School of Podcasting's Big News with Podpage

Dave Jackson (0:00): Hey, it's Dave. And throughout this episode, I tell you that this is episode number 1,028. And guess what? It's not. It's episode number 1,029.

Dave Jackson (0:11): So thanks to the joy of dynamic content insertion, I can tell you that all the show notes are available at schoolofpodcasting.com/1020nine, and you can just ignore the rest.

Unknown Speaker (0:23): I'm gonna leave that there.

Dave Jackson (0:27): Well, some big news this week, and that is the school of podcasting has been acquired by Podpage. Hooray. Thank you, James Cridlin from pod news dot net. But I was thinking about how am I gonna talk about this because this does this really give you any value? And I could just hear the listener thinking.

Unknown Speaker (0:47): Oh, great. Another episode where Dave talks about Dave. Ugh. Seriously? It's like enough about me.

Unknown Speaker (0:54): What do you think about me?

Dave Jackson (0:56): And so I was like, what can we learn from this? And I was like, how did I get from a guy that was just divorced, just went through bankruptcy, living in his brother's house to building a company that eventually got acquired? And then I saw it. There was a kind of a theme that ran through the whole thing. And if I hadn't done it, I none of this would have happened.

Dave Jackson (1:22): So, yes, we're gonna walk down memory lane a little bit, but we've got some lessons to learn along the way. Hit it, ladies. The school of podcasting with Dave Jackson. Podcasting since 2005. I'm your award winning hall of fame podcast coach, Dave Jackson.

Dave Jackson (1:43): Thank you so much for tuning in. If you are new to the show, welcome aboard. This is where we help you plan. We help you launch. We help you grow.

Dave Jackson (1:51): Hey. If you wanna monetize, we can even help you with that. The website, yep, hasn't changed. We'll get in there's really not much that's changed, but there are a couple things, and I'm excited about it. And that website, of course, tell your friends, schoolofpodcasting.com.

Unknown Speaker (2:08): Welcome to Because of My Podcast, where we spotlight the results people are achieving because of their podcast.

Dave Jackson (2:16): So, yeah, my because of my podcast, my podcast got purchased along with my business. But we're gonna go back way back here. And, basically, it boils down to the thing that I saw. This wouldn't happen unless this happened. Oh, and this wouldn't happen except, well, this happened and this happened, etcetera.

Dave Jackson (2:39): And I was like, well, how did each of those things happen? And if you're an introvert, you're gonna hate the answer, but it comes down to relationships. And I realize for some people, hearing that word just makes you wanna go, but I often say one of the biggest benefits of a podcast is people you have no business talking to will come on your show. And so I thought about it when I first started off in podcasting, like the early days, 2005, I connected with a guy named Marcus Couch. Why?

Dave Jackson (3:14): Because we both love hard rock music. And Marcus was a guy that I believe I really connected at the very first podcast event. Back then, it was, I believe, the podcast portable media outlet, something like that. But at that event, I met Marcus Couch. I met Paul Culligan.

Dave Jackson (3:36): I remember Paul walking in with a bag of a box of books saying, you know, if we got a big enough audience, I think we could actually make some money at this podcast thing, and people wanted to throw us out. And I probably I'm a little hazy on that because it's a while, but I think I met Rob Walsh there. If he was there, that's probably I've known Rob forever. And but Marcus so there's there's I'm I'm growing my network. Marcus put in a good word for me at pod show, which later would rebrand Amevio, which enabled me to work before and with the one and only inventor of podcasting, Adam Curry.

Unknown Speaker (4:13): Hello, everybody. My name's Adam Curry. This is the morning announcements. Enjoy it in the morning.

Dave Jackson (4:19): And so back then, this show was actually called the school of podcasting's morning announcements, and that's where you learn the lesson. Don't get cute with your name because we're calling it the morning announcements, and then you had to explain because you get it. It's the school of podcasting. Yeah. So if you have to explain your name, you've picked a bad one.

Dave Jackson (4:38): And so I was able to get on pod show, the first podcasting network, which later became Mevio, Got my first advertising spot for McDonald's. Got to get to know Callie Lewis, who is now Luria Petrucci, Keith and the girl, Michael Butler, and as I said, Marcus Couch. But meanwhile, things like podcast pickle back in the day, this was one of the first podcast directories along with a thing called Podcast Alley. This is all before Apple and maybe iTunes had come along, but the owner of Podcast Pickle was a guy named Gary Leland. And then later, don't know whose idea it was, we did a show, still around, hasn't had an an episode out in forever, called Today in Podcasting.

