This week, we had the opportunity to speak with Colin Gray, the CEO & Founder of
The Podcast Host. We spoke about the company, its mission, and what separates it from other similar companies.
Please describe the story behind the company: What sparked the idea, and how has it evolved so far?
Back in around 2007 or so, I was a lecturer at a university in Edinburgh, teaching other lecturers how to use technology with their students. One of the on-trend techs at the time was Podcasting and I was asked to look into it by my boss.
As soon as I started exploring it, I was totally hooked – I fell in love with the medium. I just connected really deeply with the mix of in-depth, long-form, ultra-specific content, and the personality and intimacy that came along with the audio.
I started teaching other lecturers how to use podcasting in their teaching and began our blog, ThePodcastHost.com at that point too, to share with the world all that I was learning.
Right place, right time, and a bit of hard work meant that the blog started to do really well, generating income through affiliate programs, and that let me jump out of my education job and run the website full time.
From there we started doing client production work, then selling courses, and then finally creating Alitu, our podcast maker app, to help all of the podcasters who got in touch to tell us that they hated traditional editing.
What is the mission of The Podcast Host?
Our mission is to help your passion become the world’s inspiration. We do that by making it as easy as humanly possible to start a podcast, through content, education, and tools. If we do our job, then there’s no barrier for anyone in getting their voice heard, and putting their message out into the world.
What services do you offer?
Our core offering is the content we produce over at thePodcastHost.com. It’s all free and teaches tonnes about how to run a successful show.
From there, we often recommend our podcasting software platform, Alitu. It helps anyone to record, clean up, edit and publish their podcast episodes.
It’s designed to take care of the tech, and make the whole podcast creation process as easy, fun, and quick as possible!
Finally, we have our own education platform alongside that which builds on our free content, by offering coaching, guided courses, and much more detailed how-to.
In our podcast host academy, you can learn everything there is to know about podcasting!
What separates you from other similar websites/companies?
The main one is that no other company offers the combination of education and tools that we do. We not only teach you how to run a great podcast, but we offer tools to help you do it in the easiest way possible.
On top of that, we do it with personality! We’re sometimes silly, sometimes serious, sometimes irreverent, but we’re always human. We’re humans, helping humans, to help other humans through their voice. And a lot of the other tools in the industry don’t make the effort to humanize their brands in that way.
Who are your typical customers, and what do you think is the main challenge that your product solves for them?
One of our core segments are solo entrepreneurs, looking to build a personal brand. A niching in even further, it’s the mentors, the teachers, and the coaches within that.
Podcasting is such a great platform for that type of person, helping them to build trust and reputation, and to showcase the personality that makes them “them”, separating them from other coaches.
Our education not only helps them launch their show, but it also helps them figure out how to attract an audience around it. And Alitu solves the problem that the technology introduces. It takes care of the audio cleanup, it takes care of call recording, and it takes care of the editing so that the podcaster can concentrate on what they do best – to speak!
How do you envision the future of your industry?
I think the next big thing is helping podcasters to really figure out the monetization side. Sponsorship, for example, is still a really fragmented and manual world to work in.
If you want to advertise on a show, you have to either pay a lot to an agency, or you have to contact dozens of podcasters yourself. Then, you have to review the advert, check it was delivered, and pay them all manually.
It’s nothing like Facebook or Google ads, where you click a few buttons and can have a campaign running almost instantly. The platform that solves this will be a huge boon for advertisers and podcasters alike.
