Rox Codes on Building YouTube Studio for Podcasts

[00:00:00] Jeff Umbro: This week on Podcast Perspectives

[00:00:02] Rox Codes: I think there's a big appetite in this industry for innovation, and I think there's a lack of it. This is a great idea. This is a thing that we should do right now because this is new. This has not been done yet, and this is so helpful. And I constantly look for those opportunities.

[00:00:15] Rox Codes: If I'm gonna build a really cool dashboard, the first thing I have to do is build an entire hosting platform. Being data-driven is so hard, but I think a lot of people misunderstand being data-driven as being married to data. I'd prioritize YouTube before anything else.

[00:00:32] Jeff Umbro: For years, podcast hosting was pretty straightforward.

[00:00:34] Jeff Umbro: You uploaded an audio file, distributed through an RSS feed, and tracked how many people downloaded it. But today, podcasting looks a lot different. Creators are publishing full video episodes to YouTube and Spotify, and now to Apple. They're cutting clips for social media, and most of the tools they're using weren't necessarily built to work together.

[00:00:51] Jeff Umbro: Today on the show, we are speaking with Rox Codes, the founder and CEO of Flightcast, a video-first hosting platform that he built with Stephen Bartlett of the Diary of a CEO. We'll talk about why he decided to enter an already crowded hosting market, what video-first creators need that traditional platforms haven't delivered, and how AI and better audience data could change the way that podcasters grow their shows.

[00:01:15] Jeff Umbro: So is Codes your last name? Like, I assume that's like your Twitch handle or something

[00:01:20] Rox Codes: I hate to tell you this, Jeff, Rox isn't even my first name

[00:01:23] Jeff Umbro: That's, see, that was question number two. So it's very fitting for what you do. Walk us through a little bit of just, like, your background to how you learned to code, and then we can move into the content side of it

[00:01:40] Rox Codes: Yeah, I mean, I learned a bit online before college, and then I went to college for computer science. Well, actually, I went for game development, but we didn't really land that one. I learned most of it in college, but then when I left college, I started to learn web development, which is basically like everything that we actually do today, and almost none of the college stuff carried over. I started building stuff myself online. I started doing startups when I was in college. Then I got depressed, sold everything I owned, moved to Thailand, and started building on my own on the internet. And I started Twitch streaming around the same time, which was COVID. Uh, and then basically relearned to code or learned to build, like, web apps and things that you could sell. Learned from some other indie hackers, is what we called ourselves back then, how to build and sell things quickly. yeah, I-- Just because I had been a Twitch streamer for a minute, I started building stuff for creators 'cause I didn't really know what else to build. And then next thing you know, I've been doing that for six or seven years. AI made everything a lot faster, and I went from Twitch tools to YouTube tools to now podcast tools.

[00:02:48] Jeff Umbro: A- and specifically when you were building some of your original, you know, products for creators, it was, thumbnail testing, it was clipping, it was all the things that we're all talking about today

[00:02:59] Rox Codes: Yeah, the YouTube world quite ahead of the podcast world in a lot of ways. So a lot of what I feel like I'm doing now is kind of taking the YouTube playbook from a couple years ago and dragging the podcast industry into that, kicking and screaming

[00:03:14] Jeff Umbro: give us like the 5,000-foot view of kind of what's important when it comes to like being a creator for people who are coming from podcasting who are, you know, very good storytellers for audio but have never really worked in the video space.

[00:03:31] Rox Codes: First of all, I think I'd be interested how many people that run podcasts think of themselves as great storytellers. think Twitch streaming and podcasting have this thing that they share of it's actually very easy to do a bad job of it, because a lot of the time you assume that by the content existing, it's good. Oh, I had a conversation. I liked the conversation, therefore this is good content. Oh, well, I went live. I, I streamed for 10 hours and I played the game and I had fun, therefore this is good content. is very harsh in that definition. It has to be a thing people would click on, and then it has to be a thing people would watch and continue watching when they have the opportunity to leave. So, you know, MrBeast's always said he hates movies because, "What do you mean I have to watch a two-hour thing and if I don't like it I can't leave?" And, and I think a lot of the podcast industry would, would hate that because it, it goes against art. But, you know, a lot of YouTube is the game and a lot of being a long form creator these days is YouTube. first was very unique in that there were no algorithms, so growth happened in a very different way. But video first being primarily YouTube means that now it is algorithmic growth, which means you are then measured on those same things. So you get back to this same question of, yeah, actually you do have to tell a very good story, including the thumbnail and title, and it needs to be very retentive and very interesting.

