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In this episode of the MarTech Podcast, I share how to scale a bootstrapped business using external resources. As a startup with a limited budget, getting the best bang for your buck requires some creativity. Cultivate meaningful relationships with freelancers to improve employee churn rates and assure your access to the global talent pool.
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Obviously the business's job is to keep the customers happy, but I feel as my job as CEO is to keep my employees and now freelancers happy. And so Fame's mission is actually just to keep clients, team members, and freelancers happy. That's like literally the mission of our company.
Today we're gonna talk about growing and monetizing a podcast. Joining us is Tom Hunt, who is the founder and CEO of Fame, which launches and grows some of the world's most profitable B2B podcasts. Fame clients includes companies like Workday, ideo, and Bevy. Yesterday, Tom and I talked about growing and monetizing a podcast, and today we're gonna continue the conversation, talk about leveraging freelancers to scale a bootstrapped business.
All right. Here's the second part of my conversation with Tom Hunt, the founder and CEO of. Tom, welcome back to the MarTech podcast. Right to happy, excited to have you back on the show. You know, I feel like we're kindred spirits. We, uh, have followed a very similar career path. You were running a marketing department, you started a podcast.
It was very successful. You kind of went into this line of business. I was running a consulting practice, started the MarTech podcast. It grew faster than I expected, and basically the media portion of my business ate the consulting portion. And here we are today talking about how to grow podcasts, and I feel like one of the secret ingredients.
Is not actually doing the work yourself. So we're both coming from bootstrap companies. We leverage a lot of freelancers, automation, technology. Talk to me a little bit about how you're scaling your bootstrap business using external resources. I think maybe it's useful to, we maybe going on a tangent, but just to communicate the difference between like a online marketplace and an agency slash consultancy.
So if you go to Upwork, you are there Upwork, and not like taking accountability for the results you get when you work with a freelancer. But they're gonna find your freelancer, they're gonna manage the payment. On the other hand, we have an agency, which is like a brand you don't really get to see behind the.
And the brand worth guarantees the results and that's why you pay more of a consultant slash agency versus going finding your own freelancer on, right. What I think is an interesting opportunity for any consultant slash agency at the moment is to retain this face and retain your pricing, but then being able to work effectively with flexible.
Global talented freelancers on the back end. So instead of having your team of like seven consultants that you employ full-time, you can have a team of maybe, or a pool, let's say, of 15 freelancers behind the scenes that remain freelancers that deliver your service with your, like maybe a couple of full-time employees to handle communication with.
So I think the opportunity that we are taking a advance job is leveraging this more flexible model with global freelancers, with this like thin service layer across the top of full-time employee. It's a lot like a managed service and it allows smaller companies, or even individual, let's call them solopreneurs, to be able to produce high volume of work.
This is our model. I never shy away. We've got a team of, I think 15 people now somewhere around there that do everything from. Communicating with our guests, scheduling our content, editing the content, publishing it, building our social media, helping us with lead gen. There's a whole sort of different profiles.
We've had some engineers, we've got all sorts of different types of work that we've done with freelancers. But one of the problems that I feel like we've worked very hard to overcome internally was not only figuring out who to hire, how to train them, but also. There's the workflow management, how to let someone know when they're responsible for a given task.
Talk to me a little bit about how you manage freelancers. How are you able to keep everybody on track going the same direction, working on the things that they're supposed to work on at the right time? So we just have essentially the combination of Slack, Google Drive, and Trello, and it's all tied together with Xavier.
And then we have the other external tools that tie into this. But essentially what this means is that when any like external thing happens, let's say a guest book's on a client, The guests will work through Coly and then that is gonna talk via Vaporia to Slack, Uber Drive, and Trello to inform the six people that need to work on their episode, what they need to do, when they need to do it, where the assets are gonna be when they've completed them.
And this can all be done completely automatically, or due dates are signed, relevant labels are signed, relevant freelancers assigned. That can all happen automatically as soon as the guest books. And so all of that automation and process is like dealing with the freelance. And then there's just the client communication layer over the top, like project management and account management.
I totally agree. What is super important for this model to work is the task management with all these people that don't necessarily like freelancers, that don't necessarily wanna jump on calls with you, but just want to simply turn up, have the five tasks that they have to do that day they can do without too much hassle and too much bother.
And if you do that, you can find good freelancers that will bring your cough down to enable you to offer a better. We spent five years working on the MarTech Podcast. We launched the Voices of Search podcast four years ago. We launched our third podcast, the Revenue Generator Podcast, and I'm not the host.
This time. Doug Bell, who's the CMO of Lean Data, is the host and Lean Data is also the sponsor of that podcast. And the reason why I bring this up, Through all the automation and rules that we've created, we use monday.com and there's a little Dropbox, there's a little Google Drive. We all communicate on Slack when something breaks down, but primarily everything that we've done is build these workflows and automations and triggers in Monday that allows us to basically copy the infrastructure we have and reproduce it for new podcasts.
So when you are creating podcasts for new clients, or you're doing this at scale, Do you find that it's easy to replicate the same process? Are all podcasts following the same process? Are you able to scale the teams or are you constantly hiring new people to do new projects? I think the answer to that question, like you as the agency, can choose how productive the thing that you offer your customers are.
Now, obviously the more productized the better it's gonna scale, and so we typically just like to offer. The same thing to all clients, so that all of that process we just spoke about can be literally copied and pasted. Obviously there are flight nuances. Maybe they want video snippets for TikTok and another client wants them through a different social platform.
