Running a Small but Mighty Podcast Operation with Podcamp Media’s Dusty Weis

Dusty Weis: It's a great time to double down, remind yourself why you fell in love with the audio medium, remind yourself why it is that you do it, because the days of 10x growth, the days of quick and easy money, those are gone.

Jeff Umbro: This is Podcast Perspectives, a show about the latest news in the podcast industry and the people behind it. I'm your host Jeff Umbro, founder and CEO of The Podglomerate. Today on the show, we are chatting with Dusty Weis, the president and founder of Podcamp Media. 

Dusty is super interesting because he comes from the world of commercial radio and journalism. He founded Podcamp in 2019 in order to create a boutique production experience for B2B podcasting. Basically, he comes in and will help trade associations and other smaller publishers create a podcast that can help tell their brand story in a non-boring way. 

I think Podcamp media is extra interesting because it's more reflective of the less-visible parts of podcasting: one man shops, non-New York and LA shops, B2B/branded.

So let's get right to it. And thank you all for joining us.

Dusty, welcome to Podcast Perspectives. 

Dusty Weis: Thank you for having me, Jeff. Excited to be here. 

Jeff Umbro: Dusty, you and I have known each other for several years. We came up in the same mentor-mentee session for the Podcast Academy. You're the founder, CEO, executive producer of Podcamp Media, and we'll come to that in a minute – what that is and what you do every day.

To begin, I actually want to go back in time to when you started in audio. I love hearing you talk about this. So can you give us the two minute version of your backstory?

Dusty Weis: I grew up in a tiny town in Wisconsin, Monroe, home of the Fighting Cheesemakers football team, which is actually a real thing. And I was a community theater brat. My mother and my father were both very engaged in the local theater group. And so I grew up going to those shows, participating in those shows, but above all, I found a passion for working with audio equipment, running the sound board. 

Eventually went on to the big city of Madison, Wisconsin [and] attended the University of Wisconsin. There I got involved with student radio, as you do, and started working for Wisconsin public radio. I studied journalism, got a job at a newspaper, and eventually got back to my roots in audio working for WTDY, the newstalker state capital coverage radio station in Madison.

[I] started there as the youngest person in the newsroom, in a bustling newsroom of nine or ten people. Those times didn't last. There was a big contraction that happened in the radio business circa 2008. And I found myself one of just two people working in that newsroom after being there for just a year.

I went and worked at WIOD in Miami, Florida, which was an incredible experience for a Wisconsinite like me. And eventually wanted to get back to the Midwest, so I transitioned then into the public relations space, took a job at Milwaukee City Hall here in Wisconsin, spent some time then working in content marketing for one of the world's largest trade associations, the Association of Equipment Manufacturers.

And given my background in audio, I pitched our leadership team on the notion of having a podcast for AEM. This was in 2017. The notion of branded podcasts was still sort of taking off. And with my pitched budget of zero dollars, they said, “go for it. That sounds like a great idea.” 

We launched the AEM podcast and set what we thought were very reasonable goals for it.  Within about five months, we had 10x’d those goals. That's when my phone started to ring and I had my – I call it my entrepreneurial lightbulb moment, that I could do this for corporate clients all over North America. 

So that's what we do here at Podcamp Media. I founded Podcamp in 2019. We're going strong. We've got clients in Madison, Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, Saskatoon, Columbus, Ohio. We're just helping brands tell their story in the most compelling way possible using the highest quality audio production techniques. It's been a rewarding journey for a small town kid from cheese-maker country.

Jeff Umbro: I'm so curious, because you come from this world of commercial radio: when was the first time that you became aware of podcasting as a viable business opportunity?

Dusty Weis: I don't think that it really clicked for me that this is something that would take off and provide the opportunity to bring in real revenue until I was working at AEM in 2017.

We had two podcasts – one of them I was producing for that budget of zero dollars, and that was our member-facing audience of heavy equipment, construction, [and] agriculture manufacturers. We produced that podcast to educate and elevate that audience. But we also had a podcast on our tradeshow-side facing construction workers and construction business owners, and that one was outsourced. It was being produced by an outfit running out of Chicago. 

