Unlocking the Magic of SaaS Thought Leadership with Stijn Hendrikse

Media Thumbnail
00:00
00:00
1x
  • 0.5
  • 1
  • 1.25
  • 1.5
  • 1.75
  • 2
This is a podcast episode titled, Unlocking the Magic of SaaS Thought Leadership with Stijn Hendrikse. The summary for this episode is: <p>Do you strive to establish genuine connections and build trust with your audience?</p><p><br></p><p>If so, it's time to leverage the power of podcasting as an effective content strategy. As a founder or marketing leader, you can establish authentic relationships with your customers through podcasting. Join Stijn Hendrikse, as he shares the solution to achieving this result and establishing trust and authenticity with your audience.</p><p><br></p><p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/stijnhendrikse/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Stijn Hendrikse</a> is a talented entrepreneur, author, and marketing expert hailing from the Netherlands. With over two decades of experience in the B2B software industry, Stijn has successfully built and scaled numerous companies. Having moved to the US 20 years ago, he founded Kalungi, a growth agency, five years ago. Stijn is also the author of the popular book "T2D3.pro," which offers a playbook for scaling B2B SaaS companies. As a thought leader in the marketing world, he has helped many businesses connect with their audiences in meaningful ways through creative content strategies.</p><p><br></p><p>Listen in for:</p><p>☯️ 01:27&nbsp;-&nbsp;03:36 The art and science of marketing: How T2D3 came to be</p><p>🫡 06:18&nbsp;-&nbsp;08:01 Thought leadership begins with solving a problem your audience can't solve on their own</p><p>🔥 08:34&nbsp;-&nbsp;11:08 Utilizing the why/how technique to get to the core of your value</p><p>🧪 16:27&nbsp;-&nbsp;18:47 New ways of measuring your marketing impact</p><p>🧩 20:30&nbsp;-&nbsp;21:51 Why it's important to take ownership of your content</p><p>🔮 29:15&nbsp;-&nbsp;32:44 A look into the future of podcasting</p><p><br></p><p>Connect with Stijn</p><p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/stijnhendrikse/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.linkedin.com/in/stijnhendrikse/</a></p>
☯️ The art and science of marketing: How T2D3 came to be
02:08 MIN
🫡 Thought leadership begins with solving a problem your audience can't solve on their own
01:42 MIN
🔥 Utilizing the why/how technique to get to the core of your value
02:33 MIN
🧪 New ways of measuring your marketing impact
02:20 MIN
🧩 Why it's important to take ownership of your content
01:21 MIN
🔮 A look into the future of podcasting
03:29 MIN

Lindsay Tjepkema: Welcome to The Casted Podcast. It's the destination for the most innovative and forward- thinking marketers in B2B, like you. Each week I host conversations with brilliant marketing leaders on the tactics and tricks that they're harnessing to reach their revenue goals, rev their thought leadership engines, amplify their marketing voice in the marketplace and ultimately drive real business results. I'm Lindsay Tjepkema, CEO and co- founder of Casted, and this is The Casted Podcast.

Stijn Hendrikse: Stijn Hendrikse. I'm Dutch, moved to the US about 20 years ago and working with Kalungi, an agency I started five years ago and now more actually a consultant. I wrote a book, so I'm more working now as the author of T2D3 and working on some boards and as an investor, I do some work and so I have multiple things that I have my hands in.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Well, thank you so much for being here. I'm so excited. Let's talk first about T2D3. As a SaaS founder, I have heard triple, triple, double, double, double 100 times. Let's give a little bit of background for everyone like myself who has heard it, has been charged to go make it happen. Give us a little spiel on how that came to be for you and how you got here with that mindset?

Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, and thank you, Lindsay, for having me. I started my career as a software developer and I only turned marketer somewhere in the middle, but I figured out that marketing is so much more than the art side. Right? There's science, it's about the relevance, it's about building companies, building connections with audience, connecting problems with solutions. And T2D3 is the acronym that was... One of the managing partner of Battery Ventures, I think came up with it in 2015 probably. And it was never really turned into a real formula like with a this is how you do it, it was more about describing the outcome. And as I helped a lot of smaller software companies, I ran a couple myself, I founded a couple of startups... It became clear that this pivotal moment after you reach product market fit and now you're ready to really scale and to pour more fuel on the fire. Well, the biggest challenge is that you have to move from doing a couple of things at the same time to doing many things at the same time. Keeping your customers, reducing churn, driving up retention, building your funnel into something that is scalable across multiple marketing channels, not just the one or two things that work to get you to, let's say five or 10 million. They're organic or paid or ABM, but you inaudible to do all of those things. And then of course you need to increase the size of your customers at the same time. Things like ARPU expansion and doing all those in parallel is hard for a lot of relatively small teams who may not have been marketers by trade to begin with. Right? Most founders of B2B sales companies are either the subject matter experts who had a problem that they chose to solve with a technical solution. The dentist who builds a dental practice management software solution, or the engineer who finds a problem to solve that they care about, but usually they don't have a sales and marketing background. So the book T2D3` was a result of about 10 years of coaching and building B2B sales companies, getting them from a couple million to 15, 20 million in ARR and finding out all the patterns that sort of are similar, the challenges that sometimes I made a lot of mistakes that now I knew how to prevent those or things that I just saw others do that worked really well. And yeah, that's what you'll find in the book. It's kind of a playbook.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. And I got to say, even as a founder that is a domain expert for what the problem that we're solving, and as a marketer, it is still very, very hard. It's very hard and that's why I love that you've put together so many resources for brand builders and marketing leaders and founders that are trying to do this thing. Because it's tough and there are so many voices in your ear saying, " Hey, go do it. Go build the brand, go build the company, go bring in the customers, go grow the customers," that this, the T2D3 approach and all the resources that you put together have really helped you focus and literally lay out a framework for how to make it happen.

Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, it's also getting a little old now because we were in period 10, 15 years I think of growth was the thing, right? Growth at all costs. And investors were very comfortable financing a lot of that growth, even if it was not always codified very well or it wasn't easy to track whether we were making the right progress as a founder, as a company executive. So I think the last year, things like rule of 40 and how do you do this in a profitable way and where the growth is not just the goal in itself, but building a healthy company. It has brought a little more balance I think. All the concepts in the book are still the same, how do you make sure your customers stay with you? How do you make sure you monetize the relationship you have with the customers in the way they use your product into a better product? And the magic of SaaS, I think, Lindsay, is that these two assets, software and servers or subscription together are really magical. Software of course is magical in itself because it allows you to scale without adding new cost. But the service part, we have to deliver value on an ongoing basis. It's not just people will pay you forever, you'll have to now add value forever. Right? So there's really this win- win concept behind SaaS that I think has made the customer vendor relationship much more into a partnership.

Lindsay Tjepkema: I totally agree. And what I'm hearing is that although so much has changed in a very short period of time in SaaS and in startups, the one thing that remains is people, trust, relationships, the human element. And you talk a lot about, and you embody thought leadership. So tell me about the role that thought leadership played in the old guard and continues to play today.

Stijn Hendrikse: When you decide to build a company or to build a solution and you expect people to pay you for that solution, you better make sure that you solve a new problem, something that hasn't been solved by someone else. And thought leadership for me is actually relatively straightforward, something much more practical than a big vision or a very bold idea. It's about raising the bar, changing the narrative into something that your audience really cares for, a problem that they are not able to solve on their own. And if you're as a founder, ready to founder a company and to start and hire people and to build a product, you better make sure that you're ready to take a stance, to put yourself out there and say, " We think this can be done better." We think this can be done different. And that's by the way, where podcasts are a fantastic litmus test at the early stage of fast- growing small companies to see if the founder, the owner, the executives are able to articulate that. Are they able to really answer questions that nobody else is really answering or in a new way? So yeah, when I think of thought leadership and content being king and all those things that we as marketers take for granted, but when you then help try to help a company, help a founder grow, that's sometimes hard to get them to buy into that, they want to outsource writing the blog to you. Right? Why don't you come up with a couple of topics? Really challenging a founder to say, " Hey, why did you start this company and why was that important and why do your customers still care about using your product?" Right? That's where I think thought leadership can become very practical, very quickly, and then validate whether a founder or a company executive or a marketer who works at that company actually can answer the question, " Who's it for? Why? What's it for?" in a meaningful way.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah, and you beat me to the punch here on actually talking about podcasts. So this is a podcast about podcasting. We're very meta and I would love to hear specifically thought leadership and then you got into, that's why podcasting is a good litmus test, which I hadn't actually thought about it that way, like looking at where the founder sits on edgy new ideas. Tell me more about that and about the role that you think podcasts can and should play in a growing company right now, especially now.

