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In this episode, Tom shares Fame and bCast's revenue progress. He then dives deep into the seven lessons from growing Fame and bCast, in which he explains how entrepreneurs should operate and scale their business through effective delegation and optimizing the internal processes to achieve growth.
In this episode of Confessions Of A B2B Marketer, Tom shares the latest revenue numbers for
and then 7 lessons he learned over the past few months... here they are:
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So now the current numbers, uh, that Bcast is just approaching $5,000, Mr. So that's doubled over the year and fame is at around $140,000 mrr. So that's, again, just over doubled. In the past year.
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Confessions of a B to B marketer podcast. And today we are doing one of my favorite types of episodes, which is the classic income report. We're gonna be going through the revenue. History, I guess, for fame and bcast. And then we're gonna jump in and understand what has been driving growth more on fame than bcast, because I have that decoded more.
But let's jump in and first understand the context of these revenue numbers. So the first ever income report I did on this show was back in November, 2020, so that's nearly two years ago. Bcast was on $250, Mr. And just if anybody isn't aware, I'll link to them below. The BCAST is podcast hosting for high growth businesses, and then FAME is the biggest and best B2B podcast agency.
So that back in November, 2020, that was on 14 K, Mr. So the way B A works is like an almost low price test product podcast per month. And then they get to use the software with fame. Larger B2B companies pay us per month and we do pretty much all the work to run their podcasts. So that was November 20th, 2250 and 14 k.
Fast forward a few months to Jan, 2021 and Bcast was $400 Mr. And fame jumped up to 20,000. So that's almost a doubling or like 50% growth. 50, 60%. Fast forward three month again, and April, 2021 b a is up to 589. Fame is up to 29,000, so that's again about 50% growth. Then the next income report comes six months later in November.
BCRF is jumped to $2,200. Mr. And fame has doubled to 59,000, and that was actually the last one, the last income report. So over the space of a year, I did four. Then we actually haven't done one for a year. I have been updating on revenue on LinkedIn, but I haven't done an episode. So now the current numbers, uh, that Bcast is just approaching $5,000, Mr.
So that's doubled over the year and fame is at around $140,000 Mr. So that, again, just over double. In the past year, so knife growth on both sides. What I wanna do in the rest of this episode, give a general update of what's been happening and then dig into seven lessons that I've learned more from growing fame than from growing Bask.
Because fame, the growth has been, I guess, larger. We valid 80,000, 70 to $8,000 in Mr. Arts over the past year. So let's jump first into bcast. So as mentioned, we're up to $5,000 mrr, and we've done a couple of things. We've been grinding forward with new features, so we released one, which I think is pretty cool.
It actually came from a client of fame, like an idea from the client of fame, which is an interesting case study on how these two businesses actually complement each other. The client fame wanted to split. The episode titles of the episodes to understand which performed better. And I was like, There isn't really a way to do that.
You'd have to manually change and it'd be quite hard to track the metrics. No other podcast, toasting software enable this either. And so we were like, Why don't we try and build this into bcast? So in about a month, we released that feature. Now you can actually add two episode titles, have b a split tests for you, and then it will automatically choose the best one after 48 hours.
So that's quite a cool feature that we have added into the software. Now the other big update for Bcast is that we have released a freemium version of a tool. So now you can jump in, start a podcast. And run up the X amount of episodes for completely free with the core features of the platform.
Obviously extra features, you'd have to go to the first plan, which is called the Startup plan. But that has been, obviously we've seen a significant increase in the growth of users. The question is on the testing that we're still doing is whether that leads to more paid subscribers than if we would have a free trial and then go straight into the paid, for example, just first to remove the freemium account.
Are we gonna get more paid subscribers by using that or not? And so that's the test we're currently running, and we will see. So that is the two core updates for bk. On the fame side, the team has grown from approximately 10 to 30 people, so we've tripled that people full time. We work with around 15 to 20 people part-time as well.
And in terms of. The strategy or the positioning of the business? Absolutely nothing has changed. We have just been perfecting the B2B podcast process that we've started working on. When I was head of marketing at a B2B SAS company in 2019, and that one process that we used to build with their podcast, all we've done is take that process, tweak and improve it, and implement it in now 55 different B2B companies.
