Building a $1M/yr podcasting SaaS after "accidentally" becoming a podcaster

Colin Gray got into podcasting by mistake, then built a content company on the topic — The Podcast Host. From the content company came a service company. And from the service company came a SaaS called Alitu. It's currently making $1M per year.

Here's Colin on how he did it. 👇

Starting a content company

I started out in astrophysics, but discovered that it involved way too much math. So I changed tack to content creation and podcasting. Much more fun, and just about as many puzzles. Along the way, I’ve been a web designer, an animator, an event manager, and most recently, I ended up as a teacher at a university, covering multimedia and online education.

I got into podcasting almost by accident. I was asked at my teaching job to look into this fancy new tech called podcasting because it was gaining a bit of attention in the education world. So I did, and I pretty much just fell in love with it right away.

It's got a perfect mix of intimacy, personality, geekery, via the gadgets and the microphones, and it's so easy just to get your voice out into the world by speaking into a mic. So I started writing about podcasting, relating my experiences around the gear, the techniques, the speaking skills, and the blog that I ended up writing that on became ThePodcastHost.com

Dabbling in software

It gained traction over about two or three years, earning some money through affiliate revenue and sponsorships. And once it got to around the $3k per month level, I started to expand it into education, creating courses for our audience. From there, we offered production services. And then, we got into software.

Our audience just kept asking for this solution and that solution. It was a great source of ideas, and eventually we built a SaaS product called Alitu.

It's an all-in-one podcast maker. It’s designed to be a full recording and editing experience for podcasters, designed exactly for that purpose, and making it as easy as possible. We serve 2,500 customers right now, with an annual revenue of just around $1M.

And we have the Podcraft Academy, which is a small group-coaching community designed for podcasters and content creators who want to turn their content into a business, as we did. It runs at an annual revenue of around $100k.

From MVP to Beta

It took nearly six months to build the first prototype of Alitu. We were trying to see if it was possible to automate the production process — adding music, fading into the voice, cleaning up the levels and the background noise, and stitching together various recordings.

I contacted one developer to build that one, and it cost around $25k at the time. The end result was ugly as all hell — I had to string together command line code to make it work — but it allowed me to test feasibility. From there, I employed a UX designer and a front-end developer, and we started working on making it customer friendly. It was around a year from then, and something around $80k before we had a Beta version ready.

The beta version was kept relatively simple, and really guided. I sketched out what my perfect view of a podcasting workflow for a beginner would look like, and the app became almost a coach to enable that. It was heavily guided, and automated quite a lot. It also got rid of a lot of decisions that often trip people up, so we made those decisions for them.  

This was all funded by earnings from our content business, so I was putting a lot of time into that, making sure it was still growing and funding the building of the software.

Tech issues

The app is built on Node.js, React, and AWS. It started that way back in 2017 because the first developer that I found worked in Node, and the 2nd worked in React. We haven’t changed it since!

There have been so many challenges along the way, though. One of the biggest was building an editing UX in the browser, especially in around 2018/2019. We used open source tools at first, but ended up having to build our own, because they just weren’t accurate enough. 

Then, when we built call recording in, deployment suddenly became our biggest issue. Even with only a few hundred customers, we simply always had someone online recording at any given time. So there was no downtime for us - we couldn’t take it down to deploy new code, and that was a whole new learning process. 

Over the years, infrastructure and platforms have become the biggest things for us, being able to handle endless amounts of big media files, and then deal with the almost infinite range of equipment, computer setups, browser configurations. It’s enough to make recording a little bit of audio in the browser into a pretty complicated process! 

Make your product opinionated

Early on, we made the decision to concentrate on simplicity and clarity above all else.

We’ve had so many chances over the years to add more, more, more, in terms of features, options, choices, etc. We’re asked for them all the time. But we decided to make our product opinionated.

I’m a coach and a teacher by background, so I treat our app as a coach, too. It directs people to certain ways of putting a podcast together — ways that I’ve taught and refined over years of working with thousands of podcasters, and watching hundreds of thousands more.

I find that, more often than not, creators need to be held back rather than pushed forward. That's the only way for them to create a sustainable workflow where they don't do too much, too soon, and burn out. So, giving constraints to work within and automating certain elements makes a huge difference.

We keep this simplicity and clarity in mind always, and it’s a big differentiator from many of our competitors who are complex and sometimes — dare I say it — bloated. 😆

Simple pricing

We’ve kept our pricing really simple throughout the whole eight years we’ve been around. It’s been one monthly subscription price for everything, and no limits. 

We decided to go relatively high-end right from the start, and that’s helped us a lot. No free tier, a short free trial (7 days), and just create a great product to justify it.

