Cole Heilborn (00:00:53):

Welcome to the Backcountry Marketing Podcast. Today I'm sitting down with Nic De Castro. He's the founder of LandTrust. Nic, welcome to the show.

Nic De Castro (00:01:00):

Appreciate you having me on call.

Cole Heilborn (00:01:02):

Good to see you. How is life?

Nic De Castro (00:01:04):

Life is busy. I have young children, so I have three daughters under the age of six. As you mentioned, I'm a founder of a company. Yeah, so all of the busyness that goes along with this stage of life, I'm in the full swing of

Cole Heilborn (00:01:20):

Today, we're going to be talking about busyness in a different regard. We're going to be talking about busyness when it comes to the world of content and building brand awareness, asking questions about storytelling, and when is the right time to story tell when is not the right time to story tell. And so yeah, you're at a really interesting, I dunno if you picture it as an intersection or a junction or whatever it is, but you're rapidly building this business and you're asking these questions, how do we show up with content? That's what we're going to be breaking down today. And just having, I think a fun, maybe honest conversation about the realities of startup mode and content. And as much as we'd like to just be able to go out and make whatever we want, there's realities and there's, especially in the hunting space, there's a lot of complexity to how you show up in the world. So Nic, I'd love if you could lay the foundation, where are you at in growing the business, and then can you set the business case for content? And let's start there.

Nic De Castro (00:02:14):

Sure. So just for people who are listening who aren't familiar with LandTrust. So LandTrust is a land sharing marketplace specifically for outdoor recreation set. Another way, a lot of people think about us like Airbnb or VRBO, but for booking, hunting, fishing, camping, all sorts of fun outdoor activities on private land, we are do it yourself. So it's not guided stuff, it's just access to land to do the things that you're passionate about. I founded the company in Bozeman in 2019, so I'm coming up on six years of working on the business. Hunting is certainly kind of a tent pole activity vertical for us, although we are diversifying a lot right now into fishing and foraging and camping and lots of other fun stuff. So that's the business. As I mentioned, we're getting close to six years of kind of building the business. We're about 1.3, 1.4 million acres in 40 something states.

(00:03:09):

We've done millions in bookings and have just been growing kind of steadily. For more reference, my background, before founding this company, I was in the advertising and marketing technology space for about a decade. So that was my whole career before this. So I worked with companies to help them understand YouTube and it was kind of new. And I personally sold Microsoft gm, Adobe, their very first ever YouTube influencer campaigns and 2011, they were all terrified to be there with these YouTubers. So it sounds obvious now, but it was very scary. Then we've grown the business through a few different ways. We did lean heavily on paid advertising for quite a while. I came from that industry and it's something that we knew. And then from a content perspective, it's one thing we've always felt very deficient in, and I know how important content is. We never really had senior in-house marketing leadership ever, and we always felt behind the eight ball on content, even though we know it's very important.

(00:04:12):

So actually, I was talking to you before you hopped on, we actually just launched our own podcast and we've been doing that and basically turning what I like to say, the exhaust of our product, which is new landowners and five star reviews that come through every day and turning those into content video podcast, which we can clip and distribute and all that. So we're trying to find our way into it. So any investments we make in content or anything else, they're scrutinized and there's got to be return on investment right away. I know it was a long-winded answer, but I just want to give, set some of the foundation there.

Cole Heilborn (00:04:48):

Yeah, no, that backdrop is really helpful. Do you guys still do any paid advertising or have you turned that off completely?

Nic De Castro (00:04:55):

Yeah, no. So two years ago, I met, actually probably around two years ago today, or in the last few weeks, I met who is now our chairman, Colin Gardner, and he was at Outdoorsy before, if you're familiar with outdoorsy RV sharing Marketplace. So he's a really strong marketplaces expert, but when I first met him, he's like, Hey, look, I love what you're doing. Obviously I'm working in a kind of parallel, people rent RVs to go outdoors, and so they're kind of the demand to our supply, so to speak. He's like, but you got to stop paying for customers and you got to really work on your contribution margin. And so that sent us down a path. We started building out and investing in our programmatic SEO. So for people who aren't familiar with it, especially for marketplaces, so this isn't like writing blog post articles that's kind of more traditional, SEO programmatic SEO is we have, I don't know, close to 800 listings, and they all have a bunch of packages under their listings.

(00:05:54):

So a farmer or ranch, they might offer hunting, fishing, camping, but on their hunting they might have white-tailed deer hunting, Turkey hunting, et cetera. So you kind of have this merchandise. And so programmatic, SEO is programmatically building WebP pages to match searches on Google or now Chacha pt, et cetera. So someone searches for whitetailed deer hunts in Washington, in Google, you're going to see LandTrust rank really high and you're going to click on that link. Whitetailed deer hunts in Washington matches exactly what you search for, and you land there and it looks like LandTrust homepage only deer hunts in Washington. And so we have, I don't know, five or 7,000 of these pages that have been generated and it's really helped us. So we were spending a lot on advertising, but we stopped completely last October. So we were like cold Turkey, zero advertising and our SEO efforts, they take time. It's not an overnight thing, but they have completely carried the business now. And now we're seeing interesting things happening with chat, GBT, Google's AI overlays, et cetera. So yeah, no more advertising.

Cole Heilborn (00:07:05):

Interesting.

Nic De Castro (00:07:06):

Yeah.

Cole Heilborn (00:07:06):

I'm curious, were all those, do you build those manually, all those pages, or is there a way to do that fairly

Nic De Castro (00:07:13):

Quickly? So programmatic, SEO means they're programmatically built. So no, you go build a framework. And so yeah, there is development that happens, but once you have that framework built every time, let's just say I don't think we have a listing in Rhode Island. I don't think we have any listings there. But if we had a new property come on and list in Rhode Island and they offered whitetail deer hunting and bass fishing, our system will automatically see that, Hey, there's a new listing. It's in this new place and it's going to build new Rhode Island pages for whitetail deer hunting and bass fishing. So it all happens programmatically. Now.

Cole Heilborn (00:07:47):

Is this what drives most of your awareness today?

