You're listening to Podcasting Made Simple.

Everyone, welcome back to Podcasting Made Simple. I'm your host, Alex San Felipe, and I'm joined today by my close friend Tom Rossi. Tom, welcome, man. Thanks for having me on the show. Man, I'm excited to have you back. I wanted to tell you, this is like a full circle thing for me. So years ago, I started a podcast called Creating a Brand. And for anybody checking this out on the podcast I made simple feed, the first 157 episodes will say, like, you're listening to Creating a Brand podcast because I just kept my same feed, right? And Tom, we met because of that podcast. It was actually a specific episode we had a mutual friend on, DHH, David Handler-H. And you emailed me. I was like just a Buzz Sprout customer.

So customer of Tom's. And he's like, hey, that was a great interview. I'd love to chat with you. Like, no idea this guy is, but I saw like founder of Buzzsprout. I'm like, no way. Yeah, I want to talk to this guy, right? So we got a call and you're like, man, I've heard a lot of people interview DHH, but never like you did. and we kind of like built a friendship from there.

So like this whole thing like we're talking about like creating a brand that's different today.

So it's like funny like I purposely put the title of my old show in it, right? But like it's kind of full circle because like we met through that podcast and here we are now kind of really talking about how we've both done something different in the podcasting space, both this host and guests and also software providers in the space. So it's kind of cool, man. They've got a full circle thing for me, just be able to kind of come back and make this happen. Yeah. Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, for sure. All right, man. So what I want to get into first is, like, the setting the stage first off for the nine points we're going to talk about, what I'm finding right now, like everyone is out there trying to create a brand, whether you're podcast guests, podcast hosts, your show is the brand, your book that you're trying to run is the brand, your coaching service, just getting your reputation grown. Like, it's all a brand at the end of the day, right? And when I'm realizing more than ever is that, man, there's a lot of noise out there. And I think that that's been said online for years. Like, it's allowed, like being a creator, doing something online, it is noisy. And you have to work super hard, like harder than their belts. You've got to put them more hours. You've got to be everywhere. It'll be all things to all people. And it's just really hard to get any sort of traction. And like, that really is like the culture of it. But I know that you and I don't believe that that's what it takes to actually build something that's different that's going to succeed. And so I want to really just set that that foundation before you know these nine points. I think maybe the best place for us to start is just give it like a thousand foot overview of like where we are at as creators ourselves, right? Like you did something that's different. I did something is different. If you don't mind just like riffing on this point from it here before we get into it. Sure. Yeah. I think for us, you know, we got into building software and didn't really think about, I mean, branding, marketing really was an afterthought. Like, we want to build something cool.

We want to build a cool tool.

We want to solve a problem.

We want to build something that addresses an issue that people are like, oh, man, this

is great.

You know, this solves this thing for me.

And I think over time you realize you reach the edges of your ability to be able to

to grow your market with

with just that approach like you have to you have to engage you have to get out there and we

started to get into branding and marketing but the way that we got into branding and marketing

was more along the lines of who are you what's working who really are you rather than

who do I need to become to fit this

space? And, you know, maybe that doesn't work for everyone, but for us, that's more of what

branding has looked like. And I'm not involved in a lot of the branding and marketing, but I am involved

in who are we as an organization. Who are we as a company? Why do we do the things that we do?

And the answer to that question is never because it looks good on our brand

or because we want to be true to our brand.

Our brand is who we are.

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