Sam Sethi: 0:12

Hello and welcome back to Podnews Weekly. I'm joined today by Theo Gadd, who is the co-founder of a new company called Pod Life Events. Theo, hello. How are you

Theo Gadd: 0:22

Hi, Sam. I'm great. How are you doing?

Sam Sethi: 0:24

Good, good. We better name Check him out the front. You have a co-founder. What's his name as well?

Theo Gadd: 0:29

Yes, Tobi West, but not here today, unfortunately.

Sam Sethi: 0:32

Now tell me more. What is pod life events and why did you start it?

Theo Gadd: 0:37

called Life and Events Company built exclusively for live podcasts. So we operate under two models. The first is a podcast, exclusive ticketing platform. So this acts as a hub for fans to explore podcast events whilst helping podcasters to drive sales, increase exposure and really streamline the event process. if you imagine Ticketmaster but tailored exclusively for podcasting. So that is everything you'd expect tonight. Analytics, check and payments all at a much better value. And then the benefits you get from being specifically designed for podcasting means we can provide key integrations with RSS, which I'm sure we'll talk out today time and the podcast card, which really just helps tie the events back to podcasters and increase our exposure that way. And then the other package is an end to end events agency. So through this we have a network of partner venues, connections and kind of other event partners. So we can handle everything by the podcast. It just turns up, performs the event and gets to leave with the audio files to tie in to an episode.

Sam Sethi: 1:38

Now, what's your background? Are you event specialist?

Theo Gadd: 1:41

No, we're not actually event specialists. I'll talk about how we got into the events world, but at uni. We started a peer to peer gambling startup. So that was an imagine you and I went to play tennis. We could both put a bet on against who might win in like, a sky bat mobile experience. Mm hmm. As you can imagine with that, with, like, gaming laws and stuff that were quite a bit much, a bit crazy. So we caught that one. And then we just saw more and more podcast events happening and there was no real way to find the events unless you listened to the podcast. So that was the first thing we wanted to change And then too, we just started speaking to podcast is about the idea, and they were saying a company dedicated to events would actually really help with the set up with kind of planning it all and really making the most of events. we both thought really that events do help to solve a number of the key issues in the industry. Obviously, it's so difficult to monetise events, provide a great alternate revenue rate from ticket sales, sponsors, the opportunity to sell merch and all that sort of thing at the event. And then obviously as podcasting is a one way media, you know, fans take hours out of their day to listen to podcasts, but it's a real one way medium. It's a strange kind of disconnect. So events are a great way to build community, get everyone together and overcome that. And then finally, you've got all the, like, really engaging content that you get from events like the collection of the socials and all the photos you get from It really does help grow the podcast and kind of increase exposure.

Sam Sethi: 3:09

Yeah, it does. And I think people are looking at all sorts of different ways. As you said.

Theo Gadd: 3:14

I think fusing them all together as well. It's quite nice that kind of doing a bit of everything

Sam Sethi: 3:18

What got you in terms of the access to all of these venues? How did did you just ring them up and say, Hey, we've got an events company, can we just put you on our roster? Or did you have some sort of into those as well?

Theo Gadd: 3:30

A bit of both, to be honest. Yeah. A lot of, as you say, going to venues and checking them out, making sure that you are set up to sound good on a recording is comfortable. Nice environment for guests, that sort of thing. And also just with the past podcasts, what way have you seen the venues they've used? Come and had a chat with them, So it's grown quite organically in that sense. One thing we like to do is to pair up the venue with the podcast, so we want it to match the theme. It's a bit of a clichéd example I always give. It is like a true crime event in like an old church or that that kind of making it spooky sports stuff in like live bars and things like that. So really pairing up the podcast with the venue is something we're really keen to do.

Sam Sethi: 4:09

Nice. Now, you and I met probably two months ago now. I think.

Theo Gadd: 4:15

Yeah, about that

Sam Sethi: 4:16

the reason we met, I think, is to talk about who you were. And I said, Oh, really exciting timing. I think we've seen Wave like the music site starting to try and get into events and ticketing, but they're using another form of technology. And I said, Look, I'm really interested in coming with my CEO of True Fans hat on to talk to you about what we might be able to do because in terms of podcasting to, to, oh, this new technology had just been brought out called Publisher Feeds and the idea of a publisher feed was an aggregated feed of all of the podcasts from one publisher, so Wondery or Global, and that could be embedded within the podcast as RSS feed. So it's a great form of discovery. I could go to one podcasts. I really like this podcast. Oh, I wonder if the producer of this does any others click on it and then you can then see what other podcasts they produce. And then we said, Oh, I wonder if we can get events into this in a similar way. And that's where the conversation started. When you first heard that, what were your initial thoughts?

Theo Gadd: 5:25

I mean, I just think kind of embedding events in places where listeners live and spend their time, such as listening apps, makes a lot of sense and really does enrich that experience where as you're listening, you get notification, Oh, there's a new event happening and explore that, and I think vice versa. All of our events pages, we have the podcast card and that allows people coming across the event who might not necessarily know the podcasts already to go and like read a bit about the podcast links where they can actually listen to it and socials and all that thing. So I think that kind of technical discovery between us as an events platform and you guys is just a good thing for everyone already. Yeah.

