The Exchanges

Q I, you know, how to create a balance sheet. Um, and then people consume those videos and then they're like, okay, let me subscribe to this person or let me go buy his or her product. Like that's the other, that's the other bet I think that you're making. Cause you're not really doing when people, when people hear podcasts, they think audio, but it's really video first podcast, right?

A Yes. Yes. And, and they're just a special relationship. You, you know, this is someone who hosts a podcast that you get from, from running a podcast that you don't get, uh, in the same way. From, from other, other mediums because there's audio, because there's video. Um, and, and just to put some numbers on it, we're, we're doing about 350,000 downloads a month across 13 shows, which is, which is not huge. Like some shows, you know, my first million does is bigger than all of our shows put together probably, but we're at about two million run rate probably, um, because the shows monetize pretty well. Like each, each show, you know, we were talking earlier, like 30 K a month or something like that. Like no show is huge, But it's, it's, um, it's kind of like the eighty-twenty where it's just, it's really hard to build a, you know, mainstream podcast today, um, from, from a standing start, but to get it to a show of 30 K, 40 K a month, you know, in a, in a strong niche, it's not that hard. And so if you, if you can get a critical mass of them, you could start to build a real business. Uh, and then of course you could build all the other mediums on, on top of them. Um, and one, one thing that people don't realize, uh, as, as much as that, When you look at media businesses in the last 15 years, one of the most valuable media businesses is this business called Industry Dive, which so…

AI assessment note: “Yes. Yes. And, and they're just a special relationship.”

Q And why would you start with podcasts? Like to me, That seems painful given that I run a podcast and I know how hard it is to, to grow one. Um, why do you think it's worth investing as a podcast first? Like what, what am I, what am I missing there?

A So podcasts are underrated for a few reasons. Um, one is because they're the only media that you can create that allows you to create every other form of media from a podcast. So you create a podcast, you could turn that into a newsletter. You could turn that into A video. You could turn that into, um, a community, right? Because you have all these guests who come on, um, and you boom after 20 episodes of you having, uh, chief people officers. Now you have this, you know, incredibly valuable chief people officer community or a conference. Um, so it's, it's not that much hard work to get a podcast off the ground, um, in a niche area and, um, and establish yourself because There aren't like how many CFO podcasts are there? Not that many. How many chief people officer podcasts are there that are good? Not that many we we've created. Um, you know, just in the last few months, I think we have like a top three CFO podcast or chief people officer podcast. Um, they don't have a ton of listeners. Um, so, you know, under a thousand per episode, but they monetize really well, um, because people want to sell to that audience. Um, and if you pair them with newsletters and you can build newsletters on top of the podcast, Um, you could then monetize even better, but yeah, the punchline is the medium where you could build every other medium on top of. Um, and if you go niche, uh, it's you, you…

AI assessment note: “they're the only media that you can create that allows you to create every other form”

Q I like it, man. I like it. So, um, is there room for all of us?

A I, I, I think so. I mean, you identified early on that these niches are getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and it's, it's interesting, right? Like, because venture capitalists have raised more and more money, the, the expectations of what they need for returns are much higher, right? So, um, it used to be like one billion dollar business, uh, that they, that was like venture scale. Then it's like ten billion dollar business. That, you know, at some point it's going to be a hundred billion dollar business business. Right. And so a lifestyle business is just a business. That's not appropriate for, for a venture. And so as the venture expectations have gotten bigger, cause all this money flooded the ecosystem, these, um, the exp the, what people call lifestyle business is much bigger. Like if it can only, you know, make a hundred million in revenue, maybe it's a lifestyle business for, for some VCs. Right. But that that's massively life, life, life changing, uh, you know, And so these, these niches are, are getting bigger, um, and also these areas where VCs aren't touching, um, you know, as, as much are, are, are getting wider, um, which means there's, there's less competition, perhaps. Um, and, um, yeah, there's, there's, I mean, you, you called it a few years ago, you know, any, any subreddit where there's just a growing community, there's probably a, a big business waiting t…

AI assessment note: “I, I, I think so. I mean, you identified early on that these niches”

Q I like it. I like a big year. Um, we only got a few minutes left. Um, I want you to give folks a few free startup ideas or things they should be thinking about. What do you got?

A Yeah. Okay. So I've mentioned that I'm really excited about reputation. Uh, one idea I have is a, is Quora for people, basically a search engine for X, you know, who, who's the X for Y I'm in, um, You know, uh, who's the best dentist in Miami or who, who's the best FinTech investor, or I'm going to New York. Who should I meet? We see these questions on Twitter all the time or Facebook. They have tons of engagement and then they're never stored. And so I'm really interested in the intersection of engagement and kind of like state, you know, stored state. And so you could go on Twitter and scrape all these questions or, you know, you use LLMs to somehow find a lot of these questions, um, organize them, structure them, create your own social network just for these Um, just for these questions. Um, and then find, uh, you know, who, who to sell them to, uh, because similarly to what I said earlier, it's not like, like some of this information is really valuable to a small subset of people. So that's a space I'm curious to, to explore. Speaking of, uh, things that are really valuable to a small subset of people, um, the dating space. I, I think people are going around at the wrong way. They're, they're not price discriminating. I, I think You know, if we were to ask single people, how much would you pay of your, what percentage of your net worth would you pay to find your partner in …

AI assessment note: “one idea I have is a, is Quora for people”

Q How much have you studied music, the music business?

A A little bit. Wrapped FM was in the, was in the music business. I mean, labels were, were amazing at, uh, sort of these three 60, uh, at, at owning their, their, um, artists. And I have a friend who worked at this, uh, this, uh, company called United Masters, which tried to reinvent, uh, record contracts to look more like venture deal, to look more like situations where the entrepreneurs owned the most of the company instead of the VC or instead of the record label in the case of music. And one finding he had, Was other, I don't know how widespread this is or still today is that most artists or at least rappers actually prefer the deals that the record labels gave them because they got more money up front. Um, and they were able to do anything they wanted with that money. And I think that's a little bit different between record labels and VC. Like if you get a few million dollars from a VC, it's, I think it's less expected that you're able to just like pay yourself that. I think in fact, they encourage you to not pay yourself much. I know people Who raised five million in BC paying themselves 50 K salary. I'm like, what are you doing? You know, they pay themselves, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Why don't you pay yourself anything? But, uh, I guess artists just were more comfortable paying themselves a lot of their advance. Um, and so they preferred the…

AI assessment note: “A little bit. Wrapped FM was in the, was in the music business.”

Q Um, so I like, I like what you're doing. Um, There's another note that you have here on this list that says media businesses are under monetized. What do you mean by that?

A First of all, let me just say, I think there's this big opportunity to build like audience in a box business. Like if you're big on any individual and any platform, you'll probably be big on other platforms as well. You just haven't gotten around to it yet. So if you have a big, um, you know, YouTube channel, like Colin Samir do or podcasts, like, yeah, why wouldn't the same You know, when you also have a big newsletter and if you can have support doing that, um, it's kind of a no brainer to go to any creator who's big on any platform and say, Hey, we'll help you get big on this other platform and, you know, give you a half of it, but we'll keep half of it. Right. And so, um, there's so many people who want to expand their audiences across platforms. This, a service that did this could charge quite a bit of money or even co incubate or co own some of these media properties. Um, Is there something like this that exists yet?

AI assessment note: “if you're big on any individual and any platform, you'll probably be big on other platforms”