Dave Jackson (5:23): And who was it? People had already met. Paul Culligan, Gary Leland, and Rob Walsh. We did that for a while. And then I took my podcast, and I interviewed people like Rob from Libsyn.

Dave Jackson (5:35): I got to know the owner of Spreaker, who has now launched PodSEO. We talked about that in last week's episode. Link's in the show notes. And I got to know the head of Blueberry, a phenomenal guy named Todd Cochran. I miss him a lot.

Dave Jackson (5:50): And I met these guys at events, and they would come on my show. And, again, I've said this before, when you do a solo show, you grow your influence. Because right now, I'm just talking to you. And when you do an interview show, you grow your network. But the thing that really kinda blew me away in the early days is they were, like, there was you know, Marcus had the hard rock show, and CeCe Chapman had a, you know, pop show and this and that.

Dave Jackson (6:15): And I had the podcast show, and then some guy named Cliff Ravenscraf came along, and I was like, how dare you? You know? But, really, that's kinda what I was thinking. But then I listened to Cliff Show, and another guy named Daniel j Lewis and Ray Ortega and David Hooper, and all these guys were talking about podcasting. And I was like, but but that's my thing.

Dave Jackson (6:38): But they each had their own spin. And so after I thought, how dare you? It turns out these guys were the guys I was hanging out at events, and we would completely nerd out around podcasting. And so, again, in 2013, I was approached by the one and only Ray Ortega as Google Hangouts on air. Yes.

Dave Jackson (6:59): Welcome to the History Channel. It had just rolled out. And he thought it would be cool if we took these really nerdy podcasting conversations between myself, Ray, and Daniel, and do them in public, call it the podcasters roundtable because he really wanted to play with this live thing, and he was getting into video. And I got a lot of new subscribers from that show. How did it work?

Dave Jackson (7:24): Networking and not treating your, quote, competition like your competition. I love those guys. I wish we could get that show to come back. So that was 2013. In 2014, then this is total Humblebrag Theater.

Dave Jackson (7:39): Rick Calvert was running the New Media Expo, previously known as the Blog World of New Media Expo, and he called people like Lipson, Spreaker, Blueberry. And he said, who should I get to fill this empty spot previously filled by my buddy, Cliff Ravenscraft? And they needed a new head of podcasting to pick speakers and things for this event. This was a huge event at the time. And all three of those companies, Libson, Spreaker, and Blueberry said the same thing.

Dave Jackson (8:05): What do you think about Dave Jackson? Why? Because I'd had them on my show and because they listen to my show. Relationships and producing good content. And the cool thing about that was I got to interview all of the speakers, and I got to hire Pat Flynn as the keynote.

Dave Jackson (8:24): If we jump up to 20 '16, I lost my job as a software trainer, and I called my now ex wife. And I said, hey. I wanna take the school of podcasting and do it as a full time gig, and then I could be on your health benefits. And, hey. You make a boatload of money.

Dave Jackson (8:40): You've been doing nursing for twenty years. And she said, which may be one of the reasons she's my ex wife. So I wanted to get a job in podcasting. So I looked at my relationships and I called my friend, Rob Walsh. I said, buddy, I got this this could get awkward.

Dave Jackson (8:57): I got good news and bad news. And he said, oh, know, take bad news for a 100, Alex. And I said, I just lost my job. And he goes, oh, wow. What's what's the good news?

Dave Jackson (9:06): And I said, I'm available to work for you. And so I went to work for Libsyn. If we jump ahead four years, it's 2020. I'm working at Libsyn. And according to Brennan Mulligan, the CEO and founder of PodPage, he reached out to Daniel j Lewis and Ray Ortega.

Dave Jackson (9:26): Why? Because he wanted to make a product, and he needed to know what people wanted. He he built Podpage the same way I recommend you build a podcast. Find out what people want and give it to them. And both of my buddies, Daniel and Ray, said, look, if you really wanna understand what podcasters want, the person you wanna talk to is Dave Jackson.

Dave Jackson (9:48): So in 2020, I got hired as a podcast consultant by Brendan Mulligan to talk about this new idea, he said, called Podpage. And the very first thing I said when I met him was this. But from from what I've seen from your product, my first question is, do you have an affiliate program? And so it's been love at first sight ever since I first saw PodPage. And for four years, I was telling everybody about Podpage.

Dave Jackson (10:18): I was one of his top affiliates. I was slightly getting in trouble at Libsyn because at that point, they owned a web hosting company called Pair Networks. And instead of driving people to Pair Networks, I would drive people to PodPage. And when they asked why, I simply said, it's better. And that was kinda it.