[00:04:50] Rox Codes: And if at any point it isn't interesting, I will churn leave and I will go watch something else. So that understanding of most growth happening on algorithmic platforms now and therefore learning how to make content that is satisfying algorithmically while still creatively is, is what being a creator looks like a lot more now

[00:05:10] Jeff Umbro: Why did you make a hosting platform for podcasts?

[00:05:15] Rox Codes: I got in touch with Stephen Bartlett from Diary of a CEO a few years ago, and we sat down and tried to look at all the things that we could ever build together. I was coming off of Thumbnail Test. So I'd worked at MrBeast. I decided to leave MrBeast. built this A/B testing tool for thumbnails, which I then sold a few months before YouTube released theirs, thank God. And I got in touch with Steve, who was a beta customer of my thumbnail testing tool, was using it since day one. He had to PayPal me $20. I didn't even take credit cards back then

[00:05:45] Jeff Umbro: I, I was going to ask how you guys, like, initially connected, but that makes sense

[00:05:50] Rox Codes: Yeah, so he started, like, requesting features every so often, so he got my WhatsApp, and then he'd me- text me a business idea every so often. And when I finally sold, I was like, "All right," and, and flew out to London to work together. And he asked me one day, "What was the best thing we could ever build together?" I really thought about it, and I said, "I think it's a podcast hosting platform." He was like, "Why? How is it a podcast hosting platform?"

[00:06:13] Jeff Umbro: that is the question. Yeah

[00:06:15] Rox Codes: And that is the question, and, and here we are. So this is the same question I answered three years ago. But my big take was, A, I think that this industry will be very surprised at how effective YouTube is and largely shift to it because growth, when there is no algorithm, is just marketing at the end of the day.

[00:06:35] Rox Codes: So when you grow a podcast, people usually say, "How are you marketing your show?" word marketing never existed on YouTube. Nobody ever asked, "How are you marketing this video?" They just said, "Is the thumbnail good? Is the title good? Is the video good? Is the intro good maybe?" So Steve was pretty early to that. And I said, "I think between you being this video-first and having all of these playbooks, there is a problem in podcasting of nobody really looking at growth a thing under their control. But when things become video-first, it is a thing under your control. When your YouTube video isn't doing great, you can change the thumbnail right now. can change the title right now, and you can see the impact of that. Even after an episode is out, you can affect success." So this idea that, A, most podcast platforms had nothing to do with growth, and a hosting platform was basically just a feature of publishing and nothing else, like an opportunity to replace. B, for those workflows, they weren't really solved. Upload to YouTube and then separately rip the audio and upload it to audio platforms And I was like, "Well, this is an easy win." And then between myself and Steve, we were able to get early access to publishing video to Spotify. And so from day one, I said, "Cool, I can be the only one to publish video to YouTube and Spotify and audio everywhere else, and that is already a giant solve. Before I've even started to do anything actually interesting, have done the basics." So core insights were basically Steve and I really related on experimentation that being the main lever for growth. And I said, "Well, don't think people in podcasting really understand experimentation at all. I don't think they really understand growth at all in, in the context of what it looks like on YouTube and video. let's all the workflow stuff because we might as well. But mainly, let's try and just build what the modern podcast hosting platform would look like, where you do all the video stuff and you do all the audio stuff and you pull in all the analytics. And it's just like, if we could draw it from scratch, what would it look like?" And, and that, that became Flightcast

[00:08:44] Jeff Umbro: Okay, so a lot to unpack there. First off, I've been using FlightCast for a show. It is very intuitive and does all the things that you're talking about, and with HLS video on Apple, that adds, like, another spoke to that wheel. So, correct me if I'm wrong, 'cause, uh, a lot of our listeners probably don't know how this operates, but you have built a platform where you can upload your episode one time, and it will distribute video and audio to whatever that platform prefers. So, if you want video on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube, audio everywhere else, it allows you to kind of customize each of these, like, platforms the way that you want, or at the very least gives you, like, you know, the directions on how to do so. And you are then able to take all of the, the learnings from that, and you've built something that is a really interesting analytics dashboard. So d- what am I missing in terms of, like, the, the most basic things on FlightCast?

[00:09:47] Rox Codes: No, I mean, you got it. Like, it's--

[00:09:49] Jeff Umbro: Okay

[00:09:49] Rox Codes: The fundamental of the platform is upload once, publish everywhere, learn faster. it's all your analytics in one dashboard. So we say one upload, one dashboard. That's the big, like, through line. you publish a video. If you want the audio of that video to go everywhere, it goes everywhere.

