The Evolution of Fan Engagement with Pat Cheung

Here on Podcasting Tech, we're always looking at companies,

solutions, software, things that can help the podcaster, help

them be more successful, help them grow their show,

and grow their show in ways that maybe they hadn't even thought of. With that

in mind, we are delighted to be chatting with Pat Chung. He's the founder of

Famlyst, formerly Pod Inbox. Pat, thank you so much for joining

us. Hey. Thanks for having me. So I remember first learning

about Pod Inbox. You were a company at, I

believe, Podfest or maybe Podcast Movement, and you were doing this

giveaway that basically, you know, buy one time lifetime plan. And the whole idea

was it was this little widget that podcasters could

use, put on their website, and fans could record audio

messages that then the podcasters could use on their show. But you've

evolved tremendously since then. So kinda take us through just a

little bit about the beginning and and where you're kinda heading these days.

Sure. Wow. If you remember the lifetime plan, so you were one of the early,

early ones. Yeah. Yeah. So we launched a

podcast movement, about, I think, over 3 years ago

now. And yeah. Yeah. We launched with a lifetime plan. We

came out with a really simple idea with which is,

we saw this need that podcasters had, which is to receive

audio messages from fans. So we looked across a lot of prolific

podcasters, and we found that, a lot of them had this segment on

their show where they're where they feature a fan message.

So we kind of looked at, oh, how are they getting that fan message? Because

it wasn't too straightforward, with some of the podcasts that I

follow. I'm like, oh, we heard a lot of Podcasting say email us, you know,

your message, which we thought, you know, that's kinda cumbersome. I

at that time, I probably wouldn't even know how to kind of record something on

my phone and kind of email it to them. Right? So we thought,

let's build a better solution for that. Yeah. So that's what we set out to

do, and, yeah, we created that. It was pretty full featured actually by

the time we launched, and, yeah, sold a lot of one time deals. I

think I remember actually communicating with you and saying that I thought you should

have the ability to like, I think you originally had to be on the Pod

Inbox website, but I said, what if we can embed this on our website?

And I believe you responded pretty quickly saying, yes. We'll work on that. And then

it was like, a few days later, you guys had it up and running. So

you are very responsive, to the folks and to the fans who are out

there. So Yeah. How did it start to evolve? Where did

it go from there? Sure. That's a great question. And maybe I'll kinda address what

you said about the widget. Actually, we're not actually big fans of the widget.

So we do have a widget because people are asking for it, but I think

what people want to do is drive people to their website, which is

understandable. Your website's your brand. But,

you know, I've been a UX designer, a user experience

designer for over 15 years.

And what, you know, personally branded websites don't do

well is a lot of times they're kind of confusing for

users, just to be totally frank. Right? They they they talk a lot about

themselves. They they have content, you know, that

people wanna engage in. So there's just a lot going on. And when you when

you jump to sort of personal website to personal website as a

fan, you don't really like, there Tech some it

takes some time for that person to digest what's going on in that website and

to really understand it. Right? So the reason why I'm

not a big fan of that widget that we built is the

widget is usually a very direct call to action. Right? So if

you want someone to, you know, take an

action on your website, your personal branded website is

oftentimes not the best place to do it because there's a just a lot

to sort of understand. And a lot of, you know, people

nowadays, and even back then when I first started being a UX

designer, they just don't have the attention span to kinda, you know, go through

everything. So we really, you know, to answer your question,

how how we evolved is we really put a lot more

energy into the fan page. So the fan page is

built so that it's just super intuitive and super, simple.

So when you're a fan going to a podcaster's fan page or a

creator's fan page, it's very obvious what what the creator

wants that fan to do. And, yeah, message is a big part of it.

