digital and mobile growth.

"It's these knowledge graph relationships that tie all these episodes together and enable users to discover each other's new content somewhat serendipitously or organically."

This episode with Lucas Dickey, CEO and Co-Founder of Deepcast.fm, explores the platform's mission to revolutionize podcast discovery and engagement through AI-driven indexing and structuring of audio content.

Lucas shares his extensive background in software product management and passion for podcasting, discussing the challenges faced by both listeners and podcasters in navigating the vast podcast landscape. He emphasizes the importance of leveraging AI tools, prioritizing execution over perfection, and adopting product-led growth strategies for startups, while also offering insights into customer acquisition and team building on this week's episode of Founders In LA.

People

Lucas Dickey, Ethan Cole

Companies

Deepcast.fm

Content Warnings:

None

Lucas Dickey

So these sort of like knowledge graph relationships that tie all these episodes together that enable users to discover each other or new content somewhat serendipitously or organically.

Ethan Cole

Hey everybody, thank you for joining us and welcome to the Founders in LA podcast. I'm your host, Ethan Cole, and this is an opportunity to shine the spotlight through a product lens on some of the exceptional founders we have as part of the LA community in an unedited one take organic conversation. With us today in the studio is Lucas Dickey. Thanks for coming down the studio today Lucas. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Lucas Dickey

I appreciate it. This is going to be a great one. He's got a background in radio, works on a podcast program project, so this is going to be a good one. But first, a word from our sponsors. Founders and only is brought to you by Nearshur Nearshare is a trailblazer in nearshore outsourcing and staff augmentation.

Ethan Cole

With over 15 years of experience offering exceptional latin american software development, data, product and design talent for us projects, Nearshare has revolutionized the way companies scale their teams. They stand apart with 50% female leadership, are trusted by companies large and small, and have been helping us customers grow since before nearsharing was cool. Discover how nearshare can power your tech goals and help you stay lean while scaling fast. Learn more at www.nearsure.com that's www dot nar sire dot gov dot. We're also brought to you by Unida Club Unida Club is a co working space that sets itself apart with locations in El Segundo, Manhattan beach and Hermosa.

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Learn more at www dot unidaclub that's www dot Unita dot Cl U B. Our guest today is Lucas Dickey. He is the CEO and co founder of Deepcast FM. Lucas, I guess in an intro I. Mentioned you work with podcasts and not specifically with your own podcast, but in the space.

This is kind of like a meta episode for founders. It is indeed. Can you please just give us a 32nd description of deep cast? Yeah, so deep cast is, I think, of it as AI supercharged discovery platform. So there's a lot of legacy technology within the world of podcasting, arguably one of the most archaic technologies when it comes to media.

Lucas Dickey

We're still using RSS for distribution, which is 30 year old technology, I think, for delivering metadata. It's in an XML format, which technologists would say, we don't do xml anymore, it's JSON or some other file structure. Audio is through a host distributor model that is somewhat like a combination in other technology spaces. It's like a content delivery network meets an ad tech because they do dynamic ad insertion meets, you know, they're just confluence of different things. It's just a, it's a weird business relative to the world of studio, you know, film and television or music with publishing and labels.

So anyways, yes, podcasting has a need for some change here, and in particular because I got it off of the 32nd version of what this is. It's all about discovery, distillation, and dissemination. I'm having a lot of fun with those three ds lately. So discovery, on behalf of listeners like listeners, are inherently looking for nude podcast to listen to. And so you are obviously taking part of this trend with the show, which podcasting went from 7 million monthly active listeners to about 500 million monthly active listeners in the last six years, which is a phenomenal growth curve.

And trajectory is still, that will go another half billion in the next two to three years, with a lot of growth happening in Latin America, with Spanish and Portuguese. Indonesia was one of the fastest growing markets. Korea seven x ed over the last year in terms of podcast consumption. So it's definitely hit an inflection point. And a lot of other secular trends with like, mobile adoption and access to the Internet on mobile and a bunch of emerging markets.

I can go on and on about sort of like the mixtures of all these technologies hitting at the same time. But inherently, it's people like you and me. I'm subscribing to ten podcasts. I personally subscribe to about 45 podcasts, but in a given day, which one do I decide I want to listen to? So I also end up having sort of analysis paralysis because I've gone through the discovery loop, but now I need something more like the distillation.