Dave Jackson (10:36): There's this thing called integrity. And I always say every podcaster starts with two things, no audience and integrity. And the goal is to get an audience without losing your integrity and nothing against pair networks, but Podpage is made for podcasters, and it was just better. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jackson (10:58): Yeah. And so four years goes by. I'm one of the top affiliates. I asked him, can I buy the domain tripod page and learn pod page? And I would give him an idea.

Dave Jackson (11:11): In some cases, like, that's great. And he would somehow wave this magic wand, and it would just appear. And it really got to this point. Here's another clip from that first meeting that we had. What doesn't it do, I guess, at this point?

Dave Jackson (11:22): And so we would text back and forth, kinda keep in touch. And then one day, Brendan sent me a video via text.

Brenden Mulligan (11:30): Hey. Hope you're well. I'm here in Maryland on a farm. It's very nice and peaceful. So we've known each other now for four years, and I feel like, you know, I've always really appreciated everything you've done contribution wise for PodPage externally.

Brenden Mulligan (11:47): I think that we've talked about this for a second before, but I'm curious to see if you'd wanna have a conversation about, essentially coming over and working on pod page full time. And when I say full time, I mean, you know, your libs in full time kind of commitment.

Dave Jackson (12:04): And then he rolled out a position that sounded like it was tailor made for me.

Brenden Mulligan (12:08): Basically, community focused. And so that would mean, doing the support, and it's kind of stuff you're already doing, which is why I feel like you'd be such a good fit. Like, you know, I'm I'm already asking if you'd be interested in, like, right doing our demo videos for us and, you know, stuff like that. Like, I just doing that, doing, like, a podcast about websites. And so I know you're doing a lot of the stuff sort of with the angle of driving affiliate sales.

Brenden Mulligan (12:36): So I'm curious to see if you would just be interested in in doing doing it to drive pod page growth. And so

Dave Jackson (12:43): And so one of the things he said really caught my attention because when I was working at Libsyn, I wasn't really allowed to mention the School of Podcasting a whole lot, and Brendan said this.

Brenden Mulligan (12:54): You've really valued the flexibility in being able to keep pushing forward with School of Podcasting. There'd be no conflict there. We could talk about ways we could integrate it in a way to be able to drive drive customers to, School of Podcasting.

Dave Jackson (13:11): Yeah. Which really caught my eye. And so I've been it's hard to believe I've been at PodPage for two years now, and that has led to this.

Brenden Mulligan (13:22): We'd announced yesterday that PodPage has acquired the School of Podcasting. We are incredibly excited to sort of partner with Dave on this next leg of the School of Podcasting journey.

Dave Jackson (13:30): At the 2025, we were doing kind of our yearly wrap up. And, Brendan, it's kinda funny, said, you know, it seems like everybody knows you. Again, relationships. And I'm also here to say, no. Not everybody knows me.

Dave Jackson (13:46): But why isn't the school of podcasting bigger? And I said, well, I make part time income from a part time job. I work seven to midnight a couple nights a week and a little bit on the weekends, and I make, you know, part time money. And I think that made him go, And so it's a great marriage in the fact that Pod Page is still an amazing product. And I know you're gonna say it's because you work there.

Dave Jackson (14:20): But I've now proven I've loved this product really since it was love at first sight. And the one thing that people leave PodPage for, like, what's the big reason? What's the one thing? And it's very simple. It has nothing to do with PodPage.

Dave Jackson (14:38): It's just they quit podcasting, probably because of one of those really selfish things called babies, the arch nemesis of podcasters. But that's our biggest we do an exit survey, and it's like, yeah, I'm not podcasting anymore. So we're hoping that the school of podcasting can help some of these people keep podcasting. And so, again, relationships. And if you're an introvert, you gotta just pull yourself out.

Dave Jackson (15:07): I've told this story before. When I was 16, I was fired from my first job because I was too shy. And a teacher of mine said, act the way you wanna be, and you will be the way you act. And I am still deep, deep, deep, deep down, still a little shy, but not as introverted as I as I was. And I'm just here to tell you, how do you get better at it?

Dave Jackson (15:28): You just have to do it. I remember once I was at an event, and I went there looking to find people that needed podcast. And I went to I was speaking at this event, and I went to a dinner that was all speakers. Well, hello. Every one of those people needed a podcast.

Dave Jackson (15:45): And yet there I was. I couldn't have been any further away from the group, and I just kinda mentally kinda grabbed myself and was like, hey. Look, you idiot. The opportunity is right here in front of you for about the next twenty minutes. And I just kinda mentally put my finger under my collar and just said, come on, you.

