262 | He Gets PAID to Market His $12M Business (Here's How)

What if instead of paying thousands of dollars a month to reach your customers, instead, you got paid to grow your business? That is not hypothetical. Today, you're going to meet David Leco. He is the founder and CEO of Deal Machine, which is a software company that he scaled past $12 million in annual revenue. And when that growth hit a ceiling, he didn't just throw more money at ads. He started a podcast. I'm getting paid to market my business. 500 episodes later, his show drives inbound DMs every single day. It uncovered a $4,000 product opportunity and it exposed a problem in his business that was silently costing him revenue. So in this episode of Grow the Show, you're going to hear how podcasting fits into the week of an eight-figure CEO. And why he believes that if you're a CEO and you're not podcasting, you're ignoring the single most important part of your job. My name is Kev Michael. This is Grow the Show. Let's dive in. Can you kick us off by sharing a little bit about what Deal Machine is and why you started a podcast in the first place? Absolutely. So Deal Machine is a real estate investing platform. We provide 700 filters on every person and property in the country. And real estate investors primarily will use us to build targeted marketing lists. And it's a monthly fee that starts at $100 a month just for context. So we started in 2017, which is about eight years ago. And for the first five years, we had no marketing team at all. We actually grew up to about 12 million in revenue until we kind of hit a ceiling and actually a detraction. That's when I realized we need to start a marketing team. So up until that point, it was a really good product market fit and people that were successful on YouTube that taught people how to invest in real estate would refer people to us. But in order to grow further, and especially that bit of a scary painful moment to a new entrepreneur who'd never had a downturn before, it made me realize my whole business is driven on social media, but I don't know anything about social media. And so that's whenever I took it upon myself to start the podcast, we just said our 500th episode. And so I guess we've been doing the podcast for three or four years. I started the podcast. I looked to your show because I needed help to understand what to do. And I knew about you because a mutual friend of mine, Brian Lubin here in Austin, is very successful on social media. And I know he mentioned you, right? So that's how I got connected with you. So I hired you. We did some coaching. And then in the later years, my editor, who's in house, I wanted to continue growing the podcast with him. And I've told him to listen to your podcast. And so he's consuming your content, right? Which is a great resource for me. So I don't have to like pass on stuff that I know to him. And so yeah, in summary, that is what deal machine is and why we started the podcast. And knowing that I needed to learn podcasting and social media, you had been a great resource from the beginning. Oh, thanks, man. It's been cool to have you in the fold. And I was thrilled to hear that after we worked together. We worked together for a few months. Got some growth. It's been cool to hear you've stayed tuned since then. Now, what I'm curious about is like, we know you take a company to that point. Obviously, you're, you're skilled. Obviously, you have competency. And I'm always curious because I talk to a lot of operators who have grown businesses to a certain point who haven't done content before. What would you tell that person, someone who's been successful with their business so far, they might be feeling the same way about social media, about content. Not sure what to do. What advice would you have for them? Okay. Well, I'd say, first of all, do you run paid ads? And most of them would say yes. And then I would say, okay, well, what do you pay per view for paid ads? And they probably wouldn't know. And I think it's around three cents per view. So that means if you have an Instagram reel, a lot of times if you have no social media skills or followers, you could post an Instagram reel and get 300 views. And that feels really bad because you're like, oh, man, that sucks. Nobody likes it. Same with the podcast episode. If you launch a podcast, like people aren't going to just find it and listen to it, right? But you might get 300 listens. That's six dollars right there. So you're spending six dollars for that. So when you think about it like that, and you're like, I can post four times a day and that's like six dollars worth of content, you know? So now, hopefully that feels a lot better. On the podcast front, YouTube will actually pay you for publishing your podcast when you get to a certain point. So I actually make you know, six hundred dollars a month in order to reach my customers, which is actually the opposite of paid ads. Do you think about it? So it's actually terrific, right? To get paid in order to reach your target customers rather than pay, you know, 20,000. You're getting paid to market your business. Yeah, exactly. I'm getting paid to market my business. So one thing that I remember from when we worked together was that you have a bunch of different format types, right? You've, I've seen you do all kinds of different content, man, which is why for me, it's funny to talk about a time when you didn't do content because I've seen you do, I've seen you interview people on podcasts, I've seen you do vlogs, I've seen you grow an unbelievable Instagram profile around race car driving. So like, did you find that it just like, I don't know, did it just come naturally to you or was there something tactical that you had to teach yourself in order to be come so proficient at content? So when my business felt that I had lost the control of driving it, basically, because it was just