Welcome to Podcasting Tech, a podcast that equips busy

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potential of your podcast. New

product that just came across my radar recently that I think is an incredible one

for podcasters to check out. We are chatting with Eric Melkor. He's the

cofounder of Podkit. He's also the host of the Innovators Can

Laugh podcast and founder of the b two b podcast network, b

two b Pod Pros. Eric, thank you so much for joining me here

today. Hey, Matthew. Pleasure to be here. Well, I

I'm intrigued by what you've built, obviously, with Podkit, but it sounds like

you've been messing around with the podcasting space for a little while. So

start off, tell me, how did you get into podcasting? What was your, like, first

foray into it, and and what have you been doing since? Yeah.

I got into it a little over three years ago. I just moved to Europe

from Texas. I didn't really know anybody in Romania, and,

I thought, hey. Interviewing other tech

founders, entrepreneurs, people that were very innovative

may be a good way to make some friends, build some relationships, sort

of develop a network, and then also just kind of develop a name

for yourself in the tech industry over here in Europe. And so that's what led

me down the path of podcasting. It was it was crazy, Matthew. I never

forget my first few episodes. I had pillows, like, these

pillows that you put on the bed around my laptop

because next door, they were building this apartment building, and you heard this

drill going on. And I was just trying to drown out the sound, you

know, from outside. And one of my guests saw, like,

what are you doing? And I'm, like, you know, putting these pillows around my laptop.

And she goes, what is this? Pillow Talk with Eric? And I'm, like, you know,

I mean, like, that would be a good podcast name, actually.

Yeah. Well, that's how I got into it. It it might have a different inference

than, pod pros or b two b if it was Bill to talk with Eric,

though. Yeah. Well, I was telling I told that

joke with my wife what happened. She didn't she she wasn't too happy about it,

though. So it's interesting that, you know, we've

talked about it plenty of times on the show that a lot of folks, you

know, they're focused on podcasting to the audiences, but it seemed like your focus

was more on who the guests were and, right, building your your network that way.

Is that still the case today, or has your podcast evolved from that

first iteration? No. It it is. And so

it's a great way to meet people, make connections. And what I did

is the first season, I only interviewed Romanian start up

founders, and so I built a good network here in Romania, and I didn't know

if I was going to continue podcasting, but I enjoyed it so much. I

thought, wouldn't it be interesting if I did a different country here in

Europe every season? And that's what I did. So one season was Lithuania.

Another season was The Netherlands. Another one was, like, Bulgaria and The

UK. And the great thing about this is that whenever I go to these

places, I I know people who can show me around like a local.

So it's a great way not just to build relationships and connections, but

also tour guides. Right? Tour guides. That's the other reason I do it.

But, yeah, that's the main reason. And then about, I guess, last

year, I thought, how can I monetize my show? And I I was only getting

maybe a few hundred downloads a month, And I started researching Spotify

and some other ad large ad networks. But they didn't want me, Matthew,

because I wasn't doing, like, 10,000 downloads or more a

month. And because I was in the b to b space, I knew my

audience was valuable. I knew they worked at tech companies, and they're deciding what

tools, they should be using for their companies. And so I I approached

other b to b podcasters in the space and said, hey. I think we're in

the same position here. There's no risk to you, but what if I were to

pitch us, like, as a group sponsorship package to potential

advertisers and maybe it's additional revenue for you and

and just see where it goes? And there was a lot of people that were

like, yeah. Sure. Why not? And that's how b two b Pod Pros was formed.

So that that happened about a year ago, more or less. Wow. Very cool. And

has that been successful? Have you been able to

leverage a network of shows to attract more business

interest and potential sponsors and whatnot? Yes

and no. Most of the podcasters who have come on have been through referrals from

other members in the group, and I try to make it a community. So we

have a private Slack channel where we hop in, answer, ask questions. And

every month, we have a different guest who comes and talks to the group.

Usually, it's around podcasting, maybe streamlining your your production

process, or maybe different ways to grow or different ways

to tackle YouTube and grow your show there.

And so I'm more focused on the community aspect, but it has been growing

steadily and over the past year. So I think we have more than 60

members now. And I tend to focus on b to b podcasts that are

in the SaaS space, b to b marketing, and then also

product management. And we're starting to expand a little bit into, like,

HR and web three and digital transformation shows.