Dave Jackson (16:05): Get over there. And I just instead of thinking, oh, all these people, I picked one person. It was a blonde female. And, no, not that kind of thought here. I just was like, look.

Dave Jackson (16:16): She's close. Go talk to her. And I just went over and I'm like, what, you know, what brings you to the show kind of thing and got the conversation going. And the more you do that, the better you get at it. And nobody has punched me in the face yet.

Dave Jackson (16:29): Now if you want the nitty gritty of the actual deal and what does it mean for members of the school of Podcasting, and what does it mean to you if you're not a member of the School of Podcasting? We're gonna talk about that right after this. Have you ever been driving along and your favorite song comes on and you're like, yeah, and you crank up the radio, and then the phone rings, And so you turn down the radio, not all the way down because you still wanna hear your jam, but enough to where you can answer the phone. Well, guess what? You know how to mix audio.

Dave Jackson (17:01): And if you've ever attached a photo to an email, you know how to upload an m p three file to your media host. And if you've ever deleted text in a Word file, then you know how to do it basically in Audacity. It's not that there's no learning curve. There's a little one, and I'll be right there next to you to help you flatten that learning curve. I'm just telling you, it's not as scary as you think.

Dave Jackson (17:23): Go to schoolofpodcasting.com. Use the coupon code listener when you sign up for either a monthly, quarterly, or yearly subscription, and you can join worry free with a thirty day money back guarantee. Just go to schoolofpodcasting.com. Use the coupon code listener. It's time to go back to school.

Dave Jackson (17:48): If you host a podcast, your website should work as hard as you on your episodes. At Podpage, we automatically create a beautiful professional site for your show. Complete with episode pages, transcripts, audio players, SEO optimization, and building tools to grow your audience. No design work, no plug ins, no ongoing maintenance. In less than a minute, you can see exactly what your podcast would look like on PodPage.

Dave Jackson (18:19): Go to podpage.com/preview and generate your free preview site right now. See your show the way it should look at podpage.com/preview. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jackson (18:34): We did a town hall, and I'll have a link to that out at schoolofpodcasting.com/1020eight. But school of podcasting member, and I love her to death, her show is called nosy AF, and she's very, very curious, which makes her a great podcaster. And she asked, alright. So what did Brendan buy?

Brenden Mulligan (18:55): Podpage bought everything, bought the IP and the name and all that stuff. And when I presented Dave with options, I said, there's a couple different options. And all of them had a here's what we'll buy the IP for, and then here's a rev share of going forward. The question about equity, I mean, we get this as a different q and a. Start up equity tends to be it seems like it's gonna be a great idea, and very few times does it end up being a good idea because of just the way equity waterfalls work.

Brenden Mulligan (19:23): And I don't ever intend to sell the company, so the equity would never turn into anything. So instead of thinking about equity, I presented Dave with the option of actual rev share. And the rev share is very much is tied to specifically tied to the school of podcasting. Because I didn't want decisions made with Podpage or expenses with Podpage or anything muddying this work. And so we've actually we're accounting for the school podcasting revenue and expenses totally separately, and then we have a a profit share at the end of the year, and we will both be making the decisions on the expenses.

Brenden Mulligan (19:56): So it's kinda like a company running within a company that won't be touched by any of the expenses outside the company. It doesn't have Dave's salary isn't actually part of the expenses for the school podcasting. And so the goal is the more we can grow school podcasting, like, Dave just continues to to generate revenue or profit off of it. And after looking at spending time doing, like, the analysis of the the school podcasting, like financial books, I think what'll end up the the entity itself will be more profitable because a lot of the expenses can just get absorbed into Podpage. The point is that it was important to me that, like, as a school podcasting grew, his compensation for it still grew, and I think it would actually end up being better than if it was independent.

Dave Jackson (20:40): And that's one of the things I get. I am now being guided by someone who's had multiple business, and they've done well. But people have asked, well, what if it doesn't go well? And we actually have a lot of things in our paperwork that talk about that. And then Brendan on the roundtable mentioned this.

Brenden Mulligan (20:59): I have bought businesses before where, like, a year in, it didn't go as well as I was hoping as the new owner. I was like, oh, this business isn't isn't growing like I thought it would when I added more resources, or the person who started it and I have are misaligned. And then there's this whole thing, like, I I put all this money into it. I can't just give it back to the person, but I also don't really wanna run it. Should I shut it down?