Nic De Castro (00:07:50):

Absolutely. This and podcasts, frankly. So a big part of our strategy was me going and being guests on other podcasts, both on our supply and demand. So if you think about, we're a two-sided marketplace. Our hosts are landowners, predominantly their farmers and ranchers, multi-generation farm and ranch families. So I've been a guest over the years on dozens and dozens of ag focused podcasts. And then same thing, being a guest on podcasts and more of the hunt fish side of things too, predominantly hunt. So podcasts have performed extremely well now, not podcast advertising, being a guest on podcasts, long form conversations.

Cole Heilborn (00:08:29):

Yeah. How do you track those?

Nic De Castro (00:08:32):

So on our signup flow, we'll ask people, Hey, how'd you hear about us? And one of those selections is podcasts. And so we see a lot of people will select that. So we do see it as a big referral. So our biggest referrals are word of mouth, like friends and family, and then podcasts.

Cole Heilborn (00:08:46):

Gotcha. So if you've got programmatic SEO working strong for you, and you've got podcast hosting and guesting working well, why the need for content? Why do you feel like you need, I mean, that's a headache.

Nic De Castro (00:09:00):

Well, I would say it's all content. Some of it's programmatically generated. Sure. So maybe not the sexy content that the business that you're in, so to speak, but I'll specify video or photo content video. Yeah, so video or photo content. Yeah. Well, I think there's something to be said for brand building, and now brand building can be this fuzzy amorphous thing that you could dump so much money into and maybe never see returns, so to speak. And I was always a performance marketing guy, so we'd kind of chuckle at brand guys, you just want to spend money and make beautiful, sexy film. I get it. We all like it. But no, I still think that it's really important to be able to establish a brand identity. And we still, I don't know, we still probably don't have that, frankly. And we're almost six years into this business, so there is a need, and we've invested a little bit into it over the last couple of years. And we had someone who kind of helped us and we did produce some pretty nice quality video content that has done well, and it's something you're proud to show. So I do think that as a founder who's trying to scale a business and try to make their brand more known, certainly high quality video that establishes brand in who you are is important.

Cole Heilborn (00:10:21):

So this begs the question, how do you define LandTrust? The brand that you want to sometimes different than the brand that's interpreted? How would you describe what you want the brand to be in 10 or 20 years from now?

Nic De Castro (00:10:37):

Well, I'm a sales guy, not a marketer, so it's a little bit harder for me to ask. I answer maybe it said this way. I often say I'm very blessed that we get to work in a business that is in the business of creating lifelong memories and helping preserve multi-generation legacies. And so those are two things. I don't know if you're familiar with the Jobs to Be Done framework? No,

Cole Heilborn (00:11:01):

What's that?

Nic De Castro (00:11:02):

Okay, so marketers often think of personas. So hey, these are the personas that we sell to and market to salespeople have the same kind of idea. So I came from that world, well, jobs to Be Done. It was actually introduced by Clay Christensen who wrote Innovator's Dilemma and some other pretty kind of big books. But here's the general framework. It says, instead of personas where you're like, Hey, I'm looking to target a mid thirties married guy who's got two kids and household income of X, the easiest way to explain it is, let's take a subway car in New York City at rush hour. I used to live in New York City. So just like the entire slice of humanities in there, from the homeless dude to the a hundred millionaire, every shape, size, color, household, income in between.

Speaker 3 (00:11:49):

So

Nic De Castro (00:11:50):

In a persona mindset, how could you target that train? Well, couldn't have to have so many different personas. Jobs to be done says actually every single person on that train car has the exact same job to be done at that time, which is, I need to pass the next 10 minutes until I get to where I'm going. And they hire different solutions. Some guys might hire sleeping, reading a book, looking at TikTok, audible book, looking at the cute girl across from you, whatever. And so they all have the exact same job to be done at that moment, and they hire different solutions for it. And the cool thing about once you understand that job to be done framework is that job is very durable. As long as people are riding train cars, that job exists. Now, the solutions that get hired, when TikTok launched, that was a new thing that got hired to pass time or audible books, whatever.

(00:12:39):

And so for us, our jobs to be done on our guest side is one is called the hunting vacation, or you can replace hunting with other activities. But I want to go to a new place with a group of my friends or family to have new experiences and create lasting memories around hunting or fishing or whatever it might be. So that job is very durable. I would argue that jobs existed for a long time, since maybe the beginning of time and will exist for a long time now. The solutions that you build to get hired for that job right now, LandTrusts, is we've built a solution for that, but it might change. So you're not marrying yourself to your product or solution currently. You're marrying yourself to the job and just finding solutions for that as we continue to grow. So yeah, I dunno. It's kind of how we look at it.

Cole Heilborn (00:13:25):

Yeah. Why do you look at it that way? What's the benefit of looking at it in this Jobs to Be Done framework rather than a more conventional persona or audience framework?

Nic De Castro (00:13:38):

And it's not to say that personas have no place, we don't use personas at all because I think jobs are a little bit more macro. I don't really care what you look like, how much money you have, anything like that. Demographics, I don't really care if you love this activity, whether it's hunting or fishing or whatever it might be. And you want to go on trips, which we all do, and you want to go with friends or family, which most of the time we all do. I don't know. I don't really need to know the other stuff about you. It's kind of like the difference between contextual targeting and advertising versus data targeting. So let me be clear about that. So if you're Rolex and I come to you and I say, I'm the golf channel, do you want to advertise against golf content? Your answer is yes. Do you need to know the demographics? Do you need to know the psychographics? No. You're just like someone watching the golf channel. I'm Rolex. I want to advertise to them. You kind of don't need to get into all the minutiae. So that's the power of using the content there. And for me, jobs to be done is kind of the same thing. I don't really care about all the minutiae if you have this job to be done, so to speak.

Cole Heilborn (00:14:55):

Sure. So you guys launched this podcast, which I do want to talk a little bit about, but I'm curious. So one of the ways that personas and Beyond Personas, but true insights about your audience.

Nic De Castro (00:15:12):

Sure.

Cole Heilborn (00:15:12):

One of the ways they can be helpful is by informing the type of content that you produce by understanding what are people watching, what are they not watching? What's the white space, what are they emotionally interested in? What are they technically interested in? How much information, if any, do you have about these jobs to be done, but the more soft tangibles about these individuals that maybe could help inform your content?

