The Real Way to Monetize a Podcast (Without Millions of Views) w/ Travis Chappell 🎙️ EP150

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Money Moneys Podcast where we cover three core topics how to make money, how to invest money, how to give it away to charity. As you guys know, these episodes are under 40 minutes for your listening pleasure because the average workout is 45 minutes, the average commute to work is 45 minutes. So this episode will be between 33 and 37 minutes for you today. The reason this podcast is doing so well is we have a 93% listen to rate and you guys supporting liking commenting subscribing we obviously always need that. This is not a podcast filled with ads or commercials. This podcast is designed for you to actually listen to it share with your friends and have important discussions with your friends family and followers about money. We grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. I think it's ridiculous. I think you have to talk about it. And I think that with the success of the podcast it's showing that people are actually engaging with it, showing it to their friends and family and I get to hear all these stories of what's happening because people are finally being blunt about money because it's part of your normal life. For your medical bills, your health, your food, utilities, rent, car payment, those are all not evil things. They're just part of your daily life and you need money to do those things. All right, without further ado, we're going to dive into our first guest. So I've known for years. We've been at events together, we've done masterminds together, we've done podcasts together and it's been a person in my circle. I sent clients to him all the time because I love what he's doing, I love what he's built. So what we're going to do is have Travis Chappell give a quick two minute bio so we get straight to the money. Sure Matt, so quick two minute bio. grew up thinking I was going to be a pastor. Got my unaccredited degree in Bible and Church Ministries in college. It was sort of a cultish called more like a bubble now these days because it's the easiest way I can explain it to people. But I thought I was going to be a ministry. I grew up in an internship in college, realized I did not want to do that. And I couldn't really find work as an unaccredited Bible degree holder. There's not a lot of employers that are lining up offering jobs. So I did door-door sales for about five years, six years just to pay the bills, figure things out. Pretty quickly realized I didn't want to do that with rest of my life either. So kind of back to square one, that's basically trying to figure out what I wanted to do with rest of my life doing the work of like a 14 year old because I was like 22 and I had a wife and I had a mortgage. So I jumped into podcasts. It was the first time I listened to podcasts. It was the first time I've seeked information elsewhere and really started falling in love with the medium. Fast forward a little bit, started my own podcast, hired a coach, jumped in mastermind. And then that was eight years and 1500 episodes ago. So in the meantime, basically anything inside of the podcast space we've done podcasts consulting courses, coaching communities, events for treats around the world, things like that. But then also a software company and an agency, how people get booked on podcasts. So we've sort of touched basically every piece of the, every piece of the puzzle now. Yeah. Wow. Why have you dedicated so much time, energy, money, and passion into the podcast industry? It was really relationships to be honest with you. Like when I first jumped in, it was like I was trying to figure out a way to make money but without being tied to a physical place, right? Like door-door sales was an underrated industry in my opinion. You make a lot of money doing it and you do it on your own time. It's 100% commission for the most part. But I basically got to the point where I was like, I have to physically be here to make money and that sucks. So podcasting originally was just kind of like, oh, I didn't realize people made money with this and I started following a couple of people, a couple of mutual friends of ours and at the time was like, the student made how much? Just podcasting from like a spare bedroom in his house and my buddy John Lee Doom is doing it in Puerto Rico. From a spare bedroom making a million and a half bucks a year just podcasting. I was like, that's not a bad gig. The quickly realized that it's not that easy to do, which is why there's a burden. You can go ahead and get your money. Yeah, exactly. I have 5.4 million podcast. Exactly. So yeah, so I got into it for that reason and then I started, my show is called Build Your Network because I basically was starting my network from scratch at the time. Like I said, I grew up kind of in a bubble cult type deal. So when I left that world, I was legitimately starting from scratch in terms of the people that I knew. I had no business being in business, didn't know anybody who was doing business at the time, didn't grow up with anybody who was in business or had a parent who was in business. And so I was like, if I'm going to figure out how to this entrepreneurship path, which probably like meets somebody who's done it, you know what I mean? So I started doing three interviews a week when I first started all with the purpose of like figuring out how people were connecting with each other and then it, and then like two