[upbeat music] Before I get to this week's episode, just a couple of quick reminders. The Rebooting's fourth anniversary is coming up in a week. I can't believe it.
It seems like a long time, but it also seems like I'm just getting started with this.
I suspect that's common for a lot of these endeavors, particularly in media, where everything takes longer and is three times as hard as the cliché says.
I'm gonna engage in a little navel-gazing with a newsletter next week about the lessons learned and plans for the next phase of the Rebooting.
One spoiler, I'm very glad I took this path, you know, even if sometimes it seems a lot harder than other journeys, because I, I can't imagine doing anything else.
And one way to support the Rebooting is to upgrade to a TRB Pro membership.
You can get full access to the Rebooting, all of the Rebooting's content, invites to member events, including preferred access to our dinner series. Soon, there will be a tech scene community.
I'm interested to try that out, and we're gonna keep adding to this membership. I've set up a twenty percent discount for podcast listeners.
Now, I am not into regular discounting because I just look at what it did to Gap, where everything's always fifty percent off. But I wanna try one of these around the anniversary. It's usually a good idea.
And here's what you need to do to take me up on this offer. Go to therebooting.com if you're already getting the newsletter, and I hope you are. Sign in, and you can upgrade from there.
Use the code PODCAST in all caps, and twenty percent will be applied at checkout.
The regular cost of a TRB Pro membership is two hundred dollars, so you can get it for a hundred and fifty dollars, or as many publishers say, it's less than three dollars a week. Think about that. That is...
That's basically a quarter cup of coffee in New York City. So hope you will consider that. One other thing to check out, we recently wrapped up a research study about the state of sustainable news businesses.
I was frankly a little surprised at the results. They were, they were more optimistic, honestly, than I was thinking.
Over half of our respondents said that they were profitable, and, you know, a large majority said they expected expanded profitability in twenty twenty-five. Now, this could be just the nature of the respondents.
You know, we knocked out those who do not produce journalistic content as their main business lines.
It, it could also be a sign that a lot of the, the cost-cutting and slimming down that we've seen this year and honestly, you know, going back a year, is really getting these publications a little bit fitter.
There's no doubt that news is still a pretty challenged business, but I do hope that this is something of a counterpoint to many of the doom and gloom narratives out there.
Because while a lot of businesses are in difficult positions, there are other upstarts that are in, you know, in healthy shape. And I think sometimes we have to be able to keep those two things in mind.
Anyway, check out the research for yourself. Let me know what you think. Uh, you can find it on the Rebooting's homepage. Thank you to Outbrain for supporting this research.
They're great partners, and, uh, really greatly appreciate it. So this week, I am talking to Anthony Venere. He is co-founder of Fit Insider, which if you don't know Fit Insider, it is...
It's one of my favorite, you know, niche media companies, and it's sitting at the intersection, and I love intersections, of a booming industry, which is fitness and business. And this is always a good approach.
One of the things that I like about Fit Insider is that it touches on a bunch of things that I believe about, you know, where we are with building these sustainable media businesses. For one, it's niche.
Fit Insider is, is just zeroed in on the fitness industry, and, you know, that's what it lives and breathes. The other one is, as I said, it's B2B.
And this could be my bias from my background, but the most robust media models that I see, they tend to be in B2B or at least in reaching influentials and using B2B-like models.
The other thing I like about Fit Insider is it comes from the point of view of a practitioner. Anthony and his brother Joe, who is, uh, a co-founder too, have spent their careers in the fitness industry.
They've been gym owners, investors. And this is just qualitatively different than the role of the observer that the reporter or journalist typically is. It's not an all-or-nothing thing.
I think too often these two different approaches in what I call the information space are pitted against each other. And to me, they're complementary, right?
You know, y-you can do the play-by-play, and you can do the color commentary.
And really, you know, Fit Insider, and we talk about this, you know, it's about the connecting of the dots, and I think that is a, a very robust area of journalism still.
And the other one is that Fit Insider uses media, and this is critical, as the front end to a bunch of other better businesses and uses the content to act as a flywheel.
So I think that is something that we're seeing in a lot of areas, and sometimes it doesn't go so well with content and commerce models, but Fit Insider has a really interesting approach to this.
It started as a simple text group among industry friends. You know, Joe and Anthony were sharing just their views on the fitness and wellness industries. It evolved into an email newsletter during COVID.
What, what, [chuckles] what else? And now it's, it's really on its way to becoming a comprehensive media platform and even expanding into, uh, B2C. Couple of the key takeaways that I had from this.
One is the power of organic growth because they didn't go down the regular newsletter route of, you know, pumping it up with a lot of, you know, recommendations or aggressive marketing.
One of my pet peeves about the newsletter world is that, you know, there's a lot of arbitrage in it, and, you know, I think it's a path. It's, it's harder to pull off, in my view, long term.
But in the short term, you know, yeah, gets you a sugar high. But I think you can see this with Fit Insider's numbers.
You know, open rates, yeah, we all know that they have their flaws, but, you know, if Anthony's talking about sixty-eight to seventy-five percent open rates, that directionally indicates that they've got a good tie to their audience.
Another one is, is, you know, they've really taken an unconventional approach to monetization.
You know, they haven't done the common B2B media tactics like webinars, guilty, branded content, guilty still, or dedicated sponsor emails. On this, I'm not guilty.
And instead, what Anthony and Joe are doing is, you know, leveraging that audience trust that you get through content, right, in order for other business expansion.
So for instance, Fit Insider has a successful recruiting firm. It offers consulting services for in-depth market research and analysis, and it's also investing in businesses.
SoI think this is a really good approach if, if you have, you know, the right background for it, and just in our conversation, I can tell, you know, Anthony does.
He's a serial entrepreneur in this space, and, you know, I think it comes through in our conversation that he has a very clear vision of what Fit Insider can be, and it's not, quote-unquote, just a media brand at all.
So hope you enjoy this conversation. Anthony shares some great details about Fit Insider's unique approach, and I really enjoyed it, so I hope you will too. As always, would love your feedback.
You can do that a couple ways. One is just sending me an email. My email is bmorrissey@therebooting.com. It's all over all the newsletters I think usually, or you can just reply to one of those.
