Chasing Financial Freedom
From Art to Analytics: Jeff Dolan's Shift from Musician to CEO of Wavve
Ever wondered how artists and musicians transition into the corporate world of sales and marketing? We sat down with Jeff Dolan, CEO of Wavve, who walks us through his unique journey. Our conversation delves into his initial struggles and how he shifted gears from art and music to marketing, eventually leading him to the helm of Wave, a game-changing platform for podcasters and audio creators.
Are you tired of reshooting content? In the age where social media engagement is crucial and personalities are the driving force behind brands, we discuss with Jeff the smart move of re-purposing content and striking the perfect balance between entertaining and informative. Jeff shares his insights on finding your niche audience, building your personal brand, and staying relevant in the rapidly evolving digital marketing landscape.
Join us as we navigate the highs and lows of Jeff's podcasting journey and how he managed to reach over 260,000 downloads. We also explore the genius behind Wavve's revolutionary idea of syncing visuals with audio waveforms to enhance social media marketing for podcasters. Jeff offers invaluable advice on creating a unique listener experience and using visuals effectively to captivate your audience. Tune in for this enlightening discussion with a leading voice in the podcasting industry.
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Ever wondered how artists and musicians transition into the corporate world of sales and marketing? We sat down with Jeff Dolan, CEO of Wavve, who walks us through his unique journey. Our conversation delves into his initial struggles and how he shifted gears from art and music to marketing, eventually leading him to the helm of Wave, a game-changing platform for podcasters and audio creators.
Are you tired of reshooting content? In the age where social media engagement is crucial and personalities are the driving force behind brands, we discuss with Jeff the smart move of re-purposing content and striking the perfect balance between entertaining and informative. Jeff shares his insights on finding your niche audience, building your personal brand, and staying relevant in the rapidly evolving digital marketing landscape.
Join us as we navigate the highs and lows of Jeff's podcasting journey and how he managed to reach over 260,000 downloads. We also explore the genius behind Wavve's revolutionary idea of syncing visuals with audio waveforms to enhance social media marketing for podcasters. Jeff offers invaluable advice on creating a unique listener experience and using visuals effectively to captivate your audience. Tune in for this enlightening discussion with a leading voice in the podcasting industry.
Start for FREE
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
Thanks for Listening! Follow us on Tik Tok Facebook and Instagram
Hey guys, ryan Amant from Chasing Financial Freedom podcast. I hope you guys are having a great day today. On the podcast, we have Jeff Dolan. Jeff is the CEO of Wave, a cloud based platform that helps podcasters and other audio creators keep marketing on social media simple. He's a podcaster, musician, award winning filmmaker who loves to encourage creators of all stripes. Sir, welcome to the show. Thanks, ryan, glad to be here. Thanks for coming on. I know it was a little bit of a wait, but we had a nice little pre-conversation. I'm looking forward to our conversation today Me too. Yeah, it's gonna be fun, awesome. So, before we get into more what you're doing, a little bit more about your doing with Wave. What about yourself? Who are you and what makes Jeff?
Speaker 2:Wow, that's a big question, isn't it? I live on the coast in Wilmington, north Carolina. I love to surf and have a growing family and always have been interested in I don't know the word for it is always changing, but always improving yourself, self help, hustle culture. I don't know what that is. I think all of this type A's just pretty much are like no matter what situation we're thrown into, we're just gonna try to be better, jeff, and one thing I really missed in myself, really on, was that I was a creative person and a creator and I was always into art and music and graphic design and video, and so I have always tried to pursue that in some way, shape or form.
Speaker 2:And then it became pretty apparent at some age where it was like, all right, you got to actually make money if you want to live and thrive.
Speaker 2:So then I was like, okay, so I can't just go to a corner and be creative, I gotta actually figure out how to make money. And so that's where I got into a business sales marketing, the whole business side of it and I never really lost my love for the arts and encouraging artists and I really think they are leaders. And so I feel like, if you're going to be a creator slash leader of whatever you're doing, whether you're a solopreneur or leading a company you have to bring that creativity and know what you're doing all the time, and especially in this market. There's so many inputs we were talking about earlier, so many different things that are happening in the world and in our culture, and online and social media and podcasting Everything's changing. You have to have that kind of lateral thinking, that kind of creative mind to compile all of it and be nimble and move with the market. That's always been something I've loved and pursued to just encourage creators, and that's why I love doing conversations like this.
