My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Ben McCarthy didn’t set out to create a media company focused on Salesforce, he just began blogging about his use of the product as a way to document the various use cases he encountered. As it turned out, there were thousands of other people who were encountering those same use cases, and via Google searches they began landing on Ben’s blog posts.    Fast forward 10 years, and he now runs a 20-person media company that generates over 1...

Get $100 your CEX tickets by entering the discount code OWENS100   My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   When Joe Pulizzi launched The Tilt in 2021, he already had a pretty good idea of how to build a successful media company. Back in 2017, he had sold his previous media startup, The Content Marketing Institute, to one of the world’s largest event conglomerates.   Joe ran The Tilt with a very similar playbook – first starting with a weekly newsletter, and then expanding into...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   When it comes to knowing all the intricacies of real estate investment, few are more knowledgeable than Brad Hargreaves. In 2015 he founded Common, a company that manages rental properties and consults  with real estate investors on building design.   And then in 2022 Brad decided to begin sharing his knowledge through a paid newsletter called Thesis Driven. Within a matter of months, it was generating six figures in revenue, and he...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   I spend most of my time on this show interviewing entrepreneurs who founded English-language media outlets – mostly because that’s the only language I speak – but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in the media ecosystems from other regions in the world. That’s why I was super excited to talk to Andreas Sator, the host of one of the most popular podcasts in Austria.   Andreas got his start at a major newspaper, and after a few years at...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Earlier this month, I sent a newsletter to my audience with the subject line: “Ask me a question.” Basically I told everyone to jump into the comments section of the post and ask me any questions they have about the media industry or creator economy.   Several of you did pipe in with some amazing questions. I then invited on Alexis Grant, the founder of They Got Acquired, to help me answer them.   We answered questions on a range of...

Before William Knight launched Early Morning Media, he had worked for years at a company that specialized in sending press clippings to corporate clients. While these services were mostly utilized by a client’s internal communications team, William realized at some point that these same news curation practices would be appreciated by an external audience.   So in 2011, he launched B2B newsletters covering multiple industries. At first, these newsletters were monetized mostly through paid...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/    The rise of cloud computing introduced all sorts of benefits for the enterprise software space. Not only could license holders access their accounts from virtually anywhere, but it also allowed the software companies to issue updates on a more regular basis. But this also made the sector a lot more complicated and created a need for more experts who could educate cloud software customers about the intricacies of the tools.   Tom Arbuthnot...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   I think everyone likes to think of themselves as being financially savvy, especially if, like me, you write about business topics, but how many of us truly understand finance terms that are bandied about like gross profit and lifetime value. Like we may know that the term EBITDA stands for “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization,” but how many people actually know how to calculate it?   CJ Gustafson knows. After a...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   For most of Instagram’s existence, it wasn’t thought of as a platform for distributing news, but a growing number of media entrepreneurs have figured out ways to leverage its photo and video features to deliver engaging news digests.   One of those entrepreneurs is Sam Koslowski. Back in 2017, he and his co-founder launched The Daily Aus, a social first news outlet that’s grown its Instagram account to over 500,000 followers. As it ramped...

Subscribe to my newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Ask about just any media executive, and they’ll tell you that the year 2023 was not a good one for the advertising business. A combination of high interest rates and an uncertain economy made companies extremely skittish, and that caused them to pull back on their marketing spend.   There’s some recent signs that advertising spending is picking up in 2024, but it’s still too early to know how it will shake out.   But what...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   By the time Riad Chikhani was 16 years old, he had already built a hugely successful online community for gamers and then sold it for a healthy sum. Two years later, he founded the company that would eventually become GAMURS Group, and while it took far longer to gain traction, it eventually grew into one of the largesting gaming media companies in the world, with outlets that include Dot Esports, Gamepur, and Gamer Journalist.   In my...

Earlier this month, I sent a newsletter to my audience with the subject line: “Ask me a question.” Basically I told everyone to jump in the comments section of the post and ask me any questions they have about the media industry or creator economy.   Several of you did pipe in with some amazing questions. I then invited on Alexis Grant, the founder of They Got Acquired, to help me answer them.   We answered questions on a range of topics like   How to monetize newsletters on LinkedIn ...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   When Jack Karmer and Nick Martell launched their daily newsletter Market Snacks in 2011, they kept their names off the publication so that it wouldn’t jeopardize their finance day jobs. But once the newsletter started to attract readers and sponsorship revenue, they decided to come clean. Luckily, their bosses let them continue on with their side hustle.   Flash forward about a half decade, and Market Snacks had gained enough traction that...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   It’s no secret that local journalism has struggled since the Great Recessions, with hundreds of newspapers shuttering and thousands of reporters losing their jobs. Over the past few years, entrepreneurs have launched dozens of local news startups to help fill in the gap, but there’s still an ongoing debate as to whether local news should be a for-profit or nonprofit industry.   Berkeleyside is one of the few organizations that has tried...