How do I decide I want to listen to that four and a half hour Lex Friedman episode that just dropped? Or I should be jumping into Trump on trial from NPR, or I should be jumping over to, you know, Huberman lab because I've got, you know, GI issues or whatever, and I want to listen to a story about, you know, it's hard to figure out what to listen to at any given moment because there are no previews or trailers for the most part, within the world of podcasting. So we are aiming to deliver that with sort of just build versions of episodes. Some folks have looked at them and said, this reminds me of IMDb. Another person looked at it and said, it's kind of like genius.com, with music, lyrics and who the producers are behind it.

And when pitching the venture capital community, I often say it's kind of like IMDb meetsgenius.com. And if you're a fan of sort of AI backed search engines, perplexity, because it's beyond sort of Google for podcasts because. Because we do a bunch of other interaction mechanisms there. So that was way longer than 30 seconds. But moral of the story is we want listeners to be able to find stuff and more deeply engage with it and in turn help podcasters like you be discovered.

So it's brand awareness, brand affinity, introducing users to you in sort of a serendipitous fashion. It could be that I discovered this episode because I'm inherently interested in podcasting and entrepreneurship. There happens to be a topic label on the page that is entrepreneurship. I can use that to navigate to other shows and episodes about entrepreneurship, or you're on the episode, you have another business. We identify you as a named entity, and Ethan happens to also be a specialist in something else.

We can use that to see where Ethan showed up as a guest on a show. So these sort of like knowledge graph relationships that tie all these episodes together that enable users to discover each other or new content somewhat serendipitously or organically. So there's push models and pull models at the same time. That's amazing. It's awesome to be a part of metaversion of this.

Ethan Cole

It's awesome to be a part of this explosion of podcasting through founders and even our little podcast. I call it little, but our podcast is dedicated to Los Angeles and looking at the analytics, we're streamed in, I think, 22 countries right now. It's wild to see the proliferation of it. And to your point, you bring an interesting context to it in terms of the scale of not only the amount of information that's being provided by each podcast, but kind of a lack of indexing of each episode, right? So it's thinking about all these podcasts and myself include, I have a description of it, but going through the deep cast interface interface, you know, I could see that the level of scrutiny that each episode is given on episodes on your platform.

And it really does a good job of telling you what's exactly on it. So there's hours and hours and hours and hundreds, thousands, I don't know. You probably know better. There's literally 75 million hour of podcast episodes recorded. So how do you get through all of that?

And it's not like, it's not like IMDb or DVD's back in day where there was chapters and they were able to index it based on these things that happened at this time. A lot of it is just kind of. I guess we're gonna go take a step, take a step into the nerd. I'm like unstructured data where it's just like you don't know what everything is and what you're doing is structuring the data. You're structuring the data so that there's discoverability, so there's able to connect the dots through an interfacing.

Oh, I mentioned I'm interested in this and this. And it's not just from a kind of superficial title or summary level. You can actually dive into the conversations themselves for sure. Yeah, I was going to say, you and I were talking prerecording about sort of history podcasting a little bit. But one of the things I didn't discuss with you is like, because podcasting is an old technology that leverages XML through an RSS feed.

Lucas Dickey

Apple in the early days said you inherently have to limit the amount of information you put in these fields. So if you want to send over the title, it has to be under n characters, summary has to be under y characters. Well, if you're describing a four and a half hour episode, your lex, and you're interviewing Benjamin Netanyahu, it's kind of hard to cram that into an interesting form letter or form field that only allows for 1000 characters. So it's archaic technology. And then we're saying, okay, the bulk of what's interesting is oftentimes not in there.

So how do we extract it from it and how do we structure the data and how do we present it to users? So, like, for every one of our episode pages, this one will be on there imminently. We do things like, what's a three paragraph summary of what we discussed? What are eight key takeaways that either you as the host or me as the guest said? What are some of the key quotes that we said that we extract and imminently will be given context for it as well?

So that sometimes quotes are good punch lines but you're missing the t up for it. So we'll start having the t up as well as the punchline. And to your point, we also chapterize everything. So we're structuring conversations thematically as you navigate, again with key episode takeaways, summaries, and quotes within the chapterized version of it as well. And doing part of this is the beauty of the generative AI era that we've entered the epoch time of roughly three GPT 3.5 and chat GPT.

The other is speech to text, becoming significantly more effective in terms of the quality of transcriptions and then the cost dropping. So it dropped almost in order of magnitude two years ago. It dropped about another 50% at the beginning of this year. You got podcasting as something that there's both interest in from the sort of consumption and generation perspective, because I talked about the growth from 70 million to 500 million on listeners. But podcast creation, ten x'ed over that period of time, as well as brand equity builders who are trying to tell a story, which is why you see so many branded podcasts.