Speaker 1:So how does a CEO of a tech company live on the East Coast and not actually live in Silicon Valley?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a good question. So I think these days it really doesn't matter where you live unless you're trying to get like funding. And with Wave it's private equity backed and the guys are all from North Carolina and they love the calm approach to growing a company where it's not like the hyper pressure Like we invested 100 million, you better 10x or you're dead, and so really good guys over at Calm Capital and they're really having a different view of how to grow companies and I think it's catching on a lot of shift away from Silicon Valley and especially with COVID it's become pretty much we can live anywhere to do whatever we need to online. And then you have a lot of the VC firms. For a while there they were just throwing money at people before even doing any due diligence. If you try to compete with that, all the smaller VCs are private equity. It's just a numbers game. A group that I'm with. They are very good about finding good leaders, putting them in charge of good companies and having a long term view.
Speaker 1:So a little bit about Wave. Did you found Found? Did you Found it? And it's 12 in the afternoon here on the West Coast and it sounds like I need some more coffee. Were you the actual founder of Wave?
Speaker 2:I was not. No, it was started by three founders back in 2016. And they pipped a few times and then hit on what Wave is today, right as kind of podcasting. Bow Wave Crested during COVID when everybody was at home saying that I could sort of podcast while I'm sitting around at home, and so we really did it from that. And that's actually when the original founders started another B2B company, which was, which was hoping with churn, and so they wanted to switch over to that and they sold Wave to the private equity called Capital Guys. And then they saw what I was doing in marketing and said, hey, can you help us scale Wave and lead Wave? And so they put me in a couple years, almost three years ago now.
Speaker 1:So the journey that you've been on with Wave, how would you rate it?
Speaker 2:It's incredible for me. I'm a first-time CEO. I came out of corporate America in medical software sales, so SaaS sales, but in the medical field selling to doctors and health systems. That whole field was getting real interesting because Epic and Cerner were starting to take over, a lot of the smaller players were getting eaten up, a lot of consolidation happening and a lot of saturation in that market. As a salesperson I was very much getting antsy or angsty about not doing the marketing because in traditional corporate it's like sales and marketing.
Speaker 1:How to be chatter Exactly.
Speaker 2:We sent you leads. You didn't close them. It's your problem. You sent us horrible leads. Of course, we didn't close them. Send us better leads.
Speaker 2:What I saw happening was you really needed to be one person and really know how you're prospecting and marketing a lot of the digital market yourself. It's interesting as I saw that trend. I started a social media agency on the side. One of my first clients or actually my first client was like hey, I really like what you're doing for me. Can you help me more full time working to scale the company? That's when I got out of corporate America back in 2018-ish.
Speaker 2:It's interesting how the industry has progressed. It's really become not just sales and marketing melding into one person or one entity, but I've seen the rise of the influencer, where it's like the personality is leading a company. That's been really interesting to see. I've actually had to deal with that. I've gone through this whole cycle where it's okay, corporate America, BSE, traditional mindset. Then it's actually look at all these guys building and they're leading their companies. They're on social media, they're doing podcasts, they got a YouTube channel, they're like level Z celebrity or whatever you call it. It was really interesting to see that shift happen where, if you're not out online leading your company and then being visible, nobody really knows who you are. I don't know anything about this company If I can trust them, especially with AI now on the scene you don't know what is real. You're looking at some dude with 16 abs and you're like I'm pretty sure that's not anatomically correct. I don't know.
