The Pomp Podcast - #418: Dave Nemetz on The Current State of Media Companies

Episode Date: October 29, 2020

Dave Nemetz previously founded Bleacher Report and Inverse. Today he serves as the General Manager at BDG Media, along with spending time advising and investing in early stage startups.  In this conversation, we discuss new media models, building digital audiences, the value of persistence, DTC media, the rise of creators, and new trends that Dave is exploring.  ======================= Want to sell your wonderful internet business? Tiny partners with founders to give them quick, straightforward exits that protect their team and culture. We’ll make an offer within a week, close the deal within a month, and keep your business operating for the long term. Get in touch at tinycapital.com, and we’ll let you know within a couple of days. ======================= LVL is a new crypto investing platform that I'm an investor in. They allow anyone to trade an unlimited number of times per month for only $9. If you buy or sell more than $500 in Bitcoin on any exchange, you're spending too much on trading fees. Use LVL to save money and trade as many times you want, but only pay $9/month. https://lvl.co/pomp ======================= Diginex is the first company with a cryptocurrency exchange to be listed in the US. That exchange, EQUOS, has been built to institutional standards, but is available to everyone. You can trade Bitcoin and Ethereum spot, as well as Bitcoin perpetuals, and get a 5% discount on all fees, by signing up using http://www.equos.com/pomp

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Dave Nemitz previously founded Bleacher Report and Inverse. Today, he serves as the general manager at BDG Media, along with spending time advising and investing in early-stage startups. In this conversation, we discuss new media models, building digital audiences, the value of persistence, DTC media, the rise of creators, and new trends that Dave is exploring. I really enjoyed this conversation with Dave, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

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All right, let's get into this episode with Dave. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Dave here with me. Thank you so much for doing this, sir. yeah no thanks for having me here pumped absolutely let's just jump right into your background uh i feel like you have uh quickly become the uh the king of new media to some degree uh just what did you do before you started uh all these media sites uh so i started right out of college i you know it was like you know kind of very fresh very fresh i went to i went to USC film school. Uh, I, I wanted to be a film producer or TV producer, uh, and then got out of school, went to work at, uh, Endeavor agency, uh, run by Ari Emanuel. Uh, and this was like when Entourage was, was on and it literally was like that. Um, you know, I was, I was Lloyd, I was

working at a desk, you know, getting abused by agents. Uh, and you know, on the side, uh, some high school friends and I had started this sports website. Uh, and it was just like a total passion project. Like, Hey, we, you know, we have an idea for a sports website that we would want to see in the world. Uh, so we were working on it and, you know, eventually it kind of got to the point where I was like, well, I can, you know, keep taking abuse, uh, you know, from, from the agents or I can go work on this thing on my own. And, you know, we, uh, uh, you know, we went all in and i started bleacher report uh and have been you know kind of off off to the races ever since you know figuring out as i go along absolutely where'd the name bleacher report come from

so that came from uh a brainstorm uh you know we were trying to figure out a name and just throwing a bunch of things out there and like asking our friends and had some really dumb like one of the names that uh uh one of one of the co-founders suggested was like drink your milk dot com uh so imagine if that could have been it uh and then uh my co-founder brian uh you know who now now uh runs runs uh bdg where i'm at um he he was like hey what about bleacher report and we're like yeah we don't hate it so we're like we'll keep it on the list and he said oh well the domain's available i can buy it for 10 bucks so i'll just i'll just get it so we have it uh And then, you know, if we come up with anything better later, you know, we'll just have that as

an in reserve. And it stuck. I love it. It's always, that's how the naming goes, right? It's like the best of the worst things you can come up with and then eventually you just make it into a thing. Yeah. Yeah. And our investors hated the name. They really tried to convince us to change the name and they didn't like, they thought it was too long. They thought that they didn't like that it was like two r's next to each other it was hard to spell and they tried to convince us to like hire this like i can't remember how much they cost but some like you know naming branding firm to come in and like give us a new name and this is like you know when all the the you know web 2.0 companies had ridiculous names like zingo and stuff and who figured that's where it would

end up and we just kind of you know resisted that that effort and and uh you know stuck with Bleacher Report. And that's how it worked out. Yeah, it worked out pretty well. Talk a little bit about kind of when you guys started this, there's a lot of things in media today that didn't exist or weren't popular. So kind of going and building a website was, that was what people did. Talk through like how you financed the company and just kind of the decisions you guys made along the way that maybe in hindsight, given today's environment, people would be like, oh, wait, that's like a weird way to do it. But at the time, like that was pretty much standard how people finance and grew, uh, media companies? Yeah. Yeah. So, um, you know, we, we bootstrapped

