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- [00:00]
A
What if instead of paying thousands of dollars a month to reach your customers, instead you got paid to grow your business? That is not hypothetical. Today you're going to meet David Lecco. He is the founder and CEO of DealMachine, which is a software company that he scaled past $12 million in annual revenue. And when that growth hit a ceiling, he didn't just throw more money at ads. He started a podcast.
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B
I'm getting paid to market my business.
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A
Five hundred episodes later, his show drives inbound DMs every single day. It uncovered a 4,000 DOL product opportunity, and it exposed a problem in his business that was silently costing him revenue. So in this episode of Grow the Show, you're going to hear how podcasting fits into the week of an eight figure CEO and why he believes that if you're a CEO and you're not podcasting, you're ignoring the single most important part of your job. My name is Kev Michael. This is Grow the Show. Let's dive in. Can you kick us off by sharing a little bit about what, what DealMachine is and why you started a podcast in the first place?
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B
Absolutely. So DealMachine is a real estate investing platform. We provide 700 filters on every person and property in the country. And real estate investors primarily will use us to build targeted marketing lists. And it's, you know, monthly fee that starts at 100 bucks a month, just for context. So we started in 2017, which is about eight years ago. And for the first five years, we had no marketing team at all. We actually grew up to about 12 million in revenue until we kind of hit a ceiling and actually a detraction. That's when I realized we need to start a marketing team. So up until that point, it was a really good product market fit and people that were successful on YouTube that taught people how to invest in real estate would refer people to us. But in order to grow further, and especially that bit of a scary, painful moment to a new entrepreneur who'd never had a downturn before, it made me realize my whole business is driven on social media, but I don't know anything about social media. And so that's whenever I took it upon myself to start the podcast. We just did our 500th episode. And so I guess we've been doing the podcast for three or four years. I started the podcast, I looked to your show because I needed help to understand what to do. And I knew about you because a mutual friend of mine, Brian Lubin, here in Austin, is very successful on social media. And I know he mentioned you. Right. So that's how I got connected with you. So I hired you, we did some coaching, and then in the later years, my editor, who's in house, I wanted to continue growing the podcast with him, and I've told him to listen to your podcast, and so he's consuming your content. Right. Which is a great resource for me so I don't have to, like, pass on stuff that I know to him. And so, yeah, in summary, that is what DealMachine is and why we started a podcast. And knowing that I needed to learn podcasting and social media. You have been a great resource from the beginning.
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A
Oh, thanks, man. It's been cool to have you in the fold, and I was thrilled to hear that. After we worked together, we worked together for a few months, got some growth. It's been cool to hear that you. You've stayed tuned since then. Now what I'm curious about is like, well, you know, you take a company to that point, obviously you're. You're skilled, Obviously you have competency. And I'm always curious because I talk to a lot of operators who have grown businesses to a certain point who haven't done content before. What would you tell that person, someone who's been successful with their business so far, they might be feeling the same way about social media, about content, not sure what to do. What advice would you have for them?
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B
Okay, well, I'd say, first of all, do you run paid ads? And most of them would say yes. And then I would say, okay, well, what do you pay per view per. For paid ads? And they probably wouldn't know. And I think it's around $0.03 per view. So that means if you have an Instagram reel, a lot of times, if you have no social media skills or followers, you could post an Instagram reel and get 300 views. And that feels really bad because you're like, oh, man, that sucked. Nobody likes it. Same with the podcast episode. If you launch a podcast, like, people aren't going to just find it and listen to it, right? But you might get 300 listens. That's $6 right there. So you're spending $6 for that. So when you think about it like that, and you're like, I could post four times a day, and that's like $6 worth of content, you know? So now hopefully that feels a lot better on the podcast front. YouTube will actually pay you for publishing your podcast when you get to a certain point. So I actually make, you know, $600 a month in Order to reach my customers, which is actually the opposite of paid ads, if you think about it. Yeah, so it's actually terrific, right, to get paid in order to reach your target customers rather than pay $20,000 a month.