Speaker 1:That's hard. You're talking about AI and we can go down that rabbit hole shortly, but that's the you really hit on a nerve that I know I've struggled with over the years is if you're not out in front of everybody social media-wise, how do they know who you are? My podcast or my passion projects? I'm in the real estate space more affordable housing and the only way I can get eyeballs on what we do is by posting three to five times a day across my social channels. After a period of time I can't manage it. I have two VAs that do that for me. That's awesome, yeah, but before I did that, I was always wondering why I couldn't get people interested, more interested in what we were doing, because I'm in Arizona. A lot of our work is in the Midwest, so I'm not near it being able to effectively communicate and share our story. Podcasting, video, social media, blogging all those things I hardly ever did.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is funny how we think somehow people are going to find out when everybody's in their phone and we somehow think they'll just search us. I think the new stats are like all the Z folks are now not even searching Google anymore, they're searching their socials Really. Yeah, they're searching like TikTok and Instagram search.
Speaker 1:Wait a minute. They're getting their data and their information from TikTok.
Speaker 2:Yeah, isn't that crazy. The Gen X and older, they're still going to. Google to find With the younger generation. They're already on all the social video platforms and they're just searching right there.
Speaker 1:They're on YouTube or wherever. What you're telling me is one of the largest generation doesn't even go to Google. How, if you don't put yourself out there on these video platforms, how can you be found? Correct? Great, that just blows my mind. Yeah, not that they just go there, but is there any more to that story? Why do they go there before they go to Google Is it a trust thing. They're already there.
Speaker 2:Think about the psychology. I've explained this before. I'll try to make it more concise. Our generation, the older generation we're into long form content as the first step. Yes, we're going to create the podcast, the long YouTube video. We're going to write the book, we're going to have the documentary. We're going to go all out because we're deep thinkers of experience and we know what's going on. The younger generation bump that. Just give me the 30 second trailer so I can see if I even want to spend more time on it. This is the generation basically watching Netflix on.5 X speed what I can't even imagine that.
Speaker 1:Wait back up, you serious, they watch it one and a half times Speed.
Speaker 2:Go to Netflix. I could not believe when I saw this. Go to Netflix or who? Click on the settings and you'll see the ability to speed it up now, just like YouTube. It's insane. Who is watching anything on that speed?
Speaker 1:What you're telling me is their attention span is shorter than anything we know.
Speaker 2:Yes, what's interesting is they will create that form first, which is smart. They'll test out the short form trailer first. If that hits, they'll spend more time on it and make longer form. They don't even waste time if it doesn't go viral or it doesn't get likes or changes, whereas our generation we're not sure. We just Google it and then we chop it up and put it on socials.
Speaker 2:They're going to be honest, even as far as I've talked to some folks doing socials where they're like if something popped off, they say you should go back and read it and make a new title and the first few seconds different and repost it. They're like no, that's too much work, I'm just going to reshoot it. They literally won't even go through the work of repurposing stuff. Just reshoot it, read, make it fresh. It's that iteration.
Speaker 2:They're already creators on the platform, live streamers on the platform, gamers on the platforms. That's where they live, that's where they search. They're not used to saying, oh, let me go to this other webpage and search and then get a bunch of text and then find it and then click and then get another bunch of text and then read through this long blog to try to get what I need. They're just like. I need somebody to explain it to me in 30 seconds or less. Just explain it to me Then, if I'm interested, you have a link where I can go. Why do you think YouTube just came out with this new where you watch a YouTube short and, if you like it, you click to watch the whole long YouTube video right from the short?
Speaker 1:I saw that on my podcast channel. Because we do shorts on that and I see that now I think TikTok started that. Because I've been doing that on TikTok for several months now, I'll put out a short like from our podcast. I'll get a 30 second short and then I can link it to the longer version. Right, yeah, that's huge.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really huge. Yeah, it's interesting too, even with folks that are going live. Now I got caught the other day on TikTok where I couldn't even go live because I didn't have a thousand followers. But you can't even go live yet on TikTok. You can't go live on someone else's channel. So if they're live and they got millions of followers or whatever and they want to call you up, they'll be live on it with them. You can't even go live unless you have over a thousand.
Speaker 1:But can you go live on your own channel without a thousand followers? No, Wow.
Speaker 2:So I got to bolt my game up on TikTok basically.