So nothing has changed. I guess what we have done is slowly, incrementally improved that process, but then also slowly, incrementally improved how we market fame as a business. So I'm gonna do a whole separate episode on how fame prioritizes and test what I call growth programs. But that probably isn't relevant for this episode now.
But in terms of the learnings that we've realized since growing up to 140, so it's about a hundred, 1,000 20,000 pounds per month. The first is more of a CEO entrepreneurship insight, and it's that you really have to like as you grow the business, Beyond where you can be doing stuff, you really have to become an expert delegation.
Or if Andrew Wilkinson, who runs a VC equal tiny VC says, Well, you must become Teflon for tasks. So I used to be doing all these small little tasks that don't seem like they're taking that much time, but ultimately really do like paying invoices, sending invoices, sourcing candidates, running the inbound sales process.
And these are all things I've done since day one, but I shouldn't really be doing them anymore because those tasks ultimately are not gonna have a big impact on how happy our customers are or how many customers we create. And so you really have to continuously be putting yourself out of a job. By bringing on people that can take on those tasks, and it really, it's like a, what would I say, a psychological challenge because we all think that we are really good at all these tasks and that it's gonna be so hard to find someone that can do the tasks, but in reality, Actually, there's a lot of people that can do all of those tasks better than you, and maybe they'd actually enjoy doing those tasks better than you as well.
And the feeling you get when you hand them over and someone enjoys them and does 'em better than you is amazing. But I think so many entrepreneurs don't actually get to that point. So that was the first realization. Something I'm still struggling with, but something I'm think I'm getting. Better at all.
Right. Next up, and I've got seven of these, and I'll quickly just give you a shout out for the names in case you wanna skip or something. So first one, as we just discussed, is Teflon for tasks. Second one is managers become managers. Third one is creating versus capturing demand. Fourth one is process creators versus process Implement.
Fifth one is non-essential costs. Six is don't fuck up the momentum. And seven is a culture of documentation. So let's jump into the second one. Say managers become managers. So as soon as you start a business, you'll probably end up hiring people. And when you end up hiring people as a CEO of fashion entrepreneur, you manage them.
And if you're not good at managing, it's hard for you to get past that stage to maybe past five people. Because what happens after five to 10 people is that your managers, the people that you manage, have to become managers. And so then either you're hiring good managers or you have to train people to be good managers.
Now, at fame, we've had no UK fulltime employees leave the business. And this for Jeff, To me, that A, the company is exciting, or B, we're doing something right, but C, ultimately I think it's because we have good managers. There's a very well known statistic in the world of hr. The number one reason why people leave a job is because of their manager, not necessarily because of the business or their role or their pay.
It's because of their manager. And so what happens is you start to scale up is that you can no longer manage everybody. Right now, I wouldn't be able to manage 29 people, otherwise I'd be spending all my time managing 29 people. But you'll find that the people that you start to manage will have to become manager.
And so passing on everything and anything you've learned about being a good manager, hopefully you are to these people who's gonna be crucial in order for them to retain and engage their team members. Now, the most important management lesson I think I understand or I have learned is that your goal as the CEO or as the manager, is really to serve that person.
If you can tie what they're trying to achieve in with the work that they're doing for you, then they're gonna be engaged. Then it's worthwhile for them to do good work. So step one is understanding what this person wants to do in the future. And step two is fitting in the work they're doing for you as part of the road to them getting to that place.
And the interesting part is that place doesn't even have to be with your business. Let's say someone wants to do something else that your company will never do in the future. That is not an issue because you can still be under no illusion. Not everybody in your business is gonna be with you forever.
And so as long as you can over a period of time, engage them. Ultimately get like good work done by them, then that's absolutely fine, and they don't have to be with you forever. So it's understanding where they want to be in their career, what work they wanna do in the future, and then building a bridge via the role they're doing for you to that place.
And if you can do that, it's likely that you'll be able to engage employees for the long term. Number three is capturing versus creating demand. Now there's a big. Big hype around the value of creating demand, but if it's capturing demand, I'll quickly outline the difference between the two, but to capture demand is to take the people that are already looking for the thing that you are selling and then selling them that thing.
So in our case, if somebody is searching for best B2B podcast agencies, that's us capturing the demand. Maybe we have a Google ad, Maybe we have a blog post because they're already looking for the thing that you have. Creating demand is going to a B2B marketing leader and educating them about the power of B2B podcasting.
