Sean Griffey on the Growth of Industry Dive

Jacob Cohen Donnelly: Industry Dive personifies vertical business media and should honestly be a case study at any journalism school and how to launch new verticals that complement each other. Can you talk about the germination of the idea of Industry Dive and how you guys got started?

Sean Griffey: Sure. My co-founders Eli Dickinson, Ryan Willumson, and I have worked together for some time and we were at a company before this in B2B media in the vertical spaces. As we were there, we were looking and noticing that there were opportunities, honestly, to do it slightly differently and better. If you go back to 2011 and 2012, it was a time when mobile was disrupting media companies. The way we worked and I always joke around that if you remember the knockback then was Facebook was going public and people were wondering if, could Facebook make money on mobile. That was the knock on it when it went public, could they figure out a way to make money using a phone?

What we thought when we launched this business was that there’s an opportunity to create new media properties that are built on three things, one, mobile which was going to be one of our differentiators. Two was going to be design, and when you start something new, one of the things that we realized is that great design and user experiences could give you a way to make three guys look much bigger. Then the third thing we wanted to was just great content. Focus on the core of what makes media companies successful for hundreds of years now which is producing something that’s compelling and insightful and essential to their audiences. That’s why we launched Industry Dive thinking of those three things.

Jacob: It’s interesting because in this very short time that I’ve had the podcast, my first guest was Brian at Exits & Outcomes, Arsalan is going to be a guest of mine I believe next week or the week after, and then there’s you, Ryan, and Eli. I jokingly refer to you all as the FierceMarkets mafia. Why do you think FierceMarkets wound up creating so many independent media operators in such a short period of time?

Sean: It’s a good question. I’ve wondered and honestly, it’s something that I consider really fantastic. If I look back on Industry Dive in 10 years, and it’s been a launchpad for successful companies, I will really have viewed us as a success. I think part of it is the type of people that were attracted to FierceMarkets at the time and that we recruited there which is we liked people who were entrepreneurial in nature. As a small company, you need people who want to innovate, want to build, and who enjoy it. We certainly got those and you see it with Arsalan and Brian and even a couple of folks that haven’t gone out on their own but are doing entrepreneurial type things at different organizations.

Maurice Bakley’s Education Week and Stephen Wellman is at HIMSS now but has been around. There’s a legacy of people from FierceMarkets that really enjoyed creating, enjoyed innovating, and then wanted to do it on their own. I think the last thing I’d say on that is FierceMarkets really understood digital media well and we did it in a different way than other people were. I think people realized that you could replicate that ethos and how we thought to attract audiences and monetize in numbers of different markets, so people are out there doing it on their own which is fantastic.

Jacob: Thinking about when you, Ryan, and Eli leave in FierceMarkets and you launch Industry Dive, Eli is your CTO so he built the site and you and Ryan are more on the business side. What appears to be lacking there is somebody on the editorial side. Can you walk through what the logic was in starting a company with no one on the editorial side because that seems to run counter to how many media companies start?

Sean: I think it was more of a byproduct that the three of us are very, very good. Ryan’s incredible at the revenue and as you said, Eli is great from a technology standpoint. I certainly enjoyed the audience pieces but then filling in the business operations blocking and tackling sides of it. The fourth piece is the editorial. That was a huge gap of ours from the start. I think it was just we didn’t have the resources and we didn’t know someone that we thought would be a founder with us to do it.

It’s always something that we’ve fought to overcome. It’s certainly something that we’ve hired some great people and we’ve had three good editors-in-chief here over the time. A guy named Brian Warmoth who created content, was a content director, first came in and set the foundation. Randy Lilleston, who is a media veteran has been at some premier media organizations came in and really gave us a foundation for great journalism, then Davide Savenije is our editor-in-chief now. You’re right that we’ve launched without it and it was a weakness.

Jacob: Industry Dive is a brand of, I believe it’s 20 different franchises that each have their own brand but then back up to the Industry Dive super brand. What is the process you all go through when trying to identify a new vertical to launch?