Also, leave a, leave a rating or review for this show wherever you get it. I always like to see them and, you know, I think it helps grow the show.
I'm still-- I still don't know anything about podcast growth, so if anyone, anyone has any tips on that, I mean, this is growing fine, but I really don't understand how the, the mechanics of, of growing podcasts even after doing them for so many years.
Anyway, here's my conversation with Anthony. [upbeat music] Awesome. Anthony, thank you so much for, for joining me today on the Rebooting show.
Yeah, excited to chat. Okay, so give us the, give us the background on Fit Insider. This is, this is a pandemic baby.
So first, I mean, your background, you know, you were, you were in the sort of fitness industry, right? You-- Is that correct? Yes. And you're also like an investor.
But give, give us the background and then how you ended up like with a media business that is now becoming more than a media business, but give us the background. Yeah. We've-- my brother and I own it together.
We've owned everything together, and we kinda have pretty much done anything you could do in the health and wellness space. Owning gyms, producing equipment, education, fitness products, technology.
We have done so many things, and I think that's also why we have a unique approach to media is 'cause we've actually been in the space that we talk about our entire careers.
But every company we've ever run, there was always a media component. It was very early on. It was like Thrillist days, Gary Vee's books were coming out, and it was like this content commerce model.
We always bought into content commerce, and this was super, super early on in, you know, twenty tens, two thousand and twelve, thirteen, when even when we were running our gyms, localized before there was any real social media, anything, especially where we started in Pittsburgh, it was always content commerce.
So we went that route, and then after our last company, we were sitting around during COVID, and it was no one talks about...
It started pre-COVID actually as a random just text group where there were-- we were going through some deals.
Joe and I were working on an investment and trying to sell our company, and a few people in the industry were like, "Oh, did you see this happened?" Or, "This company's gonna raise."
And it was when fitness and wellness and health wasn't nearly what it is today, even though it was only five years ago, and there wasn't that much investment dollars, and there wasn't that much going on, and a few people were talking about things.
And then it went from like twenty people in a text group to I started sending it out as a Gmail where I would just BCC people. Okay.
And then COVID happens, and then it's a BCC of like two hundred and fifty people, and then you started having to split it up because you could only send emails to so many people at a time as we got into the hundreds, and every week people were like, "Oh, put me on this list, put me on this list," or like, "Email me this thing."
So we, we- Wait, let me ask you this. So you started with a core of people who are in the industry, right? It was friends that I would just- Friends. 'Cause I loved the news side. Okay.
And I would just be like, "Hey, this company raised, this company did this," and it was me always just sending info to them like, "Hey, I think this is gonna happen. What do you think about this?" Yeah.
And, and were you attracting the kinds of people or, and were you able to tell if you were attracting the kinds of people that, you know, made it be like, "Hmm, there's something here."
There's, you know, that it's one thing if like, you know, random people are, are, are getting on the list, but it's another thing if, if those people are, you know, in the target segment.
I don't know if you had a target segment at the time, but people in- Well, that's what it was. It w- we didn't know at first, but it was just who we p- who we worked with because of our work in the industry. Yeah.
It was founders, execs in, in the market, and that's where like the Gmail came around, and as that started to grow, and then I think it was, you know, I'd say a couple months after COVID hit where, you know, Joe and I looked up and we're like, "We have five thousand people reading this email that we send out," and it's all industry people.
We've never promoted it or talked about it. There's not even a way to sign up. You had to like ask to sign up for it. And we were like, "Okay, we don't really know what we're doing, but..."
And i- it's a kind of a crazy time. At the same time, I had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. So like I was out health-wise, not really working.
Joe was doing his thing, and we were just like, "Okay, well, we're doing this," and it's kept me busy, kept him busy.
With everything going on, it was kinda fun, and we're like, "We don't know what this is gonna be," but when the CEOs of all the companies that are doing big things are reading something you're writing, you're like, "This is at least worth pursuing," 'cause it was just a once a week email.
Yeah. So let's talk about the, the industry, right? Yeah. Because like I wonder about the fitness industry, right? Because if you're in a gym, are you in the fitness industry or are you like... You're in gym owners.
Like I don't know. Yeah. How do the parts-- 'cause I think about like Skift, right? Where as I remember when, when Rafat was, was starting there, I was like, "Yeah, I don't know if there's like a travel industry."
I mean, airlines are in the airline industry. They don't consider themselves in the same industry. I mean, I mean, they are in like some kind of research report or something, but day to dayWhat is the sort of overlap?
Or is this like a series, or is this a bunch of different industries that sort of overlap but don't quite overlap? That's why we took off.
So the problem with our industry, fitness, and I should have never called it fit, 'cause it's well- Right... beyond fitness. Fitness- Oh, okay... is such a small sector of what we do.
But the fitness industry, especially if you look at, which we didn't know we were doing at the time, but like the B2B media side. Yeah.
It's been the same companies or copycats of those companies that do write about the same nonsense, pay to play, branded content, just bad media all around. Bunch of- Yeah... ads on the site, just not done well ever.
And I think that's why we took off, because it was, it was, yes, fit and fitness, but it was health, wellness, active lifestyle, recreation, nutrition, and this broad...
Anything that butts up against like payer provider healthcare, all the way through fitness and wellness and health. And if you look at that market, it's insanely massive.
The wellness market, the global wellness side of trillions and trillions of dollars. Yes, a gym owner is somebody that reads us, but it's also the person that owns 150, you know, Orange Theory franchises.
It's also the person that works at innovation at Kaiser Permanente. It's also the... You know, it's, it's so broad, especially now.
And that's, we were just good timing as well with the wave of COVID, where fitness and wellness and health and healthcare was just at the forefront of everything. Yeah.
Everyone's attention, working out at home, Peloton, all that stuff, and we were the only ones that had a perspective on it outside of some of these older brands that, like I said, were just publishing press releases for people- Yeah...
and rewriting things. So it just went from thousands and thousands of people every month and just kept growing organically. Okay.
So the white space you saw was that, one, and this is in a lot of B2B areas, like the, the white space starts [chuckles] sort of with the incumbents like sock. Like they just have a terrible experience. Yeah.
