9 Lessons From TBPN's $100M+ Exit

16:06John Coogan:Yeah. No, he really showed us that there's levels to this game because we were like, oh, we're exhausted. And he's like, I do it on my way to work. Actually, I think of it as like a warm-up.

16:13Samir Chaudry:That's crazy.

16:16John Coogan:Four, branding, differentiation on set design. Everybody has a slat wall. We went a very different direction with a bunch of, we got a studio that's a, it's a, oh, we call it the Ultra Dome. We even branded it like a football stadium, thinking about selling the rights to the stadium. and put a lot of effort into creating a differentiated look that would pop out on social media clips. So you would see something. This started very early. One of our first growth hacks was we needed things to talk about, so we'd react to the news. We'd react to people's posts on Twitter or whatever was in the news.

16:50John Coogan:We'd print out their tweets, wear a suit, film it with a 4K camera in this very austere wooden room that didn't really look like any other normal podcast set. And then we would quote tweet the post of whoever originally posted the take or the news item. And we would quote tweet it with the video. And you would get a notification. You get a lot of notifications. Oh, 10 people liked your post, 1 ,000 people liked your post. It all just becomes random numbers at a certain point when something's going viral. But if someone quote tweets your post with a video, you have to watch that video. And so you watch the video.

17:25John Coogan:The video of two guys in suits. Two guys in suits in 4K with a printed out tweet. And you're like, why? Like this is so much above just a repost, which takes one second, and a like that takes half a second. And so that really created this like brand world of bringing this analog to the digital tech community. We're wearing suits, tech people normally wear t-shirts. Why are these guys in suits? That's weird, but it's actually a more welcoming environment for a Fortune 500 CEO, so it wound up working out in the future. And then there were a lot of other of these like little branding elements that came through Jordy Wells.

17:59Yeah, visually, early on, with our first sponsors, I pitched them as we're building a Formula One team. So you're going to sponsor an entire season. You're sponsoring the next 12 months. Locked in, fully contracted. You're not getting out of it. Technically, you could maybe not pay us, but it was very solid. And then we're just going to put you everywhere, right? So we weren't afraid. A lot of people in tech will have a podcast, but they don't run ads because they're like, I'm a hot shot. investor or a founder. I don't need this sort of like lowly ad revenue. We took the opposite approach. I love advertising.

18:37I think it's like it's the economic engine of the internet. It's amazing. It allows great products to be free. And so we really leaned into that and built the aesthetics of the show around with that kind of energy in mind. So we made like racing jackets that had all of our sponsors. We put logos like everywhere, right? A lot of now I see more shows kind of following in our footsteps and I feel a little bit bad because it's kind of makes the Internet a little uglier. But at the time with advertisers, it was like, hey, you could go sponsor a podcast where you're going to get one mid-roll ad and there's going to be no evidence that your ad is in the content unless somebody sees that exact moment or they scroll into the description and look around for it.

19:25And so we just really leaned into that and it created its own brand. And so thinking about the business side as like really part of the content, I think is important and really resonated with advertisers and gave us like permission to just be loud and proud about our sponsors, which our sponsors love, right? And I've worked with creators in the past where advertising is like a necessary evil. They're like, I wish I didn't have to do this, but I got to do it, you know, being apologetic with their audience. And your audience should want you to be selling advertisements so you have more revenue so you can make better content.

20:02And so we just embraced that and made it part of the product.

20:05John Coogan:Really quickly, can we give a round of applause for all the sponsors of Press Publish LA? Let's give them a round of applause. They make it possible.

20:11Samir Chaudry:Thank you. Gemini. Yeah, can we get them up on the screens? Gemini, YouTube. Yeah, this is a missed opportunity in our book. I want to see all of them. You're not sponsoring this.

20:19John Coogan:get on it. Yeah, number five. Are we ready? Treat it like a show, not a podcast. Podcast is sort of a narrow box. It needs to be, people have concepts of what it is. One interview a week. It can only be one guest per show, per podcast episode. And I think once we opened our mind to it's a show, it's live, it can be 10 guests for 10 minutes each. It can be one guest for two hours if we want. It can just be us. We've been no guests. We can take it on the road. We can do whatever we want with it. That really helped. And then also it gave us permission to pull best practices from television, pull best practices from other media products that didn't feel like we had to fit in a narrow box.

21:05John Coogan:And then that also made us like a different product to advertise. Yeah. When I think when you're making a show, you're in the mindset of a performance, Yeah. Which is, I think, quite different than the mentality of going into a podcast, which is, all right, let's sit down, turn on the microphones. It's very calm. But John and I, in the hour leading up to the show, are like chugging Andrew Huberman's Yerba Mate, like tons of nicotine. We're getting like really, really high energy. We're leap up all every single day. I want to be like exhausted when the show ends because I'm going to go home and sleep and do it again the next day.