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A
You're getting paid to market your business.
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B
Yeah, exactly. I'm getting paid to market my business.
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A
So one thing that I remember from when we worked together was that you have a bunch of different format types.
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B
Right.
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A
I've seen you do all kinds of different content, man. Which is why for me, it's funny to talk about a time when you didn't do content, because I've seen you do. I've seen you interview people on podcasts, I've seen you do vlogs, I've seen you grow an unbelievable Instagram profile around race car driving. So like, did you find that it just like, I don't know, did it just come naturally to you or was there something tactical that you had to teach yourself in order to become so proficient at content?
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B
So when my business felt that I had lost the control of driving it basically because it was just growing on its own without me doing anything. And that just happens naturally with software or anything. Subscription based is eventually whatever you're doing hits a growth ceiling. Right. It just won't grow any further unless you reach more customers, keep your customers longer, or raise the price, earn more per customer. And so, yeah, I just realized, well, I'm doing nothing to reach my customers. Other people are using social media to reach customers and refer them to DealMachine. So let me learn this critical skill. So I took a challenge and it started with around the same time I formed a podcast. You know, Gary Vaynerchuk suggested post four times per day. So you get over being shy. So that's, that's how I approach it on Instagram and podcasting in parallel to get over, you know, being shy on camera. So it was like a commitment to a certain number of posts per day and a certain number of podcasts per week. I feel like the number one challenge of starting a podcast for most people is to bring on guests that are interesting. But if you have a business already, this is actually amazing because you have a customer base that you can just sort through and invite to come on and be on your podcast. And so the hardest thing for making a good podcast is now not hard for you. You don't even realize you have the all the best people in your database already. So a lot of times, I think software companies, we like to hide behind our computer and this is really important. To get in front of your customers because you could actually hear about problems that wouldn't otherwise reach you. Right. Which will help you drive more revenue for your business. I gave an example on that. But let me get back to your question, which was like, how did I start making content? Why was that important? So again, it was just a commitment to the actions rather than worrying about the results. And that's what I committed to. I was like, I'm going to do two episodes per week on the podcast and I'm going to do four social media posts per day, which was a lot. After a year, I pulled back, I just did one per day and I actually got better results with that. But it was an evolution. I got better results with that because now I had enough skills and repetitions that I could actually pull back and spend less time experimenting and more time executing the things I knew would work better.
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A
Yeah, I would love to hear that example of where you spoke to a client on your podcast and learned something you needed to learn.
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B
Well, yes. So every time that I would get off of a podcast, I would ask them a, is there any, like, hard to get data that we could help you with? And oftentimes they'll give an answer and I'll be surprised. This is an opportunity for new data that we can source and put in the app sell and help these people. So it's conversations you'd have with your customers anyway. But like it's combined with the podcast, which then and of itself is more valuable because other people can listen to it as well. There was one particular time like two or three years ago where my support team actually, they had five star ratings. Most of them almost perfect, five star ratings. You know, Intercom has a system where it's like after the chat, rate your chat and then each rep has like a rating. Right. And so what I realized was my team was showing me five star ratings, but like, other people were unhappy. They were like, well, I feel like you guys billed me and it was like a surprise or something like that. And that's when I found out our annual payments, like they were renewing but people weren't getting the reminder emails. And yeah, my team was like holding strong to my own policy of like, hey, we, we have a no refund period after like a certain number of days. So people were getting charged. They didn't know it. And then my team wouldn't fix it, right. But they actually would keep pausing the conversation for 30 days until they realized, you know, in the Intercom software, if you pause it 30 days, then you close it. It won't ever send that survey.
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A
So it's like, dude, it was.
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B
It was like a great revelation where, you know, I really had to get to the root of that because I feel like my support team is good people. But somehow that just became ingrained is, like, what they do. And they didn't even. They. I don't think they realized. Most of them realized, like, what that was doing. And so, yeah, I mean, that's the type of connection to your customers that allows you to find hidden problems in your business that you didn't know about.