[00:10:08] Rox Codes: So the default function is what you expect. You close your eyes, you drop in a video, you drop in a title, and the right files go to all the right places. you're a more advanced user and you have different versions or different titles for different platforms or different thumbnail for Spotify, YouTube, whatever, all of that customization is there. Uh, it is not a requirement. it is trying to be the fastest way to publish if you are a simple publish, and the most customizable way to publish if you are an advanced publish. then once we have published everywhere, YouTube, Spotify Video, Apple Video, iHeartVideo, Amazon Music Video, ripped the audio, put the audio everywhere.

[00:10:42] Rox Codes: You want a custom audio file, you can put in a custom audio edit. goes out to all the places, we track all those stats. So that comes into one dashboard and aggregates into one overall measurement of the whole show

[00:10:52] Jeff Umbro: What, what about DAI for video? Like, are we ever actually gonna see that?

[00:10:57] Rox Codes: it's there. I mean, you can do dynamic host-read video right now. You could plug a video ad into Flightcast and run it on Apple Video, you can run it on Amazon Music video, you can run it on iHeartVideo, and Spotify video, which is the really unique thing that we did. Most of the people that are publishing Spotify video right now didn't integrate to Spotify's ad system. when you're doing video on Spotify, you would think, "Oh, it's Premium, don't get any ads," because of the Spotify Premium program. But the free users still get ads, and if you don't integrate ad system, then they just get spam, right? Spotify's programmatic. But if you integrate into the ad system, we do is we basically mirror your campaigns into Spotify, then you can traffic simultaneously to those free users and to the podcast listeners. So you basically unlock that extra 30% of inventory that you would've otherwise lost, because those free impressions were all gonna go to spam if we didn't build a system like this. So, you know, since we're, like, the video guys, determined that that was a thing we had to do. I just Yeah, I felt like it would be a failure if we didn't

[00:11:55] Jeff Umbro: Will, will YouTube ever do DAI? Like I know that they have a beta out there and some people are doing it, but feel like they've been saying that that's gonna open to everybody for like a year now

[00:12:04] Rox Codes: All I can tell you is I've seen the beta, and the beta looks good. Uh, not too much I can say, but I am, uh, I'm cautiously optimistic. But also, as a guy who's been building YouTube tools for probably longer than any human, wouldn't trust it to be fast, wouldn't trust it to come out soon. It took them eight years to launch AB testing after they first announced it. So... And that was for thumbnails, you know. Now they're moving a lot faster, though. They've been a lot more innovative the past few years. So there's a world, but I think there's a lot of UX work that they still wanna do to make sure it makes sense, to make sure it's obvious, to make it all flow through how we hope. God willing, if, if we see it in even a year or two, I'll be very happy, and I think it'll really empower this industry. than anybody, podcasts have figured out monetization. That is the thing that is so unique about this industry that I love, and so I think opening that arm up be awesome

[00:12:54] Jeff Umbro: there like a critical mass that you think you need to hit or have you already hit it because you have so much inventory on, you know, Diary of a CEO and, and your other shows before you can kind of convince some of these bigger platforms to work with you?

[00:13:08] Rox Codes: Like YouTube or like advertising side?

[00:13:11] Jeff Umbro: Both. Yeah. I, I meant that in the sense of advertising, like, you know, are there any agencies who, like, you know, think you're too small to bother with or something like that?

[00:13:20] Rox Codes: No, I would say having Diary of a CEO and, like, the other big shows on our front page usually carries enough weight. 'Cause even if your inventory isn't massive, if it's premium, people are happy to talk to you. then because of all the work we've done with the video stuff, you know, we're a bit farther ahead than most people are with that. And so when I talk to advertisers about that, there, there, there, there's some interest. so we've been pretty, lucky. I think we have a very different customer set than the rest of the industry does

[00:13:50] Jeff Umbro: So a funny question for you. You just said that your, your customer base or client base is fairly unique for podcasting, and, and I've been just trying to wrap my head around this. Like, if This American Life, for example, came to you and said that they wanted to host on FlightCast, like, is there really, like, a benefit for them doing that? Because they, they're not gonna be taking full advantage of, of, like, the video integrations. They're probably not going to be taking full advantage of, like, any of the AI tools to rewrite your, you know, chapters or descriptions. So, so is there a benefit?