We have raised prices twice over the years, from $28 to $32 to $38. The rise from 28 to 32 was really good — no change in signups and an increase in revenue. Going from 32 to 38 was more interesting, in that it did reduce signups, but revenue growth stayed the same. So we were serving fewer people for the same revenue.Theoretically good, but actually, I feel it’s probably better long term to commit to the resource requirements and create more fans and users of the brand.

I sometimes look back and think we should have reversed that rise. But, once you’re a certain amount of time in, it’s quite costly to do so. So, I’d say, it's worth doing that research and decision making quick and early to make sure you’re not getting locked in against your will. 

Growth via content

Our core channel has always been content marketing. 

Email list

We launched in 2016 to my email list which I had built to around 10k through blogging. This translated to an initial batch of roughly 50 customers. From there, I continued to promote via the email list, bringing in dozens of users per month in the early days. 

Targeted content

I also started writing a lot more articles that targeted the buyer intent for Alitu — anything related to editing audio, editing podcasts, podcast production, podcasting apps, etc. That didn’t take too long to get a foothold, because I had been blogging for a few years already at that point, so we included Alitu as one of our recommendations, and that started attracting the bulk of our trial signups from then on. 

Affiliates

Because we had good content ourselves, it meant we had a bit of a reputation in the space, so I reached out to other blogs with similar articles, and set up affiliate relationships with them. In our early years, I'd say around 30% of our new customers were coming from affiliates on these adjacent blogs, so that was an excellent channel. 

AI search

These days, a lot of people are decrying the death of content marketing, but in my view, it’s as alive as ever. It’s branched out though — video and audio have to be a huge part of it, too. But, text is still alive and kicking, even with the rise of AI content.

The AI content, after all, learns from our human blogs, so it’s still critical to write good SEO related content yourself AND to work with other content creators in your space to get your product included in the wider ecosystem. We get a good percentage of clicks through from AI search results as a result of this. 

Reddit has been great for this too, since it’s such a heavy source for AI content. Offering value alongside mentioning your product is key, and running AMAs once you have a bit of reputation is a great tactic. This engages users, and the community, but also generates good volumes of content about your product on reddit, which then informs AI results in future. 

Video and audio

In terms of the other media, such a large proportion of our users say they found us via our written content, but signed up because of our podcast or our video content. YouTube brings some great search traffic too, to be fair, but it’s just as important for showing the humans behind the business, too. And the podcast amplifies that 10x by encouraging users to spend hours with us, learning more about the people on our team, how we think, and learning from us.

That’s gold when it comes to building trust and selling the product. 

Go small and fast

The main thing I learned, and tried to stick to, was to build small and fast. Every time.

What’s the smallest version of this feature or idea that you can deliver in the next month, or two? Deliver that, complete it, and get feedback from users before moving to the next stage. Because, so often, the next stage they’re looking for isn’t exactly the next stage that you expected.

We’ve adjusted features or product concepts so many times due to the reception we got from users for the first version of it. We’ve killed ideas because of this, we’ve pivoted, and we’ve doubled down.   

In terms of how big or small to go, the smaller, the better. There was some amazing advice from the founder of Sierra games — Ken Williams — about this:

“One-hour projects take one hour to complete. Four-hour projects take a day. One-day projects take a week. One-week projects take a couple of months. And, six-month or longer projects tend to never complete.” —Ken Williams

The key is, the longer the estimate, the more uncertainty is likely contained within. If you estimate an hour, then it’s probably pretty accurate. If you’re estimating that length of time, you probably know the task really well. If you’re guessing a week, though, there’s probably quite a few things in there that you’re unsure about. And if you’re estimating a month, then there’s probably a LOT you’re unsure about. 

So, do the work up front to break this task down into tasks that are ALL less than a day. If it’s looking like a week, then pick out the first step of that — can you break something down into a day? If so, set that as the task, first, complete it. Then progress from there. 

As soon as I see one of my devs say something is going to take two weeks, I ask to see the breakdown. And if it’s not broken into 4 to 8 hour tasks, then we work to do exactly that.

No revenue or traffic goals

Truthfully, we just don’t set revenue or traffic goals any more. Instead, we set goals to complete activities that we think WILL increase traffic or revenue, and we pick the ones that we think are likely to do that the most.

From nearly ten years of setting arbitrary revenue and traffic goals, I know that there are so many things related to both of those that we can’t control. 

What we set goals for are things like customer service rating, number of blogs or YouTube videos published, etc. — all much more within our control.

Set goals for the things you can control, work on them to your best ability, and the other indicators will follow. 

Follow along

Here are our big guides on how to start a podcast and how to grow a podcast.

Please do contact me on LinkedIn and subscribe to our YouTube channel on how to run a great show. And if you need a place to make your podcast, check out Alitu.com. 

Plus, if you’re into podcasts, try our creator business show, the Creator Toolbox.