Does the world even need a ‘Quiz Maker’ podcast? Quiz experts Boris and Mike chat about their journey from asking ‘Should we…’ to ‘Let’s go for it’ with ‘The Quiz Makers’. Their mission? Help marketers grow their business – one quiz at a time.
Big thanks to Rob Cressy from baconsports.com, who got us hooked on creating a podcast.
Video
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Transcript
Boris 0:00
Hello, welcome to the quiz maker podcast, talking to you in the spring of 2020. We’re all in full Corona lockdown, sitting at home and attending zoom meetings instead of personal meetings, and zoom conferences. And in one of these zoom meetings, I met Rob Tessy, who’s a seasoned podcaster and also runs an online training on how to run a podcast. He really got me interested in doing this and setting up first podcast.
So I’ve been toying around with the idea for about a week really started to like it, and introduced the idea to my co founder, Mike, who I’m going to bring in now introduced to you. We plan to actually launch this podcast together, podcasting about it before we go to our regular format that we came up with for the riddle podcasts. I hope you enjoy this. And if you’re going to do your own podcasts, maybe you’ll learn from our mistakes. And I’m sure we’re going to make a lot of them while we record this. Thanks for your patience as well for listening to us. So without further ado, here’s Mike.
Mike 1:16
Apologies for the puffy jacket. It’s quite cold here in Manchester, England.
But, you know, when you first mentioned the idea of doing a podcast for quiz marketing, I was a little skeptical. I was thinking, well, we’re a small team. Is it distracting us? And so we had chats about that.
Boris 1:35
Yeah. And here we are, right. We’re doing we’re really doing we’re doing a podcast.
Mike 1:39
Yay. Excited. You got me on board. This is great.
Boris 1:43
Yeah, yeah, I know. I tend to do this. No, I have crazy ideas. I get all into things all the time; now we’re doing podcasts and videos. If you’re just listening to this, go, go check out the video. You’ll get to see Mike In this company winter jacket even in a late Manchester spring,
Mike 2:04
Yeah, it’s May in Manchester wearing a thick puffy jacket and you’d also get to see Boris with his also posh Monet impression is backdrop; he’s got this cool impressionist painting thing going on. So obviously, with the Coronavirus, production values are not high. But thanks to technology, you were able to do these things.
Boris 2:26
By the way, it’s not an original Monet, so don’t even think about breaking into a house. I think the original is hanging in Paris if the river still there. Go check it out after Corona. It’s another thing we should probably mention, right? It’s like we’re all in lockdown. We’re all in our house. It’s good. You get to see Mike and both of us adapting to these new work environments.
Mike 2:50
Well, it’s interesting, though, I’m not sure how many other you listening now are from startup or small team companies. But essentially, I kind of view my job as a cofounder; you each have different skills and different strengths. So like, you know, Boris, you’re really strategic, you’re really good at the big picture, things like that. I think one of my jobs is to not get you distracted by really cool new ideas.
And you’ll go for it, you’ll often go big. So I’m then thinking “But what about a kind of trying to pull people back?” So that was my journey from the initial ‘do we really want to do this?’
But now I’m totally on board. I think it’s a it’s a brilliant concept for small businesses and startups to get the word out.
Boris 3:29
Yeah. So one thing we should probably let our listeners know is, what are we going to talk about, right? We’re founders of Riddle – if you don’t know Riddle, by all means, go check us out on Riddle.com, but we’re a quiz builder. We’re a SaaS company software as a service.
So we sell tools to build quizzes, polls, other interactive formats that you create and put on your own. In a nutshell, what we do is not all that exciting, but there’s more exciting companies that could do podcasts. I’m sure, I’d be very interested in a podcast from SpaceX and people talking about the first manned flight on a SpaceX rocket that they’re preparing for to Mars
Mike 4:17
And Tesla, apple, etc, you know that these are all sexier companies. But at the same time, like you know, we do you know, we’ve been around six years; we’ve got a wide range of customers from the BBC to Red Bull to loads of small and medium companies and entrepreneurs using quizzes for lead generation. So there is an audience and there’s there are people who want to know how to use quizzes for quiz marking. So that’s definitely a cool, cool niche for us to talk about.
