485 - WP Builds hijack - how show.fm simplifies podcasting for WordPress creators

Dan Maby I don't know if you can hear it, we've got an ice cream truck right out the front.

Marc Benzakein I want ice cream right now, and I don't think you should pause it. I think we should just get ice cream.

Dan Maby Welcome to the WP Builds podcast, bringing you the latest news, interviews and fun for the WordPress community.

Dan Maby Now, welcome your host, Nathan Wrigley.

Marc Benzakein Uh, guess what? I'm taking over the show. My name is Mark Benzikane, and I am with Maine WP, and I am taking over the show today to talk about some podcasting. Podcasting is a huge industry, and it's still growing. One of the reasons is that creating a podcast has become easier than ever. According to Search Engine Land, estimates put the worldwide podcast audience at about 584 million listeners in 2025.

Marc Benzakein Increasing to more than 619 million in 2026, with continued growth expecting beyond that. But there's another statistic that may be even more interesting. Podcast index tracks roughly 4.7 million podcast feeds, while only a fraction of those are still actively publishing. And that points to the real challenge. Starting a podcast may be easier than ever, but keeping one running consistently is a different story.

Marc Benzakein Recording the conversation is often the easy part. The real workload comes from everything around it. Scheduling, guest communication, research, show notes, publishing, promotion, analytics, and all the other moving pieces that come with producing a show. That's the problem Nathan Wrigley and Dan Mabee are addressing with show.fm, which they describe as a pod ops platform. Software designed to bring the operational side of podcasting together in one place and automate as much of the repetitive work as possible.

Marc Benzakein And they come to the project with a ton of relevant experience. Nathan Wrigley has been podcasting for years and has produced, edited, and published somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,200 episodes. Jeez. Along the way, he's had plenty of first-hand experience with both the enjoyable parts of producing a show and all the repetitive work that happens behind the scenes. Dan Mabee brings the technical side to the equation, with roughly two decades of experience in software development, product development, and technical architecture.

Marc Benzakein Together, they've taken that combination of real-world podcasting experience and software expertise and used it to build Show FM. And for today's episode, I get to turn the tables a little bit. I've spent plenty of time on the other side of the microphone with Nathan asking the questions. Today, I've taken over this show, and we're going to spend some time talking with Nathan and Dan about Show FM and what they're building to make podcast production easier to manage.

Marc Benzakein So, Nathan and Dan, welcome to my show. Thanks for joining me.

Nathan Wrigley That was so good. You actually wrote some stuff down. I never do that. And it sounded like I read it almost, didn't it? The nice thing about this is that it was your idea to do this as well, which I'm really grateful of because I got an email from you, I guess, and you said, how about this as an idea? And I was like, yeah, that's such a great idea. So I'm very grateful. Thank you, Mike. Oh, my goodness. The BS is strong with this guy. This was not my idea. This was not my idea.

Nathan Wrigley No. In fact, the way that I heard it was that you wanted the best interviewer possible. Oh, that's it. I remember now. And they weren't available. So we got you. Bottom collar. But I'm bummed. Okay. So first of all, I... In all honesty, I really appreciate that you came to me and asked me to do this. This was not my idea. This was, I think you actually mentioned that it was Kyle from the Admin Bars.

Nathan Wrigley Oh, yeah. Okay. Now the mists are clearing. I think it was Kyle. Yeah, right. So I appreciate that you thought of me and I appreciate that you're having me do this. This is a little bit of a departure for me as well. So we're all going to have some fun here and let's just get going. First of all, before we even get into the the actual software that you've created, I would like to know a little bit about the history of you and Dan because I think most people want to know a little bit about the history of the people behind the product and, you know, whether or not they are actually connected.

Marc Benzakein I know that you guys have been together for a long time, but I'm kind of curious what the history is. Did you guys like, you know, steal someone's cab and or end up in the same cab together? It sounds like it sounds like there are wedding vows in here. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's not what happened. Yeah, so do you want to take that, Dan? That means memory. That means going back in time.

Dan Maby I do have a very vivid memory of you and I in a car park many, many years ago. Talking about podcasting, talking about the WordPress space, talking about getting content online and what does that mean. I think I'd run a meetup that night. It was an Ipswitch. That's right, yes. And you came down, joined us. I think that was really the start of our conversations around how do we work together on it. Yeah. Many years ago, wasn't it? That was right. You'd run the WordPress meetup in Ipswitch.

