Podmatch: Automatically Matching Ideal Podcast Hosts & Your Perfect Guests For Interviews with Founder & CEO Alex Sanfilippo on Episode #0233

Alex Sanfilippo [0:00]
Hey, this is Alex Sanfilippo, the founder of podmatch.com and you are listening to EA Interviews.

Intro [0:04]
EA Interviews, Episode 233 inspiration, transformation success stories and the imperfect action round seven days a week. Join Mario Fachini for today’s expert authority effect interview.

Mario Fachini [0:18]
I am super excited for this episode because I have the CEO and founder of Pod Match here, Alex sanfilippo. And if you have a show, if you’re thinking about doing a show, or if you want to guest on shows and you don’t have a show, see how easy and clear I made that. Here’s the deal. podcast guesting is huge, you should be doing it no matter if you have a show or not. His service will help you, we’re going to be talking about it. And I’m trying to keep a straight face because we’re having a great time already. And it’s just going to be great. So if you want to get on a podcast, he can help me by talking about it. When I come back from thanking the sponsor, we’re going to have Alex Sanfilippo.

Sponsor – Free Business Book Publishing Course [1:02]
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Mario Fachini [1:17]
Here he is. Ladies and gentlemen. Alex Sanfilippo. Alex, how are you feeling today?

Alex Sanfilippo [1:22]
Mario, I’m feeling great. Thank you so much for having me, still the best dressed and all of podcasting land. Here you are. I almost threw on a vest for you. But I just decided it’s just couldn’t do it. I can’t fight with you there. So glad to be here, man.

Mario Fachini [1:34]
Well, I do appreciate that. And I want to know more about it because we met each other at a podcasting event. And we were in touch. We’re cool. We’re talking about this and that. But it seemed like out of nowhere. You were like, I did this thing. And I was so excited for you. Definitely supporting you. But why did you just, I mean, tell me about it. Because I don’t even think I know the full story. And we’ve talked at length about it. And I’m just so excited for you, man.

Alex Sanfilippo [2:03]
Yeah, thank you for sure. I’d love to get into it here. First off, I believe the first time we met if I’m not mistaken, was at pod fest. Absolutely. It was an in person conference. I don’t know if listeners know what that is. But we used to actually go to an event center or a place and we’d all like to shake hands and hug and stuff like that. And we wouldn’t get each other sick, believe it or not. So the world has changed. But, uh, yeah, so we met back at pod Fest, and…

Mario Fachini [2:32]
It was a pod fest 2020 in person in March.

Alex Sanfilippo [2:36]
That’s it? Yep. Yeah. And I remember going to that conference with this idea. That wasn’t an idea. It was an idea to find an idea that I decided to do. And I said that kind of like jokingly but a friend of mine, who had a conversation with him, he’s been in the business world for a long time. And his advice to me was to stop trying to come up with my own ideas for businesses, and instead listen to the people that I can serve the best and the people that I’m surrounded by. And I decided to really go all in on that. I decided, you know what, I’m actually going to try this. And his name was Dane Maxwell in a book called start from zero. And his whole idea is to start from nothing, not even an idea, just go solve somebody’s problem. So when I went to that conference, where it happened to me, I was asking as many people as I could, what they were struggling with in the podcasting space, because there’s that podcast and conference. And I’m a podcaster like you. So I was like what, is there a way I can serve these people with a need that hasn’t been met. And Mario, I found it really interesting, because I very quickly realized that there were podcast hosts in the room. But also there were enough people, there’s like 2000 people at this conference or something like that, it seems like a lot. But there’s also just people that haven’t had a podcast yet. They were authors. They’re people who wanted to actually just talk about their story. And it was very interesting to see these people in the same room granted a massive room that couldn’t find each other. But they really wanted the host to say, I need a guest that can talk about this. And the guests on either side were saying I have a book that’s about this. And I was like, wow, I shouldn’t introduce them. So I just started making introductions and talking to people like, oh, I just met someone, so they’d be a great guest where you are, who I know, this host would be really great fit for you. And that’s really when it clicked, I realized there was a need to actually do some form of matchmaking for podcast guests and hosts. And yes, there are booking agents, which I absolutely love. You and I are mutual friends with some of them. Some of the CEOs of those companies, and man, they are fantastic, but they’ll even tell you it’s not realistic for everybody, for people that are just getting started or maybe just releasing their first book, they really can’t afford that. So there really wasn’t an option I was seeing that that the industry had and that was kind of like the birth of pod match was me just realizing okay, somehow I have to help these people find each other.

Mario Fachini [4:45]
Well, that is great. And I’m glad you brought that up because if you’re not familiar if you… Okay, calm down because this is so powerful, and I want to make sure people get this. Whether you have a show or not you should be guest podcasting. I tell my author clients that, you know, I have a show. So I’m on shows all the time, and people are always reaching out to me, which I’m thankful for. And absolutely, I take them up on it, because I’m telling you I should be guest podcasting. But it’s this little niche that is so voluminous to begin with. If you’re promoting, if you have a business, if you’re promoting a book, if you’re doing a campaign of sorts, if you’re willing to invest in paid advertising, the world is all digital. And I’ll also throw in, it’s been that way for a good decade or two, this is nothing new. Just saying, you are the TV station, you are the media. And people have heard about press releases, but not a lot of people do them. Everyone’s heard about paid ads. But you know, not a lot of people do them. There’s all these things. And I’ve even trained people on all these different methods. And they’re just like, I didn’t know this was all out there. They still think it’s like newspapers and stuff. But there’s nothing better than going on a show where they have the credibility of the host. They’re being promoted, they get to share, they get to educate, they get to add value the same way. I love publishing books for people, business books, specifically, because you get to share that training and expertise and put it in someone’s hands. And you’re essentially building up the sales cycle. Within that we have the agencies you have, if you’re if you have no time for anything, you just say, Here’s money, book me on a dozen shows, there’s people who can do that. But like you said, not everyone’s in that position. Then the other alternative is Facebook groups, and LinkedIn groups and all these things. If you have more time than money, you can absolutely spend 10, 20, 30 hours a week just looking around for stuff and you’ll find it. But what I like about your platform, because I use it, is it does it for you, you have a great high caliber guest. And you don’t need to be spending hours and hours because as a host, I look at it going, if I spent five hours doing this, I could interview five to six more people. What’s the solution to this? So tell me why you decided to make that matchmaker feature into it, and pair people up and say, hey, I’m looking for authors. Here’s an author, instead of just a normal listing, where it’s cool, you give me these people that they’re in here, but I’m still doing a ton of work, frankly.

