Adam White on Building The Politico of Sports
Jacob Cohen Donnelly: What provoked you to launch Front Office Sports while also having to handle a pretty full college class load? How did you first really get that started?
Adam White: It really all started when I went to the University of Miami as a freshman and then college, born and raised in Phoenix, decided to get away for a little bit. Really it’s funny, I never had parents who were in a trade or a specific industry. I never had parents who were like, “Oh, you’re going to be a lawyer,” “Oh, you’re going to be an accountant.” The one thing I did do growing up, was I played sports. The one thing that the University of Miami had was a sports administration program, so entering the Sports Administration program.
During that time, while I was there my freshman year, one of the projects and the kind of, I guess, marching statements or echoing statements that a lot of the professors made was, “If you want to have success working in sports or adjacent sport or adjacent industries, it’s all about who you know, not really about what you know.” I don’t totally agree with that, because I think it’s a mix of both. At the time as a wide-eyed freshman, I was like “All right, cool. It’s all about who I know. How can I find a way to make sure I know a lot of people?”
One of the things was a project that we did, and the project was you have to go out and do an informational interview. Long story short, I did the informational interview. I think I did it with the ADM at the university at the time I did that, I went back home to Arizona over the summer and I was still playing baseball at the time, and I was someone who had to get a job over the summer, I was still paying for school and all these things. I was looking into getting a job, interviewed at a bunch of places, the traditional restaurants, but I was only at home for three months.
Because of that, for some reason, it just didn’t work out from a serving standpoint or whatever, and because I was playing baseball at night, it just didn’t make sense. I sat down and I was, “Okay, well, what do I want to do that’ll allow me to use my summer effectively and also meet a lot of people who work in the space with the idea of just starting to build a casual network?”
I started to look around and my whole idea was, “Well, why don’t I just take what I was doing with the informational interviews and just publish them instead of just doing the informational interview and then leaving, or grabbing 15 minutes on someone’s calendar and saying, “Hey, let me pick your brain.” My whole idea was instead of saying, “Hey, let me pick your brain.” It was, “Hey, let me tell your story.” What happened was I was like ” All right, well I’m going to do this.” I paid $40 for the original FOS logo that had a briefcase in it, had one of my buddies design it. I got on Wix, figured out how to build a Wix-based website.
It was funny because this was 2014, I believe, the original very first version of the site was a black background with white text. I joke, I was like, I was five years before dark mode was a cool thing. I was just too far ahead of it, and so did that. Originally the name was supposed to be an Executive Report, which is funny, and I’m so glad we changed it because it was me and my dad were just talking about it and he is like, “Oh, why don’t we do Front Office Sports?”
I was like, “That makes sense, Front Office Sports, easy enough. FOS would be something that would be memorable.” Over that summer, and that whole turn of time, I was back home in Arizona, I reached out to people on LinkedIn and did my first interview with someone. The first interview was, I want to say two hours long. I realized that by the time I had to transcribe that two-hour-long interview, and if I wanted to do this, I could not do a two-hour long interview, so pulled everything down, got like five or six questions that I got really good at asking, and ended up doing 110 informational interviews over that first year. That’s how it all started.
Jacob: I’m curious just because I like sports perhaps not as much to launch a business around it, but I do enjoy it. When you started college, was the idea that you wanted to become a GM of a team?
Adam: I had literally no idea, if I’m going to be completely frank with you, I really had no idea. It’s so funny, I love the sports industry and I love where we sit in the sports industry, but even now, I don’t even know if I would work in the sports industry right after all of the things that I’ve learned and just the area and the fascination I’ve had with media. I don’t know if I’ll ever use my degree for anything outside of FOS. We’ll see how it all transpires. I really had no idea, everyone talks about being an agent. Everyone talks about being this, I just went in with an open mind. It was like “All right, well, I’ll just figure it out.” I’ve always been the type of person where I’ll just get into a situation, and figure it out eventually, however, the cookie crumbles.
I think by the time I graduated in ’17, I was definitely more along the lines of the partnerships, sponsorships, sales side of things. I thought it was interesting. I had built packages for FOS at the time, and so I was like “Oh, I like being creative. I like doing those types of things. I think it brings everything full circle.” For me, that was where I had actually applied when I was going to leave school. It’s so funny because I joke with people that Front Office Sports up until really 2018, was just meant to get me a job in the sports industry.