years into the sort of experiment I started realizing because people would ask me, you know, because I do, I do appearances on the podcast and because my topic was networking and relationships, people started asking me like, well, Travis, what's your number one networking tip, you know? And I would always give them some abstract answer like, well, you got to give more than you take and it's all about value and it's all about, you know, delaying gratification, it's the long term, which is all true. But when I really thought about it, the practical answer to the question was like, my podcast, like 100% hands down. Like I would not know any of the people that I know if it weren't for the fact that I had an excuse at a Trojan horse, I had a reason to sit down with people who I admired or respected or at least wanted to know more from. And then the podcast sort of became that like launch pad that grew into just this network that kept expanding into new relationships and new worlds, which has taken me like entrepreneurship to podcasting to even like comedy and television and athletes and entertainment like all these different worlds that I'd be able to get a glimpse into just because I had a reason to talk to people. So the relationships is what's kept me going over the years for sure. So on the make money side, you know, we cover these three core topics, make money, invest money, give me a charity on the make money side. How can someone out there that starts their podcasts make any money from their podcasts? It really depends on what you're willing to do. So if you are somebody who only exclusively wants to make money from building an audience and having sponsorships, the road is going to be much longer for you. Just bottom line. Is it possible? Yes, people do it all the time, but it's just a longer road. It's more difficult because you have to have a strong audience size, you know, like if you want meaningful sponsorship revenue, you really need to be like five to 10,000 downloads in episode. Now it's gotten a little bit more democratized over the years because when I first started, they looked at it, they basically paid you on a 30 day time period from the episode of being released. So they wanted to know the core metric was what is your average downloads per episode through 30 days of release. Now with dynamic ad insertion, that matters a little bit less. They just want to know how many total impressions you can serve to them over a month. And that could be an episode you released six years ago that you can dynamically insert an ad into because 62 people are going to check that out this month and accidentally listen to it before realizing it was done six years ago. So you can serve ads across your entire library. So it's a little bit easier just because you can pump out more volume and get more impressions and some more impressions. But either way, it's sort of a long road. The other way to do it, especially for people listening to this podcast, who I'd assume are mostly entrepreneurs or at least entrepreneur, you'll is to use it as a foundation for building a business. There's two ways to build the business. One is you start with the product, the second one is to start with the audience. And so if you're starting with the product, you're going to do a similar process. You're going to have to go talk to people, figure out if they want the product, if it's a good product, if this product actually solves the problem or if they have to tweak it, test it, get a new version of it, whatever. The other side is more like you care about a topic or you care about a person and then you create content around this topic, solving this problem for this person. And then you serve that content out over six months, eight months, nine months, a year. And then you get to know that audience as much as you possibly can and you ask them what they need. And then you build what they need and sell it back to them because they already told you that's what they need. So for me, like coming from door to door sales, doing like podcast selling was like the biggest stark contrast you could possibly imagine because I'm going from like knock, knock, knock, hey, you didn't expect me to be here. Sign this contract to like you've listened to my podcast for six months. I jumped on a call with you three months ago. You, you know everything I talk about. You know exactly how I solve this problem for you. And you've told me on a phone call that this would be a solution that you would like to see for this problem. And now I've built that solution. Would you like it? And it's like, well, a barrier to sell is a lot, a lot lower in that context than it was when I was doing door to door. So there's, there's, there's two ways to do it is like you, you, you, you to, to build, to make money from the podcast. You build an audience and you monetize your sponsorships and, and affiliate stuff, or you build your own products and services. This one is a lot more immediate and a lot more, a lot more profit on this able to be able to do that one. But it also requires you to do something that maybe you didn't intend on doing when you started a podcast, which is build a business. And not everybody wants to do that. So it's sort of like a takeer pick. What are your thoughts about some podcasters that are making it patreon style or there or something actually using patreon? Yeah. So you're paying monthly subscription for like a VIP or exclusive part of their podcast. Yeah, totally fine. It's