Finding Opportunities in a Crowded Industry with Squadcast

Tom recently attended Podcast Expo, an event designed for the little, non-corporate podcaster, and one of the vendors he met was Squadcast. Squadcast has an interesting tool to help podcasters, and they’re using it for this episode! This week on Innovation in Compliance, Tom Fox, the Compliance Evangelist talks to Zach Moreno and Rock Felder about how they found an opportunity to make a big difference in a crowded industry. How did Squadcast come to be?Zach Moreno is a technologist who’s interested in seeing what’s possible with technology. Rockwell Felder has an audit CPA background, but he left it to become the other co-founder of Squadcast as well as the CFO. The two high-school friends had been podcast listeners for years, and as they got more and more interested in the industry, they looked around and thought ‘we could do this!’ What they found, when trying to create a science fiction audio-drama, was that there wasn’t a good tool for people to record well together - but remotely. They decided to solve the problem - and that became an opportunity for podcasters to capture studio-quality audio - from anywhere. See What’s PossibleTom asks Zach and Rock how the principle of ‘seeing what’s possible’ influenced their growth as a company. The company looks at new opportunities as chances to ‘prove themselves wrong’ and doing that has let them be very experimental and push the needle in terms of what is possible to do from remote locations. Zach also mentions that the venture capital opinion of the podcast industry led them to bootstrap the company, and really challenge ‘conventional’ wisdom about what was possible. Ongoing ImprovementSquadcast actively seeks out and takes advice from their clients - using feedback to make real changes to their platform. Podcasters are a vocal group of people - and as a company, Squadcast wants to give them what they need and get out of their way. They knew they couldn't fake being all-knowing experts, they needed to listen to and learn from the veteran podcasters. Any opportunity to let people be heard is one they want to take advantage of. Many companies *say* they’re community-focused, but the founders’ lack of experience AS podcasters forced them to really do it. Rock talks about how they like to attend the smaller industry events to get to know the community. What Compliance Professionals Should RememberTom draws a parallel to how important it is in compliance to listen to your people and genuinely respond to what they need, rather than what you think they ought to do, and talks about what a great strategy publicly taking, analyzing and responding to feedback is.  Resources:Squadcast.fm