And like there's a whole bunch of different reasons, but it, it's a nearly like abusive relationship with the audience. Very service- Exactly...
oriented, a lot of regurgitation of press releases and doesn't even seem like they're trying a lot of times.
But then also it seems like what you're saying is there wasn't anyone taking a more of a holistic view of, of this space, right? Is that accurate? It was holistic and connected the dots between it all- Yeah...
which it is now, and now it's common, it's common sense and knowledge of what that is, and that's what everybody says. And then more importantly, it was not us writing news. It was what does it mean? Why does it matter?
Yeah. What's our take on it? And as operators and builders in the space, here's what I actually think this means. Yeah. And it's not saying, "Oh, Peloton's worth thousands of dollars."
It's us being like, "Peloton just did this. Here's what I think it means. What does it mean for you? Here's all the other investments that are going on. What should you be building?"
Connecting, you know, our input and our thoughts and our experience and strategy as well as news and information into, you could call it like creator stuff or however you wanna look at it. Sure.
But it was just, it was me, and the newsletter comes from my email and me, and it's not like, "Hey, we're a media company."
It's like, "Here's what I think is happening, and here's what's going on, and here's what you should know about it." Yeah. And that is tremendous, you know, leverage, right?
Because you have, you and your brother both have, you know, operator experience and investor experience that gives you...
And this is something we see across lots of different areas, that gives you a different perspective and honestly credibility that, you know, a journalist doesn't have at the end of the day, right? Mm-hmm.
If there, if it was someone- Yeah... who was aggregating content about the fitness industry, that's not gonna have the same cut through as someone who's been in it. Totally.
And it's not only our experience compared to the journalist, but it's also, we weren't monetizing their eyeballs and their attention in what they were giving us in any way. Our model was different.
So not only was our approach different- Yeah... in terms of what we were covering and why and our input, but then it was, "I'm not trying to get you to read this.
You, if you're gonna read it, it's gonna be valuable, and people will share and read and engage. But if you read it or don't read it, doesn't bother me at all." And we were only...
It was like, can we build the best possible content? If I was a founder, I've been a founder in this space my whole life, what would I wanna know about? What would I wanna read? And that's the lens we look at- Yeah...
for today too, and that's why people... I mean, we have like a feedback page on the site, like hundreds and hundreds of people talking about the brand and what we cover and what we do and the relationships we have.
It's because it's always the value, and I'm never gonna monetize our connection to them through garbage. Yeah. When did you dec- when did you decide that, when did you both decide, "Let's make this like a real business"?
Yeah. Honestly, not even until last year. Really? We didn't m- we didn't monetize it at all until we put our first ad. This is very unusual. This is, this is a very unusual approach. [chuckles] Yeah. Years. Years.
Three, two and a half- 'Cause you're doing a shit-... plus years... ton of stuff. [laughs] Like- Yeah, now we are. Now we are. Oh my God. But like, yeah. It was...
So we're lucky that we've built and sold some companies, built some big brands- Yeah. Yeah... done a lot of projects.
And that when we were doing this, it was very much, it was purely for the love of the game and the value and the relationships and because it was Joe and I's name and our va- and our brand.
Every day, every week, when tens of thousands of people leading the space and investing and building in the space would trust us, we built that trust over time, and we didn't have to monetize. So we were just doing it.
And it re- it was a lot of stuff, but in reality, you know, once a week newsletter, once a week podcast, built a jobs board, but it's, it's free.
We built these other platforms where they were free and valuable for the audience, and hired a few writers and, and kinda built some things.
But it was, it was end of 2022, early 2023, and we're like, "Oh, this is a business. Here's what we wanna do." But again, we didn't wanna be ads and, you know. It just...
th- we didn't wanna go typical model, so we started working on a different approach and, and building things around it and building this kind of- Yeah... flywheel that centered around the media.
And that's when as soon as we did that, it hit, and we're like, "Oh, this is insane."Yeah. What's really interesting that I find, 'cause I talk with a lot of people whose, whose backgrounds are in, in media.
You know, like I've been in media my whole life, right? But then I talk with people like you whose backgrounds are, are totally different, right?
And I think one of the refreshing things is you didn't have like a media playbook that you were just gonna run, right?
Like, if you had been like steeped in, I don't know, B2B media, let me tell you, you'd be doing a lot more webinars- [laughs]... and you'd be doing a lot more sponsored content.
You'd be, you know, you'd have a lot more ads and all that. But tell me about- Yeah... how you ended up thinking, because you didn't have that go-to playbook to fall back on, right?
But what did you take, say, from like your, your other businesses that informed the model that you guys are building now? Yeah.
It's al- we've always run businesses that revolved around content and just never media perspective. Yeah. And it was really, what we saw was we have the trust and attention of these people.
And to extract the monetary value from that relationship, it would have to be f- an, a webinar every day, an ad every e- like it would just...
And then it, it, it's always a race to the bottom of devaluing the product if you do it that way. And you see it across all platforms.
As every, every time you look on one of these sites, there's more Google ads, there's more sponsorships, there's more events they're doing that are pay to play or the sole purpose of running ads.
And that just wasn't our game, and it just didn't seem interesting to us. Like it, it, we know we're leaving money on the table even to this day for a lot of stuff. But- Mm... it was...
If you look at our market, in reality, the wellness and health and, and fitness market is behind from an investment perspective, from a talent perspective, from, uh, research in data and information.
It, it all changed very drastically. So we said, "Okay, how do we build those pillars around this market?"
Instead of we knew the media playbook and we went and talked and engaged with the media world, and I would rather do anything else than run a webinar my entire life. Okay. So it was very much like- I, I run a few.
They're not bad. Once you get in, once you get used to them, we call them online forums here at The Rebooting, okay? And- Yeah... I just [laughs] I try to...
So my, my approach is very different in that, in that I try to take the things that people are used to buying and doing and finding value in, and rather than trying to create something totally new, to basically say, "We're basically gonna do what you're comfortable with, but do it like, do it better and in a way- Mm-hmm...
that the value exchange is higher between the audience and, you know, what you get. You're gonna get more. Hopefully, the, the audience is also gonna get, get more value.