it starting out and, you know, we were like, you know, college, uh, you know, just recent college graduates, you know, I was thinking I was making like 25 grand a year at, uh, at Endeavor. So, you know, we weren't like swimming in savings, but, you know, I've had some leftover bar mitzvah money and stuff like that, that, you know, we, we put to work, uh, and, and, uh, you know, when it was just a side project we weren't paying ourselves salary we didn't have much many expenses we we outsourced the development to just like a friend of a friend like we weren't engineers we had no idea how to build a website we outsourced the development to a friend of a friend who you know ran like a dev shop which i'm pretty sure was just like all you know offshore uh developers that that

he was managing uh and they built uh a site on on an open source uh cms called jumla uh which might still be around today but it was like you know it's pretty like bare bones basic like there's a lot better you know options out there today and you know uh you know we just didn't know any better but it served its purpose you know kind of we probably spent like a few thousand dollars to like build it. Um, and that allows us to get it out there, uh, and start building a community, building an audience. Uh, and then, and then we, we kind of kept it going. Uh, we, you know, once we quit our jobs, uh, you know, we got, you know, friends and family to, to help out and put some money in, uh, you know, like I think, you know, less than less than six figures just to

like help, help float us. And, you know, I moved back in with my parents and, and, you know, we, we had a we got like a small windowless office that was like 500 bucks a month in the middle of uh you know the summer in uh in minlow park uh and so it was you know very classic startup type stories and um you know we kind of used you know that friends and family money in that time to build out uh you know kind of a custom site and get off the the um the open source thing you know we, we, uh, we hired, uh, you know, a couple rails developers, uh, which, you know, rails was pretty new at the time, uh, you know, to come build like a custom rails app and launch like the first real version of a bleacher report in maybe six months.

Um, and then we went out and tried to raise money around it. And, you know, this was like, I remember at the time, like reading from some of the first articles that, uh, the ball was writing on venture hacks and things like that. and like uh you know it was like super early days there's no playbook for how you raise money as an early founder um there was no like established community of angel investors it was all like you know kind of looking for needles in a haystack um so it was interesting like we went in and like pitched some venture firms that we were like way too early for but it you know gave us some like good reps and like kind of used every every connection and intro we could get

uh and eventually we found uh these two kind of super angel investors these guys who had made uh just a a ton of money in like the first like dot-com wave uh and and you know kind of put together their own fund to uh fund early stage companies and you know they you know bought into our pitch they believed in what we were doing and they put uh uh about a million and a half in uh, and that, you know, kind of got us started as a, you know, as a company, but we stayed super scrappy in those early years. Cause you know, we were, we were young, we didn't need much to survive. And, you know, we, uh, you know, we're trying to kind of make it, make it last as long as possible. Absolutely. And then obviously you guys ended up building, you know, one of,

if not the preeminent sports site, uh, in terms of content and kind of really expand and scale this thing, uh, talk through, like you eventually get to the other end of the journey, which is, should we sell it or not kind of what was the thought process there and how did you guys kind of think through that yeah yeah i mean we went through this huge transformation you know it was like in the early days you know we got a lot of hate i mean we probably still get a lot of hate you know people love to hate things uh but you know i remember um you know there was this like famous uh segment uh in the sports media world on uh i think it's on real sports on hbo in the early days where like Buzz Bissinger was like going just like crazy over sports blogs and

Will Leach from Deadspin and like talking about how those guys were like you know the the worst thing that ever happened to sports media and you know we we watched that and we were like all right you know we're part of this like upstart you know we're gonna like prove prove like the sports establishment wrong but even the sports bloggers hated Bleacher Report in the early days and like will leach and deadspin i mean they i mean they were pretty you know they they tore everyone apart that was their whole deal but like we got so much hate we got so much you know kind of and some of it rightly so some of the stuff we were doing was not you know it was like we had to continue to raise the quality bar over time but eventually you know we kind of we kept building towards like

the vision that we wanted and like all of a sudden the tables started to turn and we you know we the quality went up we started to bring in like more of the sports media establishment was recognizing what we were doing uh we brought out a couple uh executives uh to join the team who came from like fox sports uh brian gray who was phenomenal rich kolache who came from cbs sports is our our chief revenue officer um you know really helped to like put us on the map in terms of legitimacy like we built this audience we built this kind of new brand uh and then we had you know people from the old guard you know kind of coming in and you know things were just you know at that point taken off and uh and Turner kind of came in uh you know with with interest to buy

