Dear founder,
One of Podscan’s main customer profiles that I’ve recognized over the last couple years building this business is marketers - people who think in marketing terms, who have marketing jobs and marketing goals. And in a way, even my other customer profiles - founders, builders, public relations experts, researchers - all of them have a similar process to how they use the data that Podscan provides, whether it’s the alerting system or the deep full-text search capabilities into millions of podcast transcriptions.
Everybody has certain interests, certain things that they want out of this data. And the more I run this business, the more I realize there’s a kind of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that marketers have in terms of how they look at data.
A quick word from our Sponsor, Paddle.com. I use Paddle as my Merchant of Record for all my software projects. They take care of all the taxes, the currencies, tracking declined transactions and updated credit cards so that I can focus on dealing with my competitors (and not banks and financial regulators). If you think you’d rather just build your product, check out Paddle.com as your payment provider.
The Discovery
In a recent conversation with my brother-in-law, who runs his own branding agency and is a deep expert in brands and markets and audience perceptions, I realized that even without understanding that there is this hierarchy of needs, I have actively used it in my product onboarding. And it’s caused several pretty sticky customers to stay on the platform.
Let me share how this came about and what it’s all about. I think it’s probably very interesting to look at the data that people you serve need - people that have a job to be done - and understand what exactly the data is and how important different kinds of data are to them, in that specific order.
Like I said, it’s kind of like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which, if you’ve never heard of it before, is a theory of motivation that describes how humans need to fulfill one kind of need before they can go for another. They have physiological needs first - actual physical needs like food, water, air, shelter, clothing. Once those are satisfied, they move to safety needs - personal security, ownership, property, health. Once that’s satisfied, it gets more cerebral. It becomes about love and belonging - partnership, friendship, connection. And once that’s established, people can develop something akin to esteem - self-esteem, motivation, respect with each other. And ultimately, when that is established, self-actualization - making a dent in the world - becomes a possibility.
I find something similar exists for marketers and anyone seeking somebody else’s attention. There’s this specific lens through which to look at what marketers need to make smart choices, what people who are trying to convince others to use their service, join their organization, sell them something, or get them to pay attention need to know.
Building the AI Onboarding
A couple months ago, I decided that we’re all using AI in really strange ways on the internet. How about we make it useful and start using AI in interesting and user-helping ways, instead of just making AI do jobs that nobody needs them to do?
So I tried to figure out how I could use AI in my onboarding process. What I found was that people often struggled with creating good alerts for their businesses or jobs because they didn’t know what to look for. They didn’t know how to phrase it.
Since I’ve had a lot of customers and a lot of insight into what they ultimately ended up searching for and what was effective, I built this list of 10 things that I believed people should look into, in order. I built an AI - an agentic system around it - that asks people a couple questions and then builds those 10 alerts perfectly for that particular user.
If it’s a medical company, it asks them what branch of medicine they’re in and what they’re trying to accomplish in the podcasting space - what they do, what they do best, what they’re known for, what they’re maybe not known for. And then it starts tracking all kinds of different things about them.
In setting up the different things that I wanted to build so that people would have a very broad overall net to fish in the podcast conversation space with, here are the things in order of relevance that I came up with:
Level 1: Self-Awareness - “What Are People Saying About Me?”
The biggest one is the mention of the service or the product that these people work for. Somebody who works for Notion will look for mentions of the Notion product or Notion AI. Somebody who works for a soccer club or football club will look for the names of their players, the name of the club, their mascots - they’re going to track where people mention those things.
It’s very specific, but it’s always about what we are - some kind of identity. The thing that they care about, the thing that they’re paid by, the thing that they need to market, that they need to facilitate.
So the first thing people always search for is the name of the product, name of the business, or even their own name. That happens quite a lot as well, because people want to know where they’re mentioned so they can react to it.
Level 2: Competitive Awareness - “What Are My Competitors Doing?”
The second biggest thing is always: what are my competitors doing? It’s the moment you know where you’re mentioned, you become increasingly interested in the people around you - the people you compete with, the people that are in the same market. What are their interests? What are their conversations that they’re participating in? What are they not just saying, but what is said about them?
This reliably is the biggest thing that I find being tracked on the platform. There’s a nuance here, because there’s a kind of self-selection - people often only know of a few of their actual competitors by name. There’s always an unknown unknown in there as well. Sometimes you just don’t know who is building the business that is coming to replace you, and sometimes you’re just not aware of these competitors that are up and coming.
So in that sense, I’ve seen people track not just competitors, but emerging trends in their industry, so they can spot new names along the way.
Level 3: Industry Awareness - “What’s Happening in My Field?”
It goes from what are people saying about me, to what are people saying about my competitors, to the next layer: what are people saying about developments in the industry? What am I missing out on by having this myopic lens just on myself and the immediate threats around me?
It becomes a widening of the conversational landscape that people become interested in once these two basic needs are dealt with. Like, what is what am I going to eat today, and is somebody going to steal my food? Once that’s dealt with, people are asking: well, what food is out there? What new places to hunt? What new places to harvest could there be?
Level 4: Sentiment Awareness - “How Do People Feel?”
Very quickly with that come what I would call the sentiment-based interests. People very quickly turn their attention not just to the factual conversations in the field around them, but also to the emotional sentiment around it.