Stijn Hendrikse: So whether you take Peter Drucker or whoever, whatever management guru, but building a business is basically about connecting a problem to a solution. Right? As I mentioned earlier. And so podcast is a nice way to challenge a founder or an inaudible to articulate that, what are you really trying to solve for? Why is that important? I actually do, when I do my own podcast, and this is maybe a trick that can help some of your listeners, Lindsay, I use the why/ how lettering technique a lot. That's a technique that comes from product design and user experience design where you ask users or your research subject to articulate why something is important. You do the five why's basically. And that helps you really get to the core of what they really care about, why it is important for them to have access to a certain piece of technology or to be able to do a certain task and what the higher value of that is. But then you also step down the ladder using the how question or how is it that you do this that is special? Right? And in that way, in a podcast you can really articulate not only the higher value and the purpose behind doing something or investing in something or spending money on a certain product, but you also get to why is the way that you do that special? Right? The features, the capabilities, the positioning if you will, the competitive differentiation. And so how is it that you do this special? And I think a podcast is a medium because it's so high fidelity. When you think of content, I don't know who wrote this, but I read somewhere this, there's low and there's high fidelity content. Low fidelity content, kind of a blog, you can skim it, or a book, you can kind of scan it a little bit, but you don't necessarily have to really engage with the content in a deep level. But when you listen to music or you listen to a podcast, you have to, and that's what this person called high fidelity content. And because podcast is high fidelity, you cannot really fast- forward and not... You will miss part of the content. Right? You cannot scan it. And so if you use a podcast to really do, for example, the why and the how lettering and letting a founder or an owner really explain why this is so important for their audience, I think you get to the core very quick. And then the other, what I love about a podcast, and we're experiencing this right now, Lindsay, you're not inhibited by any friction. Like, " Oh, it's hard to write. I don't know if my grammar is good." I'm Dutch, you know, my English is not great, but I don't worry about it in a podcast because I could get away with my accent, et cetera, much better than when I have to write. And someone will scrutinize me over that my inaudible is written with a E versus and A all the time. Right?

Lindsay Tjepkema: Well, and I think it's even that much more better because it's you.

Stijn Hendrikse: Oh yeah. You hear the tone and the tempo and the cadence and you hear voice, motion.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Your side, you don't have to worry. Like what you just said is you don't have to worry so much about grammar or how you write something. And then on the other side, somebody who would be reading something that you put forth, it's edited, it's polished, it's corrected. Whereas if somebody... Everyone who's listening right now can hear your beautiful accent and can hear the excitement and the passion in your voice, and it feels like they get to know not just your ideas and not just your thought leadership. Which are great, I mean, blogs are great, written content is great. But in addition to that, they also get to hear your excitement and your passion and your enthusiasm for what we're talking about. Which builds trust, which is important for every business, but especially something that's growing and it's a new idea, it might be new to the market. So couldn't agree more. It's funny because I got in, you started to ask about, or you started talking about how and how do you do this differently right when I was going to ask you how should founders or marketers at startups and growing companies, how should they be thinking about thought leadership content and podcast content differently than a really large brand or somebody else who might be creating the same type of content? Do you recommend a different state of mind when they are approaching a strategy behind a podcast or their thought leadership? Is there something different or is it the same and they shouldn't put up barriers because of their size and their age as a company?