Sean: I think the most important thing for anyone launching in the media, when you think about markets and verticals is one of the things you have to understand is how are you going to monetize. There’s some markets that fit our model which we are unapologetically marketing-driven for the vast majority of our revenue comes from marketers. We have to pick markets that fit a model like that and not all of them will. Some markets are better served as subscription.

For what we do, we look for ones that fit our model and ad supported. There’s a couple of things that make a good market for us. One, we look for industries that are disrupted by technology or regulation. I think there’s two things there. One, and the most important one is there’s a need to follow the news. People’s jobs and their companies and their careers change on a dime and they need to keep up with what’s going on. The second is that regulations, technology disruption creates some dynamism, dynamic industries. We look for something that makes the news and what we’re covering is going to be compelling. That it’s not a sleepy industry.

We look for industries with high capital spend. The executives there have to be buyers and they have to control large budgets. I think one of the things that people in media make a mistake of is they launch into industries and they try to do an ad-supported business but their target audience really doesn’t control much that many dollars to buy things. They find themselves with a market that’s not supported by advertising because advertisers don’t want to reach people who weren’t buying things which sounds simple but it’s something that people overlook all the time.

Then I think the other things that we look for in an industry, I’ve always looked for large trade shows and events and associations as a proxy for markets. A trade show, if there’s a 50,000-person trade show, those 50,000 people are all readers. If there’s 500 exhibitors there, those 500 exhibitors are potential advertisers. It proves to us there’s a market and then it’s an established market. For us at Industry Dive, we like big markets where there’s lots of dollars. We’re not afraid of competitors because media is an execution game.

I think Jacob, we’ve talked about this before either online or in-person, there’s no secrets in what we’re doing. You just have to do it better every day than someone else. We’re not afraid to try to do that. Those are what we do with the markets. I think as we launch new ones now, one of the things that we increasingly look at is how tangential is the market that we’re going into to where we are today. That in the sense of is there an overlapping Venn diagram between potential advertisers and maybe even potential readers? If there are, you can launch into the next vertical even quicker.

We were in the food industry as one of our early publications writing for people manufacturing food, so the hinges of the world, all of those folks. Then we started going into grocery and there were advertisers that wanted to reach both and we were in retail and some of those retail advertisers would want to be in retail and in groceries. Having those overlaps just make it a little bit quicker to get running both from an audience and a monetization standpoint.

Jacob: Let’s talk a little bit about audience because I think one of the things that you and I both agree on that a lot of these solo creators or passionate creators don’t quite understand is that the hardest part of this business is that audience development. When you’re launching a new vertical, do you have an out-of-the-box audience development strategy that you execute or is it each vertical requires its own really unique strategy to grow that audience?

Sean: Well, I think we do have a playbook that we apply to all of the verticals, and we do have standard sorts of channels and techniques and tricks that we provide in terms of where do we go to look for an audience, how do we try to attract them, how do we convert them, how do we measure those things? They don’t work equally in every industry, and so you have to be willing and able to adapt what you’re doing to specific markets. That’s just often on the behaviors of the people within those markets.

Jacob: Is there any particular channel that you have found that you would be willing to share that is particularly good for the businesses that you run?

Sean: Well, I certainly talk about them, but you’re right in the first part of this a bit ago, there is no magic answer to this. If growing an audience in a real audience, and that’s, I say real audience to differentiate it from traffic, it’s easy to get traffic. It’s easy to get names. It’s really hard to build an audience. If it was easy to build an audience, media would be a much, much easier industry but it would be even less valuable than it is today. You want hard audiences to build because that’s what makes your media property valuable. If it was easy, your media property is not super valuable to start with. Lemme say that and then answer your question about the channels.

They change all the time, to be honest. What worked one day doesn’t necessarily work the next day, and part of that is because circumstances and platforms and technology changes, other parts of it is because when marketers figure something out, they hammer it until they’ve destroyed every ounce of value out of it, which is how digital marketers work. The secret to this is you have to be in all channels and you have to be experimenting in all channels. Clearly, for us, the number one thing we do is produce a lot of content every day and do it for a long period of time.

