Arsalan Arif on Loving What He Does at Endpoints News
Jacob: According to your subscription page, you launched Endpoint News in 2016. How did you find your way to launch in a biopharma publication?
Arsalan: Well, it comes from my past, and I was at FierceMarkets before this, and I was the publisher for the Life Sciences Vertical there, and that’s where I met my partner now, my co-founder, John Carroll. It was there that I got into life sciences, actually, and that’s how I learned this industry and actually learned a lot of what I do now. That’s how I got into it.
Jacob: So your background prior to Fierce had nothing to do with life sciences, or were you like a biology major or anything like that?
Arsalan: Nope. AP biology was my worst subject in school. I said no, absolutely no.
Jacob: I want to spend a second talking about Fierce because the very first guest of the AMO podcast ever was Brian at Exits & Outcomes. I had Sean from Industry Dive on the show. He started that company with Ryan and Eli, and then there’s you. The one thing you all have in common is that you spent time working at FierceMarkets, actually around the same time, and then went on to launch your own companies afterwards. Some might say that this is a FierceMarkets mafia, if we think of it similarly to the PayPal Mafia. Why do you think Fierce wound up creating so many independent media operators?
Arsalan: A lot of the credit goes to Sean Griffey, the co-founder of Industry Dive, he’s a good friend, but really, more importantly, a really good mentor. He came into this, the founder of that company came in and found that he brought Sean in a little bit before I joined Fierce. Brian was already there, and Brian was actually in a different vertical, he was a wireless reporter, writing for Fiercewireless. Actually, even though we had nothing to do with that vertical, Brian and I actually covered the launch of that first iPhone together, even though I was in life sciences. Either way, a lot of the credit goes to Sean Griffey, because there was a good business sense at Fierce.
At a media company, essentially, it’s a business, and that’s what we learned over there. Frankly, Sean was brought in over there to institute a business and a process in a way. I can speak to my experience, Brian could speak to his but to mine, when I met Sean, I was as really an entrepreneur, looking for something, and really, he came in and I didn’t have that kind of training of here’s how to run a P&L, here’s how to do this.
I did feel like I knew a lot about news, I knew I could rely on my partner, John Carroll to help me with that kind of stuff, but what Sean taught me was really how to run a media business. I think, a lot of that, we did that over many years, and we grew that thing together. He and Ryan Willumson and Eli Dickinson they went on to found Industry Dive, John Carroll and I went on to found Endpoints News. Frankly, a lot of that just came from some of that basic blocking and tackling and building a business and making sure that there’s, frankly enough money in the bank to run a media company. To fund one’s ambitions and to actually run a business. Really, I thank, Sean, for that.
Jacob: There are multitude of media companies that cover the biopharma space, Sean’s got his own with Biopharma Dive, you’ve got Stat News, which covers it, and up in Boston. There are so many different publications that do it. What is Endpoints angle or perspective on the industry that makes you guys unique?
Arsalan: We’re covering for the core biopharma audience day in and day out. If you work in this industry, you work in, let’s say, manufacturing, you’re in a biopharma manufacturing, you do cell and gene therapies, or even you manufacture small molecules. You manufacture the stuff that you and I buy at CVS, when we have a cold or Afrin or something like that. If you want to stay on top of your industry, on a day-in and day-out basis, you want to know what your competitors are doing. You want to know what incidents have happened. You want to know what the hot market is. You want to know that analysis. That’s where you’re going to find it at Endpoint stand.
Sometimes our stories are not sexy, I’d say but it’s information, and it’s news. That’s what we’re looking to deliver in all of these industries, and we’ve identified some key industries and some verticals within the life sciences and biopharma which we just think are key and actually amendable to be served by this daily or weekly news product that we’re really good at putting out. All of those ones that you mentioned, like Stat News, I’m a big fan, I love Stat News, we link to it, it’s a very important organization, won a really great award, I really want to congratulate them, and they do great work, and so does Biopharma Dive.
We have a place there too, and some of those stories that we’re going to do, they may not do, sometimes we’re going to cover some of the same stories over there, but day in and day out. We’re the journeyman going out there and the journeywoman putting out that content every single day for our core audience.