Brenden Mulligan (21:21): Should I try to sell it's like, it's a little bit of a mess. So Dave and I actually started with that conversation, and, you know, assuming that nothing in the world goes crazy, even with AI and everything that's happening. Basically, what we said is, the goal of this merger is that school podcasting can help pod page, and pod page can help school podcasting grow. And so it's kinda like, I forget I think we said we'll do a check-in after one year and two years. And I was like, if after a couple years, school podcasting hasn't grown, nothing's really different there, pod pay it hasn't really helped pod page.

Brenden Mulligan (21:53): Like, if a strategy doesn't work, as long as there's some sort of balance on investment made and revenue, which there should be, we can just unwind it. Because my the goal here wasn't to, like, take something of Dave's and then make it it it was just to, like, I wanna put a lot of time and effort into it, and so this was the structure that we came up with.

Dave Jackson (22:12): And what about ask the podcast coach, your podcast consultant, and all the other podcasts that Dave does?

Brenden Mulligan (22:18): Dave is a kind of a tricky person when it comes to both hiring and doing a deal like this. Because he has so many podcasts, and they're all kind of related. When I first hired Dave for pod page, a lot of people asked me, well, was there anything in his employment agreement about school podcasting? Because what if he does an episode of the school podcasting about a competitor or WordPress or and if if when I I've joined larger corporations before. Usually, when you join a big corporation, they basically say, you can't you have to stop doing all this other stuff because you work here now.

Dave Jackson (22:46): And one of the things I loved when I first joined Podpage is I explained to Brennan that I do group coaching at noon. I that's why it's called lunch with Dave. And I said, hey. Can I expand that from, you know, thirty minutes to an hour? And he's like, sure.

Dave Jackson (23:01): And we both trust each other because he knows that for every hour that I might be you know, even though technically it's my lunch hour, there are plenty of times I'm answering pod page tickets at 10:30 at night because I always check before I go to bed. So there's a lot of trust there, and that really helped the deal go fairly smooth once we got through the awkwardness of explaining what exactly are you buying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jackson (23:27): And so what is going to change at the school of podcasting?

Brenden Mulligan (23:31): One question I always ask Dave is, like, you're you're a one you're one man. How are you gonna like, I think of school podcasting, I think, like, tons of courses. How do you handle doing all that? Have you ever thought about having other people get do instruction? Because I see just as like a person outside of this sort of educational world.

Brenden Mulligan (23:48): I was like, so all these people running courses and all this, like, everyone's trying to, like, launch their own set of courses, generally about different stuff. Like, you ever thought about inviting other people to publish on the school podcasting their own course? And we're gonna start experimenting with that by having more than just Dave teaching. Because Dave might go on he does some great deep dives into software, but it might be even better to have the per people who created the software do the deep dives into their software. In a way that obviously would be promotional, because they're promoting their own thing, but hopefully educational.

Brenden Mulligan (24:21): That's a balance that we wanna strike. And then also just people who are, you know, like, there's certain people who are the best podcast lawyers. So when you think about what you should know, podcast as far as a podcast are about, like, how to set up, you know, your entity or anything you're gonna do around law. Instead of Dave and I trying to, like, figure that out, let's have the the people come on who know the know it the best. And yes, if a great podcast lawyer is teaching you about what you need to do and then you need help, you're probably gonna reach out to the podcast lawyer.

Brenden Mulligan (24:46): So it's hopefully gonna be good for them, but the education will be good for the community. And so that's something we're gonna try.

Dave Jackson (24:52): So what's the overall vision for the school of podcasting?

Brenden Mulligan (24:56): My vision is for school podcasting is like the person who came today and said, hey, let's let's make this bigger, is is relatively simple. It's just it should be where anyone who wants to learn anything about podcasting signs up. There's not really a lot of nuance to it. Like, if you're a pretty big podcaster and you're trying to fit in, you've got a good audience, now you're just trying to figure out monetization, it should be super valuable to you because you can log in and you can read all kinds of stuff about monetization. You can take courses, you can take courses from experts, you can connect with other people at your level.

Dave Jackson (25:25): And so when I heard that vision, I was like, that's my vision.

Brenden Mulligan (25:28): If you're just thinking about podcasting for the first time and you woke up thinking, I think I wanna do this podcast, come in as a free user, get some basic information about if this is something you wanna do, and then if you're serious, you sign up and your hand is held through the process of launching a podcast in those first steps. So the more people who can come in with their expertise, I think the better. And so we've gotta figure out the right way to both make sure that the education quality is consistent, and also, you know, give give enough a framework for people to teach. But I think that it'll be it'll be really cool to have a more centralized knowledge base for sort of all podcast or education. The thing about pod page over the last six years is I go to these conferences, and I see Dave's old company, Libsyn, when he used to work for Libsyn, there are all these hosts that are all friends with each other.

