EP7: Rented vs Owned: The Digital Real Estate Dilemma for Founders

Note: this transcript is super messed up due to some upload/import issues, so there will be sections that are missing/incorrect.

Sarah: welcome back to founder problems podcast. I’m Sarah Schumacher, and I spend most of my time clearing caches for CDNs, browsers, and websites while I fix things for website clients.

Lee: I’m Lee Zuvanich apps or help people out of building apps.

Sarah: Cool. So we are going to be talking about rented versus owned platforms.

So rented would be a social media platform. You can have a profile on it. It may be free. You might pay for it. But it’s not something that you have full control over.

An Instagram account, a TikTok account Facebook, any of these, these are all rented platforms. There’s pros and cons are not all good. They’re not all bad, but you do need to be mindful about which ones you’re choosing and for what purposes. 
 

The big thing that is useful for Rented platforms is to [00:01:00] have a way to connect with other people so that you become top of mind when they think about, I need help with my website or I need help with my branding or whatever.

 I primarily use those as a way of showcasing expertise personally. I really only do that on LinkedIn and somewhat on Bluesky. I am not on any other platforms. And at this point I don’t plan to be so how do you guys approach these.

Zach: I’m most connected to LinkedIn also. It really depends what you’re trying to achieve. I think there’s certain types of media platforms that curate a certain crowd or whoever you’re trying to push your message out to when I’m on LinkedIn or when I was, I’d say more active on LinkedIn, it was an opportunity to connect with people who may not necessarily be near me because some of the industry and some of the things that I was looking to do was primarily focused around military and defense and things like that. Kansas city Midwest is not really strong in that department. You can’t really do too much of that outside of DC. So it really offered me an opportunity [00:02:00] to do some self promotions, some self branding, and really hone in on my identity as I looked for different networking and engagement opportunities.

Lee: I probably have a few thousand people following me on LinkedIn now, and I don’t know those people for the most part. And it’s been really cool to just use that as a platform to share my thoughts and learn from other people in the industry and make industry connections without doing a lot of effort.

I haven’t had to go to networking events or invest money in tech conferences cost so much money and then figure out the whole, well I’m gonna submit a paper and then be brought up on stage as a speaker, and then maybe five people will show up to my talk, or maybe a hundred people will show up to my talk, but it’s this whole process, I have to fly there. On LinkedIn I can just like

[00:03:00] Silence.

than anything that I could have done on my own. Which is why these Social media platforms are so powerful and even being regulated by governments because they have the power to impact elections. That’s why we’re there. We’re there to make those connections in ways we couldn’t have on our own little custom built space.
 

Sarah: Zach and I were talking about just how exhausting it can be to do in person networking. And that was kind of the one thing. So yeah, That we landed on was like, you can do a lot of networking online. The thing that I enjoy the most are Slack groups, actually.

I guess that would be more of a rented platform or that might be somewhere in the middle.

Lee: totally is a

Sarah: did you get, yeah, because you can get kicked out of a Slack group if you come in there and you’re like, I’m gonna sell everybody, that’s how you get kicked out of a Slack group.

But those are a more curated way of doing the same kind of thing, but within a niche part of an industry. [00:04:00] So there’s a lot of stuff that you can do online that think if you’re less comfortable doing in person things or maybe you have immune system issues and you do not want to be out right now, like

Zach: Hello. Hello.

Lee: curates it pays for that. And then they try to pass that on in some way or get money back. I got an email recently and they’re saying, level up and be in some selective inside groups that were running pay to be a part of it.

So it does turn into kind of a business of its own, like innovate her KC. That’s another example of someone who started a

Sarah: Yeah.

Lee: group and then turned it into something bigger based on the momentum that I had.

Sarah: Yeah, I actually applied to join a paid one,

Lee: Ooh,

Sarah: I think a [00:05:00] month ago. Yeah, because it is a pretty much a hundred percent my target market in this group. So if nothing else, really, really good market research. 

Lee: Yeah.