Jacob: I want to jump right into the business side of things, because this is what a media operator is all about. To start, let’s discuss your subscription business. On your business model page, which I think is one of the most transparent pages I’ve seen any media company put up. You say that enterprise subscriptions are the most important way to support your business. Your model is unique, because you charge $1,000 per company to get unlimited seats to Endpoint News, and that doesn’t matter if there’s 10 people at the company, or 1000 people at the company. Can you talk about the logic behind this strategy because it is fundamentally unique compared to most other media companies?
Arsalan: It’s unique. Certainly, the first thing I want to say about that is that if there’s companies hearing this and they say, “Hey, I want a subscription,” I would run and go buy one of those right now because we may not be offering it for much longer, so there’s that. We have some important hiring news, I can’t talk about it just yet, but we have some great hiring news coming soon, and I think we’ll always have a place. The logic behind that comes from the fact that if you are a company, I want to try to make all of our information or basic news or news product. I want to make that as accessible as possible for as many people as possible always. We have a basic news product in which it doesn’t cost anything.
I’d say 75% to 90% of our content on a daily basis is free basic, doesn’t require anything. Even that paywall content, that extra sort of stuff, I still want to make it pretty accessible, particularly to companies. I want to make that discovery at a Pfizer and Novartis at these big companies, which of course, at this price point, we have acquired a few companies who’ve joined. I want to make the discovery of our product and the discovery of our news product as freely as accessible as possible to everyone at these companies. That’s the logic behind this.
We’ve had a lot of success with that, but that’s not to say that there wouldn’t be products in the future, which would have other added benefits, which would cost more and be more in line with your proceeds or that kind of model. Really, it’s out of a desire to make our news as accessible as possible. Some of it does require a cost, but we think it’s a cost that just about every single company can afford.
Jacob: Yes, $1,000 is not that much money to get your team access to this news. For operators that are listening if they were curious about offering a similar type of structure. When analyzing a market, how large of a market do you think has to exist for that to work? Is it 1,000 companies, 10,000 companies? Because if you think about it, 1,000 companies paying $1,000 is equal to a million dollars in revenue. In your opinion, how big does the market from a company number perspective have to be remit for this to be a viable model?
Arsalan: It’s not a viable model unless you also have a significant advertising business, which we do. Our advertising business right now is much larger than our subscription business. Though, you’re right, as you quoted that type of revenue for us, though, again, this is a media company. This is the type of stuff you learned it’s a little bit different than other kinds of company. Right now for us that subscription revenue is more important to me on a long-term basis to me for the health of my company in our company than the advertising revenue is.
The advertising revenue is only as good as what we’re delivering, are we delivering the proper brand impressions, are we delivering the right next to their ads, we’re delivering leads. All that kind of stuff they’re looking for that kind of advertising, but with the subscription is are they paying for our content? Do they value our content? It may be at a different price point but if I see that product selling like hotcakes and I see the right companies buying it, lots of companies buying it, then I know it’s winning. Back to your question of what kind of thing I think it’s worked for us.
Also, the reason we did it is, essentially, other companies may come in and just say, “Hey, we’re going to bring Pico in or other kind of software.” They may bring in member for or whatever you may use, they all have their pros and cons but they may not have that kind of option built in. For us at Endpoints, just because of my background, I like to code, I like to program. I’m not great at it but it was just one of those things that I was able to do a little bit in our company’s formation to get this stuff and that’s what me and my team was able to code very cheaply and quickly and in a way that worked along with our vision.
Other companies may not have that where their team may come back and say, “Hey, here’s a model and here’s how it works and this other thing is crazy to do that.” Well, yes, I understand, I’ve had a lot of people telling me that it’s actually crazy what we do and they might be right, actually.
Jacob: You said that the ad business generates more revenue than a subscription business? Let’s talk about that for a little bit. What are the products that you’re offering your clients and how do you think about pricing those products?
Arsalan: Well, we price them– Okay, what do we sell? Essentially, we sell branding, we will sell brand opportunities next to our premium properties which will be our website and our newsletter. Those are our two things, our email newsletter and our website in which you can get prime opportunities and those are limited so we don’t slice and dice those beyond our top-level skew. That would be our main endpoints addition or endpoints pharma, or endpoints marketing RX. You can buy a brand impressions there, and you’re going to buy it all or nothing at that point and so that’s generally a brand play.
We’re selling lead generation opportunities, we’re selling those through webinars, we’re selling those through virtual events, we’re selling those through email blasts. Those are what we’re selling but we also look at our inventory and we create artificial inventory. We actually limit it and just say there’s a certain point in which we will not send any more emails to our subscribers even if it’s a $25,000 contract that an agency will just give to us at the last second or something. There’s a certain amount of guardrails that is actually built into the product itself that actually prevents access.