Speaker 1:Then let's share, because I'm in the same boat, because I just recently put I put together a TikTok page just for the podcast. I got 150 followers, whatever. But you know what You're in the space and maybe we talk about it is the consistency and being persistent with putting video out. But sometimes even with that it doesn't help with algorithms and I'm not trying to win the algorithm, I'm just trying to figure out what sticks and sometimes some of the stuff we talk about on my podcast with guests doesn't stick at all, doesn't resonate, because it's things that people don't want to listen to, as in change, it's a four letter word for people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, People, some people are looking. It's entertaining. Some people are looking as news right, they just give me headlines, give me the quick takes on what your opinions are. They're looking at trusted people Very few people. If you look at kind of the stats how they break down, very few people are looking as like a improvement platform, Like let me go find the gurus that are going to teach me how to do something, In other words, learning that's why I struggle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that is a portion of it, but a lot of us that are on creating content, we are sharing our knowledge, our experience, we're teaching and you have to make it fun and entertaining to make it palatable for some of the younger audience, right, because they're just tuned it out. I just want to be entertained, right, so you got to make it more entertaining. The shock value, right, the surprise factor, there's all these different things that you can do. But then, as a creator, you have to step back and say why am I doing this? Because, literally, I'm not trying to dance, I'm not trying to like have a talent show situation.
Speaker 2:So you have to be okay with the level of engagement that you get on whatever you're trying to put out, because you're just trying to find your audience and your customers. Right, because I think the other thing is there are YouTube channels that make so much money and they don't have many followers. Right, they might have 300 followers and they $300. Those 300 people are really important for what they're trying to do. Yeah, if you get 300 VCs on a YouTube channel for very specific content and they have dollars at their disposal and they invest in your company, that's all you need.
Speaker 2:You don't need millions of followers. And so you got to look at like who is your audience, who are your customers and what do you really want to put out? Because the other concept that I struggle with is, once you start doing something and start getting known for something, you're almost painting yourself into a corner right, because now you have an audience that's like leaning in. I want to hear from you about this. And then maybe your life changes and you're like I don't do that anymore. Or I was on a diet and now I'm in shape, and now I don't care about talking about foods, I'm going to move over here or whatever. And then I was like oh man, you got to start over again.
Speaker 2:And I was at a conference where they asked this of YouTube executives and they were really fans of it. If it's around one topic, around one audience, put it all on one channel shorts, longs, whatever. But if you pivot majorly, just create a channel. And I thought that was really interesting. Because the other way that I was thinking about it is if you're a personality, you're taking your audience on a journey and if you're entertaining enough, if you're an actual personality, then your personality should outshine whatever you're talking about to where they're like I trust Ryan, right, I trust him. I want to hear from him about real estate. I want to hear about him, hear from him real estate in Arizona, in the Midwest. I want to hear about affordable homes. And then all those keywords are like this is what I trust Ryan to talk about.
Speaker 2:And then, all of a sudden, you're like, hey, I'm in a commercial real estate or I'm flits or whatever right Now. It's okay, you're taking them on a journey, and they're like I love Ryan so much, I'm just going to keep listening because he's going to make it fun and I like the way he teaches, I like the way he puts out content, right, and so that's ideally. You want to get to that kind of next level where you're not just one of the people teaching, you're like a person that people trust. And then they're like okay, cool, I'm going to tune in. And then, when new platforms come out, they're like I'll, let me find Ryan on there, make sure I add him real estate, because that's what I'm doing and I think that's the hardest challenge. It's the hardest challenge to break out as an actual personality and let your personality shine on socials. That's the hardest pivot to make.
Speaker 1:I would say that's a struggle that I've been through many times and I'll tell you for very specific YouTube, in the sense of Ryan Demant as a real estate guy podcaster and I didn't mention before we just recently got a nonprofit approved that is going to help people with financial coaching and so forth to become homeowners Congrats, thank you. But that didn't do well with my podcast. About three weeks ago, four weeks ago, I broke off and created just a channel on YouTube that's just Ryan Demant and it's just me talking Personal brand. Personal brand it's mixed right now because I'm still. I still have real estate, I still talk about lending. And then true talk is really my hashtag TRUTalk and just talking real to people. Some people tune it in, some people tune it out.