That said, yeah, we we updated the widget too. The widget's super powerful. It's probably

the best widget on on the market. But, you know, when we

really you know, I do a lot of demos still for the product. And

whenever I sort of coach or train podcasters, I'm like, Mathew. Use the

widget. You know, you you might see some conversion of

of fans taking an action. But if you really wanna take an action, you know,

just link to the fan page. That that's where they could take

not only one action, but many more actions, you know, which also to

answer your question, how do we evolve? We yeah. We

developed a lot more features that we can't just fit on a widget

and and those features around monetization. Right? We kind of

asked ourselves, how else can a fan engage other than

leaving audio messages and text messages? Well, we thought, you know, a

lot of fans wanna support the show. They wanna donate. They wanna buy stuff.

They wanna, subscribe. Yeah. So things like

that. Yeah. Not not not not not to sell it too much, but, yeah, that's

how we evolved. No. I mean, that's exactly what we should be doing is selling

it so that folks can check it out and see if it's right for them.

So just to, you know, summarize for folks, some of the core product

features of FamelessNow. Again, you still have the ability to

message folks. You do lead capture. You can do memberships,

private subscriptions, tips and donations, paid perks, chat

rooms, widgets, and a leaderboard, which I love the

gamification of Podcasting. That's always a nice way to

drive interest. People always like to win the game. What are you finding

is the most used feature with podcasters

today that are using Fanlist? Yeah. Good question.

I think it's still the audio messaging feature. I think it's

probably because that's what we launched with, and that's what people have known us for

for a long time. So which is maybe kind of lead into you

know, we went through a branding change. When we first launched, we were called Pod

Inbox. We wanted to give an inbox for podcasters,

like this audio inbox, that hence the name. But

after we, you know, created this whole suite of features,

we're like, is the inbox still the most important thing? We're like,

actually, no. Probably probably not. As much as that's

probably the most used feature, we kind of see that as

the lead funnel now. Right? So let's say you're a podcaster and you're like, you

know, I really want my fans to engage. I really wanna build my newsletter email

list. Right? That's kinda what they teach all of us to try to build that

email list that you could own that fan, right, versus kinda borrowing it

from social media platforms. So we're like, well, yeah.

You know, that's how we kinda changed the name too. We're like, well, our platform

is really to help creators and podcasters build their fan

list, to build their email list. So we're like, fan list is a pretty good

name. I mean, to answer your question, the the most

used feature is the inbox, and we think that's a great first

feature to use. Right? Because if you're a Podcasting wanting to

build your email list, oftentimes they kinda teach us to, you know, have

that, lead gen, that that kind of free giveaway. What

better free giveaway for a podcaster than to, you know, tell your fans, hey. You

could leave a message here. I'll I'll listen to it. I'll reply to it, and

we might even feature it on the show. Right? So as they kinda dive

into your fan page and they say, oh, not only can I leave a message,

I could do all these other things too? So we kinda like that the inbox

is like the first touch for for any fan. And then you also

have like I said, once you get people to maybe leave a message down, you're

doing email capture, then you can sell them on the memberships, the donations,

the private subscriptions. Are you finding

that a lot of shows are seeing

success with those features? I think many small podcasters

worry that or fine sometimes even that, you know, just

because they create these paid features doesn't mean anybody's actually

joining them. Yeah. I mean, I think

it's important to set expectations. One of the

things we teach a lot is sort of kind of a common rule of the

Internet is, like, about 5 to 10%. Actually,

to be quite honest, it's usually anywhere from 1 to Tech% of

your audience will take an action, will participate.

So it might not be a lot. So if you have a 100 listeners to

your podcast, which is pretty common, maybe only 1 to

Tech people will actually take an action, might give a tip or might

subscribe. But, you know, I think if you do a good job,

it might trend more towards the 10%, which is pretty good. Right?

You know, we all often do the calculation of, like, you know, a lot

of podcasters, they are interested in monetizing. Takes a lot of

effort to put together a podcast Passy you know, and and getting rewarded for

it is, it feels good. So a lot of times we do the

calculation, you know, between, like, fan monetization

versus sponsorships, which is another common way to earn money, of course.