I was always very interested in that side of things and became very well acquainted with that project manager. At one point, she let slip what it was that they were paying that production company per episode. And it was this cartoonish moment for me where dollar signs shot out of my ears and I said, “wait a minute, you can get paid that to do something that, to me, is easy and fun and compelling?” I started drafting up my business plan the next day.

Jeff Umbro: It's because of the idea that you really enjoy doing this and see the inherent value in bringing this to brands that really puts a smile on my face.

So you were in this landscape where you worked in smaller and somewhat larger markets in commercial radio. I am so curious just to have you lay the scene for us what that looked like in the early 2000s versus today. 

From my point of view, there are a handful of massive radio companies today that have a very strong foothold in podcasting, but the radio business is kind of hemorrhaging ad dollars. I know there was a lot of consolidation over the years, but what did that look like when you first entered the space versus today? 

Dusty Weis: Well I got into radio in about 2002 and I was working for a very small group [that was] locally focused. We called it the “chalet in the valley” but really it was a shack in a cornfield. There was a lot of independence and stubborn pride in the fact that we were locally owned, that we were the Davids in a sea of Goliaths. 

Because at that point, the convergence had been happening in commercial radio for a long time. The scene was set for it by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that lifted ownership limits both in-market and nationally, and it allowed companies like Clear Channel, now called iHeart, to come in and buy up fully one out of every three radio stations in the United States of America. Companies like Intercom, now Audacy, companies like Cumulus Media – between those three alone, you're talking about companies that own something like 80 percent of the radio stations in America, which was wild, frankly. 

We used to laugh in our newsroom because our primary competition was a Clear Channel station in Madison. And this was at a time when Clear Channel was spoking and hubbing a lot of their operations. They would take markets and they would fire about 80 to 90 percent of the staff in that market and then pipe in a lot of their programming from different markets. This was going on when I worked in Miami for a Clear Channel station. 

When I was working in Madison, working for the local guys, we would tune in to monitor our competition, and laugh as they were mispronouncing local street names because they had never been to Madison before. And so it was a fun time to be the little guy right up until the 2008 crisis hit. And everything came screeching to a halt. 

And I know that we're at sort of an inflection point in the podcasting business right now. I want people who work in podcasting to take comfort from the fact that this is not 2008 for a lot of reasons, and we in podcasting are undeniably [in] a much better space right now than the radio business was then, or frankly will ever be again.

Jeff Umbro: As a point of comparison, I live in New Hampshire, kind of a Boston boy – a lot of my friends listen to Felger and Mazz religiously. It's one of the larger sports radio shows in the country, especially around this area. They're owned by Beasley Media Group. Beasley is a really tiny radio organization compared to Audacy, or Cumulus or iHeart, and even so they have 40 stations, give or take. Their market cap, the last I checked, I think it was like 25 million, give or take, which is huge compared to quite a few companies that are operating in podcasting, but minuscule compared to quite a few companies that are operating in podcasting.

So I mentioned that mainly to say that there are a lot of parent organizations operating in the audio space that have different business models for the on-demand audio, the podcast world, as well as the more terrestrial broadcast audio stations. And it's funny to watch from my point of view, and hopefully from yours, as a lot of these organizations try to find their foothold in the podcast industry, because a lot of them are really trying to branch out and capture that audience that they once controlled kind of exclusively.

In the podcast side, and this really is a concept that's divorced from what you're talking about, [i.e.] the hopes of the industry as a whole after a tough year, but what was it like in 2008 and why is today different? 

Dusty Weis: Well, I'll tell you what it was like working in the newsroom. It was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving in 2008 and we had been reporting on this market crash and all the layoffs taking place throughout industries all around the world. We had four or five people working in the newsroom at that point. 

I hear three of them stand up from their chairs, kind of stretch and go, “huh.” I come out from my little cubby and I'm like, “what's going on?” We just got an email that said we have to report down to the lobby for a meeting. I looked in my email and there was an email referencing that email, but it said if you didn't get that email, just stay in your spot and continue doing your job.