That benefits us in two ways. One, you as someone with an SEO background, that helps from an SEO standpoint. We’re starting to win in the topics we cover cause we’ve been here for eight years now, writing about it daily. The second thing is, it helps with the referral. The two biggest sources of our traffic or our audience growth, I should say, not traffic, come from referrals of our existing audiences and then conversions on our stories. That said, we also spend real time, effort, and money on different channels, albeit social, be it email marketing on our own partnerships with trade shows and associations. You name it, we’re there.

As I said a second ago, what works today won’t work tomorrow. The thing that really helped us eight years ago, LinkedIn was one of them. We built LinkedIn groups and got into LinkedIn groups quite a bit in 2012, and 2013. They drove really targeted audiences then. They don’t now, just because of how LinkedIn has prioritized groups versus other parts of their platform. Those things change. They disappear and you just have to be ready to pounce on the good ones when you find them.

Jacob: I want to understand how the systems that you have at the business work together, because supporting 20-plus websites could really overwhelm any operator without having a real structure in place. Can you walk through the various systems that power the business from the CMS to your ESP and the ad server and how each of those tools work together to help you power that business?

Sean: It’s a good question. I think, let me give one piece, and then I’ll dig into the systems that we have. When we launched this, we knew we wanted to be in multiple markets. Media for us and value for us scale was something different than what other people viewed. I think when we launched, it was in the heyday of VC-supported media companies, and scale was getting, as many people as possible under your site. They may be of marginal value but if you get enough of them, maybe they’ll be valuable in the whole, which seems silly if you think about it. Something that’s not valuable, you do a whole bunch of times and hope that it’s valuable.

For us, what we were trying to build was take very valuable audiences and then scale that. Scale then means do it multiple times. That meant multiple markets. It meant that we had to have a foundation that was easy and scalable and that was repeatable. If you look at our products and our websites and our media kits, they’re all very much the same. The underlying technology is the same. What we sell to marketers is the same which is a secret in its own right, but we do that so we can make it easy. The only thing that changes is the market knowledge and insight and the editorial content that sits on top. That’s the background of what we’re trying to do.

What that means is, we built our own CMS, Django Python that Eli created which is at the foundation of what we do right now. I think the biggest thing that we did and most recently was put in a CDP, and I say recently, a couple of years ago, and we’re using Lytics, but something like Omeda is a great product for this for publishers now. We put in a CDP to monitor our audience. The quarterback, our audience experience between our ESP, our ad server, which we’re just using the Google, and our audience databases.

We’ve got some legacy, warehouse systems that we use but the CDP sits in the middle of it, which allows us to really segment our audiences, and define high-value segments for each of our markets, and then see what they’re doing not only in those platforms, email, and the web and webinars and the rest but also across our verticals and track those. I don’t know if that answers fully the question, but those are the main pieces that we have. Obviously, there’s other technologies that we have on there. We use Lead Square for some of our, lead capture programs on behalf of audiences and webinar platforms, and you name it. There’s other technologies, Trickle win, but those are the big ones. ESP web Server, Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and then Lytics.

Jacob: That makes a lot of sense. I do know that when COVID hit, a lot of publishers started to look at their business, and then with third-party cookies going away, publishers are now starting to recognize that they really need to understand their data, their users a lot better. I’ve been hearing from a lot more publishers that they are starting to invest in that whole CDP. It’s good to know which one you guys use. I’m sure it helps other publishers.

Sean: I think there’s certainly ways to do it like we’ve done, which is you get a CDP and you connected to all the technologies. I think everyone does that on some whole piece. I think if I was looking at this over again, I would start with the first thing that’s probably most important for media companies now, which is the email service provider.

Because that is for most of us it’s the database of record. Then I would build off of that and I said, Linux does a good job of that. ODA is built, is an ESP that is built the CDP functionality among other things on top of it. I think there’re great they’re a great provider. If you want rock-solid database management with, the technologies that you’re getting from two or three different people, not to sound like an advertisement for those guys.

Jacob: Well, it’s not as if publishers have much money to spend anyway.

Sean: Exactly.

Jacob: I think that’s one of the things you take very much pride in, that publishers are a little bit cheap.