Brenden Mulligan (26:13): But at the end of the day, they're they're all competing for the same customer. And so, yes, everyone's friends, but at the same time, yeah, I mean, Libsyn would love a Buzzsprout customer to come over. Buzzsprout would love a Captivate customer to come over.

Unknown Speaker (26:25): Right.

Brenden Mulligan (26:25): Well, Podpage has always been like, no one else really does websites, not really, at these conferences. It's just I and I work with everyone. So I've got this Switzerland approach of being like, yeah, I'm friends with everyone. And I think school podcasting should be as neutral. It's just it's just a neutral platform for podcasters to come and hopefully we can serve as many people as possible.

Unknown Speaker (26:43): So

Dave Jackson (26:44): And I love that attitude because I've always been Switzerland even when I worked for Libsyn. I was friends with people at Captivate and Buzz Sprout and Blueberry. And Brendan has come up with some pricing perks.

Brenden Mulligan (26:54): This is gonna be a little bumpy because I've got I'm still working on the way to do this so it's easy. But my end goal for this will be, if you were paid a paid member of pod page, and you're a paid member of school podcasting, you will get a an automatic discount on your school podcasting membership. And if you go to our blog and read about it, and we have it in our support center, like, how the discount depending on what tier you're on, what your discount is gonna be. Obviously, like, people who pay more for pod page should get a bigger discount on school podcasting. But it's gonna be automatically applied, so there's no coupons, so no one who's, like, just hasn't heard about this misses out.

Brenden Mulligan (27:31): When the school podcasting goes to bill you, whenever the regular billing period is or when you go to sign up, it will do an automatic check to pod page and say, is this email address a paying member of pod page? If it is, then it'll automatically apply coupons. You don't have to do anything, And if you've been a long standing member of Cool Podcasting, you've just been paying, you you just get billed, you should, starting soon, see your bill just automatically reduced. If you're a paying member of Pod page. So that's how it's gonna work.

Brenden Mulligan (27:58): We're still making sure that it it's consistent. The way that the invoices are created and stuff, we're still making sure that everything is done at at the right time. If you're paying for both, we really appreciate you supporting both services, and so we wanna make sure to give a discount. So the next time you get a bill after now that it's public, check if there's a discount. If there's not, obviously, just write Dave.

Unknown Speaker (28:17): We can we can make the adjustment and more more importantly, figure out where the bug is.

Dave Jackson (28:21): And so now that the School of Podcasting is going to be part of my day job, this is how Brendan sees it.

Brenden Mulligan (28:27): So I said to Dave, I was like, I'm kind of thinking you're probably eighty twenty as far as the time you're spending on pod page in school podcasting right now, in your working time. So 80% of your time is on pod page 20. It was like, by the end of the year, I would like to flip that. And so you're spending 20% of your time on pod page, and 80% on school podcasting. That that's my goal and the way that I wanna do that is try to figure out any of the areas of pod page that are taking more time than they should and try to help with that.

Dave Jackson (28:53): And so for current members of the school of podcasting, they're like, has anything changed? And the answer is no. We added a free tier. Now the free tier gets access to a couple courses. One that is before you start the road to podcast success, And, of course, there's a free pod page course.

Dave Jackson (29:12): And then you get access to some of the community called general podcasting. But there are also things like the SOP episodes. There is a special ask the team section. There are event replays. So if you can't come to the events, there's replays.

Dave Jackson (29:28): There are questions about courses. There's an AI community and analytics community, a monetization community. So all those, you get the general one. But if you want all of the community, then you would become a paid. And then likewise, there is coaching that I always talk about on this show that you get access to me.

Dave Jackson (29:47): And so that is part of the paid plan. So it's really kind of gears for people that want to come in and chime in with the community, get their feet wet, get into podcasting. I was looking today, there's some things on my YouTube channel. So it's things I've already said for free in public. I'm gonna add those to the free course.

Dave Jackson (30:05): And that's for me, one of the things that I'm kind of excited about. I've never really done the freemium. And freemium is a different model because if you don't have valuable things in the free, well, then why would they upgrade? Because this stuff isn't very good. And then likewise, if you add too much stuff to the free, well, then why do I need to upgrade?

Dave Jackson (30:24): Because everything I need is on the free section. So so it's a little different than the fourteen day trial on pod page because on that particular trial, you get access to everything, but it's for a limited time. Now if we flip that around, you can be a free member for as long as you want, but you're not gonna have access to everything. So that's how that works. And again, if you're a current member, I keep saying nothing changes.