growing on its own without me doing anything. And that just happens naturally with software or anything subscription base is eventually whatever you're doing hits a growth ceiling, right? It just won't grow any further unless you reach more customers, keep your customers longer or raise the price or earn more per customer. And so yeah, I just realized while I'm doing nothing to reach my customers, other people are using social media to reach customers and refer them to dual machines. So let me learn this critical skill. So I took a challenge and it started with around the same time I formed a podcast, Gary Vaynerchuk suggested post four times per day so you get over being shy. So that's how I approached it on Instagram and podcasting in parallel to, you know, being shy on camera. So it was like a commitment to a certain number of posts per day and a certain number of podcasts per week. I feel like the number one challenge of starting a podcast for most people is to bring on guests that are interesting. But if you have a business already, this is actually amazing because you have a customer base that you can just sort through and invite to come on and be on your podcast. And so the hardest thing for making a good podcast is now not hard for you. You don't even realize you have all the best people in your database already. So a lot of times I think software companies we like to hide behind our computer and this is really important to get in front of your customers because you could actually hear about problems that wouldn't otherwise reach you, right? Which will help you drive more revenue for your business. I gave you an example on that. But let me get back to your question which was like how did I start making content? Why was that important? So again, it was just a commitment to the actions rather than worrying about the results. And that's what I committed to. I was like, I'm going to do two episodes per week on the podcast and I'm going to do four social media posts per day, which was a lot. After a year, I pulled back. I just did one per day and I actually got better results with that. But it was an evolution. I got better results with that because now I had enough skills and repetitions that I could actually pull back and spend less time experimenting and more time executing the things I knew would work better. Yeah. I would love to hear that example of where you spoke to a client on your podcast and learned something you needed to learn. Well, yeah. So every time that I would get off of a podcast, I would ask them a, is there any like hard to get data that we could help you with? And oftentimes they'll give an answer and I'll be surprised. This is an opportunity for new data that we can source and put in the app and sell and help these people. So it's conversations you'd have with your customers anyway, but like it's combined with the podcast, which then and of itself is more valuable because other people can listen to it as well. There was one particular time, like two or three years ago, where my support team actually, they had five star ratings, most of them almost perfect five star ratings. You know, Intercom has a system where it's like after the chat rate your chat and then each rep has like a rating, right? And so what I realized was my team was showing me five star ratings, but like other people were unhappy. They're like, well, I feel like you guys like build me and it was like a surprise or something like that. And that's when I found out our annual payments, like they were renewing, but people weren't getting like the reminder emails. And yeah, my team was like holding strong to my own policy of like, hey, we have a no refund period after like a certain number of days. So people were getting charged. They didn't know it. And then my team wouldn't fix it, right? But they actually would keep pausing the conversation for 30 days until they realized, you know, in the Intercom software, if you pause it 30 days, then you close it. It won't ever send that survey. So it's like, dude, it was like a great revelation where, you know, I really had to get to the root of that because I feel like my support team is good people, but somehow that just became ingrained. It's like what they do and they didn't even, they, I don't think they realized most of them realized like what that was doing. And so yeah, I mean, that's the type of connection to your customers that allows you to find hidden problems in your business that you didn't know about. Yeah, I'm curious. What are some things that you have learned about how to do a podcast right, dating back to the launch, dating back to us working together? What have been the key lessons? Big takeaway from you is that a structured podcast always does better. And so you would always preach solo episodes and they do take more preparation. But I wanted to still talk to my customers. So now what I do is I coach my customers and I say, hey, to the extent that you're willing to share a breakdown of a deal with like financials in a spreadsheet or a breakdown of your business or KPIs with financials in a spreadsheet, if you can come to the podcast with that, I know that's even going to do better, right? So I kind of did like a hybrid. I was like, well, instead of it being in totally random conversations, I'll prep them in advance to say, can you bring something structured? And that's going to do well. I had a particularly good one with a sales coach. And I said, instead of us doing a random interview, why don't you come with your top 10 objections that real estate investors face during the sales process? And I will comment on each one. And that way we can just roll through each of those 10, right? You say it. You suggest you suggest whatever they do to avoid it. And then I would just share like a personal anecdote on how I've experienced that. And so that was the episode. It was great. One of