Sean: We’re either cheap or disciplined. It’s one of the two.

Jacob: I prefer disciplined. [laughs] Talking about ads, because you guys are unapologetically 100% advertising, can you walk through the various ad products that you offer and how you come up with pricing for those various line items?

Sean: I will say this, I no longer say that we’re ad-supported, I say we’re marketing-supported, and I think there’s a real difference there. The thing that we’re not is we’re not running programmatic ads and we don’t have ad exchanges up there. We’re almost 90% of the time, we’re selling directly to marketers in the industries. Those are some of the biggest marketers out there, but also middle market companies and even smaller startups within our spaces.

I’m a strong believer that with the way data’s going, programmatic and third-party ad models are troubled in general but I think from a media standpoint, if you stop and think of what we as a media industry is done over time, which is said, “Hey, I’m going to outsource all of my revenue to this programmatic, faceless, sort of machine that’s going to come drive value and that means I don’t really need as many sales teams as I used to, and I don’t have to have as deep a relationship and I don’t hear exactly from my customers as much and I don’t know actually what’s happening on the sites or the bidding of the rest.” If you say it that way, that’s a crazy business model.

It’s not something you would set up to do but I think over time, drip by drip, we’ve gotten to this point where media companies got further and further away from the marketers who were buying from them. What we’ve done is we’ve tried to get super close to them and have real conversations with them, really understand what their problems are, be consultative in what we’re doing to meet those needs. To answer your question before I went on a rant there, we have a number of products and we talk about from brand to demand and how we serve marketers across the funnel of their needs.

I think when we started it was very easy to see us as companies that help with lead generation because that’s one of the things we’re really good at and that’s one of the things our products and email and digital can do very well, is you can target specific audiences and you can convert them in a measurable way. We do that very well and we have that to be from content-based conversions or virtual events like webinars or podcasts or different things that we can connect those folks and try to capture leads.

Over time, we have had products, we’ve moved more towards products that serve the whole funnel and help clients not just capture leads, but tell very complex stories about their products and solutions and how it solves people’s needs and so today, our content studio is one of the biggest parts of our business. Even before we did an acquisition in July where we acquired a content studio but even before that, the content studio for us was one of our fastest growing parts of the business and that is really helping marketers create custom content to reach niche audiences in a way that’s authentic, incredible.

When you look at the products, we’re doing things from helping them write their own white papers, helping them create content hubs on their sites for specific audiences, to hosting online events for them, to packaging our best content around specific topics and gating it for lead gen conversion and driving real leads to people. We’re there but what we’re not is programmatic and the banner ads on our website, I like the money we get from it, but it’s about 5% of our revenue. It’s not what we’re doing from a marketing or ad-supported business.

Jacob: I want to build a little bit on the marketing business that you’ve run because part of what makes your business so interesting is you’re able to really provide a very focused approach to the specific people that these marketers want to talk to. In one of our recent Twitter exchanges, we discussed a scenario where I was saying that publishers would be able to tell an advertiser not only how many people saw their ad, but what type of person saw their ad and the content of the content their ad was seen against, which is a mouthful to say. You said this isn’t hard to do today, but that it’s hard to do that at scale for the operations team.

Can you talk about how you’ve overcome that sort of operations scaling burden?

Sean: Well, candidly, I’m not sure we fully have. That’s the piece, and what’s really hard is, if every one of your advertiser has a slightly different version of what their target audience is, then you have to build sort of profiles that track those people. The first thing though that we have done, both from a marketing and an editorial standpoint is, we have built segments within our CDP of what are our target audience. In utility dive, which is electric utility industry publication, one of them, we’ll say, “Okay, we care about utility execs at these types of companies.”

Then we can say, “Well, we want people who care about solar, we want people who care about load management. We want people who care about storage and batteries.” and we can break those segments in break those groups into different segments and then track their behaviors based on that. The hard part is getting the data to build those segments and you can do it in a couple of different ways. The first one and most important one is to get them to register or sign up for the email and collect demographics.