Stijn Hendrikse: I think it's different, Lindsay, it's a great question. I think the bar is just so much higher. I worked for Chris Capossela at Microsoft, the CMO at Microsoft, and when he writes about something, it's totally fine for him to talk about ideas that have been written about 15 times. And he's extremely smart, so he'll add his own pieces that will make it valuable in itself. But just because it is Microsoft, it'll be read by many people and it'll have a lot of impact, et cetera. You and I cannot get away with that. We need to come up with something original. We need to answer a question that nobody else has answered. Right? So I think that's one of the things that's really different. If you and I work on a podcast or any other company that's not maybe a Fortune 500 brand, you need to be very relevant. That's probably the word that comes to mind. A trick that I've used that I've always coached people on is, every day that you work with your clients, with your audience, they're asking you questions or they're telling you stories and out of those, if you at the end of the day can distill one question that you heard, that when you type it into Google or these days ChatGPT, you don't get a clear answer. That's an opportunity for you to write or to cast about. And I get these a lot and they're usually not generic marketing questions, but they're related to a generic question, but they're put in a certain context or they're... One of the most successful blogs I've written, is very funny, it's what's the difference in popular meaning or successful meaning and the amount of traffic that are attracted. It's about what's the difference between a BDR and an SDR? And I wrote this four or five years ago. 10, 15 years after Salesforce came up with this whole concept. So there were 12,000 blogs on the topic on BDR and SDR and job descriptions, et cetera. But when I worked with CEOs, I constantly heard them ask, so confusing, there's all these title, what's really the difference? And the reality is there's no difference. But what I did, I wrote a blog that literally just talked about a bunch of the things that were out there that were confusing, cleared up some of those confusions, made some comparisons, and it became a blog that in itself added value because it was answering the question that was still being asked by people that I worked with, that was not being answered by the 12,000 blocks that were already written on the subject. Right? So if you are able to... if you hear a question that your audience asks you and you have something meaningful to offer, that's also helpful, that you have something to say... And you type it into Google and you don't see a great answer, then go record it. Get out your iPhone and record a podcast.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. Yes. So yes, just get started because that is actually one thing that I get asked about a lot is where do I start and what do I need to do and how do I put together this huge strategy? And the first step is just start. Just have a good conversation or share your ideas and capture it and just kick the tires, right? Test the theory. So you said traffic, which gets into measurement. What do you recommend or what do you see or how do you recommend brands and marketing leaders at startups measure the effectiveness of their podcast? What do you look at or what do you think people should be looking at?

Stijn Hendrikse: I think it goes to the bigger question, what do you measure to measure marketing success or impact? And the reality is that it depends a little bit on how mature your channel is, your podcast, your content, where you are in your part of the funnel that you're trying to develop. Are you trying to drive eyeballs and awareness or ears or what's the equivalent of eyeballs for a podcast? The listeners, I guess, audience. Yeah. Or are you really at the more deeper stage in the funnel? Is it all about conversion? Is it about getting people to come back and to feel that you're more credible in your field? Or whatever, right? And so I think just when you want to get healthy, you can of course try to measure your blood pressure as an outcome, but you'll have to measure how often do you go to the gym every week? Or how many calories do you count? You have to measure some of these inputs so early. And then of course later on you got to get to more qualitative metrics. And then ultimately for me in the podcast that I do, that I haven't been very good at getting a lot of episodes out lately, but we do one with the agency that I've started Kalungi called B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks, and I have a co- host, Mike, who's all over all the real metrics. Right? The size of your audience, how they behave, how many listen, how many episodes they consume and all that. I don't look at that at all, Lindsay. I personally enjoy it when someone tells me they bought my book because they heard the podcast, they found it or they found it to someone else. So my metrics that I care about are relatively soft, and that's fine for me because for me, the podcast is not about getting MQLs or getting sales or something like that. So I think it's a little bit, what do you care about? Why are you doing it? And then how do you turn that into something that you can measure consistently. Right? So you can have some apple to apples comparison. One thing that Mike did that I really liked, but I don't have a lot of real detail behind it, but I just like the concept. We started to get questions from listeners or from people who followed our content around very specific topics that we just couldn't get to in the podcast because they would take longer than 10, 15 minutes of conversation. So we started to do a member only a more, call it deep dive set of episodes and that for me was a great metric too. How often do people ask for those things? Right? And then can you produce those and do people actually listen? So that would be an ultimate quality metric of real engagement.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah, this is so exciting to hear you say this because as I mentioned, we get asked all the time, the same kind of question like what should I be measuring and how do I get started and where do I start? Which we put together this thing called the B2B Podcast Maturity Curve, which says just that. When you start at stage one and stage two... Stage one like you just said, is just start. Record something on your phone, post it on LinkedIn, see what happens, get into a cadence. Stage two is when you actually are producing a show, you actually are committed to a cadence and at that point, the metric that we tell people to look at is, are you producing a show? Did you produce a show? Did you publish? And did you publish it... did you say you wanted to do 10, and then you did 10? Good job. That's nailing it when you're getting started. And then, and only then can you actually start saying, " What about my audience? How do I grow my audience? Who's in my audience?" And then from there, you can start to say, " Am I growing my brand? Is it impacting other channels?" And then ultimately five stages in, you can start to say, " How is this impacting revenue? How is this connected to sales and CX?" And that should be the ultimate goal. But if you record on your phone and post to LinkedIn and expect to close a deal from it, you're going to stop before you even ever start. So on that note of don't do it that way... What are you seeing, whether it's in podcasting or content, marketing even in general, what are you seeing brands and growing companies doing wrong that that can potentially be frustrating to marketers and marketing leaders at these companies that you wish that they would avoid?