the best episodes we ever had. And it was with a guess. And that structure I think is really important. So that was a big one from you. There have been any measurable results or outcomes that you've gained from doing the podcast for 500 episodes. Oh, man, that's a good question. So I think one thing I could get better on is saying use this tracking promo link. Yeah, I don't know. I just I don't do it, but I could do that more. So I wish I had an exact trackable thing. But here's stuff that makes me know it's impacting. I interviewed like Costa Carellis, which is rear front home buyers in Kansas city. And about six months ago, he said, man, I use Salesforce for my CRM. I'd really love to have data whenever I enter leads. And so now we're actually going like this week, we finally built the API that connects with Salesforce. He's going to pay $4,500. And he's very happy to have this problem solved. And that's probably one of the bigger items that we sell. Because remember, I said it's like a hundred bucks a month. It's not that expensive. And so it just it uncovered that opportunity. We built it. And then I didn't really have to sell it because he he just told me this is what he needed. So we could solve it, right? And it gave me the confidence to have the team build that. And so yeah, got him connected yesterday. And so he's the first customer. And there's like 20 more that I've discovered through doing this, right? The other way that that's measurable is whenever I email or whenever I interview people like that, they'll say, hey, I was at the gym and somebody at the gym recognized me from your podcast. And man, that this thing has a lot of reach. And I'm looking at the metrics. I'm like, well, it's not as big as the biggest real estate podcast in my category, which gets like 40,000 views per episode, right? But like his episode, you know, got a couple thousand in the first week. And so it's like, dude, I mean, it's a couple thousand people who are obviously very, that's the niche. They're in the niche, right? And so it's like random enough. And so usually once a month, somebody like that will say, oh, man, like this person at the gym, they they came up to me because they recognized me from your podcast episode. So that's an indicator. And then man, I get like five DMs per day on Instagram and Facebook. They're just sending me a message saying, hey, like I know who you are. I'm having a problem with deal machine or hey, I'm interested in deal machine or have interested in data. Like what can you help me out with that? So that's those are the indicators that I have. Yeah. It's funny because like I find myself more nowadays having conversations with business owners who are considering podcasting. And the challenge for me is that it can be hard to describe the ROI. So just last week I had a another client, previous client on the show's name was Orlando. And he said that like, yes, his show has driven consulting clients. He's got a consulting business. He serves like big companies. But he what he told me then was he wasn't expecting all these like other impacts that having a brand and having a podcast had. And it's so hard to even know like when you're doing this work and you're spending all this time and you got Kevin screaming at you to make your intros better. It's like, what's the freaking point of all this? It's it can be so hard to quantify that ROI. So if you were speaking to a business owner now, who's like, I think I want to do this. But what's the ROI going to be? Being on the other side of 500 episodes, what would you tell them? I had somebody asked this to me earlier and I can tell they weren't convinced. They're like, okay, $600. Like that's not a big deal. But my question to him was like, as a CEO, what the heck else are you supposed to do? You know, it's like you're supposed to be a prolific communicator. That's your job. You're communicating to your team. You're communicating the value to the potential customers you have and your existing customers that you have. So like, what else is in the job description besides excellent communication? And today the way to communicate is social media. It is podcasting, especially on YouTube. So yeah, if you're not doing that, what are you doing? You know, I didn't know how else to say it. I just get a lot of inbound DMs. I learn about customer opportunities. I'm sure this guy I was talking to talks to his customers already. So why not get more value from that by recording it and publishing it? So as somebody running a figure plus company, how does podcasting fit into your week? Yeah. So it starts with inviting guests. And I have refused to outsource that with an assistant because I personally get five podcast invites from people's assistants every week. And I delete them without recording, without reading them. Maybe that's a mistake. But if you get five a week, I mean, eventually, you're gonna be like, turn, tune this out because if they really wanted you on their show, you know, they're saying, you know, I feel like they'd reach out directly. So first of all, that's why I refuse to have an assistant. Okay, the second thing is I'm very active on Facebook groups that are relevant to my business, real estate investing Facebook groups. I will answer questions. And also when somebody else provides an excellent answer, I will reach out to them and say, I'd love to interview on my podcast. Okay, so I'm always keeping an eye in and ear out through that. I mean, this happens when I'm going to bed, Kevin, like at 10 o'clock, I'm in bed, I'm doing the final scroll on my Instagram. I'm too tired to respond. But I see some good answer. I'm like, I've got to invite this guy right now. Otherwise, I will forget tomorrow. Right. So it's that if the CG quarterly meeting is coming up, then I'll go through that and reach out. It usually I have to reach out to 10 people there to get one. Yes. Right. So