Blackrock will do one, and then American Express does one, et cetera. Or you have individuals who are creating personal brand equity, or you just have people who love stories, or you have people who are diehard fans of some super niche thing that the Internet makes possible, right? So given all of that, how do you find sort of like signal versus noise? But the difference between signal and noise is different for every listener perspectively, right? So we're building a platform that somehow makes that easier, regardless of whether you're looking for, like, a serendipitous push model where, like, we surface it proactively to you based upon some sort of behavioral mechanism, or you're explicitly looking through things, and you were talking about sort of like, key keywords that are in podcasts.

We're ingesting data, and to get technical for a second, it's going into a vector storage. And so we're doing what modern llms interact with these structured data sets, these vector structured data sets. We can go in and you can type something like, how do I improve my gut biome? What's the latest with the Trump criminal proceedings? Those words don't have to have shown up in the keywords of the metadata.

Instead, it's coming from the transcript and some variant thereof, trying to make it, you know, as, you know, possible for listeners to discover it through every mechanism so they don't just get stuck on the same ten shows. So it's almost like a natural language processing where you can ask a podcast, I'll call it an aggregator, but kind of like a guide, almost explorer. Yeah, I think of as like a canonical source or a compendium. Or it's Wikipedia meets llms and generative AI and podcasting and podcasting. And we do have a forthcoming, you know, even stepping one step back, like our mission statement for this is really about audio.

It's like how do you unlock all the information that exists within audio, which is inherently a non indexable medium. To your point around, like how do I find this stuff? Well, it's trapped within audio, but very like, you know, how do I cook my Thanksgiving dinner? What are the first steps to finding product market fit? Like I could go on and on about these topical things that like the experts in almost any field are visiting podcast hosts right now.

So Jonathan Haight, social psychologist, has a book around the anxious generation. He's doing a tour. You know, Walter Isaacson releases his book on Elon Musk. He's doing a tour. You end up getting some of this like really compelling information that doesn't exist anywhere else.

It's not in print media. If print media is really thing anymore, sort of like the digital equivalent of it, it's within podcasting, which is in an audio form. So how do I get it out of audio so that I can index it so I can make it more accessible to others in sort of whatever modality is like optimized for that individual which goes to the back end of this business, which is the ethans of the world and founders in LA. How do I find net new revenue for my show? I'm running sponsorships, I'm doing dynamic ad insertions.

Is there anything else I could be doing? Well, if we have a browser and a native app based interface, we can do display ads for you, we can do video ads for you, we can do highly intentful affiliate ads for you. You and I talked about off camera Spotify for podcasters. They actually have like an affiliate revenue model. You could potentially, I could say when I mention that that is now a monetizable event.

And between our platform kind of taking YouTube structured fee, I intend on passing revenues back to, or we intend on passing revenues back to the podcasters as another way for them to identify new revenues for us them. So it's really about thinking about the podcaster and the listener because it's this simpatico sort of virtuous circle relationship between the two. And they both have to be happy. So I have to super serve both of their audiences to make this thing work, ultimately. So I have to ask more about your background because you are clearly very well versed in audio format and podcasting and down to the technical level as.

We'Re getting into JSON versus XML and vector storage. Yeah, vector storage and getting into LM. So like, you know, beyond kind of surface level for people who are just total novices. So I gotta ask, like, how did you find yourself in deepcast? Where did this, where this idea come from?

Ethan Cole

And did you see yourself sitting in this position? Yeah, it's a good question. Very circuitous. I mean, I have a 20 plus year history of software product management and I've done b, two b and b, two c and b, two b, two b and b, two b, two c. Like basically every business model across something like twelve verticals now.

Lucas Dickey

But the first ten years of my career was all in digital media and specifically digital music. So part of the team that launched digital music at Amazon and then internationalized it into Europe and into Asia and then was part of sort of like the decision inflection point of should we move from an ownership model to an access model, which Spotify was spearheading in Scandinavia at the time, but hadn't made it domestically to the US just yet? I advocated that we should be switching sooner versus later. Amazon wasn't quite ready to make that jump yet. So I said, well, at the very least, one of our value props as a company is to create value and convenience.

So if I buy music from Amazon, I should be able to listen to it on any of my devices and I shouldn't have to go through this burden of sideloading it with USB, etcetera. So it happened to be at the same time that the Android G one was launching. So the first Android device, the iPhone, was live, and it said, okay, if you're buying an MP3 from us at Amazon, can we put it into your cloud storage locker in the sky? At which point you could download it to any device directly from that interface or play it through a browser based interface or a native mobile interface. So I've been building sort of catalog merchandising systems almost my entire life.