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A
Yeah. I'm curious. What are some things that you have learned about how to do a podcast? Right. Dating back to the launch, dating back to us working together. What have been the key lessons?
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B
Big takeaway from you is that a structured podcast always does better. And so you would always preach solo episodes. And they do take more preparation. But I wanted to still talk to my customers. So now what I do is I coach my customers and I say, hey, to the extent that you're willing to share a breakdown of a deal with, like, financials in a spreadsheet or a breakdown of Your business or KPIs with financials in a spreadsheet, if you can come to the podcast with that, I know that's even going to do better. Right. So I kind of did, like, a hybrid. I was like, well, instead of it being totally random conversations, I'll prep them in advance to say, can you bring something structured and that's going to do well. I had a particularly good one with a sales coach, and I said, instead of us doing a random interview, why don't you come with your top 10 objections that real estate investors face during the sales process, and I will comment on each one. And that way we can just roll through each of those ten. Right? You. You say it. You. You suggest. You suggest whatever they do to avoid it. And then I would just share, like, a personal anecdote on how I've experienced that. And so that was the episode. It was great. One of the best episodes we ever had, and it was with the guests. And that structure, I think, is really important. So that was a big one from you.
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A
Have there been any measurable results or outcomes that you've gained from doing the podcast for 500 episodes?
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B
Oh, man, that's a good question. So I think one thing I could get better on is saying, use this, like, tracking promo link. Yeah, I don't know. I just. I don't do it, but I could do that more so I wish I had an exact trackable thing, but here's stuff that makes me know it's impacting. I interviewed, like, Costa Karelles, which is Riverfront Home buyers in Kansas City, and about six months ago, he said, man, I use Salesforce for my CRM. I'd really love to have data whenever I enter leads. And so now we're actually going, like, this week, we finally built the API that connects with Salesforce. He's going to pay $4,500, and he's very happy to have this problem solved. And that's probably one of the bigger items that we sell, because, remember, I said, it's like 100 bucks a month. It's not that expensive. And so it just. It uncovered that opportunity. We built it, and then I didn't really have to sell it because he. He just told me this is what he needed so we could solve it. Right. And it gave me the confidence to have the team build that. And so, yeah, got him connected yesterday. And so he's the first customer, and there's like, 20 more that I've discovered through doing this. Right. The other way that's measurable is whenever I email or whenever I interview people like that, they'll say, hey, I was at the gym, and somebody at the gym recognized me from your podcast. And, man, this thing has a lot of reach. And I'm looking at the metrics. I'm like, well, it's not as big as the biggest real estate podcast in my category, which gets, like 40,000 views per episode. Right. But, like, his episode, you know, got a couple thousand in the first week. And so it's like, dude, I mean, it's a couple thousand people who are obviously very. That's the niche. They're in the niche, Right? So it's, like, random enough. And so usually once a month, somebody like that will say, oh, man. Like, this person at the gym, they came up to me because they recognized me from your podcast episode. So that's an indicator. And then, man, I get, like, five DMS per day on Instagram and Facebook. They're just sending me a message, say, hey, like, I know who you are. I'm having a problem with deal machine, or, hey, I'm interested in deal machine, or, hey, I'm interested in data. Like, what? Can you help me out with that? So that's. Those are the indicators that I have.
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A
Yeah. It's funny because, like, I find myself more nowadays having conversations with business owners who are considering podcasting. Uh, and the challenge for me is that it can Be hard to describe the roi. So just last week I had a. Another client, previous client on the show, his name was Orlando. And he said that, like, yes, his show has driven consulting clients. He's got a consulting business. He serves like, big companies. But he, what he told me then was he wasn't expecting all these, like, other impacts that having a brand and having a podcast had. And it's so hard to even know, like, when you're doing this work and you're spending all this time and you got Kevin screaming at you to make your intros better, it's like, what's the freaking point of all this? It can be so hard to quantify that roi. So if you were speaking to a business owner now who's like, I think I want to do this, but what's the ROI going to be? Being on the other side of 500 episodes, what would you tell them?