Boris 4:45
Right? So you know, one thing we decided early on is we will bring on guests, so don’t worry, you’re not going to have to listen to the two of us banter for a minute and have them talk about themselves and have them talk about their experiences and marketing and what They tried and failed. I don’t think everyone needs to be a real user, though. I think we can bring up some interesting people. Talk about trends in marketing.
Mike 5:09
Yeah. Yeah. Because marketing’s it’s, I mean, we’ve both been doing this for 2020 plus years. Marketing is feeling Oh, yeah, marketing goes in waves. And there’s trends and the technology changes and audience behavior shift, there’s always going to be changes in behavior. So yeah, getting a wide range of voices, I think it’s going to be really interesting. You know, we’re going to talk a lot about quizzes and how to use quizzes and interactive content, to get people’s attention and to get them clicking and thinking. But yeah, getting some really cool people on board. It’s gonna be a lot of fun.
Boris 5:44
So it was that and I think what we’re doing right now we can continue and we will continue to talk about our company. So if you’re a startup founder, and you’re not interested in quiz marketing, by all means, listen to it because Mike and I, we’ve been working together for way too long. Long probably years or more, we’ve been in a whole bunch of startup type companies.
We’ve been working at Standard and Poor’s 500, stock traded companies, setting up European operations, lots of things that we’ve done together. So we know a thing or two about starting a company. So we’ll talk about that and about running a company and all the challenges and fun stuff, I think. So we have to come up with a name Mike, for the podcast. When you listen to this, it will have a name, but I think that’s, we’ll go sleep over this and for the next episode, we’ll have a name about that.
Mike 6:38
Sounds good.
Yeah, I think I think the initial thoughts about what we were going to call it. It’s not a riddle focused podcast. This Is us chatting more about quizzes and quiz marketing. And so I’m personally I think simple is best.
So I think why not just call it the Quiz Marketing Podcast?
It says what it does on the tin. People who are browsing, they’re like, I know what they’re talking about, right? If it evolves and turns into something else great, but I think this is where we can offer, you know, offer people like you guys listening, “Hey, I just want to know, primarily quizzes, marketing, and then the growth of how to do that.”
Boris 7:19
I have to admit, I came up with a name that I really like. I was in the car picking up my kids from school and because I was trying to be a good driver, I did not pull out my phone and I did not write it down. And whoops – I forgot. So I’ll have to defer this to the next episode. And then we’ll see what we come up with.
Mike 7:46
What’s out. You do realize you sound a lot like a high school student who says “Hey, I had this great idea for homework or had the script, but I forgot.”
Boris 7:57
My dog ate it because I clearly don’t have a dog.
Mike 8:03
Yeah, no. Okay, well, that’s another thing that to put off, I think the next couple episodes we’re going to talk a little bit about. So this is just a quick shout out, should we, I mean, I think for us from a startup perspective, we want to get people talking and learning about how to use those quizzes for marketing, which is good. If we could throw in the odd mention of riddle, you know, hey, that’s not going to hurt.
That’s kind of a cool thing for us. But I think for us, our business objective is to just get people thinking and talking more about why quizzes and also all interactive content formats, which turn passive browsers into active clickers and answering questions. Why that works and how that works. Yeah, so that’s kind of our business objective from our from our from our side. I mean, is there anything else I’m missing?
Boris 8:53
No, no, and I’ll do what I do best. For the next episode, I’ll research how to upload podcasts, and most importantly cut and edit them. So by the time you listen to this, we’ll obviously have figured this out. But follow along, at least if you’re not interested in quiz marketing, follow us for maybe three, four episodes why we put this podcast together. And at the worst case, you save yourself hours and hours of research on how to launch your own podcasts. We’ll do that for you. And now with these famous last words, I’ll say goodbye. See you ’til next time.
Mike 9:27
Until the next episode. Sounds good. Cheers Boris.