Speaker 1:There's some haters out there that are like why are you talking about this? People don't I talk about adversity. We all go through adversity and we have problems and I'll share some stories and people are like why do you talk about this? It's boring. Yeah, I get it. I'm not that entertaining personality, I'm just being real with you guys. But what I wanted to get back to is if you can't truly be yourself and be real in your marketing, so forth. You're going to stuck space where you're not going to get anything. You just got to put out what makes you happy and, like you said, find that niche market or those clients that fit you and market to them.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, it's a mix of different types of content too. You can get stuck with the format and how you do things, your workflow, where you just put the same exact every time. That's a hard thing to break too. You have to be sensitive to what the trends are, what's cheap, what the styles are. Youtube, tiktok all these platforms change all the time, so you got to constantly be like hey, now they have this new feature and that lets us do this with the music, or this with the clips, or this with the rinse. You swipe up and you swipe this way. Now we swipe this way, right, all the different things that are changing.
Speaker 2:You have to read the market and your audience and keep it as entertaining as you can. I think the other thing is, if you're teaching something right, like you're teaching real estate, there's a local aspect to it as well, of course, and so you could also tap into the regionality of what you're doing. So if you are in a certain area, then the people local will start tuning in. That's really powerful. If you want to bridge it over to like real life, right, like in the real world, I've seen even the podcasters where they're like hey, I'm going on tour, which is crazy to me Going on tours of podcasters and you're literally just with a microphone and interview just lives. But you can do it if you're regional, right, you're like, hey, meet me at my next house. We're gonna have 30 to 50 people show up because we're all tuned in and I'm gonna interview you for my podcast. That would be a really exciting podcast to watch, right, you're interviewing somebody while you're walking through one of your properties and explaining stuff and teaching stuff. That's much more dynamic.
Speaker 2:And so, being creative like that and thinking what are different ways that I can do it, I think it's really funny how, once guys really achieve what they want to achieve in real estate or investing in your business, they're always like, okay, now I don't have any meeting in my life, I'm bored, I'm rich, I'm just gonna be a podcaster. And so they buy the big studio and have the interviews with all these guests on. They really could go up and they do really well, a lot of them. And so I think the rest of us, they're setting a bar. They're setting a bar for the entertainment, the quality of guests, the quality of the show. That's a lot of the folks. If you're teaching a certain topic, you have to look to. Just okay, anybody who's searching in my space is gonna find these people. Why am I standing out? Am I just trying to copy them and just be another version of them, or am I bringing something different, to give them a reason to say hey, I want to follow Ryan as well, because I'm on the blank?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's back to finding your voice and working on that. I call it the shtick, because you really need to be yourself. It took, it's still taking me some time, but it's also when you're in front of the camera, knowing how to speak and being able to effectively communicate your message in a short period of time. I struggled with shorts for the longest time and I'm like you know what Until I can manage it properly, I'll shoot us old people, we'll shoot a longer version and I'll use a tool like Opus to cut it down and find those shorts that work. Have I gotten better with shorts? Yes, but I still think I struggle with it and I'll continue to do it. I'm not gonna give up on it. It's just a lot easier for me to sit down and shoot five minutes, or stand up and shoot five minutes on the other side of my room here and let Opus do the rest of the work For me.
Speaker 2:That's time well spent, one of the things that I realized was a shock to me was if you shoot some long form content, you can't clip it Like it's unclipable. So if you do, like listicle type blogs or like these are the top 10, whatever, If you just clip that, you have no context of what you're talking about. It's just unclipable content. So there's certain content where or you're telling a long story, it has different parts and it just has no context when you clip it.
Speaker 2:And what some influencers are noticing is working is they're really focusing on giving a short pitch their longer form content. So instead of clipping it, they're just shooting. They're having a guy summarize it right, or they're taking a summary, or they're taking the most attractive part and they're saying hey guys, I'm going to be talking about this awesome thing. Click the link to tune in. Can we to see you there? We're going to be live chatting when we're doing this. See you there. And it's just that short, but it's not even about the content. It's just a trickler to get somebody that's swiping to stop for two seconds and be like oh, there's something happening that I want to check out.