the company and it it was like you know it's definitely a part of part of it was everything we had built uh and but it was also just perfect timing and a perfect fit um Time Warner had had recently, uh, spun out Time Inc. Uh, so Time Inc spun out as its own public company. Um, and Time Warner, you know, kind of got, got out of that part of the business. Um, Sports Illustrated was part of Time Inc. That was like the sports property, uh, that Time Warner owned that they had, you know, kind of digital rights to, and all of a sudden they didn't have that anymore. Uh, and so they were looking to kind of fill that, that hole in their portfolio. Uh, and at the time, the two big digital sports properties that were out there were us and SB Nation. And so I'm sure

they looked at both. And our team, through some of those execs that we brought in, had really strong relationships with Turner. And we were growing like crazy. We were profitable. So they came in with a pretty aggressive offer. And we just raised a big round of funding from Oak. uh you know we were going after kind of a big like go after ESPN strategy uh but you know it's kind of one of those offers you can't refuse and um you know we decided to you know consider selling the company and and things just you know kind of you know led to led to fruition from there absolutely and so as you think of it uh today like the media landscape has shifted quite a bit right and um maybe let's just start with like if you guys were to rebuild Bleacher Report today

like what do you think is different and kind of like what would you maybe look at doing differently than you guys did um it was obviously this this big success and you go from you know literally you and your friends kind of just passion project to eventually this company that everyone knows but new environment you got to take new tactics like what would be the things that you would do differently yeah i mean i think you know the the you know a couple big things that have been uh you know big developments in in sports media or just media in general recently you know obviously the rise of subscription and paid subscription has been huge and um you know i think the the athletic was was early on that uh and you know a lot of other people you know new york times on

down have been going all in on that um so i could see that you know kind of as a route uh and then you know kind of the rise of the individual creator you know the uh the pumps of the world uh and so to speak um and you know bleacher was part of that obviously bleacher empowered kind of this whole you know kind of new you know kind of uh generation of sports analysts um but it was much more like bleacher reports started is you know definitely user user generated content it was kind of like almost anything goes you know too much goes um and that's that's why we got some of the hate uh but you know we kind of started to like you know level that up over time I think, you know, what would be interesting to look at would be to look at some kind of subscription play, you know, kind of looking at like the best individual creators out there in sports and kind of bringing them together on some platform where, you know, maybe some of it's paid, some of it's free.

But, you know, I think kind of that that core piece of like empowering a community, empowering people to create, you know, kind of owning the relationship. You know, I wrote, uh, you know, recently on, on my site about, uh, how, you know, Bleacher Report really went all in on email, uh, newsletters early on. And that was like a huge game changer. I think those, those pieces were still there. It was just kind of like, you know, some of the tactics have, uh, have, have evolved over time. Yeah. And you've talked a lot about like building audiences, this idea of like D to C, uh, media talk just through like some of these ideas that you've written about and maybe elaborate on, like, let's start with just building the audiences today. Uh, it feels like kind of this multi-platform, you know, again, direct to consumer, like own that relationship, uh, is what everyone's talking about. How do you view that having built one of these large media companies? yeah yeah i mean i think you know it's one of those things that like you know i get interesting reactions to some people are like yeah you know that's obvious of course you want to build you know your direct relationship to your audience and um you know it's sometimes you need to say the obvious things because not everyone not everyone realizes them or what seems obvious isn't isn't as apparent to everyone else so you know there's definitely been an era of

media companies chasing scale at all costs. And I think that's led to some of the biggest problems in media and digital media over the last 10 years. And some of what I've been writing about has been trying to make sense of that because I was a part of that as well. And looking back, Bleacher Report got a lot of positive press and accolade for how we built such a large audience, such a scaled audience, how we built on other platforms. Bleacher has been dominant on social for a long time. And looking back, I think in some ways, it's been given credit for kind of the wrong reasons for its success. And I think one of the keys to success was owning that audience relationship through the newsletters and then the TeamStream app.

And so, you know, I think we're going back to that time where the scale at all costs is just, it's a strategy that maybe a few people can play in. If you're really big, if you're really well funded, if you're going, I mean, you know, where I'm at, at BDG Media, we have a huge portfolio We have brands, you know, we're reaching close to a hundred million people a month. We're playing in the scale game, but few can play that game. And a lot of people who've tried have, have just hit a wall. But then you see a lot of other people who focus on, focus on a niche, focus on owning the audience relationship, owning that space, thinking about monetizing in different ways.