Sarah: has control of communications platforms and how to censor whatever they want and do whatever they want with it and not give people what they want.

I mean, it was so funny that blue sky got big and all of a sudden Instagram was like, Oh, Oh, Oh, we, we have chronological feeds again. Yeah. Yeah. Like, nevermind the fact people have been asking for that back for years and they did not care, but as soon as there was some competition, it’s like, oh, now we have to get people that they don’t actually care.

Right. So there’s a lot of frustration around that. And I think that that’s a healthy conversation we should have. But if I was a normal person, like I was normal person, I wouldn’t be on any of them. I think a lot of us have to be out, or feel like we have to be out there for our businesses, right?

Founder,

Lee: a [00:06:00] normal non tech, non digital

Sarah: non Yeah, it could be tech too. I just think like an entrepreneurial person that’s constantly creating and building new things. It is wise to build a personal brand on these platforms because then if you have people that you can connect with, that connect with you.

There’s people that are listening. They’re like, Oh, cool. I have this new thing I’m working on. So for those of us doing that kind of work, we kind of have to be on these. I’m saying normal people as in people that just work a full time job.

Zach: For those people Who are working at conventional nine to five, opportunity to use those platforms, you can brand and advertise yourself, I guess, in a new way that you have so much of a hiring market in the way that the world’s going, you can only do so much with one, two pages. That say your entire life history. So there is that professional element where you can

Sarah: That’s a good point.

Zach: stand up person and somebody could be like, Oh, that person based off merely how you engage, if you’re helpful and things like that. Cause I’ve also seen it work to the other end where you could be a jerk online and someone could be like, wow, this guy’s super qualified.

We want them [00:07:00] to come in right now. And then they go back to a post you made like six years ago. You’re like, so do you really think that? And then you’re not going to get the

Sarah: Yeah.

Lee: Yeah,

Sarah: Yeah. No, that’s a really great point. Career development, especially at the higher level. Especially marketers. The personal branding thing is really big. There’s one that I followed for years.

And I remember when she started working with this other marketer that I really admire. They already knew who they were because they both have such great personal brands. Oh yeah, I’d love to work with this person. 

I think the risks that people need to understand are that it can go away immediately. The whole thing with TikTok that just happened, could still happen. If you build Millions of people and you’re being paid insane sums of money because you have these people that are following you on Tik TOK, you can lose that tomorrow.

Sarah: And when you lose that tomorrow, you have no recourse. They’re just gone. So the strategy that you should be using is to also incorporate an owned platform. So an own platform would be something like a website, an email list, email lists are super important. Potentially if you did like a self hosted podcast maybe a book, I guess could technically qualify.

Anything that you fully own and control, those things [00:08:00] are where you ideally want to be driving traffic to. So if you have a following on, TikTok or whatever, you should also be pushing those people to your website that you own and control completely and your email list. That you can take to any email marketing provider. Let’s say TikTok does get shut down tomorrow.

You have everyone on the email list that cares about what you’re creating. And you can email them all and say, Hey, you know what? I’m now on YouTube. Follow me over here. If you don’t do that, you have no way of reaching those people. So the strategy is to use both and to use both in different ways.

Zach: Silence.

Sarah: for a living. So I’m going to, I’m going to beat this. It is so freaking important. I didn’t want to get into like leased platforms here, but I do want to throw out the fact that something like Shopify or Squarespace or Wix or any of those like

Lee: [00:09:00] Yeah.

Sarah: just tanks and goes down tomorrow, your site’s gone. You can’t pick that up and take it with you. You can’t back it up and take it offline if you decide you don’t want to, you know, pay for it for a year.

It’s safer in some ways than a rented platform because you are paying for a service. They have incentive to deliver a service that you want to keep paying for. But it’s still not something you fully own. So that’s why I’m a big proponent of self hosted WordPress.

 There’s classic build your own HTML site, if you’re techie.

Lee: Yeah.

Sarah: the host that you’re with, you pack it up and you move it elsewhere.