Alex Sanfilippo [7:34]
Yeah, you know, it kind of goes back to the need that I saw. There’s directory services out there, which are awesome. I’ve used some of those, like, that’s great. It’s a directory service, but I really wanted to actually solve the need just to match people together. I mean, a lot of people in the space you and I included, we don’t have a lot of time to look for guests or for hosts to have us as guests on their shows. And so that again, that was the need that I saw. And you know, going back to like one of your I listened to your podcast in a previous episode, I might do that. It’s 184 with Cory Lee, he talked about how when he decided to add masterminds to his coaching service, because he just saw a need and decided to fill it. So for me, the need wasn’t just the director anymore, similar to what Cory was saying he saw a need and he decided, you know, I can do something about this, I can feel this need. So for me, I was like we need a matchmaking service one is truly going to match people together. And so I mean, your other guests are saying it too, which I think is interesting. We’re talking about the same thing: truly finding that niche and getting really focused on it. So for me, I knew the only way to really help people in that giant room. One person being an author, one person actually being a podcast host is looking for an author that wrote a book on the same topic would be to truly match them. Because if I just put them in a smaller place together like a directory, it still didn’t solve the ultimate problem that I wanted to so man, I went straight to the drawing board after that conference, I mean, the world shut down like virtually a couple days after I mean, I feel like we were so blessed to get like to get in at the end there. But um, when I went back home, I remember I actually had a kettlebell in hand. I was doing kettlebell swings on my back porch because I don’t know why I was doing back there. But I was working out. And I just stopped mid-workout. And that’s when the idea clicked. Cuz I was like thinking about, like, What can I do for these people? And I ran straight inside of my whiteboards, and immediately just started writing it out. And I thought, what if it was like an online dating app, but instead of finding people for dates, it found podcast guests and hosts to do interviews together. And man that was kind of like the birth of it. I just literally said it was March 10. I’ll never forget it, and just started writing it down, getting it all out there. And that same night called an old friend of mine that had done a project like a SAS project before, and just said, hey, are you working on projects right now? And he was like, no, actually, I’m just now freeing up on something. He was like, you got something going on. And I explained it to him. He literally was like, I’m all in. Let’s get started. And man, it was June 15. Same year 2020 when we actually launched it into very early beta. But yeah, man we got it launched really fast, got it knocked out and made a very minimal viable product. A mutual friend of ours, Chris Krimitsos was proud of me because we started ugly. Like his book says, We literally watch it day one that we possibly could tell people, it’s not gonna be beautiful. But here’s the crazy thing I launched with 100 users. And most of those people that I launched with, were in that room back in March, they were the people that I was talking to, we were able to exchange information. So I already had a bit of a built in audience because they said, oh, I need this. I said, Well, let me get your information. And when I have something for you, I’ll let you know. And I was able to actually test with those people. And they’re very gracious, because it had a lot of problems initially, of course, because we launched very early, but we’ve been able to work out those issues and continue to grow it since then.

Mario Fachini [10:35]
Yeah, I remember seeing I think it was a LinkedIn post you had shared it. And I was like, what is this because you weren’t really talking about it the months before. And I was like…

Alex Sanfilippo [10:45]
I didn’t know yet, man.

Mario Fachini [10:47]
You know what I mean? It’s like you didn’t bring it up at the conference, you weren’t talking about it. And then all of a sudden, I was like, this is awesome. But what’s going on here, and I remember being on the speaker call for the pod fest global summit. And for anyone who doesn’t know, Chris, check out episode 111. He’s fantastic. He’s also been on the show and pod fest is a great organization that I highly recommend you come join us with. But we were on the speaker call for that. And you were talking about it, you sponsored it. And I was just like, I think I had already signed up at that point. But when you started talking about it even more, I was already telling people about it, because I knew what you were doing. And I know for a fact, people signed up.

Alex Sanfilippo [11:33]
Oh yeah and you’ve helped a lot man. I’ve done some things for the audience listening to. I’ve done some coaching with Mario, he’s helped train me a little bit and we’re reaching more people now since I’ve talked to him because that’s your area of expertise. It’s not mine, I’m solving a problem, you’re helping me find the people that have the problem. So I appreciate that. That’s just a little side note there had to say,

