[00:00:00] Dan Maby: I don't know if you can hear it. We've got an ice cream truck.
[00:00:01] Marc Benzakein: It's an ice cream truck. I want ice cream. I want ice cream right now. And I don't think you should pause it. I think we should just get ice cream.
Guess what? I'm taking over the show. My name is Marc Benzakein and I am with MainWP, and I am taking over the show today to talk about some podcasting.
Podcasting is a huge industry and it's still growing. One of the reasons is that creating a podcast has become easier than ever.
According to Search Engine Land estimates put the worldwide podcast audience at about 584 million listeners in 2025. Increasing to more than 619 million in 2026 with continued growth expecting beyond that.
But there's another statistic that may be even more interesting. Podcast Index tracks roughly 4.7 million podcast feeds, while only a fraction of those are still actively publishing.
And that points to the real challenge. Starting a podcast may be easier than ever, but keeping one running consistently is a different story.
Recording the conversation is often the easy part. The real workload comes from everything around it. Scheduling, guest communication, research, show notes, publishing, promotion, analytics, and all the other moving pieces that come with producing a show.
That's the problem Nathan Wrigley and Dan Maby are addressing with show.fm, which they describe as a Pod Ops platform. Software designed to bring the operational side of podcasting together in one place, and automate as much of the repetitive work as possible. And they come to the project with a tonne of relevant experience.
Nathan Wrigley has been podcasting for years and has produced, edited, and published somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1200 episodes. Geez. Along the way, he's had plenty of firsthand experience with both the enjoyable parts of producing a show and all the repetitive work that happens behind the scenes.
Dan Maby brings the technical side to the equation, with roughly two decades of experience in software development, product development, and technical architecture. Together they've taken that combination of real world, podcasting experience and software expertise and use it to build show.fm. And for today's episodes, I get to turn the tables a little bit.
I spent plenty of time on the other side of the microphone with Nathan asking the questions. Today, I've taken over this show, and we're going to spend some time talking with Nathan and Dan about show.fm, and what they're building to make podcast production easier to manage.
So Nathan and Dan, welcome to my show. Thanks for joining me.
[00:03:01] Nathan Wrigley: That was so good. You actually, wrote some stuff down. I never do that. That was way better than.
[00:03:07] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, and it, sounded like I read it almost, didn't it?
[00:03:11] Nathan Wrigley: The nice thing about this is that it was your idea to do this as well, which I'm really grateful of because, I got an email from you I guess, and you said, how about this is an idea? And I was like, yeah, that's such a great idea. So I'm very grateful. Thank you.
[00:03:24] Marc Benzakein: Oh my goodness. The BS is strong with this guy. This was not my idea. This was not my idea. No. In fact, the way that I heard it was that you wanted the best interviewer.
[00:03:39] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's it.
[00:03:39] Marc Benzakein: Possible and because, and, they weren't a avail available. So then you asked me. Yeah, so you got me.
Okay, so first of all, I, in all honesty, I really appreciate that you came to me and asked me to do this. This was not my idea. This was, I, think you actually mentioned that it was Kyle from the Admin Bar.
[00:04:01] Nathan Wrigley: Oh that. Yeah.
[00:04:02] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. And yeah.
[00:04:03] Nathan Wrigley: The mists are clearing. Yeah.
[00:04:04] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:04:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you're right.
[00:04:06] Marc Benzakein: So, I appreciate that, you thought of me, and I appreciate that you're having me do this. This is a little bit of a departure for me as well, so we're all going to have some fun here. And let's just get going.
First of all, before we even get into the, the actual software that you've created, I would like to know a little bit about the history of you and Dan, because I think most people want to know a little bit about the history of the people behind the product, and whether or not they are actually connected.
I, know that you guys have been together for a long time, but I'm curious what the history is. Did you guys like steal someone's cab and or end up in the same cab together? Or how did you how.
[00:04:46] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds like there are wedding vows in here!
[00:04:48] Dan Maby: That's right!
[00:04:50] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, almost.
[00:04:53] Nathan Wrigley: The, yeah. So do you want to take that, Dan?
[00:04:55] Dan Maby: That means memory. That means going back in time.
[00:04:58] Nathan Wrigley: No.
[00:04:58] Dan Maby: I do have a very vivid memory of you and I in a carpark many years ago.
[00:05:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yes.
[00:05:03] Dan Maby: Talking about podcasting, talking about the WordPress space, talking about getting content online and what does that mean? I think I'd run a Meetup that night, hadn't I?
[00:05:11] Nathan Wrigley: It was in Ipswich.
[00:05:12] Dan Maby: That's right, yes. And you came down, joined us. I think was really the, the start of our conversations around how do we work together on a thing? Many years ago was wasn't it?
[00:05:22] Nathan Wrigley: That was right. You'd run the WordPress meet up at Ipswich? I'd come along because I was down seeing my in-laws. I guess we must have, been in communication prior to that online, through big orange chart and things like that.
[00:05:35] Dan Maby: Yeah. No, this predates that, wasn't it?
[00:05:37] Nathan Wrigley: Does it?
[00:05:37] Dan Maby: Yeah. Yes.
[00:05:39] Marc Benzakein: How many years ago was this, do you think?
[00:05:42] Dan Maby: We're back into, oh, I dunno, 2016. Yeah.
[00:05:48] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:05:49] Nathan Wrigley: Certainly in the region of about 10 years ago. And I'd already started doing a podcast, which is this one WP Builds, which I fell into. Didn't intend to do it. It just serendipitously serendipitously happened because I was hanging out with another guy called David Waumsley, who I still do a podcast with, but not in the WordPress space.
I guess it had taken off a little bit and I obviously, I was keen to try different things out and you were keen to do a podcast or at least have somebody do a podcast.
[00:06:19] Dan Maby: Yep.
[00:06:20] Nathan Wrigley: Which then I did do for.
[00:06:21] Dan Maby: You did.
[00:06:23] Nathan Wrigley: What was WP&UP, which then became Big Orange Heart.
[00:06:25] Dan Maby: The Press Forward Podcast. Yes.
[00:06:27] Nathan Wrigley: Right. Oh.
[00:06:28] Dan Maby: It's 70.
[00:06:29] Nathan Wrigley: wearing the T-shirt. I still got.
[00:06:30] Marc Benzakein: Oh.
[00:06:31] Nathan Wrigley: Dan and I very often, so Dan and.
[00:06:34] Dan Maby: I am.
[00:06:35] Nathan Wrigley: Have you got it on Dan?
[00:06:36] Dan Maby: I have.
[00:06:36] Marc Benzakein: You know what? Hey, this is audio only. You could have said you were wearing the t-shirt.
[00:06:41] Nathan Wrigley: I'm.
[00:06:42] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:06:42] Nathan Wrigley: I'm an honest chap. And we had loads t-shirts for the Press Forward podcast,
and Dan and I are basically the only people who took 'em. So we've got about 20 each, so.
[00:06:55] Marc Benzakein: Oh wow. Yeah.
[00:06:57] Nathan Wrigley: And very often we'll get on the call and we're both wearing the same old fashioned Press Forward podcast t-shirt. Anyway.
[00:07:03] Marc Benzakein: As a side note, and we're not going to get derailed too much, but do you remember the old days when like WordCamps were all about the T-shirts, and now nobody, wants the T-shirts.
