Jun 7, 2024 · 48m · more-or-less
#50: Startups to Start: Media Edition · More or Less Podcast
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of the More or Less podcast, the co-hosts celebrate Brit Morin's upcoming Life360 U.S. public listing before delivering an in-depth masterclass on modern media entrepreneurship, urging founders to build customer-obsessed, bootstrapped niche publications rather than pursuing venture-backed scale.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 99.3% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 5.9 Guest teaching 3.8 Guest disagreement 3.1 The hosts pushing back 3.8
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 21:58 Brit dismisses the resurgence of homepages in favor of AI summaries
Brit directly challenges Sam and Jessica's core argument that audiences will return to homepages, pointing out that AI assistants in Gmail and ChatGPT will summarize and bypass publications entirely.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 27:14 Sam shuts down Brit's CPG acquisition theorySam forcefully rejects Brit's proposal of selling Brit & Co to a consumer goods brand, arguing that media is the strategic flywheel and she should manufacture her own products instead.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 4:30 Brit educates the hosts on Life360's cross-platform dominanceBrit counters Sam's reductionist assertion that Life360 is just spyware by laying out its 70 million active users, emergency crash response features, and cross-platform hardware interoperability.
The host holds their own ▶ 33:21 Sam deconstructs the structural missteps of modern digital mediaSam demonstrates deep domain knowledge by diagnosing why legacy news outlets failed by prioritizing generalized web traffic over capturing the disproportionate wealth of top-tier niche subscribers.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| More or Less Animated Opening Title Sequence | 6 | 5 | 3 | 4 | Brit details Life360's financials, growth metrics, and dual listing on the ASX and US exchange. Sam playfully pushes back by categorizing the app as family spyware, which Brit reframes with specific safety features like crash detection and Tile integration. | |
| County Fairs and Child Barcode Tracking Ideas | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 | A collaborative and humorous brainstorming session where Jessica describes using AirTags at the county fair and Sam pitches temporary 3D barcode tattoos for tracking children. | |
| IPO Good Wishes and Meme Stock Advice | 3 | 2 | 3 | 3 | Sam teasingly ribs Jessica for being late to trends with her 'win win' podcast merchandise, while Jessica defends the cultural resonance of business slogans. | |
| The Media Paradox: Editorial Talent in a Broken Market | 7 | 3 | 2 | 3 | Jessica lays out her thesis on media economics, pointing to editorial talent breaking away and recent FT investments into niche publications like Charter and The Logic. Brit probes on valuations and notes poor M&A multiples for Brit & Co. | |
| Built to Flip vs. Built to Own: The Locomotive Model | 7 | 5 | 4 | 4 | Sam delivers an extended conceptual framework contrasting venture-backed public exits with high-margin owned media acting as a locomotive engine for spinning off CPG brands and C-corps. | |
| Platform Perils and the Decline of Social Distribution | 6 | 3 | 3 | 5 | Dave challenges the high-level theory and demands tactical clarity, pointing out that Instagram is flooded with unskippable ads and AI slop, making platform-dependent media untenable. | |
| Niche Destinations, AI Summaries, and the Disappearing Middle | 6 | 5 | 5 | 5 | Sam asserts audiences are abandoning algorithmic feeds for dedicated homepages. Brit pushes back, arguing that AI chat interfaces and email summaries will disintermediate websites entirely. | |
| From Demographic Ad Bundles to Launching Owned CPG Brands | 7 | 6 | 6 | 6 | Brit suggests legacy demographic bundling like Meredith or being acquired by a CPG firm is a viable exit. Sam aggressively rejects the premise, telling Brit that media companies should own and launch their own CPG products instead of selling out. | |
| The Content Flywheel and Lessons from Dwell Magazine | 7 | 4 | 3 | 4 | Dave shares lessons from his board tenure at Dwell Magazine on the friction between ad sales and 10x content quality, while Sam argues subscriptions provide a qualified audience funnel rather than mere standalone revenue. | |
| The Scale Trap and the Washington Post Crisis | 8 | 4 | 3 | 3 | Jessica cites the Washington Post's heavy financial losses to illustrate the collapse of the middle generalist strategy. Sam frames this as part of the broader fallacy where media chased tech scale instead of monetizing elite niche audiences. | |
| Customer Obsession, Mark Rober, and the VC Distortion | 7 | 5 | 2 | 3 | Dave highlights customer obsession using Mark Rober's direct-to-consumer science kits. Brit and Sam dissect how venture capital distorts media incentives by enforcing premature scale over focused passion. | |
| Building for the Customer vs. Building for the Charts | 7 | 4 | 4 | 5 | Dave differentiates between building for algorithmic charts versus direct customer relationships. Sam offers a nuanced counterpoint that algorithms can act as a top-of-funnel filter to weed out broad audiences and find core zealots. | |
| Pop Culture Corner: Eminem's Return and Authentic Artistry | 4 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Dave closes with a brief pop-culture analogy about Eminem returning with authentic artistry regardless of platform trends, which Jessica and the group playfully endorse before signing off. |
Statements from this episode (31)
Sam Lessin: I No Longer Follow Accounts on Social Media
“Listen, I don't follow shit anymore. I just get things fed to me, like a pig. It's just whatever comes up next.”
Brit Morin: Life360 Grew From $15M to Nearly $500M in Revenue
“You know, I think there was like fifteen million in revenue when I joined and now Close to half a billion and the numbers are all looking incredible.”
Brit Morin: Life360 Is a Top-Five Social App With 70M DAUs
“Life through 60 has been this sleeper company that people don't realize is a top five social networking app and has been for many years, has, like, seventy million daily active users.”
Brit Morin: Life360 Is Uniquely Interoperable Across Apple and Google
“And it's really the only app and network that is interoperable across Google and Apple.”
