The Infinite Seat Theater: Jeff Revilla on Building a Risk-Free Stage for Podcasters

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Jeff Revilla gave himself a deadline. He’d been carrying the idea for seven years, and turning 48 he decided he had two years to find out whether it was a real business. “I talk about this thing all the time. I have ideas for this thing… I need to know by the time I’m 50.” What he built is Poduty — a live podcast theater in Tarentum, Pennsylvania, where a creator walks in, performs their show on a stage in front of an audience, and walks out with a recording and a check.

He joins host Abbey Crane on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast to talk about the business model, the terrifying quiet months, and why removing risk from the creator turned out to be the whole strategy.

Skateboards, a housing crash, and an accidental digital-marketing education

Revilla grew up in 1990s skateboarding and punk rock, which he credits for a permanently independent streak. “I’m a big DIY guy. So by the time I found podcasting in 2006 and 2007, I knew there was something here for me.”

“You’re the creator, you’re the producer, you’re in complete control of all your content and your destiny. Like it’s all you. There’s no more DIY than podcasting.” — Jeff Revilla

His first business was Blank Skate Supply — unpainted, ungraphic skateboard decks sold at $20–$25 into a depressed area where a $50–$60 board was out of reach. (He explains why it mattered: decks lose their “pop” and go mushy in a week or two of hard skating, so cost compounds fast for anyone without a sponsor.)

The lasting value wasn’t the boards. Packing e-commerce orders twelve hours a day, seven days a week, he was listening to Marketing Over Coffee, The BeanCast, and Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation. “I’m getting a full masterclass for free just because I subscribe to these people.” He built the social presence, shot the videos, and published a magazine for the shop.

Then he leveraged hard into manufacturing right as the housing crisis hit. Sales dropped 30% a month, month after month, and the business was wiped out. “Those eight years, that education that I got just grinding away day after day — I actually walked out of there and became a marketing director of an auto group.” He’s held that role for fifteen years.

The car-dealer content pivot that produced 70 million organic views

Revilla now runs a department of ten across ten franchises, with roughly a quarter of the team dedicated purely to building the group’s own media. About a decade ago they abandoned the standard playbook.

“We’re not going to yell that we have a sale, that we’re family owned and operated, that we’ve got the best prices in town. We’re going to demonstrate the features of the car.” — Jeff Revilla

Not horsepower — the tactile stuff buyers actually wonder about. What does this lever do? How many cup holders? Do the seats fold flat? “The seats fold flat and you can fit like a sheet of plywood in a sedan.” The result was hockey-stick growth almost overnight, more than 70 million organic views with no paid promotion, and something rarer still: they’re one of very few dealer groups to have monetized their channels, taking a YouTube check every month and rolling it back into equipment and conferences.

He’s clear-eyed about what the content is for. Car buying converts in the showroom, not online. So YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok all run awareness: we do these things, we have fun, we care about the customer — repeated until “when you think of Mazda, we’re the Mazda dealer in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.”

Blab, and the idea that wouldn’t go away

The theater traces back to 2015 and a live-streaming platform called Blab, which pushed 30 or 40 people into your room the moment you went live. Revilla used it to run Stuff I Never Knew, his trivia game show, with eight players from around the world — then extracted the audio for the podcast feed.

Blab died fast — “it grew so fast, it had no business model and eventually just crumbled under its own weight” — but it left him with a question. Downloads and comments aren’t connection. What replaces that?

First attempt: a portable stage rig called Theater Anywhere that fit in the back seat of his car, so he could set up in a park or a pavilion and record the show wherever people already were. Second attempt was booked for a coffee shop on March 30, 2020. It did not happen.

What the shutdown produced instead was the concept he pitched at Podfest Origins that year: the infinite seat theater.

“You’re not bound by the seating capacity. You don’t have to rent out a hotel ballroom or Madison Square Garden or your local theater. You can do this in a small room with friends, family, real close personal fans, and broadcast that out to the world of thousands of people… your scale is quick and infinite while your expenses are flat.” — Jeff Revilla

The room holds 40, with typical shows drawing 20–25 and live streams reaching into the thousands. Behind the curtain there’s a large screen, so a host on stage in Tarentum can pull up a guest in California and interview them live while the in-person audience watches and the internet comments. “The stage concept is almost like a portal to the world.”

The seating wraps the stage in a C on purpose. He’s trying to reproduce the feeling of a podcast in your earbuds on a commute — that intimate sense of being in the room — except now “you’re with 30 of your closest friends.”

The empty-room months

The honest part of the story. Poduty opened last June timed to the town’s night markets, which brought curious foot traffic through the door. Then school started, the holidays came, and the room went cold.

“All of a sudden I’m doing shows by myself. I’m just going down there, locking the door and recording a show to an empty audience… By the time Christmas rolled around, it was a ghost town.” — Jeff Revilla

He’d planned for it — the business model carried nine months to a year of runway — because he knew he was fighting on two fronts at once. He had to teach the public that a live podcast is a night out, like a comedy club or a gig. And he had to teach podcasters, who are comfortable in their own home setups, to trust a stranger’s room: “come to my theater, I’ll do everything for you. I’ll produce it, I’ll record it, I’ll give you the recording.”