21:42And so that mentality of like, you're making a show, this is a performance, people are giving you their time, you need to like, you're there to entertain. And we function as like a news source, but we want to be the most entertaining news source.

21:56Samir Chaudry:I think another thing that I love about this concept of treating it like a show, and maybe this will come up a little later, but I want to pull up this image of, I think this is La Brea, the billboards that you guys have up all over LA right now. yeah like that if we don't win we're fucked i'm kidding that is another element of treating it like a show like there's billboards all over la yeah for your emmy consideration campaign yeah yeah and this was another way to uh another way to differentiate is like yeah we're not a you know we view ourself as like interactive uh you know interactive entertainment yeah news product it's not a we don't want to be in the podcast category.

22:38With this too, it's like we maintain the mentality the entire time of being super scrappy. We partnered with a company to get all of these billboards.

22:48John Coogan:We did ads for their billboard company and they gave us billboard ads.

22:54Samir Chaudry:Let's just thank the sponsors of Press.

22:59Samir Chaudry:Barter deals are underrated. Thank you to all of our sponsors. Figuring out a way to get 10 or even 20 billboards, I don't know how many there are, with zero dollars out of our pocket is just like maintaining that mentality. Because there's no way we ever would have run a campaign like this if we had to. I mean, it's completely ridiculous running a billboard campaign for a niche live show.

23:24John Coogan:I think that also links to number eight. We're sort of jumping around. We'll get back to it. We're running out of time. We're used to three hours. Sort of this idea of like a lot of people in tech have had sort of a hostile relationship with the media. They've seen themselves as like disruptors up in Silicon Valley. Hollywood's this other thing. We, by virtue of the fact that we have families here, we built our show, our studio is in actual Hollywood, and we always saw what like legacy media does is amazing and incredibly important to how we do the show. I read the Wall Street Journal cover to cover every day to prep for the show, and some of the best journalism is still being done in legacy media.

24:04John Coogan:The creators in this room are doing amazing things that are extremely entertaining, but that doesn't mean that the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times aren't incredibly valuable sources. And so something like this is sort of a way to just take seriously everything that is great about Hollywood. And we did this across the course of the show where we would engage with the media and Hollywood, having New York Times reporters come on the show, having Vanity Fair reporters come on the show, and then also saying yes to doing profiles. A lot of tech people are like, oh, it'll be a hit piece.

24:40John Coogan:And there's always risk when you let a real journalist come and hang out with you for a week. You might say something that you regret. They could always take a quote out of context, but we realized that there's a lot of mutual respect there and that they're trying to tell a story to their audience that's worth telling, and we wanted to be a part of that. And so we never came at it as like a word. Yeah, we were never antagonistic. Never antagonistic. Tech has always been about disruption, building the next billion dollar company, taking down incumbents. And so I think people expected us to say things like, we're coming for CNBC.

25:14And we're at no point doing that. I like everyone at CNBC. We have friends there. We were like, we're just trying to best serve these 200 ,000 people. We don't care if other people are also trying to serve that audience. That's great. But being hyper-collaborative with every different player in our category served us really well.

25:36Samir Chaudry:Where are we, John? Number six.

25:38John Coogan:We're on number six. We're on six. Six is you can't buy an audience. Even though we talk to venture capitalists all day and we've raised money for previous ventures, We didn't raise money for this venture, even though we saw it as serious as a startup. In fact, we probably worked harder on this than some of the previous startups that we've run, just because we were in the right pattern of life. But we didn't raise money because, fortunately, so much of the equipment and tooling that's necessary to actually produce a great media product has been democratized. your phone can film things and even higher end camera gear can be offset with brand deals at a certain point.

26:18John Coogan:It's hard to take a venture capital dollar and turn it into a real fan. It's just very, very difficult. And so I think that there's some people that see big deals and think that that's a prerequisite. And I don't think it is at all. Jordi, do you have anything else? Yeah, I mean, part of it is that we have, you know, probably one venture capitalist on the show every day. And again, that probably sounds crazy to some of you guys. But yeah, we're constantly fielding offers, probably daily offers. Okay, can I invest? And every single time we just, early on, we're like, what would we do with the money?

26:54And we could not find a single thing that would actually make the show better. We really, really tried. and part of that was if we had wanted to, if we were trying to go after something other than serving that 200 ,000 people, there would have been things we could do with the money. But if you actually had that, again, like staying true to how do you make the best daily media product for those 200 ,000 people, we couldn't find anything. And so that just helps you stay aligned with why you started it in the first place.