Speaker 1:That's what I typically do for these. I'll shoot a short that just talks about. I give them a I call it an eye popping opening of some sort that catches their eye and say, hey, wednesday at 5am Eastern new episode drops blah. And just give them a little bit of information and then see what happens. Those do quite well. Those reels and shorts do very well for me where people are engaged in and they're there. But again, until you start doing it and physically putting yourself out there to move forward with it, you don't know.
Speaker 2:So yeah and it's, yeah, it's hard to commit to that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:It's just, yeah, that's, that's. The other thing is the time commitment to all this Yep, and then you show up and I've done things.
Speaker 2:This is everyone. You start off no followers. You're just like hey show up and then one person's all right, and that's.
Speaker 1:It has to start somewhere, because I know that feeling all too well. When I started this podcast I was getting three, four downloads and I know it downloads as a vanity number, but when you're first starting it's man. Will somebody listen to my podcast?
Speaker 2:And that's why Mr Beast is so funny. I saw a cloak from these basically. I basically tell you how to do everything. Hey, yeah, he's make a hundred episodes of whatever you're doing. Don't even look at your follower accounts and take 100 and just fix one thing each time.
Speaker 2:So each time you do it just fix one thing and all of it is just right, like you're not even in the I mean to you past a hundred. Oh, what are you doing? So I'm like wow. And so I think a lot of it too is just like along. Do you have the endurance to take the distance to even get the data to see what's working or not working?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that is that's in this space called pod fade. I know that because when I started, this December will be five years of this podcast. In five years, yeah, every Wednesday an episode, never missed.
Speaker 2:Good job.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I took a picture when I started and 25, 26 podcasts were there at that time. Only four right now are active. When I say active, at least putting one episode out a month or some type of rhythm of episode. Of those there could have been more. I just snapshotted those and just and I watched those and it's crazy how quickly people just drop off for the longest time. Two, three, four, five downloads is what I was getting. Yeah, they only list listened for three minutes four minutes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was pretty depressing. And then I found pod match Alex and his team over there. Man have been huge. Yeah, it's changed my podcasting world and now it's I have to decide how I can take it to another level, because I think I'm stuck here with my downloads and I'm stuck here with listens. Now it's like how do I better my game, bring better quality, help with listenership, and there's a bunch of stuff to do. And I haven't even scratched the topic of monetization yet. I don't even think I'm there. I think I'm passing 260 or 270,000 downloads, something like that.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. And is that mostly real estate oaks or no, it's, it's.
Speaker 1:I get the audience is all across the United States. When I first started I was really localized to the United States and some how I got into the Soviet Union, I got into South America, japan, the Philippines. I get I've got two VAs there that have been working for me from almost the beginning of this. So I'm guessing they're sharing some of that. So I'm guessing that's how I got there Nice, and then Canada, and it's just, it's spread across the you know the globe. But Podcasting is just weird. You have to find that space and stick with it. We're coming to the end of the year and I'm like man, can I preload a bunch of episodes and just get them over with and give myself some downtime, because it's a lot of work.
Speaker 2:It is.
Speaker 1:It's a lot of time and effort that goes into this and as my plate continues to get fuller on my other businesses, I'm like I don't want to stop podcasting, because I enjoy talking to guests like yourself, about everything, and I learn something new all the time. I just have to figure out how to make this work again, because it's getting to the point where my plate is full.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of the things that I recommend to folks is the season. So, just like TV shows have seasons, that's the best way to do podcasts, because you do have that built-in break where you can say, hey, this is the last season of this season, we'll see you back in January, we're doing this and this and the year, and then you reset the expectation and you can be thematic so you can say we're trying something different this season. This season we're going to be doing XYZ, and so it helps you a little more on your episodes and gives you a break point to replan and come back, and a lot of times it doesn't hurt your numbers. It's interesting, like I've seen Patrick, like David do, I've seen a lot of folks do it Casey, neistat, where they take a break and people are sad but they come back stronger and people are like, oh yeah, this is, I can't wait. It's like they're looking forward to you coming back and as long as you tell them you are and set that expectation, that's a way of giving yourself a built-in break, because there's no rules to this, as much as everyone says.