Mario Fachini [11:52]
Well, I do appreciate that and wasn’t expecting it. But nonetheless, it’s still appreciated, but what you’re doing is so I see it as like, my whole goal with this is I want to connect the world. And if you are 10 hours a week, I’m always telling my author clients, what is the highest and best use of your time? You know, because when we’re talking about business book publishing, it’s like, well, what about this? What about this, it’s again, so voluminous. I got all I need from you is your expertise. The rest we can handle stay right here, stay very niche, stay very focused. Because it’s like, what can only you do right now, my teams working on stuff, and I’m very thankful for them. But right now I’m the only one who can host my show. You’re the only one who can be doing this interview. Now, there’s other stuff that can be going on. And I think people get too diluted with all of it. And it brings me back to your software. Because if you only have 10 hours a week to do what you want, I would say that’s better than having 100 hours a week because it’s going to force you to go okay, where’s the highest and best use of my time? And the answer isn’t, I would say for anyone hosting a show or any serious author, or any CEO, it’s not just doing all this other stuff. There’s tons of ways to get the bookings, you should be doing the interviews. And like you mentioned, I know people with other services, they’re great. Some of them have been on, some of them are coming on. And I think they all have their place. And there’s so many people for sure. I see cooperation, not competition. But you have done something unique. And when I first used that, you were one of the first services to get me bookings nearly instantly in under seven days. And you don’t even know this yet. It’s in those notes I just showed you. And it’s one of the things I go what is something that you did and I go you know what I mean? It’s that proof of concept where if someone doesn’t know you, and they go to use this like right now anyone listening, check out, pod match. Okay? EAInterviews.com/podmatch. And you will see within… I don’t want to say any time frames but it’ll be a lot quicker. And you’ll have guessed for your show. As well as if you want to be a guest on show. It just works. So tell me about the behind the scenes. How are you pulling this off instead of just having yet another Facebook or yet another direct LinkedIn with names and all this and people still have to do it. How are you finding such high quality connections?

Alex Sanfilippo [14:39]
Yeah, man First of all, thanks for the kind words like seriously just made my day so thank you. I really appreciate you saying all that means a lot and your support, your expertise, like you’ve been where you’re at that’s makes my day so thank you. Yeah, I’ll go back to like when we started building it, so I’ve got the business partner so I immediately again, I’m looking to solve a need so I wasn’t gonna be greedy in this at all. I knew that I wanted to, to do it quickly to help people. So I immediately brought that friend in as a partner. So we did all the legal stuff that you’re supposed to do, right? So he said, okay, we’re just gonna work on this thing together now. And he’s really like the guy who’s built everything. Some subcontractors and some tools and things like that, of course, but I wiped it all out, I’d actually write up the technical documents like, here’s what needs to do how it needs to work. And we just started building them. Like, again, I pitched the idea to them on March 10, and March 11, we hit the ground running, and we just went for it. And we just kind of had a vision for what it needed to do. And then we started testing with users as early as we could. So we just bring on two or three people and just ask them, hey, what do you think? And what I actually ended up learning was that the better feedback I was getting is from the people who didn’t like it, versus the ones who liked it early on, because people are just like, this is so cool. There’s nothing like this. And then there’s other ones that like, it’s really slow, or I don’t understand what this does. And I really like honing in on those people, which I think many of us want the gratification of, right? So we kind of try to avoid that, even if it’s subconscious, but I knew I needed to if I really wanted this to do well, I had to be willing to let it hurt a little bit. So I just kind of really dove in and listened to those people and said, okay, if this was really going to work well for you, what would it need to do? And a more recent question to kind of fast forward and kind of fill in the gaps here. But the more recent question I’m now asking people is this is now to the people who actually like it. I asked them this question, what would a pod match need to do in order for you to tell everybody you know about it? What do you think about that question, man, that’s like, super powerful, right? Like, they might say, like, oh, it needs to get me paid, or it needs to do this. But like, I want to hear that information. If I can somehow take that in and do something with it that helps people at a deeper level, that’s going to be really big. So I want to make sure I’m asking that question. But along the way, we’ve built this whole thing, based on asking questions, and we can get into exactly what it does and how it works. But it’s all been based off of real time feedback that we’re getting from people.

Mario Fachini [16:58]
That’s fantastic. And I want to ask you a specific question that I know you have a great answer to. But everyone’s gonna want to know. And it’s actually another one from the notes that you haven’t even seen yet, but it’s around the security, because so many people are so concerned with security nowadays.How much have you looked into the security of your platform? And why are you so confident about it?

Alex Sanfilippo [17:26]
Yeah, that’s a good question. I’m glad you asked that. Actually, we don’t really talk about this at all. But it’s because…

Mario Fachini [17:31]
And that’s one of the notes you absolutely need to and lead with it because it’s on everyone’s mind. And not a lot of people do. And it freaks people out seriously.

Alex Sanfilippo [17:40]
Yeah, you’re right. This is good coaching for me, this isn’t even a podcast episode anymore. This is just coaching.

Mario Fachini [17:45]
No, it’s a legit question, because…take the floor.