And there's, there's so many more paths to success there, you know, versus going to the like, you know, go big or go home strategy. Yeah. And it feels also like because some of the changes to building the audience that owning the relationship, it's also changed the funding environment. Like you don't see as many companies going out and raising these really large rounds on the media side. You've got everyone from kind of the morning brews on down. How do you look at that? Right. I mean, there are still some barstool, you know, comes to mind and a few others. but it does seem like there's been this shift that, hey, you can build a lot of this without the venture funding, or maybe venture funding isn't the right path for some of these media companies. Yeah. I think it's a chicken and the egg thing too, because I can say this from direct experience with my last company, Inverse, the venture funding environment for media just dried up in the last three, four years. And a lot of that was because of the well-publicized

struggles of these these overly funded digital media companies that raise a ton of money and just couldn't get profitable you know couldn't grow to live up to expectations they were being you know being given uh funding rounds at at kind of tech venture valuations but you know media lives on a on a different spectrum and you know you look at the mashable you look at mike.com uh and You know, there was just a lot of kind of well-publicized, even the ones who've done well, like no one knows, you know, when BuzzFeed is going to have an exit or Vox or BDG where I'm at. It's an environment that's still very much in question. So that led to just a drying up of new funded companies and a new class of bootstrap companies that were able to figure it out on their own and become profitable quickly and realize

that you can run a profitable, efficient media business if you aren't shooting for 100 million uniques and 100 million in revenue. And you might get there over time, but you can do it organically. And, you know, I, early on, I met like Sam Parr from The Hustle and became an advisor investor to him. And he's raised maybe a million bucks and like they're doing fantastic. And they've just been incredibly scrappy and focused on building the audience, building different products that cater to that audience and being really smart and strategic about it. You look at Morning Brew. It sounds like they're going to get acquired by Axel Springer for a great valuation. That's really the way it's done. And I think that's the way it should be done in media because venture funding for media, it's not great for the media companies and not great for the investors, with some exceptions. The early investors of Bleacher Report are very happy they invested, but those kind of results are few and far between. Yeah. And I think that now we're starting to see media companies figure out other monetization methods as well. Right. So we talked a little bit, used to be ad supported. Now you've got kind of subscriptions. We're also seeing merchandise. We're seeing all kinds of

products. Like it just feels like when you don't have that venture funding, you have to focus more on revenue and profitability. What are you seeing on that front? Yeah, I think that's the lack of venture funding and the shift in, you know, you have to be, have to focus on being profitable if you don't have funding. So publishers are going to experiment more early on. I raised money, venture money early for Inverse, largely looking at following a similar playbook as I did at Bleacher Report. So there were certain things where I was focused on. I need to get to enough scale to be able to attract bigger brand advertisers. I need to focus on growing uniques because that's the primary metric that, you know, uniques and top line

revenue are the primary metrics that, that most investors are going to care about for me to be able to raise my next round. What, you know, what has changed is that, you know, with that venture funding going away, you can, you can kind of focus on different things. You know, there were revenue streams I didn't focus on early on because I didn't feel like they were going to be impactful enough to be able to convince, you know, a big, a big VC firm to come in for the next round. So I think that's, it just changed the whole, the whole strategy and the whole dynamic and led to people being a lot more experimental and really focus on building, building an audience that they really own and that they can, they can engage with in different ways. Cause if all you're

thinking about is the, you know, getting the biggest numbers possible, most of those people are not necessarily going to be very invested in your brand they're not going to buy a product that you develop or sign up for a paid premium community or anything like that and you know they're really just window dressing to try to help you get bigger advertising deals yeah in terms of kind of when you see the audience development now you were talking about uniques earlier is that maybe not as important kind of moving forward? And it's more of like how deep the relationship is with a smaller number? Or how do you kind of think about some of those metrics, whether it's for investors, it's for advertisers, or just understanding the health of these media

businesses, right? What are those metrics that you think now are important? Absolutely, absolutely. Uniques really only matter if you're trying to sell brand advertising to big fortune 100 brands they care about that there are certain brands that won't won't even take a phone call from you unless you're at five million uniques or 10 million uniques or that you know the bar keeps going up and when you're competing with facebook and google for some of those deals it's you can't even be in the same conversation until you're you know many tens of millions of uniques so you know there's it just it kind of leads to this vicious cycle where you have to keep growing to be able to make the money. But as you grow, the goal keeps getting pushed further