Nic De Castro (00:15:38):

Totally. So in order to get to that statement, that one, and by the way, we identified multiple jobs on the guest side, and we have a job on the landowner side too. So we identified five originally. We choose to serve two of them. We explicitly don't serve a few of them and just what are they? Yeah. So one is called the hunting vacation, but again, you can swap out hunting with other activities. One is the local spot, which is why I started the company originally I was living in Bozeman. I'm like, man, there's a bunch of public land, which is awesome, but there's also amazing private ground around, and I'd love to have access to that for Saturday. And so I want to find something that's within two hours of my house that I can easily access and have to myself to enjoy myself for short periods of time.

(00:16:21):

But then there was one, if you look at hunting, there's kind of the trophy job to be done, which is, and I don't say trophy as a pejorative, I don't think it's a negative connotation in my perspective, but it's like, Hey, I put in for 12 years for this tag and this trophy unit. None of my buddies drew the tag obviously, and I drew it, and I really want to kill an animal. I want to harvest that big mule to your buck or a big bull or whatever it is. And I'm kind of not going to be happy unless I do. That's a job that we choose not to service. Not to say that you couldn't do it on LandTrust, we absolutely have some properties in those types of units where you could do it, but it's really about if that's the job you have, hire an outfitter, hire a guide that is right up the alley. We're more about the experience and people are very successful on LandTrusts, but it's not the end goal. Yeah.

(00:17:14):

So that's an example of 'em. Now, when you're building these jobs, there's a very specific framework you go through to actually get there. So for me to be able to say that hunting, vacation job, that took a lot of work to be able to get to one sentence, right? Sure. So there's social, emotional and kind of like there's a pull progress. It's really, he describes it as building a documentary. You're a documentary filmmaker and you meet this customer and you're like, man, take me back to the first time you even thought about something like this. And you basically deconstruct all of it, and you look through all the steps and you're like, I can tell you all the steps that someone who has that hunting, vacation or fishing vacation job to be done from daydreaming how it all starts. I just was talking to an investor of mine.

(00:17:58):

He is like, man, I just got back from Marathon Island and we were fishing for tarp. And I'm like, oh, daydreaming. That would be super cool to maybe actually planning and browsing and getting inspiration to talking to a couple buddies that you're like, oh, this would be a fun trip to do together. To actually looking at maybe some actual options, some properties like, Hey, I want to go do this Turkey hunt in Kentucky. Here's a few properties to start to making it real all the way to going on the trip and post Tripp. So we really understand that process. And so then from a content perspective, when I'm doing interviews on our new podcast, which is brand new Little Baby, we've released three episodes. We have 15 in the can. But when I'm talking to people who've gone and had five star experiences on land, I'm trying to walk through, Hey, when did it first dawn on you? How did you hear about LandTrust? Basically walk through all those steps that we know that happened. So that's how it informs us. And are we doing it perfectly? No.

Cole Heilborn (00:18:56):

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Let's talk more about the podcast is you said you were trying to find a way to turn the exhaust of your business into content, and what a better way to do that than start a podcast and talk to people. Give me the worst case and the best case scenario that this podcast could have on the business for a LandTrust. What's the goal? Are you after awareness, are you after relationship building with private landowners who partner with you? What's your main objective?

Nic De Castro (00:19:27):

So we backed our way into a podcast. It wasn't like, let's have a podcast to create a media business, which a lot of podcasts do. A lot of podcasts say like, man, if I could really do couple guys launch podcasts, and they're like, man, it wouldn't it be cool if we could quit our jobs and just do the

Cole Heilborn (00:19:44):

Podcast? I think every group of friends that at one point in time.

Nic De Castro (00:19:47):

Yeah, totally. Totally. So I just want to be clear, that's not how we got to a podcast. We're running a two-sided marketplace. We've raised investor capital. It's not about that. That'd be cool if it gets to a seism, we can sell sponsorships, great, but it's not how we got here. How we got here is content. We had none of it. And we're like, man, we have nothing to feed the platforms. And as you know, the social platforms are hungry beasts who need to be fed content all the time. Vertical video historically or more recent history has been like, you've got to feed it vertical video. And all the time, we don't do TikTok. We just don't have, maybe now with the podcast, we could feed the beast, but 0% chance we could feed the TikTok beast before because we just didn't have the vertical video at the volume that you needed to actually go and feed it.

(00:20:34):

So we came to the podcast through almost reverse engineering it, which is like, I need two things. I need more awareness, but I also need more conversion at the bottom of the funnel. So it's not like buying a pair of black tennis shoes. It's a bigger average order value. Average order value is around a thousand bucks for everyone listening. You can book $20 a day fishing. I'm just saying average order value, it's a little bit bigger purchase. You're taking days out of your time. Often there's travel involved. It's like panning a vacation. It is a vacation, essentially, it's a hunting vacation or a fishing vacation. There's more consideration there. And we're new. This is a newer model.

(00:21:17):

There's a lot of people that get there and find properties that they're really interested and maybe they just don't convert for whatever reason. We started with, Hey, how could we increase conversion? And I don't think there's any better way than through video other than actually meeting in person. So if you can't meet that landowner in person, which you can't, how about video of people talking about experiences on it or the landowner themselves talking to me and telling people about their place and what they want to offer and all that stuff. So that's how we started shooting some of that video and basically going through all the podcast mechanics, but without making a podcast with scheduling and what we're going to talk about and what we're doing right now, basically. And we were recording that video and pushing out to social, but then we're sitting and thinking to ourselves, we're already doing all the hard work of a podcast effectively. Why not just turn it into a podcast? And that way we can drive more awareness too and kind of syndicate it like that. And so that's how we ended up here. It wasn't like we want to have a LandTrust podcast. That would be fun, and maybe we can make a media business.

Cole Heilborn (00:22:16):

As you think about your audiences or your jobs to be done audiences, where does a podcast fit into their media mix and what they're consuming out there?

