Go On Podcasts

Kriste Goad: Awesome. Well, how about we dive in and you just tell us a little bit about kick caster and how it came to be? Tell you a little bit about yourself?

Ryan Estes: Yeah, let’s do it. So Kitcaster is a podcast booking agency. We work largely with funded startup founders, entrepreneurs with exits, and C suites, execs, and we book them on the world’s top podcasts. There’s about 18 of us on the team now. And our job is to basically be the best in the world at booking podcasts for our clients. And I think we’re, we’re getting close to that mark. It never ends. But I think we’re close to that kick caster started two years ago, we launched September 6, 2019. Basically, as a collaboration with friend of mine, Brandy Whalen, who’s our co-founder. She has a PR agency and I had a PR agency for 10 years. And I had a digital marketing agency for about the same time. And I had a podcast for about nine or 10 years, it started out being called the Denver business podcast, and it became a podcast called Talk launch. And it was a founder’s podcast. So I interview same kind of folks, tech founders, stuff like that. And Brandy would bring her clients to my show. And so we’re getting coffee, and just kind of like, hey, let’s do a project together. So we kind of went through a process of validation looking for a project in podcasting, and kind of came to this idea of a booking agency. And I think what we liked about it, is the way you scale, a service, like this kind of a productized service is old school, it’s like having an HQ and putting butts in seats, and like creating a company culture. And both of us with kind of software tech startup kind of background, it was kind of the flip side of what we’ve been doing, kind of lean and mean teams with 90% margins and explosive growth or catastrophic destruction. This is this was kind of more like… kind of building a team. We started out with the pilot program that went really well, and kind of put everything into it. And two years later, here we are.

Kriste Goad: But I’m also curious, why would I work with a podcast booking agency? Tell me the pluses of it.

Ryan Estes: From both sides, I think what we’re saving people’s time and money. If you’re podcast hosts and let’s say you reached out to your network on LinkedIn, you realize that that takes a lot of time to book guests. So, working with podcast agency like us, if you’re podcast hosts, it’s totally free for you. Like, tell us which podcast about, let us feed you great guests. For podcast hosts, we say that they make great guests because one, they like to talk, so they’re on podcasts. But two, they’re also already comfortable with kind of the emotional material that will come up from doing podcasts, big emotions. It’s kind of shocking at first, maybe.

if you’re podcast host, you’ll get in a rhythm of making people comfortable. It’s your job is like, “Hey, I want to bring out the best for you so that we can have a great conversation here”. And you get better and better and better at that. Now when you turn the table, and now you’re the guest, you start to understand maybe why those guests were a little uncomfortable. I mean, because big emotions do arise. You look at the podcast, you’re like, “Man, am I good enough for this show?” Or maybe “I’m too good for this show”. Or “look at the guests that were on the show.” “What am I going to talk about?” “What are they going to ask me?” Like all of these things, just being plain nervous bubbles up and in figuring out, like, how to work with that, as that’s coming up and get comfortable with it. So largely podcast hosts have kind of dealt with that already. So they can kind of really hit the ground running on that side.