So it is fully under your control. So I write an email newsletter. I host the email newsletter through my personal website. I host the website myself. I can do anything I want. No one can tell me what I can and cannot do. And no one can kick me off the thing.

I completely control all of that. So I did not go with a sub stack. Sub stack is convenient. I understand if you don’t know what you’re doing and just want to set something up. It is still a leased platform that you don’t fully control. [00:10:00] So I did not go that route very specifically because I want to own and control everything.

And also for the IP of stuff, I don’t, I don’t want to be creating content for somebody else’s platform that they’re making money off of. I don’t monetize my newsletter in any way, but if I were to do that, I don’t, I’m not doing that for some corporation.

Lee: I want to say for the people listening right now who are overwhelmed by all the information you just shared, there,

Sarah: I love that Yeah Yeah Mm hmm

Lee: about like GoDaddy? What about the people that are hosting, the platform that I purchased a license on? Okay, if all that sounds like gibberish to you, just reach out to Sarah and I.

That’s what we do for a living. Or anyone else you know and trust. There are [00:11:00] people who do this for a living for a reason. It takes a lot of time

Sarah: Hmm.

Lee: just different levels of risks. So having a

Sarah: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

 There’s also different stages of the journey. So I have a client who I ended up building a website for him, but when he came to me, he had set up his own wordpress. com website. There’s actually two types of WordPress. It’s very confusing.

And one type of WordPress is like Squarespace. It’s a leased platform. So he had done that on his own. To add this project I want to do. I’m going to go out. I’m going to set up his account. I’ll do it myself. He did it and he realized, you know what, this is a little trickier than I thought it would be.

 [00:12:00] So then he reached out to me. Right. So sometimes you have a starting point and as you learn more, you shift and do something different. Definitely do research in the beginning, but I also don’t think it’s a bad thing to be like, you know what, I just need to get something online.

I’ll just start with this. There are phases.

Lee: I was thinking like flywheel, that kind of reference.

Sarah: Oh, hosting companies. That is a whole separate conversation.

Lee: With Licensed platform that’s reputable that’s been around a long time like Wix or, or WordPress. Those are low risk compared to putting your entire career and all of the market validation people are looking for when they Google your name onto one platform like Facebook or TikTok or

Sarah: hmm.

Lee: So. Spreading your influence out, spreading your ad spend out across those platforms, getting an email list, that’s important. Those are higher risk endeavors. Lower risk would be, get a good reputable host for your website and a web developer or teach yourself how, but [00:13:00] someone who’s been around a while that’s not an experimental platform, although some would say WordPress is getting riskier because of the hijinks being performed by the CEO and then the lowest risk rented platform out there that you’re not hosting by yourself would probably be the whole concept of building an email list and managing it through, another platform, CRM of some kind or email management platform like HubSpot. And for the nerds who are trying to figure out, well, how do I own truly own it? What about owning, which we’ll talk about in a minute. Please do not go down the path of getting your own on site, like on premise server putting it in your house.

Sarah: Is anyone listening that’s really going to go that hardcore, because that’s,

Lee: asked

Sarah: that’s hardcore.

Lee: many times and I currently have,

Sarah: Wow. No. Yeah.

Lee: on premise servers and insisted that it made them feel safe. So when you get into app development, and I know people listen to this, like I was saying, there’s people who [00:14:00] are going down that path. They’re thinking, okay, rented versus owned. I’m gonna own my own server, I’m gonna host it in my garage, and that’s gonna be foolproof. And then their house floods. And they lose everything.

And that’s not a joke. That’s, I’ve helped people who’ve gone through that. there is a balance. Yes, hosting on

Sarah: Yeah. Okay.

Lee: be risky in some ways. Like, what if they go down tomorrow? They’re not going to. And your server data is being seeded across multiple states, so they have backups on their backups, versus you at home with your backup hard drive and then you have a house fire.

in the digital world,

Sarah: So

Lee: really deep.