Subscribe to my newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Lucas Grindley knows something about building sustainable revenue streams for media companies. When he was hired to Here Media, a network of LGBT news outlets, it was losing money, but over a period of six years he nurtured it back to profitability.    Now he’s the executive director of Next City, a 20-year-old nonprofit magazine dedicated to urban policy and equitable cities. When he first joined, the publication was almost...

Sign up for my newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   It’s been nearly five years since Spotify announced it would diversify its audio offerings beyond music streaming, and while it spent most of that time building its podcast capabilities, it made no secret that it eventually wanted to get into audiobooks.   Then in 2022 it made its first move into the industry by acquiring an audiobooks distributor called Findaway. Later that year, it launched the ability to purchase audiobooks...

Subscribe to my newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   There are plenty of popular politics newsletters out there, but none with the kind of unique origin story of Wake Up to Politics. It was started by Gabe Fleisher when he was only 9 years old. While the early editions were sent out by a Gmail account and only read by his mom, Gabe kept at it, waking up early every day before school to write the newsletter. Flash forward about a decade, and he’s now a senior at Georgetown and Wake...

Subscribe to my newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Earlier this month, I sent a newsletter to my audience with the subject line: “Ask me a question.” Basically I told everyone to jump in the comments section of the post and ask me any questions they have about the media industry or creator economy.   Several of you did pipe in with questions, and so I spent a few hours jotting down notes and then recording this episode you’re about to consume.   I answered questions on a...

It’s been a bad few years for Buzzfeed. After a disastrous IPO in 2022, it’s faced a tanking stock price, declining revenue, and a shutdown of its news division.    But things only look to get worse in 2024. As Adweek’s Mark Stenberg reports, BuzzFeed faces a fiscal cliff where it’s in danger of being delisted from the NASDAQ stock exchange, which then would trigger a required payment on its debt. Such an event would be disastrous for the company’s future.   I recently interviewed Mark...

How do you write about the travel industry when people can’t fly on airplanes? That’s a question Kelsey Ogletree had to ask herself in 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic. By that point, she had worked for several years as a freelance travel writer, and like many of her colleagues, she didn’t know how the travel restrictions would affect her own career.   So she decided to do something about it. She announced on her newsletter that she was hosting a live Zoom call about the future of the...

Ash Read didn’t launch a review website about household products because of some lifelong interest in home decor; instead, his interest came about simply because he was moving into a new house and needed to furnish it.   While it was easy to search for products listed on retailers like Amazon and Walmart, he realized that there wasn’t a good directory for the direct-to-consumer goods that are sold directly through a company’s website. So he created a database of direct-to-consumer companies...

For most of his career as professional ultra marathoner, Dylan Bowman didn’t have much of an online presence, but in 2019, he suddenly found himself with a lot of time on his hands after he broke his left ankle and had to take a year off from racing. That year, he launched a podcast where he interviewed his fellow pro runners, and it pretty quickly became a huge hit.   It didn’t take long for Bowman to realize that the podcast provided a huge opportunity for his post-racing career, so in...

In 2011, Rafat Ali launched Skift, a B2B publisher that covers the travel industry. At first, Skift was mainly monetized with advertising, but Rafat quickly realized that scaling a B2B niche outlet required a diverse set of business models that included memberships, research, events, and advertising. He also acquired multiple other media outlets that operated in adjacent industries. In an interview, Rafat walked us through this journey and explained how he managed to simplify the company’s...

Patrick Walls is the founder of Starter Story, an outlet that’s published thousands of case studies on how entrepreneurs built successful businesses. At one point, he was selling upward of $50k a month in sponsorships.   But earlier this year, he not only stopped selling advertising, he also switched from recurring subscriptions to a one-time payment that gave customers permanent access to his content archives. The move helped him grow to $1.5 million in annual revenue.   In a recent...