[00:14:28] Rox Codes: Yeah, I thought about this a lot when we first kind of ideated the product. I said, so when we were at MrBeast, Feastables was launching, right? When I was over there. Feastables is his

[00:14:39] Jeff Umbro: It, th- yeah, it w- it is my favorite chocolate right now. Like genuinely

[00:14:44] Rox Codes: And that's awesome to hear. the fun thing about Feaster-Bliss Chocolate you could argue it didn't have to be good. The chocolate could just be chocolate, it was just ch- like, if he copy-pasted Hershey's and he put his brand name on it, it probably would have still done pretty well

[00:15:03] Jeff Umbro: Yeah

[00:15:04] Rox Codes: Because he cares, decided, no, it's also gonna be the best, and I'm gonna find a way to make it the best. And he's done a ton of work to make it, like, not have slave labor, uh, or child labor, uh, and, and, and all of these very, very positive things, and they do a ton of testing, and they try and-- really hard to make it taste good. But he didn't have to do any of that. So when we came into Flycast, I said, like, "Well, we're gonna be the video-first thing for the video-first guys." I said, "Well, we could kinda tell the audio guys to, you know, go somewhere else." But I think there's innovation to be had on the audio side. So I have fought to try and build a better dashboard, even just in analytics, even if it's an audio-only show. And I believe that we've done that. I believe that some of the analytics that I have created or some of the visualizations we've made are, are, are innovative. At the end of the day, it's analytics. Anybody can make any view on it, and whatever graph I make is only good as long as somebody else hasn't copied it. But I think some of the things we have pulled together that are graphs that are audio first have been a reason people have converted. I think that the better of your own data, even in an audio context, because I am intending to build YouTube Studio for podcasters, video or audio, has resulted in people feeling more empowered, having a better understanding of their content, and thinking of how they can improve their content strategy based on that data. Like, we had one show-- give you an example. We have a graph that shows you the overlap of people that listen to episode A and people that listen to episode B. tough part about a graph like that is there's education that has to come with it. But I had a show that did a solo episode and then an interview, and then a solo episode, and then an interview episode. that graph looked like a checkerboard. Bright green, bright red, bright green, bright red. Every other episode had no overlap in audience. But they didn't know that, 'cause they saw five thousand returning listeners. Because each episode got five thousand views. Completely different five thousand views. So they did not have one audience of five thousand, they had two audiences of five thousand. They were just completely unrelated. split the show into two, and they made two podcasts out of the one, so the people watching the interview episodes could go over here, and the people watching the solo episodes could go over here.

[00:17:21] Rox Codes: And both shows did well single-handedly, and the overlap between the shows became, like, eighty percent for each episode. The solo episode, solo episode, solo episode had great overlap. Interview, interview, interview had great overlap. that is just not a thing you'd ever be able to find if you just have a new and returning number. It-- There, there is a depth to be had in all analytics, and this is where, like, the growth mindset and the YouTube mindset beyond that platform. It's not just that FlightCast is showing you data about thumbnails and, and click-through rates and, and telling you to make better titles. It is the mindset that this content can be made better, that this can be improved, that there are patterns to be extracted from here, and we must pursue them until we can find every ounce of insight that could ever exist, and insight is growth.

[00:18:08] Rox Codes: If you learn faster, you grow faster. If you learn faster, you make the content better, you make better content. That content does better. So, so that was foundational to being YouTubers, right? Even if you didn't get that data directly, you'd look at every retention dip. You, you'd look at the thumbnail and ask if you can make it better.

[00:18:24] Rox Codes: You'd A/B test everything. trying to bring that logic into audio in the same way

[00:18:29] Jeff Umbro: I wanted to ask you about the Bumper dashboard and the listener dashboard and how they compare to what you've built. You kind of just preemptively answered a lot of my questions about this, but like, I, in my opinion, the Bumper dashboard is really excellent at giving audio listeners a lot of insights that they didn't previously have. I think they're very good at YouTube, and they're very good at showing people why YouTube can be such a growth lever. But I don't know that they have, like, really insights on the YouTube side, um, or maybe I'm not using it right. opinion, like, what's the-- When you look at those two, like, as compared to what you've built, what do you think?

[00:19:11] Rox Codes: I love all those guys. and Jonas are absolutely legends. I think they are some of the few people in this industry who can talk to them for five hours and, and not be tired. They are on top of it. We have very similar opinions, because building a dashboard is quite an opinionated thing. their dashboard is quite similar in intent.

[00:19:29] Rox Codes: The nice thing about being a hosting platform is I can get deeper data than they can get because I have the first-party data of it. I have every IP address. I have every user, every, everything about all of

[00:19:39] Jeff Umbro: Oh, that, that's so interesting. I didn't realize that. So they're not getting the, the IPs when people are downloading the files. They get the IPs on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, but not, not from the hosting platform?

[00:19:51] Rox Codes: So it, it depends. Very few platforms will actually give you that data, right? But when you're the hosting platform, you have it 'cause you made that data, you tracked that data. So that was half the reason I built a hosting platform, was because I realized I could not test or build the features I wanted to without the foundational bottom line being my tech. I could not use the Megaphone API to create the things I wanted to create. I, I could not invent without, you know, it's kinda that old joke, but to build a peanut butter jelly sandwich from scratch, you must first create the universe, right? 'Cause that's the only way to truly do it from scratch. And so it was very similar in, in mindset.