Nic De Castro (00:22:25):

So we have two sides to our marketplace. We have our hosts and our guests, so landowners and then sportsmen. It's interesting. A lot of people wouldn't think that the farm and ranch farming and ranching community, which not all of our landowners, but a lot of our landers are farmers and ranchers. They consume a lot of podcasts, and then maybe it's a certain segment of them because the landowner community from the farm and ranch sector who use LandTrust, especially a couple of years ago when we were really new, we're very progressive. Not politically speaking, but they're trying new things. They're innovators. That's what I mean.

(00:22:58):

And so it's almost that they're going to be the ones listening to a bunch of podcasts and trying to learn, and what's the new regenerative ag practices and how are people doing X, Y, and Z? So they're innovators. So that was really, really effective for us. We're speaking, we're preaching to the choir there. We always say, if we hear a landowner or a farmer rancher say, well, that's not how granddad did it. They're not our landowner. They will be in 10 years because laggards. But right now we're wasting our time trying to talk to 'em. We're not going to convince 'em anything in 10 years. They'll come around. So I do think we went and found them where they were from a podcast, me being guests on podcasts, and then same thing as, you know, hunters, fishermen, climbers, bikers. We're all hardcore enthusiasts and we're trying to consume that content. So injecting ourselves into other people's podcasts to spread what, no one's heard of this. What is this in long form conversation has been incredibly effective.

Cole Heilborn (00:24:00):

Have you looked at what I keep using the word audiences? I know that's not how you

Nic De Castro (00:24:05):

No, no, that's fine.

Cole Heilborn (00:24:06):

Yeah. It's an audience. Yeah, yeah. All right. Have you looked at what your audiences type of podcasts they are consuming? Looked at that landscape and then tried to figure out, okay, how do we produce a show that's unique or different from all of the other hunting and Phish shows out there?

Nic De Castro (00:24:23):

Certainly,

Cole Heilborn (00:24:24):

I don't know the number of them, but there's a lot. Oh my God, so many

Nic De Castro (00:24:29):

Again. So we have one podcast called the LandTrust Podcast, and so that was even a strategic decision. We have two audiences. We have a host side and a guest side,

Speaker 3 (00:24:39):

And

Nic De Castro (00:24:39):

The guest side, there's hunter hunters, there's fishermen, there's foragers, there's campers. So we can serve a lot of verticals there. So it's been kind of hard from a brand perspective. We've gone back and forth where we had separate Instagrams and you're like, oh, I don't know. I don't know that this is the right answer. Let's just take hunting. It's the biggest activity. We are not generating a hunting podcast. I am not an expert hunter. I don't even get to hunt that much. So I don't have any novel expert advice for you. There's a thousand podcasts that you can listen to.

(00:25:11):

We want to talk to people about successful outdoor experiences and success, not meaning necessarily people killed stuff, but we call it five star stories. LandTrust is about experiences and not outcomes. So some of the best hunting trips I've ever been on, we didn't kill or even see animals, but it's the people you're with. It's the setting. It's the disconnection from technology and the day-to-day and all that stuff. So five star, that's a five star experience. We see reviews all the time. They come in every day like, Hey, we didn't get anything, but it was a five star in the three paragraphs of how cool it was to meet the family and see the land, all that stuff. So it's really not a hunting podcast. It's just a cool outdoor experience podcast. So we're not like, this is how I killed a 200 inch buck.

(00:25:57):

There's so many podcasts about that, and I've never killed a 200 inch buck. I can't even tell you how to do it. And then on the landowner side, it's really about this community, especially the Farmer Ranch community. It's a very insular community. They've been burned by a lot of people. They've been sold a lot of snake oil. And you have to realize you're talking about their family's legacy. I think our oldest land owning family is six generations deep. And so what we're trying to convince them as their partners to do is to let people into that legacy. And that's a big, big deal. Trust is in our name because this business doesn't work without trust, old fashioned trust. And so for us, there could be nothing better to talk to those people than people like themselves coming on and talking about it. That's the ultimate truth. I'm a sales guy, but I'm not going to be as effective ever as just them seeing and hearing somebody that is just them talking about their experience so far. Good, bad, and ugly.

Cole Heilborn (00:26:59):

It sounds like what you're saying is the show was about the connection between land and experience and the history and legacy and the emotions that gets wrapped up in all of that.

Nic De Castro (00:27:10):

Totally. Yeah, totally. And just again, as a guest, you're hearing other guests and the really cool high quality outdoor experiences they're having, and as a landowner, you're hearing about how LandTrust has been for them to participate with as a partner, but also the effect and changes and improvements has impacted on them and their families.

Cole Heilborn (00:27:30):

How are you going to measure success of the show?

Nic De Castro (00:27:33):

Yeah, so it does take a little bit of investment. I think the investment has come way down. We've thought about a podcast for years, frankly, there's just coordination and scripting and all this stuff. Now with ai, we stood it up in two weeks and we're using Riverside right now. You use Riverside. We use Riverside. The AI tools for editing it, it's taken so much of the work out, frankly.

(00:28:00):

So yeah, there's some investment that we put into it, not a ton. And so we look at, hey, we had to boil it down as in marketing. It would be really cool if everything was super attributable. They saw this thing on a billboard and they came and bought the gear. You can't really do that. So we just said, Hey, let's take a high level metric like listens or views across the different platforms, and let's just aim for a goal for, we just launched. If we can get to 500 listens or reviews across all the platforms per week, we did some math and said, okay, we think it'll probably have this down funnel of effect on us. So that's where we're at right now.

Cole Heilborn (00:28:38):

What's the down funnel effect? How do you calculate that?

Nic De Castro (00:28:40):

Well, eventually it should lead to conversions, meaning bookings, right?

Cole Heilborn (00:28:43):

Yeah.

Nic De Castro (00:28:44):

And we're literally in the middle of this right now. We didn't even start promoting the podcast till I think yesterday or today. We sent an email, I think it was this morning.