[00:07:13] Nathan Wrigley: No. I go and don't take any swag.
Yeah so, that was the whole thing. We got connected, and then we didn't an alliance. I think it was probably six months later or something, Dan suggested I do the Press Forward podcast for WP&UP, which then became Big Orange Heart.
And I carried on doing my WP Builds podcast, and then I can't even remember how, but Dan and I kept lines of communication open, then we ended up talking about, do you remember why? How did we end up on wanting to build a podcast platform?
[00:07:47] Dan Maby: I don't remember how we got to that point, but I can certainly remember talking about your skillset, my skillset, what does that look like? Is there something there to support one another through the creation of a thing? And that thing has evolved multiple times before we even got to this stage.
[00:08:03] Nathan Wrigley: So when I began podcasting, it became obvious really quickly that just like any industry you're in, as soon as you've been doing it for a little while, you figure out there's pain points all over the place. Genuinely there's, I can't imagine anybody who's had a job for more than a few weeks who hasn't thought, that could be better or that could be better. You just do, right?
[00:08:21] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:08:21] Nathan Wrigley: And with podcasting, that's what I came up with. I came up with a bunch of things which I thought this could be done better. But I couldn't build that platform. I was too busy doing other things. And also, I genuinely not technically capable enough. So I had somebody build a version of what was, at the time called Podcaster Plus.
And that was going until just a few weeks ago, really. It was just a very slimmed down platform. You've been through it, Marc for this show and various other things.
[00:08:47] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:08:48] Nathan Wrigley: But that was the beginning of it. I had an idea, had a platform built, didn't have the capacity to get it over the line. And then Dan and I at some point sat down and thought, actually, that's not a bad business idea.
[00:09:00] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:09:01] Nathan Wrigley: Let's take it and run with it. What happens with Dan is he takes it and he decides that it's going to be infinitely more capable, and infinitely more complicated. And so that's what we've got now with show.fm.
[00:09:12] Dan Maby: Complicated for us, not for the end user.
[00:09:14] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Yeah, And, I did not realise that Podcaster Plus was your brainchild.
[00:09:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah?
[00:09:23] Marc Benzakein: That's pretty fascinating actually.
[00:09:26] Nathan Wrigley: It really was just born out of copying and pasting.
[00:09:28] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:09:29] Nathan Wrigley: One of the things that you have to do for podcasting, if you do it like me a really large proportion of podcasters do interviews, right? It's just a really great format, because you don't need to write a script or anything like that.
You can have people on, and if they're interesting enough, the audience are fascinated by that.
But what happens is you've got to do the whole, find them. They've got to know who you are to find you credible. You've got to get them in the calendar at the same you are available in the calendar, and then share show notes and then get the thing published and recorded.
And then after that inform them that their podcast episode has gone live and, there's just a thousand different things. And it was literally a copy and paste exercise it it adds up to hours of utter drudge work. There's just no purpose to it, apart from the fact that you've got to get there and, if you could click a button and make it all just happen. That's what show.fm does.
It takes that complicated thing and hopefully makes it a lot easier with automated stuff here, there, and everywhere.
[00:10:30] Marc Benzakein: Looking at show.fm, I'm looking at your website right now and it has a boatload of features that I would think would be very useful to any podcaster.
You've got your booking links guest network. Let's talk about the guest network a little bit. Tell me a bit, 'cause that seems like it could be very powerful if used properly.
[00:10:53] Dan Maby: Yes, absolutely. So Nathan and I have spent probably, I'm going to say Nathan, probably the last two years, really focused on planning prior to the build even starting. So there is a lot of features, a lot of functionality in there, and it's all come out of looking at workflows, looking at how Nathan works, looking at how, how can we ensure that you create those smoother workflows for the end users.
So it's been way more time focused on the planning than actually on the, on the build itself. And one of the big pieces that kept coming outta the conversations we were talking about, were talking around was guests and guest management, and how do you enable podcasters to be able to connect, with new guests?
And that's really where the guest network was born. It's an opportunity for anybody that is invited onto podcast to create a free guest profile. They sit in that guest network then, and other podcasters that have accounts across show.fm can then look at that guest network. There's then options to invite people to be a guest on your show.
So it's about, really about connecting people. It's really the major focus for us in the guest network.
[00:11:59] Nathan Wrigley: I guess it's a little bit like a mini LinkedIn or something like that. One of the curious things that happened to me, after a period of time desperately trying to find people to be on my podcast, and finding that a real struggle, because nobody had heard of my podcast or heard of me.
You write a lot of email and most of it's ignored and, so that's the thing. And you keep going. You get your way through that, and then eventually at some point people in your niche know who you are a little bit. But also what then happened, the flip side of that is after a few years and my name in the WordPress space had become a little bit more familiar, the opposite happened.
People started to come to me saying, can I be on your podcast? And so then I was in this odd situation of, no, because you, you are really not talking about WordPress. You are talking about something else. But somehow my name has ended up on an email list. So you are thinking that you can come on my podcast. But you on the other hand, wow, that's brilliant. Yes, I really want to talk to you. And so it's this process of like this, basically we built this double fronted kind of double fronted marketplace, where people who have podcasts, who want to explore guests, they don't now hopefully have to go out and find a million email addresses and download some dodgy lists from somewhere and pummel it.
They can find people in the platform who've said, I talk about WordPress, I talk about car maintenance, I talk about knitting, whatever it may be. And you go search for them. If you find their profile credible, you can invite them on, and the flip side. If somebody that wants to be on a podcast joins our platform, they can find people who have podcasts in their niche.
And it turns out that in the years, in the 2020s getting on podcasts for business reasons became really powerful. you could really get into the marketplace that you were trying to be discovered in just by being on a handful of podcasts, a really quick way to short circuit the discoverability of your product or service or whatever it may be.
[00:14:00] Dan Maby: And we introduced options that allow hosts to recommend guests as well.
[00:14:06] Marc Benzakein: I saw that.
[00:14:08] Dan Maby: So you'll see little flags coming up saying, guest has been invited back. It's a marker that individual, they're providing genuine content, providing genuine quality content, when they come and join you as a guest.
[00:14:20] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:14:21] Dan Maby: There's both sides to this that we want to make sure that the guest and the host are equally happy.
[00:14:25] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. And I have a suggestion for you. You could actually have a bribery button too, where people can just bribe you to let them on the show. So even if they are talking about knitting.
[00:14:36] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe we could take a cut as the platform?
[00:14:37] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, Exactly. Exactly.
[00:14:40] Nathan Wrigley: We're not doing the bribery button.
[00:14:43] Dan Maby: No..
[00:14:43] Marc Benzakein: Nathan, you did make me bribe you to be able to be on your show that first time, but yeah.
[00:14:48] Nathan Wrigley: The cheque's in the mail.
[00:14:49] Marc Benzakein: It's still in the mail. It's been four years, but it's still in the mail.
[00:14:55] Nathan Wrigley: It was so much money as well.
[00:14:56] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:14:58] Dan Maby: We've created this option. You can have endorsements across the platform as well. It's all within the control of the end user.
[00:15:03] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:15:04] Dan Maby: We didn't want to put anything in there that creates that sort of really uncomfortable of, I've got a one star review, for example from a podcast host. So hide the ratings until have X amount of ratings from different podcasters.
[00:15:19] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:15:21] Dan Maby: And then it becomes anonymized. So there is that ability to rate your guests.