I've built, I think, 14 different media players across six different operating systems. And that's not including browser based interfaces. Had created sort of Pandora like service with digital music licensing combined with technology that Spotify ultimately bought. This company called the Echo Nest. So first ten years was all digital media, and then I got into a phase of my career where I had ad tech and Martech.

So programmatic buying of media through demand side platforms, side platforms of which there's a lot of this in the LA market. So the trade desk is here. And many other folks went through that period and ultimately hit my own element of sort of entrepreneurship. After a few other media adjacent businesses where I launched a company in La called Furnish in 2017, we went through Techstars. That business ended up getting sold off June of last year.

So I was in the market sort of debating what I wanted to be next and who I wanted to be next. Doing a bit of thought partnership with a general partner at Okapi Ventures named John Waller. And he'd been thinking about this sort of like, podcasting challenge for a long time. He's like, I'm stuck in this rut. I know I want to listen to more.

The only way I discover new content is through word of mouth. If someone sends me a message, it's half the time I ignore them because I pull up the episode and I see that it's four and a half hours long with Sam Harris on, you know, making sense. And he's like, mm, I don't think I'm ready to commit to four and a half hours yet. So how do I, you know, he goes, there's got to be a better way for this. And he kept on using Google for podcasts as an analogy.

And I said, I think it's deeper than that, right? But it is inherently taking audio and moving into textual modality so that you could structure it and then run it through llms to generate a bunch of output. So we had secular trends of AI tech, which I really wanted to get into generative AI, having done early stage like ML and data analysis through Amazon, like, very well known for personalization and how it uses ML for those things. But how I take this generative AI era and specifically multimodal, I like the idea of doing it with audio and text. And then how do we start auto generating quotes embedded within images so we can distribute it on your behalf, Ethan, to all of your social channels through a social calendaring application?

Well, all of that is just multimodal and generative AI. So it was kind of a confluence of tech plus my interest in podcasts. I probably listen to two to 4 hours of podcasts a day, but I listen at two x speed. So cut that in half, right? So it's driving because we're in LA or it's walking the dog or something like that.

I get a lot of consumption in. So, long story short, one might say I have the founder product fit between my digital media experience across a bunch of different platforms. I can talk about audio compression and lossless versus lossy and codec types and things like that, if it matters, because I did ad tech, things like content delivery networks and dynamic ad insertions and the Internet Advertising Bureau and all those rules is secondhand for me. So it was okay, I'm done with my previous business, which was furniture rental. So I had warehouses, drivers, refurbishers, the whole gamut.

Logistics and operations just covered all of the physical stuff. And that was the first business I had done that had all the physical components, and I was ready to get back to developers, designers, customers. Like, how do we make this inherently? Yes, there will be business development and sales and a bunch of other things, but the core constituency is really designers and developers optimizing a product for end users and b, two b through the podcasters. That's kind of the origin story for it, passionate about it, really love what I'm doing.

And then because we are in this genai, at its early inflection point, I get to consume that from the fire hose and somewhat justify it, because where does it have an application with what. We'Re building today and with you, there absolutely is applications. The generative AI for you isn't slapping a chatbot onto an existing product or technology and calling it AI. The technology used allows much like other great uses of AI, it almost democratizes certain things. So there's some podcast out there that do just absolutely kill it with their indexing.

Ethan Cole

So, like, Lenny's podcast is a good example. Massive. Yeah. Such a solid job of just not only providing a description, but also here, here, like interesting time, time stamps that you might want to look at kind. Of deep link into.

Yeah. But then deep cast FM goes and. Says, this is for everybody. Starts to democratize that starts to give the opportunity to have that level of attention to the description of it. And so taking like this, yeah, this massive, you know, somewhere sometimes, you know, two to 4 hours of just like words and conversation and really allowing you to sharpshoot.

Hey, I want to listen, I want to hear this part of this podcast and allows it to be across the board, not just kind of like the top, not even 1%, the top zero five.

Lucas Dickey

Yeah. I think if you look at anyone in sort of like top 500 podcasts, there's generally a production team of some sort behind them, or it may be after the fact, like this really popular podcast, which is conversations with Tyler, which is the economist out of George Mason. You know, he's got grad students who can come in after the fact and clean up his notes for him and add links as necessary. Not everyone must be nice. Exactly.