[00:20:29] Rox Codes: If I'm gonna build a really cool dashboard, the first thing I have to do is build an entire hosting platform, because otherwise I'm getting nowhere. You know? I'm gonna build... I'm gonna be capped in, i- in the capability that I have. So I think Bumper is as much as it can be. I think Bumper is an awesome product, 10 out of 10 in my opinion. Only if you need to go farther than that is it worth moving to Flycast for an analytics perspective. Listener, very different purpose. Listener is just an aggregator of all the analytics in a very beautiful media kit type way. That's more for sales enablement, just to make it easier to send your numbers around and, and track stuff.

[00:21:00] Rox Codes: They have this gorgeous UI of episode clusters that I love, and big fan of how they did it, and people put a lot of hours into that platform to make their stuff tracked well. You know, we don't do that right now. I surely will eventually, but it just depends on the purpose

[00:21:16] Jeff Umbro: was gonna say, it, is it Podstock that does that as well and, like, brings in social?

[00:21:20] Rox Codes: Yeah. So of purpose, Bumper exists for the sake of understanding your numbers and starting to use them for growth, but is capped at what they can do without being a hosting platform. exists to help you largely make a media kit and attribute content back to the core piece of content. So attribute the clips back to the main episode, and then aggregate all of those numbers and track followers and everything. Podstock exists to enable ad sales and track the, the direct sale of a campaign in a YouTube episode, and then tag that in the same way that you tag the dynamic. So it's all kind of tracked in one place. And then Flightcast is kind of intending to be an amalgamation of those things. I would say it is Bumper plus we have enough tooling to be similar to Podstock, but we don't go to the extent that they go.

[00:22:09] Rox Codes: They go quite, quite deep into a lot of, like, custom SQL queries and things. And Listener, a bit more media kit-y. We don't really have any, any media kit function as of yet. We don't touch the socials yet. My intent is at some point we'll do all of those things, but

[00:22:22] Jeff Umbro: that was gonna be one of my questions for you. Yeah

[00:22:25] Rox Codes: Yeah. Like, Bumper is mostly for the individual creator to, to, to grow faster. The listener dashboard is more for either you to have something nice you can sell to sponsors or for networks a little bit to, to, to converse more easily. And then PodStats is more for networks to, like, track and, and change their ad ops

[00:22:43] Jeff Umbro: let's go to the AI piece of the dashboard that you've put together. You have Faye AI, which is built into the dashboard. What are some of the things that people have been using it for?

[00:22:55] Rox Codes: Oh, Which was kind of the point. I think some point you make enough dashboards that you're like, "Ah, I cannot fathom every graph that everybody will ever want, so I will give them this empty chat box." there's downsides with it. I don't think it's as good of a modality as giving people a very, like, opinionated graph, but then you have to come up with the graphs. People use it to find good moments of clips. People use it to find patterns. I would say that's the main thing that they do. So, oh, what topics that I talk about have the highest retention? What-- Were there any patterns in the biggest retention drops of my top, of my last 50 episodes? Y- you know, a- and just trying to find across larger scales of, of, of content and, and analytics, what worked and what didn't, where there's opportunity to improve. Look at the click-through rate of my last 10 thumbnails. Which one was the best? at the views versus engaged views in my last 100 episodes. Which was the best? Why? You know, like, look at the comment count. Was there any pattern in what got more comments? Was there any pattern in what got more likes? Did I say anything special in those episodes? 'Cause we can analyze the transcript, right? So you get this kind of ability to, to, to, to converse with theories. So I think a lot of Flycast is intended to be an experimentation tool, so, you know, mess around and find out about every theory you have. And to some extent, y- you can prove theories most easily by looking back at what happened. And then you can say, "Oh, I think when I start the episode like this, it probably gets a better intro retention." And then just ask. say, "Oh, hey, go through all my episodes. Split them by the intros where I started with, 'Hey guys,' versus the intros where I started with, 'Today I'm talking to blank,' and tell me if there was a pattern in, in, in retention." And we can start to dig into that. That is how people use it the best. There's a lot of other uses where we have, like, a fast mode and a thinking mode. So the thinking mode is usually what you're using for those questions. The fast mode is generally used for people who are on a call with a sponsor at that moment, and the sponsor asks for some crazy number like, "What's your average hundred and twenty-day performance on an episode?"

[00:25:04] Rox Codes: And you're like, "I don't know. Where would I get th- why would I have that number at the ready?" That's a crazy question. Who cares about four-month performance? So you just go into Fei and you type, "What is my average hundred and twenty-day performance on YouTube?" And then you get an answer pretty quick.

