# podcast/14k downloads in one week

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## Email content

In 2011, I turned down a $6.5m cash offer for my company.

I took a $2.5m VC deal instead. I gave up equity, and I sold the company for much less than I should have.

Every point of equity you give away is a permanent tax on your exit.

After that exit, I made it my work to help SaaS founders grow without repeating my mistake.

So I built Founderpath to wire capital to founders without taking their equity.

For the past 8 years, I interviewed over 3,000 SaaS CEOs and documented exactly how they grew.

I distilled it into 31 repeatable ways to grow a software company without dilution.

Today, I want to go deep on tactic #10: podcasts.

I've run this one myself.

My download data from April showed 14,000 downloads over 1 week across 3,080 episodes (iTunes data only).

itunes

What carried those numbers?

There wasn't one breakout episode. 3,080 of my published episodes got at least one download that week.

Every episode is a deposit into a library that pays out for years, with no equity required.

4 plays from CEOs I've interviewed who built their own shows into growth channels:

1/ Pick a name that filters for your buyer

Kyle Racki runs Proposify and needed digital agency owners.

He started a show called "Agencies Drinking Beer."

The name tells you who it's for

Agency owners find him before he ever has to find them

Test it: write 5 podcast names that would make your ICP self-select in.

2/ Sell sponsorships before you have scale

Harris Kenny runs Intro CRM and hosts the "Hello Blink Show," which averages a few hundred downloads per episode.

He landed an $800 quarterly sponsorship anyway.

His listeners are the exact operators his sponsor wants to reach

Sponsors pay for who's listening, not how many

Test it: name 1 company that would pay to reach 200 of your buyers. Pitch them.

3/ Build the format around stakes

Josh Muccio created The Pitch, a show that modeled the Shark Tank dynamic (live pitching).

Year one results:

750,000 downloads

$80,000 in ad revenue

Test it: add one stakes element to your existing content (a live decision, a public commitment, a verdict).

4/ Use your show as video, then chop it into content assets

Eric Siu hosts Marketing School and Leveling Up, with 2m+ combined monthly downloads.

He records every episode as video, then cuts it into:

Short-form audio

Short-form video

Blog posts

One recording can become 5-10 distribution assets and feeds his content engine for Single Grain.

Test it: record a pilot episode as video, then pull 3 cuts for LinkedIn and 1 long-form post for your blog.

3,080 of my episodes earned downloads in a single week.

One longtail episode you record today keeps paying out years later.

But longtail only pays out if you do 3 things:

Commit long term

Be obsessed

Have a real perspective on the world

Every episode is a free deposit into your company's enterprise value that VCs can't touch.

But playing the long game takes runway. You can't commit to podcasting or any growth lever if you're 12 months from running out of cash.

I don't want you to sell your equity to a VC for that.

Why don't you take my money instead?

It takes 2 minutes to get a term sheet: https://founderpath.com/

We've wired $271m to 724 SaaS founders without taking a single share.

Or just reply to me with your questions, I'm hanging around my inbox in the next 3 hours.

Nathan Latka

CEO, Founderpath

PS: Top SaaS events in 2026: Bookmark this list so you don't miss any. I'm speaking at SaaStanack in Croatia in 8 days. Will you be there? LMK!

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Founderpath, 815A Brazos Street, , Austin,TX,78701,USA,(210) 718-8920

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