But a lot of other networks, they send an email and they're like, hey, you

can make money if you join our platform or join our

network. Me, I've got some criteria. You've got to at least publish

30 episodes, Have to be consistent, at least two episodes a

month, and you're consistent with how you promote it. So I wanna make sure that

you are promoting it through a newsletter or maybe on Twitter or x or

LinkedIn. And so if you meet those criteria, then I am willing

to talk to you and just get on the phone with you and and do

a call and just see how, if we have that sort of, good

rapport, good connection. And, because it's not really about the money.

First is, hey. How can we help you and your show? And then second is

if there's sponsorship opportunities, then then, sure, there's maybe a way to make

money there. Alright. And speaking of sponsorship opportunities,

I imagine that was somewhat the impetus for creating

Podkit. Is that right? That's right. So one

of the members in my group, he is in California,

and he said, you know what, Eric? My partner, he's a developer out of

Romania, and he's built this thing for affiliate marketing, but

he's also interested in building this thing for podcasters. You

should talk to him. I said, sure. Why not? And so we got on a

Zoom call, and he showed me his idea. And it was like a

dynamic shareable media kit that doesn't

exist yet. And right away, I was really, really interested and fascinated. And

so he showed me some wireframes, and he had this idea how it would work.

And then I gave him feedback from a podcaster's perspective because he wasn't a

podcaster. And so we worked on it, and I think we got it

developed in about two or three months. And then we had it in

beta phase, and we got a lot of feedback from podcasters in my community.

And so we just wrote out version one right now, so there's a it's really

I think you've seen it, Matthew. How would you describe it? So, yeah, the way

I would describe it is it's basically a way to create a

simple piece of marketing material that is dynamic and

engaging so that if you are a podcaster trying to

showcase your work to not other podcasts. Right? This

isn't about growing your show. This is really about approaching potential sponsors and partners

and basically creating this very dynamic and beautiful media kit. I I

literally signed up for it today. It couldn't have been any simpler. Added my show

information, links to a couple of my social profiles. And, you know,

obviously, we'll have a link to to the one that we created here in the

show notes. But, you know, I've already got a great looking

website. I've got some background video based on an episode that I selected. I've got

an episode being highlighted from Spotify, pulling in all my

videos from YouTube, even some of my shorts, you know, throwing up there

my number of followers on YouTube and Instagram. So it really is this

great, you know, dining it's almost like a pod page but for media

kits. It's like enter a little bit of information, and you guys take care of

the rest for us. Absolutely. I mean, you could get it set up in

less than five minutes. And once you set it up, you can forget it because

it automates it it updates automatically with all your

stats from Apple, YouTube, Spotify, but also Instagram,

TikTok, and LinkedIn. And then you can also add different sponsorship deals

that you worked with in the past on there if you like to. But just

like you said, it's like it's it's beautifully well done. I

was very, very impressed with how the first version of this, I think it

looks great. I don't think there's anything like it on the market. If you

Google I say Google, I feel like that's very old now because if you

go to JetGPT or Google or anywhere and you type podcast

media kit, they all wanna take you to places like Canva or

PDF version or something like that or Google Slides. And

I I can't believe that we've been doing that for so long and how

how much time consuming it is to create these

slides, grab all the various data from all these different platforms, put it in

a presentation. And by the way, maybe every quarter you have to go back

and update these numbers. Why something didn't exist like this in the

first place? So we kind of eliminated all of that effort,

all of that time spent on creating media kits into

just like you said, it's like a dynamic, shareable media kit. You create it one

time and then never have to never have to mess with it again. Yeah. And

I love the fact that, you know, once you've had sponsors, you can add them

to your profile. So if you're showing this to another sponsor, it's like, hey. Look.

We've had success doing this before. Right? We're not just some, you know,

one time podcaster begging, for for your money. How

do you expect podcasters to use this? Is it just for acquiring

sponsorships? I see you actually have a find a sponsor feature

coming, but is there more to it than just that?

Well, I'm glad you said that because we're actually in the

next rollout, probably in a couple of months from now, we're gonna make it

super easy to find ideal sponsors that align with

your audience, your show's audience. And so we'll be incorporating

AI into this. And so AI will just look at your show, look at the

listeners, find out what the show is all about, and then

automatically recommend ideal sponsors that you can connect with and get in

touch with quite easily and be able to share your podcast with them

through a quick message. Maybe it's a quick email or something like that. But that's

what we're working on right now. It's really to help podcasters

just find the ideal sponsors that are really perfect for their show,

that align with, with their audience. Have you had a ton of

experience with selling podcast sponsorships? And if

so, you know, one, what has been the your

experience in the landscape right now? And two, is it any different overseas

in Europe versus what maybe we're used to here in The US?