And I mean, my hope is that The Rebooting gets, [laughs] also gets some more value, too. But, you know, I think that there's an advantage to doing, to doing it totally differently.
So explain, explain to me how the flywheel works. Yeah. It wa- it goes back to the content is created in with the value of the founders and the builders and operators in mind. What do they need to hear or see?
And then at the same instance it was, well, what, what else do they need help with? Hiring, data, access, information, relationships, and connections. So it's like, how do we build those?
So it started with the jobs board. And, and obviously we do monetize our content. We have the typical newsletter sponsorships, typical podcast sponsorships.
We do other things like that, but we do it in a very high-cost, high-level way that is built to deliver value and lets us focus on few partnerships at a high level. And then outside of that, it's we have hiring.
One of the biggest areas for a lot of companies that are growing, it's, it's the problem is hiring. And, you know, a lot of people launch traditional jobs boards where you pay to post a job and that's the model.
Ours was the jobs board is free, and everyone can post, and there's thousands of jobs which now draws in almost 100,000 job seekers every month.
And then on top of that, we built a recruiting firm, an actual full service talent recruiting firm in that network. Because we're talking to these people, we now help place them. So we have the jobs board.
You can post things and can pay to post things there. But then on top of that, there's the recruiting.
So we have, you know, a very successful recruiting firm that sits on top of our job board and our candidate network and our platform that is, that we built and it was just a different model. And in my mind- Yeah...
it let us monetize it in a more s-specific and consistent and high growth way. The, the max out of where we could take that, that firm that sits on top of our platform for talent- Yeah...
is instantly much higher than I could ever see any jobs board getting- Yeah... and then us going from there.
So it's so funny you mention that because jobs boards have frustrated me for my entire career because they're like- Yes...
one of those things that everyone brings up and puts on a whiteboard, and they never make as much money as the trouble that they are. They just don't. Yep. You're going up against LinkedIn, you're going against...
And it's just, they're, it's really just difficult to make work. And at my last place, I, I saw all these people were coming to our events and getting jobs. I mean, they were going to get, get jobs.
And as hire, I was like, "We need a recruiting firm." Mm-hmm. "We need to do executive recruiting. Forget this jobs board stuff. Let's..." What do recruiters get? Like 15%, 20% of the first year? Depends.
15% to 25%, depending on the role- I mean-... and how you structure it and- That- It's- I like those, I like those numbers better than 200 bucks for a job post, I gotta say. Here was the problem.
We had like a, a more traditional media playbook we were running, and it started to conflict with would our sponsors or want, you know, their people being poached? Would...
Like, it started to conflict with the media playbook model. So it sort of didn't make sense 'cause you ended up protecting your, your core business.
So it's interesting- Which is why our media exists almost like a nonprofit, where it's the value, it's the product. You protect the product. And it ha- our group has a wall around it that makes our media, and that's all.
It, it's never for anyone other than, yes, we have sponsors, but it, it, it has no impact, and we don't take any-We don't engage with them in a way.
It's like if you're gonna buy a title sponsor spot on the newsletter podcast, this is what it is and how it is.
It's not like we're selling them relationships and these stacking, these packages and, you know, customer engagement and everything. Buy it or don't buy it, someone's gonna buy it.
We're sold out through half of-- all of our inventory for half of next year is sold out on all of our ad spots already. So- I gotta try this model. I do, [chuckles] I do totally different.
[laughs] So- This is not my experience at all. [laughs] And it's-- I think it really lends itself to the value and the trust that we have, and then the services we provide. It's 'cause we know the space.
Like the recruiting or like consulting is another division of what we do, and investing is the, another one.
With the consulting division, a lot of people put out reports, industry reports, and they're branded and co-branded and behind paywalls, and they're downloadable forms.
There's companies in our industry that do this in the scammiest way possible, where they put out a report which honestly half the time is stealing our content or other content that's written, put it in a thing, put it behind a, a e-email form, and then that email- It's lead gen...
goes to- I do some of this stuff... every sponsor on there. It's-- But it's done in such a bad way where they don't know they're getting lead gen and they don't- Oh, okay... know what they're getting. It, it's hidden.
It's always hidden. And so for us, we don't do that. We don't put out reports. We will eventually. They'll be free for everybody 'cause it's about the content, and there'll be no lead gen involved at all.
But what we do is the companies in our industry that need a deeper dive data, whether it be a fund or a company or a firm or an investor or startup, when they actually need true data and research information and first-party data, they come as a consulting project and hire us to do that very in-depth report with actual information that is truly valuable in a high-ticket way.
Yeah. So it's like having it... One client for us in that way is like having a report, you know, hundreds of sponsors on a report or a data membership with thousands of paying customers a year just with one partner.
Yeah. I mean, it's, it's funny 'cause you have to, you have to optimize to something and you sort of have to pick a lane to some degree. Mm. Right?
And to me, it's like really, it's fascinating, it's admirable is the sort of like lane you're taking is, you know, this really deep business insights and, you know, trying to solve for a lot of problems within the organization beyond, beyond just, you know, servicing, you know, basically being a sales enablement engine.
Because I think a lot of B2B- Yeah... it, it works, and I'm guilty. I'm not guilty of this, I'm, I'm proud of it.
But, you know, it basically works as sitting between a buy and a sell side and, and brokering between the two of them.
Now, I don't know, maybe the fitness industry doesn't have those dynamics 'cause like I was just talking with, I just did last week's podcast was with Adam White from Front Office Sports.
And you know, I've, I've been talking with Adam, you know, since really the beginning of, uh, Front Office. And you know, I was always being like, "Oh, you should go into B2B."
'Cause like, you know, I had my own playbook, right? [chuckles] I was like, "You should do all the B2B stuff."
And he's just like, "Yeah, there's not the same buy and a sell side that you have in, say, you know, the media- Business... marketing industry."
So he's like, "It doesn't really even necessarily make sense for, for me because, you know, there's only, whatever, 32 teams in the league and all of that."
Did that influence that or did you just, was your-- was this just more of like a conviction? No, that, I mean, that's, it exists. There's, there's buy and sell events.