if I'm booking eight guests, I've got to reach out to 80 people. And these are these are individuals who are like, I'm this is not a cold outreach really because we're in connected like a genius. But yeah, so I guess my routine is always looking out for people to invite who would be good guests. Then we always record on Wednesdays. And this is another thing. I Kevin, I made a co-host. And so the first reason why I had a co-host was like, hey, I don't want to like create a job for myself that I can't ever like step away from. Right. And if I have a co-host, if I'm sick, if I'm on vacation, whatever, the podcast can still happen. Right. I could just be absent for a few episodes. That was one reason why I wanted co-host. The second reason was I was like, hey, my podcast and my business, we serve people who wholesale real estate. I've done 19 deals, but by no means am I a wholesaler? I've actually bought and kept these properties. Right. So I would market the same way a wholesaler would. But like I could hear them saying like, oh, well, you don't actually like do my business. I'm not going to listen to you. So I intentionally picked a co-host who does wholesale like a lot of, you know, Ryan Heywood is one of my customers since 2019 without a good relationship. And I asked him to be the co-host. And so we've been a co-host the whole four years of the podcast. And so that it's been an excellent way to also provide a consistent perspective from somebody who's wholesaling, which is what the people listening want to hear from. And so that's how I kind of solve that issue. And so we have to have a specific time in data record since it's the two of us. And I want to respect his time. So we do it Wednesday mornings and we'll do two to three episodes every Wednesday. So that's our time slot that I will book stuff in as Wednesday mornings. Something that I remember you weren't doing it first, but then got really good at is introducing Ryan and explaining why Ryan was there. And what you just explained so well is like, look, Ryan has done this. He's he's had this type of business that you the listener of deal machine wants to have. And so this is why we're on here. And when you do that, then it's great. People are like, wow, this is amazing. But the key is if you're going to have a co-host then make sure, you know, achieve what you want to achieve, which is to not give yourself a job. You just got to make sure that people know why that person is there. One of the things I'm excited about is always experimenting. And I feel like, again, I know we can reach a larger audience because the biggest podcast in our space, it does 40,000 views per episode, right? And we're getting maybe 1000, sometimes 2000. And so I think you helped us try something that will help. And that's to create a separate channel for the podcast. And that's because on the deal machine channel, we really have three types of content. We have product tutorials, we have my head of partnerships. He basically has like his own podcasts. And so he'll interview people with his completely different than the deal machine podcast, right? And so there's three types of content there. And we're going to pull our podcasts out separately. So that way, if somebody subscribes for a tutorial on the product, they're probably not going to click into a podcast. And so that hurts the distribution of the podcast because the algorithm sees, oh, they clicked into this. They were not interested. They didn't listen very long. So it stopped sending it out to people. And so I think that idea from you echoes what I've heard from Alex Formozzi, where he's created several YouTube channels. And he was like, hey, I'm doing this because all the YouTube experts told me to. And this is why I have two channels. And this is where you find on this one. And here's what you find on the other one. So we're going to do that soon. Awesome. I think that's going to be totally I saw the same thing I looked at your show recently. And one of the one of the tricks. And so listeners take this. If you're on YouTube and you're not getting as much reach as you think you should be, go to your YouTube and click on go to look at your channel and click on popular and see what videos have the most views. And a lot of times for a show that feels like it's being suppressed, the popular videos are a different format or a different topic or therefore a different avatar. So for you, I hit popular and it was ton of product tutorials. Like you said, here's how to use deal machine. And that's the type of thing where YouTube sees that and is like, Oh, I need to show these videos to people who want more product tutorials to deal machine, which is maybe there may be some overlap for people who want the podcast, but it's just preventing you from people. Here's the key. People who have never heard of deal machine before. Well, that's what you want to reach those people, right? So if you have a separate channel and you can also expand out the topic a little bit to be a little more real estate focused, you can achieve that. And that's different from Instagram where Instagram's algorithm is really good at if you publish like five different formats on one Instagram channel, it will show it to the right people who want like some people only want to see your race car videos. Other people, you know, might want other videos of yours. Instagram's good at like showing it's dealing the cards in the right way. YouTube is not good at it. Not yet anyway. So glad that you shared that and I think that'll be valuable for some of the other folks here. I have a question. So I know that you do done for you editing and production of the podcast. Do you also do short form clips as part of that? Yes, we do. Got it. What are your tips for short form clips? Yeah, because what I found is Riverside is such a good platform, but oftentimes if you just use the AI feature and it's