Because we’re independent we actually don’t have any investors or anyone to actually say that we shouldn’t be doing that kind of thing, essentially. Those are the things that we will sell just in terms of rates and space conversation that people will call us up. We’ll also sell through our studio, essentially, if people want to come to us and just say, “Hey, we really want to be with Endpoints, we like your brand. We want to reach this audience and we have some ideas but we don’t know how, or we just don’t have– We’re at 70% help us bring it to 100%.”
There’s that kind of conversation, we have a great studio team that will essentially sell them the space and then sell them obviously the services on top of that. Now our events businesses which actually is just coming back, that’s also essentially part of our advertising business, what we would consider and all that’s coming back. All of that is a bigger piece of the pie right now than our subscriptions business.
Jacob: Yes, and I want to talk about the events business in a few minutes. Biopharma is an interesting industry, what type of companies are actually advertising? If your readers work at biopharma companies, who was trying to sell to the biopharma companies? Who is the advertiser exactly? Is it Pfizer or is it somebody else entirely.
Arsalan: Well, Pfizer is a client, certainly, because Pfizer has to hire cell and gene therapy scientists, and that’s probably some of the hottest jobs. If you can get that kind of job, that’s pretty good gig right now [chuckles]. Certainly, they will do that but that’s not the primary advertising target, exactly you’re right. For example, if you’re not familiar with the biotech industry, I guess it would be akin to the fox cons of the industry who want to advertise to the IP holders who are the biopharma companies who essentially read us. They will be the companies that run clinical trials, they’ll be the companies that manufacture all of the materials.
It will be materials that will be for commercialization, the stuff that we buy at Walgreens and CVS and the stuff that gets prescribed to us and the stuff that gets administered to us at hospitals. Also, all of the drug material that is produced in clinical trials as well. There’s a lot of that very complex type of work that goes into a very limited number of doses so that cost per goods over there as you can imagine, insanely high for something like that. Actually, it’s a very lucrative market.
Sometimes in some of these markets, you’ll have 8 or 10 giant companies who will just constantly be vying for mindshare and attention and essentially be one giant saying, “No, we’re the biggest,” and then a couple years later, “No, we’re the biggest.” If we can be at the top end of the market, generally, there’ll be a good place for that type of brand advertising.
Jacob: I want to go back to something you said, which is that you create artificial supply and you’ll decide not to send another email, even though the agency can be dangling 25,000, you’re like, “No, we’re not going to do it.” Obviously, as the founder or as the co-founder of the business you can say that. What are the processes that you’ve put in place? What are the systems that you’ve put in place? My talk to a lot of people in B2B, they get very addicted to that email blast. It’s just one more email blast because in other words, it’s like cashing checks, it’s so easy. What other systems you’ve put in place to make sure that you’re not overwhelming your audience?
Arsalan: We have a great client success team that actually has heard the message and is actually empowered to say no to our sales team. I guess that’s the beautiful thing about running a truly independent media business is that. Of course, everyone likes money, Jacob, everyone listening to this podcast probably likes money. I have been at companies in which that’s right, exactly, like cashing that check. Of course, we were faced with that exact thing this week, this issue exactly, and so it’s so fresh in my mind how we actually solve this because essentially, it all starts from our yearly goal.
Are we on pace to hit it? We’ve got a great CFO, they’re telling us are we going to hit it or not? It starts on that confidence, first, are we out of plan? Are we hitting plan? Are we ahead of plan? Automatically, your mindset as a founder, as someone who’s trying to protect the long-term interests of the business but also not trying to mess up people’s bonuses and trying to mess up a long line of implications as a business owner and as a publisher that you have to take into consideration too, of course.
I just can’t all say, “It’s all highfalutin, no, we turn down blast, look how great we are, I’m like the Pope.” No, it starts from that realization first. If we’re out playing, we’re hitting that and I’m already in a mood, and everyone’s already geared towards someone coming and saying that– Again, I want to say if it’s 25,000, it’s just easy deal and we can go to another client and it’s just like an airline, it’s like, “Hey, can we move to this date, we’ll bump you up to first class, we’ll give you some extra cookies, we’ll do something, and we’ll really make it up to you.” Sometimes we’re able to make that work but, yes, it does come from that.
