'hey let's hop on a call'

hey hop off a building,

Greetings and welcome back to Entrepreneurs Being Entrepreneurs, the newsletter serving up more consumer surplus than Sam Altman and Dario.

Here's what we’ve lined up for you:

• An idea that Facebook figured out in 2015 that this $5B industry is still sleeping on

• Proof people already want this

• How to build it without breaking the bank

• The business model

• Our honest take

Let’s get into it

Podcast Ad Marketplace

Idea Source: Sean Frank (Founder of Ridge Wallet), Half Baked (gethalfbaked.com)

Problem:

Podcasting is a $5 billion industry, yet the way people buy and sell ads still runs with the infrastructure of a school bake sale. Let me explain,

Spend is growing 20% a year, much faster than digital advertising as a whole. This is the exact spot Facebook ads were in back in 2015, before legacy media woke up and piled in, causing spend to double every year after.

Unlike Facebook, podcasting has yet to build a live auction place. Which is fine, until you hit the last-minute inventory. Podcast ad space is perishable. It's worth something until the episode drops and swiftly dissipates into thin air afterwards. Every unsold slot is money set on fire. Here's the idea.

Solution:

An ad exchange for podcast slots, where last-minute inventory gets auctioned in real time instead of expiring worthless.

Sellers set a minimum price and cutoff time, then let buyers fight it out. The same live price discovery Facebook cracked for display years ago.

The moment a bid wins, the brand shares their creative with the podcast for sign-off, to then be rendered using ai into the host's 'real' voice.

Market Validation

• US podcast advertising is up 17.6% year-over-year to $2.86 billion in 2025, capping off an explosive 30x growth trajectory over the last decade.

• Audiences respond to familiarity, host-voiced ad delivery drives a 95% higher brand lift than brand produced commercials, allowing native-sounding audio placements to command nearly double standard programmatic rates.

• The marketplace remains friction-heavy, relying on relationship-driven manual rate cards and static buying cycles.

Community signals:

• The CEO of Ridge Wallet calls podcast ads an inefficient three-party market with no real auction

• A podcaster describes spending 30 to 60 minutes producing each one-minute host read

• Imagine filling almost 50 proposals for a single $15 sponsorship

Go-To-Market

This is a two-sided marketplace, advertisers will not turn up to bid on an empty board, so creators must come first.

Customer Acquisition

Early Users

• Creators: Select a specific niche such as business, finance, health etc. targeting independent podcasters doing 5,000 to 20,000 downloads an episode. Reach out directly, and post where they are already complaining about money, e.g. r/podcasting.

• Advertisers: Small brands that want to test podcast ads without a big budget. Find them in startup and marketing communities where they are already asking how to test podcast ads for a few hundred dollars, and offer your platform.

Scaling

• Creators: Paid ads aimed at the pain, another episode going out with an empty slot, find where pod hosts congregate and tests ads for winning creatives. 

• Advertisers: Once one niche has depth, run paid ads at the advertisers within that niche. Offer lead magnets such as promotions and discounted rates to help get them in the door.

Business Model

*Assuming a 15% platform fee

A show with 10,000 downloads listing four slots a month with an average CPM of $30 is worth $180/month to you. Therefore, the platform generates $5,000 in revenue with 28 hosts averaging 10,000 views per week. But with larger shows, premium niches, and hosts listing more frequently the revenue numbers could increase sharply.

Verdict:

Sean Frank's playbook for making money by finding inefficient, fast growing markets before the agencies arrive like how Facebook ads was in 2015, so maybe podcast ads are exactly that right now.

Would you let a sponsor's ad run in your cloned voice if you approved every word first? Let us know, we read everythiinngg…

That's it. Go build something, or at least screenshot this and tell yourself you will.

We'll be back next week with an idea that might finally let you tell your boss what you really think of him.

(⌐■_■)ﾉ