like, hey, make these clips. These these clips aren't doing super, you know, it's just it's it's very hard to make viral clips from long form content. It seems like the best podcasts today are like planned, right? And that's why they go viral is because they're like planned in a certain way. Yeah, you know that. So it is hard to make a viral clip. Even if you spend eight hours on the viral clip like I'm trying to make a viral clip. The problem with podcast clips is that you need someone to accidentally deliver a viral video, right? Which is there's people whose entire careers right now are trying to manufacture viral videos with everything at their disposal. So it's not like what I tell people is, look, we're going to make the clips like for our done for your clients, we make two from every episode. And we say our goal with the clips is more so retargeting because here's the key. The what makes podcast clips so difficult is that when when we're having conversation, we are not speaking in short form sentences and short form sentences require you to give the short form viewer all of the context that they need to understand the video. There's so much context. What are we talking about? Who were you like all that stuff? And you and I now what 35 minutes into the conversation have established so much context like there's so much in our listeners heads right now about who you are, who I am, what I what you know, what I know what you've done that when you just grab a clip of it that context falls away and a viewer who is just being dropped in the middle of a conversation has no freaking idea what you're talking about. So in order for it to work, you either have to go through the conversation and pull like all these different sentences and Frankenstein them together into a script that works. Sometimes yes, you accidentally fumble into a clip that goes viral and then everyone's like, look, you should do clips, but it was just totally like what do they say? Like you put a thousand monkeys in a room eventually they'll write Shakespeare. Same thing here. So what we do is we say, look, what we're going to do is we're going to grab a sentence that'll work as a hook. As you know on social media, the hook is what 80% of the game it's worth doing. It's good sawdust for retargeting, but as far as like going viral, it's just it's pretty tough to do. Now I will grant there are agencies who all they do is grab podcast clips and convert them into viral clips and they can do it. It just takes a whole business. It takes a whole agency to make that happen. So that's how I look at it. Cool. Yeah. Well, I picked up on a tip from you now is when you recognize something was worthy of maybe a hook, you actually had me say it again. So that was something I'll start doing, I think, too. Yeah, or say it in a different way or like if the sometimes the guests will like drop of fricking jam, but they're like, why don't they do it? Like can you just say that again for me, like with some conviction and a lot of times that it can become a part a clip in the intro, it could become clear. It's just good, good to have. So yeah, is there anything that we haven't touched on that you feel like a business owner who's like not the podcast isn't growing. They're not sure about this. Anything that they should know. So I learned one of my people that I also listened to told me that if you're doing a podcast as a guest, if you yourself don't have a CTA of some sort, you're fumbling the bag, you're fumbling the opportunity, right? And it can't be something that is salesy. And so what I've come up with is when I have like two social media clippers that they're not related to the podcast, they're on the Instagram side. They're not clippers, but we actually sit down and we do like a fake podcast. This is actually something I do in my second room over here and I have a podcast mic and he asked me questions from my comments, Kevin. And so this is very plant, right? It is not from the podcast, but it's like a fake podcast, if you will. So anyway, finding that person was tough because a lot of people will edit videos on social media, but they're not necessarily good. And so I created this process for hiring somebody on the Instagram side that knows that specifically. Yeah, if you DM me on Instagram, the word viral, I'll send it to you. And it's essentially like, hey, these are my past top videos. Please find more that are like these in the niche. And it's a bit of a test project, if you will, as part of the hiring process. And so that's just been super helpful for me on the Instagram side. So figured I would share that as well. Well, we'll throw your Instagram handles in the description. My last question was just going to be if anybody wants to get in touch. What should they do? And it sounds like they should DM you viral on Instagram. Yeah, awesome. We'll have to do that. Well, dude, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's great to see you. And yeah, here's to 500 more episodes. Thanks, man. I appreciate it. So that's going to do it for this episode of Grow the Show. If you found this valuable, let me know below in the comments and let me know any questions that you have about lead magnets. And by the way, lead magnet creation is something that can be a little bit of a pain in the neck. But for my clients, we actually create a lead magnet for you for every episode that you publish of your podcast. So if you want my team to be in charge of not only growing your podcast and getting more audience and subscribers to your show, but creating dedicated lead magnets for every episode so that you don't even have to think about it. All you have to do is hit record, send us the file, and we handle publishing, growing, and getting you leads. If that's interesting, click the link in the description and see if you qualify. That's it for this episode of Grow the Show. I'll see you next time.