What 30 Years in Radio Taught Me About Building Software

I didn't come up through Silicon Valley.

I didn't come up through a coding bootcamp, a startup accelerator, or a venture fund's portfolio. I came up through radio. Morning shows. Program directors. Drive time. Ratings books. Signal coverage maps. Listener call-ins at 2am.

For nearly 30 years, I lived in the business of attention — how to earn it, how to hold it, and how to make someone feel like a station was theirs.

When I started building It's Buzzing, people asked me what my background was in software.

What people sometimes didn't know was that I’d been building in tech for years before It’s Buzzing. As Internet Services Director at Cox Radio and later VP of Digital at SummitMedia, I directed 52 website redesigns, launched apps, built out streaming and podcasting infrastructure, and led digital teams across 46 radio stations in 9 states. I’d built software products inside a corporate structure. What I hadn’t done was build one under my own name, from scratch, with no team and no budget behind me.

That difference — corporate builder versus founder — is real. But what I told people was this: the hardest part of software isn’t the code. It’s knowing why people stay. And I’d spent three decades learning that.

What does radio have to do with software?

More than you'd think. Radio is a trust product. Nobody has to listen to you. There's no contract, no lock-in, no switching cost. Every single morning, the listener makes a choice. And if you give them a reason to tune out — even once — they will.

That dynamic shaped everything about how I think about building a platform. You don't earn loyalty with features. You earn it with consistency, relevance, and the feeling that this thing was made for me.

Software companies forget that. They ship features. They announce updates. They send changelog emails nobody reads. They treat users like accounts.

Radio taught me to treat listeners like neighbors.

What did radio teach you about what users actually want?

They want to feel known. Not tracked — known.

There's a difference. Tracking is when a platform knows what you clicked. Known is when a platform knows what you need before you click anything.

In radio, the best program directors didn't just look at ratings data. They went to the grocery store. They sat in parking lots and listened to what was playing. They talked to the person at the gas station. They understood that the data was a map — but the territory was the community.

That's how I think about product development. The features we've built at It's Buzzing didn't come from a competitor analysis. They came from watching small business owners fumble through spreadsheets trying to track who referred who. From watching a church secretary manually text 200 people about a Sunday event. From watching a contractor pay Angi $80 for a lead that ghosted them.

I built what I saw. Radio taught me to look first.

How did media experience shape the way It's Buzzing is designed?

Radio lives and dies on simplicity. You have about four seconds to make someone feel something before they change the station. If your on-air talent needed a manual to run a segment, the segment was too complicated.

That same principle drives every product decision we make. If a small business owner can't figure out how to launch their referral program in five minutes, we didn't build it right. Not because they're unsophisticated — but because they're busy. They're running a shop. They're managing staff. They don't have time to learn our interface.

The best radio stations didn't make you work to enjoy them. The best software shouldn't either.

What's the thing most tech companies get wrong that media companies understood?

Relationship is the product.

In media, we knew that the content — the music, the talk, the news — was just the reason to show up. The real product was the relationship between the station and the listener. That's why people called in. That's why they showed up to remotes. That's why they put bumper stickers on their cars.

Tech companies spend billions on features and almost nothing on relationship. They optimize for activation and retention metrics but they've never actually asked: does this person feel like we're on their side?

At It's Buzzing, relationship isn't a feature we're building. It's the foundation everything else sits on. The referral tools, the review automation, the ambassador program — those are instruments. The music is trust.

What would you tell a founder who doesn't come from a traditional tech background?

That your background is the advantage — not the liability.

There’s a myth that building a software company requires a traditional tech background. I’d been building digital products inside media companies for most of my career. What I didn’t have was a VC check and a Stanford network. What I did have was something harder to acquire: I knew people. I knew communities. I knew how to build something that made a person feel like it belonged to them.

Software skills can be hired. Community instinct takes decades to develop.

If you've spent your career in service, in media, in education, in ministry — you know something most engineers don't. You know why people show up. You know what makes them stay. You know what makes them bring someone with them.

That's not a gap. That's the whole game.