[00:15:25] Marc Benzakein: Oh, that's neat.
[00:15:27] Nathan Wrigley: I know it sounds a bit glib. Some people are really good guests. It's little things like they show up on time. They don't ghost you. They don't communicate with you five minutes before the interview to say, ah, I'm sorry, I forgot I can't come. And so those little things you can commend them for. They're punctual, they're reliable, and our platform will allow you to do that.
But also some people are just really great at expressing their thoughts. They're brilliant raconteurs. They can talk and they're really credible and they will draw an audience towards your podcast. And so it's nice to have a bit of quid pro quo there. To be able to say thank you by way of endorsement after they've been on the show and say, look, they are a five star guest.
They're brilliant at talking. They showed up on time. They were civil, they were polite, they did everything that you would wish to do. Let's give them a load of kudos. On the other hand, this person, they never showed up. We won't give them kudos, and we don't encourage, in fact, we don't even raise to the surface negative commentary. It's the absence of good comments and good commentary that will be the indicator that.
[00:16:38] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:16:39] Nathan Wrigley: It didn't work out for that particular person.
[00:16:41] Marc Benzakein: I think that's really important because I can tell you as a guest who has been on multiple shows myself, I never really get any feedback. So I don't know if what I'm saying is valued or wanted or needed or anything. Fortunately I'm arrogant enough to think that it is.
[00:16:59] Nathan Wrigley: I can tell you, it's disappointing Marc.
[00:17:02] Marc Benzakein: I know, my stats are disappointing. Fortunately I go to the people who love me, all one of them, and they say, you did a great job. I did listen to the show, but you did a great job.
[00:17:13] Nathan Wrigley: He's back on the show many, times. That tells you all you need to know.
[00:17:18] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:17:18] Nathan Wrigley: Anyway.
[00:17:19] Marc Benzakein: So going down through this list, which by the way, I don't know that we have enough time to go through the whole list. The other day, Nathan, you were showing me, and I know it seems like I'm just reading right down the list, but I'm not. The other day you showed me something really cool, which was the next thing on the list, which is the guest research AI thing.
Explain that to me, it, does the work for the guest, right?
[00:17:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Dan, do you want to take that or shall I? Up to you?
[00:17:46] Dan Maby: Can do.
[00:17:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:17:47] Dan Maby: Yeah. The guest researcher was, again, really born out of conversations with Nathan and Nathan, can jump into that a bit more about the, the human side of it, if you like. What we're trying to do here with the platform is the use of a very thin layer of AI and in a way that is genuinely beneficial. We're not interested in requiring you to run your entire show or through a chat interface that's not what we're trying to accomplish here. We want to find ways that the AI can a tool that actually supports that process of creating a podcast.
One of those ways is exactly this, the guest booking, process. We've given you an option to turn on AI research. Now what that does is it gives you several questions, that you can toggle on or off you can make required or make them optional. It's all completely up to you as a host, as of how to manage it. What happens is the guest will book on via your booking link. They can answer those questions, and then AI will actually go and research based on the information that's received from the guest. We make sure that it is limited to publicly available information. It's only researching based on the stuff that the guest has given you, essentially.
So it then comes back with a whole bunch of information about, the topic. There's, subject matter that the guest wants to talk about along with some suggested questions. So some, some icebreakers and some, various, topics to get into. I think Nathan, that's probably it for the sort of technical side, but sort of the human side.
[00:19:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay, so when you watch a TV interviewer, you may think that person is just an incredible minefield of knowledge. No, they're not. They've got a team of people behind them doing research on that guest. If somebody's in front of them, somebody else has done a load of work to discover, okay, what would be sensible questions to ask that person?
The conversation can go off in any direction, but let's write down 10 things on a piece of paper so that David Letterman, or whoever it may be, can hold them so that he's got things to say. That's basically what's happening here. Because the guests will come, they'll go into your booking form, fill out the questions. If they provide answers in AI fields, which they do not have to do, it depends how you set up the form. The AI will go off in the background and do some research and then it will return to you things like that.
And, what's really nice about that is that then you are prepared before the show actually starts. You've got things that you probably wouldn't have thought of because you probably don't have time to go off and do that research. So it's short circuit it.
Now, there's no prescription there. You don't have to read them out. But it might just be that you could take some intuition and think, oh, that's a curious direction. I wouldn't have thought of that. I'll make sure to ask something in that area.
Then the nice thing as well is that the guest is steered by your booking form into revealing things that they may be, I don't know, maybe they're shy. They don't really have a lot of confidence in what they want to talk about. That has happened to me a lot. Some of the best guests that I've had on have been incredibly shy, unwilling to put things in the booking form. And so I've teased it out of them. But this process allows you to not do that.
All I can say is, it is gold. It is really gold. And it drops into the show notes, which get created automatically, so that when you both arrive at the interview stage, you've both got access to the show notes. You can see all of this research and the interview can carry on. It's really good. It's really powerful.
[00:21:22] Marc Benzakein: And so the guest then has the ability to look at the show notes and say, this is not accurate, to correct it. Which does bring up a question. I imagine that until you get like really good sample size, you're not going to know for sure.
But how do you prevent things like AI hallucinations and confusion with, I know that you mentioned that the guest goes in and puts a little bit about themselves, which I'm sure is one way to prevent the fiction. But how do you prevent that entirely?
[00:21:56] Dan Maby: I think the honest answer is you can't. However, we do put in several guardrails to support that process. First of which is the URL that the person provides. So they can provide, if you are answering the AI questions, you can provide up to three individual URLs. The research is targeted to those sources. It will come back with cited information, so it tells you where it's gathered this information from, and is also honest about it. So it'll also come back and tell you, I don't have this information.
So it depends on what's been given as to how much it provide back to you. We've tried to make it in a way that it is constrained to the information that's being given by the guest. And obviously it's age old adage, garbage in, garbage out. If you get a good quality response, then you're going to get a good quality output.
[00:22:43] Nathan Wrigley: It's just a starting point as well.
[00:22:45] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:22:46] Nathan Wrigley: I don't actually think I would ever read any of those questions. I would just read through them, half an hour before the interview started. Take some intuitions from it and then write out my own questions. But what's curious is it does send you off in interesting directions.
It might have discovered something in their past, which is directly related to where they are now, but you would perhaps not have had the time to go and explore in that way. And yeah, and it's bound to the links that they provide. So there's a bit of trust there. Obviously if they provide links which they are not responsible for, and they claim to be the prime mover in, I don't know, some branch of physics, which they really have nothing to do with. We're gonna fall foul of that. But that's that's how it goes. It's a nice to have. It's not essential. If you're a great interviewer with a panel of people behind you, you wouldn't need it. But for most people, I think it's just a useful little crutch.
[00:23:34] Marc Benzakein: No, I think it's probably a little bit more than a little useful. I think it would be very useful, and very cool. I just think that it's up to the guests to make sure that there's no fiction there. But also I have found that with AI, when you request that it site sources, it tends to also be fairly accurate. I've found far less hallucination occurrences when that happens.
[00:24:01] Nathan Wrigley: The nice thing about all this is as well is that, I think probably everything that we're going to talk about today you could do elsewhere. You could go and do that stuff elsewhere. The best bit here is we've wrapped it all up in this one service, so you don't have to think.