Dave Jackson (30:50): But the one thing that's going to change is I'm now going to have more time to make more videos and grow the community and bring in some experts. So things are going to change. But in terms of access to the content, as a paid member, you get access to everything.

Brenden Mulligan (31:07): We're just funneling everyone into joining the school podcasting as a free member. And if they want the additional time with Dave, all the coaching, all the courses, they can sign they can go over. But if they just want sort of a a place to ask some questions in a chat, just like they're doing in Facebook, we have that in the school podcasting.

Dave Jackson (31:24): So There is one big change.

Brenden Mulligan (31:26): One thing we did as part of this, I don't know if anyone noticed, was we moved to schoolpodcasting.com from a ten year old WordPress installation over to Podpage. And then we added some cool functionality. So we would've this would've never happened if we didn't do this deal. But the first thing that we did was we needed to get the content over. So in Podpage, we built an entire WordPress migration tool, which now we can offer to other podcasters who wanna come to Podpage from WordPress.

Brenden Mulligan (31:51): That's just a tool that, like, we needed to build for this and now we get to offer it to a bunch of other podcasters. So that's really cool.

Dave Jackson (31:57): And the beauty of having a different set of eyes look at your stuff is you find things like this.

Brenden Mulligan (32:02): Anyone who wanted to read about any of Dave's courses, there was nowhere online that you could actually look in details about them. You had to join the school of podcasting on Heartbeat to look to see the description of the courses. It's a horrible way of discovering the content. And for some reason, all of the platforms, Heartbeat and Circle and all, they just they don't have publicly available pages, which means Google can't access them. Which means if you're searching for a course on podcasting, Dave's courses would never ever ever ever ever show up because they're not public.

Dave Jackson (32:30): And the beauty of having a Brendan Mulligan on your team is he then just comes up with a solution.

Brenden Mulligan (32:35): When we moved it over to pod page, what's cool is now I built an integration with heartbeat, which is the platform that it runs on. And so now, if you go to schoolpodcasting.com/courses, you see the whole course catalog, you get to read about it, you get to see all the lessons. Google gets to see that, but but we can share that link with other people. But now you get to go and you get to see all the courses. It's cool.

Brenden Mulligan (32:54): And that we're adding an events page. So all events that we're putting inside this cool podcasting will be publicly you could see the list. Now, you can't join all of them, but you can see what what's going on. And then, I'm working with the heartbeat team now on a reverse integration where anytime school podcasting episode is published to pod page, we'll actually also publish it into a channel within the school podcasting heartbeat. Again, that will be a feature that anyone can use as as a heartbeat community.

Brenden Mulligan (33:19): So it's been cool because one of pod pages biggest, I'd say constraints or or limitations has been podcasters grow beyond just podcast and they have their own community, and it's on Circle or Heartbeat or Mighty Networks. And by working with Dave internally on this, we're able to sort of be like, okay. Let's build these features for school podcasting that then get everyone on Podpage can enjoy. So that's those there's things we're gonna release in the next couple months.

Dave Jackson (33:44): So I'm very excited to have additional resources and now additional time to work on the school of podcasting, and this is what we see for the future.

Brenden Mulligan (33:52): This is the start. And, you know, I don't think we mentioned it, but there's no change to pricing. And the goal will be, you know, by the end of the year, I think I say I sent Dave a little bit of an overwhelming list, but I was like, okay, I looked at your courses, courses, but what if we thought of this as, like, if you were to build an actual physical school to educate podcasters and they were to go through a curriculum, what would that curriculum look like and what would the different cohorts be? And I think it ended up being, like, 60 courses. It's a little much.

Brenden Mulligan (34:25): But but the courses are very targeted. So like, the courses are intended sort of the way that we had we started designing it was these courses would be like mini courses. They would be able to be consumable in like a thirty minute chunk or an hour long chunk. So it's not like a long course, which means at your lunch break or whenever, if you just wanna sit down and be like, I just need to be schooled on affiliate marketing for my podcast. Cool.

Brenden Mulligan (34:48): Go and take the course. You're done. Right? Because you lack look at all these course platforms and the completion rate's really low. Well, the completion rate's low because these courses are really long.

Brenden Mulligan (34:57): And so instead of having like a everything about pod monetization course, maybe we just need five or six courses with specific things to learn. So the hope is by the end of the year, we have a really really awesome curriculum that spans the whole podcast lifestyle that has very short, very actionable pieces of advice for each different thing. And so we're hoping like the actual the the recorded courses end up being really really special by the end of the year. Obviously, not today. Right?