And a lot of times, yeah, fan monetization kinda wins out, in terms of

just looking at the numbers of, you know, how successful it could

be. And, of course, it's important that if you're a

podcaster hearing this, that you can't just say, oh, now you can pay for our

show. You have to deliver value in exchange.

People aren't just gonna give you money just because you asked for it, but they

will give you money if you if you provide value

for what it is you are asking them for. For $5, you better be giving

them better content or, you know, more episodes

that are fulfill the mission of what it is you told folks to check

out, when they came to your show in the first place. What about the,

leaderboard? How does that one work? Leaderboard is

just basically in design what we call a face pile.

Right? It's a pretty light touch, and it's just a way to

give a little recognition to the fans. Like, we looked across a lot of the

other creator economy platforms, and they don't really sort

of pay back the fan, and we're really about that payback. A

lot like what you said. I I mean, I could go on for hours about,

you know, giving value and value for value. I'm a huge believer in that.

And, hopefully, even, you know, I think you you mentioned mentioned

Podcasting,

tip you. Right? It's always about value. So as you as you

mentioned, as we're talking about, you know, value being important, do you

track or do you have a sense of what are some of the best add

ons or what are some of the best, like, perks that podcasters are giving

away or perks that podcasters are finding

are most effective for growing an audience. Like, if

I go to the demo page and I look at buy a perk, you've got

a 3 books on fan engagement for $3, episode

chat up for 10, private Zoom call. Like, do you kinda take a look and

track at what people are using those perks

for? And and if so, any that are standout

successes? Not really. We have some of our favorites,

but there's such a diverse group

of different creators and podcasters using our perks feature.

And just to give the audience some indication what a perks feature is,

it's basically an online shop that you could create, very easy

and offer fans to buy stuff. Right? Usually, they're digital

goods, things like digital downloads, and some of the

things you mentioned, like, shout outs and stuff. I

think, you know, the things that we teach a lot are

maybe stems from a lot of podcasters we Tech to, and we

talk to a ton of them, that they're usually afraid to start

selling something because it's hard to create stuff to sell.

So we like to, you know, think about stuff that's easy for a podcaster to

sell. So, like, episode shout outs. Right? We all do

podcasts. So Doesn't cost you anything. Yeah. It doesn't cost you anything. And

if you, you know, if you say, hey, you know, buy this episode shout out

perk, on our fan page, and we'll give you a shout out, then you could

just start giving shout outs on your, on your podcast.

So our favorites are the things that are easy and kind of free. You know,

another good example, it's not free, but, like, a lot of times people just wanna

meet you for a Zoom call. We kinda call that, like, a higher ticket item.

Right? So let's say I'm a fan of your your your podcast, Matthew, and I'm

like, oh, you know, I really you know, Matthew seems like expert in his industry.

I would love to just get, like, a 30 minute Zoom call with

them. Well, you know, how are you gonna sell that Zoom call? Right? It's

hard. You have to kind of, you know, either create a Shopify store or or

choose one of these types of platforms or you could just create that perk on

your fan page. So Zoom calls are great, you know, and you could charge you

know, it's hard to say what to charge for it. But, you know, we've seen

people charge $200 for a 30 minute Zoom call because they're, you

know, they're a prolific podcaster. So those are kind of our favorites

because sort of anyone across the board could do

that, whether you're, you know, like, a true crime podcast or or or you're

you're selling financial advice, you know, whatever it is. It's it's pretty

relevant. Yeah. That's, I like that idea of

selling the Zoom calls and the consultations. We, might have to think about that and

and think about implementing that here on the Podcasting Tech show.

And and one thing that we should let everybody know is that the pricing of

your Rodecaster. Right? This is a you know, a lot of times Podcasting

What do you mean by totally different approach? Because recently we did a lot of

changes. So we changed our name from pod inbox to fan list, and we

changed our business model too. So, depending on what you

remember, so for the longest time, we're a paid service,

in the industry, what's called SaaS. Right? Right. This is this is what I wanna

get to because on your site, you say the service is basically free. Yeah.

