Building the MarTech Podcast — H1 2021 — Benjamin Shapiro // benjshap LLC

Quotes

• We had some sponsors that pulled out or withheld payment for the services that we had already done. And so that kind of shook our business up a little bit." - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

• "Fortunately by the end of the year, everything had recovered and really sort of felt like the business was recession-proof on some level." - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

• "With our podcast sponsorship offering, we do advertorial content, hosted advertising, and retarget listeners to specific content. We do direct response for our advertisers" - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

• “I always felt like the model for the show was to be able to provide value to people that wanted to reach marketers... ” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

• “It's actually a really scary time for our business because the presenting sponsor withheld payments saying that we didn't own the IP of the content that we recreated.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

• “It was one of the scarier times I've ever had running this business. We got down to $3,000 in our business checking account.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

• “We had about $90,000 in accounts receivable that were due, but times and cash management was a little bit of a problem as a scary time at the beginning of year.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

• “The dirty secret about working with HubSpot and being a member of the HubSpot podcast network is that I cold emailed their CMO... And one thing led to another.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

• “So we went from, I've got $3,000 in our business checking account... to now we have multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

• “One of the big things that we did was we hired an SDR. I had been managing sales independently for the MarTech podcast since day one.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

• “A big part of what our show is built on is making sure there's lots of people listening. So we could sell access to those ears, to our sponsors...” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

• “We went from the beginning of 2020, about 40 or 50,000 downloads all the way up to our peak of 90,000 downloads in November of 2020...” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

• “In December, because I was a little concerned about cash flow, we turned our marketing efforts off. We went from 90 to 70,000 downloads.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

• “Generally, we spend about $4,000 a month on podcast advertising.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

• “All of a sudden I looked up and we were sitting here close to the middle of the year. And I said, Look, we've lost about a third of our audience.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

• “What I'm seeing right now is that we're having a tough time scaling just purely based on our podcast advertising.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

• “At some point last year, we saw our number of reviews we had for our podcast go from about 280 to about 160.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

• “When you're trying to optimize to get podcasts from the apple app store, you need new subscribers and you need positive reviews.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

• “I think our low is about 60,000 downloads and we picked up about 10,000 downloads last month.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

• “We're back to about 70,000 downloads per month or so, which is picking up about a third of what we had lost over the first half of this year.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

• “So where we are halfway through this year, our goal is to get to 100,000 downloads per month.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

• “I honestly consider this the pinnacle of my career at this point and could not be more excited to be working with the team at HubSpot.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC