How Do Creatives Pivot Their Careers | John Taylor

PROFITABLE TALKS...

In this episode of The Profitable Creative, host Christian Brim welcomes John Taylor from Act 3 Agency to discuss his journey through various careers and the evolution of podcasting. John shares his personal story, detailing his first act as a musician, where he faced numerous rejections from film schools but found success in the music industry with his band, The Uninvited. After a brief stint in music, he transitioned into the professional world, navigating through various industries including real estate and wine, before finally establishing his podcast marketing agency. John emphasizes the importance of understanding the podcasting landscape, especially as it has evolved from a niche medium to a significant player in the entertainment and marketing sectors.

PROFITABLE TAKEAWAYS...

• This is the third act of my life.
• I never got in. I applied six times for film school.
• You have this evergreen long form piece of content.

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Transcript

Christian Brim (00:01.465)
Welcome to another episode of the Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Special shout out to our one listener in Portage, Michigan. I'm assuming that's in a lake somewhere, but in any case, thank you for listening. Joining me today, John Taylor of Act 3 Agency. John, welcome to the show.

John Taylor (00:26.702)
Thanks, Christian. Really honored to be on the show today.

Christian Brim (00:29.903)
Well, I'm excited to have you because I want to pick your brain. But let's start with let's start with the pedantic. How did you come up with Act three?

John Taylor (00:33.25)
Let's do it.

Okay.

because I'm just old as you can possibly imagine and this is the third act of my life and this is what I hope to be the last work project of my life. So it's kind of a of the culmination, everything that I've done up to this point and going out with a bang.

Christian Brim (00:45.595)
I

Christian Brim (00:52.387)
Okay, okay.

Christian Brim (01:03.203)
I love it. So what was act one and act two?

John Taylor (01:07.238)
Act One. Well, let's say that Act One was the music career. So I went off to college, went to USC, was trying to get into film school at the time, because that was the mecca for future directors was USC, because Coppola and Spielberg had just poured all this money into it, and we were watching it being built right in front of our eyes.

Christian Brim (01:14.075)
OK.

Christian Brim (01:24.071)
yeah.

John Taylor (01:34.222)
But I never got in. I applied six times for film school. They all rejected me. So did NYU, UCLA, Cal Arts. It just wasn't happening. like, well, why is this not happening? realized it because my actual calling was as a musician, songwriter and producer. so my brother and I, who I'd been in bands with when I was just a kid,

We decided to make a go of it. We got about seven minutes of our allotted 15 minutes of fame. Our band got signed to Atlantic Records. We did the national tour thing, played the MTV Music Awards. you know, then we got caught up in the absolute turmoil of the music industry in the early 2000s. We're dropped from the label and, you know, just sort of did the independent music thing from then on.

And so that was pretty much act one. okay. So the band's called The Uninvited and we are in fact still around and my brother and I still do it. And we play shows. I'm here in the San Francisco Bay area. We play shows around here, down to LA, out to Vegas, up to Phoenix.

Christian Brim (02:32.035)
Okay, pause. What was the band's name?

Christian Brim (02:54.189)
What's the genre?

John Taylor (02:56.158)
So the genre is, well, back in the 90s, it was alternative rock, right? That was sort of the catchall. No, closer to Bare Naked Ladies, but we had two quasi hits. We had two lower, lower billboard charting singles like...

Christian Brim (03:02.693)
Grunge or no?

Christian Brim (03:09.253)
Okay.

John Taylor (03:21.876)
way down there at the bottom. One was definitely third wave SoCal, Ska-Punk. And the other was our contribution to Western civilization, a song called Too High for the Supermarket.

Christian Brim (03:37.849)
I'm going to have to go check these songs out because that that genre is right in my wheelhouse. I I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma that, you know, everybody 80s listening to, you know, heavy rock, hair bands or country and Western. And I just couldn't I couldn't abide to any of it. So I was, you know, on the second English wave of alternative rock.

you know, everything from Morrissey to the cult to the cure. So that was so I'm sure I love your stuff. So.

John Taylor (04:12.758)
Awesome.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that was, that was, you know, that's when we were doing it. And, in fact, the uninvited in 98, I want to say maybe 99, we, the biggest festival we played was in Tulsa, Oklahoma. yeah, for some, I forget the name of the radio station there. but the, the single was top 10.

Christian Brim (04:21.423)
The uninvited, watch it, look it up for listeners.

Christian Brim (04:29.178)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (04:35.544)
okay.

John Taylor (04:44.686)
at that radio station. And that was one of the craziest things about the whole experience at the time was that, so, you know, if you were getting radio support, you were huge. And if you weren't, you weren't. So we would go and play this festival to 30,000 people in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and they were all singing the song. And then the next day we would be in Missouri and we'd be playing for the waitresses because there was no radio support. So, yeah.

Christian Brim (04:56.186)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (05:11.405)
Yeah, you'd be at the Des Moines County Fair and you know. Alright, what was act two?

John Taylor (05:15.285)
Yeah. So, yeah. So act two is going out into the professional world, you know, getting a job and, we rode that train as long as we could. so really for me, like my professional career, job, job, job was didn't start until I was about 33. So I got

Christian Brim (05:25.071)
Hmm.

Christian Brim (05:41.06)
Okay.

John Taylor (05:44.79)
a friend of mine gave me a job as, he was doing a software, development company, right around the internet boom. and he made me an offer I couldn't refuse, which was very generous. So I just, since I had no idea about software, but I was the sales guy, sales and marketing. And so, you know, that company survived until one of the partners had a midlife crisis and, you know,

stole all the money from the company to buy cars for his mistress. And then the internet exploded and the dot com bust happened. And then I went into real estate. I thus began what one could call a series of entrepreneurial endeavors that

Christian Brim (06:27.512)
Okay.

Christian Brim (06:42.811)
Mm-hmm.

John Taylor (06:43.542)
you know, led to a certain amount of success and then died. Failed, died, whatever. In the real estate world, I had built up a company that was doing private mortgage investing and fix and flip rehab type of funding, that sort of thing. We had $10 million of assets under management. We were being eyed by a private equity firm.

Christian Brim (06:51.663)
Mm-hmm.

John Taylor (07:13.494)
and a hedge fund for another $100 million in investment capital. And during the due diligence process, we discovered that one of the partners had been running a Ponzi scheme, basically. And so the whole thing imploded. That was fun. Then from there, I went into marketing in the wine business right up here in Napa.

I worked for a couple of different wineries doing marketing, direct to consumer marketing for wine. And it was great. It's wine. mean, what's there not to love? And the people were great and the wine's great and the food's great and it tastes like crap. But again, I started my own company, I my own wine brands.

Christian Brim (07:46.295)
Mm-hmm.

John Taylor (08:03.956)
I had an angel investor who was like, if you can make these wine brands work to X level, I'll come in and I'll fund the rest of it. And then we'll build the brand and then sell it to Southern Wine or whatever. And so we built it to beyond X, built it up to this very competitive, two very competitive brands.

Christian Brim (08:19.323)
Right.

John Taylor (08:32.044)
And then my angel investor had a heart attack and had quadruple bypass surgery and then came out of surgery and was like, I'm never working a day in my life. So sorry. And then that company died. And that's when it went on and freelance started doing freelance marketing. know, post COVID, the wine industry started to die. And if you keep track of that at all, just, you would just.

Christian Brim (08:45.187)
You know.

Christian Brim (10:24.577)
And he's back.

John Taylor (10:25.391)
Yeah, and he's back. Yeah, sorry about that. was internet chest said, bye. All right. So there we were in the wine business. The other, the other part of the, of the wine thing. That's when I started podcasting. One of my clients was, you know, said, Hey, what's up with this whole podcasting thing? And so I started a podcast for them. I, they,

didn't get it. So I took over the podcast myself and did about 110 episodes. It was a wine podcast. And it got really popular. And it was one of the, and that's when I started getting my sponsorship opportunities. And so I was like selling a ton of wine for the sponsor. That's when I actually decided, Hey, I'm going to do this wine brand myself. And that's whole thing started. But then

I kind of wrote this novel, this fiction novel sort of based on the podcast and kind of my own experiences. That attracted the attention of Netflix. And so we did a, basically a series Bible and a pilot script for Netflix and they loved it. And then,

the head of legal who was sort of representing me got fired and Netflix just restructured everything and then it was dead. yeah. So yeah, that's what I, you know, then 2000, 2001 as I'm just kind of doing freelance work, that's when I decided to start my own agency and realized that the niche that really needed to be filled was podcast marketing and.

Christian Brim (12:02.555)
Huh.

John Taylor (12:20.929)
I understood podcasting, understood marketing, and here I am. So thus begins act three and off we go.

Christian Brim (12:31.683)
Okay. So I let, let's dig into some basics around podcasting. Obviously there's, still a lot of growth from what I've seen in the industry, but it's changed from what it was probably when you, did your wine podcast in that. Like you still have, well, the way I see it is, and I want your opinion as to whether I'm right or wrong. You have.

John Taylor (12:44.623)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (13:01.079)
you have major podcast shows which essentially have replaced what probably were radio broadcasts before and or video because you know like TV shows like there's there's you know both formats but the vast majority by numbers of the people that are in podcasting podcasting never attract

an audience to generate revenue, like from sponsorships or advertising. And there's more of a promotional purpose as part of their marketing strategy, right? Is that accurate?

John Taylor (13:45.781)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think it's extremely accurate, and I think there's a lot to unpack there.

One of the, when podcasting sort of first started out, it was very new and people are discovering what is this and what does it mean and how do we do it and how do we monetize it and things like that. It was very much the Wild West of new media. And I think one of the things we're starting to see now, as the dust settles and there's more of this sort of foundational acceptance of podcasting, a couple of things.

Kind of like what you were alluding to, think that a lot of the big companies, YouTube, Netflix now, are seeing podcasting as this kind of new way of doing entertainment, but it's still the old way. What is new is the distribution, right? The same thing that happened to the music industry back in the late 90s.

Christian Brim (14:47.227)
Right.

John Taylor (14:52.877)
We got all caught up in, you had Napster and, and, and MP3.com and these great new ways of stealing free content, right? Of turning paid content into free content. You're a good, you're a good man. so you have just all that's changed is the way that this content is distributed and is consumed. But the content itself, the, the, the material that people want to listen to and watch.

Christian Brim (15:02.755)
I never stole anything, officer.

Christian Brim (15:16.197)
Mm-hmm.

John Taylor (15:22.575)
That hasn't changed. I, I, I, this Hill is what I'll die on is that there was, you know, back in the nineties, there was a ton of daytime TV talk shows, right? There was Ricky Lake and, uh, Sally, Jesse, Raphael and Arsenio Hall. And I'm not talking about quality. I'm just talking about quantity of talk shows. And then they all seem to just go away. And what you're seeing now, I think is, is the through line to there where

Christian Brim (15:33.093)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Beautiful.

Christian Brim (15:41.05)
Yes.

John Taylor (15:51.801)
People still want their talk shows. They still want their daytime TV. They still want this kind of form of entertainment. And it's just being, it's just now called podcasting and it's being distributed in a different way. And then on the other side of that coin is podcasting for B2B or B2C or direct to consumer where the podcast is

not necessarily for entertainment purposes, but for educational purposes, for trust building purposes, for thought leadership purposes or thought provoking purposes. And the podcast serves as this tool to explain to people your perspective, your experience, your expertise, and then hopefully get them to, you

Christian Brim (16:46.949)
Mm-hmm.

John Taylor (16:49.965)
buy what it is you're selling, whether that's a service or a product or, you know, what have you. and I think one of the challenges that a lot of podcasters face is sort of deciding where they fit in there and then where the podcast fits. it is the podcast, the thing is that, is that what you're selling? Is that the, this content I'm making or is what you're selling.

Christian Brim (17:17.763)
Right.

John Taylor (17:19.523)
this thing that I'm talking about, right? In which case your podcast is part of your marketing matrix, you know, and it fits up here and there's funnels that go through it and there's, you know, all of that, you know, so, yeah.

Christian Brim (17:34.715)
Yeah. And I would overlay onto that. The technology, you know, obviously has made brought down the cost of doing podcasting. Uh, and it's this long tail where, you know, it started with Spotify of like, you know, you're, you're, you're 20 % of the curve didn't really change, but the, the, the tail that goes out where you might have

John Taylor (17:42.286)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (18:02.619)
10, 15, 25 downloads is really long, right? I was shocked when I, and I'd been doing it several months, Alex Sanfilippo with Podmatch and his data was, okay, if your episode gets 25 or more downloads in the first seven days, it's the first, it's top 50 % of all podcasts. And I was shocked by that. I'm like,

John Taylor (18:07.277)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

John Taylor (18:17.155)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (18:32.411)
really. But then I think that's an incomplete number in and of itself because I don't necessarily, you know, in using the podcast the way I'm using it, I don't really care how much is listened to in the first 25, I mean, the first seven days. It's really the long tail of, you know, how many people eventually listen to it.

John Taylor (18:32.911)
You

Christian Brim (19:01.635)
and the benefits of having the SEO, the transcripts on the website and being able to drive traffic from that as well. And it's, it's interesting trying to figure out the strategy behind the content because it's, it's not always a clear path, which I guess is where you come in.

John Taylor (19:19.758)
Mm-hmm.

John Taylor (19:27.407)
Yes, where the agency and what we do comes in, yeah, for sure. Because it's exactly like you say, you have this, when you create a podcast, you have this evergreen long form piece of content. And especially over time, I agree 100 % about what you say about, is it important to get all these listens out of the gate? No, not really.

It's a piece of content that will live on the internet for as long as electrons exist. you know, it's a long game. And after you do 100 episodes, or 50 episodes, whatever, let's say after you do 100 episodes, you also have now 100 hours of your expertise recorded. And that's one of the areas that we're coming from as well right now.

Like, wait, you've just created basically your own large language model of your expertise, which is completely unique and different from somebody else's. And that is a content goldmine, right? It's comparable to writing a couple of novels that are strictly about your expertise. It's huge.

Christian Brim (20:33.488)
Hmm.

Christian Brim (20:49.615)
Right.

John Taylor (20:54.775)
Yeah. And that's, that is where we come in. you know, our, our agency is all about promoting podcasts in a way that increased discover ability, which again, that long form content is all about, and increased your listenership to your sort of ideal client profile. Like who is your ideal listener? We help you find that person. We more importantly, help that person find you.

Christian Brim (21:21.999)
Well, yeah, and that's, that's ultimately the problem with long tail that my bird clock, it, it was a gift. sorry. It just, I'd take the batteries out of it, but you know, that's the problem with long tail is the technology there's, there's, you know, if you want to find, you know, the uninvited on Spotify, you have to know that it exists, right?

John Taylor (21:31.366)
that's great. That's awesome.

Christian Brim (21:51.981)
And you have to know, and that's the problem is that there is great content, but how do you find it? the aggregators, GoodPod, and Myopod, and some of these others that, even the main platforms like Apple, cetera, Spotify, they're starting to get better at recommending through algorithms of listening.

But it's still as, a podcast producer, it's, you know, it's kind of like, how do you find you? I, I don't even know who my listeners are right. Like at the end of the day, it, it kind of is like speaking into the void. I, I don't get, I don't have a feedback loop. Like I don't really know who's listening or what they think of the content other than just the very raw data of episode down.

John Taylor (22:31.897)
Mm-hmm.

John Taylor (22:38.382)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (22:51.731)
which, you know, trying to discern why did they want to live? There's one episode that is like, you know, Six Sigma. It's way off the charts. And I'm like, why is that content that much more popular? I have no idea. I can't on the surface see any reason. It's not like the guest was super special or they had a large following on social media. Like I didn't promote it.

John Taylor (22:51.822)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (23:21.133)
Like, why is that episode? And the content itself, I'm like, well, I mean, it seemed pretty normal. Like, why is that one performing better? So I'm assuming you also help folks figure that out.

John Taylor (23:35.343)
Yeah, yes we do. And you know, it's really, your example was so interesting and so spot on for what we do and what's going on in the world right now. So yes, let's say that you wanted to go find music by the uninvited. So if you type in the uninvited into your browser, okay, first you're gonna get the movie from 1956 and then you're gonna get.

a bunch of hits on Alanis Morissette, side note, her producer stole that song name from our name. Yeah, I know. And then you're gonna get like half a dozen Icelandic death metal bands of the same name, and then somewhere down there you'll find us. And so that's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. What, so,

Christian Brim (24:12.091)
districts.

John Taylor (24:31.823)
the person who's searching for it, you wouldn't just type in the uninvited anymore. You know that's what's going to happen. So when people are doing a search now, they're like, the uninvited, this, I guess, alternative rock band that what, sounded like the bare naked ladies from back in the 1990s. That's the way they search. And so that's what we optimize for is to make sure that

that that band comes up when you do that search. And because that's the way people search now, that's the way AI discovers things now. So that's the approach you have to take, because then you are finding that user who you want to be your user, we want people to listen to our band. So you want them to find you instead of finding the 1956 Ray Milan film, right? And so,

Christian Brim (25:09.893)
Mm-hmm.

John Taylor (25:28.715)
Everything you say there is so true. How do you decide, how do you know who's listening to you and what topics they're resonating with? so one of the reports that we generate is a pretty simple correlation of your downloads to your episode title names. So we break down your episode title name.

Christian Brim (25:56.291)
Mmm.

John Taylor (25:58.859)
episode titles by word. We take out all of the ofs and ands and these and a's and stuff like that. We take all those out and all the adverbs and action words and adjectives and nouns we keep in. And we correlate that with the number of downloads each of those words received from that title. And

Then we kind of structure them together and into like two word combinations. And we look at the data and we see and we're like, yeah, the words globally, like this was one client, the word globally had like a 10 X higher download rate than the next most comparable word. And she had no idea. And it gave her insight to say, well, okay. I guess content that

is more centered around a global audience is what's resonating with people. And you can never really get into like exactly what's in the mind of your user. That is, you know, wish, but you can follow these kinds. There are ways of following topics of your content that you can use. One of the, one of the, the, the, the key ones that we use too is, um, just creating trackable links.

Christian Brim (27:07.917)
Right.

John Taylor (27:26.367)
and making different trackable links to go into your different content. So for example, you have a series of YouTube playlists for your podcast. Each one of those playlists is on a different topic and you organize your podcasts by topic in these playlists. Well, you put a trackable link in the playlist and you put the same trackable link in that content, in the videos that go into that playlist.

Christian Brim (27:41.624)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (27:50.555)
and you put the same track link in that content in the videos that go into that place. And now this is a track link and it's converting to your book or to your service. You can then look at it and say, oh, check it out. This time.

John Taylor (27:56.535)
And now since it's a trackable link and it's converting to your book or to your service, you can then look at it and say, check it out. This topic is leading to more conversions than that topic. And yeah. And so that's sort of, know, there, there, are ways, there are ways to track your users, but you're always going to be like,

Christian Brim (28:12.003)
Right.

John Taylor (28:22.615)
It's like tracking them through the forest. You're always going to be ten steps behind, but at least you know where they're going.

Christian Brim (28:28.451)
Right. Okay, so I'm going to pivot now and talk about the business model of your agency. So we talked about what you do. Let's talk about how you make money at it. How did you come up with your pricing model on the service that you do offer?

John Taylor (28:47.833)
such a great question because it's a constantly evolving, constantly moving target.

I demand, what is, I can't even think of the term now. It's, it's demand based and, and what the market will bear. And it, like I said, it's, been a constantly moving target and a very frustrating part of the business because there are, there are these lofty podcasters.

Christian Brim (29:07.087)
Mm-hmm.

John Taylor (29:26.019)
that that 1 % that is willing to say, okay, yeah, I'll pay you $5,000 to do your entire package to optimize all of my digital platforms and to do a 90 day program of optimizing all of my content and giving me all the tools that it takes to do that on my own afterwards. And that's this tiny, tiny, tiny little sliver at the top. And then there's this

Christian Brim (29:53.231)
Mm-hmm.

John Taylor (29:55.311)
larger layer that's like, okay, I'm willing to make a $3,000, maybe $2,000 investment. But I want the exact same thing. and then there's, you know, the ones are like, I got 500 bucks, man, what can I do? And yeah, and so we are trying to

Christian Brim (30:08.389)
Right.

Christian Brim (30:16.132)
Right.

John Taylor (30:22.127)
We're trying to do a little bit of something for everybody in that respect. And I mean, that's one of the reasons why we create our course, right? You can get a course for $499. That explains all of this, everything we do. You can do our entire strategy from the digital optimization to the marketing content. If you've got the time, I've got eight modules of video for you to watch, right? And it's 499, you can do it yourself. And isn't that, I mean, the bottom line is that that is the trade-off, right? You've either got time,

Christian Brim (30:25.614)
Yeah.

Christian Brim (30:45.145)
Right.

John Taylor (30:51.915)
or you got money and if you've got time, then I'll show you how to do all of this on your own. And if you got money and you have no time, I'll do it all for you.

Christian Brim (31:07.929)
Well, what I'm thinking and maybe you've got this thought as well is that, you know, the, the promotion of the podcast is, is really kind of secondary because, I would assume there's a lot of people out there that have podcasts that don't really have any, overarching intent. Like,

One of the conversations I have with my head of marketing or head of revenue here is, you know, it's, it's totally fine to spend money on something if you know it's working to promote it, right? Like, but, what's the point of promoting something that's not converting, right? and, and so, but I, I think that if, you were to take most podcasts producers out there, it's their podcast, isn't quote converting.