What actually broke it open: meetups

The unlock was embarrassingly analog. Buy pizza and drinks, invite the Pittsburgh podcasting community into the theater, answer their questions, and let them see the room work.

Three meetups later, roughly 20 people a night are showing up — and three or four per event book live shows. From one Saturday meetup he booked a magician from Buffalo, a trivia host from New York doing four shows over two days, and another show in development. He’s now fielding two or three inbound inquiries a day about the space and the model.

His read on the timing is the interesting part: “I’m the only one who’s been thinking about live podcasting for seven years. Just now the rest of the world is starting to… there’s something here.”

Why live matters to both sides

For the fan, it collapses a parasocial relationship into a real one. “You try to guess what somebody looks like from the sound of their voice, but you’re always wrong.” Now you meet the host, shake their hand, and tell them the November episode about honey crisp apple pie was a hit at your family’s Thanksgiving.

For the podcaster, it replaces a number with a room.

“They tell a joke, they know right away if they’re funny or not… if they were just to publish an episode and then in one week go back — I had 250 downloads. That’s the only information you get when you release an MP3.” — Jeff Revilla

His framing of what the technology has made possible: “this is like a DIY television studio. Saturday Night Live is a live audience with a stage that’s being broadcasted to the world… This little guy from New Kensington now has a little TV studio in a 1,600 square foot building.”

The business model: remove the risk, split the door

This is the part small business owners should study, and it comes straight out of the skate scene. “You take what you see in the community and you develop from that… then you give it back to the community for someone else to make it their own and keep the scene going.”

Renting a ballroom or a small theater to stage a podcast costs thousands. Poduty charges the creator nothing:

• No contract, no minimum ticket sales — “just a handshake deal”
• Poduty builds the event landing page and handles all ticket sales
• Poduty records and produces the event live, and returns the audio and video
• At the end of the night they open the ticketing dashboard together, account for refunds, and split the total 50/50

“They have no risk of coming in. They’re going to walk out with some money and a recording — which they were going to do at home anyway, but now they’re going to get paid to get the recording done.” — Jeff Revilla

And the split is designed to move against the house as the show grows. If a podcast starts drawing three, four, five hundred people, “it’s not fair to the house to continue to take 50%… it might be 60/40 or 70/30, because we want them to grow and become a fixture of the theater.” Thirty percent of 400 tickets still covers front of house, back of house, and new equipment.

His own target is modest and revealing: one or two “home run” events a month that cover the month’s expenses. “Then I have 28 other days where we can experiment. We can test new concepts… without worrying about will the lights be on next month.”

The name, and the reason for it

Poduty is a portmanteau — pod, plus duty as in mission, duty to serve. He also enjoys that saying it out loud makes people act like they’re back on the kindergarten playground. That’s deliberate.

“That ability to feel safe and to laugh is what I’ve realized really sparks creativity. Because if you’re tense, if you’re nervous, if you feel like you can’t say what you want, then you’re going to hold back and it’s going to restrict you from being free to create what you want and who you are.” — Jeff Revilla

He got the insight secondhand as a young father, when someone pointed out how much his daughters laughed — a sign their other needs were met and they felt safe. The house rule that follows: goof around, but always with respect. “Some of the best jokes you’ll make are because you understand the person, you’ve researched their history… you’re really honoring people when you tell a great joke.”

What’s next

Keep the meetups going, because the community is the flywheel — “this theater is becoming the pivot point… that linchpin that’s building this community of live podcasting.” Bring in national and touring acts. And, eventually, see the format copied into Cleveland, Baltimore, Cincinnati, so small podcasters can run a weekend tour the way comedians and bands do.

Asked about franchising, he says it’s down the road — the first two years are the proof of concept — but he’s not shy about the ambition: “if I could put a Poduty podcast theater in every small town, I would do it.”

He also flags an advantage of the virtual stage that most venues don’t have: he can book high-level speakers without funding travel or hotels, which means more of the fee goes to the speaker.

The closing line

Asked to fill in the blank — you have to ___ to ___ — Revilla reaches for Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Ted Theodore Logan.

“You have to be excellent to each other. And if you’ve lived your life just serving and being excellent and being a great host and providing what people need — imagine what the world could be. Imagine how you could inspire them to be excellent to each other.” — Jeff Revilla

Connect with Jeff

The theater is Poduty in Tarentum, Pennsylvania — upcoming events, private rentals, and booking are all on the site. Jeff hosts the trivia game show Stuff I Never Knew (170+ episodes, with recent seasons produced for local cable) and the podcast showcase Rise and Outshine, where a creator performs ten minutes of their show while the audience scores them on audio quality, content, and host engagement in real time and builds a live word cloud of their reactions — feedback most podcasters have never received in their lives.