Sarah: So I think that maybe a way we can make this easier for people to understand is ideally your data should be transferable. That’s kind of the key. Right. It needs to be transferable. I had a client once that had a Squarespace site and they wanted to just shut it down for a while.

There’s no way to do that. You either pay for your site indefinitely or you just delete it. You can’t download a backup and save it and store it for later. You can’t take it to a different platform. It is only a Squarespace site. It can only be [00:15:00] on Squarespace.

You have to keep paying for it. So If you do a transferable product, if you build an app or whatever, you put it on AWS, you can move to Google cloud later, right? Make sure it’s in a transferable format. The other email list, that’s another good example.

Squarespace has built in email marketing. So if you did have a Squarespace website and you had an email list, you were curating, you could export that as a CSV. Just make sure that whatever you’re doing, you’re thinking about, can I export my data and take it elsewhere?

And that’s a big conversation that’s happening right now, partly because of blue sky, because Twitter is so locked down and people have been leaving Twitter like crazy. People moving to blue sky. People think blue sky is just a Twitter clone. It’s not. Blue sky is a protocol. So it is a firehose of information. Anyone can access the API underneath the blue sky and they can build an app that runs on top of this firehose of information, which means that if you decide you don’t like blue sky, you could go to a competing blue sky product, but all of your information lives in this firehose and you can just take it and use it anywhere.

And that is the model

Lee: that.

Sarah: build. Yeah, I have a whole [00:16:00] separate thing I want to write about it because there’s so much more that’s like a decentralized platform and that is what we should be moving towards is decentralize everything so that people own and control their data and if they don’t like what’s being done over here, they can take it over here because if you’re doing that, people are incentivized to make sure that you want to remain on their platform. There’s specific people that are still on Twitter because they feel like they need to be because their audiences are there. 

So if data is transferable, you could leave and you could still communicate with your audience, but from somewhere else. That’s getting more technical, but make sure your data is transferable is what I’m getting at.

Zach: So I’ve been through, I’m someone who’s probably been through, I don’t know, 567

Lee: Go

Zach: So along that journey, you end up with hundreds and hundreds of people within the cohort, all the mentors, all the advisors, all the people who’s hop in the classroom and say, howdy duty or whatever, and

Sarah: [00:17:00] Okay.

Lee: of

Sarah: Silence.

Zach: something like 2, 3, 4 years ago, had some random person make it. I think it was like 50 bucks all in. I paid another 50 bucks to have them slap it up on a webpage or something like that.

What it allowed me to do in terms of ownership is someone could reference my name. Google Vetelligence or whatever I was working on at the time would be pretty high at the list. And they say, what’s a Zach guy about? And they would see what I was working on, what I was doing and why I was doing it very quickly.

So I think that speaks to the idea of owning your Brand and your identity comes along with that because I own the email list and I can spam people at will if I desire. [00:18:00] And then I also have website where

Sarah: Bye bye. Hmm. Hmm. 

Zach: of sizzle . And then all those people, what happened? Poof, they couldn’t do long

Sarah: Yeah. 

Zach: this. look or the feel of the big shot, I got it all going on. And then I’ll shoot. We’re underfunded. We can’t keep this going goodbye. And then you have

Sarah: Yeah.

Zach: the reality of this people not owning or being able to manage their own social presence.

Sarah: Yeah, well, and that’s a good point, too, is things do change, so [00:19:00] you also, you can’t assume that what worked or what has continued to happen so far will continue. 

Lee: Great

Sarah: right? So if you’re on Vine and you see the writing on the wall, you better pivot to YouTube. Quick right. You do have to pay attention to those things and do some basic research. You will be left behind. 

I think the other thing I’d throw out as the AI

Lee: Okay.

Sarah: thing right now, SEO is really interesting. Google has gotten so bad. Ads are kind of terrible. And then a lot of searches are being done through AI. So now it’s also a question of, okay, if that’s shifting and let’s say you have an SEO strategy, you’ve been implementing on your website.