Brit Morin: Life360 Is Growing 33% Year-Over-Year and Launching Ads
“Not only do they have a. 33% annual year or year growth rate already, but they're also now starting to introduce ads and kind of playing that Instacart strategy of, you know, the bigger picture here in terms of how big the market can get.”
Sam Lessin: OpenAI Steals Ideas and Handles the Consequences Later
“You know what OpenAI would do is they would just steal it and then deal with the problems later.”
Jessica Lessin: The Logic and Charter News Raised FT Financing
“A technology publication in Canada that I backed early on just raised a significant round of financing from the FT, which follows two weeks before when another publication I backed raised a significant round of financing for the FT, and these publications One …”
Jessica Lessin: Media Subscription Growth Is Linear, Not Hockey-Stick
“Subscription growth in media is not hockey stick. It's linear, but it's recurring revenue, and it gets big fast.”
Brit Morin: Brit & Co Is Profitable but Media Multiples Are Depressed
“I mean, just anecdotally, Brit & Co has gotten, A bunch of inbound recently on the M&A front. It's profitable. It's growing, but it's like the X, the multiples are so bad.”
Jessica Lessin: Massive Media Exits Like Politico Are Not Imminent
“I'm not going to argue that there's going to be like a slew of billion dollar exits like Politico or, you know, we've got the athletic at 500 and so forth and so forth. I don't think those are just around the corner per se”
Sam Lessin: Startups Are Bifurcating Into Public Plays vs. Cash-Flow Assets
“There's just this massive bifurcation of companies that are being designed to go public versus companies that are just incredibly good to own.”
Sam Lessin: Owning a $10M Business Is Easier Than a $1B Exit
“One is just broadly, you can own 10% of something that goes public and somehow gets liquid at a billion dollars. Or two is you can own a hundred percent of something that makes ten million dollars a year for a decade. It turns out the latter is a lot easier, r…”
Sam Lessin: Standalone Media Business Valuation Multiples Are Terrible
“The multiples on the media part of it are terrible, right?”
Dave Morin: Instagram Is a Train Wreck Impossible to Build On
“You know, like Instagram is an absolute train wreck right now. I don't know how you would build a business on this platform anymore.”
Dave Morin: Instagram Is a Declining Asset Meta Is Merely Harvesting
“You know, which to me suggests that this asset is, is now a declining asset. Like they're now in a position where they want to just harvest it, monetize it as much as possible while moving on to the next thing, which is probably threads fine.”
Jessica Lessin: Media Businesses Must Start With Exclusive, Unique Content
“And to your question of how you do it, there's only one way to do it, and you have to start with content that no one else has.”
Sam Lessin: The Internet Is Shifting From Feeds Back to Destinations
“The internet is going back away from feeds to destinations”
Jessica Lessin: Chatbots Are Not the Future of Consumer Media
“I, I'm making a call. Chatbots are not the future.”
Dave Morin: The Internet Does a Terrible Job Distributing Niche Content
“The internet's doing a very terrible job at distributing this stuff to people right now.”
Sam Lessin: Media Is Strategically Valuable but a Terrible Standalone Business
“Media is incredibly strategic to own, but a shitty business, right? Doesn't mean it doesn't create cashflow in a flyway we can build from. It's a shitty business, right?”
Sam Lessin: CPG Manufacturing Is Easy, Brand Authenticity Is Hardest
“In 20, 24, the hardest part is authenticity of our brand and connecting with the demo. Yeah, that is the hardest part. Making products is easy. Like you just go to fucking China and press four buttons. You have your like normal CPG with nice branding.”
Dave Morin: Connecting Media to Consumer Products Is Rarely Achieved
“It's easy to say, like, build the media machine that delivers either a product, a CPG, like you're saying, or a service of some kind, but connecting those two is a very rare thing that people pull off.”
Jessica Lessin: High-Quality Journalism Is a Phenomenal Business
“I mean, I, to be very clear, I think high quality journalism is a phenomenal business and have a lot of evidence to prove it. It is really hard and it takes a really long time.”
Jessica Lessin: WaPo's General News Strategy Competing With NYT Isn't Working
“And this is, again, to the point you're making, Sam, that even, this is the Washington Post, but it went a kind of middle strategy, right, of trying to be more general news, trying to compete with the New York Times. It just really, really isn't working”
Sam Lessin: WaPo Would Make More Catering Exclusively to Elite Insiders
“What they should have been doing is saying like, Why do I care? Like, I'll be the Washington Post. I'm going to be super elitist. I only cater to Washington insiders. Guess what? Great fucking business because everyone's trying to influence those thousand peop…”
Jessica Lessin: The Washington Post Lost 50% of Its Audience
“The Washington Post lost half its audience and seventy seven million dollars last year, not 77% of its audience.”
Brit Morin: Venture Capital Drives Premature Expansion and Startup Failure
“Taking venture capital inherently makes you think that you need to expand faster. And I think is the downfall for a lot of companies”
Dave Morin: MrBeast Builds for Algorithmic Virality Rather Than Customers
“If you look at Mr. Beast, he's building a business for the charts, right? Like doing, you know, everything, just incredible analytical studying of what it takes to make something go viral, literally make any content that will make something grow and go viral, …”
Sam Lessin: Creators Should Make Content Most Dislike but Targets Love
“You basically want, I think the idea is like in a social media context, designing content, That isn't going to go hyper viral broadly, but ideally most people will hate, but exactly the right people will like is kind of the zone you want to be in.”
Dave Morin: Creators Must Diversify Platforms and Build Direct Channels
“What I'm arguing for is that people do not build only for Instagram. I think you've got a lot of people that are out there building only for Instagram, only for TikTok, only for YouTube, whatever. Just like an investor would never invest in a single stock. You…”