John Taylor (31:55.437)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (32:06.959)
because that's not their intent. don't even really know that it should be their intent. like, so there's like this knowledge gap or education gap, strategy gap between like, would I even want to promote my podcast? Because I don't know what the hell I'm doing with my podcast.

John Taylor (32:23.535)
Absolutely, 100%. And I would say that 60 % at least of our clients are podcasters who've hit the 50 to 70 podcast level and are coming to me and saying, okay, I forgot why I'm doing this. What is this supposed to do? Am I supposed to be making money? What happens here?

Christian Brim (32:40.059)
Yeah.

Christian Brim (32:44.687)
Mm-hmm.

John Taylor (32:53.007)
And you know, then we have to take this step backwards. And that's that very big special. What's your goal? What do you want to do? What did you, why did you get into this in the first place? And what is it you feel like you're missing now? Why are you, why are you coming to me and saying what happens? And usually that's the conversation you have is that, is that conversion conversation like, well, actually I wish I sold my book as a result of this, or actually I'm a life coach and I'd like.

more coaching clients. And I thought maybe that just doing this, would get some. And it's like, well, yeah, well, you are establishing your thought leadership. You are showing your expertise. But now let's talk about how we make that convert and how you ask for the sale basically through the podcast as well. And yeah, I mean, a lot of people start without knowing exactly why.

And that's we try to help them figure out.

Christian Brim (33:53.787)
Well, that was me. That was me. Like I told you in the green room, I started this podcast because I wanted to have a conversation that wasn't happening anywhere else because I'm impassioned about the idea. I think that there's definitely synergy and could have commercial purpose. And I think it has, you know, raised

visibility, awareness, and trust with our prospects. looking at the audience, I have no idea is this people that could be target customers or not? I have no data on that. When you're talking to people, independent producers,

John Taylor (34:39.567)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (34:48.635)
And like, you know, people that have reached that 50 mark or maybe 100 mark that they have proven that they've got something worth doing and that they're willing to do it. Because my other understanding from looking at Alex's numbers is that the vast majority of podcasters, like, you know, in the 90s, never get to that 100 episode mark. They just quit too early.

John Taylor (35:11.373)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (35:18.841)
What is a reasonable expectation? like, you know, I use the metric of 25 downloads, like, you know, you get to maybe a thousand downloads a month or something like that. You've, you've, you know, you've got something. But like, what's, how do you manage those expectations with, with your clients?

John Taylor (35:37.313)
Now that is such a great question. That is such a great question because you really, you really do. The difficult part about answering that question is it's kind of like asking how long is a piece of string? Because let me give you a couple of examples. I've got, I work with my oldest client.

Christian Brim (35:40.355)
I know that's what I do, John. I ask great questions.

John Taylor (36:08.427)
I totally under charge because he's my oldest client. Has about 165 episodes now of a podcast that is all about wholesale distribution. So you really can't think of anything more. Oh, it is an hour and a half every week of wholesale distribution. You can't.

Christian Brim (36:25.925)
Sounds like a riveting conversation.

John Taylor (36:36.121)
think of anything more niche than this. And at no point do they ever have more than say 150 listeners. But they're selling a SaaS product. They're selling this SaaS software that they develop that un-silos your data and gives you this much better sort of CRM.

If they sell that thing to one listener, that's a quarter of a million dollars. So 150 listeners, if they can convert, you know, 1%, that's huge. That is huge. They don't need a thousand listeners. They would like a thousand listeners, but you know, there you go. I've got a same kind of client who works in spa management. She's a consultant for wellness spa.

Same sort of thing. Very niche, very, you know, and would she like a thousand listeners? Yes. Is it a thousand listener kind of show? No. But if she can convert, you know, one of this rotating 200 listeners into a client, you know, it's a $50,000 engagement. So those are the sort of things you have to think of.

Christian Brim (37:45.72)
Mm-hmm.

John Taylor (38:02.415)
in terms of what is the success of your show and what is the success of your audience number.

Christian Brim (38:13.477)
So what it sounds like you're saying that in a lot of cases, number of downloads is a vanity metric that really is irrelevant. It depends upon one, what your business intent with it is, and two, the cost you can afford to pay for that piece of marketing.

Right? mean, like, so if you're selling a book at 20 bucks and you make, you know, $10 on it, that is a whole lot different paradigm than if you're selling a $250,000 annual subscription to a SaaS product. Completely different.