Jeff Umbro: That must have been an uncomfortable moment for you. 

Dusty Weis: Well, I'm sitting here, I was 23 years old, Jeff. I had been working in this market for less than a year, but I was talking to people who had 40 [years] in that market, veterans. People who knew every state senator by name, people who had been out drinking with the mayor, these sorts of deeply established and wildly credible people who, frankly, I didn't have a right to hold a candle to at that point in my career. 

They left the room, and it was me and one other guy. We looked at each other and said, “I think it's up to us to do the news today.”

Jeff Umbro: [Laughs] I'm sorry for laughing, but what a moment.

Dusty Weis: No, it was, it was wild. 

We found out later on that they had called 50 percent of the staff at our eight-station cluster downstairs and sent them home on that day, the day before Thanksgiving. Our program director was fired. Our news director was not, but our editor was. 

I remember a couple of days later sitting down in the office of our assistant program director, eventually elevated to program director, and telling him, Chris, I don't think I belong here. I'm feeling incredibly guilty. I think that one of the reasons that I was left here is because, frankly, I'm only making $30,000 a damn year, I'm one of the youngest people on staff, and I'm a body who's gonna move meters, but I don't have the qualifications of those other people. 

And Chris Murphy, Murph, sits down across from me, looks me in the eyes and says, “look, this is a tough time. We're gonna have to reinvent how we do business here. We're gonna have to reinvent everything about the radio station to make it work going forward, but I want you to know one thing: this is a tough business that we work in and it's gonna get tougher. And even if it contracts to the point where there are only 5,000 people working in radio, you're gonna be one of those people if you wanna be. You have the talent, you have the capability, you just need the belief in yourself. I'm telling you to do it, and you're gonna be great, and you're gonna be one of the reasons that this radio station goes on.” 

It sucked to have to see those really talented, really incredible people, who helped shape me as the journalist that I was at the time, go out the door. But that pep talk from Murph is what kept me going, is what gave me the, frankly, the fortitude to go a year and a half without taking a vacation day or a sick day, because that's what we needed to do to make the meters move at that point. It was frankly brutal. 

And so we're at a point as a podcasting industry right now where it sucks. 1,500 people laid off from Spotify – that's terrible. It's not their fault. They're not the ones who made the decisions that created the conditions for these layoffs to happen, but they're the ones who have to bear the burden of that.

One of my favorite indie rock acts from the early 2000s, a band called Stars. They opened one of their best albums with the quote, “when there's nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.” Podcasting is at a point right now where there's nothing left to burn, frankly. And so, we've entered this period of self immolation. And we're going to emerge on the other side, hopefully stronger for it. 

But it's a great time to double down, remind yourself why you fell in love with the audio medium, remind yourself why it is that you do it. Because the days of 10x growth, the days of quick and easy money, those are gone. There's still growth that's going to happen in podcasting. But the people who got into it for the wrong reasons are getting out. And that frees up room for the rest of us to make some waves. 

Jeff Umbro: So that brings us to dusty in 2019 founding Podcamp Media. You kind of touched on this a little bit earlier, but walk me through why you decided to take this idea and turn it into this big entity of its own. What went through your head and why did you make that decision to go out and start your own company as opposed to joining another or expanding one of your radio jobs or something? 

Dusty Weis: Well, it's funny, I referenced that quote from Stars. Frankly, I'm somebody who's set myself on fire quite a few times over the course of my career, going from radio journalist, to public relations, to content marketing, to entrepreneur, all over the span of 20 years.

The one consistent thread through everything that I've done has been a commitment to storytelling. I had a professor in journalism school, a fellow by the name of Stephen Walters, a statehouse reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and he liked to say that everybody has a story that they're just waiting to tell, and it's your job as a journalist to go out there and find that. Brands are an entity that are classically bad at telling their own story. And so if I can take those good tenets of storytelling and apply them on their behalf, I think that's a win for everybody. 

And maybe it's the emphasis on the bottom line, [but] so many potential clients have come to me and said, “we want to do a podcast for our brand, and it's going to be about our products and our services.” And I say, “that's not a podcast. That's an infomercial. And those are less popular than Congress. Don't do that.”