If you do that, then ideally when they come to the time at which they need a B2B podcast agency, they'll come to you because they know I can trust you because you helped educate them about the topic. And so my point here is that getting up to, let's say, a million arr, depending on the market, obviously you can really capture demand.
You can just ultimately find the people that are looking for the thing already and then bring them over to you. The challenge here is that if the market is too crowded, then you'll end up paying too much, and that will not become profitable for you. Basically, you won't be able to rank your blog post, or you won't be able to pay enough for the Google ad in order to get people over to you if the market is too crowded.
And so this typically happens with more mature markets. So either you get really good at doing those things, or you shift them budget from capturing demand through into creating demand. As mentioned, fame have largely just been capturing demand up until this point. But as we move past the 1 million ARR mark, then it's time for us to start understanding how we can go to people that are not necessarily looking for a BBB podcast agency, but they are a B2B company that could benefit from a podcast.
So that is what we're gonna be doing going forward. And of course I'll be updating you on our learnings in this show. And next up we have what I'm calling process creators versus process implementers. I think a lot of people, especially in the startup or early stage business world, confuse the two. I think there are two types of roles that can be.
There's roles where the person is responsible for creating a process, doing something new. And there's roles where people are executing an existing process. And the mistake I sometimes see is that, uh, founder or ca there's inexperienced in either let's say sales or marketing. They haven't proven out any way to get new customers and they hire somebody from another business who was just implementing processes that worked, bring them on and expect them to be able to.
Develop and innovate on new processes to get customers for that company. And they're just completely set up fail cause they haven't actually done this before. It's typically much more complex for someone to create and make a process work versus just implementing it. And so what this means, or when we understand this, we basically set ourselves up for hiring success because before we hire someone who may be cheaper and less experienced, We can either do the work ourselves or hire someone that's more expensive or more experienced to get the process to work.
And maybe that's a consultant, et cetera. Or maybe that's just us doing it or yourself doing it. And then once it is working, or at least it seems like it's starting to work, then we hire the person who's cheaper, less experienced, who can then just go on and implement that process. So it's understanding the difference between those two roles and then making sure, or increasing the likelihood we get a new process to work.
By hiring someone who has more experience or has proven the ability to get things to work, new things to work, versus Jeff executing existing processes, non-essential costs. And I've learned this really from a combination of researching and learning about Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos and how they've run Berkshire Hathaway slash Amazon.
So in the Amazon example is that they wouldn't pay for death. They just put old doors on some wood in order to have their death. So they didn't have to pay for them because they had to reduce cost because they were serving the customer. And then you look at Berkshire Hathaway and Bch Hathaway's office, despite them being like a 400 billion company or something.
It just has 20 people. It's just the counters, Warren Buffett, except Cetera. And. Pa, like nothing fancy, no people, they don't need because they're reducing costs cause they serve in their customers or in in their case investors. And so we've done this, like, this is exactly how I like to run fame. If we can build a service that's cheaper and better than competitors, then we're gonna grow.
And so the way we do that is by ensuring that we're not paying for anything that isn't having a significant increase or impact on customers. So, for example, we still don't pay for three of the most important tools that we use every day, which is Slack Guy, Internal Cons Tool Trailer, which is our project management tool and Fresh Desk, which is our external email tool.
Yeah, pretty much every team member use of them every day. Yes, there could be like small efficiencies probably gained by upgrading to paid plans on those, but right now I don't see that as something that is gonna have a significant increase on customer happiness. So we cut that down. It means we can charge less for our service, which increases the value of that service.
A really important mental model I've learned recently is the dis between price value and. So if we can, and to think of these three lines on a piece of paper. So if we have value, which would typically be the top line, that is how much value, the thing that you have in the eyes of your customer. And then the next is obviously price, which is how much you charge customer, then it's cost, how much it costs you.
And so if we can bring, if we can ensure value is high, by focusing the service, improving the service. Then if we can bring cost down by not paying for stuff that isn't gonna bring the value down, then that enables us to bring price down and the gap between price and value, eg. The better deal the customers think they're getting or the better deal the customers are getting that accrues as brand value, eg.
