Why I listen to podcasts and how they help me on my SaaS journey
Podcasts are a great way for me to learn. My own SaaS journey is very sequential, where I’m building step by step, brick by brick.
I heard someone once say, podcasts are being able to be a fly on the wall and listen to a conversation you previously weren’t privy to.
Being able to pick up on context and nuance of decisions, challenges, what worked, what didn’t… is great. The conversation ones are the best with a blend of a great host who structures the story, yet lets the organic wandering happen.
Listening to others allows me to time shift and jump around and see what other people see. Since I’m jumping around across various podcast series I get to be taken on the journey the podcaster dictates. Which also allows me to “wander” and discover organically.
They just run in the background and give me exposure. Some things get flagged for later, some resonate to where I’m at right at that moment… Giving me an insight or idea that can help me with a problem I was having or sometimes didn’t even know I had.
Some have given me mental models that reframe my thinking about a topic. Two recent ones
Even better, I’ve learned that if there is a specific episode I get a ton of insights in… then likely there are more in there that didn’t hit me. Insights I didn’t see because I’m not ready for them. These are the episode I flag to come back to later. I put them in a queue to remind myself to listen to them again in 6 months.
I thought I’d list a few that I really enjoy lately:
- Churn.fm – SaaS Churn and Retention
- Business of Software Presentations and talks on software entrepreneurship (tons on SaaS and great stuff for founders) but also great videos from their famed conference
- In Depth by First Round Review Deep interviews with all kinds of people in startup tech (not just founders, but great managers, people ops, ICs)
About 5 months ago I decided to finally put some of this back out into the world and share while also helping an aspiring founder to find his SaaS and get his startup going. It’s called Searching for SaaS, we’re about 14 episodes in so far and it’s getting to be a lot of fun.
Also a quick shout out to the podcast that was the inspiration for our format: Software Social which talks about Colleen and Michele’s journeys as SaaS founders. With Colleen being earlier and Michele being later (and working on writing a book!!!).
As an honorable mention I also really enjoy the SaaS Podcast by Omer Khan and SaaStr Podcast. Both are great but very different. Omer has great stories of founders through various stages and SaaStr speaks to more enterprise SaaS. I subscribe to both, but admit I hunt and peck vs listening to every episode.