It's a funny thing because you're a one-man shop. You make all of these shows, you produce them, you develop them, you edit them. You build the platform that they're going to live on. In many cases, you actually co-host them. Where do you see yourself in this whole process? And what would you change about that if you could? 

Dusty Weis: I see my part in the process as being essentially the chief brand evangelist, the chief storyteller on behalf of a lot of our clients. In some cases, it's put me in a position where I have to very quickly become an expert in something that I didn't know a whole lot about beforehand, foremost on that list: corn.

Jeff Umbro: I was just going to make that joke! 

Dusty Weis: When the National Corn Growers Association approached me and said, “we'd really love to do a podcast for our brand,” I said: “I'm gonna need a couple of days at least to study up because there are a lot of complexities here in the commodities markets that I'm not really the guy to get on microphone about.”

Yeah, I wind up co-hosting some of these shows and having to position myself as an expert on things that I wasn't an expert on five years ago. But I think that's where having a – I'm going to use a word that I hate here, Jeff – “boutique podcast production firm” really pays off on your behalf, because we have a small roster of clients. We have fewer than a dozen clients and that's a number that I'm proud of. But it means that you've got the president of the company working on your behalf all of the time. And I take seriously my commitment to helping these companies, these brands, and these associations tell their story. 

I'm a lot of the time flying across the country to be with them at trade shows, at events. [With] the National Corn Growers Association specifically we've recorded two podcasts on Capitol Hill with members of Congress in Washington, D. C. which is a colossal honor. 

But at the end of the day, you've got to be passionate about the story that you're telling. And to be passionate about it, you've got to be able to find the things that you can really love about it. And even corn has got things about it to really love and great stories to tell right there.

Jeff Umbro: How do you think about that? Like when you're working with the National Corn Growers Association, you're spending a lot of time focused on what stories they should tell and what the show should sound like. But how much of your thought process is going into, “how am I going to find listeners once we have this amazing product that we've found? How are we going to put it in front of the right people?”

Dusty Weis: That's definitely been one of the points where having you as a mentor has been a colossal help. Because I came into this, like a lot of people do, with the very naive assumption that if you build it, they will come. There's a corn reference for you, by the way.

And I came into this from a background of having worked in commercial radio, where we had an established brand. People knew where to find us on their radio dial. They were already listening. Certainly we wanted to grow that audience. But we had a team of people who were responsible for putting up the billboards, and the bus ads, and everything else that drove people to the radio station.

And I guess, when I got into this business, I did not understand how much work goes into the podcast discovery process. That “if you build it, they will come” just doesn't work in podcasting when you don't have a massive name, a massive brand, a massive celebrity standing behind you. 

Jeff Umbro: And even sometimes when you do, it still doesn't work.

Dusty Weis: Yeah, that's the wildest part. It's definitely one of those things where I have days when I'm like, man, I wish somebody would just buy the company up. I think I can say that because everybody does have those days.

Jeff Umbro: Of course.

Dusty Weis: But I miss having a team stand behind me who is expert in the process of steering new listeners to it. Like paying my taxes, like being my own IT manager, discovery is just not something I'm passionate about. It's something that I do, and I've learned to do better from people like you, from other experts in the industry, from my own research. But it's not where my passions lie. My passions are in storytelling.

And especially over the last five years here, I think we've seen a really strong shift where it just becomes harder and harder to build it and have them come. Now if you're not investing in audience growth, you're losing audience, frankly. And so that's been a hard lesson to learn. 

Jeff Umbro: The one thing I'll push back and say that you're doing very well in that regard is that you need a good show in order for the audience discovery to work, and you do focus on that most important piece of making something of high quality.

So let's take a different tack here. Because you are not a coastal company, you are based in Wisconsin, a lot of your clients are also not coastal clients. How do you go about trying to find your clients? How do you think about discovery as a one man production shop? Is it all word of mouth?