Cole Heilborn (00:28:52):

I've asking you a lot of questions for a brand new

Nic De Castro (00:28:54):

Podcast. No, no, no. And it's great. I mean, these are the conversations I like to have with my friends who are running businesses like, Hey, are you measuring this stuff? So if we backed out math and if we can drive another 40 bookings a month or so from people who kind of engaged with, listened to a podcast, that's great. Whether they're already down the funnel, they didn't discover the podcast, but it was on a clip of, the podcast was on the listing, and they saw that counts. So down funnel kind of conversion, or they discovered it through someone sending or it being recommended on YouTube or coming up in your shorts or in Spotify has their little shorts thing now. So yeah,

Cole Heilborn (00:29:30):

Here's a theory I have, and I'm curious to get your thoughts on this. AI obviously is everywhere,

Speaker 3 (00:29:36):

And

Cole Heilborn (00:29:37):

There's a lot of people talking about, oh, well, AI could just go out and write blog posts, infinite blog posts, and what a way to theoretically earn SEO. But what if I think that could happen in the podcast space? Oh,

Nic De Castro (00:29:53):

For sure.

Cole Heilborn (00:29:54):

Look at all of the AI voice generators, and if you fed an AI machine, all the content around your business and around your industry, you could theoretically create a very compelling, very interesting host that people might want to listen to. Totally. My question is, for all of the currently all the human led podcasts out there, how do you differentiate? How do you make sure that your show is valuable enough that it rises above the 80% of theoretical, I don't know, AI podcasts out there?

Nic De Castro (00:30:31):

So I've actually, in my personal life, been looking at this recently. Have you messed around with Notebook LM much?

Cole Heilborn (00:30:37):

That's what I was thinking of when I was,

Nic De Castro (00:30:38):

Dude,

(00:30:40):

It's crazy. Yeah, if your listeners haven't, I don't know, barrier, the bottlenecks of knowledge acquisition now are just gone, and I'll explain what I'm talking about, but I actually listen to a podcast that I know is AI generated, and it's like the AI Daily Dose. And so it's literally a podcast about AI and the progress. I'm pretty sure it's a daily dose of AI or something like that. And the guy will tell you, so there is an actual dude and he will do the podcast, but then he'll tell you when his AI voice is going to take over.

(00:31:18):

So he is like still tells you, and it sounds exactly like him. I mean, I dunno if you've played with Riverside. Riverside will do Your voice for Reads. I've not tried that feature. It's pretty weird. It's pretty weird to listen to yourself say stuff you never said. I think there's a place, and it's funny, I have a group of buddies and we have group chat and we talk about different theological doctrine, and there's esoteric concepts and stuff. And one of them was recommending a book. It was written like the seventies or 80 by some theologian. I'm like, well, now I got to buy a book. I don't even read book fizzle books. I'm always doing stuff, so I just listen to stuff. I'm like, there's no way I'm going to do that. But then I'm like, huh, I've been wanting to mess with Notebook lm.

(00:32:01):

So I found a PDF transcript of the book on scribed, downloaded it, uploaded a notebook, lm, and then was able to chat with it and then creating a podcast instantly, like, holy crap. So I literally have thought about this in my personal life. I could just create episodes of all the conversations that we're having and the sources and doctrines that we're talking about. I'm creating the podcast and I'm disseminating to my buddies through a group chat, but I could just put it on Spotify. Why not? Then I could just share the spot. They could just follow it instead of me downloading it and uploading it there. So it's honestly an interesting question that I don't know the answer to yet. Am I spinning my wheels by doing this personally or could I just do this with ai? I don't know. Now I will say I don't think I could get our guests to participate in that. So I think you can do topics where

Cole Heilborn (00:32:57):

You could talk about a 200 inch buck without actually having personal knowledge of how to do

Nic De Castro (00:33:01):

It. Yes. Or another for my exact, so I recorded a podcast earlier before you hopping on this. It was with one of our guests. He was probably 70, probably around my dad's age, had a great time, talked about his experience, but I could have just fed his review into a notebook LM type thing and just generated a podcast about it. Is that the most engaging format for that? Probably not. It's probably better to hear and see someone again, it's kind of like the guests seeing themselves in that person. My dad seeing another guy in his cohort using this technology to go have great experiences. So I think it depends on the format and excuse me, who your audience is, but I certainly think, and I might even be launching another personal podcast just to upload these notebook on podcasts that I'm doing

Cole Heilborn (00:33:52):

Well. But that's where I think it all has to come back to trust and to brand. And that's not necessary for every industry or every job to be done.

Nic De Castro (00:34:02):

Nope.

Cole Heilborn (00:34:03):

But especially in your position where trust is the name of the game. I don't know. It doesn't seem like you can replicate that at this point.

Nic De Castro (00:34:13):

No, I don't think our audiences, I think our sportsman audience might be a bit more receptive to it. I don't think our landowner audience would love that

Speaker 3 (00:34:21):

Yet.

Nic De Castro (00:34:22):

And again, in two years, the pace that this is accelerating at, maybe it will be, but I still think now that personal, especially as the founder, me doing the interviews and having that connection, I think is still very important in trust building.

Cole Heilborn (00:34:37):

Yeah, it's an interesting theory. Hunting is a notoriously difficult market to be in. Your hands are tied in many ways. What other ways besides the podcast, are you trying to build your own organic channels, your own organic audiences and getting around the pay-to-play walls that are even tighter for the hunting world?

Nic De Castro (00:35:00):

Yeah, two things. So on that point, yes, for people who aren't familiar or don't work in this industry, and again, I came out of the advertising industry, hunting specifically is a very difficult hunting and Second Amendment stuff. So any firearm related things are like firearms are probably the most hard, and you can't really advertise anywhere online, like paid digital hunting, at least for a while there it's starting to loosen a little bit, but really difficult to try to run paid advertising campaigns like if there's a dead animal or a weapon or a broadhead or anything. It just flagged constantly. And so it's just really difficult to advertise.

(00:35:39):

The way we're looking at it is we're looking to partners and channels. So we've over the years done partnerships. And most of them, frankly, they were more marketing centric partnerships that just didn't really produce, and I don't lay that at the feet of the partners. It's really on us because it takes effort to make a partnership work. If it's a marketing level partnership, you've got to be proactive. You've got to plan, you've got to really put effort into it. Getting a partnership signed is really kind of easy. And that's the beginning. It's not the end. What sort of

Cole Heilborn (00:36:19):

Partnerships are you talking about?