[00:25:16] Jeff Umbro: Well, I love that. We've been building a lot of dashboards lately. We've used yours, we've used the Bumper dashboard and their MCP integration. We've used Gemini with some stuff that we just built ourselves. can find insights that you don't know that you're looking for, and it really can go deep and answer things that, like, always been able to give some version of an answer.

[00:25:41] Jeff Umbro: Like, just for example, recently somebody asked, like, what should their publishing cadence be? And they've been publishing for 10 years. So we have a ton of data that shows, like, how effective that's been. And I have my stock answer, and I have, you know, 10 reasons why you should do Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday as opposed to Thursday, Friday, and Saturday or whatever. And I, I asked-- I just posed the question and it said, you know, "If you publish on Mondays and Wednesdays for week one and Tuesday and Thursday for week two, then..." And I don't know why it suggested that, but it said that, like, your retention from... It was a serialized show, so it said your retention from episode one to five will be, like, 70 something percent, and if you publish once a week, then your retention is gonna be, like, 40%. And I'm like, wow, that is an incredible insight that I couldn't have gotten on my own. However, that show is now going to publish twice a week instead of once a week, and who knows what happens? Like, maybe the, the show suffers because can't keep up with their, like, production schedule. Maybe they're choosing topics they wouldn't otherwise choose if they had more time. So it's kind of like a correlation versus causation thing, and I'm just curious, like, if you think about that at all in terms of, like, is the data poisoning what we would naturally do with our instincts?

[00:27:01] Rox Codes: Of course. Data's rough. data-driven is so hard. sucks. absolutely sucks. But I think a lot of people misunderstand being data-driven as being married to data and always following what it says. Data shouldn't push you to lose your creativity or change your message. It should focus how you frame what you're trying to say

[00:27:41] Jeff Umbro: It's a very eloquent way of putting that

[00:27:44] Rox Codes: Y- y- you just gotta-- If my intro is, "Today I'm sitting down with Barack Obama. He was the president of the United States in an extremely tumultuous time. He brought in the programs XYZ, and today we're gonna talk about X, Y, and Z." And then I do a different version of that intro where I say, "Today I'm talking with Barack Obama. This was my favorite interview of all time. He is one of the greatest speakers I've ever heard, and one of the most infectiously thoughtful people I've ever met. I hope you enjoy the episode." Episode's the same. But the way you opened it might affect the expectation of the viewer coming in. and, and you didn't have to change the two hours to change the twenty seconds. And you don't have to be precious about the twenty seconds. The, the, that's the least precious piece of that episode. So you don't have to lose the soul, and I think a lot of people really misinterpret being data-driven as killing the soul.

[00:28:41] Rox Codes: And it's bit telling that podcasting is quite a bit behind in terms of what YouTube actually is, 'cause people still say the word clickbait. haven't said the word clickbait on YouTube in so long. Like, we barely use it. We barely say that anymore

[00:28:56] Jeff Umbro: I want to talk about clips for a minute. How are you thinking about clips? Is it-- I know you already mentioned like social is something you haven't tackled yet, but just as somebody who understands this world better than most people in podcasting, like how do you view clips short form content in order to use for growth?

[00:29:15] Rox Codes: I'd prioritize YouTube before anything else. That is true by a mile, and I think you will learn way better lessons getting good at YouTube versus getting good at clips. Getting good at clips has... I won't say it's been solved, it's damn close

[00:29:31] Jeff Umbro: There's kind of a few formulas that you can use

[00:29:34] Rox Codes: There's innovation in clipping. There's learning as to what content does well. Whether clipping works for your show depends on the show a lot. friend Steph, who is podcast lead at Mark Manson, she, at a dinner we were at, said that when she was at Impact Theory, they had largely determined that their audience on shorts was unrelated to their audience on long-form, and that it was just two different sets of people. conversion from short to long is not high, and a lot of early creators will misinterpret two thousand views on a clip on YouTube to be meaningful, and with love, it isn't. With love, that is not a lot of insight. What is insightful is the pattern in that data. If you upload a hundred clips and 90% of them get less than a thousand views, and 10% of them get a thousand, and 1% of them get three or four-- five thousand, okay. We have data you can interface with. But that data is just saying, "These are better clips. These moments made better clips." Why? That is why the Fly-- That is what the Flycast clips function is. It is that one playbook, 'cause that I am convinced of. It, it's just like you, you make a ton of clips, 'cause we all- everybody uses Opus Clip.

[00:30:47] Rox Codes: You upload them to a channel, you track the stats. That's it. That's it. And we just see if there's anything that we can learn, 'cause the faster you can learn, the faster you can get better. But searching for, at least early on, searching for growth in clips is quite hard. It is still a huge lever, I think it's maybe ten thousand to one, right?