And now we just as of early this year, 2024,

we've changed to a totally free model. So we used to have a pro plan

where you had to pay, you know, about $10 a month to get all the

pro features. We thought, you know what? You know, we just hated the idea of,

like, pay walling or feature gating our

best features for the paid plan. So we're like, well, what if we just gave

it away for free? So that's what we just we decided to do, and,

the only way we make money is just based off of transaction fees.

So, you know, let's say you never use our monetization features.

You only use our inbox. Well, you get all all the benefits of all the

pro inbox features now for free. That's amazing. So, yeah, you

should definitely check out fanlist.com. Tech have a link to it obviously here in the

show notes. And take a take a spin around. They've got a demo on there.

They list all the features, so you can kinda see how it works. It integrates

with some of the other services that we've talked about, including pod

page. So it's not like you have to give up something else to use it.

And again, cost you nothing to, check out. So, Pat, before we

let you go, we have a few questions that we're asking everybody here on the

show. I know, obviously, you're working on this piece

of fan engagement, but is there another place inside

podcasting that you'd like to see improvement? Is there,

you know, service or changes or something that you think would help the

podcasting world? Oh,

that's a tough one. I mean, yeah, my mind is mainly on fan

engagement. I've been kind of working in and around this industry for, like, 10 years,

so I think about that, you know, day and night. That's something I think about

day and night. But we we you know, has a lot

of, podcast Tech, is thinking about

AI has come into the conversation quite a bit, and we even think

about it a lot. Even in the early days of OpenAI, we

implemented an OpenAI technology not a lot of people know about is

called Whisper. So that's we use Whisper to do our transcriptions.

So, you know, by using AI, we're allowed you know, we're able to offer

transcriptions for free. Whereas before, when we were thinking of doing that feature, we're

like, oh, should we charge a little bit more for transcriptions? And the way we

use transcriptions are, if someone leaves you an audio

message, a lot of times, you know, for some of our high end you or

high volume users, it's hard for them to listen to every single

message. Right? So somewhere in the lifetime of

our product, we thought, you know, we really could use transcription. So because, you

know, when someone leaves a message, we email the the creator,

you know, that that they received a message. So if we could put the transcription

in there, they might not even need to listen to the message if they didn't

want. So convenience and so like that, we thought AI has been super

helpful already. You know, they offer this free service, a free transcription

service that we could build on. But, yeah, as AI

grows, yeah, I don't know if I could share yet, but like there's some

of these, really interesting features that we're

thinking of creating that leverages AI. And,

kind of in this fan engagement type of, realm.

So once again, it's under the guise of fan engagement. It's something

that we're thinking of bolting on to Fanlist. And it's something,

unfortunately, I can't share too much of it yet, but super exciting.

And I think that's where the industry, you know, when I think

of, some of the next technologies that that's gonna rise. Like, we

have, like, things like show notes already, obviously, that are

some cool companies and technologies around that. That just makes our

life a little bit easier. But, you know, when I think about it, it's like,

how can we use AI to make, podcasting a little bit

more interesting? Not just to maybe solve a productivity

problem that we see a lot of AI companies doing, but

to solve an entertainment problem, maybe.

So, yeah, that that that's what I'll tease out right now. Alright. And maybe, once

we release it, we'll have you back on so we could talk about, the new

features that you're you're rolling out here for Fanlist. I noticed

that you're using a Shure MV 7 as your microphone.

Mhmm. I'm curious. What are you using for your

camera and anything else for recording? Oh,

my camera, I'm using a Sony a72 mirrorless. Right

now, it's fuzzy because I don't know why. I

think I just turned it on before this call, and I forgot to focus it.

