Podcast Content Studio

Utilizing Podcasts for Growth – Ryan Estes on How It’s Done

Podcast host Kriste Goad speaks with Ryan Estes, co-founder of the podcast booking agency Kitcaster.com, in this episode of “a Podcast for Curious Marketers.” Ryan Estes discusses how to use podcasts for business growth. Ryan goes into greater detail about how Kitcaster.com came to be and who they work with.

In this episode, you will learn:

• How Ryan Estes and his co-founder launched Kitcaster, starting with each of them having a PR agency and a digital marketing agency. They started with the pilot program that brought Kitcaster to where it is now.
• About utilizing podcasts for growth and how you can leverage a podcast booking agency like kitcaster.com to help grow your brand.
• About emotion-friendly business strategies and emotional attraction in the role podcast play.

Good Question & Answer 1:

Kriste Goad: Awesome. Well, how about we dive in, and you tell us a little bit about Kitcaster and how it came to be? Tell me a little bit about yourself?

Ryan Estes: Yeah, let’s do it. So Kitcaster is a podcast booking agency. We work largely with funded startup founders, entrepreneurs with exits, and C suites, execs, and we book them on the world’s top podcasts. There are about 18 of us on the team now. And our job is to be the best in the world at booking podcasts for our clients. And I think we’re getting close to that mark. It never ends. But I think we’re close to that. Kitcaster started two years ago, we launched on September 6, 2019. Basically, as a collaboration with a friend of mine, Brandy Whalen, who’s our co-founder. She has a PR agency, and I had a PR agency for ten years. And I had a digital marketing agency for about the same time. And I had a podcast for about nine or ten years, it started out being called the Denver business podcast, and it became a podcast called Talklaunch. And it was a founder’s podcast. So I interview the same kind of folks, tech founders, stuff like that. And Brandy would bring her clients to my show. And so we’re getting coffee, and just kind of like, hey, let’s do a project together. So we kind of went through a process of validation, looking for a project in podcasting, and kind of came to this idea of a booking agency. And I think what we liked about it, is the way you scale a service,like this, kind of a productized service is old school, it’s like having an HQ and putting butts in seats, and like creating a company culture. And both of us with kind of software tech startup kind of background, it was kind of the flip side of what we’ve been doing, kind of lean and mean teams with 90% margins and explosive growth or catastrophic destruction. This was kind of more like… kind of building a team. We started out with the pilot program that went really well, and kind of put everything into it. And two years later, here we are.

Good question & answer 2:

Kriste Goad: But I’m also curious, why would I work with a podcast booking agency? Tell me the pluses of it.

Ryan Estes: From both sides, I think we’re saving people’s time and money. If you’re a podcast host and, let’s say you reached out to your network on LinkedIn, you realize that that takes a lot of time to book guests. So, working with a podcast agency like us, if you’re podcast hosts, it’s totally free for you. Like, tell us which podcast about, let us feed you great guests. For podcast hosts, we say that they make great guests because one, they like to talk, so they’re on podcasts. But two, they’re also already comfortable with kind of the emotional material that will come up from doing podcasts, big emotions. It’s kind of shocking at first, maybe.

If you’re a podcast host, you’ll get in a rhythm of making people comfortable. It’s your job is like, “Hey, I want to bring out the best for you so that we can have a great conversation here.” And you get better and better and better at that. Now when you turn the table, and you’re the guest, you start to understand maybe why those guests were a little uncomfortable. I mean, because big emotions do arise. You look at the podcast, you’re like, “Man, am I good enough for this show?” Or maybe “I’m too good for this show.” Or “look at the guests that were on the show.” “What am I going to talk about?” “What are they going to ask me?” Like all of these things, just being plain nervous bubbles up and in figuring out, like, how to work with that, as that’s coming up and get comfortable with it. So largely, podcast hosts have kind of dealt with that already. So they can kind of really hit the ground running on that side. 

Additional topics discussed:

• Ryan’s journey of being an American Buddhist entrepreneur.
• How Kitcaster determines which podcast to target.
• About conversion rates and how Ryan typically thinks about that with a podcast.

Host / Podcast bio:

Kriste Goad is an innovative, analytical, and disciplined consultant, strategist, and brand builder with a track record of driving leads, sales, reputation, revenue, and profitability. She is the host of the “How It’s Done” Podcast. 

Guest bio:

Ryan Estes is the co-founder of Kitcaster, a podcast booking agency. Ryan owned a media and marketing agency for the last ten years. He hosted the founder’s podcast Talklaunch. Consistently ranked in the iTunes “Top 100” podcasts and have recorded 300+ interviews with more than a quarter-million downloads.  He also attributes $1M+ in revenue as a direct result of podcasts.

Resources and links mentioned in the show:

https://kitcaster.com/us/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandy-whalen