What we want to do is we want to know who you are, what your company is, company type, job title, and your job function so that we can put you in the most basic buckets of what we’re doing, of who you are and then we can layer on behavior on, “Okay, what do you care about?” It’s very easy, though. The first thing is very easy. If you sign up for Utility Dive, then we say, ‘Well, this guy probably cares about electric utility.” but for some people, they may sign up for Healthcare Dive and they might sign up for Biopharma Dive. Then we say like, ‘Well, do they care more about drugs or they care more about hospitals and hospital management?” Then we start to watch behaviors.

We can put you into buckets, that are set up that track those. The hard part is if an advertiser comes in and says, “No, no, no, I don’t want that. I want this.” and it’s not a segment that we’ve pulled up and so you have to create those segments for them. Then the other hard part is when you’ve got 20 publications and you’ve got hundreds of advertisers just actually pulling the reports and giving it back to them in a way that makes sense and shows the value is hard and so we’re looking to build systems to do that, but right now it’s a real time-consuming piece and we don’t do it all the time, to be honest. We can’t do that all the time but for some types of campaigns, we might.

Jacob: With 20 verticals and obviously a central back office that supports all those, how large is the team these days?

Sean: Company-wise, we’re about 220 employees right now full-time.

Jacob: What is the breakdown of the team across editorial, sales, audience development, operations?

Sean: Editorial, full-time editorial, we’re, I would say 80 people right now. Which is our biggest department. Sales is probably 30 to 40 folks and I’m spitballing here, so someone’s going to write this down, and then the numbers aren’t going to add up to 220 and I’m going to hear about it. Sales is our next biggest one. Our content studio where we have strategists that help create and execute high-end contents, that’s probably now with the acquisition we did in July, our third biggest or probably even bigger than our sales organization but somewhere right around there.

We have an ad operations team that helps ads and helps some of this client piece that you’re talking about. That’s four or five folks. We have an ad ops team that’s 10, say.

Then we probably have a 10-person design team, engineers and accountants, and HR round out the rest, and then marketing, I totally miss them, which does audience development our own marketing. Then if there’s a lead generation campaign for a client, our marketing lead promo team that falls under, marketing handles it. That happened because what we realized is, the best online marketers in our company were in our audience development team.

As we were doing campaigns for clients, we just wanted to build off the excellence they had so we’ve folded all online lead generation and digital campaigns into a marketing department, which includes stuff for ourselves and stuff for our clients.

Jacob: Growing to 220 somewhat employees, what have been some things that you’ve learned scaling to that many employees? You started the company with obviously just you and the two co-founders, and now there are hundreds of you so what have been some learnings you’ve found there?

Sean: There’s all kinds of them across it and we make mistakes all the time with what we’re doing. I think our very first hire was audience development and I think what we realized was you got to have a great product before you can even do some of that stuff and so we really focus more on product and the content. I have never regretted hiring a designer in the long run, which is something going back to the FierceMarkets days, we probably didn’t value enough. I think one of the things that I’ve really appreciated is design really matters and user experience really matters. I’ve never regretted hiring someone there.

We’ve always hired sales reps before we think we need them, and it’s one of the things that’s helped keep us growing. They’re looking for money all the time, and they give you great feedback loops when they find something that would be easier for them to sell. They have a tendency to tell you that, and that’s a signal of, “Hey, there’s dollars here. The sales reps really want this product.” Having those folks there pushing us has really been good. Then the third, the biggest department we have is the editorial department and content. It’s a reason for that, right? It’s something that I think people overlooked for a while there in media companies.

I think that’s changed now, particularly as we start talking– More and more people talk about niche audiences and they talk about the value of knowing a market deeply and economies of creators who know a specific area. I think that’s swung back but there was a stretch there five years ago where the secret to media was figuring out how Facebook was going to share your story. The up worthies of the worlds were the darlings in there. Having an editorial department didn’t really matter as much as having viral aggregators. I think that has changed for the better, back for the better. We do that.

The other thing I would say on there is there’s got to be a balance between all of it. If you find yourself all editorial, then you’re probably missing the boat. If you find yourself all sales, you’re probably missing the boat. You got to think about how it’s balanced across the business.