It’s funny because it failed, I never actually got a job in the sports industry, I did two finalist interviews where they flew me out in ’17 after I graduated and I didn’t get them. I just decided to go all in on the site at that time, but it is funny that the original credence and desire for what I wanted to do with the site, and never really played out how I wanted it to.
Jacob: If the goal really was for you to find a job, were you using the interview just to get in the front door, or were you actually thinking about how to build an audience when you were using that black background Wix website?
Adam: Really, for me at the time, it was the first, I don’t want to say a year, it was really just all about how can I meet a lot of cool people and just interview people. I don’t think I really thought it could start to be a site, or start to be a real business until some people started to ask us to do things. It’s so funny because I’ve told this story before, but everything we’ve done is really based on the feedback of our audience, and early on is the fact that essentially what happened was when I was doing all those interviews is I was asking all the people and the professionals who are working in the space, like, “What do you like, what do you don’t like? What’s missing?” et cetera.
Even though we had no money, and I still tell people that to this day, like, “I guarantee you if I would’ve gotten money for FOS when I was a freshman, it would not be successful.” Because I would’ve never known what to do with it, and so essentially those four years while I was at school, and the year after that I worked on it before we got the investment, was just essentially a big type of market research study that I did. I just kept asking people, “What do you want? How do you see this working out? What’s missing? What do you need?” et cetera, et cetera.
For those first four years it was all just really built around building relationships, giving myself some sort of, I wouldn’t say social or prominence, but more of people, if they saw my name, they knew who I was because they associated me with FOS. Luckily, all of those conversations allowed me to say, “Okay, one of the big things and one of our big projects is Rising 25, which is our big award.” It came out of the idea that I talked to a lot of people who were younger in the space who were saying, “Oh, there’s just nothing for us.”
We decided to build something for them, and so I do look back on it and say, “Oh,” and I laugh because during the time I was like, “Man, I wish I had some more help, or I wish I had some of this when I was still in school.” I genuinely believe that because I didn’t, and because it was all through school and because it was built around just asking people questions and getting their insight into the space, it was something that I thought, now paid dividends because we were able to execute on everything that we had been told people wanted once we got the investment. Again, it was really just supposed to be to meet people to get me a job, and maybe be something like that was a side hustle when I once got a job.
Jacob: All right. You decide after college, to do this full-time, you’re going to become a media operator. When you were looking at the space, who were some of the competitors that you looked at that you did some research on? Then what did you see that they were doing wrong that you could do better?
Adam: For us, I think the biggest thing, and the two things that we’ve always focused on and will continue to focus on is we want to own the inbox and we want to own social media. How can we be the best in the inbox and how can we be the best on social media? For the longest time, that’s where I think the places that we look to as competitive sets just ignored, and I always thought, “Well, okay, if we can take the best of what people are doing on social media, multiple accounts and do it from a brand perspective in a professional and premium way, this is some really interesting stuff.”
At the time, this was really early on, 2017, that’s just before the business of sports had gotten in vogue. It was a little bit more. It’s amazing what’s changed in three years, some athletes have started to invest in companies and all of these different things, and so that’s the one area where I was just like, as long as we focus on delivering a newsletter every single day that we can hopefully scale that we write and execute in a way that’s not only interesting for people who work in sports, but it’s interesting for people outside of sports too. My whole guiding light and you talked about competitive sets, but the whole inspiration and what I see is the one media business that is something that I want to be as a media business one day is Politico and we’ve talked about this before.
Where Politico built such an amazing business by taking free consumer-facing news around a broad-based subject like politics and building vertical-specific paid products eventually, as you guys know. My whole idea at the time was that “If Politico can do it with politics, why can’t we do it with sports and not just sports, but the business of sports?” The $600 billion industry sports is, but no one, in our opinion, had really ever covered it as a true business industry. You see, Bloomberg covers real estate finance. They cover like you would cover a true business industry.