Speaker 2:Consistency, yes, that's true if you want to consistently grow, but it's your life. It's like you're a person. You have to run your business and take care of your stuff. So, yeah, I think I'm a fan of the season. I'm also a fan of. Artists are not robots, and if we're creating stuff, it's okay and we want to connect with people and grow our businesses and things like that. Yeah, all of us have to do what makes the most sense for us, and if it becomes just a drudge, just like a heavy weight, then you're not going to show up, you're not going to bring your energy, you're not going to enjoy it. People sense that and then they're going to tune out and that's not what you want.
Speaker 1:Not at all, and I'm going to switch topics here. We haven't spoken about it and I think it needs to be brought out. Is Wave? I was an early adopter. I know I used it and it was a great platform. Can you talk a little bit about Wave and what land this episode and close it out? But I'd love to be able to hear what's going on with Wave.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we're a small company. We help podcasters, audiobook authors take their audio and turn it into video for social media influence. It's for people that don't want to be on camera, like we are. They don't want to edit video, they don't want to mess with, do anything around hiring people to do video, but they want to create video right, because that's what social media is about.
Speaker 2:And really, when you're talking about the content you're producing, especially podcasts, it's longer form and there's no visual to it. It's just you're listening, you're working out, you're running, you're doing errands, you're doing chores, you're not actively looking at a screen. So really what Wave is doing is hey, put some visuals to your audio, clip it out and just make something that's moving on the screen to capture the attention so they read what the topic is and then listen to it and then get them hooked. And if you can do it fast enough, easy enough, often enough, they will become fans of your podcast. And so you're trying to get somebody that doesn't know anything about your podcast to a listener, a regular listener, and if you have the right targeting, the right content, you're attract somebody. So if I'm like hey, I'm an Arizona real estate investor and I need to know more about the market and I see that it says Arizona real estate, affordable housing guru, and then I'm going to click on that and I'll listen to it and in the scroll, when I'm scrolling, wave has given you that we could probably say it's AI driven, but it's basically we're matching the audio waveform to your voice. So it's custom.
Speaker 2:Every video is custom, every clip is custom. We make every frame of that waveform match your audio and that movement is just enough to stop the scroll, for them to say what is that? Oh, interesting, and then have them read and listen to it. You can put captions on at progress bars. It's just enough to where you can rapidly get it out, very cost effectively, very easily, and find your audience. And so that's what we've been working on. Like we talked about prior to the show. A lot of the podcasters are moving to full on video, right, they're recording on Zoom, they're recording on Riverside, we're on Reast, all these platforms that are creating the video easily, and then that's what they're starting with. Now some people don't like their visual, right? They haven't dialed in the lighting, the background, the right.
Speaker 2:So they're just like I recorded on Zoom so I can see the interview and have an interview, but I'm not using this visual, and so they have their nice professional photo, they create the way video and they put that up on social. I've also heard interesting one where the podcasters are recording on Zoom or similar platform. They're putting out their audio only podcast, but their clips are of the visual of the video, so they're only clipping out the talking heads, but when you go to the podcast it's just audio. So that's an interesting thing too, and all of these things are different levels of creator sophistication and so we're ways. Really, coming at this point is what's the easiest on-range that we can give you to on socials as a podcaster, right? So we're really catering to the person that just there's small shop. They don't want to mess around with the video, they want to get rapidly, they want to get as many platforms as they can. They already have the logos, they already have the nice headshots. They already have maybe it's a corporate. We have a lot of corporate folks. We have audiobook authors where the investment in book cover is way more interesting than anything they could have on video. They have some artists that has some amazing cool side-by looking art on there and that's the cover and that's going to stop the scroller. And they invested a lot in that book cover and they want to market that book cover and so they just put that on there with some audio under it and that's all they're trying to do. Same with music artists. Music artists use a lot because they want to make their album cover famous. Right, they got a really cool photo that they spell out of time and trying to figure out the right curated album cover. That's what's on their audio gram, right? They just put that cover on there with the music going. That's all they need because they want people to imprint that as the new thing that's coming out.