You send them a booking link. They fill out the booking link. That's obviously got your calendars, and they'll link it with their calendars and say, yes, I can do that. That will then automatically do the guest research. Automatically create the show notes. Automatically create the link so that you can all join the show at the right moment. It's all just built in, and then a whole load of other things that we haven't got to yet.
[00:24:35] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:24:36] Nathan Wrigley: And it's inside this one entity. So you're in this one platform. everything happens, and you don't have to think so much.
[00:24:42] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:24:43] Dan Maby: I think this is where these conversations about how do you, allow the human through this process? Where's the human side to it? I think in this, in this period that we're in at the moment where, it's AI, AI, AI everywhere.
[00:24:55] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:24:55] Dan Maby: Everywhere you look that's not what we are looking to achieve here. Use it as a tool and how do you ensure that the guest is treated like a human. The host is treated like a human. We're not just expecting them to go through and fill in these check boxes. We want to make sure that the end result is actually, a good quality podcast.
[00:25:13] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:25:14] Dan Maby: An interesting podcast.
[00:25:15] Marc Benzakein: Every time we talk about AI, we always come to the same conclusion where we say, you still need human oversight no matter what. You need human oversight.
[00:25:25] Dan Maby: Yep.
[00:25:25] Marc Benzakein: But look at how much time it can save, and this is an amazing workflow product really, that automates so much. I am not a podcaster per se, although I have some ideas like everybody else, and I've gotten some things going.
And then I discover the same kind of hangups that you're addressing here, which is the post-work and everything that goes on, or the pre-work. All the work that goes on , around the podcast to put it out. It's not just, when you get right down to it, it's not just you record it, and then if you're a certain type or you edit it, right?
We'll just say record it, you edit it. That's oversimplification. You're talking about 20 other things that go on in order to produce a podcast. Which is why when I brought up that, Nathan, you've done 1200 podcasts, that just blows my mind because, or episodes I should say.
[00:26:22] Nathan Wrigley: So I go to the gym and basically every year in January, the gym gets filled up with.
[00:26:27] Marc Benzakein: Crowded. Yeah.
[00:26:29] Nathan Wrigley: The gym, there's just thousands of people that you've never seen before. And then about two weeks into January, you go back to the gym, there's nobody there. They've all discovered, oh, yeah, I'm going to get fit. New Year's resolution, I'm going to get fit, I'm going to make myself really a different character. Two weeks later, gone. That's what happens in the podcasting space. The metric is three episodes. People are really excited. They love the idea of doing it. The medium is brilliant. You speak into a mic, the world potentially can hear your voice. Three episodes in they discover the stuff that's required and they give up.
[00:27:01] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:27:02] Nathan Wrigley: Don't get passed the third episode. And that's the audience that we're trying to help through. Because, you probably did want to get through it, but you suddenly realised oh, I have to do all these other things?
[00:27:14] Marc Benzakein: I can tell you, I for one have a podcast that I've literally got five episodes in the can and they have.
[00:27:21] Nathan Wrigley: Well you did more than most.
[00:27:23] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, which is typical, I always do more than most. But the problem is finding the time because I have a real job and all these other things to actually get it out there. And then if you have any pride in what you're producing, you don't want it to be just this raw thing that you just throw out there, because you know that people aren't going to listen to you going um, um 5,000 times.
So, this is very cool. And then the next thing is. I am going through this whole list here. I'm not intending to, I'm trying to pick the highlights, but every single thing I'm looking, I'm not kidding when I say, every single thing I look at that this thing does under features is a highlight. It really is amazing to me.
The distribution portion of it. Okay. So I, literally am just like, because that's the other thing is like, I know how to upload onto YouTube, but what about all the other thing? What about Apple and all the other platforms or, the other, podcast hosts or whatever.
How do you get that out there? And talk about how your distribution works, because I thought that was pretty cool too.
[00:28:29] Dan Maby: I think just take a little step back here. What's been really interesting for me is the production of content here, and the ability to get your content online. That's been a passion of mine for many years in the WordPress space. It's the ability to get your written content online. Here we're talking about obviously audio, and as you mentioned, Nathan, it's a really powerful thing to be able to get online, to be able to get your voice out there. Distribution is absolutely key at that. You've got to be able to get that out to the various podcast players. And let's be honest, it can be a bit of a minefield. There's a lot of options. A lot of ways of doing it.
[00:29:01] Nathan Wrigley: So uninteresting to do this job.
[00:29:02] Dan Maby: We've listed 20 podcast players, within our distribution settings that enable you to send your podcast to those podcast players. So you've, spent all that time producing a fantastic episode and you want to get it online. You obviously want people to be listening to it, and people are listening through a whole multitude of podcast players. Starting with the big ones. You've got the likes of Apple, Spotify, YouTube, et cetera. and then you're moving down to your Pocket Cast. So many options around how you consume that, and that's the beauty of podcasting, because it all hinges on the RSS feed.
[00:29:33] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:29:34] Dan Maby: Open technology. Using our platform to distribute, you can go through every individual player. So if you start with Apple, for example, it will give you guided steps. It will tell you where you need to go. It'll give you explain the process. We actually focus on privacy through this so we don't put your email address, for example, into the RSS feed, which many podcasts hosts do these days, unfortunately. So you've got various options and ways to get you from the point of publishing to the point of distributing through, through show.fm.
[00:30:02] Nathan Wrigley: It's such a weird system. Like I don't suppose anybody who isn't a podcaster has ever given this much thought, but basically what you do as a podcaster you create a bunch of audio files. So you create episode one, episode two, episode three, and it's audio. it could be video increasingly, but it's audio. And then you put them in a host, and then that host then creates an RSS feed. And the RSS feed is like XML, it's just, text with a bunch of enclosures.
So it's got description tag, start description, end description. Image, start image, end image. And it does that for each episode. However, when you go and turn on the telly and you want to watch your favourite TV programme, you go to the BBC because you know that's where it is. And you go to ITV or you go to, I don't know, what the American networks are called, but you go to that network because that's where that programming is. Podcasting is nothing like that. Your content can be consumed by any app which is an RSS podcast reader. So on your phone you could have 15 different apps that all consume your content.
And so there's this weird dance that you have to do one time right at the beginning when you set up your podcast to tell all the podcast player apps. This is where my content is. So that when somebody searches for it on PocketCasts or Apple or Spotify or YouTube Music, they know. And you have to do it once and it's dead weird. But once you've done it, it's done. It takes about an hour. But we make it drop dead simple because you click Spotify, we open up a little modal and it says, do this, do this, do this, do this, you're done. And then you open up YouTube, do this, do this, do this, do this, you're done.
Nobody else does that because they figure you've got to go and figure it out for yourself. And so we've really bent over backwards, I think, to make it as easy as possible. That was a bit of a weird, went off in a bit of a random direction there, but it is a strange thing about podcasts and, it's the best thing about it as well. Because it's open and because you control the audio, the players have to find you. And so it's your job to go and tell them where your content is. And from that moment on, they know forever more.
[00:32:22] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, there's a podcast that I listen to, it's a sports podcast. It's an ESPN sports podcast. And for six months they were complaining about the fact that they could not get it on the Spotify. They were just, yeah, they were having struggles with Spotify. I'm like, man, if ESPN is having a problem getting it on, Spotify, then, where's the hope that I can? But obviously they didn't have show.fm to tell 'em how to do it.