Alex Sanfilippo [17:50]
Yeah. So that was one of the media things we wanted to address just because we see the world we live in today, where things, information of people’s information just gets thrown out everywhere, like it’s all over the place. And you can see things getting hacked more and more. And I don’t want that to happen to us, obviously. But we wanted to make sure that was really, really safe for people. So the very first thing we did before we even let people do beta testing, like we were still in alpha testing, I met with an attorney who specializes in this type of software, if you will, and just asked her some questions like what do I need to do to keep people safe? And one of the first things she mentioned is make sure there’s no one under 18 on the platform, because that would already be that could potentially cause some issues, which isn’t directly security, but it’s security of our IP, right? If it turns out, there’s a bunch of 15 year old kids getting interviewed, but people are older and there ends up being an issue, the whole thing gets shut down. And that to me is the security issue in itself if we can’t keep it up. So we made sure that like, it’s like one of the first questions and it’s actually the number one complaint people were like, why does it need to know what year I was born. And I was just because we needed to know if you’re over 18. If you’re not, it won’t let you register. But anyway, that’s kind of like where we started. But the lawyer also gave us some other things. But long story short, the guy I’m working with and I can’t give up too much of his information, his work history, but he worked for the military as a database builder. And you can imagine the US military database has got to be at least somewhat secure, right? I mean, Mario, we can both agree, it’s got to be there. So. So what we did is we actually really worked hard to make sure it was really safe for people. And then on top of that, we actually have a friend who’s in cybersecurity, also working for the government. And I’m just gonna leave the rest of it out there. But we asked him to actually do some stress testing, I was like, hey, from your perspective, is this safe. And the first run around was during alpha testing, and he poked some holes in it like that we didn’t think would be there to kind of give us a different frame of mind. But we did end up really doing some heavy patching and like actually really upping the security on it and making sure that’s a really safe platform. So we’re really proud to say today that it’s up to a super high standard. I can’t say it is like the military or government standard, but it’s extremely safe for our members and we call our people that are on pot match our members, not our users, not our customers, we call them our members because we want to consider it something that we’re part of as well. And I believe when you’re part of a community, you want everyone to be safe in it. So we merely made sure that the security side of things was really up to par. Because again, those are my people. And I want to make sure I’m doing what I can to take care of them.

Mario Fachini [20:11]
Yeah, and I wanted to highlight that because when I developed my SAS for building WordPress websites automatically, it was paramount. I mean, especially with WordPress, and all the plugins, and all this other stuff. And that’s a whole other thing.

Alex Sanfilippo [20:27]
It’s a whole nother topic there. I use WordPress as well. But I feel for you, you have done it, my friend.

Mario Fachini [20:33]
And people just don’t talk about it, because it’s not that sexy, cool thing. And I’ve had security experts on the show. And I was asking them some stuff. There’s at least three to four episodes where they worked for the FBI, the CIA, their cybersecurity experts. And it was just fascinating to me, because it’s like, I would say most people in the mainstream, they’re irritated if they can’t log in, or they forget their password. Use LastPass by the way,

Alex Sanfilippo [21:01]
Yes, I use that.

Mario Fachini [21:03]
But there’s so many people, it’s like, oh, yeah, I’m secure. I have two FA on it. Or I have forgotten my password. And people are like the tip of the iceberg. But the reality is, it’s much deeper than that. Everyone’s got all these screens. Everyone’s got the internet. And I think pretty much everyone’s probably got near half a gig or gig internet. I don’t know anyone that’s running. I remember when I had a five meg connection, it was like, whoa, that’s rocket fast. Now it’s like, oh, it’s only 646. It’s a slow day. Like, think back to 288 like, relax for a second, just enjoy what you have. But the reality is, you can. I’ve actually processed payments doing over 80 miles an hour in a car from a hotspot. You could be on a plane hacking something with the internet, you can be attacking stuff, and I’m not advising it. Okay. But the reality is, if you do anything online, you need to protect yourself from a user standpoint, like use Carbonite, have a VPN, but especially if you have a software and owner server. Holy smokes. That’s a whole other thing. So when you were telling me just briefly, I was like, I’m definitely gonna ask you this because too many people are wondering, too many people are losing trust in, let’s just say different things. And one of them’s on, nevermind, I’m just gonna shut up right there. But there’s a lot of websites that people use nowadays that they don’t trust what’s happening to the information. So I’m glad you definitely secure that down.

Alex Sanfilippo [22:40]
Yeah, we did. And we made it so that there’s a lot of things that we don’t have access to like we use stripe, which does a pretty good job of keeping certain information private, we want to make sure that even from our standpoint, because right now it’s me and my partner, Jesse that are working on this, and that’s fine. But when we add a couple VA’s here, like we want to make sure still that everything is going to be safe. And there’s no information that ever gets shared. Like we want our members to use this and do so feeling secure. And some people may never think about it, they might hear this and be like, wow, I would have never thought about the security implications behind a SAS right. I was there a few years ago. But now I realize that like no, they’ve trusted me to give me their information, even if it’s just a name and email address. But they’ve trusted me with that. So I need to respect that. And I need to honor that and do what I can to protect it.

Mario Fachini [23:28]
So now that we covered the security side of stuff, because I just think it’s so cool. What you’ve done.

Alex Sanfilippo [23:35]
Yeah. Thanks man.

Mario Fachini [23:36]
Tell me more about the results. Now what are some of the transformations you’ve seen? I know I’ve experienced it literally within the first week there were already getting matches. I was like this is way quicker. And I’ll tell you some of the timelines for the other ones are six to eight weeks later. There was one I reached out to not gonna say who there only like the guy wasn’t super nice to be honest. And he was like, well just know, I don’t have a free trial. idiotic? No, I don’t have a free trial. Just get the full plan. But don’t expect anything the first few months. Dude, you’re not in sales, are you? Because you’re doing everything that you’re not supposed to be doing. Needless to say, I’m more upset. I didn’t get to test the platform because sometimes I don’t need it. Sometimes I just dive in to say, hey, because there’s a lot of people who watch the show, listen to the show and they go, what do you recommend? I want to be able to say empirically, hey, here’s what you should do, here’s what you shouldn’t. You’re definitely on the hey, sign up. This other one. I’ve never been an advocate for they’re horrible, they’re bad, blah, blah, blah. Just throw them under the bus because you don’t need to and I think people would just figure it out on their own. I do not promote them though. But that was literally my first hand experience, I’m more upset. I didn’t get to test it. I don’t care if I’m on it or not, because I frankly have a waitlist of people. But I’m more upset because I’m like, I want to see the inside and how it works. But just based on the owners, I mean, if the owners mentality is that there’s no way it’s going to far exceed my expectations. You know what I mean? There’s just some things that make common sense. So tell me about the transformations that people on the platform are having if someone wants to sign up right now, which they should at EAInterviews.com/podmatch. What should they be doing? And what should they expect to see in the next couple of weeks?