Nathan Wrigley I'd come along because I was down seeing my in-laws. Yeah. I guess we must have been in communication prior to that online through Big Orange Heart and things like that. Yeah, and this predates that, doesn't it? Oh, does it? Good grief. Yes. How many years ago was this, do you think? We're back into, oh, I don't know, 2016? 17, 16, something. Yeah, it'd be something like that.

Nathan Wrigley Certainly, I mean, in the region of about 10 years ago. And I'd already started doing a podcast, which is this one, WP Builds, which I kind of fell into. Didn't intend to do it. It just sort of serendipitously happened because I was hanging out with another guy called David Wormsley, who I still do a podcast with, but not in the WordPress space. Yeah, I guess it had kind of taken off a little bit. And I obviously, you know, I was keen to try different things out and you were keen to do a podcast or at least have somebody do a podcast, which then I did do for your what was WP and up, which then became big orange.

Dan Maby The Press Forward podcast, yes. That's right. Oh, no, I'm not wearing the t-shirt. Dan and I very often, so Dan and I had loads of t-shirts made.

Marc Benzakein This is audio only. You could have said you were wearing a t-shirt. Yeah, but I'm an honest chap. And we had loads of t-shirts made for the Press Forward podcast. And Dan and I are basically the only people who took them. So we've got about 20 each. So we're slowly going through them with our decorating and very often we'll get on the call and we're both wearing the same old fashioned Press Forward podcast t-shirt anyway. As a side note, and we're not going to get derailed too much, but do you remember the old days when, like, WordCamps were all about the t-shirts and now nobody wants the t-shirts?

Nathan Wrigley No, no. I go and don't take any swag. But yeah, so that was the whole thing. We got connected and then we didn't form an alliance. I think it was probably six months later or something. Dan suggested I do the Press Forward podcast for WP and Up, which then became Big Orange Charm. We did that for a while. Well, I carried on doing my WP Builds podcast and then I can't even remember how, but Dan and I kept lines of communication open and then we ended up talking about, do you remember why, how did we end up on wanting to build a podcast platform?

Dan Maby I don't remember how we got to that point, but I can certainly remember talking about your skill set, my skill set, what does that look like? Is there something there to support one another through the creation of a thing? And that thing has evolved multiple times before you got to this stage. So when I began podcasting, it became obvious really quickly that just like any industry you're in, as soon as you've been doing it for a little while, you figure out there's pain points all over the place.

Nathan Wrigley I mean, genuinely, I can't imagine anybody who's had a job for more than a few weeks who hasn't thought that could be better or that could be better. You just do. And with podcasting, that's what I came up with. I came up with a bunch of things which I thought this could be done better, but I couldn't build that platform. I was too busy doing other things, and also I genuinely not technically capable enough. So I had somebody build a version of what was at the time called Podcaster Plus, and that was going until just a few weeks ago, really.

Nathan Wrigley It was just a very slimmed down platform. You've been through it, Mark, for this show and various other things. But that was the beginning of it. I had an idea, had a platform built, didn't have the capacity to get it over the line. And then Dan and I at some point sat down and thought, actually, that's not a bad business idea. Hmm. Let's take it and run with it what happens with dan is he takes it and he decides that it's going to be infinitely more capable and infinitely more complicated and that's what we've got now with show .fm complicated for us not for the end user yeah well said yeah and and i did not realize that podcaster plus was your brainchild yeah that's pretty fascinating actually yeah i mean it really was just born out of copying and pasting so one of the things that

Nathan Wrigley for podcasting if you do it like me and a really large proportion of podcasters do interviews right it's just a really great format because you don't need to write a script or anything like that you can have people on and if they're interesting enough the audience are fascinated by that right but what happens is you've got to do the whole like find them. They've got to know who you are to find you credible you've got to then somehow get them in the calendar at the same time as you're available in the calendar and then share show notes and then get the thing published and recorded and then after that inform them that their podcast episode has gone live and yada yada there's just a thousand different things and it was literally a copy and paste exercise and it adds up to hours of utter drudge work.