[00:31:09] Rox Codes: A hundred thousand to one in terms of how many views you have to get on a short to get somebody converting to your audience.

[00:31:16] Jeff Umbro: Yes

[00:31:18] Rox Codes: million views, I think you might get a hundred listeners, maybe

[00:31:22] Jeff Umbro: And, and so that's great if your, if your goal is awareness or entertainment or whatever, but not great if your goal is to drive traffic to your channel

[00:31:28] Rox Codes: Yeah. But you can have that other goal, being a name that people recognize. The other thing is, people who watch your clips think of you as a show they watch, even if they don't. has been proven again and again in a lot of research. I could watch 100 shorts of The Basement Yard podcast, never see The Basement Yard, and I would say, "Oh, I love that show."

[00:31:48] Jeff Umbro: Yeah

[00:31:48] Rox Codes: And a podcaster would go, "That's crazy, you haven't seen the show." And I'd be like, "Yes, I have. I've seen 40 minutes of these guys making me laugh," 'cause I've watched 40 60-second clips. I think The Basement Yard's hilarious. I love those guys. If I ever meet them, I'm gonna go, "I love your podcast." I've never opened Spotify and clicked it. never opened Apple Podcasts and clicked it. But you have to get to a certain scale before that's valuable. Y- y- you know, like just having people that like you is meaningful to some extent, but if you're only selling DAI and it's only in the long form and they're not converting to the long form, you're losing. If your long form is bad still because all you're doing is clip farming, then people really won't stay for the, for the longer episodes, right? So learning to make a good piece of long content is really hard. There's a lot of people who are really good at making clips. There are very few people who are good at making long podcasts.

[00:32:32] Rox Codes: So if you had to aspire to something, I'd go long form all day. I'd go getting good at YouTube all day, 'cause you can be a student of the game with YouTube. Clips, you can bring somebody in. If the long form is good, the short form will also likely be good. If the long form is bad, you're gonna struggle to make the short form good.

[00:32:47] Rox Codes: It's possible, it is a struggle. And I will say, I've watched shows where I loved the clips and I hated the long form, and I was like, "Oh, this is just like the clips with a bunch of garbage in between." And, and, you

[00:32:59] Jeff Umbro: Yeah

[00:33:00] Rox Codes: truly, truly... So you gotta, you gotta be harsh. If you wanna grow, you gotta be really harsh with yourself and be honest about what's good and what's not.

[00:33:08] Jeff Umbro: Kill your darlings. Yeah

[00:33:10] Rox Codes: Be obsessed with winning, not being right, know? It's, it's not about my first intuition was the correct intuition. It's about have got the outcome you were searching for

[00:33:20] Jeff Umbro: I wanted to spend a minute talking about stephen.com and how you're working with Stephen Bartlett. But, like, there's a bunch of tools on the website that it's, it looks like Stephen is using for his show on, like, guest research, clip research, insight research that is not available to other folks out on the internet. So I was hoping you could spend a minute just talking about that ecosystem and, and if there are other tools that we can expect in the future, and if you have any part in those.

[00:33:49] Rox Codes: Can't say too much, but as far as what you're seeing on Stephen.com, those tools are all real, and they do exist in the Stephen.com universe and the Flight Story universe. They are used internally for the shows that the team works on and, and assists with. They're not yet commercial products. It, it takes quite a bit of work to make a very good commercial product, and it's not always worth pursuing. The difficult thing about everything that we build here is it's advanced tooling, the more advanced tooling is, the more expensive it needs to be, and the more complex it is to use. A- a- and it took so long to make Flight Cast usable for regular people because the workflows that they have at Diary of a CEO are gorgeous and complex. So how do I make it the best in the world and easy? know? The- there's an old saying in software design, which is common things should be easy, uncommon things should be possible. working through that methodology for all of publishing, all of analytics, all of AI, all of clips, every single thing has to be in there, has to make sense, it has to be intuitive.