Now if we’re behind plan, we’re doing that kind of thing and someone’s going to dangle $25,000, well, I haven’t been in that situation here at this company just yet so maybe we’ll have another podcast when that situation arises.
Jacob: Well, I hope that situation doesn’t arise. Let’s talk a little bit now about how the advertising and subscription businesses work and support each other because I write about this all the time, there’s been a lot of dogma tweeted about or and talked about how it’s subscriptions or advertising but most mature operators understand it’s both. How do these two particular business models work together?
Arsalan: How do they work together? I guess you’d have to ask me more questions. I don’t know how they don’t work together. When John and I started the company, John asked me– I was in charge of revenue and he was in charge of content, we would both work with each other very closely but essentially, that’s the breakdown. I told him, “When we’re going to start the company we will not going to go for paid subscriptions,” in 2016. I told him, “We are going to start with advertising,” because that’s what I knew from [unintelligible 00:20:24]. That’s where I had my relationships, and it was very few it was just John and myself, our CTO, Igor and my wife Shehla.
It was the four of us working full-time when we started. I said that I didn’t know how to do it any other way other than call my advertising context that I had and say, “Hey, we’re doing this thing and let’s get started,” and that’s how we did it. I started realizing that, “No, this really is–” Essentially, it started when we had one of our readers email John and I and just say, “Hey, I would pay you not to get this email blast, please.” Suddenly I had this realization that I was just being way too cute and way too smart that I was just really missing the giant opportunity that no subscriptions are incredibly important.
You can have an advertising business, and you can have a subscription subscriptions business together. You can have both, because essentially, the bargain that we have with one class of our paid subscriber, it’s $225 a year. It’s an individual plan. You get all of the content and none of the advertising. You want our core product, and you never want to see an ad. You just want the news product, great, we’ll send it to you. You’ll never see an ad, you’ll never see an email blast, you’ll never see anything. That’s a subset of our audience, which is not large enough to make a difference to our advertisers essentially.
They just want the contact. Perhaps that’s the type of audience that advertising turns them off. There’s always that class. I don’t think it’s a big number. I actually have a lot some data here to prove that, but it’s not a big piece of the pie, but it’s a very important part of the audience right there. If they say, I don’t want to see that, I know all about these people who want to advertise to me. They call me. They’re a very busy executive. They’re calling me, they’re calling my assistant, they want meetings. They’re hitting me up on LinkedIn. I get it. I just want the news. I respect that. We respect that a great deal.
We don’t want to send them advertising at all. In fact, our sales team will tell that we don’t. Do you want send an ad to someone who doesn’t want you? You don’t, but we have a significant part of our readership who even, for example, our enterprise readers they will see the ads and they won’t see too many. Now they’ll see some email blasts, but they’re not going to see 25 a week. They’re not going to see 20, they’re not going to see bottom dollar ones. They’re not going to see all of them once. That’s how it really works I think.
Jacob: The first is what you call franchise events, which are produced and programmed by your team. What’s the model here? Is it exclusively sponsor driven? Do you charge for tickets? Is it both? Talk to me a little bit about this. The franchise events.
Arsalan: All of the above. The events business is really based on, it all starts with credibility. Can you put butts on seats yourself? Do you have the ability to do that? Again, a lot of that, I give the credit to my partner, John Carroll because this is something he’s been doing year in and year out since he was at Fierce and now at Endpoints. Where we’ve been going out there, it’s an important part, I believe, of being a credible media business, is that you go out there and you can be with your audience at important places. Put yourself out there and give them an opportunity to meet you and to and to do all that kind of stuff.
Our event strategy and the business model is exactly, it’s based around the fact that John and our team now beyond just John, is able to program a panel essentially. A panel of executives and talk about a relevant topic that now hundreds, if not thousands of people want to hear about live. Everything is built around that, essentially around the events business. Now, for our franchise events, essentially, what we will do is we will offer the brand opportunities to say, “This event is brought to you by big brand.” That will be a pricey proposition generally.
Sometimes they’ll want to have activations to say, “We will want to be part of the panel.” That’ll be a discussion we’ll have with John or the editors is this person. Sometimes we’ll have folks that want to sponsor it. I’ll give you a good example here. Pharma, for example, they’ll come in and from the outside you’ll look, this is a pharma that has lots of money. They’re lobbyists. I can tell you that when they have given us their money and we are just completely transparent about it, they have given us absolutely zero guidelines on what to do with the content. No say on who we put on the panel, just that their president is on the panel.