Yeah. It's a mirrorless camera. It's got a pretty nice lens. It's, f

4 16 millimeter lens.

It is a nice picture. And actually, somebody else, we just had the show, was

using the exact same camera. So, obviously, very popular.

Is there any technology on your wish list? Is

there anything out there either you know that that exists that

you wanna get your hands on or something that you want created that would,

improve your podcast operation? Yeah.

Something I'm about to go run out to buy today. Maybe I'm

saying it because you asked me about my camera, but I'm thinking of dabbling with

a new camera, with a new, mic setup that's a little bit

more on the go, run and gun type thing. I do a

lot of traveling. I love traveling. I do a lot for, you know,

professional life and and personal life.

So I and I like small rigs. Right? I'm kinda like a big

EDC geek, you know, everyday carry type guy. You know, what can you throw in

your bag, and how can you be like a road warrior type

Samson? So the setup I'm looking at is,

the DJI Pocket camera. It's I think it's

called the DJI Pocket 3. It's their 3rd version of their pocket

camera. And I could talk about that a little bit,

but it's it's a cool piece of gear, because it also comes with a

wireless mic. So I think this piece of gear is kind

of changing the landscape for a lot of vloggers, but I think it's gonna be

big in podcasting too because, you know, it's a camera that's gonna be

way better than the camera that's on your, computer, which I'm

all about. But, like, to haul my rig around, if I if I

were to show you a picture of my setup, it's it's just it's too much.

It's insane. You can't throw this in a backpack. So that was the DJI

Pocket 2? Yeah. Yeah. And it comes

what's incredible about it is it comes with this wireless mic that

even the mic is awesome because if you buy buy the mic package,

it's the DJ wireless microphone,

package. And that's a cool package in itself if you need, like, multi

mic. But for, you know, the types of Podcasting that I do,

interviews, and even being a podcast guest, that's

you know, I could probably leave all this stuff at home and just bring the

pocket camera and with that comes with the wireless mic and

just use that as a podcast setup. I'm not sure how new it is, but

there also looks like there's a pocket 3 available. Obviously, it's a little

bit more fun. What I'm talking about. Oh, the pocket 3. Yeah. That's the one

I'm talking about. The pocket 3. Yeah. I I would not recommend the Pocket 2

or the Pocket 1. Tech kinda dabbled in those a little bit, and but with

the top Pocket 3, that's really the game changer, and I think it came out.

Yeah. I wanna say, like, 6 months ago now. So it's something like that. Nice.

Well, we'll, we'll put a link to it, by the way, if anybody wants to

check it out so they could see, exactly what Pat is talking about. And then,

of course, we always ask everybody, what is the podcast

that you are listening to? What's the 1 or 2 that, you know, no matter

what happens, you're gonna make sure that you listen to that podcast when it

drops? Oh, that's a good one.

Yeah. It's hard to pick 1. It's like, you ask people what their favorite song

is or favorite movie is impossible. So similar with me, I would listen to so

many Rodecaster, but I mean, if I were to choose 1,

maybe a podcast called My First Million. I love it.

These, 2 hosts are just super not just

informational, but entertaining. So, you know, they're kinda

like a financial I don't even know how you would

categorize it, but they they talk about start ups. They talk about entrepreneurship,

and they're very informational. But I pretty much just listened to

them kind of on the background. I think they have, like, 2 or 3 episodes

a week. And, they're just entertaining. Very cool.

Well, we'll, we'll put a link to that show. We'll also put a link to

fanless as we talked about the product here that Pat is the founder of. And

we'll also include a link to podcast

growth hacks. And I assume the website that I'm looking at is a a

Famless page for it? Yeah. I mean, if you're looking at the

website, that's just a custom website I built, but I do have a fan list,

fan page for it too. Yeah. We'll make sure to put a link to that

so that people can check out the Podcasting action and, check out

your show as well. Pat Chung, founder of Fanlist,

thank you so much for being here today. Thanks for having me.