Nic De Castro (00:36:20):

So I would say with a brand or with a larger influencer, not just, we've had really large influencer partnerships and it just didn't produce what we would've wanted it to. And again, it's not because of them, it's because of us. We were not proactive. We didn't plan well enough. Everything that person we asked them for, they gave to us right away, but we just didn't ask them for things. We didn't plan it out, we didn't coordinate it. There's a lot of stuff we didn't do, and so it just kind of fell flat. Now we're looking more towards product level, like integrations. And so something that is scalable from that perspective, if you think about it, we're a technology company, and so can we integrate into mapping apps where it's like, cool. Now you still have to do marketing around that type of thing too. But it's also happening at a product level. It's integrated. And so you start to see us and discover us through these other channel partners who are now distributing LandTrust through their apps. So I'm starting to look, we're looking more towards that.

Cole Heilborn (00:37:30):

I see. I mean, yeah, that seems like a really, I say convenient way to build that awareness pretty quickly.

Nic De Castro (00:37:38):

So one that I just did a podcast with our chief marketing officer are familiar with a company called On Water.

Speaker 3 (00:37:45):

Yeah.

Nic De Castro (00:37:46):

So Alex, I just did one yesterday. We'll release it in a couple weeks. But yeah, so LandTrust, you'll now see every LandTrust property that has phishing available in on water's mapping apps.

Speaker 3 (00:37:56):

And

Nic De Castro (00:37:57):

We're going to be announcing another one with more hunt centric mapping apps in the next couple of weeks as well. So those are those product level integrations that we're using to reach our customer who just hasn't found out about us yet. Yeah.

Cole Heilborn (00:38:13):

When we first connected, you were talking about this question of, gosh, in the hunt space, there's so many brands that get out there and produce awesome films and tell cool stories. And one of your questions was Wind. Do we do that? Is there a time that we do that or do we just completely bypass that as a creative product that we could create? Let's talk more about that specifically. What are your thoughts around branded content, like high quality storytelling?

Nic De Castro (00:38:44):

I mean, the answer is you always want it. You see those and you're like, gosh, I wish as a founder, you're like, I want that for my company. So I think in Hunting Sitka, I would say really did it first and best with really beautiful film, really well-written, really well-produced, shot, all that stuff, at least in my opinion. And I think it really helped grow that business, but it's not cheap to do. But they were already kind of a bigger brand. I don't remember exactly when they started releasing their first films, but it's been a while now. It's probably a decade ago. But I think they were first in the hunt space to really go after that, and then they really set the tone. And I know out of Bozeman, Seacat Creative and some of these guys, those guys were early in that space. And then Yeti started to get into it, and obviously Yeti took that model and ran with it.

(00:39:48):

So as a founder, again, you see these things, they're beautiful, and you're like, man, I wish I could have that, but I don't have the money for it. And I think over the years it's probably, I would be curious to ask your perspective on it. I don't have the answer. I think some of that stuff has become more attainable from a cost perspective maybe than it had a decade ago. And we're still looking at that. I think there's different levels of content. That's the brand, the hero content, right? Aspirational, beautiful. It also makes you look very buttoned up as a company. They're not just fly by night, Joe Blows or whatever, right? No, I mean that's a very professional, I dunno any better way to say it. So it's like, yeah, what stage is that investment worth it? Could you see the return on investment? And again, not in five years as a startup, you don't know that five years, five years is not guaranteed. So there's a bunch of questions I don't have the answer to, frankly.

Cole Heilborn (00:40:57):

Yeah, I don't know that to be honest. I don't know that anyone does. I think anyone who is producing that type of branded content, I don't know that people have the answers. I think we have some answers that we like to try and throw around. And you can certainly make the case like, oh great, storytelling is great marketing a hundred percent. But in terms of actually analyzing ROI and all of that, it gets really tricky. To your point about cost, I think the cost has, it's definitely come down. I think that what I'm seeing, and this actually kind of fits with the whole AI podcast idea, the barrier to entry is much lower, therefore there's a whole bunch more content being produced out there. And I'd argue that that content, most of it isn't actually that good. It looks good because production is cheap and production quality is easy right now. But what's actually difficult is telling, if you're going to tell a story as an audience, you have to make me feel something. I need to be emotionally invested. And that's the biggest differentiator I think between content that works and content that works really well because I have this theory that audiences just don't care. They do not care what a brand puts out unless if they're like that 1% loyal tattoo,

Nic De Castro (00:42:29):

Yeah, totally

Cole Heilborn (00:42:30):

Logo on the arm. People don't care. And so in a world where you are just inundated with ads and branded content and you're competing with Netflix and you're competing with Spotify and you're competing with notebook, LLM, apparently, now you have to give the audience a reason to care. And you do that by making them feel something. And I think that's the biggest opportunity I see is there's so many brands producing content, but it's not strategic and it's not as emotionally compelling as it could be. And I feel like if you're not going to aim for those two things and why even do it? I totally agree. I think, sorry, I was on a soapbox there.

Nic De Castro (00:43:10):

No, no, no. And so the frustrating part to me is we literally, my business facilitates lifelong memories. So I mean, the amount of first hunts, last hunts, I had to land around talking about how he's hosted a couple last hunts with the dad who ended up passing away first hunts with kids, first hunts with new hunters, just lifelong memories that these people talk about for the rest of your life. So that's what I deal in, that's my business. So it's like the most fertile ground for rich emotional storytelling. And then you go to the other side, which is four or 5, 6, 7 generation landowners who were still trying to keep that legacy going and the history, we have very fertile ground for high quality emotion evoking content, and we've only been able to produce a tiny bit of what could be captured there. So that's why I'm uniquely frustrated if I had a sushi delivery app, I don't know, dude, let's just run performance marketing and see if we can get the app downloads. So I wouldn't be like, man, I wish we could do some really high quality brand film or something like that.

Cole Heilborn (00:44:16):

Well, but I think there's a way, and you're already doing it. There's a way to tap into that emotion and present it in a way, in a medium that isn't as expensive.