Is that going to continue working or now do you need to figure out how do you make sure that chat GPT pulls up your information when people are searching for you? So there’s always things happening in the background.

We’ll see where that goes. I do want to really quickly highlight the pros and cons of both of these. We covered them at a high level but I think the biggest takeaway that I want people to understand is that there are needs for [00:20:00] both.

If you have a website, if you build a completely yourself hosted WordPress website, it’s beautiful. You love it. launch it. You’re so excited. It’s got all your information, got your services, how people can schedule discovery, whatever, whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re selling, you’ve got it.

Oh, it’s beautiful. Crickets. Okay. You have to market websites. This happens all the time. I have to tell people you have to market.

Lee: If I build it,

Sarah: No.

Lee: Isn’t that right?

Sarah: No, it’s a myth. It’s a myth because,

Lee: Yeah,

Sarah: well, you know, maybe like the 90s

Lee: a

Sarah: when there was like five websites.

You have to think about that. There are so many websites, there is so much noise. People will not just find your website. So if you build this beautiful platform and you’re like, yes, I own all my stuff. I’m going to start writing this newsletter. No one knows you exist.

You still have to get people to realize that you exist. This is where the own platform should be the foundational pillar . But then you can go out and forage around a little social networks to bring people back to your main thing.

another thing we probably should have talked about, you need to know what your goals are. If you’re [00:21:00] targeting business professionals, you probably should be on linkedin.

So if you have a service that you are selling and you have this beautiful self hosted website. Go showcase your expertise on linkedin and then send them back to your website. Find people that resonate with what you’re doing to build this group of people that actually care because it’s also better quality leads versus running an ad. These people know who you are.

They’ve been reading your content. I think I’d like working with this person. Send them back to your website. Go find these other places and go hey, I have this newsletter go sign up for my newsletter. And now they have been Added to your own platform. But you’re finding them in these other places.

So the downside of the rented platforms is that you don’t own it, but you can build a following. The downside of the own platform is that you own it, but no one’s going to know that it’s there. So use them together and then be strategic about which one you’re prioritizing.
 
 

The other thing with social is followers don’t matter.

You can have a million people Instagram

Zach: Okay.

Sarah: going to buy anything. It’s a [00:22:00] vanity metric. It doesn’t mean anything. If you’ve got a hundred people that follow you that are all in your target market and will eventually need your services at some point so you’re staying top of mind, that’s better than 10, 000 people that don’t really care about what you’re selling.

 Just be really strategic about what you’re doing.
 

Zach: You need to be able to stimulate your audience on one, which would be the rented and then be able to quote unquote, close them on the own platform because

Sarah: hmm.

Zach: Like, for example, there is this person that I follow on LinkedIn, entire business is

Sarah: Okay. Okay.

Zach: and support. From an

[00:23:00] there.

So I think

Sarah: Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence.

Zach: that exchange.

Sarah: Yeah, and if she’s active, on LinkedIn, then her call to action and her bio is sign up for my email list, schedule a consultation, something like that. Driving to the website. People aren’t always ready to buy at that moment.

When you are ready to buy, I can go to her website and she’s got her packages listed and I can just click the book or whatever.

Lee: Yeah

it time to go set up a bunch of social media sites and invest the time and the money into marketing [00:24:00] across all these different platforms?

That’s like so overwhelming for people to do as they are also building a business for the first time. I’ve honestly probably never done it really well. I like to just seed social media sites with something that shows that I’m alive and drives people to my website, but I don’t maintain them very well because social media is a job.

That’s why you can go hire specialists to do

Sarah: Yeah,

Lee: though,

Sarah: None of us are good at social media. Lee, I think you’re actually pretty good at it, because you can just write and throw up something quickly and do on occasion. I,

Lee: Like,

Sarah: yeah, I’m not great.

[00:25:00] I’m trying, I am actively trying to get better. Yeah, because

Lee: always be throwing up.

Sarah: that’s like a t shirt idea.

Zach: go on a shirt. Yeah.