There's-- It's all the same that you would think for- Yeah... anything else. The industry really has, especially I think fitness equipment alone, just gyms and fitness equipment. Mm-hmm.
That connecting piece is worth millions and millions of dollars. So it's just something that we personally didn't wanna do, and the conviction around long-term sustainable business that can't be devalued over time.
Scale- But these are, but these are also both services businesses that you're building. Yes. You know, I mean, so that is... it's a factor obviously. Obviously, you're an investor and you know that.
A lot of, a lot of media companies, and I think that's inevitable, are gonna be front ends to other businesses. And look- Yes... it's great if you're a front end to a, to a, a SaaS software business.
Yeah, I'd love to have a SaaS business. I would love to have 90% margins and, and that'd be wonderful. But the reality is I don't think many of those are gonna work. And so a lot of them end up being services businesses.
You know, for instance, my last company was, it was, it was an events company with, with a publishing arm, right? And you know, events have slightly different dynamics.
What I see a lot of times is, you know, people have different flavors of services businesses. Now, this kind of services business has way better dynamics than like a content marketing services business, that's for sure.
And I mean, events are part of what we have planned in the future and so are SaaS style businesses. So the...
that's where the investment arm comes in, and that's where us being in the position to invest, acquire, and partner with companies in a big way and have actual long-term ownership.
But again, it all, it all centers around protecting the content and the audience. We'll never jeopardize that.
But everything we do around that as a business in this almost holding company model where we do multiple things and own a number... I mean, we just launched a B2C company.
We just launched a B2C media brand called Well With Me. Yeah.
Because all of the advertisers and partners that would be involved in that from that audience who need to reach them are already partners and people that follow and engage with us.
So it only made sense to do something like that because it made the business that much easier and scalable over time.
And with the team that we have in place when it comes to content and hiring and consulting and others, those people all work for us. We have that, that team.
So when-- for us to be able to stand these projects up, it, it makes sense. And I think what you said about, you know, being the front end of a lot of companies, I see that.
And a lot of times the media either monetizes enough with a decent audience- Mm... to scale and then try to sell for a, you know, whatever multiple you, whether you think it's good or bad.
They sell for that multiple, and they go and sit somewhere, and it's a quick transaction. Or-Over time, they just scramble to, to get eyeballs and, and do this thing and launch multiple things.
And for us it was we want-- we're taking a very long term approach to this, and if we could own the infrastructure play for an industry with talent and media and investing and consulting and events and other things, what other things can we put on that infrastructure that we own that are valuable for that audience?
And we never wanna sell them something that's not truly valuable. Yeah.
And I think, I think one of the core decisions a lot of these kinds of, of niche businesses, media businesses need to make, it's kind of a basic one.
It's like, are you gonna go, are you gonna go deeper or broader, right? Mm-hmm. Are you gonna try to, you know, go the industry dive route?
Are you gonna try to have, you know, go fit inside or whatever, keep going into different areas, right? And that is a very media operator play and a lot of people wanna do it. And it, it can work, right? Like you...
Once you have a playbook in any business, you're gonna wanna use that playbook in, in other sort of sectors probably. And we are. Yeah. But like, I guess you can try to do both, right? Or do you wanna go deeper?
Do you wanna provide more services to your existing, that fits within your existing vertical, right? Yeah. Well, so as an example, we acquired a company called Well To Do out of Europe, UK. Yeah, there's geographic too.
That's a different way of like scaling [laughs]. Geographic. And we're looking at acquiring other newsletters. So the, the good thing about our sector is health and wellness broadly is so much. Yeah.
We could do a newsletter about each individual category. Yeah.
Honestly, we're, we're struggling with do we launch a second or third one because there's just so much information, especially now that we acquired the international brand and rolled it under the Fit Insider thing, and we have to...
Just an investment section on international and US space alone takes up half the newsletter nowadays.
So scaling the production, scaling the categories, going niche in some areas, it's a massive base, and we wanna do all of that with that playbook and, and do more. And we take a ton from Industry Dive.
They've done a lot. We built a press release platform.
Because we don't do any branded content, because we don't do anything, we built a, a press release platform that I think is, is, I mean, has done super, super well for us from a business perspective.
Events is something we're doing mu- uh, uh, a lot of. We started with smaller events and we're scaling from there.
And I mentioned the B2C Media is really just taking our playbook and reversing it and saying, "We have these people that are all, that would be partners. Let's, let's work with them and sell them through to Wellworthy."
So we're doing that and always keeping our eye open and what can we learn from all of these different places that are doing media in their way.
But for us it was, it was always we don't want the end product to be the actual media itself. Yeah. How big is your team? Full-time across everything, 10. I mean, you do, you guys do a lot of stuff.
How do you decide what's like, what's too much? Because, I mean, you're running a recruiting agency. Yeah. You're running like an investment firm. Mm-hmm. You, you're, you're doing events. You've got a consumer play.
Uh, what am I missing? The consulting arm. Mm-hmm. And then you go, oh, the, then you have a media business too, by the way. We have a media business and a bunch of other stuff we haven't announced yet.
[laughs] And a bunch of other stuff we haven't gotten to yet. Yeah, yeah. The good thing about us taking the time and building the flywheel- I feel very lazy right now, Anthony [laughs]. No.
I'm lucky that I have a k- I have a team of superstars that all work for us, but also we did, we've built previous companies where we had hundreds of employees and all that. Okay.
This model was hire absolute killers that can run entire divisions and crush it on their own. Use a lot of contractors. Our podcast editing, our social, our, anything we're doing is, is agencies and contractors.
So that's why our full-time team is small. But also it's the flywheel.
It was orchestrated so that, you know, every client we have, and we have a, a pretty great list on the talent side alone, which is only a handful of months old.
There was, there's no sales process, there's no account maintenance, there's no client maintenance. They're people we engage with and work with, and they know us and they trust us. Mm-hmm.
And we have this in the, the recruiting model for us. We have a tens of thousand people that opted into a candidate database. We have our newsletter audience that is data enriched and we know who's there.
We have my LinkedIn audience, which is 50,000 plus people and deep connections. We have a database of people that we know are killers that we can go to and recruit to.
And our brand carries, so when we try to hire somebody, they respond to us very fast. So we're able to do it in better ways. Same thing with consulting, same thing with investing.