Because they are probably one of the most newsworthy actors when it comes to drug price in terms of their power on Capitol Hill, if they didn’t pay for that panel, and we were doing one on drug pricing. We would invite them because that’s a legitimate newsmaker. Let’s say that someone comes in, they’re not a legitimate Newsmaker. We may offer an auxiliary panel, with their KOL and some other folks and build around that. It’s again, a very case by case basis that we will do with the franchises event. Before the Pandemic, we did sell tickets. It was nice, I want to say it was a little bit more than just change, of course, it helped pay for the venue and stuff, but it wasn’t the biggest piece of the event pie.
It was nice, but essentially, as all good event planners know it was mostly a guarantee that people show up. Once you sell that ticket, we know there’s a certain percentage that will come and we know how much to oversell and all that kind of fun stuff. When the pandemic did hit, we completely stopped charging for tickets or any attendance because our model was never predicated on the fact that tickets were the main thing. It was just big, we tried to do our thing, but again, with the big brand sponsorships. I’m hopefully, this year we’ll be taking those back out live again.
Jacob: Then the second strategy has to do with co-locating at industry events. I have a bunch of questions about this because it’s candidly something I hear about in my day job. Can we go to South by Southwest? Can we go to [unintelligible 00:27:46] can we do these things? Let’s use an example. You hosted a three day virtual conference at JP Morgan’s Annual Healthcare conference. How does this model work? Do you get support from JP Morgan? Are your attendees going to the main event and you’re hoping to pull some of them off?
How are you convincing those attendees to not participate in JPMs portion and instead participate in yours? It’s a very interesting model that makes a lot of sense to me, but it also seems very complicated.
Arsalan: Boy, this is where, this is media operating, isn’t it? Huh? The answer to that question is that you have to be deeply embedded in this industry to know what’s what and think that’s in any industry. I don’t know much about– I’m a nerd, I know about CES and stuff like that. I’ve never been but what I do know about trade shows and organizations and investment banks and investors shows is that every single one is different. Every single one is run by different stakeholders and they have different priorities.
When it comes to that JP Morgan event itself, and particularly before the pandemic, it was the industry’s yearly number one news event where you would actually have– There was just certain elements of it. Combined with the fact that the Investment Bank itself, JP Morgan currently, and through historically, could change any year, but historically, they do not care that anyone uses, say, “I’m at JP Morgan and we’re doing an event at JP Morgan.” As long as you’re not actually at the Weston event, which you can’t and doing it under their name with their logo. They’re quite happy with anyone just co-locating a party in San Francisco’s Union Square and saying they’re part of JP Morgan. Fantastic.
It’s actually this nexus of the industry every single year. I don’t think JP Morgan quite minds. It’s a very smart strategy. Now, I have spent a long time developing like good relations with a very reputable scientific organization like ASCO, which is the American Society for Oncology. They have a very important meeting every June. They are very, and rightfully so, very protective over their brand and very protective over how you say that. We cover that show, our journalists cover that show because it is a very important show to cover all the most important cancer data and findings. The most important cancer specialists and doctors and researchers all congregate there.
It’s an incredibly important event for us to simply be there, let alone co-locate an event or anything like that. It’s just simply part of our mission to be there. If we’re going to do an event there at ASCO, we are not going to infringe on our friends at ASCO by saying that it’s a great party at ASCO and that it’s not. ASCO has their thing and it may be Endpoints is cancer Summit party in Chicago. We’ll tell our friends and ask exactly what we’re doing and make sure that they know and they’re okay with it. We’re just very careful about that, if people want to sponsor ASCO, they can’t do it through Endpoints. If people want to sponsor JP Morgan, well, they can’t sponsor JP Morgan the bank. No. If they would like to sponsor an event around JP Morgan, they can do it at Endpoints or start or any one of my competitors as well.
Jacob: You mentioned that you’re hopefully going to start doing live events this year or in-person events this year, but over the past two years, we’ve all learned how to do virtual. What are you thinking about a hybrid approach with these events? Just talk to me what your thoughts are about the hybrid approach to pulling off events now.
Arsalan: Well, I think it’s a couple different things. For one, I think that the events business, we all know it’s changed, but I think that we’ve permanently lost maybe about 20% of the audience that was coming before. I don’t think they will ever come back to any crowded, networking business event. I think they were also the people who hated going to those things to begin with and found it very perfunctory. That kind of thing. I think that a lot of that is going to be gone. You’ll find events will have to be a lot more intentional.