Traditionally, sports had been covered like sports where it was player X or athlete X doing something on the field first, and then no one really talking about what was going on off the court. There was a few people, but it was like in spits and spats. Bloomberg had one person, ESPN had one person, Yahoo! maybe had one person, Wall Street Journal maybe had one person. No one said, “Hey, look, we’re going to devote our whole publication to it.” Then the other side of the coin is that I just felt that the business of sports while yes can be more of a niche play and more of an endemic industry, endemic play, that it’s far broader and far more interesting than just to the people who work in sports.
That was the approach we wanted to take is that when we started to build everything is we wanted to be an approachable but premium brand that people came to for news and insights around what was going on in the business of sports. The competitive advantage we’ve had for so long is that everything we’ve been delivering has never had a paywall, whereas our closest competitors have a hard paywall, very hard paywall, extremely high dollar paywall. That’s been what has allowed us to really take not only the market share, we believe that’s internally in the space where we like to call endemic, but also we’re able to grab a lot of people who are not traditionally maybe would have been exposed to this stuff, because, yes, they’re interested but would they have paid the subscription for the high paywall.
That’s what we looked at. I looked at Politico and I was like “Look, if they can do it with politics, I think we can do it with sports.” That’s what we’re still building too. I still do believe that to this day. We just felt like, going back to your original question, that people hadn’t done everything for verticalized, not verticalized media but for verticalizing everything. They didn’t treat platforms differently. Twitter we treat very differently than Instagram, which is very different than LinkedIn, which is very different than our newsletter, which is very different than our owned and operated site. Still to this day, I don’t think anyone in our competitive set do that. That’s the whole idea is that they’re different platforms for different reasons.
We felt if we could optimize for each of those platforms, deliver a newsletter that’s built for reading in the email versus linking out social content that’s built for sharing on social, that’s built for consumption in the feed versus linking out going hard on LinkedIn, which again I feel like it’s an underutilized platform but for us it’s our fastest growing one. It’s going to be on pace to likely be our largest by the end of this year, even though we just started posting more frequently at the beginning of 2019. Those are the weaknesses and the areas that we thought.
We also thought we can actually build a real brand here. There’s something about taking an approachable way. I think this is, luckily it wasn’t at the time but when I was first doing it, because it was so personal and so one-on-one people, got attached to the Front Office Sports and FOS brand. Our whole idea is that we want people to know us as Front Office Sports, but we want people to really know us as FOS. If you know us as Front Office Sports, you may be a casual reader, but if you know us as FOS, you either follow us on social, you come to our events.
You know once you’ve gotten our merch, you’ve attended a webinar, whatever it is, you know us more than just Front Office Sports. That’s how we’ve always been like our audience funnel. It’s like, yes, Front Office Sports is who we are, but we want everyone to know us as FOS and what gets them to that funnel where they become so ingrained in our audience development funnel or our content production that they know us truly as FOS or they call us as FOS. When someone says FOS, and they’re like “Oh, I know exactly what that is.” Again, that’s been the progression as we’ve seen where it’s like, I don’t know, I just don’t believe that others may have taken advantage of that opportunity.
The other single thing and I’ve talked about it ad nauseam, but just the fact that we were active on social and built a following that really cared about the brand there first, has helped us in a lot of different ways, which traditional, I would say B2B publications, which we’re starting to not grow out of that, but we’re moving into the next phase of where we see our publication sitting, that I just don’t think anyone’s ever really taken advantage of that. Especially sports, it’s sexy. It’s one of the sexiest industries in the entire world. Why can’t there be a publication that covers it like that, that looks like that?
That’s why we just did a redesign of the site. That’s why we just did the redesign of the logo, because we want when people come to FOS, we want them now to think about it like “Wow, this is on the echelon of The Wall Street Journal, the Politicos, the Bloombergs of the world, but it’s covering sports versus some of the other things that they’re covering. I know I went through multiple different layers of that question. That’s the areas in which we saw were weaknesses, saw as someone who did it really well and we could, not emulate, but look at what they did it for their model and potentially take what’s best practices from them and apply it to us and then how will you see it playing out going forward too.