Jacob: You’ve mentioned a couple of times the NewsCred acquisition. Can you walk through how that deal happened? Did you approach them? Did they come to you? How does this acquisition help Industry Dive grow, either faster or deeper with your partners?

Sean: Yes. It was a deal where we came together. We have a chairman who has a long-standing relationship with Shafqat Islam, who’s the CEO over there. Shafqat and I have gone back online, you know, friends, Twitter friends, more than real-life friends, but we go back a while as well. Our chairman knew that they were pivoting their company towards the software platform that they were building. NewsCred’s had a history in content marketing. They built a really phenomenal content studio and they built a software platform to support it. What they realized was that they viewed the future of their company as the software and the software platform, and they were spending less time on the content studio.

It made sense as we were looking to build out our studio and to double down on it, they were looking to spend resources and energy away from theirs. We found each other off the market through our chairman, the go-between mutual connection right as the pandemic was starting. We had one in-person meeting in late February in New York and then we never saw each other since then. There’s still people on the team that I’ve not met in person to date. We spent all summer trying to figure out if there was a good deal here and getting the deal done and close in July.

For us, the part of your question you talked about was, the rationale for us is we have world-class audiences, and we reach them in ways that help marketers and our clients tell the stories, and I said the complex stories and provide insights and go from the brand to demand. As we grow as a company, we’re looking to add capabilities on top of these audiences. The secret of media is you build audiences and then you leverage those audiences to make money in different ways. People have done that from- ESPN started as a TV station and then launched magazines and websites, and they do events. Martha Stewart, I think started– I don’t know how she started but then has magazines and goods and stores and the rest. You find different ways to do it.

When we looked at our audience and said, “What capabilities can we do to build on what we’ve done, which is great audiences, relationships with marketers, how do we add on top of that and content studios, something that we could apply across all of the markets?” The NewsCred, one, had just incredible talent and deep relationships and were leaders in this space. Ones that have tackled it for years now, not some one thing just stood up today. We were attracted by that.

We were attracted by, “What is the content studio of content marketing, sort of 1.0 was a decade ago, what does 2.0 look like?” What we realized is niche media companies have the ingredients to do something incredibly special when it comes to content studios. That’s why it combined. What makes it special, I think, if you take really great content expertise in a content studio, marketing strategy, and expertise with the ability to create great content, you have a good content studio and a lot of people can do that, right? Ad agencies have stood that up and they say that they can do that.

Then if you take it and you add on real insights into the targets of your clients, and I mean data, about what do your target audiences care about, and we can certainly do that. We talked about the pieces that we have. Example I always give to that is, we could tell people when COVID wasn’t the most important topic that CFOs were reading about. We can point to the week that they stopped reading about COVID first and they read about something else. If you say that to marketers, like, “Hey, now’s the time to change your campaigns from COVID working from home to budgeting or whatever.” If you want to reach those CFOs, that’s really powerful. A media organization that focuses on data can do that.

Then finally, the thing that only a media organization can do is combine that with distribution. An ad agency can create great content. Maybe they can go to third parties and try to figure out data about the audience, but it won’t be as good as what a media company can do. Then if you want to distribute the content you’ve created, you’ve got to find someone else to do that, and only a media company can do that. For us, our view of a content studio that is the world-class of tomorrow is combining those things, world-class marketing strategy, world-class content creation, data insights built on first-party data, and then distribution to highly targeted valuable audiences.

Those are the four things we’re trying to bring together with the acquisition and Industry Dive. I think if we can do it right, it’s incredibly powerful.

Jacob: Speaking of another acquisition, and I’m going to butcher this name, but Falfurrias also acquired a majority of Industry Dive. Can you talk through how that deal happened? Again, did they approach you? Did you seek them out? How does having this partner allow you guys to grow quicker?

Sean: Yes. It’s Falfurrias Capital Partners. They’re a private equity firm down in North Carolina. It was an interesting story. We weren’t really looking to sell part of the business. We weren’t looking to do a transaction at all. In fact, I was prepping to get our financial house in order so that we could raise money on our own so that if there was opportunity or recession or something happened, we could be inquisitive and that we could start to go on the hunt of buying companies in the downturn, which we thought would be a way to build a great company. We were prepared to do that on our own.

