The Soloist Life Aligning Your Podcast With Your Business Growth with Reuben Swartz
Have you noticed that expertise podcasts—even from “celebrities”—tend to have an arc? They grow, they evolve, they might even shrink or pause for awhile and at some point they end.
When Sales for Nerds host Reuben Swartz put his highly rated 100-episode podcast on hiatus with an intriguing announcement, I invited him to the show to talk about:
Why he hit the pause button on Sales for Nerds.
Where his podcast aligns with his core Soloist business—and where it diverges.
How he thinks about the value of his time and the role his podcast plays in personal learning and driving business.
The organic arc (rise, plateau, fall) his podcast experienced as his business and his goals have changed.
How finishing 100 episodes made him review his experiences and think about what’s next.
LINKS
Reuben Swartz Mimiran | Sales for Nerds | LinkedIn | YouTube (Mimiran) | YouTube (Sales for Nerds)
Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram
BIO
Reuben Swartz is the founder of Mimiran, the fun, “anti-CRM” for independent consultants, born of his experience as a sales and marketing consultant for the Fortune 500, struggling with his own business development efforts. He's also the host and chief nerd on the Sales for Nerds podcast.
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TRANSCRIPT
Reuben Swartz
00:00 - 00:28
So i dropped an email to jason cohen at wp engine hey jason i got this new concept for podcast i bring a bottle of wine to your office and interview you talk about wine i really like your blog he writes this brilliant blog and i've heard you speak at blah blah blah blah blah and I really like what you have to say blah blah blah blah blah blah And I'm also a customer blah blah blah blah blah blah Right? Like this really nice, suck up email. He just writes me back 5 minutes later--you had me at wine, here's a link to my calendar.
Rochelle Moulton
00:33 - 01:08
Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Live podcast, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth, impact, and power. I'm Rochelle Moulton, and today I'm so excited to welcome Ruben Swartz to the show. Ruben is the founder of Mimarin, the fun anti-CRM for independent consultants, born of his experience as a sales and marketing consultant for the Fortune 500, struggling with his own business development efforts. He's also the host and chief nerd on the Sales for Nerds podcast. Ruben, welcome.
Reuben Swartz
01:08 - 01:10
Oh, it's so great to be here, Rochelle. Thanks for having me.
Rochelle Moulton
01:11 - 01:45
Yeah. So we met on your podcast and the sales for nerds podcast, and I've been on your email list ever since. Just kind of like to keep tabs on what you're up to. And then last week I got this email, which with your permission, I'm going to read because it just felt very Ruben and very vulnerable and very true. So I'll just get to it. When you get this, I'll be recovering from eye surgery. Nothing terrible, but it's been an interesting year or so with 1.5 eyes. I won't get all my vision back in my left eye, but it should be much more functional.
Rochelle Moulton
01:46 - 02:15
While I certainly hope to see better visually, I also try to keep seeing better conceptually. And along those lines, I'm putting Sales for Nerds on hold for a bit. Nothing against the great guests I've enjoyed speaking with, but I'm feeling like I'm not offering much that's new and that putting out new episodes is more for me to say I did it than to offer real value to you. If you think I'm missing something, let me know what you'd like to hear. I've got some ideas for a reboot, but I need to go think about it for a minute.
Rochelle Moulton
02:16 - 02:47
So what I so appreciated about that email is that I know exactly that feeling, as does a pretty surprising swath of our fellow podcasters. So I just had to ask you to come on and talk with me about how we manage what I'm thinking of as the arc of podcasting, like how expertise business owners can roll with the different waves that hit our podcasts and our business growth at different inflection points. So that's the setup. I'm just so glad you said yes.
Reuben Swartz
02:48 - 02:48
Well, it's great
Reuben Swartz
02:48 - 03:17
to be here. And it's funny that we're having this conversation because in some ways I had been feeling this way for a while. And I think like most of us, I'm just kind of stubborn. And I think, well, if you know, if things aren't going great, that's fine. You just power through. And then I heard you and Jonathan discussing just ending your podcast. Like it had come to the end of its lifespan and you'd said what you wanted to say and you were going to move on to different things. And I was like, Oh, That's interesting.
Reuben Swartz
03:18 - 03:53
Maybe I should think about that. And I've been sort of thinking about it for a while. And when I started, it was great because every single episode was just so new and so interesting. And I felt like I was learning so much and. a hundred plus episodes in, it's not that the guests were any worse or better than the earlier ones, but I didn't feel like I was learning as much. And whether or not that translates to the audience, if I'm not learning as much, then I'm not as excited to be there because I love learning things.
