A portal to the next dimension of podcasting powered by AI and blockchain for a rewarding, personalized, and interactive experience.
A smart AI-powered ‘matchmaker’ helping fans easily find the right podcast, and podcasters find and grow their perfect audience.
A gathering place to fuel your brain, calm your soul, laugh out loud, and open your heart.
A haven for creators who want easy and timesaving ways to grow their reach, influence, and impact … and make money doing it.
A way for fans to reap valuable rewards just for listening.
A powerful platform for brands and businesses to boost their ROI with targeted, authentic, and contextual ads and sponsored content.
Podopolo is on a mission to revolutionize the fastest growing media of all time – podcasting. We believe in making it easy and rewarding for fans to discover, discuss and share their favorite shows – and just as easy and timesaving for podcasters to grow their audience, engage their fans, create their content, and profit from following their passion.
Podcasts inspire learning, growth, innovation, connection, fun, creativity, hope, healing, and transformation. When people gather together around the ‘podfire’, amazing things happen.
Your next life-changing connection, epiphany or a good laugh is just a tap away.
To engage, enlighten, entertain, empower, and elevate – each person, each podcast, each partner – each and every time.
A five-time serial entrepreneur in media and tech, Melinda has always believed that the best content is conversation. She’s spent the past 20 years innovating interactive and personalized content with cutting edge technology, from the earliest days of AI, natural language processing, and social media.
Melinda’s entrepreneurial journey began at age 6 when she went door-to-door in her Toronto neighborhood demanding pre-payment for her first interactive ‘show’. She went on to work as a correspondent for The Times of London, covering business, media, and the early days of the internet. Steve Jobs once told her that she “asked the best questions”, and she later worked as a TV host and anchor for CNBC’s Financial Times Television, ABC News’ World News Now, and the BBC, where she created and grew a TV newsmagazine to an audience of 20 million in just a few months. Her successful companies have spanned broadcasting, social media, and AI-driven analytics. Her first venture, Capitol News Connection, delivered award-winning localized audio, video, and print content to a 3 million daily audience across public radio, local TV, online sites, and newspapers. Then came NewsiT, a mobile crowd-sourcing platform using innovative algorithms to evaluate relevance and reliability of user generated content, ironically the solution to “fake news” and social media disinformation long before anyone knew it was a problem.
I launched my first podcast Wings of Inspired Business as a “pay it forward” for female founders like me who I believed were succeeding in silence and against powerful odds, and ignite a community where women helped each other to soar to success. Like many podcasters, I created the show I wish I’d had when I needed it most.
Unlike many podcasters, I had a head start. I already knew how to grow audiences and engage listeners. Back in the day I had created and grown a “gamified” crowd-sourcing news app to 3 million users in just 8 months. But podcasting was different: There was no way easy way to directly engage fans or understand who was listening or how they were listening… because downloads didn’t tell the story.
Like so many indie podcasters, I made it work – the hard way. I even had 4 side hustles repurposing my podcast into online summits, membership programs, events, and retreats. It was exhausting, but my audience grew and along with it a special accolade: Wings was ranked #8 of 20 top business podcasts by Entrepreneur Magazine. It wasn’t easy. I know what it’s like struggling to be discovered. I know what it’s like to burn out trying to grow and engage a community. I know how frustrating it is to be locked out of sponsor and ad revenue. I also learned that 85% of podcasters don’t make a dime – and that all but the top 1-2% with 10,000+ downloads per episode were excluded from lucrative sponsorship and advertising dollars.
Along the way, I discovered that listeners and viewers were as frustrated as me trying to find and engage around podcasts, and that brands were holding back from advertising on podcasts because the lack of actionable analytics was turning their ROI into guesswork.
That all had to change. So, I created Podopolo.
You may be tempted to pronounce it Podo-Polo. Like Marco Polo.
Which is fine. We don’t care how you say it so long you’re here at the party, and for the record we prefer Pod-op-olo (puh-dohp-uh-lo).
We wanted to say “podcasting” while also saying “community”, “social media”, “fun & games”, and “mission-driven impact”.
The “pod” part was easy. The second part? Not so much.
So, we thought “polis” (or community), and something that suggested rewards from games and quests — that’s where the “polo” part comes in.
Mostly we just wanted to be different. And have a name as playful as we are!
At Podopolo, we embrace diverse voices to celebrate and operationalize a culture of abundance, innovation, ownership, integrity, and collaboration. We put the needs of our customers first, and we believe our success is as much about who we are “being” as what we are doing.
We live the Podopolo purpose each and every day: To engage, enlighten, entertain, empower, and elevate everyone we encounter.
Are you a developer or a data scientist? A marketing maven? Operational ninja? Sales hunter? Financial wizard? Video or audio producer?
You’ll have the freedom to contribute to fast-paced innovation, profitable revenue growth, and mission-impact instead of being a drone in someone else’s dream.
JOIN PODOPOLO
Melinda’s grandmother was the first to diagnose it: “You’re disruptive,” she told the 6-year-old after she sold 100 tickets to her “show” going door-to-door with her black lab. Melinda lives and breathes all things innovation as a 5-time serial entrepreneur in media and tech, growing four businesses to 7- and 8-figure success. An acclaimed podcaster, award-winning journalist and executive spanning the world’s biggest media brands, Melinda hosts the Entrepreneur Magazine top-ranked Wings of Inspired Business podcast and Zero Limits: Business Growth Secrets.
With Podopolo, she set out to revolutionize an entire ecosystem. A spiritual practitioner of meditation, yoga, and gratitude, Melinda is passionate about encouraging conscious leadership and social impact entrepreneurship using business as a canvas to solve global challenges. Melinda is also mom to two teenagers and Podopolo’s mascot “golden receiver.”