Sam Sethi: 6:03

So what we've done, we've worked together on creating an event feed and we've worked together on proposing a new tag called Podcast Events. And the idea is that in the RSS feed of the podcast that you just put podcast events and then you have a link to the event feed that is run by, say, pod life events of the event. Companies could do that as well. And then in that event feed, you have the overall name and the channel of the tour or the event and then you might have individual item levels for each individual podcast venue, the date, the tickets where you could buy them and the people involved. So I think it works really well. We worked with a guy called Nathan Gass, right, who's been really helpful, and we've put that up on to the podcast into our own GitHub as well. So that's all there. So you saw this working today, I guess, or you've been reading the GitHub. What are your thoughts on that as well now?

Theo Gadd: 7:05

we put out quite early and rough as this is what we're planning and we wanted to get some feedback. Then we saw Nathan's come back and actually really build on our initial proposal and improve things quite a lot, tying things together a bit more neatly and getting other existing tags involved, like the person tagging the location tag per event level. Yeah. But yeah, it's been really helpful getting feedback from everyone.

Sam Sethi: 7:26

And I think we have had a conversation offline earlier today about adding support for popping. So you might have a new field that we will out called status. So it's on sale or sold out and using popping you could update that field directly by updating the events feed itself which I think is a really nice way of making it interactive as well.

Theo Gadd: 7:50

Yeah, 100%. I suppose what we speak, not as well as adding a few more little things like that status and having an image at the event level. So each different location you can have the all work for that event shine through as well.

Sam Sethi: 8:03

So I think what we're looking for now is community feedback on that. But again, we have in true fan style, already built it. There's a event that Public Events is running called Oh, for food Sake and you can find that podcast and then go to the events tab and you'll see it. And if you click on the buy button, it then goes back to pod life events for the ticketing purchase. So that works really well. We also create the publisher page for you as well. So there is a Pod Life events publisher page, but instead of showing podcast episodes, we're going to show all the podcast events you do. So apart from Alpha Food site, you're doing another big event as well, aren't you?

Theo Gadd: 8:45

Yes, we are. So we've got a number of things in the works. I suppose the biggest thing we announced last week was Chair Falafel, which is a comedy podcast festival. So they went on launch yeah, about a week ago now. And I suppose to explain a bit more about them, who they are, what they're up to. So Falafel is a comedy podcast festival and it's going into its third year this year and this year they've got a line of it's more than 30 events across various venues all over a nine day period. And with the kind of line ups involving some of the UK's biggest names in comedy, podcasting and what the team over there and Giles do really well is support a number of upcoming kind of smaller shows. I think he was telling me a success story of one where last year I can't remember the name of the show, but they were doing kind of 100 person event this year. They're up into the hundreds. And what we've done for Giles is he really wanted to take this year's festival to that next level. So we created an immersive branded experience across the entire user journey. So from the event pages all the way through, check out and confirmation emails alongside a number of custom features specifically for the festival like day passes, we're selling their merchandise, some livestream tickets. And one exciting feature for me is the ability to manage multiple podcasts so that at the festival level, manage all the events across different podcasts and allow the podcasters to get a log in to view their sales. So that's quite a nice kind of collaborative feature. coming through on that publisher page and true fan. So it'll be really nice for exploration and discovery.

Sam Sethi: 10:20

Yeah, and again, this is super early. It's literally the first time anyone's done this. So we will have arrows of mistakes and so again, we do it as a learning journey. But I'm really glad that we've partnered on this together because I think it shows how podcasts can move easily to evolve the RSS feed with standard building blocks. And that's what actually I love about what podcasting 2.0 is now. I'm beginning to see that I can mix and match tags together to now create new, I guess, pages and new ways of discovery or interactivity or monetization. So I think it's beginning to get people's imaginations going about what they could do. And events is just one of those that we're working on.

Theo Gadd: 11:04

Yeah, I think kind of building on that, we are having a conversation about the idea about combining the live item tag with the events. So having both options for those online sales or the in-person experiences and yet I think that kind of flexibility really powerful.

Sam Sethi: 11:19

Yeah, we have a proposal. I haven't even told you about this there, to extend the live item tag with a field for the ticketing. So the current live item tag doesn't have a ticketing feel, it has a content link. That might be the way we do it. But again, if we do it with the content link, our feel, which is part of the spec, we've suddenly got a ticketing field and then it all work. Yeah.

Theo Gadd: 11:41

So it's amazing how much is already in that. Just has to be repurposed. Like a lot of what we've done with events is just repurposing things that already exist. Isn't that really?

Sam Sethi: 11:51

for anyone who wants to get involved with pod life events, where would they go?

Theo Gadd: 11:55

Yes. So I think the best way is probably just the website. So it's pod life events dot com or just Google+. And alternatively, like if you're interested in events, just want to have a chat. Myself. My co-founder Toby are always open to having this conversation. So just email us Toby or say pod life events dot com you'll be able to find us through various 2.0 listing apps, true fans and vice versa.

Sam Sethi: 12:18

hopefully other apps will adopt it and then you'll be across multiples. They'll be great. Theo, thank you so much.

Theo Gadd: 12:25

No worries. It's awesome. Thank you for having me on.