Reuben Swartz
03:54 - 04:40
And so I didn't feel like I was bringing my best game to my listeners. And for a while I had sort of been thinking, okay, I need some better way of organizing this than just here's a bunch of random episodes that all have helpful info. I wanted to have themes and I thought about sort of having playlists. So, you know, if you work in marketing, if you're working on networking, if you're working on sales, here's a bunch of episodes you should look into and there's no good reason i haven't done that but what i realized later was maybe i want to have sort of like a start to start a new season of the podcast where it's going to be sort of more serialized content where you want to listen to episode one and it's going to lead to episode two to episode three and so on and then when you get done with it you've gone on this journey and you've learned the following things
Rochelle Moulton
04:41 - 04:41
the Netflix
Reuben Swartz
04:41 - 04:43
model. Kind of like that. Yes.
Rochelle Moulton
04:43 - 05:05
Yeah. Okay. So before we go too far with the arc of podcasting, will you talk to us a little bit about how you got here because you operate what I would call a soloist business, but you also decided to develop a product to help solve a very common soloist problem. So talk about, you know, how'd you get here doing this right now?
Reuben Swartz
05:06 - 05:39
With very poor vision and strategic planning would be the short version. I started a business 20 something years ago because I was young and single and didn't have a lot of expenses and had some savings and I remember thinking if I didn't do it then I would never do it. Brilliant business plan really. I've heard worse. It could be worse. Yeah. And it was a lot of fun, actually. And to be a guy in his mid-20s, flying all over the world, helping these giant companies and working with executives two or three times my age, it was great.
Reuben Swartz
05:39 - 06:29
Something I had never envisioned myself doing. And I learned a ton and I like to think I was very helpful. And then life has its way of intervening because I thought I would do that for a while. you know my thirties i didn't mean maybe settle down and have some kids want to start gotten all that out of my system and then met my future wife and we had a certain schedule we had to get to if we're gonna have a family and that kind of threw off my planning and i didn't wanna travel as much and one thing led to another and i would love to tell you that In the course of my struggles to use the enterprise here we were helping our clients use that i saw the need for a CRM or an anti CRM geared towards the soloist and that's not what happened at all i literally accidentally started building things to plug into the enterprise tools.
Reuben Swartz
06:29 - 07:02
And then people started asking me for access to them. So I made them from a tool for myself into an app that other people could access. And at the time, it was still mostly like enterprise type clients. And then what I noticed was the enterprise folks would start off really excited. They had good budgets. I was used to working with them. It was all great. But their requirements never ended. They would usually, they would want to bring me in because I'd say, hey, our, our sales teams just, they won't standardize anything. We need to standardize the way we're actually presenting stuff to prospects.
Reuben Swartz
07:02 - 07:36
Your stuff is exactly what we need. Blah, blah, blah, blah. We just needed to do the following three extra things. Can you handle that? And I'd say, uh, sure. Okay. We can make it do that. We'll do that. And then I'd say, okay, everything's great. We just need to do the following three extra things. And eventually we all realized there was no end to the extra things and that's why they were using excel because. No one could ever say no to a prospect and say, here's how we're going to sell you stuff. If the prospect said, present it like this, they went off and presented it like this.
Reuben Swartz
07:37 - 08:09
And the whole effort to standardize would fall apart. Meanwhile, there were other indie consultants who thought this was the greatest thing since sliced bread. And they didn't have big budgets. You needed a lot of them to equal one enterprise customer, but they were thrilled. And it was making their lives better in ways that I could personally relate to, because I was doing the same thing. And they started asking for more stuff. I started off just like wanting to know if people had read my proposals. So I figured if I could put the proposal in the cloud, I could know if people were reading it.
Reuben Swartz
08:09 - 08:38
That was sort of the genesis of this crazy journey. So then people said, Hey, the end of my sales cycles, smooth, easy, predictable, love it. What can I do to get more people in the front of the funnel? And I thought, you know, being the techie guy, I'll just go do some research and say, well, you should use this. And I had one of those moments like you have at the end of the movie where they show you all the clues and suddenly it's all obvious, but you missed it at the time. I have a lot of those in my life, but because I had tried so many things myself and nothing had really worked well for me.
Reuben Swartz
08:38 - 09:22
And I realized that there were so many things out there, but they weren't geared towards this tribe. They were geared towards e-commerce type companies where you get an email address and you just Automate the crap out of email marketing or you have a big sales team that's gonna pound the phones all day and neither of those scenarios applies to the soloist and i thought well wait a second i've got this technology to let people share content online and no one someone's reading it what if we made that into a lead magnet. So instead of having one of those weird pinch and zoom experiences with a pdf you could actually read it on your phone and you could know not just when someone request it but if they look at it again next week next month whatever you have another chance to actually talk to them.