[00:32:50] Nathan Wrigley: Spotify's a weird one because it's a walled garden. So a bit like Apple Podcast is a bit of a wall garden as well. A few of the players like Pocket Casts and things like that, much more open. But Spotify, you have to create an account. You have to have a Spotify account, and then you tell them what your RSS feed is. Many of the other platforms, you don't need to do that. You just, turn up, tell them what your RSS feed is, and they just run from there. So yeah, it's curious. There's all these different things that you've got to do and once you've done it once, it's done, which is nice, but it takes, I don't know, an hour or so.
[00:33:24] Marc Benzakein: I want to just cover, I'm going to cover these two things as one because it's, they're both in my mind, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, they fall under this idea of white labelling, which is the embeddable player, and the podcast website. Where you can brand it to your own, your own look and feel and everything,
[00:33:41] Nathan Wrigley: So if you'd have done this interview yesterday, I'd have had a whole different set of answers. I woke up this morning and, I woke up this morning and Dan, about half an hour before we got on the show completely upended that. So go on over to you, Dan. This is Dan All over. Just built something last night, which made it way better.
[00:34:03] Dan Maby: We have our public sites as you mentioned. If you head over to, for example, the.show.fm, you'll find our show.fm podcast public website. It's crawlable by search engines. you can make, control how it looks and feels, et cetera.
We've also got embeddable players. So if you are, running a WordPress site, or next js whatever, you can go and embed your player, over there. Again, fully controllable. We've got various designs, various layouts, et cetera. But we've been talking about, that distribution piece, not just distribution to players, but also distribution to your own website. How do you own that content? How do you make sure that you are, you're not ending up in a walled garden that you cannot get yourself out of?
Yeah, that's where I've lived in the WordPress space for so long. It's, something that I'm, you know, truly passionate about. We spoke and we've planned, for quite some time what this looks like. We've developed a WordPress plugin. So the WordPress plugin now ties in directly to your account.
If you have an account, you don't actually have to, you can use the player independently. But it allows you to then render your content on your WordPress site. There's actually an NPM package, so if you want to go off and, run it elsewhere, it's all web components. So you can actually run it on any site, any site, not just WordPress. But the WordPress plugin does a few, a few interesting things in that you can actually choose when you're publishing your podcast episode from within show.fm to also have it publish an episode on your WordPress site as well, if you've connected the two together.
[00:35:31] Nathan Wrigley: It's so good.
[00:35:32] Dan Maby: And it will also allow you to migrate from your old podcast players. So if you've got existing players on your site, really we want to support that whole journey of migrating from one host to another, because we know it can be painful. That includes obviously the ability to migrate your audio on your website as well.
[00:35:52] Nathan Wrigley: It's so good. Like it's genuinely really good. It's really, good. It's going to be, I think a lot of the intuition came from me trying to figure out how to, I don't mean me with the idea, but the problem that I have is that I've got, I don't know, nine, 850 or something episodes on WP Builds, and they're all rendering legacy players. And so there's this whole thing of I'd have to go into 850 posts update. And so Dan Overnight has made that go away. It's just now I click a few buttons.
[00:36:20] Marc Benzakein: That's.
[00:36:21] Nathan Wrigley: They all get slurped up.
[00:36:22] Marc Benzakein: I can see why you, I can see why you're so excited about it, Nathan. Yeah.
[00:36:26] Nathan Wrigley: That's about 12 hours just saved, right there. It means that you can move your existing podcast over to us and if you've got a WordPress site, then hopefully that'll be about as painless as it can be. Because each post contains probably an embedded player somewhere, and we can swap those out for hours in a heartbeat, which is great.
[00:36:46] Marc Benzakein: That's, very cool. So this brings up a question, which has to do with how you two work together. Does it tend to be something where Nathan's ready to throw his computer out the window, and he tells you about it, and then you come up with a solution, Dan? How does, that whole dynamic work with you deciding what the next thing is, the next big thing that you're going to add to show.fm?
[00:37:13] Nathan Wrigley: I'm going to take this question because this is honestly, this is what happens. We meet on a Tuesday, we have a big long meeting. We talk about all the things that we want to do, and then I do nothing. And then Dan, does absolutely masses, and I come, and then we come back a few days later and I, genuinely this is what happens.
Dan joins the call and says, do you want to have a look at what I've done? And I go, yeah, all right. And then I go, oh, that's so good. And then he'll do something else. I, oh, that's That's such a good idea. That's genuinely what happened. And he's going to deny it, but.
[00:37:49] Dan Maby: I am going to deny it.
[00:37:50] Nathan Wrigley: That is what happens.
[00:37:51] Marc Benzakein: So it's a two hour meeting with you complaining for an hour and a half.
[00:37:55] Nathan Wrigley: More or less!
[00:37:56] Dan Maby: Pretty much.
[00:37:57] Marc Benzakein: And then 30 minutes of him saying, come back next Tuesday. And then.
[00:38:02] Nathan Wrigley: Great.
[00:38:03] Marc Benzakein: And, Yeah. Okay. Okay. I see how it works. Yeah.
[00:38:08] Dan Maby: It is taking that information and distilling it down into something. That can be the challenge. Trying to figure out those pain points and trying to a system that allow us to prioritise.
[00:38:19] Marc Benzakein: If Nathan would open up about what's bothering him rather than being so reserved about it.
[00:38:25] Dan Maby: That's right. We're sitting there, we're looking at your 150 odd GitHub issues. I like, and suddenly everything's, it starts to get a priority. You have out of 150, you might have 50 odd that are all a high priority, of course, nothing's a priority in that scenario.
[00:38:41] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:38:41] Dan Maby: It is challenging. And something that doesn't often get discussed is that idea of, you're in business with another individual partners, et cetera, you spend a lot of time with those people and you've got to make sure that communication works. You've got to figure out how you communicate with one another. You've got to figure out all sorts of different things. it really is a relationship.
[00:39:04] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:39:05] Dan Maby: Yeah.
[00:39:06] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:39:07] Nathan Wrigley: Wedding vows, it sounds like.
[00:39:10] Marc Benzakein: It really is. And, I like to tell people, when I talk about my cars or whatever I say, it's like a relationship. You have to decide what quirks with the person you're having the relationship with are tolerable. And if you can tolerate most of their quirks, then you get into that relationship.
And a partnership is definitely one of those things where you have to be totally all in on like accepting the quirks and saying the benefits outweigh the risks, that's for sure.
[00:39:40] Nathan Wrigley: That's a nice way to put it.
[00:39:41] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:39:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's nice.
[00:39:43] Marc Benzakein: Going along with this, how you two work together. I wanted to say also, because I've been following the progress of this product for, I don't know, probably, when did you announce it, semi publicly a year ago maybe Nathan?
[00:39:58] Nathan Wrigley: Something along those lines.
[00:39:59] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:40:00] Nathan Wrigley: Something like that.
[00:40:00] Marc Benzakein: And I've been watching how Nathan in particular has actively sought out other people in the space to collaborate and get ideas and feedback and being open to that. And I think that's such an important part to the evolution of a product. Because at some point in time, I hate to tell you this, but the two of you are going to run out of ideas.
So being, it may be 10 years from now, but at some point in time you're going to run out of ideas, and what's going to drive the evolution and the growth of your product is going to be that of the community and the people that you're supporting.
