Entrepreneurial Productivity with James Mulvany, CEO of Podcast.co

We had the pleasure of interviewing the CEO of Radio.co and Podcast.co, James Mulvany, about Entrepreneurial Productivity for his 30 Interviews in 30 Days challenge. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/074 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing Entrepreneurial Productivity from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | Entrepreneurial Productivity with James Mulvany Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud James Mulvany is a UK-based entrepreneur responsible for launching more than five internet companies. Currently, he's working on: Radio.co, Podcast.co & MatchMaker.fm. Show Notes | Entrepreneurial Productivity with James Mulvany Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Podcast.co Radio.co Matchmaker.fm Raw Text Transcript | Entrepreneurial Productivity with James Mulvany Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17 And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:22And today we welcome to the show, James Mulvaney. He is the founder of radio.co, as well as podcast CO, and we wanted to kind of treat everybody with this interview because we think this is going to be a fun, interesting conversation regarding entrepreneurial productivity. Welcome to the show, James. James Mulvaney 0:42Thank you very much for having me, guys. Yeah, it's pleasure to be here. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:45Absolutely. So tell us a little bit about your, your entrepreneurial journey here because it's very interesting to hear that you have this company radio co that helps people create radio stations, basically online. And then this podcasting platform what got you into this and what led you to here. James Mulvaney 1:02So when I was sort of 1617, I was growing up and sort of finishing school I wanted to originally I was looking actually going into radio as on air talent, you know, as a DJ. And I used to always love music and I used to love listening to the radio, you know, when I was growing up, and I recorded myself on cassette tape and playing it back and all that kind of stuff like nerdy nerdy kid stuff, right? And, and, you know, he, when he got when it got to about 18 years old, I, I decided not to go down that route as a career, but instead I was learning how to build websites and a bit about the tech industry. This was back in like 2005 2006. I then went off to university and I grew a business which was rather than being actually involved in the radio industry, I grew a business supplying services, streaming media services to the, to the industry, because it was obviously an industry that I kind of understood because I kind of worked in radio a little bit. I've done some, you know, work experience. So I sort of understood you know, the value proposition there. Although when I began, I didn't really know what I was doing technically. So I kind of just figured it out as I went along. And yeah, it just sort of stuck, really, I'm still very passionate about radio and I love. I love audio as a tool to communicate. I think it's fantastic. And obviously, over the past, sort of four or five years podcasting has had this big resurgence, or even maybe the last two or three years, it's been quite a recent thing. Obviously, we launched radio.co in 2015. That platforms now got, I think, over 4000 different stations using it. So it's been very successful. And we had lots of clients coming to us saying, you know, guys, you're gonna have a podcasting platform, or you're going to implement some kind of podcasting feature into the service. So we sort of looked at the market and thought, well, do we want to do this as part of radio co or is really their opportunity to launch this as its own standalone platform. So we took the decision to actually create a completely new platform. You've built it from the ground up. We obviously have a link between the two services, but the two months It's also quite different. Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:01Tell me a little bit about what the podcast co does as a platform. Obviously, it's a media hosting platform. But it does a little bit more than that. And I'm curious about what, what got you to think this is going to be the differentiator between a normal podcasting platform and this, James Mulvaney 3:18we we will do some obviously, look at the market. And interestingly, the first ever podcast I recorded was like back in 2008. And this was just being like a business friend of mine and we were we had this podcast called kits to kickstart kick start profits. And that ran for like, I don't know, I think we made we manage 10 episodes or something. And this was kind of just us messing around with the medium. Fast forward like five years and you know, obviously we kind of saw that there was this opportunity of, you know, podcasting start to pick up and we looked at a lot of the the other software out there like when we meet my friend Steve records, his podcast, we used to like use WordPress with a plug in and it was really complicated and then, you know, to the idea of podcasting like to thousand eight around then was kind of you'd have to download the file onto your iPod to walk around, you know, and obviously nowadays, it's completely different. So we wanted to build a solution that was more modern, and easy to use. And it seemed that a lot of the podcast platforms out there really had been kind of launched in this period of like 2007, to about 2010. They're kind of quite clunky, old school sort of software. And we wanted to build something that was fresh, modern, and also looked at not just the actual you, how do you get your podcast online? But how can I distribute it to, you know, apple, iTunes, Spotify, Google and as many platforms as possible and really sort of take that technical knowledge away from people because it's still quite confusing for someone who wants to start a podcast the idea of understanding what an RSS feed is, is it kind of like to your average person, that's computer talk, isn't it? So so yet the plan was to just build a kind of done for you platform, just make it as super simple and clean to use in an easy as possible for consumers. Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:02And by day, I actually teach people what RSS feeds are so I feel I feel I feel that pain, regular basis Augusto Pinaud 5:09that pain is shared. You know, I I laugh when you mentioned cassette tapes. You know, I'm sure there is listeners who don't know what they are, but and they're they and then you went to the to the basic I but but it is interesting because I, you know, I said a lot I do business coaching and a lot of the things I tell the people is one of the big problems people have is they're really good at what they do. But they don't know how to share content and how to use that content to grow and what is really interesting for me about the platform is that it allows the people to come with that expertise but let you do or the platform do what it do well instead of a slowing them or stopping them to do that part and I think there is the need for for tools like that, as you said that we're you don't need to necessarily fully understand what our analysis is. But you can now come and bring the content, bring the expertise, you know, on the small businesses. What I worked the most with. That's one of the biggest, biggest obstacles is you have these people who are incredibly good, but are completely stuck where they are. James Mulvaney 6:26Yeah, I totally agree. I think the way podcasting is as moved as well is, I think 10 years ago, it was really something reserved for enthusiasts, both on people who are making podcasts and also people are listening with them, or listening to them rather. So nowadays, you know, people who are producing podcasts aren't always that technically savvy, you know, people who just want to share their knowledge. And you know, why should they have to understand that stuff. So that was kind of really one of the core values of the platform when we were sort of designing it we thought it should be simple to use, it should not be intimidating and and Also, you know, accessible for anyone really, Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:03we came into contact with you in a fairly unique way. And it was because I'm guessing I was on one of your email lists or something to that effect. And I came across this platform called matchmaker.fm. I logged in and created a profile. And and lo and behold, you popped up in my messages inbox. And so I'm curious about this match maker.fm platform that you've also launched within kind of the podcast co ecosystem, and what it's all about, and and then your, your kind of program here, the 30 and 30, where you're doing 30 interviews in 30 days, and tell us a little bit about matchmaker.fm and the 30 and 30 program what how did it come about? ...