Reuben Swartz
09:22 - 09:48
And so this work well people oh my gosh is amazing i'm finally getting leads off my website. And then I put them on my CRM, which I hate. And if it goes well, then I go into Mimarin and do the proposal. Can you please just make Mimarin do the CRM part? And as you can imagine, I said, no, that would be nuts. I would never do that. And so I kept hearing this from people and I kept saying, that's nuts. Like the world doesn't need another CRM. And I would be the last person to build one.
Reuben Swartz
09:48 - 10:18
I freaking hate CRMs. I mean, I've literally used dozens of them. And here's what my, my customers were saying to me that that kind of makes sense is like, that's why you need to do this because you understand why we hate them so much. And again, looking back, it's all clear, but at the time I just couldn't see it. CRMs are built for a VP of sales to track a sales team. And I knew from my consulting days that the sales team doesn't even like them. Yup. We hated them. They're in there the whole time.
Reuben Swartz
10:18 - 10:46
They at least know how to use them. The solo consultant who's maybe in the CRM a few hours a week, if you're lucky, doesn't want to think of his or herself as a salesperson, doesn't go through the formal training or anything like that. They just want to be able to do follow-ups. It's like, the analogy I like to use is, you're sick of carrying your groceries back from the grocery store. Someone says you should get a vehicle. And so you ask what you should get. And well, it turns out that there's a bunch of friendly vehicle consultants.
Reuben Swartz
10:46 - 11:21
And the most popular one says, well, you should get a space shuttle. And then you wonder why taking the space shuttle to the grocery store is even more frustrating than walking home with your groceries, right? Yep. Salesforce. And then someone's like, oh, yeah, the space shuttle is just way too complicated. what you need is a 747, right? Now we're at HubSpot. And these are great tools. And there are times when you need a space shuttle or a 747 or whatever it is, but not to go to the grocery store. So that's sort of the long-winded way of saying, here's how we ended up building this thing.
Reuben Swartz
11:22 - 11:53
with my customers kind of dragging me, kicking and screaming, because what I realized is we don't need to keep track of a sales team. We need to create and nurture relationships. And if you're in a relationship business, you're in a conversation business, which was very hard for me as an introverted anti-sales techie to accept. And if you're in a conversation business, you want to do two things. You want to get very specific about who you want to have conversations with, and then you want to have those conversations. That's it. Like it's no more complicated than that.
Reuben Swartz
11:53 - 12:02
And the problem is we build up so much paraphernalia around everything that we don't do those basic things and then it's really hard.
Rochelle Moulton
12:02 - 12:42
Oh, you are preaching to the choir. I mean, it's funny because I always associated CRM with relationships because I came out of a big firm when it was all about relationships. We worked with Fortune 500 companies and your job as a person who leads teams is to spider your way through an organization. And the way you do that is by building relationships with people in different functions. But then when all of the sales systems came out, I mean, they made no sense to me because I wasn't wired that way. But I did run a Fortune 500 company internal consulting group at one point in my career, and they had a rocket ship.
Rochelle Moulton
12:42 - 13:15
And it was fascinating because they had salespeople. They had actual salespeople. And when I was watching them, that's when it dawned on me like, Oh, I get it. This is just so different than how I think of this stuff. I'm not thinking about tracking deals. I don't talk about deal flow. Right. Even in a big firm, we didn't talk about deal flow. We talked about relationships and the name of the client and the name of the company. So yeah. So how long did it take you till you had something that looks roughly like what you're offering today?
Reuben Swartz
13:15 - 13:47
Well, it's funny. People always ask that and I say, well, it, how it looks today is different than how it will look in three months and how it looked three months ago. But I think, I mean, it probably took almost a decade from when I started building little tools for myself to when I would say, Hey guys, here's a CRM for solo people. And it wasn't that it took a decade of coding to do that. It just was never something that even occurred to me when I started out, which is probably, again, I'm not the most brilliant business visionary to ever walk the face of the earth.
Reuben Swartz
13:48 - 14:02
Because you could have gone and built this in a much shorter amount of time if I had known what I was going to do. It's not that it's rocket science in terms of technology or coding. It's more a matter of carving stuff out than putting stuff in.
Rochelle Moulton
14:02 - 14:33
Well, it's very organic the way you described it. And that's what a lot of soloists experience. I mean, even the soloists who come into this with a business plan saying, this is what I'm going to do. It changes like the first year usually. And it changes again, the second year and the third year and the 10th year and the 20th year. So, you know, it doesn't surprise me is what I'm saying. It's organic. And I would think that that's also what's helped make it more popular now because you get it and you've designed it for this specific audience.
Reuben Swartz
14:34 - 14:49
I think that's so true. Like having a niche. And sort of cutting out the enterprise niche was, was hard. Cause that's where most of the revenue was...