Jacob: I don’t really believe in every business idea needing to be some insanely innovative idea. You and I’ve talked about it’s more on the execution than anything else. I think that’s great. Looking at what Politico had built, it’s a tremendous success. Most people don’t really talk about it but I really think it’s a good example of like you said, a publication that started as a consumer-facing publication with this, now they’ve got a really robust, expensive membership business.
I actually want to lean into that just a little bit. When I was doing research for this, you don’t actually like to call yourself a B2B publication. You say that you’re more of a prosumer publication. What does that mean and how should other operators who either already have publications or are thinking about launching their own publication, how should they think about audience through the lens of a prosumer?
Adam: It’s something that we’ve leaned into. Leaning on the Politico side of things too, I know you touched about their massive thing, it just fascinates me because I think I went on– I’m just so fascinated by their business. I went on similar web or some audience thing and I think they did something like 100 million unique visitors in March, at the beginning of the pandemic or at the height of just the early parts of the pandemic. Then I went and looked at how many subscribers they had and they said, they have 30,000 paying subscribers.
I don’t know if that’s enterprise or if that’s individual, but I’m like “Wow, if you can get a massive scale audience and then build a really targeted thing that you can charge a lot of money for. I really like that.”
I wanted to close the loop on that. From a prosumer standpoint, I just think, and I don’t know if it works for everyone but in the sports side of things, it definitely works because I just don’t want us to be seen as an only sports industry publication. Technically, what is the sports industry? Now, the sports industry is and this is the one area where I don’t think anyone has ever from a “business of sports publication” has ever touched. They’re not covering Nike and Adidas and Under Armour. We’re now doing it.
Covering earnings, covering those types of things, talking about them. That to me, is like– the sports industry isn’t just teams and leagues. This is what we always say. We say we cover the sports industry and adjacent industries that are having some influence on sports versus sports and then the subsets of the sports industry. You have sports and then you have the subsets being maybe it’s sponsorship, maybe it’s ticketing and venues, maybe it’s facilities.
All of that’s great, but for us to build what we think is going to be a really big publication one day is that we want to cover the sports industry, but Nike and fitness and college athletics and real estate and retail and investing in tech and innovation. At the end of the day, and this is what we’ve always said, oftentimes, especially now, all athletes who want to be business people or business people who are either former athletes or want to be athletes still and that goes across most industries. It’s not just in sports. It’s crazy, because as pandemic shut down what was going on on the field, our business actually got more important off the field, and our audience grew exponentially outside of the people or for people outside of “what would be endemic to the sports industry,” which we define as teams, leagues, for the most part. The idea with prosumer is that it’s a professional publication that people who work in the said industry also will read but it’s done in a way that a consumer, “who would be someone who is a marketing executive at an agency that may not have to be involved with sport but is interested in sports,” would also be able to access or read or enjoy.
That’s the whole idea, is writing it as like I just think that there’s a bigger opportunity here than just saying, “We’re going to focus only on the stakeholders at teams and leagues for the most part,” versus, “No, we’re going to focus on the biggest brands.” Perfect example, one of the biggest brands in sports is Fanatics. They just raised $350,000,000 at a $6.2 billion valuation. That’s much larger than just the sports industry. Like, Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, has a bunch of things, “outside sports,” but he’s still intersected with sports.
There’s this idea where you have this kind of confluence of everything is either influencing or influenced by sports. Culture, fashion, music, advertising, marketing, what’s going on? That’s the approach we’ve taken with the idea that this is something that can be much bigger if you take a bigger approach to it. It’s not really a bigger approach from an execution standpoint. We can still execute the content that we execute, but we’re writing it in a way that even just simple headline tweaks. Like we’re simple execution of content where instead of talking to one or two people, maybe it’s like this is an example from recent.
Like we’re talking instead of saying, “The Denver Nuggets do X-Y-Z,” now it’s NBA teams doing something in the bubble. Just even doing that changes that conversation, changes the approach, changes I would say, the desirability of that content from a small subset of people to a larger group of people. We write about top golf, not like, would you define top golf as sports? I would define top golf as a sport, but it’s also one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world. They’re into esports now. That’s the thing, is we see these big companies and the sports teams, especially now more than ever.