away. And meanwhile, you're not, you're not profitable. So that's, that's, that's a problem. And, and I think even in advertising, there's so much Facebook and Google have also shown there's so much more advertising out there beyond those fortune 100 brands. And they're, you know, the smaller advertisers, the, the direct to consumer product brands, they're willing to spend money with a lot of different partners. They're willing to test on smaller budgets and they're willing to scale those up if they see results. So it's not brand advertising, it's performance driven. And that's what's driven the success of the hustles and the morning brews of the world. And I think, you know, it's starting to seep into just all the

publishing in general. Brand advertising is great. There's definitely a place for that. you know it does work and there's a reason that the the pizza huts and the pepsi cos of the world are spending tens and hundreds of millions of dollars on on brand advertising to you know make sure you remember to buy their product but there's there's a lot to be said for this more direct response performance driven advertising where you're actually getting someone to click can buy a product uh and in today's world with e-commerce as big as ever and just taking up taking over that's just going to become bigger and bigger so uh email is such a great medium for that that's why email newsletters are going off uh like no other right now uh and and uh you know

even even bigger publishers that you know that kind of direct response type advertising or affiliate has become big for places like Hearst and BDG and Conde. Uh, so, you know, it's definitely, it's kind of changing, changing the world, changing the way people think about things. It feels like a lot of the monetization was previously pioneered by musicians, celebrities, you know, maybe even athletes to some degree, uh, kind of these individual creators. Um, and now the big media companies are like learning from that. Right. So if you were a YouTube creator, and you were getting paid $1 or $2 CPMs on YouTube and 80% of your videos end up getting demonetized anyways,

you just have to come up with other ways to make money. And so whether it was merchandise, affiliates, all that kind of stuff became really popular and very, very profitable for those folks. Then you give it to a large media company and say like, hey, here's the blueprint. Well, they just have exponentially large audiences, right? And it's almost like they can kind of use those creators

as like R&D for what the large media companies do? Does that seem kind of accurate from what you're seeing? Yeah, yeah, definitely. There was a big moment when every publisher was trying to get into the influencer game and launch an influencer network or try to bring in influencers to partner with on these bigger brand campaigns,

which is still very much a strategy that's alive and well, but it's become kind of table stakes. everyone does it so it's not really that differentiated i think the bigger trend that that we're seeing is just these individual creators becoming their own media brands and rivaling the old school traditional media companies and you know thinking about it you know hey if i'm a if i'm a tech advertiser you know should i be spending my money on you know an old school tech site like like wired or gizmodo or should i just go with marcus brownlee and and you know, he's got the, the, the audience and the engagement and, and, you know, there's more

authenticity there. So I think that's, that's a big trend. I think it's going to be interesting to see how that develops. Do some of these individual creators become media empires in their own right? And, you know, you think about like Martha Stewart media, it's, you know, started as one person and, you know, now that's a media empire or Oprah. So are we going to kind to start to see that develop with these these digital creators uh where they they build out larger horizontal media companies or or uh are we going to see either kind of mergers or like closer joint ventures tie-ups uh where where the creators kind of blend in with the media companies or media companies get more focused on building out their own suite of creators as opposed to really focusing

on just like their top level brand. Yeah. What are the areas in media right now that you're spending a lot of time thinking about or kind of interested in seeing how it develops? So I love the email newsletter space. I think there's a ton of open field there and there's kind of a debate going on in the world of,

have we reached peak saturation in newsletters? Everyone's got a newsletter. everyone's got a sub stack. But the reality is that's in like the Twitter echo chamber and the vast majority of people are not, not feeling like they're over inundated with newsletters and probably haven't even heard of the, maybe even the top 10 people on sub stack, let alone the other thousands of people who are, who are trying to, to, you know, kind of build there. And I think that's, that's kind of led to just a more similar to podcasts, a more intimate way to connect with an audience and build community. And I think we're going to see a lot more growth and development

and new ideas and new models. You know, there's media is very cyclical. There's kind of a tried and true, there's a clear set of media categories that, that resonate with people that have existed since the dawn of time in media, and they just continually get, like, remixed and remade. Yeah, so you had the magazine era, then the cable TV era, then the digital publishing era. Now we're seeing it with newsletters and creators.