And I will say, just from what I've observed and having known Nathan for a little bit, how open you have been to people giving feedback. And even I've given a little bit of feedback here and there and you guys have been just like, oh yeah, that's a good idea or whatever. And I think that is such an important, part and piece of product development. Because when you go from creating this product to actually servicing it, you need to be in touch with your community and you need to know what's needed and wanted.
[00:41:12] Nathan Wrigley: We're just at the very beginning of that journey. It really has been a bit of a build process behind closed doors. Dan and I have done various things. We've asked people what they think at various points, and then now we're at the point where it's gone out into the wild. And we are actively seeking, at this point, a few people to jump on board at a moment where they'll be able to suggest things to us that will be impactful. Two years down the line from now, the platform will probably have solidified in a certain direction based upon what our early users have requested of us.
And so we've got this sort of founder's deal on at the moment where we're offering a kind of really remarkably cheap price. And the reason for that is we want a bunch of people who are just invested in it, want to give us some helpful advice and help shape the platform. And in return, there'll be that moment where maybe bugs will come along and you'll be able to help us through that part as well.
Yeah, I think you're right. It's going to be a journey and we, are very much at the beginning of that journey.
[00:42:16] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:42:16] Dan Maby: Very much so, and building that community around it is, is something we're passionate about.
[00:42:21] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:42:21] Dan Maby: Working with people, determining, how does this platform work for you as a podcaster? Already we've built features, we've adjusted features based on the feedback that we've already received.
[00:42:31] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:42:33] Dan Maby: In the last couple of months.
[00:42:34] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:42:34] Dan Maby: And it's wonderful to really see that, to see that evolution of a product that you have, an idea that you have and it's suddenly, people start using it and you start think, oh actually you know.
[00:42:44] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:42:45] Dan Maby: Try this way?
[00:42:45] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:42:46] Dan Maby: We just released our public API for example, and we got pinged by one of our customers to say, hey look, I've just built this on my site and I've just used your API and it's fantastic.
[00:42:54] Marc Benzakein: That's so cool. It's yeah.
[00:42:56] Dan Maby: They've taken this idea and they've turned it into something that we hadn't even really considered.
[00:43:02] Marc Benzakein: That amazing?
[00:43:03] Nathan Wrigley: So great.
[00:43:03] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Yeah. I know that happens a lot for us at MainWP, and I won't go down that road too much, but that does happen a lot for us, where people come in and they show us what they built and we're like, oh my goodness, this is, why didn't we think of that? Or, whatever.
And, Nathan, it's got to feel good for you too sometimes. It's good to see that like other people's pain points are the same as yours.
[00:43:28] Nathan Wrigley: It's bound to be that not everybody will use all the platform. I think we've got so many things in there, it's going to be okay if you go to the website and you think, you know what, that isn't exactly my problem. Keep looking around. Because if you explore the depth of everything, not everything is going to be applicable to you.
You might not have guests, for example, in which case you might not make use of the booking links. But all of the show notes and the publishing stuff and the transcriptions and all of that we do on your behalf will be really interesting. But broadly speaking, doesn't take too many hours on Reddit to figure out that there's a lot of people with a lot of problems in podcasting.
[00:44:04] Marc Benzakein: Sure. I'm sure. Yeah, I'm sure.
[00:44:07] Nathan Wrigley: A lot of very, this is going to sound a bit arrogant. I don't mean it to sound arrogant. A lot of technically, novice technical people, let's put it that way, have got themselves into podcasting. And as soon as they are confronted with the problems that they're facing, that's a real mountain to overcome.
[00:44:23] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:44:26] Nathan Wrigley: We'll be guided by them, and they'll be guided by us a little bit.
[00:44:29] Dan Maby: Right. With the power of things like the automations, you've got the MCP tools. There's some really interesting stuff that you can do. The analytics. When you combine the analytics with the CP tools, it's like, hang on a minute, I can suddenly, I can crawl some really rich data there using an AI agent. So I can start to determine which guests are actually generating more listens, for example.
[00:44:53] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:44:53] Nathan Wrigley: When this episode goes live.
[00:44:56] Marc Benzakein: Uhhuh.
[00:44:56] Nathan Wrigley: So we'll edit this down, upload it to our platform. It will then transcribe it. It will then say, who's this talking? And I'll say, that's Marc, that's Nathan, that's Dan. When that transcription goes on the website, we'll be able to determine what percentage of the time different people spoke. And then let's say for example, Marc, you come on my podcast 25 times, and every time you come on my podcast, it's noticed. Like we get more downloads. Marc comes on, more downloads. Marc's on again, we've got loads of downloads.
[00:45:29] Marc Benzakein: I feel like AI is hallucinating right now, but go ahead.
[00:45:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. but you get, what I mean. And that's such a really interesting thing that we can do because we have the transcript? And we know the names of the people on your podcast.
[00:45:41] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:45:42] Nathan Wrigley: That can then bind into our data. I don't know that anybody else can do that. And I think that's a really interesting thing. Go to your MCP and say who is popular?
[00:45:51] Dan Maby: And then you can trigger an automation off the back of that to say this individual, we're seeing an increase in downloads and it will fire out emails to inform the guests that actually, you know what, your episode was very popular.
[00:46:03] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. And, once again, as I mentioned earlier, I think guests like that kind of feedback, they want to know, they don't want to know that they weren't listened to. But if they are interested in like improving their presence. It's, good data to have.
And you also have the ability to provide client reports. Talk about that a little bit. It says, sponsor ready download reports shared on a link.
[00:46:29] Nathan Wrigley: So lead with this if that's all right, Dan? A lot of podcasters wish to have sponsorship for their podcast. That's a really credible way of making your podcast worth the while. You get a sponsor on, they'll pay for a proportion of your time or whatever. They'll give you some dollars in exchange for, let's say a mention in the the show, or you might call it an ad or something like that.
However, typically what happens is those sponsors, prior to jumping on your podcast and sponsoring, you will wish to know what your data looks like. And typically that's really hard to do because you have to log into the hosting platform, maybe download a PDF or something like that. Share it. There's that whole thing. It could be doctored. God forbid that people would do that, but it could be doctored.
[00:47:14] Marc Benzakein: Sure.
[00:47:15] Nathan Wrigley: But what we provide is you can go into the platform, open it up and say, okay, make me a report for the last three months of podcast data. Then it creates a link. You send that link to your potential sponsor and they can see. And then you can make that link expire after seven days or a week, or, oh, that's the same thing by the way, Nathan. Seven days or two weeks or a day or something like that. And then you can move on. Or you could, I don't know, just send it to somebody who might be a current sponsor to say, look, this is what you have been receiving during your sponsorship.
[00:47:51] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:47:52] Nathan Wrigley: That's really powerful. And as far as I'm aware, nobody does that apart from us.
[00:47:56] Dan Maby: We're IAB aligned in our analytics? We're really looking to build trust within those analytics. So we block bots. We block data centres.
[00:48:06] Marc Benzakein: Oh, nice. Nice.
[00:48:08] Dan Maby: That data is of no use to anyone. They're not genuine listeners. We want to make sure we look for a minimum of 30 seconds of audio play. There's various things here. So you may come to us and you may think, hang on a minute, my analytics have dropped. I'm seeing less listeners. The reality is, unfortunately, there are several solutions that don't block some of this traffic.