Dusty Weis: Word of mouth has gotten me most of the way there. I'll kind of backtrack on that a little bit and say, when I started this business, I knew that I was going to be pitching podcasting as a top of funnel marketing tool, as a thought leadership tool. And so I knew that if I was going to be doing that, I was going to need to put my money where my mouth is and have a podcast as a business growth tool for Podcamp media. 

So I launched a little podcast called Lead Balloon. Knowing that a lot of my customers were going to be marketing and public relations professionals, I launched a podcast targeting that audience. The only thing that was different was I wanted it to sound different from all of the marketing and public relations podcasts that were out there, and so we took sort of a narrative-driven storytelling approach to a genre that has very much been dominated by topic-of-the-day, talking-head approaches to podcasting. 

It's wound up being the tool that has driven about 80-85% of the revenue. That we bring in, to this day.

Jeff Umbro: I didn't realize that. That's amazing.

Dusty Weis: Either from people hearing an episode of Lead Balloon and reaching out and saying, “[we] really like what you've done there. We'd like to talk to you about having you run our podcast,” or conversely, people who I had on the show as guests who then afterwards – and Jeff, I'll pause to say, I'm terrible at sales, I'm not good at selling, I would rather have a conversation with a person and hang out and learn their story. And then, “oh I forgot to pitch them. Shoot.” 

Jeff Umbro: Well, that's the best pitch is when you don't do it. You just show them your skill set.

Dusty Weis: It turns out that's a pretty effective pitch. And so I would have people on the podcast, I'd be getting set to end the call and thanking them for their time, and they'd [say], “just a second, just a second.”

Jeff Umbro: You also were the first podcast to record going what, a thousand miles an hour in a fighter jet?

Dusty Weis: It was only 500 miles an hour, Jeff. Yes. We were invited to shadow the US Navy Blue Angels public affairs team. And part of the storytelling process there, I thought and was able to pitch them on, was putting me in the backseat of a Blue Angels F-18 fighter jet and doing some split S maneuvers and some 7G minimum radius turns and really putting that $50 million piece of avionics equipment through its paces.

That was quite a storytelling experience right there.

Jeff Umbro: That makes you not too concerned with keeping your microphone safe. 

It's very inspiring to see what you've been able to build and I think that it’s – please don't take this the wrong way. I'm going to say it anyway – but unsexy shows that are not meant for mass audiences are the lifeblood of this industry and the thing that is going to make this a slow, sustainable market moving forward.

And it's been very cool to watch what you've built, because I think that it makes a lot of sense and brings a ton of value to these organizations that need it. 

Dusty Weis: Well, again, it's smart growth. It's not crazy stupid 10x growth. It's not tech bro growth, but that's not what podcasting needs right now. It needs people who care about collaboration instead of domination. That is what is going to keep podcasting healthy and sustainable and successful in the decades that come. And that's what's going to keep podcasting from turning into the next radio, frankly.

Jeff Umbro: I agree. Radio is not going anywhere, but podcasting will continue to expand and to an extent eat radio's lunch for a little bit. S

o thanks so much, Dusty. 

Dusty Weis: Hey, thanks for the opportunity, Jeff.

Jeff Umbro: Thank you again to Dusty for joining us on this episode of Podcast Perspectives. You can find more about Podcamp Media at their website, podcampmedia.com, and check out the Lead Balloon podcast. 

You all may have noticed that there was no new episode of Podcast Perspectives last week. Moving forward, we are going to produce this show for a release every other Wednesday. I hope that's not too disappointing, but thank you all for joining us. And we hope that you stick with it. 

For more podcast related news, info and takes, you can follow me on Twitter at Jeff Umbro. Podcast Perspectives is a production of the Podglomerate. If you are looking for help producing, distributing, or monetizing your podcast, you can find us at thepodglomerate.com. Shoot us an email at listen@thepodglomerate.com or follow us on all social platforms at @podglomerate. This episode was produced by Chris Boniello and Henry Lavoie. And thank you to our marketing team, Joni Deutsch, Madison Richards, Morgan Swift, Annabella Pena, and Vanessa Ullman. And a special thank you to Dan Christo. 

Thanks for listening, and I will catch you next week.