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B
I had somebody ask this to me earlier, and I could tell they weren't convinced. They're like, okay, $600, like, that's not a big deal. But my question to him was, like, as a CEO, what the heck else are you supposed to do? You know, it's like you're supposed to be a prolific communicator. That's your job. You're communicating to your team, you're communicating the value to the potential customers you have and your existing customers that you have. So, like, what else is in the job description besides excellent communication? And today the way to communicate is social media. It is podcasting, especially on YouTube. So, yeah, if you're not doing that, what are you doing? I didn't know how else to say it. I just get a lot of inbound DMs. I learn about customer opportunities. I'm sure this guy I was talking to talks to his customers already. So why not get more value from that by recording it and publishing it?
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A
So as somebody running a 8 figure plus company, how does podcasting fit into your week?
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B
Yeah, so it starts with inviting guests. And I have refused to outsource that with an assistant because I personally get five podcast invites from people's assistants every week, and I delete them without recording, without reading them. Maybe that's a mistake. But if you get five a week, I mean, eventually you like, tune this out, because if they really wanted you on their show, you know, they're saying, you know, I feel like they'd reach out directly. So first of all, that's why I refuse to have an assistant. Okay. The second thing is, I'm very active on Facebook groups that are relevant to my business, real estate investing. Facebook groups. I will answer questions and also when somebody else provides an excellent answer, I will reach out to them and say, I'd love to interview you on my podcast. Okay. So I'm always keeping an eye and an ear out through that. I mean, this happens when I'm going to bed, Kevin. Like, it's 10 o', clock, I'm in bed, I'm doing the final scroll on my Instagram. I'm too tired to respond, but I, I see some good answer. I'm like, I, I've got to invite this guy right now, otherwise I will forget tomorrow. Right, so it's that if the CG quarterly meeting is coming up, then I'll, I'll go through that and, and reach out. It Usually I have to reach out to 10 people there to get one. Yes. Right. So if I'm booking eight guests, I, I, I've got to reach out to 80 people. And these are, these are individuals who are like, I, I'm, this is not a cold outreach, really, because we're in connected collective genius. But yeah, So I guess my routine is always looking out for people to invite who would be good guests. Then we always record on Wednesdays. And this is another thing, Kevin. I made a co host. And so the first reason why I had a co host was like, hey, I don't want to create a job for myself that I can't ever step away from. And if I have a co host, if I'm sick, if I'm on vacation, whatever, the podcast can still happen, right? I could just be absent for a few episodes. That was one reason why I wanted to co host. The second reason was I was like, hey, my podcast and my business, we serve people who wholesale real estate. I've done 19 deals, but by no means am I a wholesaler. I've actually bought and kept these properties, right? So I would market the same way a wholesaler would. But, like, I could hear them saying, like, oh, well, you don't actually, like, do my business. I'm not going to listen to you. So I intentionally picked a co host who does wholesale, like, a lot of deals. You know, Ryan Haywood is one of my customers since 2019. We've had a good relationship and I asked him to be the co host. And so we've been co hosts the whole four years of the podcast. And so that it's been an excellent way to also provide a consistent perspective from somebody who's wholesaling, which is what the people Listening, want to hear from. And so that's how I kind of solved that issue. And so we have to have a specific time and day to record, since it's the two of us. And I want to respect his time. So we do it Wednesday mornings. We'll do two to three episodes every Wednesday. So that's our time slot that I will book stuff in. Is Wednesday mornings something that I remember
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A
you weren't doing at first, but then got really good at, is introducing Ryan and explaining why Ryan was there. And what you just explained so well is like, look, Ryan has done this. He's had this type of business that you, the listener of DealMachine, wants to have. And so this is why Ryan's here. And when you do that, then it's great. People are like, wow, this is amazing. But the key is, if you're gonna have a co host, then make sure, you know, achieve what you wanted to achieve, which is to not give yourself a job. You just gotta make sure that people know why that person is there.