John Taylor (38:59.159)
Mm-hmm. Yep, absolutely different. And you have to do that sort of equation backwards, right? So if your conversion is $10, your net for a conversion is $10, and you want to make $100 a week, and you know that you're converting 2 % of your audience, well, you do the math and figure out how big your audience has to be in order to make that $100 a week.

then the question, how do I grow my audience? And it's a completely different model than your Joe Rogan's and even your Mel Robbins, who are all about the listeners. It's about the listener number. And then I can charge, if I'm charging $25 cost per thousand for Purple Mattress ads, well, then I'm still raking in millions of dollars because I have millions of years on it. And then the products become an afterthought.

Christian Brim (39:42.412)
Exactly. Right.

John Taylor (39:57.251)
book is secondary. It's nice, but it's secondary to what her advertising dollars are putting are pulling in. So that's definitely a different model. And you know, I've worked, I worked with a couple of clients who are, are in that model. and they got nothing to sell and they're not trying to sell anything. They're trying to be entertaining and get more ears. Now not to go down the rabbit hole, but even in that scenario, even in that case,

You really have to look at what that number, like what is the big enough number becomes more more interesting the more sort of niche your audience is. So in the case of this podcast I'm talking about, they are middle-aged women talking about middle-aged women issues and their audience is predominantly middle-aged women and middle-aged women hold all the money. If they don't have the money themselves,

They gatekeep the money, right? And so very attractive audience. And now you're not talking about an $18 cost per thousand, you know, basic ad. You're talking about a $50 cost per thousand, especially for some product or service that is really aimed at that audience. So I guess it's a long winded way of saying it's different in every case.

Christian Brim (40:58.051)
Yes, yes.

Christian Brim (41:24.889)
Well, there's also, so I went to a webinar Alex hosts quarterly and they had a presenter on there that sold his company to Mighty Networks. And I think it's Mighty, isn't that the online community platform? I? Yeah. And so he continued working with them and he was talking about the evolution of community. He made the comment that

John Taylor (41:43.737)
There is a might, yeah, there is a mighty.

Christian Brim (41:53.627)
and this might be useful information to you, that they already have seen a decline in online education. And that's their primary business model, right? Is creating content to sell on their platform, know, video courses, et cetera. That it's shifting to community where it's more about transformation.

John Taylor (42:05.711)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (42:21.721)
and being part of that community, his example was CrossFit. And he said, why are people so passionate about CrossFit when you know they're a CrossFitter because they don't stop talking about it? Or he used Vegans as another example. It is because of the transformation that they've experienced and they're so impassioned about it. And the shift from

John Taylor (42:40.301)
Uh-huh.

Christian Brim (42:52.003)
it not being about, you, John, and you're driving the content, but rather you're, you become the curator of the content and it's the community that comes up with the content. And, and so I'm, wondering what your thoughts are on that from, from where you sit.

John Taylor (43:03.373)
Mm.

John Taylor (43:15.297)
It's a great point. It's a very interesting point. And one of the it's a great point is because I agree with it so much. I will die on the mountain of curation and that curators are sadly missing from everything. The reason you have so much garbage in the world is that

Christian Brim (43:38.693)
Hmm?

John Taylor (43:43.705)
Technology has given us platforms for worldwide audiences for everybody, but the curators are gone. Right? Let's go back to the music business, right? When I was a kid and we were trying to be rock stars, you had to get your music past the program director at the radio station. The radio station program directors literally sat in her chair and she listened to music and she said, good, bad.

Christian Brim (43:53.051)
Mmm.

John Taylor (44:13.443)
bad, good, you know, and decided, you know, which one of the thousand CDs on her desk was going to be played on the air. And if it got played on the air, you were a hit. know, at least the audience was the judge of whether that was gonna be a hit song now. And the audience grew to trust that program director.

Christian Brim (44:34.511)
Right.

Christian Brim (44:41.179)
Mmm.

John Taylor (44:41.435)
And because they liked that radio station, right? This is the radio station I listen to. I like the music that comes from it. And so they were trusting the curator. And yes, I think there is a significant parallel between that and podcasters today. When you're growing that trust, what you're doing is you're becoming a curator to the content, to the information. And people are turning to you and saying, I trust this person.

Christian Brim (44:44.091)
Right.

Christian Brim (45:02.831)
Yes.

John Taylor (45:10.339)
to for the knowledge that they're passing on or the perspective that they're getting instead of trusting every freaking voice on the internet that I have access to.