just, again, you need volume. You know, so I've, I've never really done that before because like you need a lot of volume to be able to make it. I mean, you're selling a patreon membership at five bucks a month, nine bucks a month, or something. So it's like if you don't have a million people in your audience, because like, you know, only five to 10% are going to take you up on that. You know, you need a hefty subscriber base to make a new real money doing that. So the majority of people that's, it's an option. That's not the best option though, you know, but I have some friends that make six figures a month in patreon. So but they just, they also have 1.3 million subscribers on YouTube. So, you know, I mean, like they make a lot of money from sponsorships and they make a lot of money from patreon too. So it is, it's a model. It's just, it's less within your control, I guess is what I'm really trying to say because it's difficult to acquire those types of listeners and that type of a fan base with paid spend. Just kind of rely on organic engine. What about the affiliate model? What about someone bring up products on their podcast and saying, hey, go use this brand.com or this company.com or this company. And here's my code. Yeah. Again, it's okay. But the majority of those are just going to be really low ticket. So again, if you don't have a massive audience where that revenue is going to explode or you're not in a niche that has really expensive stuff to sell, then you're going to find it's kind of an uphill battle. Right. So I'll give you two examples. I got a buddy. He started, his name is Harry. He's a good friend of mine. He started a podcast back in the day on podcasts called podcast junkie. And it was just him talking to podcasters. But then a few years back, he got into this weird vertical farming niche. Maybe he heard of this space, vertical farming. So it starts his podcast on vertical farming. Less than, I would assume, I would assume less than 500 downloads in episode, very, very niche audience. But it's an expensive hobby. So to build your own vertical farming system in your house, there's a ton of education. It's very high trust. And then when you do make a purchase, the people who manufacture those things are there higher ticket items. So I had a buddy who got into that space. His second season, he pre-sold sponsors for booked all of his sponsor spots up made $80,000 on sponsorship revenue for a podcast with less than 500 downloads in episode for a season. One of the companies that was sponsoring flew him out to Dubai for this like international vertical farming conference, which didn't know that existed. But yeah, so flown out to this place. He told me when he came back, he was like, bro, I was like a celebrity there. Like everybody that was at the conference listened to my podcast. So it was basically like all 700 people, you know what I mean? That ever listened to his show. We're internationally at this Dubai conference for vertical farming. But it's like you have a show like that. It's like there's really niche advertisers that are probably going to be better off spending their money with you than they're going to be buying random traffic from Google or Meta to send traffic to this high ticket item that requires a lot of trust in order to be able to deliver that item. So that's one another buddy of mine started an audio file podcast and he made money off of he made pretty good money off of affiliate stuff because he's selling you sell a $30,000 speaker. Right. You're going to make a decent affiliate commission, you know what I mean? I'm another buddy of mine does. He had a background in neuroscience. So he does like a brain health podcast or something like that or YouTube channel started doing tech reviews for like any sort of neural feedback devices and things like that. Expensive purchases. So he'll make you know 15, 20 grand a month doing as a mixture between sponsors and affiliate deals. But that's why I say like if you're going to do affiliate stuff, it works. It's just most people are stuck to like audible subscriptions. And it's like you make four bucks. You know, you better have a lot of people buying that for four bucks. For sure. So it's a model but you were a podcast machine. You know, you're putting out a lot of podcasts yourself every single week. You're obviously helping other people their podcasts like talk us through the volume game. Like I'm only one episode a week. Sometimes I do a double episode. So it's two 30 minute episodes combined. Yeah. But I'm only at one episode a week and sometimes I was like, Sparak, I do like a random Friday. I'll put out a special edition episode if something's going on in the world. Yeah, sure. Like I'll rush out an episode. But man, I got tired just thinking about it. And I'm a pretty busy guy. And I hear you talk about doing multiple episodes a day walk us through that. Yeah, this was basically right around the time I decided to sell Guestio, which was my software company. And it was not like a massive win for us. You know what I mean? So I was like, okay, well, we got to go kind of go back to the drawing board and figure out what's next. And we were accidentally making some decent money with sponsorships. Like before, before I never thought about it, we just never did sponsors. It was always we build our own products and services. We sell our own stuff. And then last year just kind of like snuck up on me a little bit. Like I looked at it at the end of the