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B
One of the things I'm excited about is always experimenting, and I feel like, again, I know we can reach a larger audience because the biggest podcast in our space, it does 40,000 views per episode, right? And we're getting maybe 1,000, sometimes 2,000. And so I think you helped us try something that will help, and that's to create a separate channel for the podcast. And that's because on the Deal Machine channel, we really have three types of content. We have product tutorials. We have. My head of partnerships, he basically has, like, his own podcast, and so he'll interview people with. It is completely different than the Deal Machine podcast. Right. And so there's three types of content there. And we're going to pull our podcasts out separately. So that way, if somebody subscribes for a tutorial on the product, they're probably not going to click into a podcast. And so that hurts the distribution of the podcast because the algorithm sees, oh, they clicked into this. They were not interested. They didn't listen very long. So it stops sending it out to people. So I think that idea from you echoes what I've heard from Alex Hormozi, or where he's created several YouTube channels. And he was like, hey, I'm doing this because all the YouTube experts told me to. And this is why I have two channels. And this is what you find on this one, and here's what you find on the other one. So we're going to do that soon.
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A
Awesome. I think that's going to be totally. I saw the same thing. I looked at your show recently and one of the, one of the tricks. And so listeners take this. If you're on YouTube and you're not getting as much reach as you think you should be, go to your YouTube and click on.
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B
Go to look.
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A
Look at your channel and click on Popular and see what videos have the most views. And a lot of times for a show that feels like it's being suppressed, the popular videos are a different format or a different topic or therefore a different avatar. So for you, I hit Popular and it was ton of product tutorials. Like you said, here's how to use DealMachine. And that's the type of thing where YouTube sees that and is like, oh, I need to show these videos to people who want more product tutorials of DealMachine. Which is. There may be some overlap for people who want the podcast, but it's just preventing you from people. Here's the key. People who have never heard of DealMachine before. Well, that's what you want to reach those people, right? So if you have a separate channel and you can also expand out the topic a little bit to be a little more real estate focused, you can achieve that. And that's different from Instagram, where Instagram's algorithm's really good at. If you publish like five different formats on one Instagram channel, it will show it to the right people who want, like, some people only want to see your race car videos. Other people, you know, might want other videos of yours. Instagram's good at like showing it, dealing the cards in the right way. YouTube is not good at it. Not yet anyway. So glad that you shared that and I think that'll be valuable for some other folks here.
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B
I have a question. So I know that you do done for you editing and production of the podcast. Do you also do short form clips as part of that?
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A
Yes, we do.
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B
Got it. What are your tips for short form clips? Because what I found is Riverside is such a good platform, but oftentimes if you just use the AI feature and it's like, hey, make these clips. These clips aren't going super. You know, it's very hard to make viral clips from long form content. It seems like the best podcasts today are like planned, right? And that's why they go viral is because they're like planned in a certain way.