Not everyone has that. So deep cast will inherently do that for everyone. Now we're doing it through a centralized interface, but there's no reason why you, as Ethan, can't take any one of those parts and use it to distribute across your social channels. And like you can say, Lucas was on and here was his eight key takeaways. And if you're contemplating what is a minimum viable versus minimum lovable, here was a great key takeaway that came from it, I'm finding right now.

So I actually did a business for about ten months that I was a CPO of. There was a rental tech business, and so I followed a lot of sort of like buying properties and flipping them, or what it meant to be a manager of 50 doors versus being a large. You know, that's not considered a large property. You have 50 properties. But, like, real estate investment trusts, added a bunch of those podcasts recently to the corpus.

And I was just going through some of these key takeaways. I was like, man, there's just nuggets in here, right? And all of which is, you know, because a lot of us discover through social channels as well as search, we're creating nuggets that in turn to your point, like it makes indexable and makes it easier to discover Ethan and Ethan's guests. And what are those guests interested? Lainey's got the benefit for those who don't know, you know, career pm guy and kind of product God.

He had written materials well before, so he's got a lot of other indexed content, which inherently helps him with the SEO gods. But what about the rest of the 99.999% who don't have that? So I do like the angle of democratization that you're speaking to because I think that's definitely a big part of what we're doing. So you have founder market fit, which is so critical, especially these days. How did you go about identifying your first customers?

Ethan Cole

How did you get your first customers? So we're interesting. So we only came out of beta mode about five weeks ago, and I still consider strongly in beta mode where we're kind of hash buildinpublic in the whatever AI cycle we're in now, where a lot of people are building their products in public and just iterating really quickly and getting as many feedback loops. And I've always had a preference for building in public. It's very different than sort of like earlier days at Amazon or even today at Apple, where everything's kind of kept until the very last bright, shiny moment.

Lucas Dickey

They get the benefit of healthy cash balances that they can do that and. Marketing teams that can blow it up all at once. Yeah. So in our case, we don't have that benefit. So we're releasing it and getting rapid feedback from users.

And a lot of it is identifying folks that we did customer research development within the early days and going back and validating. Okay, we have semantics search now. Does it work for you? Well, semantic search, so it's vector based search. It doesn't yet have the integration with LLM, so it's not summarizing it cleanly for you.

Okay, cool. We need to focus on that because certain people have indicated, so it goes to the standards for like, prioritization of you're getting input from users. How do you decide what happens to happen has to happen sooner versus later. But a lot of it's happening organically through podcasting fans. And we are doing the way I thought about this business from day one is like a product led growth business.

We should be spending almost nothing on user acquisition other than whatever we might have to do in the early days to sort of stoke interest. Because if I give you, Ethan, a short, deep cast custom URL to integrate into your show notes and your episode notes, inherently, someone's going through those looking for clicks to find us. Or you put it in your link and bio on Twitter and LinkedIn, folks find us. You borrow a quote that we presented and you feel maybe a gesture of goodwill makes sense to link back to us to do so. And I'm already linking to you anyway, so it's almost like the late nineties era of link exchange, where we're all scratching each other's back to help each other.

So rising tide floats all boats. And I'm hoping, sort of, not that hope is a strategy here, but like, as a tactic, there's a lot of product led growth motions here. Users, listeners, independent of the podcasters. We inherently want to share the things we learn. This is like natural and sort of human nature, but also sort of, we all live very publicly on social.

So I read something and then I listened to something, and I want to be able to go to LinkedIn and say, here's this tasty little nugget that Elon said when he was a guest on so and so show. It's really hard to do that when it's trapped in audio only. We now make that possible through our interface, and so folks can advocate for it, which inherently should lead to visitation back to us again. So there's PLG motions in place both with the listeners as well as the podcasters, and we're pursuing both. It's like a methodical strategy.

Ethan Cole

So you, it's interesting. So you just came out of beta and are you finding, what are the challenges you're finding, how are you trying to solve them for kind of a two sided marketplace coming out of beta? Right. So you're looking for the podcasters to help supply the content, but then you're also going to start reaching out to consumers reaching out to consumers to get them on as well to receive the explorations even in a PLG or product led growth organization. How are you kind of stoking that early parts?

How are you, what are you seeing as the challenges and what are the ways you don't have to have them, but what are some of the strategies you're looking at to try to approach it? Yeah, I think we've got the beauty of you were talking, one of your sponsors was sort of nearshore development. There's also your upworks and fibers and sort of repeat automation with AI isn't quite there yet. I've experimented with a lot of them, but finding sort of niche audiences or individuals where they exist and communicating to them there. So your podcast, you post something on Twitter.