Stijn Hendrikse: And without sounding like, I'm trying to promote your company in this, Lindsay, I think helping the founder or the owner of a company do this partly themselves is really important. I don't think they should be delegating this to a junior marketing team member or to an agency for that matter, who will own the content. They should bring in agencies like yourself who could help with the production and help facilitate, et cetera, but they need to take real ownership of the content. What are the questions that my audience is really trying to find answers for? How does that connect to what we do, how we add value? And how can we educate people on that? How do we become the trusted guide to take them by the hand on their journey? The three questions that I always like to cut the funnel into, it's like, why should someone change? People are a natural state of apathy or an inertia is maybe a nicer word. Why should they change? Why would you and why now? And so if you can use a podcast medium to answer those questions, and that's partly education. You're taking people on a journey and that has to be owned by the founder, the owner of the company. And then if there's a is a company or a marketing team that can make the friction of doing that as low as possible, great. Right? But you cannot outsource coming up with those ideas or even doing the actual content creation.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Mm- hmm. I agree. And again, super biased podcast about podcasting by someone who started a podcast company, I get it. But podcasts are such a good way to do that because as founders, we talk a lot. We're passionate about the space that we're in here, you're putting it all on the line to start this company. I mean, of course you're used to talking about it and about talking about the space and talking to people like you who have good ideas about different perspectives and different approaches and different angles within that space and so it's just a natural medium. It's such a natural thing to be able to just have conversations and capture them. And then to be able to do so much more from it, you can equip your team with this conversation to say, " Okay, go forth and use this. Use this to fuel social media, use this to fuel messaging conversations," and so many other things. It's just to me, I mean, that's why we're here. It's such a no- brainer to just have conversations as a founder and be able to use it in so many different ways.

Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah. Either as an investor or an advisor or a consultant in whatever role, or a friend, when I meet an owner or someone who is leading a company, even if we have casual conversations on what they're doing, why they're doing it. I sometimes ask" Hey, can I just record? May I put my phone on the table?" Not to use it to be actually published, but to use it maybe later to come back to some of those topics and maybe re- ask the question. Because you get all the content sometimes in those casual conversations.

Lindsay Tjepkema: It's so true. So founders in particular, and their teams are strapped. There's no time, there's no money. And we hear a lot like, " Oh, I don't have time. I don't have time to do a podcast. I have a thousand other things to do. However much it costs. It's too much in time and in money." What do you say to that when you know that like a podcast or really prioritizing some thought leadership and a solid content strategy would be a good way to go for a brand that you're working with and they say, "I just don't have time." What would you say to a founder or a marketing team that says that?

Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, I mean, it's a fair question. Right? Time and our brain really are the most scarce resources we have. You can only use them once or you never get the time back. But that's the biggest question you're asking. Right? Is this a good use of my time? Because all the other friction is they're really excuses. You don't need anything more than an iPhone to start recording. So there's no other friction, but you have to decide is this worth my time? And then if you think of a podcast being a medium that can be repurposed and reused to reach so many more people, to be able to learn from the feedback that you get on the content. Right? Whether people actually engage with it or not, it's so scalable. Right? The ROI is so easy to envision. So yeah, someone who asks, is this worth my time, needs to maybe sometimes be helped to ask a couple of those follow up questions. Would you rather have this conversation once or 40 times? Or because when have it once as a podcast, you can have 40,000 people hear it. And I think that's how I would answer that question. I don't have a lot of real specific examples, but I think that's how I think about it in my own trade- off, is this is worth it or not?