Nathan Wrigley There's just no purpose to it apart from the fact that you've got to get there and you know if you could click a button and make it all just happen that's what show.fm does basically takes that complicated thing and hopefully makes it a lot easier with automated stuff here there and everywhere. Looking at show.fm I'm looking at your your website right now and it has like a boatload of features that I would think would be very useful to any podcaster.

Marc Benzakein You've got your booking links guest network. Let's talk about the guest network a little bit. Tell me a bit because that seems like it could be very powerful if used properly. Yes absolutely. So Nathan and I spent probably. Yeah. I'm going to say, for the last two years, really focused on planning prior to the build even starting. So there is a lot of features, a lot of functionality in there, and it's all come out of looking at workflows, looking at how Nathan works, looking at how can we ensure that you create those smoother workflows for the end users.

Dan Maby So it's been way more time focused on the planning than actually on the build itself. And one of the big pieces that kept coming out of the conversations we were talking around was guests and guest management, and how do you enable podcasters to be able to connect with new guests. And that's really where the guest network was born. It's an opportunity for anybody that is invited onto a podcast to create a free guest profile. They sit in that guest network then, and other...

Dan Maby Podcasters that have accounts across show.fm can then look at that guest network. There's then options to invite people to be a guest on your show. So it's really about connecting people. It's really the major focus for us in the guest network. I guess it's a little bit like a mini LinkedIn or something like that. One of the curious things that happened to me after a period of time, desperately trying to find people to be on my podcast and finding that a real struggle because nobody had heard of my podcast or heard of me.

Nathan Wrigley You write a lot of email and most of it's ignored. And, you know, so that's the thing. And you keep going, you get your way through that. And then eventually, at some point, people in your niche know who you are a little bit. But also what then happened, the flip side of that is after a few years and my name in the WordPress space had become a little bit more familiar, the opposite happened. People started to come to me saying, can I be on your podcast? And so then I was in this odd situation of, well, actually.

Nathan Wrigley No, because you you're really not talking about WordPress. You're talking about something else. But somehow my name has ended up on an email list. So you're thinking that you can come on my podcast. But you, on the other hand, wow, that's brilliant. Yes, I really want to talk to you. And so it's this process of like this. Basically, we built this double fronted kind of marketplace where people who have podcasts who want to explore guests, they don't now hopefully have to go out and find a million email addresses and download some dodgy lists from somewhere and pommel it. They can find people in the platform who've said, I talk about WordPress. I talk about car maintenance. I talk about knitting, whatever it may be.

Nathan Wrigley And you go search for them. If you find their profile credible, you can invite them on. And the flip side, if somebody that wants to be on a podcast joins our platform, they can find people who have podcasts in their niche. And it turns out that in the years you know in the 2020s getting on podcasts for business reasons became really powerful you know you could really get into the marketplace that you were trying to be discovered in just by being on a handful of podcasts a really quick way to short circuit the discoverability of your product or service or whatever it may be.

Dan Maby And we introduced options that allow hosts to recommend guests as well so you'll see little flags coming up saying your guest has been invited back it's a marker that individual they're providing genuine content providing genuine quality content when they come and join you as a guest so there's both sides to this that we want to make sure that the guest and the host are equally happy. Yeah. And I have a suggestion for you. You could actually have like a bribery button to just like, you know, bribe you to let them on the show. So yeah, maybe we could take a cut as a platform. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We're not doing the bribery button. I mean, Nathan, you did make me bribe you to be able to.

Nathan Wrigley Well, that's true. First time, but the checks in the mail, it's still in the mail. It's been four years. I know. I don't know where it went. I have no idea. It was so much money as well. Yeah. We've created this option. You can have endorsements across the platform as well. It's all within the control of the end user. So yeah, we didn't want to put anything in there that creates that sort of really uncomfortable. I've got a one star review, for example, from a from a podcast host.

Nathan Wrigley So we we hide the ratings until you have X amount of ratings from different podcasts, different hosts. Yeah. And then it becomes anonymized. So there is that ability to rate your guests. Oh but seriously I know it sounds a bit glib some people are really good guests that I mean it's little things like they show up on time they don't ghost you they don't communicate with you five minutes before the interview to say I'm sorry I forgot I can't come and so those little things you can commend them for like you know they're punctual they're reliable and our platform will allow you to do that but also some people are just really great at expressing their thoughts you know they're brilliant raconteurs.