Last summer, I started getting messages on LinkedIn and just blind emails from these people of Falfurrias and the chairman, Al Jutkowitz, who’s been in the industry for a while, and

I just was ignoring him, to be honest, because I didn’t know who they were and I didn’t think it was going to be worth our time. If you’ve been building a company for a while, you know that the venture capitalist and private equity folks ping you all the time, and it’s usually an analyst who’s two years out of school and he’s trying to fill out a spreadsheet about your company so that they can just have data and information on pipeline if they ever need it and want it. That’s really what I thought this was.

It wasn’t until a mutual connection started reaching out to me saying, “Hey, you should talk to these guys at Falfurrias. They’re really trying to get in touch with you. They have an interesting thesis.” that I paid attention. We took their call and I met them for a coffee and they laid out a vision of a media company that was eerily similar to what we were doing to the point where they showed me a slide of here’s what we’re trying to build. It looked exactly like a slide I had been showing internally to our employees for six, seven years now.

I had always viewed myself as a contrarian in the media space, and that we were trying to do things that other people said couldn’t be done or shouldn’t be done. The fact that they came with this view that matched mine really got my attention. I grabbed Eli and Ryan and said, “We’ve got to talk with these guys.” What we realized was that the things we wanted to do with a business would’ve been incredibly hard on our own without having a financial backer like Falfurrias, that brings more gravitas from the financial standpoint than a bootstrap media company would bring on our own. We just thought that our business was at the point where it deserved more.

I think a lot of people make mistakes by raising money too early in media companies’ cycles, and that you should be bootstrapped and disciplined to do it. There comes a time where the business deserves to grow faster, and it felt like we were there when the time came. We did a deal where they bought a majority stake in the business. We still retain a good chunk of it, but they’re the majority owners. We’ve been off to the races since, and it’s been fantastic, to be honest with you. We’ve got a great partner and they are incredibly fair but incredibly sharp, and they do real work on our behalf and they help us do things.

I don’t think the deal with NewsCred certainly would not have closed without either backing, but also, the experience that they bring to doing deals like this. We’re just been incredibly lucky with who we picked and how it’s worked out.

Jacob: Industry Dive is a marketing-supported media business. It’s completely free on every single vertical, but subscriptions are all the rage these days. Events before COVID were all the rage. Two questions on this. First, how have you guys stayed so disciplined on sticking to that thesis of being a marketing-driven media business? Second, do you ever look at what you’ve built and the quality of the content and question whether there is a subscription or post-COVID, a future events component to the business?

Sean: Well, I think how we’ve been disciplined is sticking with it’s an easy answer. One is we’ve tried to be really disciplined. Two, I think we know we’re really good at digital audiences, and monetizing digital audiences. For us, the opportunity, we always see more opportunities. We’re not done with 20 markets right now. We’ll be in more coming forward. Cybersecurity launches in October, and we’ll have more in Q1 of 2021. We’re always going to do that because there’s still a lot out there. There’s still real opportunity out there. I do think we have a subscription business here.

I think honestly, we probably would’ve done acquisitions in the event space if it hadn’t been for COVID at this point. We were in deep talks with some events that I think would’ve fit nicely in our portfolio event companies. There may be a day when that comes. I think there’s things there that we can do. Subscription’s something that I’m always tempted by on some level. I also think there are real opportunities now that this time and place are affording. I’ve talked a little bit about anyone who talks, I say that I think the event industry is in their newspaper moment where I’ve always said, “Craigslist came and cleaved off a huge part of the newspaper business and it never went away.”

I think virtual is going to find a way to take one or two of the reasons why people go to live events and cleave it off. I’m not sure what it is. I’ve been toying with models in my head and different things, but I think there’s a way to do virtual events and not the, “Hey, let’s take our physical event and set it up so it’s exactly the same online.” There’s new ways to tackle that. I think peer-to-peer right now is my leading thesis of, can you take peer groups? I don’t know about you, but I go to some events because the people I really care about and I exchange ideas with and give me feedback and advice, often go to those events. We use them as a way to get together socially, but as a way to share ideas.