Speaker 2:And so a lot of times you can use your thumbnail as the entire video. That's what Wave helps you do. Instead of, the thumbnail go away immediately when you start playing. You don't actually get to see the thumbnail. A lot of times, the thumbnail is the thing that makes you go listen to it in the first place. If you're ever scrolling on YouTube or any of these platforms where you're looking at thumbnails, or even podcasts players, where you're scrolling through all the covers, the cover is the thing that you say, oh, what is this? Yeah, I like that. That looks like something I want to do. If you click on that and it's just video, then that thumbnail goes away and now you're waiting for talking to do something, or you're not sure what that is going to be and what Wave is doing is. We're just saying just keep that thumbnail going and just have some movement and some captions on it, because nine times that is ten. Thank you.
Speaker 2:If it's learning, they're going to just tune out of the visual. Anyway. If I already know that we are just talking, that's what all I'm going to say. For an hour I'm moving on, I'm not going to be watching the screen and I've only heard. Despite. I've been like serving people. I think it's 10% right now is the current stat on how many people, when they watch, when they're learning, they're like watching the people the entire time, right, like they're like looking at the screen and like looking at it in the entire Almost.
Speaker 2:Everyone else is just I got it, but they're following it somewhere doing something else.
Speaker 1:Depending on the platform, because each of my podcasts are hosted in two different places. Like Anchor wants you to put video up.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So it pushes. Since I've started doing video on Anchor, it has pushed me out to more people, or at least an opportunity to more people, through Spotify, since Spotify owns Anchor. Now Buzzsprout, where this podcast is hosted, doesn't offer video, it only offers audio. But now they're saying they're going to come out with video, so I have no problem doing the video piece I've just found off of Anchor I'm getting better traction with video. I don't know stat wise, it hasn't changed. Listen time it's steady, but I'm getting additional eyeballs or exposure because they have some type and you probably know more than I do. But there's something with the Spotify and Anchor algorithms together. For some reason in the search feature I'm getting, since I've gone, video. I think I've gone from maybe a thousand or 1500 searches to where I'm over up to 7,000 searches. Yeah, they're pushing it too.
Speaker 2:They're pushing it. So if you are doing video you're getting priority and so they're proactively promoting you. So that's really good. And you hear any sort of platform where they're trying a new feature. If you jump on that feature they push that more and so you'll get an outsized return on that when you jump on stuff early. So I definitely encourage, if you are on a platform, to try out the new things, like of course, I did try out this one I think they just closed. I can remember the name of it. It was like create your own radio show and they had this huge promotion on it and it was like old school radio where you could have the songs that you like and you're the host and you're running your radio station and you're DJing or what, and I just saw the other day that they shut it on.
Speaker 1:Wow, the other, and we'll wrap it up. But this is one of the last and we'll wrap this up. But internet radio, no, anything about it. I've been approached several times saying, hey, you should have an internet channel. And I'm thinking 24 hours a day, seven days a week, I don't have enough episodes, what's?
Speaker 2:interesting is the radio trust for radio has been struggling for a long time and our realizing podcasting is a really good source of talk radio and so there's a lot of new movement lately. There's some headlines where the radio stations are saying hey, we can put programming from podcasts on air. So if you're a podcaster and you have episodes or you're willing to start putting live shows on and you can really easily move over and become a radio personality and just a podcaster, and I think we're going to start seeing that as a trend in the market. We're going to start seeing podcasters crossover to radio for sure.
Speaker 1:Interesting. That's pretty cool. So, before we wrap this up, best place people can reach out and then I'm sure people listening are going to want to test out wave and I don't know what you guys are offering. If you offer anything whatever, where would one go to try out wave?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can go to wavveco waveco and sign up for the newsletter to put out two as a week on all the latest trends and articles and headlines in the podcasting audio space and social media space. So that's a really good newsletter. It's called the Wave Audio Insider, the Wave Audio Insider, and then I write personally on YouTube on my own personal brand, jeffdolyncom. So those are the two places you can find me.
Speaker 1:Awesome. I will put a link to each of those in the show notes. Sir, thank you very much for coming on. Great conversation, love what you're doing. But also you shared a ton of tidbits and gold nuggets on this episode, so thank you very much. Cool Thanks, ryan. It was fun. And then after a while I just thought of just some pretty cool things to have in Israel as the ad for waves choosing a boat to sail home. I love you. Cheap conversation, good-bye, bye.