year. And I was like, oh, we made like six grand last month in sponsorships. Like that's not great. That's not bad. You know what I mean? That keeps the lights on type of thing based on my producers and things like that. I wonder what would happen if we like really spent time trying to do this because we're releasing like three episodes a week at the time. So January, I just basically decided, why don't we split off the shows? Because I was having trouble with my shows. Like one of them, I wanted to just be like whatever I want to talk about, I want to talk about. But it's an objectively terrible strategy for growth. Like talking about whatever you want to talk about. We talked to everybody. You talked to nobody. Exactly. And I love doing it. So it was like, I don't want to stop doing that. And I love that I can talk to a Navy SEAL and then a professional athlete and then a billionaire and then a best-selling author and a psychologist. I love that I can do that. So that's like, we keep this over here. That's Travis Mix friends. I do whatever I want on that show. But for this one, it was like, I constantly had all my business friends hitting me up about coming on the podcast. And I was like, we don't want to talk about business anymore. But I do like talking about business. So we basically just decided that at that time, if we're going to do a volume game, let's do the one that I know I can play and win, which is I can have unlimited conversations about business because I have no shortage of friends who are in that space now that I've been doing it for a long time. So we decided, let's do daily episodes. Because there's two ways to increase your total monthly impressions that you can sell if you're going to get more sponsors. One is increase listeners. Obviously. Second one is increase volume. It's like, fastest way to double your downloads. Double your release schedule. You know what I mean? So we went from three a week to one a day. So since February 1st, I want to say, or maybe the last week in January of 25, we've been doing one a day. And that was working. And it was like, well, we got sponsors to start making, you know, 15, 20,000 bucks a month or something like that in sponsors. And it was like, okay, well, this is turning into like some decent income. So like August time frame, I'm having a conversation with my buddy who runs workshops for Hermosi. And we're talking, he loves talking business. All he does all day is look at businesses and help them. So he was talking me through the podcast and he was just like, well, what if you just like doubled your releases again? And I was like, what are you talking about? And I'm releasing one a day. This is like, yeah, right. But I'd started thinking more about it and was like, I wonder if I could do that. You know, so starting September. So it's been three, four months now. We started doing two a day. So now we do an interview every day and a solo show every day. But the thing that's been sort of the magic of the back end is like, we also, my team, because we've been able to increase on sponsorship revenue, we've also been able to increase on releases on social, which has been massive. So now like before, I think we're putting out like we weren't doing a low volume before, but probably maybe 50 posts a month between like all of our social platforms or something. So it wasn't like a small number, but it wasn't a massive number. But now we're probably over 200 a month that we're posting on on socials. And that by itself is in the last like six months, we probably gotten 40 million views or something like that across all of our social channels and like just the clips of the podcast and stuff. So it was like this volume, there's something to this volume thing. I mean, especially now with all the platforms, we're rewarding each individual piece of content, not your total follower count in terms of, you know, one thing could take off and go parabolic. Just only makes sense to me is like, well, all we have to really do is decrease the amount of time in between those parabolic videos, which if you're posting 20 times a month, could take you six months to find the outlier video. If you're posting 180 times a month, it could take you one month to find the outlier video. You know what I mean? And then you just double down what's working. So the volume game has sort of been a blessing in both of those senses because we have no shortage of content to clip and post and share. So we have sort of like the social media podcast aspect of it with the backend, long form content for people who really want to listen to the long form. So like our overall audience hasn't necessarily increased that much in the last like six months. It's just the fact that we're releasing two a day now. So it's difficult to lose when you're doing that much volume, you know. So are you doing what's called podcast batching? Are you doing that? Absolutely. 