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Castos
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Researched profile. Starter Story's AI research system compiled this page from 29 public sources — the founder didn't write it. Automated research can misread or misattribute a source, so treat figures as best-effort. How this works →
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How Castos Grew

Podcast hosting platform for serious creators

How did Castos grow?

Summary of the sourced claims below

Castos grew primarily by building an integration into WordPress through their Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin, which allowed free users to discover and upgrade to paid hosting plans. They also leveraged content marketing strategies such as SEO, blog writing, email newsletters, and video content to attract and retain customers. Additional growth channels included organic social media, building an email list, partnerships, affiliates, and some paid acquisition efforts.

Channels

15 channels · grouped by how Castos grows

  • Organic social media

    · 4 mentions · 4 sources
    “Write more content (I wrote two free books but planning to write much more)”
    high
    Show 3 more quotes
    “As a content creator, it’s important to make your content available wherever your audience prefers to consume it. Of course you should submit your show to podcast directories, but you should also make it available on one of the largest content platforms in the world: YouTube.”
    medium
    “It's a marketing tool to grow your brand and get people into, you know, email lists and to buy things and whatever for your brand.”
    medium
    “Modest Midkus This guy makes $20k/month selling Notion templates. Here's how you can do it with any online product.”
    medium

  • SEO

    · 4 mentions · 4 sources
    “From there, we continued our content marketing, mostly in the form of SEO and blog writing. We did that for years until slowing down recently due to what AI is doing to SEO.”
    high
    Show 3 more quotes
    “The benefits of podcast transcriptions can’t be overstated. They make your episodes more accessible to your audience, maximize your SEO reach, encourage linking, and make repurposing content easy. All you have to do is post the transcript on your podcast website beneath your show notes.”
    medium
    “doing this episode or building a YouTube, recording a YouTube video or doing new pages on the site for SEO or writing an email newsletter, stuff like that.”
    high
    “h product-led growth and SEO Jim Raptis Here's how Jim Raptis left the VC funding world behind and built a portfolio of bootstrapped products with $6.5k+ MRR”
    medium

  • Leveraging existing platforms

    · 4 mentions · 4 sources
    “Because it allowed us to acquire a customer acquisition channel, right? Like you got a whole bunch of free users, and like a lot of, you know, kind of deal flow there. We built a castless platform to interface initially only with WordPress, about eight or nine months later, open it up to where no...”
    high
    Show 3 more quotes
    “Castos is the only podcast host with a native WordPress plugin and automatic YouTube publishing - so your show lives where your audience already is.”
    medium
    “With our WordPress podcast plugin, Seriously Simple Podcasting, you can upload and publish a podcast episode to your Castos hosting account right through your WordPress dashboard (including your podcast-specific RSS feed). This creates a new post on your blog with the podcast player embedded at t...”
    medium
    “Then you started a podcast hosting company called Castos. And you did that, you know, you piggybacked on the back of a WordPress plugin you owned.”
    medium

  • Video content

    · 3 mentions · 3 sources
    “doing this episode or building a YouTube, recording a YouTube video or doing new pages on the site for SEO or writing an email newsletter, stuff like that.”
    high
    Show 2 more quotes
    “Every audio episode is automatically converted to video and published to your YouTube channel. One recording, two audiences, zero extra work.”
    medium
    “Publish Your Podcast To YouTube This is one of our favorite Castos features because it exposes you to an entirely new audience, which makes it one of the most impactful tools we offer. As a content creator, it’s important to make your content available wherever your audience prefers to consume it...”
    medium

  • Partnerships

    · 2 mentions · 2 sources
    “you can integrate either via like a native integration with a tool like MemberSpace that we're directly integrated with. So you have MemberSpace that controls the membership kind of platform and the privileges and charges of everything of your membership site that then adds those people automatic...”
    high
    Show 1 more quote
    “Other media, podcasting and YouTube, which we definitely do, affiliates and partners, and like a little bit of paid.”
    high

  • Pay Per Click Advertising

    · 1 mention
    “So we do a bit of paid acquisition. It's our big initiative right now. And we're looking at like cost to start a trial of like 50 bucks. And if you figure half of them convert, that's kind of reasonable.”
    high

  • Email List Growth

    · 1 mention
    “We had built an email list at PodcastMotor through a bunch of content marketing, so we launched to them.”
    high

  • Online Community

    · 1 mention
    “Growing a fintech product to $12k/mo by leveraging Discord”
    medium

  • Newsletter

    · 1 mention
    “doing this episode or building a YouTube, recording a YouTube video or doing new pages on the site for SEO or writing an email newsletter, stuff like that.”
    high

  • Content marketing

    · 1 mention
    “We had built an email list at PodcastMotor through a bunch of content marketing, so we launched to them. ... From there, we continued our content marketing, mostly in the form of SEO and blog writing. We did that for years until slowing down recently due to what AI is doing to SEO.”
    high

  • Open-source community

    · 1 mention
    “Castos’ roots in the open source community through their Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin for WordPress along with the investment from Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com) further strengthens the ability for WordPress users to own their content, the platform that it’s built on, and the...”
    medium

  • Integrations

    · 1 mention
    “we built Castos as an integration into WordPress for people who wanted to do podcasting ... we have several contextual calls to action within the plugin to show the value that a free user would get from upgrading to the paid hosting plan ... And that was the majority of how our free users of the ...”
    high

  • Founder-led sales

    · 1 mention
    “I closed the first $1 and then the first $10K and then the first $100K+ of sales at this company before we started to hire salespeople.”
    high

  • Facebook Community

    · 1 mention
    “Here it is: https://www.facebook.com/groups/192719694795609/”
    high

  • Affiliate program

    · 1 mention
    “Other media, podcasting and YouTube, which we definitely do, affiliates and partners, and like a little bit of paid.”
    high

How 2,706 businesses grow

Of businesses with mapped growth channels, the share using each — Castos’s highlighted.
  • Referral/Word-of-mouth
    68%
  • Social media
    60% ◀
  • Search/SEO
    57% ◀
  • Email
    48% ◀
  • Community
    34% ◀
  • Content/Inbound
    32% ◀
  • Partnerships
    31% ◀
  • Paid ads
    24% ◀
  • Events
    24%
  • Press/PR
    17%
  • Outbound/Sales
    16% ◀
  • Marketplaces/App stores
    9% ◀
  • Product expansion
    2%
  • Influencer partnerships
    2%
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