Our, our flywheel of discovering companies, it's we, we find a topic, we write about a topic, and we cover companies that we see. And companies that are in that category that we didn't cover reach out.
People that wanna build in that category reach out. People that wanna operate within this. Yeah.
So it all plays off and, and eliminates a lot of waste, and is a true flywheel through the way that we've orchestrated it, so that there's just less people needed, and we rely on a ton of contractors and, and agencies.
Yeah. I mean, that's what I always... It's like the audience database is, is everything in these businesses- Yeah... to me. I was trying to say this like CRM is the new CMS. I don't know.
I was trying to have some sort of corny saying. But I just see in the business- It is...
you have to co- the job of content is to build loyalty and habit, and then you have to get the information to be able to segment your audience into these, these high value buckets that you then, then your job is to activate it.
Look, if you have a lead generation content marketing arm, right, it's to activate it on behalf of your sponsors to, to generate leads.
It's either the sort of what I call CRM level leads of doing downloads and all the rest of the stuff, or it's in person getting the right people in a room, you know, that that's, that's what you're, you're end up doing.
But it, it seems what you end up doing is sort of taking a similar approach, but you're, you're standing up these different business lines where the content is almost leads for your, your own businesses. Yes.
Sounds- It's that. It's like when you see a lot of, like prime examples of newsletters where people get dedicated sends. Obviously, everyone's familiar with that concept. Yeah. I know.
I would never, ever in a million years- Partner email... you would have to pay me a, a million dollars to send a dedicated email.
I got a, I got an email about a partner email the other day, and I was just like, you know, it's really hard to turn... Maybe it's just me. I don't like to turn down moneyI gotta be honest, as a c- I know, I get it...
and I'm like, I just hit send, and I'm like, I totally get, I totally get that decision 'cause I'm like, I, I think of the, you know, making money as, you know, you gotta work for it.
[laughs] I hate to tell people out there. But I'm like, this is really not much work. But I, yeah, it's, you know- It's crazy... I understand that. It's easy work. It...
I get why people do it, and then I also get why people buy email lists and grow their thing and then get to this real level.
But it, it just, for me, that audience that we have, we've never s- tried to grow the Fit audience. It's grown organically to where it's at. Yeah. And that audience, to send them an email that would have...
When they, when email comes from my personal email address, it comes from me. And then- Yeah... and the way that it goes out to have them- There's so much leverage in that, but then there's so much...
It's like, ah, damn, it's under my name. [laughs] I can't do this. [laughs] It's crazy. But in the end, like, they're getting email from me.
I would never email someone el- email them about something else to someone else because then when I email them about something- I know...
truly that is involved in the business, the value and the interaction and the trust that we have. And it's just our approach.
And I, I don't put anyone down for doing it, but just how Joe and I approach the industry, we're like, "I would never take that."
And it's because the bigger we see as the bigger opportunity, and it's, it's why we don't even consider ourselves the media as much as it is we are trying to truly elevate the industry, build things, create things, help companies creating it, and be in- perceived as the individuals driving this forward versus the ads and the other stuff- Yeah...
that are doing it. Just like the creators do, but the creators are always consumer-facing. Right. But I mean, you're sort of flipping what you did before on its head, right?
I mean, you talked about content and commerce, and I was gonna, like, jump in 'cause it was, like, more commerce and content. Because to me, I'm, I'm more of a believer of commerce and content than content and commerce.
Meaning, like, if you have a relationship with someone as a content provider, all of a sudden, you know, selling them a product, I think is, is a leap in a lot of cases.
But as a commerce company, right, you can use content to create tremendous leverage, you know, negative CAC or whatever you wanna call it.
But I, you know, I think what you're doing now, it seems like it's you started with aggregating this audience and then, and then standing up the various services around, around the audience that you're, you're, you end up getting, you know, all their data and stuff like this to, to be able to power those other businesses.
That's it. And for us, too, I keep going back to it and it sounds kinda cheesy, but I- the- if we- as long as you protect that person and that audience and that value of content- Yeah... like, no matter how...
If someone's a m- million-dollar-a-year client on Talent, I'd never jeopardize the, the broader audience and, and do anything. We never... The, the, the areas never touch, and I think that's also super critical.
Because then eventually everything becomes an arm of one or the other, where one's promoting one or the other. But for us, the media's always the value, the, the audience- Yeah... and content.
And if we deliver them true value, and then I can personally build those relationships. It's exhausting. Like, I'm on calls all day, every day. I'm in... I'm traveling all the time.
I'm meeting people and hanging out, and we're always doing it. We always say we never have an ask. There is never an ask. Like, we want something for you, whatever. If you wanna sponsor, cool, come to us.
If you wanna be a client, cool, come to us.
Being that, like, cool person that can battle this value and do all this stuff for free, it's exhausting and it takes a long time, and you have to be in the position that we were to be able to take that timeline.
But in the end, it worked out luckily for us. But- Yeah... it's not like we, we didn't come up with some crazy business model. No. We just didn't make money for a long time and built a brand for a long time. That's it.
Yeah. Well, the best salespeople are not like sellers really. So let's talk numbers a little bit. Like, what, how big is the, how big is the newsletter? We are just o- just about 100,000 subscribers right now. Okay.
And what's the- Yeah... breakdown of the, the... Like, how do you bucket out your revenue? Do you do it between, like, media revenue and then the different, you know, consulting, recruiting?
And, like, how do you break out the, the revenue when you look at the business? Yeah. The... It all exists. We don't do separate entities. It's all under one holdco, and everyone just has their own separate P&L.
So, I mean- Oh, there's separate P&Ls. Interesting. Yeah. But it, it's, it's done under one company technically. I mean, media is 5% of our business. Interesting. And the- It's interesting because, like, how...
'Cause I... My follow-up question is like, okay, but go on. Give me the other, like, s- The media's 5%, and I think, yeah, we'll probably, we're probably over 100,000 subscribers now. But we clean the list.
We give it to people. We don't promote it. And we t- I know open rate, whether you believe it or not, is valuable, but our range is 68% to 75%- Yeah... from what we can track. So it's, like, super engaged.
