Station emerges as a strategic platform for podcasts to connect with their audience
After a couple of pivots, the founder of Station, Cam Pritchard has found a sweet spot in the podcast data collection and marketing space.
When Campbell (Cam) Pritchard hit rock bottom trying to sell a community-building tool to e-commerce brands, he didn’t expect a podcast hosted by two NFL brothers to become his company’s turning point.
But that’s exactly what happened—and it’s how Station became a seemingly overnight success story, with backing from Brickyard, Market Square Ventures, and Launch Tennessee.
Today, Station is helping podcasters and YouTubers unlock new revenue streams, using AI to connect creators with brand deals in ways Apple, Spotify, and YouTube hadn’t managed to crack.
And it all started with a pandemic-era podcast.
A Founder’s Story
In 2020, Pritchard started a podcast to share insights about product marketplace trends. At the time, he was working for a company called “Setter,” which was later acquired by the home-maintenance app industry giant, Thumbtack.
He was working on building out their customer experience. But always had the entrepreneurial itch to make an impact out on his own.
“I quickly realized, it’s pretty hard to make it as a podcaster,” Pritchard explained. “But the real key to success was in capturing and monetizing an audience.”
At the time, he was not using it as a main income stream. He was primarily doing it as a complement to his work to help build his career, network, and to better understand what he saw as the future of media. However, for people who podcast or create YouTube content full-time, they’re extremely dependent on advertisers and brands to help them generate income.
Around the same time, Pritchard’s brother was working for an e-commerce company selling duffel bags. He was struggling to make money, sell online, and make ads work with Google Privacy, cookies, and tracking.
So, Pritchard leaned on his knowledge from his current career, podcast experience, and his brother’s e-commerce frustrations to launch a business called “Drop Station.”
Evolution #1
He hypothesized that Drop Station would work with e-commerce brands, build communities around them, and solve retention issues.
“It turned out to be a terrible idea,” Pritchard said. “E-commerce companies were too price-sensitive. They had too little margin, and none of them wanted to pay to try out this community building thing.”
That idea failed to take flight.
Evolution #2
Drop Station had an advisor who liked the community-building concept and introduced them to the sports world.
“Sports teams have huge audiences all around the world, but they only convert less than one percent of their viewers into transactions,” Pritchard said. “So, we began creating communities around those fan bases to get people off the social platforms and transacting in sports teams apps.”
Drop Station started experimenting with the fan bases of Rugby Australia and the English Premier League through pilot programs in 2023.
“What we had created worked really well; it was really engaging for fans,” he said. “But we couldn’t make the business work. The sales cycle was too long for sports. We realized that money first goes to the players, then it goes to the venue, and then it goes to digital efforts – and digital is super fragmented.”
Though they had proven stickiness, the industry model wasn’t the right fit.
“We hit rock bottom,” Pritchard said.
Evolution #3
It was then, at that low point, that he began to see things a bit more clearly.
“We met some interesting people in the podcast space, who revealed to us that Apple, Spotify, and YouTube don’t provide creators with good data on their audiences. Whenever someone tunes into a show, you don’t know who’s listening, and there’s almost no way to reconnect with them. It makes marketing very hard,” Pritchard said.
And there, Pritchard found it, the perfect fit for his community-building company, which he shortened to “Station.”
The Homerun (or Touchdown)
One of the most popular podcasts currently running is New Heights with Travis and Jason Kelce, produced by Wave Sports & Entertainment and distributed by Wondery.
It’s received traction, repeat listeners, tons of fandom, and potential for brand deals.
It also ended up being one of Station’s first pilots with their new podcast-centric model.
“We created a ton of engagement in a short amount of time. We grew their community to four times the size of its Reddit reader group, and it is very promising,” Pritchard said.
Not only that, but the Station community group unlocked fresh opportunities for the New Heights podcast, introducing new brand partnerships and fan experiences through bonus content, giveaways, discussion prompts, and more. All while helping New Heights directly connect with their audience.
“Station has been a driving force behind helping us build and engage the New Heights fan base this year,” said Jake Perlmutter, Strategy & Operations, Wave Sports & Entertainment.
It’s become a platform where podcasters or video content creators can send their audience, capture the audience demographics, market to them, and create engagement beyond the headphones.
Looking to the future
It’s been about a year since Station entered the podcast space, and they have seen some tangible success: this time with both engaged communities and the ability to generate revenue.
In the process, they also identified a few other issues facing the podcasting and video content industries… the primary one being finding brands to partner with.
In mid-September, Station launched the first artificial intelligence (AI) for creators that acts as a monetization assistant.
The system was developed by Saugat Poudel, the Founding AI Engineer at Station.
“Our Revenue Assistant isn’t just automation, it’s the intelligence of a media sales team. After months of building and refining our monetization model, we’ve created an engine that grows smarter as more shows are onboard, matching them to the brand most likely to spend with them,” Poudel said.
As podcast shows sign up, the AI reviews the episodes for content, and seamlessly suggests which advertisers would be likely to advertise on their shows.
Then, Station goes a step further by offering advertisers a whole package – including audio ads, newsletter placements, and link-in-bio plugins.
“It took months of tuning and the creation of a new monetization infrastructure, but now we have a foundation that gets smarter every time AI itself advances,” Poudel said.
According to the Station team, about 2.5 billion people consume podcasts or YouTube videos on an active basis. With the cultural desensitization to the traditional advertising model, potentially millions of dollars worth of conversations are being missed.
Pritchard and Poudel believe Station has the solutions.
To date, the startup has raised $1.5 million from investors like Chattanooga-based Brickard, Knoxville-based Market Square Ventures (MSV), matching funds from Launch Tennessee’s InvestTN fund, Capacity Capital, and Hustle Funds (which invested two follow-ons).
“The majority of the podcast industry is struggling to find monetization and sponsorship opportunities. We want to be that partner for the smaller, mid-sized shows to help them grow and make money while doing it,” Pritchard said.
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