But the more prototype, the better. The only caveat I would give is that being a Booth Snap company, sometimes you may want to work with a client if they don't fit perfectly into your like productized methodology because you just want the revenue or you need the revenue. So the kind of long term view is that you wouldn't do.
And you'd only bring people on that fit your perfect methodology. You keep refining the methodology and you scale up like that. And so we have largely managed to refuse people that don't fit within the thing that we offer. So we've been able to scale relatively quickly. Now, when you are working with freelancers, I'm assuming they're distributed around the world.
Talk to me about the relationships that you have. How are you finding the right talent, building relationships with them? How do you keep them on board? Because that training process can be very challenging and sometimes it's hard to find the right labor for the job. I'll try and run through things really fast.
So we constantly have applications open. There's a form on our site that anyone can come to and they can request an application. So we have the massive database basically. Then we have one operations person who's responsible for ensuring that we have enough freelancers to do enough of the work that we do have.
So that's what bringing freelancers into the organization. If we desperately need someone and we can't force anyone from our database, we'll then go to the freelancer marketplaces and find people. We'll do a test task, or we'll pay them the amount that we would pay them for this task. And we do that with like after we checked what they've done before, we offer them a test task, and then if that's good, then we'll bring them in for a trial when they're in.
This is a really interesting concept I've discovered recently as a ceo. Obviously the business's job is to keep the customers happy, but I feel that my job as a CEO is to keep my employees and now freelancers. So our fame's mission is actually just to keep clients, team members, and freelancers happy.
That's like literally the mission of our company. So then the question is, if a freelancer is just there to like go and do their work, what incentivizes them to log in a little bit later? Cause they have to fix something that the clients just requested. So how do you build that culture of responsibility when you have people that are not full-time employees?
So I've been thinking about it a. And one of the most effective ways of doing this is that we give all team members and all freelancers a monthly bonus based on how happy the clients are. We measure a client happiness by giving a score to every client after every meeting, so that's objective, and then also how well the team is working together.
Right now that's a bit subjective, but it really get a bonus based on that. And so that's one of the tools for youth to try and ensure a responsibility or an accountability of the freelancers to the organize. I think it's one of the things that people that haven't gone down the freelancer path might not understand is that you can build relationships and manage freelancers the same way that you would essentially with your employees.
There are people that are gonna be working with you remotely. You don't have the exact same relationship, but we've had the editor of the MarTech podcast, pano, so I love you. He's been working on this podcast for five years. I've never actually sat in a room with Panos. I don't even know if we've been on a video chat before, but we slack regularly.
I feel like I have a relationship with him. I definitely appreciate his work. He is a valued member of my team, Panos, let me shout it from the rooftop. I love you, man. So I think that that's one of the, you know, freelancers feel like faceless accounts from countries that you might not have heard of that are making minimal amount of work.
So the assumption is they're probably not going to work very hard or do a very good job, and that is just fundamentally untrue. Right. One of the biggest factors of building a business using freelancers, mostly when you're bootstrapping is you get to take advantage of the economics of ge. So you mentioned that you have forms on your website where people can apply to be freelancers.
It sounds like you've got a little bit of an inbound approach where freelancers are coming to you and then you're potentially going to marketplaces at time. What are some of the things that you look for in a freelancer to figure out if they are credible, hard working, have the right skill. It's pretty low risk, right?
So our process, because all the time we're spending, that ops person is spending, interviewing freelancers. She's not, he or she is not spending like improving the process. So we are literally, all we do is we'll look at their previous work, step one. If a previous work and their rates work for what we're looking for, then we'll do a test task.
If their communication and the quality of the thing they produce is good enough, they're brought into the system. And then from there, they'll just be assigned a small amount of work and then we can throttle the work up and down. Based on their performance. We have another way to manage the incentive of the freelancers.
The better they are communicating, the better the assets, the better they are with the deadlines, the more work they're gonna get, and that will, that wills down. Now you have to build trust. You can't just take a work away from a freelancer for no reason. There has to be rules around that so they feel in control.
But we, in turn, that hiring process is like very quick, very objective, and then they come into the organization and then we can throttle up and down based on like how well they're perform. So we don't spend that much time like assessing or bringing freelancers in because we have this pool that is quite flexible in terms of how much work they'll do.
Yeah. I think one of the big takeaways for me is the incentives for freelancers are different than employees, and part of it is understanding how much work they want. Understanding when they can work, understand how they want to work. And if you spend time getting to know the freelancers, getting to understand what their goals, what their objectives are, what the lifestyle they want to be leading is, it can help you define the type of work you're handing them and set up an incentive structure that puts everybody on the same page.
Tom, any last words about building a bootstrap business? Leveraging freelancers? Any other tricks you have for the. I think the most important thing, whether it's a CEO starting a business, working with freelancers, or whether you are a CMO within a business working with your team, and some of those are freelance.
I think the most important like mindset to develop is that the businesses customers are not your only customers. Your job as the leader is to make their lives better. The more you do that, the lower your employee turn, the less time you have to spend on recruitment. The happier your team are, the better work they're gonna do.
And so that's like the final thing that I like, probably want anyone listening to. It's a big world, but we are all more connected than we've ever been. You could find great talent and it doesn't necessarily have to be the person living next door.
Thanks for listening to my conversation with Tom Hunt, the founder and CEO of Fame. If you'd like to get in touch with Tom, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter where his handle is Tom Hunt io. That's T O M H U N T I. Or you could visit his company's website.
It's fame dot, so F a M e dot. So Tom also has a hosting platform that fame runs off of, which is bcast.fm.