10, 20 episodes and then boom. Live and die on batching, bro. Yeah. There's no way. That's like my number one piece of advice to people is like the reason you're not keeping up with consistency is because you don't have a batch of episodes. It's like if we stopped releasing right now, we would be good for the next five weeks probably on two a day. That's two a day. Right. So that's like 70 episodes in the can done, prepared, ready to go. The video I'm posting today at five o'clock is about podcast batching. Oh, perfect. Yeah. Yeah. So that's literally what we do. So like I'll just I'll basically go through sprints, you know what I mean? So like I'll do like a week a month where I'll just do like 40 pieces of content. But that's it for like the whole month, you know what I mean? So it's now gotten down to sort of a science because I know I can crank out eight interviews in a day and I know I could like, but the thing that the thing that's really helped recently, to be honest with you, the linchpin for us has been my producer. So my producer Eric is of content fiend himself. He's got his own. He's got his own YouTube channel, his own podcast that does really well that he started actually with me, probably five years ago and it's been doing really well now. But he's my full time producer at this point. So literally when we do a batch of recordings, like I don't have to show up with any research done before I had any prep, anything. He knows my stuff so well and he knows the content algorithm so well that basically we'll jump on for like three hours and we'll record like eight episodes and three hours. But he just has like topic question clip to react to and then we just go and then we just we say welcome the show and then we do 20 minutes stop recording, start recording again, welcome the show, we do another one. So we just knock out seven or eight at a time, but he also acts as my cohost. So we have some good repartee, some good bounce off of each other, which is sort of leading us into wonder if we could do this for other people because the producer thing has been a massive piece of the success and for people who are like running businesses and busy, that's the number one barrier is like we were doing podcast production before for people, but we would never get content. It's like they paid me 15 grand to help them launch a podcast or something, some of them a lot more than that and then never send us an episode to edit. It's my business like we would shoot them an email once a week, once a week, hey, hey, hey, just nothing. We never got anything back. So the producer thing I think is a really big, a really big hack. What do you think? Somebody do that for you. It's actually my next question. So you teed it up perfectly. There's 5.4 million podcasts in growing, but the vast majority of them never make more than 10 episodes. That's the famous stat, right? Why do you think that is? Yep. That's a massive part, batching. They can't keep up with the consistency for the release schedule. And there's no commitment. It's just always like, I think I could do a podcast and they release two episodes and it's like nothing happened. Their life didn't change, so they just quit. And they don't want to call their friends anymore to come on the episode? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it's just a lack of content, a lack of consistency and a lack of commitment. It's like it's not difficult. It's sort of that old trope. I mean, it's simple, but it's not easy. So how do you make it easier for yourself? That's the question that I always try to ask myself. It's like, if it were easy, what would it look like? Well, it would probably look like creating an entire month of content in a day so that I can go back to all the other things that demand my time. But if you do it on a weekly basis, it's just more difficult to keep up with it because then it's like, I got a release tomorrow and then your quality dip. So that's what I tell people is like, you want consistent quality content with context. So release as much content as you possibly can without sacrificing any of those things. Context being, you're not just talking about random stuff, you're talking about the stuff. It's for your audience. Quality meaning that you're not just putting out an episode of the sake of putting out an episode that you know it's actually something that's going to be meaningful or valuable for the people listening and then consistency, something that you can keep up with. So consistent quality content with context. If you do that over and over and over and over and over again, you will build an audience. I don't know how big it will be. Like the results may vary, but results will come. Which is a matter of what metrics are you really measuring your success by? So when someone wants to book someone big for their podcasts, you've had everyone from Shaquille O'Neill to Business Legends, etc. How does someone celebrity wise? Like how do they go get someone big for their podcast? Real celebrities is tough. And you know this being in the space of a bunch, real celebrities are really tough to kneel down. So I'll start with more, like that's a nice thing about them. And it's like you don't have to start with Shaquille O'Neill. And if you think that's who you have to start with, you'll never start because he's never going to say yes. You know what I'm saying? Without paying, am I? Yes. An exorbitant amount of money. People think people, and again, you know this, I'm preaching to the choir on this, but we've had plenty of people that come to us and be like, hey, can you get us some a-listers? It's like, we can. I don't know. I don't know if you want to pay $200,000. Just a down this person for 25 minutes on a Zoom call. I have a client right now from my agency. I'm booking talent for their podcast. They let it went out and raised capital. Nice. Because they wanted a household name celebrity. So I'm like, I can get up. But it's $100,000 here, $250,000 here, $50,000 here. Yes, I'll work some favors for $30,000, $50,000, but like the big