[00:48:30] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:48:31] Dan Maby: We really need to make sure that information, particularly if it's being bound to something like sponsorship, is genuine data.
[00:48:38] Marc Benzakein: There was something you showed me, Nathan the other day. And by the way, I, really recommend to anyone listening to this, that you go to the show.fm website, and just click on the features button and this whole page comes up with, and it sounds like Dan's like adding new features every five seconds.
[00:48:57] Nathan Wrigley: Give him, give him eight minutes and there will be a new menu item!
[00:49:00] Marc Benzakein: Or at least between Tuesdays, so I would say.
So I recommend that everybody go and they look at this. There was something you showed me and I can't remember the context it was in, and I apologise for that, Nathan, but you showed me, you had this little workflow builder.
[00:49:16] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah.
[00:49:17] Dan Maby: Automations.
[00:49:17] Marc Benzakein: And I want you to talk about that. I know that it's not something you can show visually here, but if you could describe it.
[00:49:24] Nathan Wrigley: There are some really easy ways to describe it, but then I want everybody's mind to just free up a little bit and think, okay, we could go really complicated with this. And we call it automations. And it's basically, think of something like Zapier or something like that. You start off with a trigger, and then the trigger leads to actions.
And so the trigger could be, when is an episode going to be recorded? So that's a date trigger, and there's a moment in time. You put it in the app, somebody books on at 2:00 PM on the 21st of October. That then becomes the recording moment. You could set up an automation to say, 24 hours before that moment is reached, send all the guests an email with this template.
So you write the email, put the merge tags in for first name, recording time, you put the email in, whatever you like. And then that email will go out and it's a good way you could do that two hours before. And it's a good way of making sure that people show up.
But we've got so many triggers in the platform based upon things like dates and times. Guests doing particular things. Download analytic data, all of this kind of stuff. And you can really get complicated.
So the action could be a fork in the road, if this do that, if it's not this, do something else. Wait, send an email. But probably one of the most powerful ones is send a web hook, because when you've got the web hooks, configured correctly, then you can send any information, a little parcel of information, anyway you like. So you could send people into your CRM or whatever. It's incredibly powerful, and we're just really keen to see what people can do with that.
[00:51:04] Marc Benzakein: And by the way, it's incredibly easy. It's all drag and drop. It's just, it is so easy and, so cool. If you've ever created a Zapier or anything like that. I thought kind of mind blowing how simple you made it.
[00:51:18] Dan Maby: I think you've covered it really well there.
It's about enabling integration essentially, integration with, external services if you're looking at the web hooks. It's that balance of technical and simplicity, how do you, and that's a really fine line to try and tread isn't it?
So things like we introduced magic tags, for example. About 50 odd magic tags across it, which you can drop into your, your email templates. There's just a tonne of places across the app that you can use those. Which means that it is very much a sort of a set and forget for many of these things.
You want to remind your guests an hour before. You want to send them a link hour, an hour after you've published, for example, to the public page. There's all sorts of ways in which you can construct that. And the magic tags really do allow an incredible level of flexibility across the platform.
[00:52:03] Nathan Wrigley: If you've ever felt guilty because you never communicate with your guests after a podcast episode, this allows you to do that kind of on an autopilot basis. And, you may think to yourself, that's not me really doing it, but the guests will quite like it. the fact that you show them, okay, here's the page where it is. If you want to go and share that. And reply to this email and I'll get back to you straight away. That'll never be missed by you again.
The moment the podcast goes live, maybe you say, wait an hour, something like that. Then send it to all the guests, maybe some additional information, come on another time. Here's the booking link. Let's do it again in six months time. You could send an email in a year's time. Again, totally automated just to, just to let people come on. And so it's about those little things that your podcast could do with be more credible.
A friend of mine described the platform thus, thus and I love this. He says it allows you to concentrate on the artistry of your podcast and not the tedious stuff.
[00:53:00] Marc Benzakein: That's really good. Yeah. That's a really good way to put it. And what's really nice is, of course, I think you said it Nathan earlier, these are all things, or a lot of these things are things you can do like with 5 million different services. And this just all is like under one umbrella. You just go to one URL, and actually maybe some of it isn't?
Like the analytics and stuff like that, you probably would have to really go through a lot of brain damage in order to get the analytics at the level that you have. So I think that's pretty, pretty impressive.
I think it's getting close to time that we probably need to wrap this up, even though there's probably a hundred more questions to ask.
[00:53:41] Nathan Wrigley: We could talk for days. But you're right.
[00:53:43] Dan Maby: That's right.
[00:53:44] Marc Benzakein: But I do have, so I'm going to ask each one of you a question and then I'm going to answer the question myself, if you didn't copy my answer.
Dan, favourite feature or the one you're most proud of?
[00:53:57] Dan Maby: Ooh.
[00:53:58] Nathan Wrigley: Love that.
[00:53:58] Dan Maby: Gosh, ooh. I don't know. I'm torn between API and automations.
[00:54:05] Nathan Wrigley: Clever stuff.
[00:54:06] Marc Benzakein: Okay.
[00:54:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:54:07] Marc Benzakein: Okay, Nathan.
[00:54:09] Nathan Wrigley: For me it's got to be the whole booking process.
[00:54:12] Marc Benzakein: Okay.
[00:54:13] Nathan Wrigley: Because that is a real actual time suck and with this, you send a booking link in an email and the podcast episode and everything is made. You don't have to do anything. All you have to do is go in at one point and say, actually, yeah, they look, like the kind of guests. You click a button to confirm them, and then all these other things happen in the background. So it's, brilliant that point of view.
[00:54:34] Dan Maby: Can I add an addendum?
[00:54:36] Marc Benzakein: No. No, it's too late.
[00:54:37] Nathan Wrigley: It was two
[00:54:38] Dan Maby: Guess portal.
[00:54:39] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, The guest portal. Yeah, the guest network.
[00:54:42] Marc Benzakein: Oh, boy. We didn't even talk about the guest portal, did we? We just.
[00:54:47] Nathan Wrigley: Oh
[00:54:48] Marc Benzakein: That's a whole nother, that's a whole nother episode. Yeah.
[00:54:50] Nathan Wrigley: We've been having a chat. We've got a whole chat widget buried inside the episode.
[00:54:54] Marc Benzakein: And the chat widget, of all the things I have to say, that's my favourite thing. I know that that's crazy, but, looking at it from the guest point of view, because I'm looking at it from the guest point of view. I think that it's, it was really cool that leading up to this episode, we had some interactions and they were, real time-ish, obviously. It was like, I typed and then you came on because you're 15,000 hours ahead of me. And you came on when it was convenient for you.
But what I really liked is gave this a better feeling of pre-show collaboration that doesn't normally happen. And so I was thinking about that actually last night. I was in the shower and I was like, that's really a cool feature that it, that we just we take chatting for granted. But what's nice is that it's, not like a channel full of a hundred people. It's a channel of the people that are relevant to that episode of that show.
And so you're only talking about those things. And it makes it really easy to focus and kind of plan and see where things are going. And so I really enjoy that feature a lot actually.
[00:56:03] Nathan Wrigley: We had this in the old platform, but it was in a separate UI. You had to click into another tab, do the chat.
[00:56:09] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:56:10] Nathan Wrigley: And then come back to somewhere else. So all happens alongside things like the show notes. It's always there, stuck to the side. You are absolutely right. Like I've now done, I've probably about seven or eight episodes, maybe six or seven episodes through show.fm. Every time the chat has been busy.
