Hello again, I hope your week has been going well so far. I'm so excited to get to speak with my friend, client, and mentor Alex Sanfilippo on the latest episode of my podcast The Accessibility Advantage. Alex is the founder of Podmatch.com A site designed to match podcast hosts with their ideal guests using artificial inteligence. But the real mission of Podmatch is to help podcast hosts & guests reach more listeners, so we can make more money, and change more lives. I met Alex for the first time when we both spoke at the Pecha Kucha track at Podfest Expo in 2019. And that friendship lead to his listening to me about accessibility and eventually hiring me to be the accessibility advisor for Podmatch. Book a short chat if you would like to discuss taking advantage of my almost two decades experience educating people about accessibility. What We Discussed Alex first shared about his early entrepreneurial experiences. Then he openly discussed the effect that the mortgage collapse of 2008 had on him. He recounted working menial jobs in corporate before working his way up to the C Suite level at a very early age. He covered the difficult decision to leave corporate to focus on a business of his own again. When I asked him where the customer centric approach came from, he told a story about personal frustrations with a major online business. And how he never wanted to cause that kind of heartbreak for anyone else. He also hopes that other tech founders will see how they are doing things at Podmatch and decide that putting people over numbers is the key to long-term success. He shared the core values of his company, and said that if maintaining those values lead to smaller profits; that would be perfectly fine with him. I then asked him to talk about how maintaining the health of his platform lead to their regularly removing people who don't use the platform. At about the 19 minute mark he tells the story about how being customer centric lead to focusing on accessibility. And for the first time I heard about how much pushback Alex received from other people in the software industry about his public decision to embrace accessibility. He shared their process openly, and we talked a bit about how they are continuing to work to improve accessibility as they continue to grow the platform. About 25 minutes in he starts speaking about the benefits of improving accessibility. Some of which were new to me. At About 29 minutes he introduces his full advisory board which he leans on to continue to improve Podmatch. And at 36 minutes he addresses why people should care about accessibility. Some of these were brand new to me. Then at about 41 minutes. I asked him why more companies doing the work of improving accessibility don't promote their efforts more openly or more often. Show Notes Still having accessibility issues with Streamyard, so have encouraged my guests to have fun with telling me we are live. Alex decided to play a few chords on his ukulele. Then, I sang a bit of my theme song The Accessibility Advantage. Then we had a great conversation. On With The Show