LISN-IN | It’s all about trusting the process

Zameer Masjedee is a Sr. Solutions Engineer at Shopify by day, and the Co-Founder of LISN, a platform helping to organize and highlight the best clips from a podcast by night. He gets real about having tough conversations about goals with your team, the unexpected hurdles that come with starting a business, and how focusing on the right things like your mission can help you make fast and appropriate decisions for the growth of your business. Shopify has taught him how to scale a company, and how as an individual you can strive towards always having a positive impact.

Season 2 — June 30, 2021

Motivation on launching LISN and the excitement about the opportunity?

Podcasting is going through a really exponential growth right now. LISN broke the 2 million podcast threshold on Apple podcast so now there are more than 2 million active shows on there. Amongst the other 47 million episodes, which kind of begs the question, Where do I start as a user, and how do I stand out as a creator?
LISN allows readers and users to repurpose existing content to make it more discoverable and to make it easier to share. LISN is trying to make it easier for creators to be able to present their ideas to people in a way that they’re willing to approach that reduces that barrier of entry that otherwise like long format conversations half.
LISN is getting upwards of 700% more views in the snippets it creates. There’s content there where users can anticipate what to expect from a conversation, making them more likely to want to engage in that conversation. It’s a benefit to add to all creators. It’s something that LISN is really focused on. Creating short clips is going to be a really cool mechanism to do that. It’s great to empower creators so that they can connect with their listeners more with specific kinds of segments.

Advice on standing out as a podcaster

It’s tough to quantify at times the attribution to certain podcasts, which is just the level of care that goes into them. It’s a matter of taking the time to put in an extra level of production work and for you to format it well with different sections.
Focus on a specific niche audience or a specific group of people. Find people who have a high likelihood to want to listen. If your focus is too broad there are so many podcasts out there, it’s hard to break through the noise.
Lastly, listening to what people are really passionate about is super energizing and engaging as a listen. It’s important to have your listeners feeling like they’re engaging with your content.

Entrepreneurial lessons from working at Shopify

One surprising thing about joining Shopify three years ago at that stage was how much was still not completely figured out and that was okay. You don’t need to have a process for every single thing. At some point, THE processes end up in PT, more than they end up helping enable you.
Shopify is really clear on its mission. They’re a super mission-driven company. This means being entrepreneurial obsessed. There’s all of this, just positioning and beliefs that the world is better with more entrepreneurs in it. Being mission obsessed, knowing what the mission is, believing in that mission, and working towards it.
There are tons of employees within Shopify that have side hustles or different e-commerce businesses hustle. That kind of support in this community, just allows people to show up to work way more authentically, more driven, way happier that the work that they’re doing within Shopify is having other positive effects within their life.

Zameer's Book Recommendations:

Daily Stoic: 366 days of Stoic insights and exercises by Ryan Holiday, Stephen Hanselman A Promised Land: A riveting, deeply personal account of history in the making by Barack Obama Shoe Dog: A deep dive into Nike's journey from an intrepid start-up to one of the world's most iconic brands by Phil Knight

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