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah, I think that's actually in and of itself is a good rebuttals. It's not about whether you do or don't have the time. It's you have the time, where are you putting it? And ultimately, is this worth it? And how can you make it worth it? What would need to be true for it to be worth it?

Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah. And to back to maybe an earlier point, how do you come up with topics and things like that? That goes to if you really care about your audience and making your connection with them and to get better and better and better at what your product does, what your solution does, try to write down a question every day that you feel is not being answered and then turning that into your podcast sort of content libraries, is not a big next step.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. Are there any brands that you've seen do this well? What podcasts do you see coming from a brand that you think has done particularly well?

Stijn Hendrikse: I think I go back to... I don't know if the word podcast even existed back then. So I joined Microsoft a long time ago in the Netherlands was the first half of my career. But then in 2004, I moved from the Netherlands, the Dutch Microsoft subsidiary to a corporate role in the Microsoft headquarters. And I had just arrived and I think in the same week... So I was part of the developer division... In the same week there was a small team of marketers, or actually I think they were really developers, but they had started this thing called Channel9, Lindsay, and I had no clue what it was. It inspired a name by the... When you were in an airplane, like thinking United Airlines, you could go to Channel9, and you had this collaborative open channel where you could hear the pilot speak or the air traffic controllers. It was very... Got a peek into the kitchen. And so what this team at Microsoft did, they started to interview architects, developers, people who were literally in the weeds coding the products and getting a peek basically behind the scenes. But they also interviewed Bill Gates, and it was a little bit... And it's really awesome. I'll send you the link actually, where you can still find... today it's part of, I think, Microsoft Learning and you can only see the last couple of years, but there's a place actually on GitHub where you can see the early episodes from 2004, 2005 too and it's fantastic, it's phenomenal.

Lindsay Tjepkema: I want them to use that now. Can you imagine what a cool show that could be today, like remixed and repurposed?

Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, he became pretty famous. I think he went to Google. Robert Scoble, he ended up doing a whole bunch of other podcasts and videocasts, et cetera. But this is how that started. And so when you asked me where did it really work well? This was the time when Microsoft had lost a little bit of their cache with technical audiences, developers, IT professionals, and providing this gave them such a new way to connect with that audience in a very authentic and transparent way. And I actually just found the link, I put it here on the Zoom chat. Yeah, it's amazing. You got some of... all the interviews, those were podcasts before it became a thing. And I think there's many other examples today and I'm a big fan of... pivots, you know, these really broad podcasts that I think are a great way for us to consume news. And then of course, when I help small software companies using podcasts to... If you can really connect to your audience about why is what you're doing special, and you can use it as an educational tool to help people in their journey who are facing the challenges that your products solve for, how to understand it better, to get the high fidelity type of content that is harder to consume maybe by reading about it. I think those are all great success stories.

Lindsay Tjepkema: I love that and having something be so successful by just getting really human, by giving people, like you said a peek into the kitchen, a peek into the cockpit and a look behind the scenes. I mean, that's just saying, " Hey, we are this really large company made up of humans, selling to humans." When you look at the future of podcasting, we've talked about how there were so many years of growth at all costs and this last year changed everything. We've felt that absolutely, our customers have felt that. When you look at the future of podcasting, what do you see for brands and the role that podcasting can play and will play with where we're headed, wherever that may be?

Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, I'm going to answer that question two ways. One is a little bit of my own journey as a professional, Lindsay. I started as a software developer and then at Microsoft turned somehow... Became a consultant and sales leader and marketing leader at some point. And the one thing that really led to all that was that always... When I think of professional satisfaction, I like to learn something new on a regular basis, ideally daily. I get bored very quick. I want to own the work I do, I want to make sure that if I wasn't there... That wouldn't just have happened as well. One of the reasons, by the way, I left Microsoft at sort of the midpoint of my career, because at Microsoft I've worked on a lot of really cool stuff, and I'm pretty sure a lot of those things would've happened without me too. So that's where when you work in these smaller companies, startups, it's much easier to say, " Hey, I made a significant contribution there." And then the third thing for me is about professional satisfaction is to leave something meaningful behind, to be able to point at something later and say, " Hey, that's something that survived me." And if you're not in the maybe position, in the luxury position that you and I have to build a company and to basically point at that as one of your legacies or to be able to maybe ship a product, then a podcast is the next best thing. If you have great ideas, if you have thoughts that you want to share, if you have questions to answers that people have. Getting those recorded and into that... Not the ether, but whatever the modern... Getting it published, it's fantastic way for you to build some form of a small legacy. Something you can point at say, " Hey, yeah, I contributed something there." But that's one of the ways I would answer your question. That is a new way of maybe people to think to create a legacy. Then now, the other to completely different way of answering your question, we think of more the technology and how podcast is evolving as a medium. AI of course has been a big topic of conversation left couple of months, how it's going to getting to in its next stage of capability and making a difference for humankind. All honestly, I love that podcasts are a long tail medium where we have all these really niche channels and people having niche ideas, et cetera, that are able to share those. It also becomes harder and harder for us to consume that, right? There's probably 12 podcasts out there that would be perfect for me to listen to, but I have no idea about that they even exist. Right? Let alone if 300 episodes am I going to figure out which 12 episodes to listen to. So if AI can somehow start curating that in the next months or years and come up with like personal podcast show, that is a combination of all of what you do Lindsay and others, and cater to me, to my personal preferences and give me my personal list of episodes at the end of the day when I step into my car and want to listen, or I step on the train. So that's one thing. I think, using AI in order to go to do better curation of this exploding amount of audio content out there. And then the other thing, I think just like we're recording video as well, not just audio... There's other ways that what we have talked about can be consumed. Right? People can watch the video, they can just listen to the audio. Maybe people also sometimes just want to read a transcription and transcription would be a little too blunt maybe, but a written version of what we talked about, it might be slightly edited. Again, AI probably can help with that. But I think those two things would for me make podcasting even more powerful in the future, the creation side and the delivering and maybe in the whatever... The medium of choice. Someone could say, " Hey, I don't want to listen or watch Lindsay and Stijn, I want to read about it."

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. Which could even be part of the curation is like, here's a whole bunch of content curated for you in the topics that you're interested, in the format that you want.

Stijn Hendrikse: Yep.

Lindsay Tjepkema: I think we're close. I think it's going to be here before we know it. Well, speaking of contributions and legacy, thank you for contributing to this show and to sharing, contributing your thoughts and your observations to The Casted Podcast. I'm so glad that you were here, and thank you so much for your time and for everything that you've shared with us today. Hey, that's our show. Thanks for joining in. I'm Lindsay Tjepkema, and you can find me on Twitter @ CastedLindsay and on LinkedIn. You know the drill. If you like this show, you'll like our other episodes too so consider subscribing, sharing with others, and maybe even leaving a review on your podcast platform of choice. And if you're ready to harness the power of podcasting for your brand strategy, make sure that you click the link in our show notes to subscribe to the Casted newsletter and to all of our shows. You can also go to casted. us for the latest content from our team of experts to yours. Until next time.

DESCRIPTION

Do you strive to establish genuine connections and build trust with your audience?


If so, it's time to leverage the power of podcasting as an effective content strategy. As a founder or marketing leader, you can establish authentic relationships with your customers through podcasting. Join Stijn Hendrikse, as he shares the solution to achieving this result and establishing trust and authenticity with your audience.


Stijn Hendrikse is a talented entrepreneur, author, and marketing expert hailing from the Netherlands. With over two decades of experience in the B2B software industry, Stijn has successfully built and scaled numerous companies. Having moved to the US 20 years ago, he founded Kalungi, a growth agency, five years ago. Stijn is also the author of the popular book "T2D3.pro," which offers a playbook for scaling B2B SaaS companies. As a thought leader in the marketing world, he has helped many businesses connect with their audiences in meaningful ways through creative content strategies.


Subscribe to The Casted Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and for more on B2B marketing and podcasting, sign up for the Casted Newsletter.