names are $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 sometimes more. That's right. And they're gambling. They believe that they can build a big brand, which I do as well. And you'll see me post about them soon. But it's working. And it's really good talent. And it's a really cool different type of podcast. But like- It's a model. You know what I mean? It's just a difficult model to- And they're in act. They knew in advance because they had a big deal to make them financial revenue from it. But like I helped other podcasts and sometimes they do it for vanity. They want Shaquille and Neo for example, I'm just using them as an example. They want him for six figures because they look up to him or they love him or they grew up watching him. And that's okay too. What's interesting I like is if you can get someone big early, it doesn't have to be that big, but it gets someone big early, that's who you leverage to get other guests. If you look at the email, the opening email and someone message you and you guys listening probably got it a lot. It's say people trying to get you on as a guest. It says I've had Gary Vee in Bradley and Shaq or whoever the people are. And they say that, that's how they lead the conversation because it breaks down the barrier to- Instick credibility. Yeah, so that's all people. It's like you want to punch in the face and credibility. Like when I'm reaching out to people, I want to punch in the face. Like I don't want them. If you're trying to get big guests in your show, you have to eliminate all obstacles to them saying no team. And the fastest way to do that is by leveraging a name that they already know like in Trash is the time. I got into Mark Cuban and Shaq, okay. Yeah, right. Why would they say no? If it's worth their time, it's probably worth my time. Because that's really the thing that I noticed was that massively successful people don't necessarily care how big your audience is. They just care that they're not wasting their time. That's it. The most important metric for them, for anybody that's successful is they know how valuable their time is. So they want to know that they're not going to waste their time. Well, how do I help make sure that they know that they're not going to waste their time? Well, massive audience is one of those things that contributes to that obviously in a large way. If you're a direvice CEO, if you're Jimmy Fallon, if you're Conan O'Brien, it's like you get basically any guest in the world on your show, Joe Rogan, any guest in the world that you want because you have a massive audience, massive distribution. And that by definition makes it not a waste of their time. But there's other factors that go into that, which, and one of those things is, is this person going to treat my time the way that I want my time treated? Are they going to ask good questions? Are they going to be engaged host? Are we going to be able to pull content from this that we can use in other parts of our business or whatever? So there's multiple ways to answer that question without having a massive audience. And the bunch of the people that came on my show came on way before they should have. They said yes. So many people that were just surprising to me, when they said yes, I was like, yes, because of you, your name, and because of the fact that you had other big name guests? Big name guests, I think, is a huge reason. Because I also would try to get testimonials from big name guests who enjoyed the conversation. Because that's your job as a host, too, right? It's like once getting the yes is the first step. But if you don't want to fritter away this amazing relationship, you have to have a good conversation. You have to actually be a good host. Like you, because people never remember what you say, but they'll always remember how you make them feel. So when you have somebody in studio or you have somebody on a Zoom call or whatever, you have to try to do your dead level best to make it the best possible experience for that person that they could imagine. So that in the future, they might be willing to say yes, a lot faster. Or they might be willing to make an introduction to somebody else. Or they might be willing to even give me a testimonial that I can use and reach out for other people that says like, you will not be wasting your time if you spend 90 minutes with Travis. You know what I mean? Because we got, we got to some stuff that was really, really good. So I always try to strive for how do we make this an amazing conversation. So let's talk about the outliers. We've seen color daddy, the Kelsey brothers, etc. I get these like $100 million deals. And oftentimes I'll forward them to you because I'm like, whoa, how did this like wrapper from 15 years ago, 20 million dollar deal like nine weeks into his podcast? Like, what are your thoughts about these outlier deals? And what is all that money for it? Is it go to the person or does that go to like marketing and what are they doing with it? Well, good news, bad news on that. Good news is that as soon as that Joe Rogan deal hit a few years ago, it basically set a number on something that before had not been set. $200 million. Yeah, right. Exactly. It was basically like water podcast worth. Who knows? And then Spotify was like, it's worth a quarter billion dollars. And there's thoughts went up like a billion dollars that day. Right. Objectively a great move for. But then with some of the other ones, it's like they just got massive distribution really, really quickly. You know, the Bobby Altafs and the and and color daddy that whole thing like they just got massive audiences. And sometimes you sometimes you get lucky. It's a thing in like in content creation and podcasting is like you could work till your blue in the face. But like there's always a little bit of a mixture of kind of alchemy, timing, luck that just makes some of these shows just go parabolic. I mean, even the Kelsey brothers is like they would not see not have seen a percentage of the success that they've seen had it not been right around the time that Travis Kelsey was getting huge because he was dating Taylor Swift. It's like, well, they leveraged that very, very well. And yeah, exactly exactly. And they just moved out and quit. We want $100 million on then. Right. 