How Craig Hewitt Grew Castos to $1M+ in Revenue

In this week's episode of the Niche Pursuits podcast, Craig Hewitt and I discuss how Castos is adapting its content strategy as search traffic changes, and AI reshapes online marketing. We cover why comparison pages and free tools are driving more meaningful results than broad informational content. Craig also explains how his team measures success when traffic falls while trials rise.

Craig founded Castos, a podcast hosting SaaS company serving thousands of customers. We also look at the WordPress plugin acquisition that gave the business an early distribution advantage. From there, the conversation turns to how Castos is using AI across marketing, support, development, and internal operations.

Watch the Full Episode

Acquiring Distribution Before Building the SaaS

Castos didn't start by deciding to build a podcast hosting platform from scratch and then searching for customers afterward. The company grew from a podcast editing and production service that gave him close exposure to podcasters and the problems they were trying to solve.

Then one of Craig's customers introduced him to someone selling Seriously Simple Podcasting, a free WordPress plugin designed for podcasters. Craig saw more than software. He saw an existing channel into a market he already wanted to serve.

The acquisition moved quickly, and the plugin became the distribution foundation for what would become Castos. Craig's team built a paid SaaS product that connected directly with the plugin, giving podcasters hosting, analytics, and related features beyond what the free WordPress product offered.

A few details show why the deal mattered:

• The plugin was active on roughly 20,000 WordPress sites.
• Craig acquired it for a few thousand dollars.
• The acquisition process took roughly six weeks to two months.
• The Castos SaaS product took about five months to build.
• Castos had paying customers on its first day after launch.

The launch wasn't entirely smooth. An update connected to the new product initially broke WordPress sites for some users, forcing the team to fix the problem quickly.

Once that issue was resolved, Castos had something many SaaS companies spend years trying to create: direct access to people already using a related product. Craig describes distribution as one of the hardest parts of building software today, especially when creating the software itself has become dramatically easier.

His experience suggests a useful question for founders: instead of asking only what product you can create, ask where your future customers already gather and whether you can partner with, acquire, or contribute to that channel.

Shifting Content Toward Buyer Intent

For years, content marketing became one of Castos' primary customer acquisition channels. The company published the type of SEO content many online businesses used successfully during the previous decade.

That included articles targeting broad podcasting topics with substantial search volume. Castos became one of the more visible companies in podcasting search results, and at its peak the strategy helped generate thousands of free trials per month.

Then search behavior changed. AI tools began answering more questions directly. Google started placing more information inside its own results, while users gained more ways to find answers without visiting individual websites.

Craig says Castos now receives roughly half the website traffic it once did. At the same time, trials have increased. That apparent contradiction has changed how the company thinks about content. Castos cares less about attracting a large audience loosely interested in podcasting and more about reaching someone close to making a purchase.

Older content included topics such as:

• What is a podcast?
• Best podcast microphones
• Best true crime podcasts
• Other broad informational searches with limited purchase intent

Those pages could attract substantial traffic without creating many customers. Today, Craig's team spends more time on content connected directly to a purchasing decision.

The shift is less about abandoning content and more about giving each page a clearer business purpose. A smaller audience can be far more valuable when the people arriving have a problem the product directly solves.

Creating Comparison Pages for High-Intent Searches

One area receiving more attention at Castos is comparison and alternative content. Someone searching for a general podcasting question may be months away from choosing hosting software. Someone comparing two podcast hosts is much closer to deciding.

That makes comparison pages valuable even when their search volume looks unimpressive beside larger informational keywords. Castos is concentrating on searches tied to specific decisions, including:

• Product-versus-product comparisons
• Alternative-to searches
• Podcast hosting recommendations for specific use cases
• Questions related to publishing or monetizing a podcast

Craig also sees increased value in making these pages highly specific. Instead of producing a generic list designed to satisfy everyone, Castos can create content around narrower situations where its product has a clear reason to appear.

That matters even more as people ask personalized questions through AI platforms. The same broad question can produce a different response depending on the user's circumstances, previous conversations, and stated goals. For Castos, specificity provides another opportunity to show why the product belongs in that answer.

Turning Free Tools Into Customer Acquisition Assets

Free tools may be the most interesting part of Castos' current content strategy. Rather than publishing another article explaining how to complete a podcasting task, Craig's team increasingly tries to create something that performs the task directly. Many of these tools represent small pieces of functionality closely related to Castos' main product.

For example, someone may have a video file and need only the audio. Castos can offer a browser-based tool that accepts the file and produces an MP3 without requiring the visitor to purchase software first.

That creates a much closer connection between the search query and the on-page experience. The company's tool ideas are selected partly by looking at specific jobs a podcaster needs to complete, such as:

• Extracting audio from another media format
• Improving an existing audio file
• Converting media into another format
• Handling specific video-related tasks
• Completing small production jobs before publishing

Craig credits companies such as VEED and Riverside with demonstrating how well this approach can work. Castos then adapts the idea to the problems its own potential customers are trying to solve.

The team also considers each tool's purpose before creating it. Some pages are designed to attract customers, while others may help earn links or expand Castos' presence around podcast-related searches. That distinction keeps the company from judging every page by the same metric.

