Podcasts + MarTech Metrics that Matter - with Ben Shapiro, Host of the MarTech Podcast

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B SaaS industry thought leaders, executives, and people just like you to discuss what metrics, KPIs, and benchmarks they use to enable better data-driven metrics-informed decisions that accelerate revenue performance and increase enterprise value. Now, on to today's show.
welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up Podcast. Today, we are joined by Benjamin Shapiro, founder and host of the MarTech Podcast. Today, we'll be covering three main areas. One, why a podcast on MarTech is so successful. Two, what metrics matter most to marketing performance, and how does MarTech impact the measurements of success? And three, what are the lessons learned from a podcast founder with over a million downloads? Ben, please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast.

**Benjamin Shapiro** (1:13)
Ray, first off, it's a pleasure to be your guest. Thank you for inviting me. I guess the context that I'll give everyone and, you know, the bio that I generally set out when I'm speaking is my story goes from working in business development and account management at eBay. That's really where my technology career started. And I got a good grasp of Internet marketing. I always wanted to get one of those really cool startup jobs. And that's what everybody, when I was in my mid 20s in the post Facebook era, wanted to do was go be the next Mark Zuckerberg. And really struggled initially to move from working for a large company to one of the more sort of scrappy, get your hands dirty type startups. I just didn't have the experience. And so I ended up leaving eBay to start my own startup, which was a company called strumschool.com.
It was a marketplace for students and teachers to connect, to learn and teach how to play the guitar. And it was kind of what I like to say was ahead of the technology curve, meaning that there wasn't really product market fit. People just weren't ready to take online guitar lessons. And at some point my girlfriend at the time said she was ready for a promotion to fiance. So I had to go get a paying job. And I ended up going back in house and was finally able to land one of those cool startup jobs that I wanted. I ended up being the head of marketing for a couple early stage VC back startups. And after doing that for roughly five years, I started to realize that the work life balance in those roles just weren't a fit for who I was at the time. I was married at that point. I had a child and I was working late nights for founders who were putting a ton of pressure on me, but I didn't have the comp and the equity to really make it worth the investment and energy, so I decided I was going to step away, and I became a marketing consultant helping growth stage companies do brand development and marketing strategy. After a couple of years of being independent, I decided it was time to launch a content strategy to help boost my profile, hopefully find more consulting clients, and that was the MarTech Podcast. To my surprise, the MarTech Podcast grew faster than I ever thought it would. It was an experiment that went totally wrong, and it ended up eating my consulting business. It became more valuable, and now all I do is create podcast content for both the MarTech Podcast and my other show, The Voices of Search Podcast, which is about SEO and content marketing.

**Ray Rike** (3:42)
Well, from eBay to a MarTech Podcast, Ben, how did you choose MarTech as your initial concept for the podcast? And did you even dream that it would be this successful?

**Benjamin Shapiro** (3:54)
I'll answer the second question first. No, I had no idea when I launched the podcast that it would become the centerpiece of my career. I was happily running a consulting business and I was really just trying to meet new people. And in the same way, when you want to expand your business, you put together a content marketing strategy, you create a blog. I'm just not a great writer. So I created a podcast and the stars just kind of aligned. There wasn't a lot of either well branded or positioned MarTech content at the time.
About two and a half years ago, the podcast industry was hitting an inflection point. And so, you know, I was able to tap into my personal and professional network to build our seed audience. And I did some performance marketing to grow it from there. And the next thing I knew, we were in the five figure downloads per month within the first year and were seven or eight X times the size of that. So it's grown quickly and we figured out a sponsorship model and now it's what pays the bills.