Alex Sanfilippo [25:39]
Yeah, so the way it works right now, and I’ll actually mention something cuz you mentioned a cost. Pod Match is a free service for 90% of our users.

Mario Fachini [25:48]
Which is smart, because you get people to try it out.

Alex Sanfilippo [25:52]
Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely. And, you know, I did that for a specific reason. It goes back to the original reason I started, I saw a need that I wanted to help fill. And I remember in Mario, I don’t you’re like a legend. So maybe you didn’t have this problem. But day one, when I started podcasting, finding guests, and convincing them to come on a show that didn’t yet exist, wasn’t super easy. People value their time, which they should, but it was really tough for me. So initially, I didn’t have any budget, I was just getting started saying I want to do it. And I had to grind to get started, man like to find my first 12.

Mario Fachini [26:23]
It was the same for me, too. Okay. Nothing was handed to me. I had to work my tail off the first year to get everything the way I wanted. And, but I did have a goal.

Alex Sanfilippo [26:34]
That helps a lot.

Mario Fachini [26:34]
To create a problem. Because I heard John Lee Dumas told me he’s like, I get over 400 requests a month and I have eight slots. I go, that’s a problem I want to have. So I just worked towards that. I said, I was willing to do the first 100 completely on my own. No booking agencies, no software, no, nothing. I didn’t frankly know about any of it. I knew there was stuff out there. But again, if it takes me four months to look into it, I can pick up the phone and email 15 times quicker. You know what I mean? So I just, yeah, it took a lot to get it off the ground. But now I’m glad there’s a waitlist, and people are months out. But this was my goal, you know, before I launched,

Alex Sanfilippo [27:16]
Yeah, oh, definitely. Kind of going back to that. So for me, same thing, like I had a goal, I knew what I wanted to do. It was just tough to get there. So when I started a pod match, I said that I want this to be something that’s free for people who really need it. And there’s people out there who need this solution. So when I say free for 90% of people, I mean, the free version of pod matches with a free version. And we have a paid version, the free version will work for 90% of users. And that was from day one was the goal, can we make this work for 90% of people for free. And then of course, in any industry you’re in doesn’t matter what it is, they’re always those 10% that are like the power users, the ones that say, I want to podcast every day, or I want to be able to search by these filters, or I want a checkmark by my name, all these different things, which are all great. But we found it’s about 10% of people. And so that was the goal we launched, we’re actually hitting just over 8% right now. And we’re actually implementing a couple things I think will boost it up that 10%. But those 10% are happy to be paying because they know that they’re the name in the industry, right? They’re the ones that really have a goal to make it a big business. And or they have a new book they want to promote. So maybe you’re just doing three months of a paid membership, instead of keeping on the free ones, they get a little bit of a boost. But we really wanted to serve those people. So that was really important. So what we found is that with either side free or paid people immediately get matches. So I say immediately, there’s always a bit of lag time because it actually has to do like there’s an algorithm and a core and stuff like that, that has to do the matching. And if like 100 people sign up at the same time, which we’ve seen in some days, it can take like an hour or two for your initial match. But we’ll match you with five people almost immediately. It says these five people are great to interview or vice versa, these five people, they could be on their podcast. And so the matching core works really fast. And we’re actually on version three of that. And we’re getting ready to launch version four, which will be even quicker and even more accurate to find more precise matches. And that was some feedback that you gave me to really improve that we’re like a week away from doing that now, which I’m excited about. But yeah, man, it’s quick. Some people they’ve said within 20 minutes, they like logged in and they already had their matches, they’re waiting for him. But the system will email you when it’s ready. And then you just start messaging. But we built that inside the system, too. We wanted to really feel similar to an online dating app, because we modeled after a couple of them. So you can actually not only message back and forth, you can also schedule the interview, add the location, it’ll send out calendar invites without ever having to exchange an email. If you don’t want to change an email you actually don’t have to. It’ll do it all inside there and then ask you to review each other afterwards. And yeah, I mean, we built it to be like a very holistic problem solver.

Mario Fachini [29:43]
Well, I’m glad to hear you’re making it faster. It was already good to begin with because there’s a big difference from three to four weeks and then the homeboy over here is telling me just use it for two to three months and you’ll see some traction like I don’t have two to three months to test this out.

Alex Sanfilippo [29:58]
Right.

Mario Fachini [29:58]
And now you’re dropping it down from, I mean, it sounds like you’re really dropping it down. I did.

Alex Sanfilippo [30:04]
Yes. It’s gonna be quicker and more accurate so that we give a match percentage, and we’re actually going to up that percentage. So the requirement that it’s gonna have to be more strenuous, if you will, but we’re fine. We’ve really just been able to kind of figure out like, okay, what makes a good match? And we’re like letting the system figure that out, and it just will get better and better over time.

Mario Fachini [30:21]
Wow, that’s fantastic. It’s great. I mean, I remember when you launched it, it was great, then. And that’s why just start talking to people about it. And this is exciting. So.

Alex Sanfilippo [30:31]
Yeah, man, thank you.

Mario Fachini [30:33]
I think I might ask you something, I’ll see if I can pull it off. So who would you say it’s the best for you to keep mentioning authors, obviously, podcast host for finding people, podcast guest for finding the host who were? Do you have any stats or do you know, here are the top five types of people we have on the platform that archetypes if you will?