12 days later. Somebody was like, OK, you're right. Well, because like the bottom line is like the companies want the attention. That's what Gary Veeves and Preach and for the last 15 years is we're seeing happen in real time now where it's just like where the attention goes, the money is going to follow. So if these massive creators have these massive audiences, somebody's going to want that attention, you know, whether it's Amazon with acquiring one dream or Spotify acquiring Gimlet, like those were a couple of the big moves that we saw early on that these were podcasts networks like Wondry was a network, Gimlet was a network and they would incubate and create their own original content. And then they sold to these massive tech platforms who had the huge budgets and wanted the attention in their tech. So now I think it's just more of a matter of, can you get a piece of that attention? And what are you going to do with the attention when you get it? Are you going to create something that's on your own? You're going to sell the IP to a big company. Is that part of the deal? Like is the IP part of the deal? Do they own rights to your name, image likeness? Do they own the rights to your show? Or they are just doing distribution and you have like a fee, like a split with them for sponsorship revenue? But when the shows are being acquired though, I think the majority of that goes to the creator. But I also think that those companies are spending a pretty penny in advertising those shows. They're squeezing the lemon and getting every drop of juice they can out of it. So when it comes to investing, let's not talk about investing in businesses. What about investing into the podcast? Someone wants to start a podcast. What does it take for them? How much money do they need? Two grand, ten grand, twenty grand? Like what does it take to start a podcast from the job? Sure. So the answer is almost nothing. Like when I started my podcast, I have a picture somewhere. I could probably pull it up if I had enough time. But I have a picture somewhere of my first ever studio setup, which was basically an upside down laundry basket in my closet with my laptop on top and a fifty dollar USB microphone plugged into my laptop. That was it. So I was all in for equipment and set up and the whole thing for sixty bucks. So you can start with that. Here's what I've sort of noticed in terms of the entrepreneurship world anyway. The more legit you can make your setup these days, the better off it'll be for your long term goals as a business owner. And this might not be the case if you're starting a sports podcast with your buddies and none of you have a bunch of extra income to dump into it. Like that is a little bit of a different barrier to entry. But for an entrepreneur who's got a seven figure eight figure nine figure business and they want to get into this space, like spend some money and make an amazing setup inside of your office or something like that, which is exactly what we've helped some like a mutual friend Jeff Fenster. When we did some consulting with them and helped them get their podcast up, we did the first year, year and a half production for them. And we were consulting them on like cave, you know, we should put a studio space and we walked into the office and I was like, okay, well, you have this office. It's not being used. What if we just like put some things on the wall, you know, probably like 10, 15 grand will be in and out. Then I came back like three weeks later and they built like a quarter million dollar studio in the middle of their office. And I was like, I guess that was what happens when you own a construction company as well you can build whatever you want. I talked to Jeff recently about it. I was like, what have you seen happen from this and he was like, bro, it's unbelievable. Just like the volume of people that we've been able to bring through the office just because we have an excuse to put them in studio and make them look awesome and like talk about their business and talk about how cool they are. They come in, they see all the stuff that we're up to and now we're doing business together. It's like you can easily track multi six figures in some of these people, seven figures, eight figures to just relationships that were formed because you had an excuse to bring somebody into your office. That's why I call it the Trojan Horse. The excuse to get past the gatekeeper. It's much more difficult to reach out and other cold LinkedIn DM to somebody who wanted to do business with us and say, hey, let's jump on a sales call. I have some processes that are going to blow your mind. It's like, yeah, you and the 43,000 other people that