Nic De Castro (00:44:27):

That's how we ended up here, because it comes down to dollars. It will be sweet to have 50 K to throw out a hero brand anthem film where it's just that beautiful thing. But we found ourselves where we're today just out of like, Hey, out of necessity, we don't have that. And so how can we produce content that does try to capture some of these emotional moments? But yeah, it's not, I'm sitting here at the same place I record our podcast. It's not highly produced or anything like that, which I think there's a total place for that too. And I think a majority of your content probably should be that. And then you have the cherry on top, like the hero, beautiful brand film.

Cole Heilborn (00:45:13):

I was looking at your Instagram earlier, and obviously you guys are active there and you've got a lot of photos, but have you ever considered pairing your podcast episodes with a photo journal or a photo essay? I'm imagining you've got these six or seven generation farmers, and I just can picture what they could look like and it would have to be the right medium where people would want to actually take the time to appreciate the photo and the story behind it. But that could be a lower lift way to really capture the heart and soul behind some of the stories you're finding.

Nic De Castro (00:45:50):

I mean, yeah, we haven't thought about that really. That would be an amazing, and a couple pieces of higher quality content that we have produced around our landowners. They're on our YouTube and they were some of our landowner in and around Bozeman where I was based. We did get some incredible photography out of those too. And the stories are amazing. So that could be a great format. What would that look like? I don't know yet, but certainly there are so many amazing stories to be told on that side of our market.

Cole Heilborn (00:46:21):

Or what if you even switched the perspective, what if instead of having it be a photo essay about a farmer, maybe it was the grandson or the granddaughter writing about their grandfather, or it was about the daughter reflecting on the hunt that her dad took her

Nic De Castro (00:46:36):

On

Cole Heilborn (00:46:37):

That perspective. That'd

Nic De Castro (00:46:38):

Be amazing. So again, I find myself being like, yes, I want that. How can I pay for it? But yeah, I'm not a creative, so I don't think about things like this.

Cole Heilborn (00:46:50):

But you're also at a tricky spot where you need the awareness and you need the audience at the same time for this to be accepted.

Speaker 3 (00:46:59):

Yeah, totally.

Cole Heilborn (00:47:00):

If you could wave a wand, wave a magic wand and produce any type of content, serial content, branded films, but you could tie that to a result, what would you want to be able to produce? Would it be this type of work or is it something else that you'd love to try and experiment with?

Nic De Castro (00:47:23):

I think it's definitely video. Yeah, I would say just rich storytelling video that follows, again, we have two sides of our marketplace. So one would be landowners and legacy and that storytelling of the land and the family and all that stuff. And then obviously integrate LandTrust into it, of course. And then on our guest side, it's capturing these extremely meaningful lifelong memories and moments across activities in different groups and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, just lifelong memories and legacies, really that's the business. And so how can we capture that in the most kind of beautiful and emotion evoking way where it's like we really starting to cement that as LandTrust. Of course, there's always the tactical, what is LandTrust? LandTrust is a two-sided marketplace where you can book outdoor experiences, right? That's not very emotion evoking the output of that is, right. Yeah.

Cole Heilborn (00:48:28):

Your background, as you mentioned, was previously in a lot of YouTube influencer campaigns, ad campaigns. Is that a route that you've explored? You're certainly well knowledgeable about it.

Nic De Castro (00:48:38):

Yeah, I had a guest on my podcast, have you ever seen the Okays Hunter brand where they just celebrate very average? It's like the opposite of a 200 inch buck,

Cole Heilborn (00:48:50):

But that sounds like me.

Nic De Castro (00:48:51):

Yeah, no, me too, right? So check him out. Okays Hunter on Instagram, they're hilarious. And it's just like he's a normal dude. He is like, I dunno, you celebrate shooting like the spike buck, whatever. So he's done a really good job. But we had this conversation on our podcast of, I don't know if I believe in influencers anymore. Is it totally saturated in any new medium, in any new channel? All the profit, so to speak, is at the very beginning, right when TikTok launched and they launched your, everyone that hopped in first sucked all of the profit out. It was the new thing. And when I say profit, I just mean performance. And then it just commoditizes down to this sea of, I don't know, everyone's doing it. So is there still a business to be done there? Sure. But I don't know if influencers are still extremely performant from driving actual engagement. That was a conversation I had with him. He also, in his day job works at Gunpowder, which is a PR kind of shop, and he runs affiliate marketing. And so

Cole Heilborn (00:50:00):

Is this Ryan by chance?

Nic De Castro (00:50:02):

So Ryan owns Gunpowder, but this is one of his employees, Eric Clark. Really cool guy. You should by the way, you should have him on. He's great. This is right up his alley. But we kind of got in that conversation of you can't just send your product to some influencer person and tell him to post about it. That's not going to work unless it's just a lightning strike. It's got to be a fully coordinated, well thought out proactively, and you've got to educate them on your products and services. And it's like training a sales team effectively.

Speaker 3 (00:50:37):

And

Nic De Castro (00:50:37):

So just finding an influencer who you think has people, I just don't think that works anymore. There's just been so much of it. And it's like banner blindness. I sell display ads. Display ads worked really well in the beginning of display ads because what is this thing blinking at me over here? They used to actually blink, and now you're just like, everyone's banner blind. You're like, whatever. So I don't know, we've dabbled a little bit and we've never seen like, whoa, that really worked. But again, we probably dropped the ball on our end, frankly.

Cole Heilborn (00:51:12):

As we start to come to the end of our time today, I've started a new wrap out theme and it's called Ending on Failures. What is a big failure you've had around, I dunno, a campaign or a strategy that you really thought was going to work and didn't work? And what have you learned about learned through that?

Nic De Castro (00:51:35):

I mean, maybe so many failures. Holy shit. There's a couple of 'em. So we landed partnerships with a couple big influencers and we kind of were in that thought process. Like, man, they talk about us and we're going to blow the doors off. Nope. You see maybe a little traffic spike, maybe see some account creates, but no blips. And again, we didn't have a team working that partnership and coming up with the ideas and pushing it and being proactive and managing it and educating and all that stuff. And we're in a unique position because I don't have a product I can send you. It's not like I just spent a weekend or two ago I was at camp with Josh from Montana Knife Company. Those guys have absolutely crushed. They're everywhere with everybody doing everything, but I'm envious because he can send you his knife and he can send a knife to be part of a giveaway or it's this thing I can give to you. I don't have that thing. So there's been failures around that. Influencer, big ones, one of them's 4 million followers and really big.