So I think that's kind of the area that I'm really honed in on is what's going to be the inflection point for newsletters or creators? What are the enabling technologies that are really going to allow them to build their business, build their audience. Uh, and you know, I'm, I'm, I'm super curious to see how it all turns out. I have a friend who's got this theory. Um, this is all great if you can hand somebody like the playbook, right? So like, Hey, here's how you build these like personal media companies. Uh, the only problem is that

most people aren't prolific enough to, uh, to actually do it. How do you think about that in terms of the success that, you know, the, let's say, I don't know, 500, a thousand people or whatever are having doing this right now. Is it playbook and you can teach that playbook to just anybody and they should be able to do this? Is it, no, you've got to have the right creator and they would have figured it out with or without the playbook. Or maybe is it kind of both? Like some people will be really, really good and really big because they know the playbook and they're prolific, but also that you'll have people who have a very niche audience and, you know, it's only 100 or 500 people, but in that specific niche of the world, they're the thing. How do

you think about that? The number one thing in media, probably in anything in life, is consistency. It's just showing up day in, day out, even when it's not working, even when you're discouraged, even when no one's listening, but your mom or maybe even your mom is tuned out. And you can have all the talent in the world, but if you don't do that, it doesn't matter. and that is absolutely true i'd be curious to to hear you know how you've experienced this is building your audience and building out the the podcast it just takes time it takes months and years of putting in the reps and it's it's more but you will you will find the audience that that you you resonate with whether it's 100 people or 10 million people and i think that's

that's that's the number one thing and it's it was true bleacher report it's true it's true for the other brands i've built and you know i think a lot of people will just they'll they'll try it out and they'll give up after a certain amount of time because it's not for them or you know they'll get discouraged or they'll get hooked into something else uh but the the people who stick with it who really find that like clear niche and like you know the the the personal monopoly as david perel calls it or whatever whatever you want to call it you find that that intersection of interests that you're super passionate about that there is there's demand out there there's a community that exists out there that that wants it but doesn't know it yet and

you'll you deliver it for them and that's that's the key in in building any of these businesses i can definitely uh confirm that the consistency is by far the uh the most important thing and i And I actually, uh, in some weird way, always tell people it's persistence because consistency just means like, Hey, you're doing it every day. And that's actually like the correct term. But this word persistence is much more like you've got to do it, right? Like if you're going to be the creator, you've got to be the persistent one. Um, and that leads to the consistency.

Um, and so it's interesting to kind of watch, I think as, uh, you know, I'm sure you get the same thing I do. People come and they're like, Hey, I want to do this. you're like, okay, here's the playbook. Like go do it for six months. Yeah. Two weeks later, like you never hear from him again. Right. And it's just kind of like, that is probably the number one killer of all of these is just literally people stop. Right. And it could be for a legitimate reason, family, you know, some situation, whatever, or it could just be like, they didn't see results right away. Hey, I thought I was supposed to have thousands of readers or

followers or views or whatever. I don't have that. It's like, it's not working. I just give up. it doesn't make sense yeah definitely and and look there's there's there's both a qualitative and a quantitative reason that you need to put in that many reps just by doing it you get better you know you you recognize your your flaws or you you you just develop uh better better better sense better skill set uh you know better sensibilities and and it takes time and repetition to do that and then the other part is every yeah everything you create becomes a data point and if you only if you only do it a few times you do it haphazardly it's hard to really draw any conclusions from oh people really liked this one thing i wrote or this one podcast or

video i created but they didn't like this one it's hard to know kind of what the reason is but if you develop it over time if you do it enough you start to see patterns and you start to understand this is how i'm really resonating with this audience this is what they they really really uh get and and like and and this is what i can uniquely deliver to them and you just need to do that hundreds of times thousands of times maybe in order to get enough a large enough data set to really start to make some of those those observations yeah it also feels in some weird way uh, a comfort level as well. So it's like you, you can kind of learn to all this stuff, but also it's very, um, uncomfortable for people to write or to tweet a lot or to sit in front of a

camera, like, like whether you're a TV anchor or you're literally just on YouTube on your webcam, like there is this comfort level. And I think that, uh, one of the things that has been fascinating to me is like, I can now see somebody on camera and immediately tell you whether they've done it a bunch or not right and you just kind of pick up on this whole idea of like it's one thing to like do an interview and then it's a whole nother thing to like sit there with the camera just on you with no editing and be entertaining or to be uh to kind of hold people's attention and to me like that is the the biggest argument for just like you gotta do for a long period of time because like you're saying like anything else you just have to improve at it right and

it just feels like that's kind of a lost piece of it everyone focuses on like what am i saying but if you actually look at like the best people it's how you say it it's when you say it it's delivery i mean like every comedian right if you go talk to them about like stand-up comedy they'll say look the joke is half what we're saying but it's everything else that makes it you know just as funny and i think that's what kind of creators and people in these like personal media companies are learning right now yeah you know you hear all the stories everyone's heard the story about the the stand-up comics who did open mics for years and had no audience and everything fell flat. And they just, you know, did the reps over and over again. And they built