Lucas Dickey

There's 18 responses to it. That's 18 people that might be interested in deep cast. How do I message to those individuals? Do I pull out eight separate takeaways from the episode you were just talking about on Twitter and share them? Someone says, oh, I really liked it when Lucas said this thing.

Cool, I can go and I can pull that exact quote. Do you mean this one with a link back? So it lends itself really naturally to like a content driven product like growth strategy. And it's not just the hosts who inherently have a need for their show to be successful. It's not just listeners who want to be able to share.

There's also the guests who are on the show. I mean, significant number of guests go and this is part of the challenge with podcasts often is I was on, I've talked to a bunch of VC's while raising money and they'll say things like, I was on six shows in last month. No idea how many people listen to them. I don't know where they're distributing them to. I don't know if anyone's actually seen them on the Internet.

So guess what? Target every guest who's been on all these shows and say, hey, you need effectively marketing collateral that came out of that episode. You can share the video or you can share the link, but not everyone has time for the long form. Try this as a tasty bite size morsel. It's effectively your TLDR exec summary for the thing, and we've given you multiple different bits you can choose to share.

That's great for the guests. So that's a strategy that we're starting to employ as well. Go to the guests of all these real estate podcasts, business podcasts, health and wellness podcasts, whatever happens to be. They're all trying to push something when they're on the shows, generally, whether it's an idea or a product, and using the guests as a potential distribution mechanism for you as well. So it's interesting, and to get your point of like, how do we choose which side of the market to focus on?

We're early. I'm used to doing long, sleepless nights, sort of having been a multiple entrepreneur and wearing a bunch of different hats. So I'm deep into growth hacker Land right now. Like, I'm thinking not just about the guests and the podcasters and the listeners, but other ecosystem players that might be interested here as well. Is it the Spotify for podcasters, acast, Libsyn, all these behind the scenes folks who distribute podcasts?

Is there something there, an executive there I should be reaching out to? So it is. Where are all these little PLG motions that might get someone to actually interact with Deepcast? And there's monetization mechanisms that will follow in many ways. And initially there's sort of like a media revenue plan play, and then there will be a b, two b revenue play that follows.

There's actually multiple b, two b revenue plays that follow. That's interesting, kind of following that track. As a serial entrepreneur, it's not your first rodeo. What are the learnings that you've taken from the previous go arounds that now you're applying as you're starting this company? A couple of them are things that I was fans of in the last business that I just kind of rinsed and repeat a little bit.

I also happen to have like a mentor friend who is our president and coo at Furnish, who's a lean supply chain and manufacturing specialist and thinks very much about sort of like last responsible moment to do things or just in time manufacturing. And I think about it the same way as we're doing product development. I was having conversation with the developer on the drive here today and through the sign up flow, do we include or exclude a particular thing? I said, well, we can kind of hack our way through that without you doing any work. As a developer, I can use Mailchimp to do a thing over here as a low code, no code, and then when we need it to be more deeply integrated, then we go back and we look at Mailchimp's APIs and we do something more sophisticated.

So where can you get away with less? And in particular, the sort of venture capital environment that we're in now, we're in the post zurp era, and there's more challenge. Raising. The investment community wants you to do more with less as well. So there's a nice alignment there between the two.

But I do think it is like, what's responsible, what do you need to do? And thinking about sort of minimum viability versus minimum livability and where that spectrum lies and basic utility you have to have before subsequent things. So there's like, hey, great, we've got content, but how do you create repeat behavior? Well, now obviously we need to create user accounts and create a reason to create user accounts. So making sure that you kind of follow through logical progressions of why users are going to want to engage with your product in deeper and deeper fashion.

So I guess what I'm getting at is just like order of operations and having done it multiple times, and also knowing what can come later and what's good enough now, I think that adage of perfection is enemy of good enough. I've been a fan of for probably ten plus plus years now, having done VC backed businesses for a long time. If you were to have like one gem of advice in terms of what can you do now, what can you do later, what would you give to, let's call it to pre seed stage startup founder. Like consider maybe they just quit their job, maybe they're early stage, they're about to go for pre seed funding. What would they be looking for in terms of like, order of operations?

Ethan Cole

What can we give an example that. You think one of them, which is a little orthogonal to maybe tech and product, is like team composition and how you grow a team. So we got virtual assistants out of the Philippines or Southeast Asia that I can get at $4 an hour. So do I need to get a domestic assistant to help me with something? If I have a sort of tactically or logistically intensive business as a leader?