That, to me, is often just as important or more important than the content of the event itself. It’s the convening of those folks. Can we do things with tight-knit virtual peer groups in a corporate executive board model online that takes away what some of the events are? I don’t know, but I see a world where we start to experiment with that. We start to experiment with events virtually and then build into in-person as well. For us, can we walk and chew gum at the same time because there’s still a ton of opportunity in the things we know in front of us? One of the reasons we’re not done is we’ve been disciplined not to get distracted or not to lose sight of what we’re good at. We’re going to have to be very careful about how we set this up if we really want to tackle these opportunities.

Jacob: Over the next three years, how many more verticals do you think Industry Dive will have, and will the various modes of monetization be enhanced with other things or will it still look very similar to what it is today?

Sean: Well, I think they’ll definitely be enhanced. We’re in 20 markets now. There’s 20 more that I like. I don’t think we can honestly launch more than two or three a year just for the effort that it takes to get it up and going. If we’re going to do it organically, we’re probably looking nine new ones at the max, but I also don’t think we’re done with acquisitions. I think there’s ways to get into markets today that we may really like that fit our model that also bring new capabilities to us. I would hope and expect that we can do some of those, either in addition to or instead of launching some of those.

In terms of revenue mix, the mix will always change and there’ll be new products in there. Some of it audience focused but some of it tapping new budgets in the corporations that we get money from today, and those could be– Like I said earlier, we started getting lead gen budgets from big companies, then we started getting their branding and content marketing dollars. I think there’s an entire different pocket of budgets and PR departments in these companies, and you can spend and tap into those budgets. We are doing more new things in terms of podcasts and video and those types and virtual events and webinars. We’re doing a number of those today. If you consider those different types of revenue than what we have, then I certainly expect those to grow too.

Jacob: Last two questions. We already touched a little bit on hiring the audience development person before having the product was probably a mistake. What is another mistake that you’ve made either as an individual or as an organization that you wish you hadn’t? What were some lessons you learned from that?

Sean: I think there’s different times in my career, I don’t say ours, mine, where we’ve had the wrong person in a role, either culturally or from a capability standpoint that we thought it would be too hard or disruptive to make a change. That’s always been an anchor on the business that you don’t necessarily see in time. For us, one person, one of the women who worked in our company said to me one time said, “Yes, this person’s fine, but the rest of the team deserves better.” I really took that to heart as a mistake that I’ve made, which is I’ve worried about short-term issues from a personal standpoint but also in other standpoint, at the expense of long-term.

I think we’ve gotten much, much better about making decisions with a further and further extended timeline and not being worried about next year’s revenue and the impact that that’s going to happen but worry about what the company’s going to look like seven years and knowing that when you get the right person in a role, the whole company [unintelligible 00:51:08] and takes off. I think that’s something that really when I was a younger entrepreneur and manager, maybe I didn’t appreciate as much.

Jacob: What is some advice that you would give someone thinking about launching their own vertical media company?

Sean: Make sure you have a plan for data. It is one of the things that you and you alone can control and own. In all of the biggest companies out there, it’s what makes them valuable. We should take a lesson from that. What makes Google valuable? What makes Facebook valuable? What makes Amazon valuable? It’s all of the data that they’ve accumulated over time. If you think you’re too small to care about that, I think you’re making a mistake. You’ll never regret having data that you can build off of and support. I have a plan for that even if you think it’s not important because subscriptions are going to drive your revenue and the rest, it is important.

It’s going to be more and more important and it’s going to be the things that even if you don’t want to monetize the data or monetize with it, it’s going to tell you whether your customers care about who you are and what you’re doing. I think too few people think about that and they choose platforms that maybe don’t give them enough of that data or they choose not to set things up or care about it, care about it. You don’t have to do a lot with it for years, but if you get the foundation right from the beginning you’re going to save yourself a lot of time, effort, headache in the future.