Alex Sanfilippo [30:57]
Yeah, so we definitely have that. So first off is like authors, which is kind of general. But it’s kind of a wide range of books. But we do find entrepreneurship business to be really the driver, which if you’re in podcasting, that’s kind of the driver of podcasting as well, right. So we’ve got that as a number one, number two seems to be coaches. So people that are actually doing some form of coaching. And then after coaching, excuse me, after coaching, we have people that are in some sort of coaches as well, but it’s more medical based. So people that are actually in some sort of mental health, physical health, that are really big into that industry. And marketing is like all over the place. But people that are actual marketers, like if you hone in on it, like people that are true marketers, that’s like actually a really big one. But I mean, you could be marketing your book, you can do all kinds of things, you know, but true marketers are kind of like that fourth one. And I’m blanking on the like, where it goes from there, because there’s actually a pretty big drop off after that. But those are really kind of the four that we’re hitting right now. But we’re adding people every day. So we’re actually seeing it kind of grow a little bit, which is, or shrink a little bit, which is nice. You’re seeing more categories of different kinds of people coming on. I didn’t expect comedians to be on there. But we’re actually seeing quite a bit of those increases, which is really kind of interesting. I don’t think I’ll ever go on into this podcast, but it’s kind of cool to see.

Mario Fachini [32:12]
I think I have some insight on that. Perhaps it’s not statistical, but I do believe comedy is the number one category of podcasts. So if you go to religion, comedy, business, entrepreneurship, house gathering, food stuff, and I know there’s this chart on, there’s literally hundreds of categories for Amazon. And podcasting in general. I do believe it’s either. I really like 99.99% Sure, it’s comedy.

Alex Sanfilippo [32:46]
Okay, cool.

Mario Fachini [32:46]
Spirituality, I believe is number two, spirituality religion. And I frankly would rather see it flipped personally. But comedy is for sure at the top. So I think just the sheer fact that it’s for podcasters. In podcasting, it doesn’t surprise me because there’s a few comedians that I’ve seen on multiple groups, platforms, whatever you want to call it, they’re just all over the place like me, if you’re serious about it, and committed, you’re just kind of all over the place. And there’s people that have reached out to me, and it’s like, we don’t know each other or anything, but we just, you know, just like at events, you see each other enough at some point. And so I’ve made some connections where I’m like, I know we’ve crossed paths, like 15 times over I actually booked a meeting with someone at an event last week. For that exact reason. I’ve seen her at pod fest. She’s speaking at the next thing like I am, and it’s literally been over a dozen times. I’m like, I just wanted to book a call and say hi, because we’ve only ever talked in person. It’s so interesting. It’s a small community and everything but I’d say go on the comedy ones I would.

Alex Sanfilippo [33:56]
I don’t know if I’m funny enough, man.

Mario Fachini [33:58]
We definitely could.

Alex Sanfilippo [34:00]
I’ll give it a shot more. I’m gonna try one. I’m gonna call you out. I feel like you’re terrible. And be like Mario told me I should. Go over EA Interviews everybody.

Mario Fachini [34:08]
Yeah, I’ve actually one of the things I want to do is actually do stand up.

Alex Sanfilippo [34:12]
Really? Okay, because I’ve always lost respect for that, man. I really do.

Mario Fachini [34:18]
I think it would be interesting. I’ve said some things and not sure if I should have said them out loud. But here’s the deal. Everyone was still laughing.

Alex Sanfilippo [34:28]
Then hey man.

Mario Fachini [34:29]
So…

Alex Sanfilippo [34:30]
You need to give it a shot. But when you do that, you have to let me know because I want to make sure that… I want to be there in person. If it’s an in person thing. I want to be there for that. That sounds cool.

Mario Fachini [34:38]
I’m still working on the routine, but I’ll definitely let you know. And I have another file like the one I showed you on your software. I have notes on everything. And so you remember stuff, but I have one that’s like stand up comedy one stand up comedy two win. Yeah, comedies are cool.

Alex Sanfilippo [34:55]
I kind of throw a little piece of wisdom out there. That’s not just for comedy, but it was using comedy. Somebody asked Jerry Seinfeld for advice on becoming a stand up comedian, like, what should I do? And his response was like, not what you’d expect as an interview, he only said, write one joke every day. That’s all he said. And he said, that’s how he got to where he was. He wrote one joke every day. So he literally wrote it. And he’d do it again the next day, and write another one the next day and just keep on writing. But that works out with anything you do. It’s the repetition. It’s the practice of what we do. In business. For me, the pod match wasn’t built overnight. It was one right step every day. But I thought it was interesting how we could kind of tie it together, because he’s a comedian.

Mario Fachini [35:32]
He has a consistency, you know, same thing I heard with. And I’ll tell everyone, that when you’re more consistent with the show, it’s like, well, how do I get more downloads? How do I get more bookings? Well, how often are you focused on bookings? How often are you dropping episodes? How often do you let people know you’re even out there? It’s like, the other one, when I’m talking to audiences, they’re like, I want to increase sales. I want to attract more people, more clients. Cool. How many offers have you made this week? What do you mean? There we go. Don’t ask me about anything else. Call someone right now.

Alex Sanfilippo [36:09]
So you know, is that actually someone I really respect? I’ve done some real estate investing in my life and not on like a massive level or anything like that. But Brandon Turner, of bigger pockets. He’s kind of the face of it. He writes all his real estate books. And his number one piece of advice for getting more real estate deals is to make more offers. And so he starts from just going, looking at listings and making offers. He’s like, if I make one offer a month, I probably won’t get that one. He goes, but I make 100 offers a month, I might actually get one, two, or even three deals. So he’s like, it’s all about doing the annual analysis upfront figuring out and just going after it making it offers everywhere you possibly can. And it turns out to just be a numbers game and so much of what we do, we’ve got to go through those motions, which is actually Seth Godin, I think you’ve probably coined it is the practice is what he calls it’s his latest book. And he just says it’s the practice of what you need to do. And eventually practice turns into something and materializes. It’s just so important. No matter what business you’re in, it doesn’t matter. That’s what you have to do. You have to be willing to do the reps. And eventually it pays off over time.