Brenden Mulligan (35:23): Was just beginning of a journey. And then we'll be rolling out like a the event schedule, like a more regular, like Dave said, more events that we can do on a monthly basis. So you'll have more access to Dave, more access to just getting information at at, like, live events and webinars. We wanna add a lot to it. We're not gonna change the pricing, but we wanna make the what you're paying for a lot more valuable if we can.

Brenden Mulligan (35:44): And then, obviously, more access to Dave.

Dave Jackson (35:46): And I believe that answers the most common questions that we got during the town hall. I did have somebody ask, are you going to retire? Are you not going to teach podcasting anymore? And I wanna play a clip from a documentary called The Messengers, a podcast documentary. And this is me, and this is how they closed the movie.

Unknown Speaker (36:06): My grandma lived to be 95. She was born in 1899. So and the one day she said that, and I was on the couch. She goes, well, honey, I was born in 1899. I'm like, woah, grandma.

Unknown Speaker (36:17): You're older than dirt. And in her age, she saw things go from horse and buggy to the space shuttle. So I wanna be that guy that looks back and when we're consuming podcasts in our head through the chip or whatever is going on at the time and go, yeah. I remember when there was no iTunes and when there was no Google and kinda be able to hopefully help people eliminate some of the headaches and and things like that. I'll still be doing that.

Dave Jackson (36:40): My wife asked me, when are you gonna stop podcasting? I said, the day you bury me. And I'll have a link to everything out at schoolofpodcasting.com/1020eight. So if you wanna preview what your site would look like on pod page, I'll have a link to that. I'll have a link to join to the school of podcasting.

Dave Jackson (36:57): And thanks to everyone who sent out the well wishes. I deeply appreciate it. We do have some work to do to kinda clean up some old stuff as we make room for the new stuff. So for all of you that are like, I'm gonna, you know, suggest me as an expert, that's fine, but that may not be coming for a bit. But we'll see.

Dave Jackson (37:15): There's a lot of it that we're like, well, let's try this and let's try that. So I'm excited that I like I said, I started after filing bankruptcy and divorce in 2004, lived in my brother's basement in 2005 to now be doing the school of podcasting and, of course, pod page as my day job, I couldn't be happier. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker (37:39): Oh,

Unknown Speaker (37:41): now that's a good question.

Dave Jackson (37:43): Oh, we're going into the deep end of the pool. Where do you think podcasting is going? Or you might view it as, what do you feel the future of podcasting is? Are you optimistic about the future, or are you kinda going, and if so, why in both cases? I would love to hear it.

Dave Jackson (38:06): I need your answer by 04/24/2026. Simply go to schoolofpodcasting.com/question, and don't forget to tell us a little bit about your show and your website address. Again, I need that by 04/24/2026. Want more podcasting tips? Join the 1,700 people who read my newsletter at podcastingobservations.com.

Dave Jackson (38:40): That's podcastingobservations.com. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We started off talking about relationships, and I just thought I would throw this in here.

Dave Jackson (38:51): My favorite tool, it's a whopping $15 a month, which is cheap for this kind of product, is a CRM. Now that stands for, you know, customer relation manager. But I and a lot of these really get into sales funnels and things like this, and this has that feature. But I really like it as a way to a, set reminders to reach out and, you know, just touch base with someone as well as I can put notes in there. It's really cool.

Dave Jackson (39:20): It's really that's what I use it for is, hey, I, you know, need to follow-up with someone about such and such or whatever. And this is the actual name of the tool, Less Annoying CRM. I'll put a link to it because there is an affiliate program, but I'm here to tell you, I use this one because I love it. I've used it for years. It works with Zapier.

Dave Jackson (39:40): So if you wanted to, like in my case, when somebody signs up, it automatically adds them to my less annoying CRM. So it's a great tool, and it's a great way to keep up with your relationships. I'm here to tell you, yes, it's great to have technology and great content, and that all is definitely still part of the deal, but relationships that I planted came back and bloomed years later. So thank you so much for listening. If you wanna join the School of Podcasting, go out to schoolofpodcasting.com/start.

Dave Jackson (40:17): You'll see the options there. You might have to click change to see the different options if you're looking for the free version, but you might as well just start with the paid because there is a thirty day money back guarantee. So if you're worried about that, you don't have to be worried. I'm Dave Jackson. I help podcasters.

Dave Jackson (40:34): It's what I do. Been doing it for over twenty years. And until next week, take care. God bless. Class is dismissed.

Dave Jackson (40:54): And then one day, over those over those yeah.