Sarah: Yeah. All right. Hang on. I know that down.

Zach: Yeah, better than

Always be closing is dead. Let it be always be throwing up.

Sarah: I love it.

Lee: productivity if you think about it

Sarah: Well, it’s also something that you can cultivate. I will write long form stuff and writing for social is just very different, right?

You need to write things in such a way that they’re intriguing you’re asking questions and you have short bullets and things. It’s a different style of writing. So I do think if you put a little effort into it, you can get better about that and you can make it a low stakes activity.

So that’s what I’m trying to do. When I have this thing where I just get off a call, I’ve had to explain this concept for the fifth time to people. I’ll just throw up a quick post. Here’s a common mistake I see people make.

 That could be quick and easy if I got in the habit of it.

Social media is actually a really great place to get market feedback from people.

You could post ideas and talk about stuff and just mess around and see [00:26:00] what people come back with and what they’re interested in because sometimes your Close, but you’re not there. and someone will be like, Oh, well, that’s really interesting, but actually I need this. And then suddenly you have this idea. This thing I wrote is really resonating with the people I think I want to work with, but not in the way that I thought it was.

It doesn’t have to be high pressure. You can just use it for feedback. Not that I am doing that well either, but I see other people do that very, very well.

Lee: Okay. 

Sarah: Just be strategic. That’s my advice. Do you guys have specific things you think stood out to you?
 

Zach: You can’t outsource your identity. Hate’s a strong word, but I detest a lot of the founder isms that come out of

different communities where they say that you have to build in the open. I don’t

Sarah: Oh. Yeah. Public. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Zach: Cause you can engage and have a lot of those conversations with [00:27:00] people, and then you can funnel them through the process, whether they want to be a part of it or not. And that would enter into the own space.

Lee: It might seem a little confusing to talk about rented versus owned. The way that I think of it, because as I said before, truly nothing that’s digital is owned by you unless you get your own server which is basically a giant hard drive, and just store your stuff on site, which is actually pretty risky and not advisable in this

Sarah: Yeah. Don’t, don’t do that. None of, we’re advising you to not do that.

Lee: not talking about that.

Zach: Silence.

Lee: that. So they’re pretty [00:28:00] thorough, and that is why we rent forever from the cloud now, which doesn’t feel good to any of us that grew up owning media, the trade off is someone is managing it and hosting it for you, and you don’t have to worry about it taking up space in your house, and then if anything happens to it, all hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of development could be gone. so first of all, everything ultimately feels like you’re renting. But the way I would put it is it’s really like renting an apartment versus buying a house. If you’re building an app, this becomes pretty important. If you’re going to spend 100, 000 on app development if you’re renting it, basically what that would look like is you’re spending a ton of money for Developers to put things together on some low code platform, so you don’t even own that stuff, it’s not hosted by you, they’re setting it up

Sarah: But

Lee: their low code site.

Sarah: be an example of that.

Lee: Which, fuck Bubble

Sarah: Yeah.

Lee: And we’ll have a whole episode about that soon, because I’ve had people come to me Escaping how bad bubble was for them. It might be good for some [00:29:00] MVPs, but it’s not good for a full blown app in this day and age. So you can spend a ungodly amount of money on platforms you don’t even own and then connecting them to other platforms you don’t own, like open AI

Sarah: Silence.

Lee: of it as, this isn’t an investment so much as it’s like living in an apartment. then
 

Sarah: [00:30:00] Silence.

Lee: so much money right now because someday you’re going to

Sarah: So much for having me. I appreciate it. Bye bye.

Lee: your water heater, all that. That’s the same in the digital world. You have to do that, and you have to pay hosting costs, which is like paying property tax to the state. So, no matter what you do, you’re paying someone. 

Sarah: Yep. Yeah, I [00:31:00] would.
 

The finance piece did not come up in this conversation at all, because that should be not the least of your concerns, but definitely at the bottom of it. You don’t want to be like, well, I want to run a server in my house cause it’s cheaper.