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A
Yeah, you nailed it. So it is hard to make a viral clip even if you spend eight hours on the viral clip. Like, like, I'm trying to make a Viral clip. The problem with podcast clips is that you need someone to accidentally deliver a viral video, right? Which is there's people whose entire careers right now are trying to manufacture viral videos with everything at their disposal. So it's not like what I tell people is, look, we're going to make the clips like for our done for you clients, we make two from every episode. And we say our goal with the clips is more so retargeting. Because here's the key. What makes podcast clips so difficult is that when we're having a conversation, we are not speaking in short form sentences. And short form sentences require you to give the short form viewer all of the context that they need to understand the video. There's so much context. What are we talking about? Who are you? Like all that stuff and you and I Now, what, 35 minutes into the conversation have established so much context. Like there's so much in our listeners heads right now about who you are. Who I am, what I what you know what I know what you've done that when you just grab a clip of it, that context falls away. And a viewer who is just being dropped in the middle of a conversation has no freaking idea what you're talking about. So in order for it to work, you either have to go through the conversation and pull like all these different sentences and Frankenstein them together into a script that works. Sometimes, yes, you accidentally fumble into a clip that goes viral and then everyone's like, look, you should do clips. But it was just totally like, what do they say? Like, you put a thousand monkeys in a room, eventually they'll, they'll write Shakespeare. Same thing here. So what we do is we say, look, what we're going to do is we're going to grab a sentence that'll work as a hook. As you know, on social media, the hook is what, 80% of the game, it's worth doing. It's good sawdust for retargeting. But as far as like going viral, it's just, it's, it's pretty tough to do. Now I will grant there are agencies who all they do is grab podcast clips and convert them into viral clips. And they can do it. It just takes a whole business, it takes a whole agency to make that happen. So that, that's how I look at it.
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B
Cool. Yeah. Well, I picked up on a tip from you. Now is when you recognize something was worthy of maybe a hook. You, you actually had me say it again. So that was something I'll start doing, I think too.
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A
Yeah. Or say it in a different way. Or like, if the. Sometimes the guests will, like, drop a fricking gem, but they'll like, wipe their nose while they do it. Be like, can you just. Can you just say that again for me? Like, with some conviction? And a lot of times that it could become a part, a clip in the intro. It could become. It's just good, good to have. So, yeah, is there anything that we haven't touched on that you feel like a business owner who's like, not. Their podcast isn't growing, they're not sure about this. Anything that they should know?
- [25:06]
B
So I learned, one of my people that I also listened to told me that if you're doing a podcast as a guest, if you yourself don't have a CTA of some sort, you're fumbling the bag, you're fumbling the opportunity. Right. And it can't be something that is salesy. And so what I've come up with is when I have, like two social media clippers that they're not related to the podcast, they're on the Instagram side, They're not clippers. But we actually sit down and we do, like a fake podcast. This is actually something I do in my second room over here, and I have a podcast mic and he asked me questions from my comments, Kevin. And so this is very planned, right? It is not from the podcast, but it's like a fake podcast, if you will. Yeah. So anyway, finding that person was tough because a lot of people will edit videos on social media, but they're not necessarily good. And so I created this process for hiring somebody on the Instagram side that knows that specifically. Yeah, if you DM me on Instagram the word viral, I'll send it to you. And it's essentially like, hey, these are my past top videos. Um, please find more that are like these in the niche. And, and, and it's a bit of a test project, if you will, as part of the hiring process. And so that's just been super helpful for me on the Instagram side, so I figured I would share that as well.
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A
Well, we'll throw your Instagram handles in the description. My last question was just going to be if. If anybody wants to get in touch, what should they do? And it sounds like they should DM you viral on Instagram.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Awesome. We'll have them do that. Well, dude, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's great to see you. And yeah, here's to 500 more episodes.
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B
Thanks, man. I appreciate it.
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A
So that's gonna do it for this
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B
episode of Grow the Show.
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A
If you found this valuable, let me know below in the comments and let me know any questions that you have about lead magnets. And by the way, lead magnet creation
- [27:00]
B
is something that can be a little
- [27:01]
A
bit of a pain in the neck, but for my clients, we actually create a lead magnet for you for every
- [27:06]
B
episode that you publish of your podcast.
- [27:08]
A
So if you want my team to be in charge of not only growing your podcast and getting more audience and subscribers to your show, but creating dedicated
- [27:16]
B
lead magnets for every episode so that you don't even have to think about it, all you have to do is
- [27:20]
A
hit record and send us the file and we handle publishing, growing and getting you leads.
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B
If that's interesting, click the link in
- [27:26]
A
the description and see if you qualify. That's it for this episode of Grow the Show.
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B
I'll see you next time.