Building Free Tools With AI

The economics of creating these tools have changed because AI can handle much of the development work. Craig says his team can ask Claude to propose new tool ideas, review them, describe the desired functionality, and then use AI to build much of the finished page. Castos has also created templates that tell the system how tool pages should be structured.

That structure includes the interactive tool near the top of the page and supporting search-focused content beneath it. Many of the tools run entirely inside the user's browser, which keeps the operating requirements relatively light. Castos doesn't need to add a large server workload every time someone uses a utility.

The workflow allows the team to move from idea to a usable page quickly:

• AI proposes potential tools grouped around customer tasks.
• The team evaluates purchase intent and business purpose.
• Existing page templates guide development.
• A human reviews the finished result before publication.
• Castos promotes new tools through its email audiences.

Craig says the company emails customers about once a month and non-customers weekly. Those messages give Castos another way to introduce new utilities instead of depending entirely on search engines to discover them.

Measuring Signups Instead of Chasing Traffic

Attribution remains difficult, especially for a company that has been publishing content for years.

Craig can't cleanly assign every new customer to one article or tool. Someone might interact with Castos several times, return through another channel, use an ad blocker, or discover the company long before signing up. So the company looks at broader trends alongside page-level data.

The numbers Craig shared point toward a noticeable change:

• Website traffic is around half its previous level.
• Free trials have increased despite the lower traffic.
• Roughly 25% of new customers may now come from newer content initiatives.
• WordPress remains another major source of customer acquisition.
• Integrations, referrals, affiliate relationships, and dedicated landing pages make up portions of the mix.

The lesson isn't that traffic has stopped mattering. The more useful distinction is between traffic as an activity metric and traffic from someone with a clear reason to purchase. Castos is finding more value in the second group.

For website owners who spent years chasing larger traffic numbers, that can require a meaningful mental shift. A graph moving downward doesn’t automatically mean the business result is moving in the same direction.

Building AI Into Daily Operations

AI at Castos extends far beyond content creation. Craig describes AI as a constant topic inside the company, with the team using it across development, support, marketing, and internal operations. He believes employees should treat AI as another tool they learn to use in their day-to-day work.

The company gives employees considerable freedom to experiment with software that may improve productivity. Several examples show how far that experimentation has gone:

• Developers spend much of their time working with tools such as Claude Code and Codex.
• An AI support system handles roughly half of Castos' direct customer support volume.
• The company is developing internal agents for support and marketing tasks.
• Castos has moved much of its marketing workflow toward AI-assisted or automated systems.
• Team members are encouraged to spend around 20% of their time working on AI systems and experimentation.

Craig has also created an open-source project called SEO Machine. It can:

• Pull information from sources such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and SEO data providers
• Identify content opportunities
• Create briefs
• Perform research
• Assist with writing or updating pages

The company has since taken the concept further by moving its website from WordPress to an Astro-based setup built around flat Markdown files. That structure makes it easier for automated systems to research opportunities, prepare updates, and push changes to the site. Human review remains available where the team wants it.

Giving AI Better Business Context

One of Craig's recurring points is that poor AI output often reflects poor context. A generic model asked to produce a marketing article with little information may produce generic material. Castos instead gives AI systems many of the same resources a human employee would use to do the job.

That means connecting systems to company information, analytics, writing guidelines, and research sources. Useful context can include:

• Search Console data
• Analytics data
• SEO research platforms
• Internal documentation
• Company writing guidelines
• Customer support materials
• Website structure and templates
• Relevant discussions from sources such as Reddit and YouTube

This approach turns AI use from isolated prompting into a wider operating system for certain parts of the company.

Craig still expects failed experiments. He says he has created many things that never reached customers, and he views that experimentation as part of learning how these systems work.

Expanding Castos Around Customer Value

Castos has operated for roughly eight or nine years, served thousands of customers, and generated well over $1 million in revenue. The company has raised some outside capital and once employed as many as 15 people. Today, the team is six.

Its next phase is focused heavily on becoming more useful to podcasters rather than remaining only a place to host audio files. Craig is thinking about adjacent parts of the podcast workflow, including:

• Recording and editing
• Video
• Social media
• Email marketing
• Monetization
• Other tools used before and after publication

Acquisitions may eventually be part of that strategy as well. Castos previously acquired another small podcast hosting platform, with mixed results because customers were accustomed to different product features and workflows.

That experience has made adjacent products more interesting than another direct hosting competitor. A complementary tool could expand what Castos offers without forcing two similar products and customer experiences together.

Final Thoughts

The most interesting part of Craig's story isn’t how Castos used SEO years ago. It's how the company is responding now that the old relationship between search rankings, website visits, and customers has become less predictable.

Castos is publishing less for raw traffic and focusing more heavily on pages tied to a purchase decision. Comparison pages bring the company closer to people evaluating products, while free tools let potential customers experience useful functionality before paying.

At the same time, Craig is treating AI as part of how the company operates, not a separate experiment: marketing, support, development, research, and internal systems.

For niche site owners, SaaS founders, and online business operators, the episode raises a useful question: what would your content strategy look like if traffic were no longer the primary goal?

Castos' answer is becoming clearer. Create things that solve a specific problem, place them in front of people with meaningful intent, measure business outcomes alongside search metrics, and use AI to make more of that work possible with a small team.

Links & Resources

• Learn more about Craig's work
• Try Castos
• Check out Rogue Startups
• Craig's YouTube account

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