their persona and they built their delivery. And that's, that's the perfect, perfect, you know, kind of story for this is that you have to do it. And I think a lot of people worry about like, well, what if I'm not good? You know, what if people don't like what I have to say? I had those worries. I still have those worries when I go and do something like this. And I just wrote something on my site about imposter syndrome and dealing with that. And I think it's something that we all feel, but you think about, okay, you know, maybe it was Jerry Seinfeld had, you know, would bomb for years and years before he achieved success. Does anyone go back and dig up those old routines of Seinfeld's to pick them apart? No, no one cares. No one cares about the early

mistakes that you make. No one cares about, you know, that your writing or your videos weren't as polished as they could be. It's just, you know, it's part of the process. And I think, if anything, people respond to that you're authentically trying to do something and you have something to say that, you know, you're kind of building it as you go along, just like everyone else. And that's a way to build relationships and build community. And that's how the good stuff happens. Absolutely. As you're kind of looking forward, what about audio? We haven't talked too much about that. Like, how do you see audio and podcasts playing into a lot of this? So, yeah, I mean, audio is something that I don't, I don't have a, I don't have an answer

for, like, I'm still figuring out. I'd love to know your, your, what you learned through it. It's, it's, I would say among the most challenging mediums to build an audience for, at least in my experience, definitely requires just putting in tons of reps. It's, it's a very, very saturated space not unlike what people are saying about email newsletters but you know i think they're at least in my experience i i know the playbook for how you build an audience around email uh whereas audio i found to be much more challenging uh to really break through and i think you know part of it is putting in the reps and leveraging audience that you have elsewhere to to be able to bring people onto a podcast i'd love to learn how you built yours i know like we've

we have some podcasts at inverse and input that we launched over this year and they're i think they're great and they're but they're you know we have 25 plus million people visiting those sites every month and and a lot of people subscribe to our email newsletters we're still trying to peel away people by the dozens to come listen to the podcast and just get them to to subscribe and i I know like, you know, Morning Brew has had similar experiences where they've got this huge email list and, you know, they've had challenges building out their podcasts. It's just, it's definitely a long-term thing. I think it's a great medium. And once you have someone, that's a super valuable relationship.

But, you know, I think the, you know, the growth and kind of the strategy around it is still a little bit of a mystery to me. yeah i um i always go back and forth on this because it's one of these things where like when you've got a massive you know take morning brew you got two million plus people on the email list uh and when they're like hey uh the podcast like cross-selling is really hard and what i think ends up happening is like it's also how hard you push it like for me because it's my name i can push it really hard right but hey if you like what i write like come listen to this interview right and and the common denominator there is a person versus a brand saying like hey if you like our one product like you'll like our other product right it's a little bit uh different

and so uh the other hard part is uh it's very hard to be data driven because you actually don't know in many cases how many subscribers you have exactly all you see is how many downloads you get right and so you like people forget that it's it's harder to do this stuff when you don't have access to the same information that you're used to on page views emails you know these other platforms um and so definitely uh there's days where either we there's tons of downloads or there's not a lot of downloads and we're kind of scratching our head like huh you know why do you think that happened and you know everyone starts throwing out their opinions and you start realizing like there's no science going on here right like this is this is complete estimation or

or guesstimations in terms of what's going on. And you realize very quickly, like, hey, it's hard to grow if everyone's just sitting around guessing all the time, right? Whereas with email or anything like, you know, if you do something, it worked or it didn't work. It had the intended impact or not. And so I think that that's like a piece that people who aren't doing audio forget about a lot.

Totally, totally. Yeah, you don't know the subscribers. You don't know necessarily how long people are listening for or you know what they what they're really enjoying or not there's a lot of mystery there and so you kind of have to fall back on just keep doing it and keep making it better and over time or you know there's there's people i think the the biggest success that people have had it's been leveraging multiple podcasts or guests or you know things like that uh you know which can be a great strategy. But yeah, it's a lot more of anyone's guess type medium. Absolutely. What are you doing

now? So I'm at BDG Media. They acquired Inverse a little over a year ago. So Inverse is a company I started about five years ago after selling Bleacher Report, similar model, similar playbook, focused on science and innovation and geek culture. And we were acquired by BDG, run by my old co-founder, Brian Goldberg, from Bleacher Report. They built out a portfolio of brands, starting with Bustle, down to the Zoho Report,

