Aligning Your Podcast With Your Business Growth with Reuben Swartz

Have you noticed that expertise podcasts—even from “celebrities”—tend to have an arc? They grow, they evolve, they might even shrink or pause for awhile and at some point they end.

When Sales for Nerds host Reuben Swartz put his highly rated 100-episode podcast on hiatus with an intriguing announcement, I invited him to the show to talk about:

Why he hit the pause button on Sales for Nerds.

Where his podcast aligns with his core Soloist business—and where it diverges.

How he thinks about the value of his time and the role his podcast plays in personal learning and driving business.

The organic arc (rise, plateau, fall) his podcast experienced as his business and his goals have changed.

How finishing 100 episodes made him review his experiences and think about what’s next.

LINKS

Reuben Swartz Mimiran | Sales for Nerds | LinkedIn | YouTube (Mimiran) | YouTube (Sales for Nerds)  

Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram

BIO

Reuben Swartz is the founder of Mimiran, the fun, “anti-CRM” for independent consultants, born of his experience as a sales and marketing consultant for the Fortune 500, struggling with his own business development efforts. He's also the host and chief nerd on the Sales for Nerds podcast.

RESOURCES FOR SOLOISTS

Join the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.

The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.

BOOK A CALL WITH ROCHELLE

TRANSCRIPT

Reuben Swartz

00:00 - 00:28

So i dropped an email to jason cohen at wp engine hey jason i got this new concept for podcast i bring a bottle of wine to your office and interview you talk about wine i really like your blog he writes this brilliant blog and i've heard you speak at blah blah blah blah blah and I really like what you have to say blah blah blah blah blah blah And I'm also a customer blah blah blah blah blah blah Right? Like this really nice, suck up email. He just writes me back 5 minutes later--you had me at wine, here's a link to my calendar.

Rochelle Moulton

00:33 - 01:08

Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Live podcast, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth, impact, and power. I'm Rochelle Moulton, and today I'm so excited to welcome Ruben Swartz to the show. Ruben is the founder of Mimarin, the fun anti-CRM for independent consultants, born of his experience as a sales and marketing consultant for the Fortune 500, struggling with his own business development efforts. He's also the host and chief nerd on the Sales for Nerds podcast. Ruben, welcome.

Reuben Swartz

01:08 - 01:10

Oh, it's so great to be here, Rochelle. Thanks for having me.

Rochelle Moulton

01:11 - 01:45

Yeah. So we met on your podcast and the sales for nerds podcast, and I've been on your email list ever since. Just kind of like to keep tabs on what you're up to. And then last week I got this email, which with your permission, I'm going to read because it just felt very Ruben and very vulnerable and very true. So I'll just get to it. When you get this, I'll be recovering from eye surgery. Nothing terrible, but it's been an interesting year or so with 1.5 eyes. I won't get all my vision back in my left eye, but it should be much more functional.

Rochelle Moulton

01:46 - 02:15

While I certainly hope to see better visually, I also try to keep seeing better conceptually. And along those lines, I'm putting Sales for Nerds on hold for a bit. Nothing against the great guests I've enjoyed speaking with, but I'm feeling like I'm not offering much that's new and that putting out new episodes is more for me to say I did it than to offer real value to you. If you think I'm missing something, let me know what you'd like to hear. I've got some ideas for a reboot, but I need to go think about it for a minute.

Rochelle Moulton

02:16 - 02:47

So what I so appreciated about that email is that I know exactly that feeling, as does a pretty surprising swath of our fellow podcasters. So I just had to ask you to come on and talk with me about how we manage what I'm thinking of as the arc of podcasting, like how expertise business owners can roll with the different waves that hit our podcasts and our business growth at different inflection points. So that's the setup. I'm just so glad you said yes.

Reuben Swartz

02:48 - 02:48

Well, it's great

Reuben Swartz

02:48 - 03:17

to be here. And it's funny that we're having this conversation because in some ways I had been feeling this way for a while. And I think like most of us, I'm just kind of stubborn. And I think, well, if you know, if things aren't going great, that's fine. You just power through. And then I heard you and Jonathan discussing just ending your podcast. Like it had come to the end of its lifespan and you'd said what you wanted to say and you were going to move on to different things. And I was like, Oh, That's interesting.

Reuben Swartz

03:18 - 03:53

Maybe I should think about that. And I've been sort of thinking about it for a while. And when I started, it was great because every single episode was just so new and so interesting. And I felt like I was learning so much and. a hundred plus episodes in, it's not that the guests were any worse or better than the earlier ones, but I didn't feel like I was learning as much. And whether or not that translates to the audience, if I'm not learning as much, then I'm not as excited to be there because I love learning things.

Reuben Swartz

03:54 - 04:40

And so I didn't feel like I was bringing my best game to my listeners. And for a while I had sort of been thinking, okay, I need some better way of organizing this than just here's a bunch of random episodes that all have helpful info. I wanted to have themes and I thought about sort of having playlists. So, you know, if you work in marketing, if you're working on networking, if you're working on sales, here's a bunch of episodes you should look into and there's no good reason i haven't done that but what i realized later was maybe i want to have sort of like a start to start a new season of the podcast where it's going to be sort of more serialized content where you want to listen to episode one and it's going to lead to episode two to episode three and so on and then when you get done with it you've gone on this journey and you've learned the following things

Rochelle Moulton

04:41 - 04:41

the Netflix

Reuben Swartz

04:41 - 04:43

model. Kind of like that. Yes.

Rochelle Moulton

04:43 - 05:05

Yeah. Okay. So before we go too far with the arc of podcasting, will you talk to us a little bit about how you got here because you operate what I would call a soloist business, but you also decided to develop a product to help solve a very common soloist problem. So talk about, you know, how'd you get here doing this right now?

Reuben Swartz

05:06 - 05:39

With very poor vision and strategic planning would be the short version. I started a business 20 something years ago because I was young and single and didn't have a lot of expenses and had some savings and I remember thinking if I didn't do it then I would never do it. Brilliant business plan really. I've heard worse. It could be worse. Yeah. And it was a lot of fun, actually. And to be a guy in his mid-20s, flying all over the world, helping these giant companies and working with executives two or three times my age, it was great.

Reuben Swartz

05:39 - 06:29

Something I had never envisioned myself doing. And I learned a ton and I like to think I was very helpful. And then life has its way of intervening because I thought I would do that for a while. you know my thirties i didn't mean maybe settle down and have some kids want to start gotten all that out of my system and then met my future wife and we had a certain schedule we had to get to if we're gonna have a family and that kind of threw off my planning and i didn't wanna travel as much and one thing led to another and i would love to tell you that In the course of my struggles to use the enterprise here we were helping our clients use that i saw the need for a CRM or an anti CRM geared towards the soloist and that's not what happened at all i literally accidentally started building things to plug into the enterprise tools.

Reuben Swartz

06:29 - 07:02

And then people started asking me for access to them. So I made them from a tool for myself into an app that other people could access. And at the time, it was still mostly like enterprise type clients. And then what I noticed was the enterprise folks would start off really exc