[00:56:30] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:56:31] Nathan Wrigley: I didn't expect that, but we've got like emoji support and people quickly find that and, fire and hearts and all that going.
[00:56:38] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:56:39] Nathan Wrigley: And we've probably got in the chat for this one, we've probably got about, I would say about 20, 25, something like that.
[00:56:47] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:56:49] Nathan Wrigley: And all it took was for one of us to kickstart it.
[00:56:52] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[00:56:53] Nathan Wrigley: So if you are the podcast host, you just write something, they all get the email to say there's an update, and you go and log in, and off it goes and you just riff around what's going on.
[00:57:03] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, it really, is. Cool. Yeah.
[00:57:06] Dan Maby: You've then got the show notes. Which are live collaboration. You can see kind of Google Doc environment.
[00:57:12] Marc Benzakein: And I guess, yeah, we didn't even talk about the guest portal, but it is very cool because like for me, like I'm going to be on your show on Monday. I think it's Monday.
[00:57:21] Nathan Wrigley: It's now your show, just so that we are clear.
[00:57:23] Marc Benzakein: Yes. 'cause I've taken it over permanently. Yeah. And it shows like right there, these are the shows you're going to be on, and then you click on that and it's just, it's, yeah.
[00:57:33] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, so when you log in, of course you have a list of all the.
[00:57:35] Marc Benzakein: Of all the shows that I'm going to be on. Yeah. Yeah. I can see you spent a lot of time in the guest portal there.
[00:57:41] Nathan Wrigley: So my, because I have a different set of privileges.
[00:57:44] Marc Benzakein: Right?
[00:57:45] Nathan Wrigley: That's how the platform works, and because I run this podcast. I have a slightly more complicated interface and so it's different for you and I forget sometimes what yours looks like, but I have that dashboard as well. Because you are part of my, and I'm doing air quotes here, team, I can just add you in to any episode by clicking a button. So if I wanted you to just drop into an episode, I can just click a button you are in, you can then manage that episode on my behalf. And there's this whole team system going on.
[00:58:17] Marc Benzakein: But it's absolutely fantastic. And like I said, we didn't really even get into the guest portal because we're just talking about running it from the host point of view. But the guest portal really is a whole other powerful part of the whole show.fm product.
[00:58:32] Nathan Wrigley: We're both quite proud, aren't we, Dan? I think.
[00:58:35] Dan Maby: We are. Yes.
[00:58:36] Marc Benzakein: It's actually exciting to see people as proud as they are of the child that they've created.
[00:58:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And the child they are as well, in this case.
[00:58:47] Marc Benzakein: So yeah. This has been fantastic. Is there anything else that you feel like I might have missed in all of this? I feel like there probably is?
[00:58:54] Nathan Wrigley: I think the bit that we're trying to drill home at the moment is that if you've got an intuition that you want to do a podcast, or that you have a podcast that kind of maybe fell into disrepair and you never carried on, definitely have a look. This may well take away a lot of the pain points and just bear in mind that we are doing this a hundred people licence thing.
And what I mean by that is we're onboarding a hundred different people at this price point. Basically, it's $11 a month that includes hosting the whole guest network, teams, everything that we've described today. There's a lot of depth and a lot of breadth. And you can find that at the founders page, which is show.fm slash founders. Yeah.
[00:59:35] Marc Benzakein: And, there is a button on the front page that says founders, I think Founders Special, or something like that. Yeah.
[00:59:41] Dan Maby: Just want to reiterate that. We're offering the Studio Plan, our Studio Plan under the founders. So as a founder's deal. So you've got three years of access to the entire platform under the Studio Plan, we very intentionally haven't made this lifetime deal, because we want to create a sustainable business here. This is what the focus is around here. This is something for the long term here.
The ability to have access to that studio plan actually allows you to publish up to 30 episodes a month under it. And you can create as many podcasts as you want. There's no limitation to the number of podcasts. You've got your teams in there, so you can have multiple team members supporting it. Three seats included. There's a heck of a lot that's included.
[01:00:26] Marc Benzakein: Wow.
[01:00:26] Dan Maby: Equivalent to $11 a month.
[01:00:27] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Yeah. That's actually very, very reasonable.
[01:00:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[01:00:32] Marc Benzakein: I just wanted to say one more thing 'cause you touched on it, Nathan, which is, if you are just starting out a podcast and you don't even know what you need, but you're just getting going. This is a great place to start because even if you don't use all the features, you will grow into using them.
And with any system, if you start out with the right system, it makes life so much easier going down the road.
[01:00:55] Nathan Wrigley: This is going to sound so boastful, but I'm going to say it. There is genuinely nothing like it. There is no tool out there that does a fraction of what this does. It's born out of a lot of thinking, a lot of hard work, and a lot of butting up against myriad problems and trying to fix them all in one platform.
So, if you are starting out, I suspect that you will get a lot of benefit out of it.
[01:01:23] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.
[01:01:24] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you, Marc. Appreciate that.
[01:01:25] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. and Nathan, I'm sure you wake up every day and, feel like, I wish I had this on day one.
[01:01:31] Nathan Wrigley: Oh. Yeah. Yeah. Or what actually happens at the minute is I wake up and I think, what's Dan got for me today?
[01:01:37] Marc Benzakein: There you go.
[01:01:40] Dan Maby: Christmas every day.
[01:01:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, It is, it really, like he totally earlier today, just this whole WordPress plugin thing, which is just utterly brilliant.
If you're a WordPresser, there is no better way to do podcasting, than the platform that we now have. Genuinely, there's nothing which comes close.
So there we go.
[01:01:59] Marc Benzakein: Thank you for joining me on my show.
[01:02:02] Nathan Wrigley: No.
[01:02:03] Marc Benzakein: And, I really, I thank you once again for asking me to do this. And just go to show.fm and check it out. It'll be well worth your time.
[01:02:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Can we, just for future, can you do all the episodes? I'll take all the credit, and that'd be great.
[01:02:23] Marc Benzakein: I'm a total behind the scenes person. And you could even AI your face on it and.
[01:02:29] Nathan Wrigley: No AI wants to look at my face!. I really appreciate it, Marc. Thank you so much.
[01:02:33] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Thank you so much.
[01:02:34] Dan Maby: Very grateful, Marc. Thank you.
[01:02:36] Marc Benzakein: Oh, of course.
Do we need to do this,
[01:02:42] Nathan Wrigley: No,
[01:02:42] Marc Benzakein: though no one can see us? No one can see us.
[01:02:45] Nathan Wrigley: capturing of the video. Let me stop there.
[01:02:52] Dan Maby: What we're trying to do here with the platform is utilise AI in a genuinely useful way. Sorry, ice cream van's back.
[01:03:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's the ice cream van again. Hang on. I got to just mark that as ice cream. Ice cream.
[01:03:09] Marc Benzakein: I think you should name this show. The ice cream truck takes over. WP builds
[01:03:14] Nathan Wrigley: Has it gone?
[01:03:16] Dan Maby: On.
[01:03:17] Nathan Wrigley: okay.
[01:03:18] Marc Benzakein: Where, were we?
[01:03:19] Dan Maby: Not a clue.
[01:03:29] Nathan Wrigley: That was really great. Thank you, Marc.