Romper, Elite Daily. And they brought in Inverse, along with Mike.com, and another brand we launched called Input to build out this new portfolio of brands called the Culture and Innovation Portfolio. portfolio so we focus we're the side of the company that focuses more on tech and and culture and and you know some of these other other topics uh so i've been building that out i've been working with uh with josh topolsky uh of uh you know the founder of the verge and and uh you know

fame from from tech media uh on growing that and uh and continuing to build out inverse which has just uh grown uh tremendously since uh since we joined the company that's awesome uh where can people find you on the internet so i just launched my own personal site dave nimitz.com check it out it's my first uh you know i've launched big websites and and done done big launches and it's my first small little personal project in forever i probably since like the early days of bleacher Report. And it was just a way for me to kind of get in touch with this new brand of creator-driven media and not necessarily throw my hat in the ring, but experience it firsthand. And I've been writing weekly essays on everything from the strategies that we used at Bleacher Report to

lessons from the media world to just general personal essays. So yeah, DaveNemitz.com and and then, uh, at Dave Nimitz on Twitter. It's fantastic, man. And the, uh, the essays are very good. So please keep writing them because there's a bunch of people who are learning from them. So, uh, and from a, uh, a selfish standpoint, uh, it's fantastic that you're doing that. Uh, I ask everyone the same two questions as I go to wrap up and you'll get to ask me one. Uh, first is what's the most important book you've ever read? Ooh, um, I, I have to say man's search for meaning, Viktor Frankl. I'm sure that's probably a popular choice, but definitely had a big impact on me and how I think about the world. And, you know, I've been in my recent more

adult days, you know, doing a lot of reflection in the quarantine world and trying to think about, you know, how to have the right mindset and right approach to everything from raising a family to Pursuing New Goals. And that's a book that just helped me stay very, very centered in a lot of that. I love that answer. Second question is more fun. Aliens, believer or non-believer? Oh, definitely believer. It's happening. I mean, it's on the 2020 bingo card, so we've only got a couple of months left. I was very pumped when there was the news like a month or so ago that they found possible evidence of of alien life on venus the you know the underdog for for uh for harboring life in the solar system so i hope we learn more about that i'm uh i'm planning a

cross-country road trip uh with my family uh for for later this year and roswell new mexico is definitely on the list of stops i made sure that so so yeah i'm i'm i'm all in on on the aliens i hope they come soon do do uh your kids uh ever ask about the aliens like they understand roswell and kind of uh is there excitement there are they basically gonna be like dad why are we driving so far out of the way uh yeah no my five-year-old she'll be very into it she loves space and astronauts and she's a little afraid of black holes so we have to kind of tiptoe around those uh but i'm sure she will be very pumped and and uh we'll probably have to buy a bunch of alien memorabilia while we're there i love it what uh what one question you have for

me to finish up uh what's what do you see for the the future of the the pomp media brand what's what's the what's the long-term strategy of of what you've been building where would you love to take it. Products. I mean, I think that, uh, there's, um, a ton of people who, and I've talked about it before, like the Joe Rogan deal or else, you know, other types of deals. And they're like, Oh, you know, I can't believe they did, uh, that type of licensing deal or whatever. Uh, to me, it's like, that stuff is the small details. I don't matter nearly as much as just like, how are you monetizing right and how you monetize it's ultimately a vertically integrated kind of full stack uh build in reverse almost this product company but you do it by first building out the

marketing and finding the customers and then it comes much much easier to actually go and build products that get product market fit right like i've always said like the idea that you build the product and then you go find the customers like that's a little uh weird right but it's been the best way for the longest time now the barrier to entry in terms of building an audience is so low that you can actually go build the audience and then figure out the products right so i think that uh i think that's you're gonna see more and more of that i don't necessarily have like some grand plan but but i just think like that's an interesting uh kind of thread to pull on and i think more more and more people uh kind of my position will start figuring it out um obviously

the really really large creators you know if you consider kylie jenner kim kardashian kanye west like like those folks have done it um but even look at like a david dobrik right he's got a mobile app now um you look at mr bees things like that and you kind of just again just trickles on down to uh the more and more niche you go i think just more niche products right yeah no definitely agree love that i mean i even on the the media publisher side i knew the guys at futurism.com and you know those guys and they launched the gravity blanket and i mean that became the entire business they ended up selling off the the media business just to focus on gravity blanket uh and of course you're seeing that with big creators and celebrities and yeah i think you know you you

you build the community you build the audience you build the relationship then you use that as your r&d to figure out what they want how you can serve them and i think yeah there's that strategy works. It works. Works very, very well. Listen, Dave, thank you so much for doing this. I think people really, really enjoy kind of all the content you're putting out. And obviously you've got the great experience of building multiple media brands and in different environments. So I think people will find this super valuable and want to do it again in the future. Thanks, Paul. This was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.