Word of mouth flash referrals. So the bigger the gap between value and price. The faster you're gonna grow basically, and the more profitably you're gonna grow because that differentiation leads to very cheap customers. For example, let's say we have a really, really valuable service, but at cost little we're gonna grow really fast.
Cause word of mouth is gonna spread really fast and word of mouth is the best way to grow. And so what we do, a fame is really, really work and review every month, our cough line, to try and bring it down so we don't have to increase prices slash we can even lower prices while still being profitable, yet still retaining the value of the service being high.
This, I think is the real secret to why fame has grown, and I think is the real secret behind how Amazon grew. And I think it's the real focus why any business can grow if they understand this. Our primary value at fame is client, client, client we call it. And this is the focus on ensuring that value line is high and that price line is low.
And next up is don't fuck up the momentum. So this one comes from Peter Teal. As he famously said to the Airbnb founders, don't fuck up the culture. Just as they were raising money slash things were going crazy for. But I think what he really meant was don't fuck up the momentum. The mental model I have here is that the jet ski is like the startup is trying to find product market fear.
It's trying to build something its customers actually want to pay for and to keep paying for. Then as that happens, the jet ski transitions into a cruise ship and the cruise ship is just going in one direction ideally and is going slowly, but then can start to pick up speed, but is have a lot more power cause it's a much bigger.
So at this stage, the like ops, finance, hiring processes become much more important and we just wanna keep the cruise ship going in the right direction. If you try to like move or tweak the cruise ship, then it has to slow down and it becomes really slow and ultimately might sink. That's the mental model.
And so here, or what I really mean by this is that the goal of the company, the team members, the growth, it all needs to maintain momentum. It just has to keep going forward in that direction. If you change who you're selling to, if you change what you sell, if you change your positioning, your branding, your messaging significantly, then you risk the cruise ship having to stop, turn, and ultimately think.
And so what this means sometimes is that we need to ensure that growth happens. Growth continues. If this cruise ship starts to slow down, maybe employees won't get promoted, they'll leave, And so we just have to make sure everything's going in the right direction consistently. Ultimately until you want to like leave the business or you want to move on, like that's the goal is just keep the cruise ship going in that direction.
And so I don't think we've had any significant issues here. The missions remain the same. The thing we sell is the same. The who we sell to has always been the same. And that for this reason, I wanna keep that all the same. I just wanna keep the cruise ship going. The something interesting that might happen is that you may have to prioritize profitability in order to keep that cruise ship going.
That hasn't really happened, but it could do in the future where we may have to lower prices or we may have to do something else in order to ensure that new clients are coming on to keep the cruise ship going. With that in mind, the final, and in my eyes, arguably the most important learning from the hundred K per month is the culture of documentation.
As we mention. Just now that the cruise ship is bound together really by documentation. If you don't have this, then knowledge is just sat within the minds of your team members. The team member leaves, or this causes for more communication, which is a cost that is an adding value to clients, even increase in client happiness.
And so everything must be documented and then further. The value of the, or a working procedure is only as valuable as its last updated date to what I'm saying here is that the documentation must be up to date with what actually happens in the process. If we don't have this and communication is gonna get outta control, that will have a negative impact on client happiness because all the time that your team are spending communicating, they're not spending delivering value to customers and clients.
So in summary here, everything, every procedure that happens more than once needs to be documented, and those documents need to be kept up to date if you're gonna scale an organization. The best book for this is called Work The System by Sam Carpenter, So I highly recommend. Reading that one culture of documentation in your business.
Though, to summarize what we covered today, we went through the numbers for fame and bcast over the past two years. We then gave a general update on each, and then I dove into seven factors that have, I've learned really from growing fame over the past a year or so, uh, to a hundred K per month. So, of course, I wanna thank you so much for listening to this episode.
If you have any feedback about the show, please go to Apple Podcast, leave a rating and review with your honest feedback. And if you do that ply screenshot, or just tell me that you've done it and I'll get your review read out on. The outro of a future episode. Finally, we must give a shout out to Hre Webmaster Tools that I use them every week to review back bank, to review the health of our site and to review the keywords that we're ranking for is completely free.
Just Google hres webmaster tools. Go and check it out. Add it to your site. If you have Google search control access to any of your sites, you can use this thing literally for free, and it's. And with that, thank you so much for listening.