DMed me on LinkedIn this year. But asking them to come through to your office to do a full hour long video recording of their life story with your multi six figure podcast studio is like, oh, sure. Whatever I'm in your neck of the woods, I'll pop over, sit down, have a conversation, you walk them through your office and then if there's a way to do business together, there's probably going to be a way that you do business together. So that's why I say it can range wildly. If you're just like somebody who has no money and you're just starting out because you want to get started, you can get started for 50 bucks for the USB mic. You got some external audio. If you want external video, just webcam that records in 1080p or something like that, you don't have to go crazy with it. Just any sort of external audio is great and then some video aspect and then you're off to the races. You need a media host, which is like 20 bucks a month or something like that. Or I think I think anchor does it for free. So even that side of it's super, super simple. Or you could go the other extreme, which is investing multi six figures in a studio set up in your office to have an excuse to bring people through and do like high level business development with those people. Like you go the more in right now. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So last main question is about philanthropy. Okay. Why do you think it's important for brands to have some type of charity component to their company, whether it's for their clients, their customers, their vendors or their staff? I think because first of all, I, I, this is just a personal belief of mine. I personally believe that business owners and entrepreneurs have more ability to impact the world around them than say the government or even most nonprofits. I, it's, it's harder for me just to like give money to nonprofits because I know how much they just. Ways? They waste so much of it, dude. It's like a penny of every dime you give to them is actually given to the cause that they say that they're all about. So for businesses to take more of an active approach, which is like what you do with your, your, even your homeless charity, it's like a hundred percent of the proceeds go to the thing that you're doing because you run a bunch of businesses. Right. Like this is not what you do so that you can get on the board somewhere so that you can have higher status in society so that you can raise money at this charity gala and then give yourself a fat salary and have a company car. It's like you give the money a hundred percent to the thing that you're actually saying you're giving the money to. So I think, I think if we're going to make the world a better place that entrepreneurs and business owners are the people who have the most leverage to be able to actually go out and do that thing because they have cash flow, they have sources of income and ultimately every cause needs money. So you got to have some sort of component that enables you to be able to give back in a little bit of a more efficient streamlined way. All right. So where can people find you on social work and they find the company your whole world? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just DM me at Travis Chapel on Instagram is probably the best place to find me. I mean, you go to my website, Travischapel.com, but that's more just like a hub that you can see all the stuff that I'm up to. But we recently just sold guestio not as much doing the podcast guest booking stuff anymore, but doing a lot more stuff with done for you production, producer placement, you know, entrepreneurship communities, things like that. So still working a lot on that front. So at Travischapel over on Instagram, shoot media. All right, guys, we appreciate you. As you know, we've been running these things ad free. I did do a sponsorship deal recently with Go High level because I actually use them for years. They power my entire back in, my ecosystem, my world for my charities, my events, my businesses, my sites, my courses, my everything. So I actually use Go High level. I'm not going to be giving out like discount codes. I'm not running like an ad, but they are sponsoring and I'm very happy to have them because I've always told you guys for the last two and a half years, I'm only going to do it with someone big like Wells Fargo, cash app like that. Where they're, someone I actually use on databases, go high level fits that category. You guys liking comedy subscribing is super, super important. No matter how big this podcast ever gets, I need you to do that because again, I'm spending a ton of money on this podcast to make it as big as I can to spread the message out there. So you out there going and talking to your friends, family and followers about money is mission critical for us and the podcast and you can literally help change people's lives. If you teach your friends how to save some money on their taxes, if you teach them how to pay their taxes better, if you teach them how to get rent versus lease, buy versus this, like them actually having these discussions, the butterfly effect is crazy what happens if they make more money on their job because now they know how to ask for a raise of their salaries because you talk them about money. Money is not the rule of evil. It's part of our day of the lives. So I appreciate you guys. Make sure to check out Travis Chappell Cross social media and we'll see you guys next Monday here at MoneyMundays.com.