Mario Fachini [37:10]
Yeah, and that’s so important. One of my favorite quotes, I believe it’s Wayne Gretzky. And he said, well, it’s not the one word I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is. But it never hurts to take a shot on goal. My goal that’s solid, what’s gonna happen, you know, it doesn’t work. So it’s definitely not going to work if you don’t try.

Alex Sanfilippo [37:35]
100% man, exactly right. With that.

Mario Fachini [37:37]
Well, I’m glad you’re implementing it for pod matches. And it’s awesome to see you succeed with it and move forward. I got one more question for you.

Alex Sanfilippo [37:44]
All right.

Mario Fachini [37:45]
It’s time for the Wheel of Whatever.

Alex Sanfilippo [37:49]
It was coming.

Mario Fachini [37:53]
And I didn’t say it earlier, even though I wanted to. And I’m getting really good at that spin. Some of them have been they dish don’t

Alex Sanfilippo [37:59]
I am gonna rest, man.

Mario Fachini [38:00]
Look at that thing go. There we go. hit the brakes, abs. So my question for you is I was gonna ask you something fun. That’s just like, you know, whatever. But I did this with someone else. And I got them to anyway, tell me something that you’re coming out with that no one knows about yet.

Alex Sanfilippo [38:19]
Geez man, look at that, man. I’m in the middle of my research for a book boundary publishing. I’ve maybe put it on my website a little bit, but it’s kind of hidden and stuff like that, because I’m not quite there. But it’s something I’ve been wanting to do for some time. And so that’s something to be coming up in 2021. I’m actually going to begin writing as soon as January hits. And I have a plan to have it finished by summer. And then doing all that, which is something you know about so I probably shouldn’t have just announced it to you, I should have made up something totally different. Because now you’re gonna be all over me about this. But yeah, man, that’s something that I’m doing. It’s uncharted territory for me. I know nothing about it. But it’s something that I do even after doing some podcast interviews, like, I guess I’m at 90 or something like that now. It’s enough that I now feel that I actually have really honed in the message that I want to get out to the world. And that’s something I’m really going to go for.

Mario Fachini [39:15]
Good for you. You definitely should. And I had no clue about that. And I don’t hound anyone if I’m always looking to help. But I do realize there is a thing as far as timing, some people like my show, we actually have produced over half a dozen other shows. For years. My team and I, before I even launched mine. Oh, wow. Okay, it was timing. It’s not that I had no idea what to do. I just was like, man, Someday, someday, someday, someday. There’s an interesting story about my very first guest, Tony Bernard, very thankful for him. He’s awesome. But episode one. I mean, it was literally just a timing thing for me, so I can appreciate that. So we’re gonna…this is awesome. You’re going to love our sponsor. So we’re gonna thank our sponsor and come back for the Imperfect Action Round.

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Mario Fachini [40:24]
And we are back with the Imperfect Action Round. Alex, are you ready to take imperfect action?

Alex Sanfilippo [41:43]
I am. Sorry. I’m laughing about the advertisement. It’s like lined up perfectly for what we’re talking about. But I’m ready. Let’s go.

Mario Fachini [41:49]
Yeah, that was great. I had no idea. I thought you might reveal something about the platform. I’ve actually, John and Stacy Curry, they own supper, savage salad dressing. And it’s delicious. Number one, but number two, I was like, did the whole thing. I was like, so what’s the flavor you haven’t announced yet that you’re coming out with next? And she’s like, oh, and I got an email from her staff. They were like, we didn’t even know how did you get her to reveal it? Wheel of whatever. So I use that now for all myriad of purposes.

Alex Sanfilippo [42:22]
Love it. Let’s get back into it. Man. I’m ready.

Mario Fachini [42:24]
Yeah, what are we doing the oh, the Imperfect Action Round right. Question one. What is the fastest path to profits?

Alex Sanfilippo [42:32]
The fastest path to the profits? Man, for me, it’s been making mistakes really quick, and then recovering really fast, because I have done a lot of wrong things. And every time it’s just showing me one wrong way that doesn’t work, right. It’s how the light bulb was made. In my life it has definitely been that. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. And I’ve gotten more and more comfortable with the mistakes I make because I’m able to then pivot and lead me closer to success. But for me, that’s kind of been the big action for me, you and me both.

Mario Fachini [43:02]
Great answer. Definitely me. Number two, what is the biggest problem you see your prospects making and the fastest way for them to fix it?

Alex Sanfilippo [43:14]
Yeah, I see people that are not willing to focus. And what I mean by that is that if something’s going to take longer than a few minutes, I find that people in today’s world like, Is there an easier way to do this or something faster, and not even cheaper, people are willing to pay for something if it’s quicker. But that’s not always the right solution. Sometimes doing the time for something makes things more worthwhile and being really willing to sit down and focus on something instead of have your TV on the background, your smartphone, your hand checking your your Instagram or Tick Tock where people check these days, but actually saying you want to put everything inside them to focus on this and see where it brings me instead of just quickly going like this is going to take too much effort. If you will be willing to do that. I think they’d see much quicker results in their lives. And I can tell you that many people I’ve served, that’s the biggest thing that I try to help them overcome.

Mario Fachini [44:02]
Excellent. Number three, what is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value?