Lucas Dickey

Probably not. Do I need to hire someone to write marketing copy for me? I do think really good marketing copy does continue to come out of humans, but I'm using generative AI as a copilot with me. And how big do I need to scale the engineering team versus what can they do? So we're both creating product using AI, meaning the product that consumers see is very AI driven, but the team that we function as is also very AI driven these days.

So I think very much the sort of, I think you had Jason from Bevzahn and there was somewhat like we teach people to, or rather the folks that I think are going to advance are those who know how to build with AI. And I think that's probably critical these days. And I think that's one of those like do you hire the person or can you get away with a fractional resource or a combination of a fractional resource plus you leveraging chat, GPT or cloud or some other interface? Do it right. Dollars are limited at that point of your business, and VC's are looking for data points around engagement or revenue and all those other things you do around team composition beyond maybe sort of core staff they almost don't care about.

So what can you get away with in a lean fashion that sets you up to hit those metrics as soon as possible so you can show the feedback loop that they're all looking for to decide your post pre seed fundable, not just this stage of the business. I don't think that was pithy, other than to say do more with less and there's tooling to do so today and do more with less and do other things more later. Like you can justify a full blown visual designer at some point, but in the meantime, Vercel has a tool to do is vzero dev, where you can plan out an entire visual interface using generative AI. Like what can you get away with that gets you to next step? That's phenomenal.

Ethan Cole

I think that's been, I don't know if we've been as explicit on any of our episodes to this point, but yeah, it's this concept of do more with us. But specifically, AI in general will replace AI plus profession will replace profession. And you're saying this very much applies in the founder perspective, this founder sphere as well. AI plus founder using enhanced versions of AI to do their business practices will blow out of the water. Startup trying without trying to use these same processes.

And so use them where at all. Possible and you get the benefit of like the wisdom of the masses through llms, right? So, you know, we decided, I can't remember if I mentioned this public or not, but we decided to apply to YC fingers crossed we get in. But as working on my YC application, I was like, man, there actually happens to be a YCGPT. What happens if I ask questions of the GPT?

Lucas Dickey

And how does it help me structure my response? All of a sudden, I've got a thought partner that I could have otherwise been twiddling my fingers or asking a multitude of humans. I just got that all done in 30 minutes. What otherwise would have taken me tons and tons of email back and forth and phone calls. So where are opportunities to do that?

Everywhere. Now, mind you, I'm a big fan of like, making sure humans still have jobs or at least some way to generate income at the same time at this stage of the business. Like, what can I do? Because capital is lean time's lean opportunity cost is material. I think if you listen to any sort of like the all in podcast with Chamath and Sachs and crew, they've been what's the smallest business that can hit to a billion dollar run rate?

Is it going to be a sub 100 person that can accomplish it? And there are many things that seem to be trending in that direction where if they don't have a physical component to the business, like, why not, right? And it's something we ask ourselves regularly. I mean, I have a thesis that, you know, the number of people who will be founding startups will probably have a trajectory like the growth of podcasts. Yeah.

Ethan Cole

And I think a lot of the growth of podcasts I know myself has come through the ease with which you can now start one and again. It all comes down to processes and your willingness to, you know, your ability to create a good process and build something. So it's the level, the starting field is equal. It requires certain people to actually do the working and rise up. I feel like that same thing will be with founders and this ability to do more with less, that will continue to exponentially work in the favor of entrepreneurs.

Lucas Dickey

Yeah. Lead to an explosion in entrepreneurship in the next three to five years. Yeah, for sure. I think it's like the continuation of like rack and stack software, hardware to cloud based three AWS, GCP, Azure, et cetera, which lowered the barrier to entry to be able to do like, I don't have to spend multiple hundred thousand dollars to buy servers anymore now. I don't have to hire teams to do some of these things.

I can leverage AI to do the things I do. Think that sort of separating wheat and chaff, you're getting a lot of people with ideas who are going to do rapid experimentation then you'll get into the execution phase. Does this thing continue to scale? Then you're worrying about unit economic positivity and cool. You can leverage AI, but it has high training model costs.

Assuming it's like a foundation model esque thing or it has high inference costs. So any chatbot is interfacing with thing and there's inference involved that has a cost. So does your business scale, doing it as a one off weekend project that you proved out you can do it. Yeah. That enables you to try it out.