Coming out of the pandemic, I think you’ll see a lot more of the diversification from the sports team side of things. It’s just gotten to the point where the industry is so much larger than that. Our whole idea is that people like you, people that are sitting in at J.P. Morgan’s investment banking desk and are interested in not just what’s going on on the field, but what’s going on off the field. They need a resource or they need a publication to provide them with that. That’s what we want to do. I don’t think by doing that, you alienate either side. It may be as a little bit of a balance and you can maybe go back and forth where some days it might be more consumer, some days it might be more pro.
The idea is that if you find a good balance, it becomes a business that you can go out and we can go out and get deals with RBC, we can go out and get advertising deals with Anheuser-Bush. Those aren’t endemic brands usually. Those aren’t brands that are usually spending with, “B2B brand or B2B publication.” Our thought is like “Okay.” The other thing about all of this, too, is I’ve never gotten it because maybe, I don’t know, I’m still young, but I’ve just never gotten why a lot of these brands tend to shy away from more professional publications.
When I’m, like “All of these people are highly qualified. All of them are usually professional, and no offense to a marketing director at an agency or a team or whatever, they don’t just want to see software pitched their way or software ads. They buy stuff too. They’re consumers too. They buy belts. They buy maybe in a pre-pandemic time, they buy technology, they buy watches. You know what I mean? That’s the other thing even in market that we have to kind of pitch when we’re talking to our advertisers is like “Yes, it’s a business professional audience but these business, professional people have a higher net worth, are more driven with an intent to buy, and they also have the opportunity to have more free, available money to buy whatever it is you’re selling.”[00:26:05]
It’s definitely for a specific subset of advertisers, but that’s the idea about the whole prosumer model, if we bring it back to the center here, is that we’re writing and we’re building a publication that people who are professionals can enjoy, people who are consumers can enjoy, and because of that, then you open up a different level of brand dollars that you wouldn’t have had if you would have just stayed on the professional side, which traditionally professional side, you’re looking at B2B endemic revenue, which we all in the different places would understand. Those are the people who are selling directly to the people in the space, B2B, nonendemic revenue.
Those would be people, like selling solutions to any business professional like Oracle and Adobe or however, you want to kind of put that. Then there’s brand dollars. I would, quite frankly, be remiss if I would say I just don’t know that many publications that can do B2B endemic, B2B nonendemic, and then brand dollars. For us, we think that, A limit or allows us to make sure we spread our diversification opportunities, which is a big thing, especially now and then B, right now when no one is buying anything at sports teams and leagues and all of the endemic partners have shut down their spending for the most part, we’re not as hurt by that because we still have nonendemic in brands, whereas people who would maybe have leaned into the endemics you’re not as big of an opportunity.
From a sports space, people tend to forget, at a high level, you’re probably looking at what, across the four major leagues there’s 30 teams on average between the four major leagues. Five, if you add an MLS, you’re looking at 150 to 200 teams. It’s a really small market if you’re looking at it. For us it’s like, okay, those are the “key customers,” at the base and now it’s how do we expand beyond that? I know it’s getting a little wordy but that’s the whole idea of prosumer, especially in sports. I don’t know if it works for other publications it may, but for us, we believe it does just because sports is such a universal language and most people, regardless of where they’re at in their business life, are interested in some sort of this.
That’s why LinkedIn has become such a massive driver for us, is because there’s a lot of people that are business professionals on the platform and if you look at our last 10,000 new followers on LinkedIn, it’s like Deloitte, EY, JPMorgan Chase, you know what I mean? It’s like those types of things where they’re not traditional to the sports space per se, but they’re interested in what’s going on off the field.
Jacob: I think that’s a great way to think about it. Having that sort of baked-in excitement from an audience that is not explicitly just working within the field and being able to look at the adjacent industries does give you more to write about and does give you more diversity to your advertiser base. I like that.
Adam: Yes. I even think, too. This is what I think more publishers are starting to think about. My challenge to ourselves and our team is, like, every single day, if we’re not the most innovative in this space, then what have we got to do to even write about it? How can we say something’s innovative if we’re not the ones who are doing innovative stuff? If we’re not the ones who are launching initiatives, if we’re not the ones who are looking at content strategies differently, if we’re not the ones who are doing that.