They’ll have to, let’s just not have the awkward coffee in front and all kinds of, they’ll have to be very intentional, what are we doing here? I think that you find a lot of enthusiasm for that as long as you have that 20% that’s not coming back, I think you have a 20% who just can’t wait. That’s how I’m thinking about our events. The hybrid model is even before the pandemic, we were trying to be good at live streaming the live portion of it. Of course, before the pandemic even we’d like to think we’re so forward thinking with this stuff, but all of our events were so geared to that in-person, making sure that the sponsors were happy with this that, and the people there who were paying were happy.
We were doing catered breakfasts at Hilton’s with 375 people in Union Square. Do we want to do that again? Maybe a modified version of that maybe smaller, maybe more intentional. Do we want to be better at, what do we do for the rest of the audience? I don’t think we can leave out the audience any longer. The online audience. We need to figure out how to make them a part of it. We have some ideas coming up. I think the summer we’re going to go to Bio in San Diego, if all goes well, we’re planning a cocktail hour later, which is not going to be virtual.
We’re planning some content in the morning, which we are hoping to make virtual and we’re trying some couple things out over there, but it’s going to be experimentation this year. I just don’t think you can leave the online audience out anymore. We’ll all be learning a lot. I know I’m going to be listening to your podcast later this year to see how others are doing it.
Jacob: If we look at the three buckets. We have advertising, we have subscriptions, we have events, which you say is part of advertising, but I think it is unique enough to classify as its own bucket. If you look at those three buckets, what is the revenue breakdown at Endpoints?
Arsalan: Well, right now and it’s just because we’ve got a ways to grow. I wouldn’t say it’s indicative of where it’s going to end up, but right now it’s about 50, 25, 25. 50 is going to be the advertising.
Jacob: Where do you think it grows?
Arsalan: Boy, I don’t know. I hope I have some exciting new hires who might be able to come on your podcast and tell you soon.
Jacob: We’ll wait for that. Back in 2019, you wrote that business model article, and you wrote that you had 31,000 basic subscribers of which 8,300 were paid. That’s about a 27% paid to basic comparison. Would you say that’s still from a ratio perspective, where you are today, even though you have obviously grown quite a bit over the past three years?
Arsalan: The ratio to pay has increased a little bit. I’d say it’s increased a little bit. As I’ve had people come to me and do the math and just say, “Look, your subscriptions business just can’t be that big. I’ve done the math,” and no, they’re right. It’ll get bigger. That’s about right.
Jacob: You mentioned that you are a bit of a nerd and that you like to do a little bit of programming. I want to talk about the technology stack that powers Endpoints. What are the primary tools that the team uses to run this business? What did you have to build? What did you pull off the shelf? I just want to understand, if somebody want to launch Endpoints for a different industry, what are the tools they would need to use?
Arsalan: Oh, see that the tech doesn’t matter. Number one thing to understand is that it simply doesn’t matter. I love talking about tech stacks. I have such great meetings with I love engineering more than I love engineering. I love talking about tech stacks with my engineering team, but I’m always reminding my engineering team that tech stack generally doesn’t matter. It generally does not matter. I’m always asking them to, just this morning the job of a publisher, I was figuring out which one of our most opinionated editors should be invited to a regular meeting with our engineering team to mouth off to them, basically, so tech stack, what did we have to build, what did we use?
When we first started, like I said, we started with four people. It was myself our top engineer and our CTOE who’s in Ukraine, he’s safe right now. My wife, Shehla and John Carroll, our editor was the four of us. When we first started out, Igor and I built up our WordPress template. He and I both coded it together. Neither of us are front end developers and neither of us are our designers. I had a vision in mind that I wanted a very stark looking website with no programmatic advertising. I wanted a very clean information only. I was very opinionated about the fonts that I wanted. I didn’t care whether the designer told me was ugly or not. I just wanted those fonts and I wanted it that way and I coded it my way.
We did that and we ran on WP Engine, that was our host. Our embryo that I had before we launched with John, it was all on WP Engine and it’s like a $30 plan that we’re using on WP Engine. We used Slack because the four of us could talk on Slack. I had to get– It was just the four of us and not much else really going on over there. We used Campaign Monitor to send our emails out. To build our list essentially, we would just keep all of our data in campaign monitor. We didn’t have any other place to store it. As we would build up our email subscriptions through our website, which John would go on and post his articles. Even back then I did news writing too.