So the clients that we've been working with with B2B Pod Pros have been both

European and The US market, primarily SaaS companies that are

midsize or enterprise level. And the

thing that concerns them the most, right, the top thing is how do you

measure and track the podcast campaign performance? Okay. So we

go into detail about measurement and tracking. And then the second

thing are, well, what's the reach? And that's where the media kit comes in

because the media kit automatically provides the show's numbers, like the number of

downloads, number of listeners. So those are, like, the two big concerns

that every advertiser that we've worked with, those are

the main questions that they have. What is your plan for

or do you have a plan for incorporating real stats

into this? Because right now, like I said, it it looks beautiful. It's showing

off our show. It's showing some video. It's showing a highlighted episode.

It looks nice. It looks clean. It's showing numbers from our social media. But, I

mean, truthfully, when I approach a sponsor, the first thing they're gonna say is, well,

what are your downloads? And is there any sort

of implementation you're planning on, some sort of API with hosting companies

or something that you're planning to do so that that information is

front and center but also, accurate and

reliable? Because, you know, people could say 1,000,000 downloads. It's like

Yeah. Is that true? Yeah. Well, Matthew, I'm

glad you asked that because that's one of the reasons why I love this thing,

because I've actually approached podcasts on behalf of advertisers

asking for a media kit, and they send me this bogus number. And I'm

like, well, listen. I really need to see the screenshot of your download numbers. And

they're kind of reluctant to send that information because they're

inflating the size of their audience.

With Podkit, and you can do this right now,

if you sign up, you can directly link your Spotify creator

account with Podkit, and it's going to pull in

direct your numbers from Spotify directly

into the media kit. Apple Podcasts will be

rolling out this week, and so the same thing. It will have a

direct API with Apple Podcasts. And so when a person is looking at your

pod kit, it's looking at real real time numbers that are

coming in from both Apple and Spotify as well as YouTube and some of the

other social channels. Alright. That's a that's a

decent listing of reliable information that, people would,

I'm sure, love to have and sponsors would at least get a a decent

idea for. What about, have you started to approach

sponsors about being on the other side of this equation, being folks who were gonna

look at the directory of folks in Podkit and wanna look for shows

to, you know, put their messaging on? Oh, that could probably be a

2026 problem. But I did think about that idea, and I'm like, yeah, that's

really farther down the road because we're not really we're we kinda wanna just get

feedback now from a lot of customers. I think first, we'll have the

API sort of like, you know, find your ideal sponsor just using the API

I'm sorry, the AI technology component. But after that,

we may make a version of Podkit for, for agencies and networks

because we've already gotten some inquiries. Can we just have one login where

we can manage multiple Podkits for many different podcasters?

And so we're starting to hear that request more often. So I think that's probably

another another version that we'll be creating before we start

thinking about the other side of the equation. As a reminder, we were chatting

with Eric Melkor. He is the cofounder of Pod Kit. You can learn more

about it at p0dk.it. Like I said,

we'll have a link to that website as well as the Pod Kit we created

for this episode right there in the show notes. You can see an example of

what it looks like. They are free and easy to create. There are paid

tiers that will give you additional access, additional information. And

as Eric has been saying, we've got more features coming down the line to look

forward to. So, Eric, as somebody who's been in the podcasting space

for, you know, I would say relatively short amount of time compared to some of

the other folks we've had, I'm curious, you know, the questions we ask everybody.

First one is, is there something in podcasting where you would like to

see improvement? Right? Whether it's the creation,

distribution, promotion, monetization, or even listening. Is

there something about podcasting where like, God, I wish it did this better?

Wow. I think, you know, the first thing that comes to mind

is the process because when I first started

podcasting, the average episode from beginning to end from

actually researching the guest, doing the recording, editing

the videos, getting it out for distribution, you know,

creating the the artwork for the episode, writing the copy.

It took around fifteen to eighteen hours per episode. I got it down

to, like, around five to seven hours after I after

I started, you know, more reps in. But I think if there was just

a simple platform that helped out with the

actual process for beginning to end, that

could, that could take away or shave off a lot of hours that goes, that

goes into podcasting, that I think that would be a big, a big,

big win. Okay. And for those who who

might be thinking about the same thing, of course, there is Riverside, which is what

we use for recording this podcast, and they do have pretty good postproduction tools

and, you know, podcast marketing asset

tool creation such as show notes and media clips and the

transcript and and whatnot. So that's one place you can look. Descript is another

one that does pretty easy editing and, you know, marketing

asset creation. But, yeah, I I I you're not the first

person who said, I really want more of an all in one solution that

does it from start to finish without having to go from this site to this

site, back to this site, over this site, this site to to have the whole

thing done. Right? Just kinda like a one stop shop for the entire thing.