Alex is a phenomenal technology pioneer who’s made it possible at Podopolo to instantly serve up all known podcasts to you, create your own interactive and personalized podcast library, and now AI that instantly transcribes hundreds of millions of episodes to power personalized recommendations, generative AI content to help podcasters market their shows, and advertisers to match relevant ads to podcast content. He’s a senior technology leader with more than 10 years of experience in functional design, full-stack development, project management, agile methodology, DevOps, Unsupervised ML and AI, hiring and management of programmers, and proficiency across a multitude of programming languages and environments – leading development from concept to commercially launched successful products, whether consumer mobile apps, SaaS businesses, e-commerce, or interactive content. In his spare time, Alex built a mobile app to transform his Honda into a driverless car.
Steve founded his first business at age 13 and sold it for $240,000 at age 15, before going on to found six businesses he grew to significant 9-figure exits. A conscious entrepreneur, philanthropist and investor, Steve is also CEO and Founder of Zero Limits Ventures, working with companies like Podopolo to fund their dreams + grow their valuations. He’s a champion bodybuilder, loving dad to two inspiring young women, and at Podopolo he is a constant mentor and guide for the team, also helping initiate and negotiate strategic partnerships and all the capital we need to revolutionize podcasting. He hosts Zero Limits: Business Growth Secrets with Melinda Wittstock.
Auggie is officially an English Cream Golden Retriever. In real life, he’s a golden ‘receiver’ or perhaps a golden ‘recliner.’ He’s Melinda’s sensei, and if you throw a ball for him, he looks at you as if to say, “you go get it.” He specializes in Zoom-bombing, adding audio effects to podcasts and live videos, looking at himself in the mirror, and demanding constant cuddling. He is a pet therapy animal with Pet Partners, volunteering with Melinda at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. He is pure love.
Eric has worked with some of the biggest names in podcasting. He spent six years as outside counsel to Earwolf (which became Stitcher), and another two years as Stitcher’s head of acquisitions, business affairs and legal affairs, until the company was purchased by SiriusXM at the beginning of 2020. Over the course of that period he oversaw every podcast deal made by the studio, from offer to execution. Some of the bigger deals he worked on include the launch of Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, the acquisition of Freakonomics and My Favorite Murder, and the renewals of Comedy Bang! Bang! and How Did This Get Made. His favorite accomplishment was convincing the Oprah Winfrey Network to take Super Soul off of television and turn it into a podcast, a decision that paid off.
After he left Stitcher, Eric went into private practice. He has since counseled and advised Higher Ground Audio (the podcast studio founded by Barack and Michelle Obama), SmartLess (Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett), Khalabo Ink Society (Kenya Barris), American Public Media, and Dear Media, as well as numerous independent podcast producers. Eric lives in Los Angeles, California, with his wife, Rina, and his daughter, Nava.
Helaine is a retail industry leader, board director and C-suite advisor guiding companies to sustainable growth through omni-channel and digital strategies focused on the customer experience. As Executive Vice President of Macys.com, she built the e-commerce strategy and execution from start-up to over $1B. She has strong operating and P&L experience with a track record of growing businesses ranging from multi-billion $ global brands to start-ups. She’s the co-founder of WHYZ Partners, a brand strategy and omnichannel marketing firm, and as a member of the Board of Directors for Lenox, On Campus Marketing, and Ashley Stewart, she leveraged her deep understanding of the competitive landscape, identifying growth strategies focused on delivering customer centric initiatives, while assessing and mitigating risks.
Arlie is a digital strategy executive with 15 years’ experience building and leading product, technology, digital marketing, analytics, design, and CRM teams. The former CEO of UpPurpose, a social good SaaS platform, and Vice President, Product Management at Condé Nast responsible for the 22 branded websites, mobile apps, and digital experiences across Vogue, New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ, Glamour, and Wired, Arlie is known as an expert in utilizing emerging technologies to deliver innovative, high quality, and cost-saving solutions along with digital transformation strategies that drive revenue growth and improve customer experience in a fast-paced environment.
Chris is a 4-time Emmy award winning TV Host, Entertainment Reporter and YouTuber with 103 million views. He has traveled the world reporting from events like the Oscars, Grammys and the Cannes Film Festival working for WSVN, WOIO, SUN-TV and MTV2 Canada. He hosts the popular podcast Insight, and you may be familiar his ‘deep dives’ into interesting topics with his trademark conversational approach that makes it feel like two old friends catching up, whether with wrestling superstar like John Cena, The Rock or Hulk Hogan or Hollywood A-Listers like Oprah Winfrey, Tom Cruise, or Will Smith.
Lynne is a high-tech sales and marketing whiz who currently leads all aspects of Salesforce Philanthropy Cloud GtM Strategy, Sales Enablement across the UW Network and Business Development for United Way Worldwide allowing corporate partners and their employees to meet their CSR goals and deliver impact in local communities. She’s led sales and business development across many Fortune 500 companies from Oracle to SAP, where she ERP, Big Data, Analytics, social media, Mobile Solutions, and Cloud to drive $1BN in revenue, and Netscape, where she created a telecoms unit that generated upwards of $200M in SaaS revenue.
Karen helps customers solve complex, strategic business problems and position for future growth, with a deep understanding of the customer experience, from leading global ‘Voice of the Customer’ portfolios for Fortune 50 companies and 20+ years of consulting. She began as an account manager at AT&T outperformed production and revenue targets by double and triple digits (up to 522%), before creating Cisco’s first partner experience team for multi-million-dollar growth, and then at Salesforce, she increased customer retention, growth, and satisfaction. Now at The Engineered Innovation Group, her focus is on profitable revenue growth, innovation, lead delivery and lead marketing. Karen is a WSJ bestselling author, TEDx speaker, and Future of Work strategist.