My wife, Shehla, she did news writing too back then and was mostly John. We would post our articles and we would copyedit each other and we would post it in our WordPress. We would then assemble our newsletters in Campaign Monitor using their WIZYWYG tool in Campaign Monitor. Shehla and I would go on and we would cut and paste literally from WordPress, our stories. John would tell us, this is the subject line and this is the five stories in the order of the five stories. It’s very much like good newspaper, top story, second story, third story of the day. We had a deadline every single day and we still do.
He would tell us, and I would go in there and I would fix it in Campaign Monitor and I would send, John and Shehla approve and he would approve it and we’d ship it to the readers. That was our entire tech stack when we first started. When we sold advertising, when I sold one, I would get the ad creative and I would just go and Campaign Monitor and I would just drop it in with the WIZYWYG thing. There’s no anything. Other than that, now our tech stack is developed into, now we have several more developers and we’ve built some [unintelligible 00:39:42] logic.
It’s all in WordPress, our logic. We now run on AWS. We run our own WordPress and AWS. We do not use any managed WordPress host. We’re really quite happy with it. We’ve developed our own template. We are working on a really great new refresh, but we are using some outside agencies, which are helping us with that, which has been great. So far we use Stripe to do all of our credit card processing. We don’t use any subscription tool. We’ve built it all in-house. We keep all of our profiles, data warehousing, all that in-house. We are not happy with Campaign Monitor. Sorry, if anyone Campaign Monitors hearing this right now. We’re not happy with them.
We’ve built in so much of our infrastructure into that, is just one of those things you just can’t move. We do all the stuff happening at Twilio. As we’ve got a product that we’re going to launch soon to send our product with SMS and they’re SendGrid and all kinds of stuff over there. We’ve been testing out all the different changes with the email metrics and all and so forth. We’ve been pretty pleased with what we see with SendGrid. We’re looking to slowly shift all of our sending from Campaign Monitor to SendGrid. What am I leaving out of my tech stack over here? It sounds like a lot, but it’s actually quite simple too. You don’t need a lot for media.
Jacob: The big buzzword, especially in B2B media, is the CDP. Do you use one? How do you use that at all?
Arsalan: The answer is we don’t use one now. We have our own system that we’ve used that essentially, we profile readers as they come in in our own biopharma classification system. When I’ve gone out to the different vendors before, I never saw something that was so automated and classified that could help me sell more ads in biopharma right now that I was selling. The long answer is that, yes, I’m looking at all that kind of stuff. I’m going to be building in some great stuff because we’re going to have some other products that are going to need it and scale from it.
Serve some contextual stuff based on profile data that we know about our users throughout of our own platform. That’s coming. Currently we’ve been able to profile our audience using our own proprietary methods. It’s worked well, but may not work well at three times our scale.
Jacob: You’ve mentioned that when you started, it was you, your CTO, your wife, and John. What does the team look like today and what’s the breakdown between edit and the different functions on the business side? How big are you guys?
Arsalan: We’re about 40 people now and growing. I would like to approach 50, 60 by the end of the year and growing. Edit, I want to be able to count this. I don’t want to be as quoted, but I want to say it’s 15 or 20 and growing. Edit’s the pride and joy of our company and that we have big planes for it and we’re going to keep hiring for it. The way it looks is we have our editorial team and it’s run by John Carroll. They’re quite independent and they’re running that product that’s out there. On the business side, we have our sales team, which is out there going and selling. They’re not selling subscriptions. They’re selling only advertising. They’re selling the brand opportunities.
They’re selling the lead gen. They’re selling the events, they’re selling webinars, and they’re selling the studio products. They’re having conversations with people saying, “We need to do this. We want to be this.” Then we match them with their needs, so their content needs and their audience needs. We have a sales team doing that. Our subscriptions team on the business side we’re building up now, but essentially is just customer support at this moment. Exactly, it’s all people that come in. Actually, there’s no proactive subscription sales that go on at that price point. It’s all in tech.
We have our client success team which is, again, essentially trafficking the ads. They’re making sure that once the sales team sells that ad, that they’re using our platform properly. That some, as you know, and everyone knows everyone’s different over there and we have our own quirks and stuff, and we want to make sure that they’re doing that well. We have a great client success team that does that. That’s putting on the events and putting on the virtual events. We have a great virtual events team that makes sure that our own team looks good on Zoom and help our clients look good on Zoom. That’s a great skill now.