What about as far as other technologies, are any on your wish list? Whether

it's something that you know is out there that you just wanna get your hands

on or a device that you're like, god, I wish somebody would make this because

that would make my podcasting life easier, outside of that

single, you know, production platform that we just talked about? You know what? The other

thing that I think would be great is, a podcast

score, like a listener score that's sort of universal.

The first thing that comes to mind is Listen Notes, which is like a podcast

search engine, and they have a listener score. But I don't think it's

universally accepted, and people don't really know what that means.

But if there was some sort of score maybe based on three or four different

factors that everybody in the industry would be aligned

with, I think that would be great because, you know, people

always ask, well, what's the reach? And it's not really it's not so much about

the reach. I mean, for especially for niche podcasts, I think the

listener scores is pretty big, especially for the smaller podcasts

out there. Because if you've got a pretty good listener score to an advertiser

or to anybody else who's just, interested, that means

a lot. You know? How consistently are they getting an episode out there?

What's the engagement like for for listeners? To

me, it's like an you know, it's like sort of like a batting average, you

know, for baseball, but you have some sort of, like, you know, metric for

podcasters. That would be interesting. And, yeah, listen notes,

definitely I I question a lot of the ways that they

tell podcasters about their success, right? Oh, you're in the top 10%

of all podcasters. I don't think I've ever gotten an email. I don't think I've

ever seen anybody on Listen Notes who wasn't in the top five or 10% of

all podcasters or, you know, in their niche. So, yeah, definitely take that with a

grain of salt. But that's an interesting idea, almost like, you

know, for a while there, there was like a platform that would do that for

your social media. Right? It would it would kinda rank, like, how you're doing across

all the different social media brands. And so something like that for podcasting would be

interesting, although difficult to, difficult to come up

with. So maybe that's your, your next challenge, sir.

Well, yeah. Again, that'd be later on down the road. Yeah.

Yeah. Still got some work to do, still, you know, finalizing podcast and making

it the best, it can possibly be. And then the last thing we always ask

everybody, is there a favorite podcast or two on your listening list?

Like, is there a show that as soon as a new episode pops out, you

are gonna stop and listen to it, or you're never gonna let an episode of

that show get by you, Yeah. You know, when it comes to consumption?

Yeah. There's probably about three podcasts I listen to for many, many years,

but the two that I usually never miss an episode is My

First Million, and, the other one is Hidden

Brain. Have you ever heard of Hidden Brain, Matthew? I've heard of Hidden Brain. Yeah.

Yeah. It's great. It's like human behavior, and they just got

really good stories that are authentic and genuine and

fascinating in my mind. I've never heard anywhere else, but I'm sure there's a lot

of other podcasts that are very, very similar. But the way the

way the host tells it and, you know, there's so much that goes into a

great show. I mean, the content could be amazing. Like, there's a lot of people

who like the show founders. I try listening to it, but I just I

can't stand the host his voice and the way he he tells it. I

can't. So I could never get into it. But this the host for

Hidden Brain is just very welcoming, and it sounds kind of, like,

cozy and friendly the way he tells the story and his tone.

And you can just you can just I don't know. It just feels natural, and

I think that's why it's been one of the more successful podcasts for so many

years is just because he's just a really, really good host. My

First Million. Those two guys have got great, great connection

camaraderie. It's almost like you're in the bar with them

just kind of, like, sitting alongside them and and being a part of the

conversation because, again, it's just they're very natural and very

casual, and they've been friends for so long, and they've got this great chemistry and

rapport. I think that's another reason why that show has been been pretty pretty

popular, and it's one of my favorites too. Very nice. Well, as a

reminder, we are chatting with Eric Melkor. He's the cofounder of

Podkit. That's p0dk.it. A great

spot to create a beautiful landing page to showcase your show and,

you know, send it off to sponsors and other folks you'd wanna collaborate with to

make it look really nice. He's also the founder of b two b Podcast Network,

b two b Pod Pros, and host of Innovators Can

Laugh podcast. Eric, love what you're building here. Can't

wait to see the new features, and thank you so much for joining me today.

Hey, Matthew. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for joining us today on

Podcasting Tech. There There are links to all the hardware and

software that help power our guest content and podcasting

tech available in the show notes and on our website at

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