The people are there. The, the opens per person is insanely high. The response rate, the trust there. The, the podcast is, is big. It's a, it's a big audience there. And we also have... We... It's not about...
The goal is to get them onto our subscriber list, but, like, my LinkedIn in- re- is, has a massive reach and engagement, and more people now tell me they're reading my stuff on LinkedIn than they are even in, commenting on the podcast or newsletter, and it kinda goes through waves.
But the, the, the only way we monetize the media is we have a title sponsor in every newsletter and a title sponsor in every podcast, and then we have press release platform. Yeah. That's it.
So it's, it's, there's not that many. And you could charge a lot for them, and we do, but there's only, there's a very limited inventory- Well, you create scarcity... and they sell out really fast. Right?
I mean, the, the biggest, the biggest problem of media when it met the internet was it lost scarcity, and we all experience the end result of that when we go on a webpage because there's limited cost to putting an extra ad unit on a webpage.
There's limited cost to firing off another autoplay video on a webpage. There's frankly no cost when someone asks me to send that, quote-unquote, "partner email." I was like, "Oh." Yeah.
[laughs] This is straight to the bottom line. I like those margins. But, you know, you have to protect, you gotta protect the asset. Yeah. What, but what is the biggest?
Is, is consulting the biggest, or is, or is it- It's tied.
It's a, it's a three-way tie between consulting, recruiting and-We, we don't talk about them, and we won't say their names, but other own companies that we oper- other own products that we own that we sell to this audience broadly.
And then I'd say- You have a lot going on. And then the investing side is pretty good. There's, you know- Yeah... fees on investing returns. But that's hard to, it's, that's hard to, like, understand. I don't know.
I mean, that's hard to know if it's... I wonder how that's gonna go, 'cause, you know, there was a moment during the pandemic when it was, like, a trendy newsletter operator kinda thing. Yeah.
You know, I, I started- 100%. "We're doing a rolling fund," [laughs] like, was sort of like... And I don't know. I'm a little older, so I was just like, "Uh." No, we didn't do that. We did a traditional fund.
There's fees, there's value there, but also it's what we- we've dedicated a lot of that money towards, we call it almost like a co-founder studio. We're creating products. Like Wellworthy is a prime example. Yeah.
We're creating products and companies that we can promote that are valuable to our audience and to other people.
There, there's no real conflict involved, and the revenue, Wellworthy is already profitable and generating a ton of revenue, and that's a product in a company that we own- Yeah... through the whole go.
So it's all within this ecosystem. And I mean, we are gonna grow media. Events are a big piece of that. We've done some. We have a lot more coming. We think obviously that's a media value there, and that's a product.
Yeah. And we tried to do growth before, and we had, you know, the, the one of the top newsletter growth agencies, and you spend these dollars, you get these people. But as we were looking, they...
I'd rather get, you know, I know you have Front Office Sports on. Yeah. They've had that playbook. Millions of- Yeah... subscribers 'cause they grow so fast.
And we've tried that, but in the end it's not the right person. There's no value. It doesn't really matter. It depends on the model. I'd rather have 100,000 people that- Yeah...
trust us dearly than I would have a million people. And we are gonna invest in growth, but- I know...
we know we're willing to pay $35, $40 for a subscriber if it's the right person, because in the end we could monetize them in different ways versus, you know, trying to get that spend to, like, the agency was like, "Oh, well we only-" Yeah...
"spent a dollar to get this person." It's, well- Yeah, I know... it's, I don't know who that is, and I don't know what value they d- they generate for us. You know what? It's true.
It's, it's kinda like, I, I always think like it's, it's fighting the last war. A lot of generals fight the last war. It's like the old saw.
And you know, everyone wants to be Milk Road or something like this, where you, like, explode in, like, 18 months and then you have an exit.
And the reality is the same examples are be- still being used, like, years later, right? Mm-hmm. Because, like, media businesses are, like, long term. They take, they take a while.
Growth, I've never seen media or, or growth of any kind, whether it's from social media, SEO, these kind of, like, co-reg, rebranded co-reg as recommendations or boosts or whatever you wanna call it, that ends up being meaningful and lasting, depending on your model.
If you're an arbitrage model, absolutely. But arbitrage, you... The window closes on, on arbitrage is my understanding [laughs] of it. Yes. So I don't know. I mean, you can make a lot of money o- off of arbitrage.
I think George Soros did. But I don't, I'm not an expert at arb, so I just, I choose not to, to necessarily do that.
But as you said, you gotta sequence it, and when you have a model where it's about high value of your audience, I mean, I approach mine totally differently, but, you know, the LTV on my, on the subscriber list of the rebooting is really high compared to these, these far larger, at least, you know, I guess if you look at it, just the top line of, like, s- number of subscribers, you know.
Because they've been, they've been growth hacked at the end of the day. And, you know- And we don't even know what our LTV is, honestly, because if you...
It's a weird thing, but, you know, one client on consulting that derived from the media is now a, you know- Yeah... multiple six-figure client. I, I don't know how to value that client [laughs] in- Right. Yeah...
in terms of, like, LTV and... We know what our media division does, and honestly, it does well. It, it's, I think we will be at a, you know, close to... Next year we'll do seven figure on the media side.
And I think as that scales from the advertising channels and especially the events not even baked in there, I believe that the product and the value's there.
But- So wait, you're gonna do a million dollars next year just in media? Yeah, that's our goal. We've, we just started- Nice... ramping up media. You know, especially the press release platform is super valuable.
Still curated, though. We say no to a high percentage of press releases because people wanna use it to promote things that we don't think are press release value.
So we, we literally said, "Can we build a, what would be our own business, you know, Cision Newswire type thing? But it has to be valuable content." Yeah. "People can post on it." And to that- Yeah...
it's generated in, you know, in that way. It, it's funny that... And Joe and I kick ourselves a lot. We're like, "We should just do this in a much easier way and, and triple the revenue in certain areas."
But I think- There's no easy way. Honestly... for us it was long-term val- no, I'm... We agree, and it's- Yeah... funny now where we're at. But early on we said that.
But I think for us it's, it's the long-term value of what we wanna create, and we think it's, honestly, for our industry, and this is gonna sound bad, but, like, it's...