Alex Sanfilippo [44:09]
To keep them first off, keep them for as long as you can write to maximize the value is really about hearing them. People want to feel involved in something so the quicker that you can keep them somehow in the loop with what you’re doing and make them feel like they are somebody of value to you. That’s going to keep them around much, much longer and keep them involved in the entire process. Ask for feedback. Ask me to tell you when they like something, when they don’t, be willing to jump on calls with even random people that might be your customers even if you don’t have any direct contact with them. Like it could be completely a service but really treating people like they’re human is really what keeps people around. People want to feel like they belong to something and that they’re actually part of it, not just another number and I found it that really helps a lot.

Mario Fachini [44:50]
Great expert authority insight. Thank you for that. What books would you recommend to the expert authority world?

Alex Sanfilippo [44:57]
Man, here’s the deal. I read. I think over 44 books this year, I love to read and I can’t recommend all of them. So I’ll go…

Mario Fachini [45:07]
Top three to five. We have room for a bonus six, but I always say top three to five.

Alex Sanfilippo [45:12]
You said top 35. Okay, now first on my list for this year that I think is really been like just a huge book for me this year and for people I’ve shared it with so many people Indistractible by Nir Eyal it’s really uncovering what I consider to be a human superpower of not being able to be distracted and it really goes deep into that goes back to the whole focus and I see being an issue for people this really hits on the head. It’s a fantastic book that I read but I really liked. Another one that I really just enjoyed reading. I’m going to go with somebody else’s books, I read a lot of galleys that books are actually not out. Let me let me think of a different one here. Fix this next by Mike Michalowicz, profit versus his more popular book previously. But now he’s got this one called Fix This Next, it’s really great about teaching you how to focus on the very next action that needs to happen to continue to grow your business. And that one was a really impactful one as well. And I’ll dive in with one more. This one is like my personal all time favorite. I’m a believer, I love the Bible. And specifically, I actually really have made it a point every single day I read Proverbs, which is one of the books in the Bible, and I read it based off whatever day it is. So like, the 17th of every month, I’m reading Proverbs chapter 17, there’s only 31 chapters. So it works. I just roll it over and read through it. And I really study it. And what I’ve actually found is most wisdom that the world shares in other books and things like that, you could actually almost put all of it into just the book of Proverbs, which kind of blows my mind if you really start dissecting it and reading it. Like there’s whole books on just this one thing, spool this one concept or an entire book on it. So that would be that’s my number one and also the one that’s like, kind of like people don’t really expect me to say, but man, that’s that’s been really impactful on my life.

Mario Fachini [46:59]
I’m glad you did mention it, and it’s why I stopped. I’ve only messed up and said business books a few times. I think the Bible is number one also. And it’s interesting. There’s 31 books, and most months have 30 to 31 days. And that’s not coincidence. And also I love when people argue they’re like, no, it was Napoleon Hill. No. is Dale Carnegie? No. Like, no, he was the originator. I’m like, wrong on both accounts.

Alex Sanfilippo [47:29]
It’s so true, man. Yeah, but yeah, so I know, it’s not all business books. But I do read just a ton of business books. I will say this, one of my goals by the end of this year is to actually for the first time since I was in high school, I suppose, actually pick up a book that is like just a fiction book. And I’m leaning towards a Star Wars book, which I know makes me sound like a nerd and I completely accept that and embrace it. But there’s like this newer series with like, Thrawn from Star Wars. I’m thinking you know what, maybe I’ll pick up my first fiction book and read it and see how that goes. But uh, we’ll say.

Mario Fachini [48:00]
hey, nothing wrong with that. I’m a geek too. And one of my favorite shows is Leverage. Have you ever seen it?

Alex Sanfilippo [48:05]
I’ve not actually.

Mario Fachini [48:06]
Oh, you’d love it. Hardison. He’s like, age of the geek baby.

Alex Sanfilippo [48:11]
Okay, all right off the check that out.

Mario Fachini [48:13]
I mean, we’re not in. I respect farmers and agriculture. And I’m very thankful. But we’re sure we definitely are in the information and geek age.

Alex Sanfilippo [48:21]
So yes, we are.

Mario Fachini [48:24]
All right, well, where would you like people to learn more?

Alex Sanfilippo [48:29]
Man that you’re you’ve given them the right URL, man, that website is perfect. But you’re sending people to send them straight back to your place? What is it?

Mario Fachini [48:38]
EAInterviews.com/podmatch

Alex Sanfilippo [48:40]
That’s it. That’s where I want people to go, that’s the space to be. It’ll have links, you can find links to me and stuff. There. It’ll all be there. That’s the place to go. Or I’m guessing it’ll be there. Maybe he talked about me all the time there.

Mario Fachini [48:53]
We can make sure it does. And there’s definitely the links for the show notes, your social.

Alex Sanfilippo [48:59]
Cool. Perfect.

Mario Fachini [48:59]
All that stuff is standard. We have epic show notes. And I’m very proud of them.

Alex Sanfilippo [49:04]
So yes, you do. So just you can you all can find me there. That is the place to go.

Mario Fachini [49:09]
All right. Well, appreciate you sharing, Alex. It’s been a pleasure.

Alex Sanfilippo [49:13]
Yeah, thanks again, Mark. Appreciate it.

Mario Fachini [49:15]
Alright, expert authority world. We have another great episode here today. I’ll see you tomorrow. Have a great day. And God bless.

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www.EAInterviews.com [49:56]
Hey, thanks for listening to today’s episode. I hope you got a lot out of it. I know I sure did. If you haven’t done so already, I invite you to subscribe to the show. And also be sure to check out EAInterviews.com for complete show notes, the full interview video experience links to the resources we mentioned in more. Have a blessed day and I’ll see you tomorrow.