(00:52:55):

The other was on more of a performance campaign. I can think back to when we were still spending on paid ads where we optimized for account creates and we blew the doors off of our CPA for account creates. It was like awesome. But then that cohort just was shit. It didn't convert. They didn't care. So lo and behold, when you move your performance metric up the funnel, it optimizes for that. It's like, cool. We drove the most downloads in a month we ever drove, or not downloads, but account creates. We don't have an app like that, but you watch that cohort over the past few years, they suck. They just don't care. And it was like at the time you spiked the football. Yeah, we crushed it. Most account creates ever and the cheapest we've ever gotten. And it's like, yeah, you paid for a bunch of cheap shit. Whereas podcasts, slow burn and highly engaged users come to the platform. It's their best platform for acquiring new landowners. So yeah, it's not the sugar high of putting some money in and driving tons of activity, but it's also this longer burn.

Cole Heilborn (00:54:07):

As we wrap up, what are some questions that you're asking yourself? What are you thinking about? And if you could summarize our conversation today maybe with some of those questions.

Nic De Castro (00:54:20):

I think we talked about this when we chatted last. There was an article written recently, a Substack by Andrew Chaney. He's like a Andresen Horowitz vc, but it was titled Every Marketing Channel is Shitty right now. And I mean, sitting in my chair, not to say we've tried it all and done it all. We're a tiny little team, but I mean there was a lot that rang true, and it's like where do you reach people now we have been throttled by meta and we finally called them, we were at 17.9 k followers for months. Months, and we finally reached out and they're like, yeah, you got to pay us to get more followers. They just said it said it out loud. It wasn't like, here's your strategy. No, you just have to pay. Okay, well, I mean, I guess I appreciate the forthrightness with this, but it was used to be you'd have your account strategist and they'd be like, oh, you should try this type of content and this type of came like, no, you're going to have to pay.

Cole Heilborn (00:55:20):

Was that just because of the hunting connection?

Nic De Castro (00:55:23):

No, I don't think so. Was literally, and this was like four days ago, so this is fresh off and like, yeah, after 15,000 subs, you basically just have to pay. You got to spend some money to drive subscribers and followers and stuff. So I guess the question that I find myself asking is great. We have programmatic SEO, and now what we're seeing happen with the answer engines of chat, BT and perplexity, that's translating very well into those, and we're starting to see more traffic and referrals and stuff coming from there. So that's great. That's always kind on. You can't tune it, right? It is not like, let's do more SEO this month. It just is what it is. It just grows. It's kind of like an annuity podcast is a new thing we're testing to see if we can drive some awareness, but also conversion out of it. But it's like, what's the next channel? Where are people finding success without just shoving quarters in the machine? I don't know. If we could answer that, then we'd be in a good spot. Yeah. Yeah. And all video is for sure it. I've been in and around selling video for marketing and advertising purposes for now since 2011. So I've been for a while, video, other than flying out to meet the person, shaking their hands and having a conversation video and long form conversation with video is the best. Yeah.

Cole Heilborn (00:56:53):

Well, Nic, I appreciate you taking the time to chat. Thanks for opening up the hood of the engine and taking, diving us in, giving us a look around as to what you're working on. I appreciate the candidness about the things that you're in the middle of learning and uncovering. Yeah. I think the questions you pose are questions that everyone experiences and I think we're all trying to sort through.

Nic De Castro (00:57:14):

Yeah. And if your audience tends to be more maybe on the production side of the business, there's only so many big brands in the world you can sell to that you can sell the 50, a hundred thousand dollars film projects or whatever it is. So I think there's opportunity if you can work with smaller up and coming brands or companies like us, but it's got to be done in a way that is achievable for us. It's a no go. I can't give you 25 grand. I can't write the check. So how can we do stuff that we can feel good about that we can see performs? And it's not a cost per acquisition. I'm not getting to that level, but you know what I'm saying? Yeah. This is the chair that I sit in. I have investors, I've got a team. I'm looking at p and l, and we have to allocate resources very carefully. I think there's a bunch more of us than there are the big boys. The big boys write big checks and that's sweet. Go get that work if you can get it. But if we can do work together at this stage and grow together eventually, hopefully we're a big boy.

Cole Heilborn (00:58:27):

And I was talking to, I was just recording an episode a couple of days ago. It was with the CMO. Her name's Bronwyn. She works at a surf company called Aire. And she's like, I have purposefully been moving down the ladder from big company to smaller company over the course of my career because I can have more impact on change. There's more degrees of variation that I can influence. And so I think the theme is true for creatives also who are looking for people to partner with and work with. The tricky thing then is how do you develop a scope of work that works within the budget and keeps everyone happy

Nic De Castro (00:59:06):

Now the pro of working. So we're less sexy to work with because we don't have big budgets. However we can say yes right away. True. So it's like I could just say yes. So if you come to me with something that seems feasible, I can say yes. And it's not like, Hey, next quarter we're having our first meeting about the following. I was like, no, we'll just say yes and let's do something. So there's a pro con to the smaller guys, but we're the next crop of who, some of us are going to be the big boys. And so growing along there.

Cole Heilborn (00:59:39):

Yeah. Well, Nic, thanks for the conversation. Thanks for the time. I'm excited to see your podcast, get out there and flourish. And where can people go and find you? Where can they, I mean people know how to find podcasts these days, but tell us where we should find you.

Nic De Castro (00:59:54):

So I haven't personally had social media since 2015 or 16. So I do have LinkedIn. I don't know, I don't really consider social media. So you can look me up on LinkedIn. Nic De Castro, there's no K in my name. And then on podcast, so we're the LandTrust podcast. LandTrust is one word. Spotify, apple Podcast, YouTube, other platforms. And then LandTrust, you can LandTrusts.com. And then we have our socials linked on there. But Instagram I think is LandTrusts Hunt or something like that.

Cole Heilborn (01:00:23):

Incredible. Well, thanks so much. I hope you have a great rest of your day.

Nic De Castro (01:00:27):

Yeah, you too man.

Cole Heilborn (01:00:27):

See you.

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