Castos joins TinySeed

I’m excited to announce that Castos is joining 10 other awesome startups in the inaugural round of companies in the TinySeed family.

As a growing, profitable, and (by my estimations at least) successful bootstrapped company this was not a decision to take lightly. Some may ask

Why give up a portion of your already successful company…can’t you just grow organically

To which the answer is a resounding YES.

The beauty of getting through The Dip (as Seth Godin calls it) and landing on the other side as a profitable enterprise that can grow on its own resources is no small feat and is the result of countless long hours, personal and financial sacrifice, and a ton of hard work by our entire team.

And we’re continuing to grow roughly 10% a month with well over 1,000 paying customers to date. Why take outside funding with a successful business like that?

I think the answer for any founder depends largely on what your goals are with the business.

If you want to create a sustainable, highly profitable business that can provide for your family and your team in the long run then taking outside funding may not be the best route to go. Most funding vehicles, TinySeed included, will take a part of that profit that your business will be throwing off. Or in the case of traditional VC strongly discourage profit distribution at all.

But if you believe that you have the ability to grow your business into something truly incredible, something that’s impactful in your industry, for your team, and for your family, then amplifying what you’re already able to do makes sense.

I believe we fall into this second category.

Castos is a growing, profitable, and stable business, and it is on this solid base that we’re now planning to amplify our growth plans into an industry leading podcasting platform.

While I’m not able to disclose the particular details of the funding you can get a sense for the type of resource that will be at our disposal from the TinySeed website.

In terms of impact, the nice thing about waiting until a business is already established, profitable, and providing for the founders is that you can pour all of an investment right into the growth areas of the business. I don’t need money to live on, so we’re going to use all of the resourced provided to us by the TinySeed investment on growing the business.

As we already have an established product, with a high degree of product market fit, and an established customer base, our focus with the TinySeed investment will be largely focused on marketing and additional tools within the Castos/Seriously Simple Podcasting platform.

This will let us help podcasters more easily create their shows, grow their audiences, and monetize their podcasts.

It’s yet to be seen exactly what the breakdown will be, but I’m planning on spending 70% of our new resources on amplifying our existing marketing efforts, and the remaining 30% on engineering and continuing to develop our product offerings.

For the latter, our ability to move faster, deliver what customers are looking for, and innovating in the podcasting space should give us a decided competitive advantage in an arena that is already buzzing with excitement (for comparison a company that hasn’t even launched yet recently raised $100 Million in the podcasting space).

And when it comes to marketing I’m personally very excited to add both people and resources to our team.

So yes, we’re hiring. If you’re an awesome full stack marketer and are interested in joining a dynamic, remote, and scrappy team at Castos let’s talk.

We’ve had good early experiences with various paid acquisition channels and this is something we’ll be exploring more heavily in the coming months and years. Additionally content marketing, which I believe still in 2019 should be the foundation of any marketing effort, will be something we not just participate in but excel at.

In short, I think I speak for the entire Castos team when I say we’re elated to join the TinySeed family of companies. This is a game-changing opportunity for our company and one which we are very honored to be a part of.

I’ll be sharing more here on the blog in the coming months on the lessons we’re learning in growing the business, how our fully remote team works, and what the impact of this funding means for Castos.