I think, especially, in the B2B space, a lot of the publications, older ones that have been around a while, have kind of rested on the fact that we’re going to get our subscription, we’re going to get our awards, we’re going to get our events, and we really don’t have to change a thing, because as long as we get that, we’re in a good spot. I’m personally only under the impression that I feel like that has stymied a lot of the growth of some of these industries because of the fact that if the publication that everyone reads every single day is ten years behind the rest of the world from a content strategy standpoint, from the usage of social media, from a usage of– How is that pushing that industry forward?
That’s even why we start to go out and branch out and write about– we should no matter what. That’s why such a big focus for us is on the deals and the markets and things like that because we’re trying to even open our audience’s eyes to new things to make them think outside the box as to even like okay, if I’m thinking about Peloton, because we cover them a lot too. If I’m thinking about Peloton and I work in a sports team, what can I think about, that Peloton is doing from a community standpoint, that I can apply to what we’re doing from a community standpoint?
Those are the ways that we’ve kind of approached this idea, is like, yes, we’re not only trying to just tell the news and things like that. We’re also trying to get people to think more critically and see that, yes, while the sports industry may be, externally, people think of sports, they think of teams and leagues. It’s much broader than this, and people who work at teams and leagues or agencies should all be taking ideas from each other. If we’re not doing the most from an innovative standpoint, if we’re not forward thinking from a brand standpoint, if we’re not a perfect example, Rising 25, which is our big award, Anheuser-Busch is the presenting partner on it.
We did a merch collab with Umbro and we built an entire soccer team, a digital and physical manifestation of a soccer team, Rising 25 FC, where we actually had kits that had Anheuser-Busch’s logo on them. We sold a Jersey patch to RBC. Most, I don’t know of any other prosumer or if you want to label it as a B2B side of things, whoever done that, or even just brands. I’m just like, “Okay, we have to continue to push the needle because if we don’t, then how can we go and tell our audience what’s good, what’s up and coming, what’s next?” We don’t have any room to say that if we’re not doing it. Again, I don’t know if that’s something that’s happening across these different news publications or these new media companies, but that’s how we see it.
Jacob: Correct me if I’m wrong, it was at the beginning of 2019 that you went out and convinced investors that Front Office Sports was worth more than just college kids, I’m going to keep teasing it, black background, white text website and that it could be something the Politico of sports. How much did Front Office Sports wind up raising and how did that change your psychology around what you were building?
Adam: Yes, so it’s so funny. It was just one of those situations where it happens to be you happen to be in one of these where you’re like, I can’t remember the saying. It’s like you, it’s better off lucky than good or whatever. I think we just put ourselves in a place to be lucky. I’ll tell you how this all happened. All happened on Twitter, of all places. You guys are, I don’t know if it’s the best place to do it, but for us, it worked. I think Twitter is still to this day is so much more powerful than most people use it to be.
What happened was is I was listening to a Digital Day Podcast, of all things, and the Digital Day Podcast had a guy by the name of Jason Stein on it. Jason at the time was running 24/7 Laundry Service. It was a agency that had been bought by Wasserman a few years prior. He was talking about what he had done and everything like that. I quote-tweeted the episode, or I think I quote-tweeted his tweet about the episode. At the time I was following him. He followed me, and it just so again, happened to be that from the main FOS account, we had shared a video that Cycle, which was the sister brand to Laundry Service, which is like the content side of Laundry Service and Cycle or Laundry Service had built or had produced a video that our audience would like. We shared it, it went, did really well, really great numbers.
I sent it to him. I was like, “Hey, if you guys have anything, just let me know. We’re always looking for good stuff to share for our audience, happy to help,” whatever. I think that’s one of the things we’ve always tried to do no matter what is just lead with value in a lot of the conversations we had early on. Did that, and he got back to me and we started chat via DM. Nothing crazy. Back and forth a couple times I kept doing what I was doing. I want to say a month later, I was being, I wouldn’t say more than, I wouldn’t say emotional on the TL, but I was definitely being more in my feelings on the timeline and it was on something that I normally do, but I think I tweeted, “It’s amazing what can happen in a year.”
