We are building a media arm. Here is why.
The subject of today’s post perfectly describes what I want to tell you today — we are building a media arm.
Here’s why we are doing it (and why I recommend that you do the same):
Why
lemon.io is a marketplace of vetted engineers.
Saturated market. 100’s are trying to solve this
CAC is too high
Rest of the competition raised massive funding. It’s hard to compete in traditional channels. But there’s no competition in your own media.
You are building trust at the top of the funnel by owning media.
When they are facing a problem you are solving, you skip a few stages:
Discovering solutions, as you’ve already educated them
Consider options, as they trust you already
Proof of concept:
When I was active on Twitter (also media), it gave 25% of new customers + 25% more came from WOM. Now imagine doing this at scale for a long time.
I love @Patticus comparison of inbound marketing and media:
Media has 3 touch points/week. Inbound - 1.4
You are growing your audience vs. funding someone’s
Media is cheaper
There’s more competition for attention than ever. Media is much better at maintaining it.
ProfitWell has 9 shows. They are bootstrapped, which confirms that you can do it with limited budget. Why:
Small TAM, a lot of competition
They sell consideration products and need to build trust
Learn from what he achieved — https://www.profitwell.com/recur/all/pth-b-side-hubspot-and-the-hustle
Hubspot acquired @TheHustle, @myfirstmilpod and other 20something podcasts in 2021.
3 months before that, @dharmesh tweeted:
It seems they are building the largest content network in the world + over 25k people visit their conference INBOUND
Look at these companies:
a16z has launched a podcast and future.com in 2021. Both became quite popular in tech
Mailchimp owns 6 shows for small businesses
Salesforce, started a streaming service in ’21.
PNGaming Inc acquired Barstool Sports for $450M
JP Morgan purchased The Infatuation and Frank in ’21
Robinhood App acquired financial news digestible MarketSnacks
These are not media but serve the same purpose:
Stripe bought IndieHackers
Zapier — Makerpad
DigitalOcean — scotch.io
How
The ideal scenario is described by Balaji Srinivasan:
Your target audience trusts them
They know the audience good enough to build more shows/mediums
With existing audience you can experiment with different content and send them to other shows
The problem with this plan is that influencers with excellent media taste want to be independent.
I already approached someone I admire, and they said no 😄
Sam Parr spoke about finding great talent early in their career, but he was the writer they wanted to work with.
Next steps:
Focus on building Twitter audience and will launch a newsletter
Keep looking to acquire newsletters.
Most of my inspiration came from the Marketing Against the Grain episode with Patrick Campbell
