Lessons Learned from 10+ Years of Building in B2B Media

I’ve always enjoyed how media entrepreneurs like Rafat Ali and Jessica Lessin have shared lessons as they’ve built media brands — I find them extremely helpful and refreshing, to be honest.

I’m approaching one year since we sold Aging Media, and I was trying to reflect a bit and wondered what I would try to pass along — especially as I’ve had dozens of calls with other entrepreneurs building in media the last year and tried to help.

I won’t do nearly as well as they have but here are a few things I’ve learned as a scrappy, bootstrapped b2b media entrepreneur, hope these are helpful:

• Digital advertising isn’t broken, your audience just isn’t that valuable.
• Scaling b2b media to $20–100M in revenue requires a repeatable process and execution playbook for multiple markets- the best operating models can be executed repeatedly. Same edit strategy and same marketing services/event platform in any market — launch, get to break even and launch a new one.
• Define what success looks like to your teams as early and clearly as possible. It’s natural that this will evolve and the bar should get higher.
• Expertise is expensive — acquire it by paying a premium for best-in-market editors with years of experience or be willing to invest time and money to develop new talent. Eventually, you need both, and a playbook for teaching new hires how to cover complex markets is critical for long-term success. Very few understand this and how hard it is.
• Define what you’ll be the best at in your market — use it to your advantage because you can’t do it all well.
• Paid audience growth is an asset to use to your advantage to grow and maintain audiences. It’s also a crutch for brands with shitty editorial teams and strategies. The best media companies are best in class at both.
• Be specialized and expensive — creating a high-value edit product in big markets attracts highly monetizable audiences. Why charge a $10cpm to reach the masses when you could charge $400cpm and not have to chase traffic and clicks.
• It’s amazing how many multimillion dollar media brands/events we started with a blank Google doc, create more of them, even if they never launch.
• Don’t go half hearted into events — new events need to connect quickly with your audience or they go stale and die. Go big and take the risk, write that check.
• Dont’ be afraid of established or well known competitors in your markets — you can win with a better edit product, execution and cost structure. They should FEAR YOU.
• Embrace being the disruptor but learn to respect the older b2b media brands — they got so much right (data/events), steal the good things and disrupt their business.
• Find other b2b media entrepreneurs building and share what works and doesn’t, it will 10x how fast you can go. I was so lucky to have found the Verticals Collective (Skift/Industry Dive/CB Insights/Breaking Media/Smartbrief/Many More), life-changing in so many ways.