[00:34:55] Rox Codes: Otherwise, we're gonna make 100 tutorials that no one's ever gonna watch. People are gonna get frustrated, and people are gonna leave. Do I assume somebody using this tool knows what an RSS feed is? I assume they understand the difference between a download and a stream and a view? And you take all that logic, and then you say, "Now we're gonna do guest research, and we're gonna talk about outlier theory." people know what an outlier is in this industry? Most of them don't. of them would not. In the YouTube world, an outlier is a video that does, let's say, 10 times better than your average video right now. If you usually get 1,000 views, and this video gets 10,000, that is a 10X outlier for your channel. there's a classic YouTube theory that outlier ideas that that video concept is great and therefore should be replicated. podcasting, that often gets simplified to this guest overperformed, therefore, I should interview that same guest. Wow, that divorce lawyer that Steve talked to, that guy crushed for him. I bet he would crush for me because basically, you're making a similar show. You're making a similar episode. You're making almost the same video to some extent. hey, guess what? That video worked, and you get to re-upload it functionally, so it kinda works. On YouTube, you would usually twist it more or try and customize it more, but you will see the same guest on a few podcasts after they've been on DOAC or sometimes before. And, and if they are overperforming every single time, why would you not interview that guy? Why would you not interview that person? Th- like, they're gonna get you tons of views. They're gonna bring a lot of audience. And there's questions inside of that they, like, come back, right? If the audience comes back, and so there's, like, a lot of work we're doing around that kind of stuff.

[00:36:31] Rox Codes: But it's just like trying to explain outlier theory, trying to get this all... A lot of the internal tools are just very advanced and, and for a much smaller market, to the point where it almost doesn't make sense to release them 'cause there would be not that much benefit to it.

[00:36:44] Jeff Umbro: final question for you. In five years, what are the things that you hope to be on Flight Cast?

[00:36:51] Rox Codes: Oh, dude, I can't answer that. Everybody will do them

[00:36:55] Jeff Umbro: Well, pie in the sky, like, thing- things that you think today are impossible. Like, if you could have one thing that you put on the platform, what do you think it would be?

[00:37:02] Rox Codes: I don't think anything's impossible. Like, the things that I used to think would never happen can now happen. Like, I'll give you an example. YouTube just released that update that... Or, or YouTube just announced that they're gonna do A/B testing videos on YouTube. You can do multiple versions of the video.

[00:37:18] Rox Codes: I've always wanted that. Things like that. There's an astounding amount of experimentation and things that I wanna do there. There's astounding amount I wanna do with analytics that I have not touched. Like, I, I, I'm thankful for all the kind words that you've given. I've not scratched the surface o- of what I'm trying to do

[00:37:37] Jeff Umbro: Well, I mean, you've, you've only been a company for two years, so you have time

[00:37:41] Rox Codes: Yeah, but that's forever, you know? Luckily, AI's here now, so I can come out with a lot of things. But it feels awesome to put out things like collaborative publishing, you know? It, it feels awesome to... What was the one before that? Uh, like to integrate the Spotify ad system, right? To say, "Cool, nobody has taken the time to, to eat dirt and do this, and it's gross, and it would ruin their code base, and it would make their product feel clunky."

[00:38:06] Rox Codes: And instead, I spent a bajillion hours, and I made it work, and I made it not terrible. and I'm just gonna keep chasing that. You know, I hope to stay bleeding edge. I, I hope to keep doing the most anybody is doing and go to the platforms. Like, uh, let's talk to Roku. talk to Prime TV. Let's talk to, or Prime Video, right?

[00:38:28] Rox Codes: And, and Fire TV. Why not?

[00:38:30] Jeff Umbro: If you can turn FlightCast into, like, a fast streaming platform in addition to hosting, like, you just got a lot of customers, so

[00:38:40] Rox Codes: I think there's about a dozen things for which that sentence is true, and I, I hope to have time to pursue all of them without losing the soul of the thing. You know, they say if you're gonna move platforms, it has to be 10 times better. twice as good, 10 times better. And that is a high number. That is an impossible bar. Like, 10 times better. Am I good? Yeah. Am I 10 times better than Megaphone? who you ask. But...

[00:39:05] Jeff Umbro: depends when you ask, so

[00:39:08] Rox Codes: and maybe it's a little bit more generous right now, lately. Y- y- you know? But that's the aspiration, man. My, my dream is just that people say it was 10 times better

[00:39:19] Jeff Umbro: Well, I think you, you've done an amazing job getting, getting close to that. So keep it up, and, and thank you so much for joining us. This was awesome

[00:39:27] Rox Codes: Jeff. I appreciate it, man

[00:39:34] Jeff Umbro: Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode. You can find Rox online at roxcodes.com, R-O-X-C-O-D-E-S. For more podcast related news, info and takes, you can follow me on LinkedIn at Jeff Umbro. Podcast Perspectives is a production of the Podglomerate. If you're looking for help producing, marketing or monetizing your podcast, you can find us at podglomerate.com.

[00:39:56] Jeff Umbro: Shoot us an email at listen@thepodglomerate.com, or follow us on all socials at Podglomeratepods. This episode was produced by myself, Jeff Umbro, and our production team, Chris Boniello, Jose Roman, and Nicholas Abuhamad. Thank you to our marketing team, and a special thank you to Dan Christo