27:29John Coogan:We have number nine, the last one, 30 seconds left. We already did it. Seven was be commercial, prioritize annual brand deals. I think we covered it. Nine was this idea that we had early on that you should be channeling the mind of a golden retriever, which is why is the golden retriever successful? Why do people like golden retrievers? Because they're hot, friendly, and dumb.

27:54Samir Chaudry:Nine really will shock you. Yes, nine will shock you.

27:57John Coogan:But this idea of there's a lot of people that are overly adversarial. You want to just be friendly. You want to look good on camera, show up every day, try and be healthy, and not try and be an expert in everything. And so actually letting the audience know when you don't know something is something that typically in scripted content that gets edited, you edit out all the places where you're uncertain and you fact check everything. But in a live show, we found that actually taking someone on the journey with us of our skepticism of where is our frontier of uncertainty around this particular topic was actually a benefit.

28:38John Coogan:Wow, I like that. It was just a funny mindset. And when people are, I'm sure many people in this room have had the experience of being completely copied or knocked off. Early on, there were big, big media companies in the first six months that created a TVPN clone. And I get really briefly worked up about these things. John maintains the golden retriever mindset. The golden retriever is simply focused on getting the ball, chasing the ball. They're not really worried about anything else going on at the dog park. They just want to get the ball. And so maintaining that, reminding yourself, just stay, just channel that and focus on the ball.

29:23Don't focus on anything else.

29:26Samir Chaudry:what do you think the deal that you guys made signals about the media industry if anything at all like having a niche tech live stream be acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars yeah what does that signal to where we are in the creator economy yeah was it signal to where we are in entertainment yeah i i think about it as uh so so just to set the table like the show

29:52John Coogan:is still editorially independent. We do the show exactly the same, but we do provide advisory services. We advise on different topics that come up on the show. We flow that back to the team at OpenAI. And we've also done this with our sponsors for a long time. Oh, you're running a Super Bowl ad? We'd love to chime in on that because we react to all the Super Bowl ads and we see what ads work in technology and don't. We'll give you a bunch of advice. Yeah, we fully delivered the concept for a Super Bowl ad that ran last year. Yeah, it did really well. And we also ran our own Super Bowl ad. Which ad was that?

30:26I don't think it's fair to take credit for it.

30:28John Coogan:We can take credit for our Super Bowl ad. Which we also ran a Super Bowl ad. We did, but we ran it in a small market, but we designed it to go viral where we included the logos of basically any company that had been on the show, got their logo in a mosaic pattern. So we put your logo in the Super Bowl and everyone was very happy. It was like a community, a love letter to the community. But I think what this might say, if it says anything, is that TBPN was very much like an audition tape for what we can do that then was a reason to want to work with us. And the way to work with us was with this type of deal.

31:06John Coogan:But I can imagine, like every time I see Doug DeMuro talk about the design of some car, I'm like, why doesn't Ferrari buy this guy's company? or like why doesn't he work with Range Rover? Because he's complaining about it. He's making good points. He should have a voice on the board or he should be sitting on the board of these companies because I think he's really talented and has great points. And this is just the way to actually flow things back. Yeah, I think the other thing is we had built like truly, it was such an incredible business. We did an interview with you guys and people started doing math on, somebody made a spreadsheet based on one thing that I had said in that moment and extrapolated our revenue from it.

31:52And I was relieved because it was like 80, 90 % lower than what it actually was at that time. And so the business was doing so well that we didn't even really want anyone to know. And so during the process with OpenAI, we didn't go out to sell the business. We never intended to sell the business. There were multiple times in the early discussions where we basically said like, hey look, if this doesn't make sense for you guys, we're happy to keep running our business and we really meant it. So there was no point. We never, companies I think the biggest lesson are this is not my quote but companies are bought not sold.

32:32So if you go out and you try to sell your company, you have no leverage, you'll get beat up on price, you come across as needing something. whereas we truly had the mindset of just we're just going to do this for 30 years and eventually we'll retire on the mics, right? And so having that leverage of full independence, we were making money, we didn't need to do any deal allowed us to get the outcome that we did. But I think that, yeah, it shows that niches are incredibly valuable and you shouldn't be afraid to to stay in your niche. Again, every person in this room wants to see the number go up.

33:16Humans in general are number go up machines. You just wake up every day, you want the views to go up, you want the followers to go up, you want the bank account, all these things. But you need to figure out, make sure that you're not working on the wrong number. Our outcome would have been a lot different if we were doing something like just optimizing for views and not staying true to that core community.

33:41Samir Chaudry:John Coogan and Jordy Hayes everybody. Thank you guys so much. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it, boys.