🏆 Best Business Podcasts of 2023
2023 will be remembered as the year of AI. There are too many magical moments to reference in one post, but the latest demo video from Google sums up where the puck is going. You and I have never experienced speed of progress like this. It’s humbling, yet inspiring. It’s scary, yet exciting. And it’s here and now.
However, business is still business. We still need to learn how to build great products, brands, and teams. We still need to be great at engineering, marketing, and sales. So, with that in mind, here’s a roundup of your most upvoted episodes from 2023 - a mix of AI and core skills to help you get smarter about business.
On a personal note, I’m going to take a couple of weeks off from writing Podup to enjoy spending Christmas with my wife and two young kids. It’s been a pleasure sharing the best business podcasts with you this year - your replies, referrals, and in some cases, your friendships, have been a true joy. Onwards to 2024!
How To Delegate Your Work To ChatGPT
Winner with 23 upvotes. Key takeaways:
Go beyond conventional expectations. To uncover novel insights, talk to ChatGPT from a semi-adversarial perspective. Ask counterintuitive questions with the goal of seeking uncommon answers.
Obsess over your audience. Generate FFGAs (fears, frustrations, goals, and aspirations) for your customers to inform what product to build, what content to create, and what messaging to use.
Improve your personal productivity. Embrace prompt engineering as a crucial skill in a post-AI world, using ChatGPT to augment your research, writing, design, coding, analysis, and other tasks.
Aaron Levie's AI Advice for First Time Founders
Second with 19 upvotes. Key takeaways:
Maintain authenticity. As AI generated content becomes prevalent, it's crucial to balance its efficiency with preserving authenticity in your communication. This ensures other people’s trust and confidence isn’t compromised.
Openly discuss AI's role. Regularly discuss with your team the impact of AI on trust and authenticity. Address concerns and set clear boundaries for AI's role in content creation to retain a human element in critical communications.
Adapt and reassess. Continually evaluate and adjust your approach to integrating AI in work processes. Ensure AI complements rather than replaces your insight, preserving your trust and authenticity in team interactions.
The Offer Is King
Third with 18 upvotes. Key takeaways:
Create compelling free offers. Design irresistible, easy-to-understand free offers that incentivize new customers, such as "30 minutes or free" delivery, to drive growth and enhance brand loyalty.
Utilize different types of free offers. Employ various free offer models like free trials, free with deposit, or free with commitment to increase customer engagement and conversion, tailoring the approach to your customer needs.
Balance attraction with profitability. While free offers can significantly lower customer acquisition costs and boost market share, it's crucial to carefully manage the costs involved to ensure these promotions are sustainable.
AI Comes For SaaS
Fourth with 17 upvotes. Key takeaways:
AI is transforming SaaS. AI integration in SaaS, through features like auto summaries, in-app customer service, and autocomplete, is revolutionizing how businesses operate, making software more efficient and user-friendly.
AI in SaaS mirrors the mobile revolution. Just as mobile disrupted web 1.0 companies, AI's integration into SaaS products will be a critical factor in determining their success or failure, offering an advantage to first movers.
Startups must innovate with AI-first approaches. With AI features becoming commoditized, startups need to focus on AI-first product development, strong distribution, and solve real customer problems to stay competitive.
Jobs Of The Future With Steph Smith
=Fifth with 16 upvotes. Key takeaways:
Introduce a Chief Automation Officer. Implement a Chief Automation Officer role to focus on leveraging current technologies to enhance productivity, automate repetitive tasks, and enable all employees to work more efficiently.
Start automation early. Start automating tasks from the early stages of your business to prevent the accumulation of inefficient habits and processes, enhancing scalability and operational efficiency from day one.
Trial an internal automation initiative before hiring. Before hiring an automation expert, test an internal automation initiative led by an in-house champion to identify and automate or eliminate low-value tasks.
Do Brainstorms Actually Work?
=Fifth with 16 upvotes. Key takeaways:
Focus on problem definition. Rather than jumping into solutions, prioritize understanding and defining the problem before your brainstorming session. This leads to more effective and targeted idea generation.
Pre-session research is essential. Form groups with diverse backgrounds and encourage pre-session research on how similar problems have been addressed in other industries to bring a wealth of different strategies and ideas.
Utilize individual reflection. Before group discussions, encourage individual reflection and leverage AI tools for initial ideation, enhancing the quality and diversity of ideas brought to the brainstorming session.
Making It Through The Messy Middle
=Fifth with 16 upvotes. Key takeaways:
Recognize and navigate the 'messy middle'. Business is hard. Maintain morale by cultivating a strong culture, setting achievable micro goals, and celebrating small milestones to foster progress and momentum.
Reassess your conviction. Periodically evaluate your belief in your mission and solutions, especially during tough times. Increased conviction suggests perseverance, while diminished conviction may indicate a need for change.
Focus on smart resilience, not just persistence. Entrepreneurship demands adaptability and intelligent decision-making. If conviction wanes, consider pivoting or exiting instead of persisting without purpose or direction.
Selling A Company For $800M At 29
=Eighth with 15 upvotes. Key takeaways:
Understand the impact of belief on actions and results. Recognize that strong belief drives decisive action, leading to positive results, while low belief can result in a cycle of half-hearted actions and disappointing outcomes.
Cultivate a mindset of positive belief and action. Foster a positive mindset and use this virtuous cycle of belief-action-results to achieve your goals, similar to Elon Musk and other great entrepreneurs.
Nurture and reinforce belief through successes. Actively cultivate and reinforce positive beliefs by visualizing success, celebrating achievements, and drawing on past successes to strengthen your confidence and belief in your capabilities.
The F*#k No Feature
=Eighth with 15 upvotes. Key takeaways:
Incorporate Easter Eggs for user delight. Add Easter Eggs in software to create surprise and enjoyment for your users, enhancing their experience and building a more engaging and memorable interaction with your product.
Use Easter Eggs to strengthen brand affinity. Utilize Easter Eggs to connect with users on a personal level, acknowledging their frustrations or interests, thereby strengthening brand loyalty and creating a sense of community.
Balance creativity with functionality. Design Easter Eggs to be subtle and non-intrusive, ensuring they complement rather than disrupt the core functionality of your product, while providing an opportunity for users to share these features.
The Ultimate Guide To JTBD
=Eighth with 15 upvotes. Key takeaways:
Understand customer motivations. Use the Jobs To Be Done framework to delve into the reasons behind customer choices, focusing on the progress they seek to make in their lives, rather than just the features of the product.
Recognize the broader competitive landscape. By understanding the real 'jobs' customers hire your product for, you recognize that your competition extends beyond direct rivals to any solution that fulfills the same need or desire.
Align product and marketing strategies with customer needs. Reorient your product features, marketing, and customer journey to align with the 'jobs' your customers need done, and ensure team-wide understanding of this framework.