Christian Brim (45:28.215)
So I just had this epiphany, okay? I've known for a long time that the technology driving down the cost does exactly what you're talking about. in order to get on the radio or for you to get a record label to produce your album, there was such cost involved that they had to make some discernment about who they let in the door. Were they always right? No, that's not the point. Now that we have

John Taylor (45:48.791)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (45:57.487)
the cost has driven down on all of the content across all different platforms, but you don't have a long tail of curators, right? So really the curators need to, you're not curating for the masses anymore, you're curating for your niche. But you know, it's just...

John Taylor (46:12.579)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

John Taylor (46:20.045)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (46:27.297)
It's still just as valuable. It's just for a smaller subset. And I think you're right. The curation is gone and AI has made the problem worse. You know, are you going to trust the LLMs to be your gatekeepers? Absolutely not. I mean, I'm even fed up with my Google feed. Like, you know, like you keep showing me the same shit. I'm tired of

John Taylor (46:31.577)
Yes.

Christian Brim (46:54.979)
And it's on me because I keep reading some of it, right? Like so it keeps feeding me back what I but but there's nobody sitting there going like I really know Christian. I really know John. I know what kind of things that they like. And to curate we've kind of abdicated that to the algorithms like there's no there's no person in the loop.

John Taylor (47:16.302)
Mm-hmm.

John Taylor (47:20.525)
Yeah, that's a great, it's a great point. you know, algorithm is not necessarily your friend, I think is the, is the conclusion here. Cause the algorithms, you know, let's look at the TikTok algorithm, for example, I mean, that's programmed to keep you engaged on the platform and keep you angry or enraged or just keep that dopamine flowing. The YouTube algorithm is a search engine algorithm. And yeah, it's a content platform and everybody puts their videos up there and, and it's good. They should.

Christian Brim (47:27.641)
No, no.

John Taylor (47:49.199)
first largest podcast platform, but it's a search engine. And if you don't treat it like a search engine, it's not going to serve up your content. yeah, and the algorithm, yes, the algorithm is not a curator. That's, that's, think that's a great takeaway.

Christian Brim (47:58.832)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (48:07.917)
Yeah, but to your to your example of the wholesale distribution like rather than You know thinking about it in terms of selling a product thinking about it in terms of curating a community around Wholesale distribution those people that are in there and want to listen to an hour and half of that content like Being thinking of yourself not not necessarily as the person that has to produce the content

John Taylor (48:23.822)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (48:37.755)
But thinking of yourself as the curator for that community.

John Taylor (48:42.339)
Right? Yes. Yes.

Christian Brim (48:46.117)
John, this has been a fascinating conversation. I really appreciate your time.

John Taylor (48:48.497)
thank you. I appreciate as well. This has been a fascinating conversation. I love the rabbit hole of podcasting, marketing, and all the above. It's, yeah, fascinating stuff. And you've got some incredible perspective on it. So kudos to you.

Christian Brim (49:04.473)
Well, let's see if I can do something with it. How do people find you at three and connect?

John Taylor (49:11.903)
well, can connect with me directly by email. John at act three agency.com. That's a CT, the number three agency.com. we're online at act three agency.com and you can find me on LinkedIn. just look up act three agency. You'll find me and my fabulous AI generated headshot. So.

Christian Brim (49:36.905)
No TikTok handle.

John Taylor (49:39.383)
My, it's, I do have a TikTok handle, but that's my band. still, I still post, you know, it's interesting though. Side note. when I first started my TikTok account, it was all, you know, band stuff. Like here's a band at rehearsal and here's the band on the road and stuff. And nobody watched it. Nobody could give a flying. And when I started talking about independent music marketing, yeah, I went through the roof. 10,000 followers, a million views here and there.

Christian Brim (49:44.603)
Sweet.

Christian Brim (49:55.226)
Right.

John Taylor (50:09.187)
blah, blah. It's, you know, and there's a, there's a, a moral to that story. mean, there's a takeaway of like, you have to establish your hook, your thing, you know, your differentiator and, yeah, no one wants to listen to my music. Why would I go on TikTok for that?

Christian Brim (50:29.051)
I do. I'm going to go listen to it. Listeners will have those links in the show notes. If you've liked, if you liked what you've heard, if I can speak, please rate the podcast, share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If you don't like what you've heard, shoot us a message, tell us what you'd like to hear and we'll get rid of John. Until next time, ta ta for now.

John Taylor (50:48.249)
There you go.

Christian Brim (50:54.383)
Well.