There, at one point in the media side, there were two or three brands that were there for 10, 20, 30 years, depending on which one, and now there's just copycats of those since they closed.
And between where the market and investment and industry's going- Mm-hmm...
and the money in it versus these other players going this way and what they create from a media events value perspective, everybody sees it and knows it and talks about it, and is openly like, "We don't like this.
We don't wanna pay for these events. We don't wanna advertise on this media. We know it's, it's bad."
We see that and we're like, "Oh, if we can keep on path and do this the right way, the value and the revenue and the, the profit is really there." But it, it's hard to- Mm-hmm...
to leave money on the table short term as we chase this long-term thing- Yeah... in that mind. We just met, but will you tell me how much revenue the company has? I will not, but- Come on.
[laughs] We, uh- You gave me this, this seven figures thing with- I- without me even asking... Yeah, that's, that's the media side, and it's, you know, with the newsletters, podcasts, and, and press releases, and-...
stuff that we do there. But as an overall business, I mean, we have big ambitions. Y- if you look at, just look at the, some of the revenue from, that's out there from, like, recruiting firms alone.
The, the, the- Yeah... the long-term potential is absolutely insane. And then when we look at the flywheel, we talk to some of these other recruiting firms or, and we'll probably acquire some.
Our goal is to now go and leverage the, the whole kind of thing and start acquiring other businesses because I think our flywheel works better.
If you look at some recruiting firms, all they do is just send mass emails and mass- I know...
messages and LinkedIn messages, and we're like, the hire, the, the one thing that Joe wrote, my brother, was the, in the copy for our deck for the recruiting.
It was, "Your, your future candidate already reads our newsletter, already attends our events, already listens to our podcast, and already applied to our ca- our candidate portal."
So it's like, it's already done, and if we could do that in a big way. So won't say them, but it, it's super exciting, and honestly, it's just us finding...
Like, our head of talent, Brian, is, is a, is an absolute killer, and our head of services in, in consulting, Courtney, she's unbelievable.
And all we do is find really talented people, and we're like, "Hey, if we can get you customers easier and build really good trust and make it so your li- your work-life balance is better, but we can build a, what is supposedly a better version of what you did previously, would you come work for us?"
And, and that's really our- Yeah... our kinda cheat code. So last thing is, is how do you decide the investment level into the media business when it's smaller, right?
'Cause I think one of the, one of the things I saw at my last company, it, uh, that I was at was, you know, events were such an overwhelming part of the business. And the publishing was...
I think if you looked at the publishing as, like, a business line, it lost money, right? Because the, the events were, you know, such high margin.
And, you know, then we built, like, a content studio, and then it, like... You know, but it was still... You know, if you were to look at the business, you'd be like, "Oh, don't, don't invest here. Invest in- Mm-hmm...
in the events bu- events. In- invest in these, like, shoulder businesses, if you will, off of the content."
Because if you're just looking at it from a pure spreadsheet level, this stuff is not driving the overall business.
And I think it takes a little bit of just feel for the business of being like, "No, but the, that's creating, that's creating value that's being realized i- in another business in some ways."
For us, because the media existed well before any revenue in where it was, we...
And because we re- relied heavily on agencies in terms of the adjacent cost that goes into it, it's just the editorial team, and we'll happily invest in, in them because we don't really, we don't spend money on any marketing or growth.
More numbers don't matter to us, so it's just create the best content and make sure it lives out there. It's not that expensive. Yeah. And we're happy to invest in growth. We wanna find more people. We wanna build it.
But, you know, if there is growth in cost, it will come from a second newsletter or this acquisition, which will then in turn grow more revenue.
So I think we're lucky that because we're not chasing certain metrics and goals from the media side, we don't have to spend money in certain areas. So it's, it's just not that expensive. Plus, we live in Pittsburgh.
Our team is here in Pittsburgh. Mm. Pittsburgh is a small, affordable city with amazing talent.
And, you know, I think it costs a lot less than obviously operating in a lot of the major cities that people are b- are building companies in. Yeah. I, I assume you're profitable. Yeah. Okay.
[laughs] I was like, it, it adds up to be profitable. I had to make sure, you know? Yeah.
Which is great to talk to people who are running profitable media businesses because sometimes it's the idea that there's not, you know, they're, they're not out there, right?
And I feel like a lot of that is just about general, and a lot of times it, it goes into, like, news and, like, hard news, and that is not the media industry.
There's different flavors of media companies, and this is a, a different type of one. But I still-- to me, like, media is of such a large space, and there are different business models.
You don't-- you can be a media company without a media business model, right? At the end of the day. Well, that's the whole thing for us.
I think we are, in its truest form, a media company, but we're working to focus actually just on the media from the product, and that's our true product- Yeah... is the media.
Everything else is just value on top of that. But-- and I think we still can learn a lot from traditional media companies. And like you were talking about webinars and other things.
Like, I'm trying to listen to your content, read your content, go to industry media events, like the media operators and others, so I can kinda get ingrained- Yeah...
'cause we don't come from the world of here's B2B publishing and here's how you do this or here's how you do that.
But I think it's really just weighing the cost benefit of both and saying, like, "We can make money this way, or we can add value."
And, and I think of it more as I think the media industry always does- doesn't value this much, as much. Like, every other company's paying you for your attention. You have that attention.
Just respect it and treat it in a different way and, like, try to see the true value in it. If they're willing to pay you for this, or same thing with goes to the events, there has to be a value within it. Just don't...
And then everybody just race-- at least from what we see, especially in our industry, they race to the bottom of like, "Can I milk as many dollars out of that?" Yeah.
We're just trying to do it differently and build their-- I guarantee probably next year, depending on growth and acquisitions and what we try to do, maybe we won't be profitable.
But we're trying to build this much bigger ship. It is for the long haul of life. We look at the industry as we know it's worth trillions of dollars. How much more value can we build? And that's where we're going.
It's not like short-term profit or short-term growth. Yeah. Nothing else really matters but that. Cool. Anthony, thank you so much for doing this. This, uh, it's a fascinating model. Congrats on the success. Thanks.
Really good to chat. Appreciate it. [outro music]