We have a great business team really too. Great CFO, great HR team, all that stuff that you need in immediate business. Like I said, it started with that four. How do we bring that HR person in? How did we bring the CFO in? How did we bring all of those people in that you couldn’t afford until you could afford them? Man, that’s been a trip.
Jacob: If we look forward three years from now, what does Endpoints look like? Is it fundamentally different? Is it incrementally different? What is Endpoints in three years?
Arsalan: Well, I’d like to say that it’s bigger, but it’s staying to its core. Its core is serving biopharma. Biopharma is a big industry and there’s a lot going on. It’s a very important industry. It’s got an industry with a very bright– It’s a very scientific future. It’s the future. It reminds me, like when I say I’m a nerd, I was into BBSs and modems and all that kind of stuff when I was a kid. It reminds me, like I said, I’m not a scientist, but the feeling that I feel, I do consider myself a biopharma journalist. The feeling I get when I speak with people in the industry and the feeling I get when I read my own team’s work, it’s like the early internet, even earlier than the internet.
It doesn’t feel like late-stage internet at all. When they say it’s just more than money, it’s just really exciting science. I want for Endpoints in three years, I want to be covering all of that stuff. What would be most important to me is that we’re really at the forefront of covering that stuff for the people who are in this industry and doing it for them in a way that they’re like this is a publication that gets it that’s for me, and is not covering it in the way that like a generalist publication would.
I’m a pilot, so when I read about plane crashes in a really generalist publication, it just drives me nuts. I always strive to make sure that in our own publication, that all of our writers, our business writers are great writers, they’re great storytellers. They may not all be scientists, but I want them to be able to tell it all of these great stories in a way that makes the industry proud.
Jacob: I want to end the show with the same two questions that I ask every operator that comes on. First, what is a mistake that you’ve made in your career that you wish you hadn’t? What did you learn from that mistake?
Arsalan: I could list a lot of mistakes. I’m sure a lot of people could, but I think probably the biggest mistake I could think of I may want to admit to right now is actually just not being clear with people about my expectations. That’s a really big one. It doesn’t matter if you think you’re good at it. You have to constantly be checking yourself at it. You can’t do that by yourself. As a founder, as someone who runs a company who has started a company from nothing, and eventually, then you’re really working with actually something and you’re responsible for a lot, that’s actually very important to make sure that your expectations are extremely clear with everyone.
Really, I think I’ve gotten a lot better. It’s actually a very civil reminder to anyone doing this kind of stuff that you can’t be willy-nilly about it, and you’ve got to be very clear about your expectations with people.
Jacob: My second question is, what is some advice you would give someone thinking about launching their own media company?
Arsalan: Don’t. [laughs] Really consider it. Don’t. Why? Why? No, I don’t mean that to be negative. You have to want it so bad. You have to want it so bad, because how many people do I know who’ve done it and burnt out and can’t do it or whatever? I’ve been there. I’ve only been able to stick through it because I’ve got a great partner. I’ve only been able to do it because I have a great partner. It’s God’s honest truth. I couldn’t have done it by myself. No way. If you want to start a media company, consider do you have the right resources around you? Do you have the right people around you? I did. I was extremely lucky.
People come to me and say, “How’d you do it?” I didn’t do it alone. I could not have done it alone. I couldn’t have done it without my partner. I couldn’t have done it without my wife. No way.
Jacob: That will be the end of the show. I’m going to hit stop recording and let this-
Arsalan: Before you do that, Jacob, I just have to say something. You are providing some of the best insights for media operators week in and week out. I really want to thank you before you stop recording because I am forwarding your emails to my team regularly. Even in the last few weeks, this very thing has happened where I get your email, I’m forwarding it to, for example, like my CFO who is an amazing CFO. He’s just an amazing person, but he’s more newer to media companies. I actually find your analysis and your content, even if it’s not exactly about something we do at Endpoints, so insightful in a way that there’s a few others who are doing it at the level that you are doing it.
I want to thank you. Even this week I’ll be forwarding your email and then I’ll have other people in my network not working over here who will be forwarding your emails to me being like, “Did you see this? This is great stuff.” Jacob, you are doing a great job. I want to tell you that.
Jacob: Thank you very much. I really do appreciate that.