Now you have to start thinking about how to scale and execute on this business as I grow. But that inflection point would definitely be much easier. It's almost like the zero to 0.5 stage is more readily accessible to everyone. And then where it gets interesting is can you do the one to ten to follow that after you figure things out? So yeah, I definitely think AI is a force multiplier and an enabler for those who kind of step in and learn it.

Big fan of Ethan Malek. The I think it was a Wharton school professor, had that book co intelligence that just came out and has a really popular substat because it's about how do humans work with AI in order to accomplish more? How do we think together? How do we co think? I've been leveraging pretty heavily and it's enabled us to make a lot of decisions quickly, including selection of technology.

I've used some AI to help me pick other AI. That's how it was. Also helpful. It's kind of turtles all the way down in that respect. We get the meta on top of the meta here.

Ethan Cole

I love it and wanted to bring us back into Los Angeles. We are the founders in LA podcast. You might have an interesting one, given your background. Do you have a most LA moment? It could be tech related.

It doesn't have to be. I was thinking about this before. I think some of my favorite sort of like product slash tech meets La moments, of which there's other just pure La moments, but is sort of your VC firms or your banks or your law firms who support the startup ecosystem will oftentimes host kind of tech meets Hollywood dinners and they'll try to commingle audiences from each shout outs. To Demarcus Williams. He was at SVB and he's now JPMorgan as an early stage banker here in LA supporting the startup ecosystem.

Lucas Dickey

And it invited me to a ton of these things. One of them I happened to be at. There's two stories merged into one. I tapped someone on the shoulder I looked at it, I was like, you look familiar. Do I know you?

And turns out it's a shay from pretty little liars who had like 25 million Instagram followers. And I had no clue. And it's like talking to her about her piece of business at the time, right? And then I turn around and Tyra Banks is at the same thing. And then DeMarcus tells me I actually, like, saw her in 1999 in an all star NBA game.

And I took a picture with her and I said, we're recreating that photo. Hey, Tyra, can you come over here? Oh, that's awesome. And I ended up like, quote unquote art directing Tyra because I got her to stand up, I got DeMarcus to stand next to her and someone else to stand on the other side to recreate the photo he had from 1999 with his little brother and Tyra, except for now he's six seven. He was not six seven at the time.

Very la moment to have. I think Chamillionaire was hiding somewhere in the background of that party, very now. Active entrepreneur and investor, all in one sort of LA meets tech environment. I was like, this is definitely an La moment. That is a fantastic La moment.

Ethan Cole

Thank you so much for sharing with us. That's a great one. We have a phenomenal community and it is a lot of fun to build here. It's occasionally, it feels like a small place because I was in San Francisco before I was in LA, and the sort of volume of activity there, it's just like the density there when you're walking around south of Market and Soma, whereas here, because we're the spread city, you kind of have to, you have to find those audiences, but once you find them, there's a lot of activity that you can definitely dial into. And because we happen to have shipping and logistics because of the ports, whether it's Long beach or LA, and whether it's me through the studios and the labels, or whether it's consumer, because so many brands are built here, I sound like an La booster or space.

Don't. Space. Don't sleep on space. Aerospace and space tech is massive. I mean, we're, you know, if California is the 9th largest economy in the planet, LA is somewhere in the big chunk of that as well, because of like the ten major sort of technology or, sorry, business markets that we happen to have fermented.

I did not even consider that, but I love that. It's huge. We're a big market. Bigger than many countries, probably bigger than most countries, bigger than most countries for sure. Thank you so much Lucas.

Well, thanks again for stopping by. Thanks for sharing Deepcast FM and you. Can find it at Deepcast FM www. Deepcast FM. And then soon enough we'll be launching Deepcast Pro for the podcaster side of the ecosystem.

Lucas Dickey

But we'll have traffic drivers that get people over there as well. But yeah, Deepcast FM is live now. Definitely try it out and you can communicate with us through all sorts of social channels or directly, and we'll make. Sure that this episode is it will. Be on deep cast relatively soon.

Yeah, that's right. Awesome. Well, thanks so much again for joining us. Thank you to nearshare and Unida, our. Sponsors as well as Prodhub AI.

Ethan Cole

You can build better products with Prodhub AI, where innovation meets efficiency, automate your. Prds, fast track your story creation, and. Speed up your product team with a single platform. It's your co pilot for product management. Discover how at www.

Dot Prodhub dot AI. That's www. Dot prldhub AI. Like to thank you again all for listening to us. If you like what you hear, please smash that subscribe button.

Thanks again for joining us and we will catch you next time on founders in LA.