Sarah: There are some things that are worth paying for. There’s a three, two, one backup rule. You should have three copies of your data on two different types of media with one copy offsite. So you can’t really do that with a server. I may get you back server up, but again, the cloud, I love the joke.

The cloud is just someone else’s computer, but if you’re paying for a good one, the cloud is lots of other computers and lots of other places. I use backblaze, highly recommend it. No sponsor. It auto backs up my computer behind the scenes.

Like I don’t have to do anything. It just automatically does it. That is an off site copy of my files. You also want to use an external drive. You want to keep this stuff backed up. I’m not saying host your own website to save money.

Whether or not it costs more or less, it’s kind of like, it should be a strategic, yeah, it should be a [00:32:00] strategic decision. Like some things you just have to pay for forever. Like there is nothing in life that doesn’t require maintenance. And ideally if you’re structuring your business, well, if this is a business investment, then you’re making more money than you’re paying on your hosting and your web development and whatever else.

Yeah. 

You need to factor that in for sure. Don’t go buy a website from the most expensive branding agency in the country if you can’t afford that. You can’t make these decisions solely based on, well, I’m going to get a cheap, 3 a month host because I don’t want to spend any money.

Sarah: There are reasons not to do that. That’s a whole nother episode

Lee: People at this point in the conversation, typically their eyes are glazed over and they say something like, it’s a lot more. That’s a lot more work than I expected. That’s a lot more money than I expected and I mean, yes. Yes, it is. That’s why I would say go to our other episodes if you need to because we go more in depth on What makes a business a good idea?

what makes why is your idea such a good idea that now you need to go spend money on a website and Not crappy host for that website and you know, don’t [00:33:00] use

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah.

Lee: These are things you can do for free. As a founder, you owe it to yourself to do those things first. Once you’re ready, you validated your concept, you know it’s going to make you some money. Hopefully it already has made you some money, ideally. Then come back and start to learn about the digital cost side of things and how to get that started.

Sarah: For anyone listening, I would love to know, what we need to break down more in depth because we could have a whole episode just about hosting, right? I love getting into technical details.

I have to really rein it back and try to stay high level.

Lee: When

Sarah: That’s why we’re here. If you have questions about any of this stuff, we will break it down. I would be really interested to hear what people want to hear more about

Lee: money.

Sarah: [00:34:00] specifically, and we’ll record an episode on that.

So Zach, do you have any other final thoughts?

Zach: I think the main thing is make sure that you have some semblance of control of what you’re putting out. I think there’s so many different media platforms. There’s a lot of different hosting options. You can put up a page website that comes up in a couple seconds, or you can take some time, get someone who almost obsessively lives in that type of code websites, hint, hint, hint, hint, hint, Sarah, et cetera, et cetera. So like, et cetera. Devote your time towards things that you’re actually good at, interested in and best suited to do. Being able to control the flow and narrative of what you have going on could be relegated to you on the social media perspective.

But for other platforms, it might be useful to engage with somebody who lives in this area.

Sarah: Yeah, set a solid foundation and then build on top of it. Just put some thought into what the foundation will be first and then work with [00:35:00] professionals to get it set up and then run with it after the research, of course. Cool. All right. Well, I think that wraps it up for today. 

Please reach out if you have questions or want us to cover any other specific topics especially tech related, Lee and I will talk, we will break down tech topics all day long.

Oh I forgot. The podcast itself is a practical example of this. Our own platform is our website. We share this on LinkedIn and we will share it on our personal LinkedIn.

So that would be our rented platform. We have an email list on our website that we own. We also use the leased platform because the way that we are producing this podcast, that’s actually a leased. Podcast platform. We are not self hosting the podcast. So we’re using all three in this stack for this very podcast.

And that’s a great example I want to throw out of how that can be done. So listen to the podcast and subscribe, but then also go follow the website, sign up for the email newsletter. And then you can get all of our updates on merch drops and everything else we plan to do in the future.

Lee: Awesome.