I’ve seen very positive sentiments around people who really solve other people’s problems in a delightful way. They get great shout-outs, their products get mentioned and highlighted and reviewed positively. And then I’ve seen social media tracking for airlines or internet providers or other companies that tend to get a lot of flack because of the intensity with which a problem, when it happens, affects people’s lives.
It’s been quite interesting to see the tracking that happens both around the shout-outs - the customer success stories, the very positive signals - and the reputation management, which is what a lot of PR companies do just as a job. Their whole point of existence is to track public relations disasters and answer them before they get mainstream. Get spin on the conversation, get the narrative adjusted.
So you’ll find a lot of that out there as well. People look for sentiment, they look for other people’s opinions - the opinion landscape. It goes from fact to opinion.
Level 5: Strategic Projection - “What’s Coming Next?”
Beyond that, it goes to projection. Once the sentiment landscape is covered, people look into signals in the market, but not about consumer behavior - about investor behavior and regulator behavior.
I see a lot of people that use Podscan for tracking acquisition and investment signals. Who gets acquired by whom? What is the big move that my future competitor might make right now? Are they being acquired by somebody that I should know of? They look for investments, for new companies springing up.
At the same time, they look into regulatory and compliance signals. Is a government or some government podcast somewhere debating how they could curtail our capacity to function the way we do? Are they going to make things harder for us? Are they going to make things easier for us? Is some podcast that is effectively just a live stream of a committee meeting giving us insight into something that we should very quickly solve?
All of that can be tracked, and people track market expansion too. I think that’s in the same line of projecting or guessing future outcomes. Where is this market going? What are the forces, not just in the sense of what’s happening in my industry or what’s the technological trend, but what happens between industries? Are there movements that I should be aware of? Is there a kind of seismic shift happening or to be expected in any given place at any given time? How can we get ahead of it? How can we be there before it happens?
A lot of that is projection tracking, but it’s understanding dynamics nonetheless.
The Framework in Practice
So if I were to give this a little bit more structure: from a marketer’s perspective, if they look at information that could be gleaned from public opinion and public reaction - public notions, values, perspectives on their product or services - they always look at themselves first. Are they mentioned? Where are they mentioned? To know what happens around them.
Then they look at what’s happening with others around them - what are my direct competitors doing?
Then they broaden this to the industry, just to see what’s the wider angle, what’s coming a couple miles ahead of me, instead of just immediately around me.
Then they go from factual developments into emotional states of people - what they’re talking about, what they’re celebrating, what they’re complaining about.
And from that, they go into a purely speculative world of thought leadership, of investment, of acquisition, of regulatory compliance, and the industry at large.
I think that is a hierarchy of market proximity. You first think about yourself, then your immediate threats around you, and once the facts are dealt with, you look into sentiment and how that will impact the future and how the future is seen by others.
Applying This to Your Customer Segments
This is a very interesting hypothesis because it helps you speak to your customers. Depending on where they are on their journey, you need to address different needs.
If they’re currently doing pretty well as a company - they’re highly monetized, highly profitable - they probably don’t care as much about what’s being said about them or the immediate threats to them. It’s quite likely that the more important stuff exists in the sentiment of the industry and identifying thought leaders. Who might we need to hire in the future? Who might need to be discussed for board positions that we’re offering? Who might we want to see if we can integrate into our company? That’s what a big enterprise business would look at, and what the people who are looking at these opportunities might resonate with in marketing and outreach materials.
Now, if you sell to a solopreneur business - somebody who’s running their own business - they’re very likely completely overwhelmed to begin with, trying to do everything. So for them, you would need to fulfill this hierarchy of needs right from the bottom. You would facilitate tracking what’s going on with them, what’s going on with their direct competitors. Maybe help them discover who those competitors even are, and give them access to maybe at most what the industry is doing, so they don’t get overwhelmed with all the signals from it.
The Practical Impact
The way we reach out to our prospects when we’re doing sales is very much informed by this. I’m not sure if something like this exists as an actual hierarchy of needs in the marketing literature, but I found it very interesting in how I communicate with my prospects and with my paying users.
When they ask me to help them set up functional alerts, more often than not, I find it works well to get a glimpse of where they currently are on this journey - which needs are already met and what the next unmet need is that I can focus my attention on. This helps me share with them what they could be doing, what they should be doing in the short term, and what the strategy for the long term should be.
Your Turn
Think about your own customers and the data they need from you. What’s their hierarchy of needs? What do they need to know first before they can care about the next level? Understanding this progression isn’t just about better onboarding or sales - it’s about truly understanding the journey your customers are on and meeting them exactly where they are.
Because just like Maslow’s hierarchy, you can’t skip levels. You can’t ask someone to care about industry thought leadership when they don’t even know if people are talking about their product. You can’t get them excited about sentiment analysis when they haven’t figured out who their competitors are yet.
Build your product, your onboarding, and your sales process with this in mind. Start at the bottom of the hierarchy and work your way up. Your customers will thank you for it - and more importantly, they’ll stick around because you’re giving them exactly what they need, exactly when they need it.
That’s what I’ve learned building Podscan, and I hope it helps you build something meaningful too.
We're the podcast database with the best and most real-time API out there. Check out podscan.fm — and tell your friends!
Thank you for reading this week’s essay edition of The Bootstrapped Founder. Did you enjoy it? If so, please spread the word and share this issue on Twitter.
If you want to reach tens of thousands of creators, makers, and dreamers, you can apply to sponsor an episode of this newsletter. Or just reply to this email!