Jason saw it and sent it to me in a DM and he said, “Let me know how I can help.” I was like, “Well, shit okay, perfect.” I told him, I said, “Hey, I want to get on a call. Let’s chat.” We chatted in early April of 2018, and I just so happened to be going to New York in June of 2018. Before that, probably a week or two before that, I had gotten his assistance after we got off the call because his assistant set it up. I had gotten his assistance email and I basically harassed him. I was like, “Dude, when is Jay around?” Whatever, whatever, whatever.
We eventually set a time for us to meet in Brooklyn at their office. I went to New York, we met in person. It was me just walking into a 600-person agency office underneath the Brooklyn, Bridge. It was insane, absolutely insane. I’m sitting in this office and we’re just talking about it. At the time, he’d told me that he was leaving the agency. I think his time was pretty much done. I think his earn-out was up, whatever. He was on to what’s next. He’s like, “I don’t know what I want to do, but I want to find a way to work with you.” I was just like, “what? This is crazy.”
I went back and Russ, who’s been with me since the very beginning for the most part, was also in New York and I was talking to him about it. From that time in June of 2018 until really November of 2018, Jason, myself, and then Billy who’s one of the people who worked with Jason, we just all chatted about what it would look like. You see Shark Tank and you think investments are all this scary stuff or whatever, but it really wasn’t. We just chatted through that what this could be, how much we think we would need, what it would look like, how do we get it off the ground? X, Y, Z, Y, W, P.
It really just became, “Okay, this is what we’re thinking, what the number is, this is what it looks like, and this is what we think we can do with it, and here we go.” Yes, we ended up raising money at the end of 2018. We raised less than seven figures and it was really just a small, small amount of money, in the grand scheme of things. It’s not a small amount of money on the whole side of things, but it was a small money in the grand scheme of media. The whole idea was, okay, figure it out and see if this works.
What happened is, I think I hinted at it earlier in the conversation was, is that we were able to basically then I moved to New York. I remember this to this day. I moved to New York from Miami, Black Friday of 2018. I actually rented my apartment site unseen. They sent me the key. I got to my apartment in New York and I thought that I had gotten hoodwinked because when I first got there, the door didn’t open and I was freaking out. I was like “Are you serious?” I have five bags. My entire life was in my bags. I was like “Are you kidding me?” I eventually figured out how to get in and I got in.
Yes, moved to New York in 2018 and essentially what I was talking about earlier is that we took all of what we knew in that part of that 2018 side of things and we said, or before that, when the lead up to that and we said, “Look, everyone has told us what they want. Let’s just go out and give them what they want now.” Hired the editorial team, started to make some other hires and really all of it, and I thank Anheuser-Busch to this day, because I forgot to mention this, but as all of this investment stuff was happening, we had had Rising 25 for two years prior to Anheuser-Busch coming on.
It was a smaller event. I had just happened to meet the person who runs the sports division of Anheuser-Busch at a conference in Chicago. We were talking, and I figured out his cadence of emails that he always responded to emails on Sunday. One Sunday, and I want to say May or June, I sent him an email and I said, “Hey, we have this Rising 25 thing. I think it would be a massive success if you guys aligned with it.” We talked back and forth. He said, “Send me a proposal.” I sent him a proposal and he’s like, “Yes, this is great. We can do this.”
I think to this day, that is what really us saying that we had Anheuser-Busch is really what helped put the investors, early investors, not at ease, but, “Okay, these guys can actually generate money here.” That’s what we did is we just went out and we took what we had learned over the course of the four years. We already had zero dollars. I always laugh and I tell people, “I say one of the hardest things ever, and really in any type of business, but is to build a media company with zero dollars, zero experience.”
I’ve never been a journalist, but I was writing everything. I was managing contributors back in the day and zero following. We built it from zero of zero of zero. It took us four years to do it, but then once we got the money, it was just like, “Okay, now we can execute on everything that we’ve been having people tell us for the first four years where we made $5,000,” or whatever it was.
That’s really just what it came down to be. Then we did that and we went from one to 14 people in the first year of 2019 and then we’re at 17 going on probably 20 now, as we come out of this. That’s something that is crazy when you look back at it. It’s like, even to think about it, we’ve only had full-time employees for a year and a half, and actually with a year and two months without a pandemic and then we had the pandemic. Obviously changed a little bit, but yes, it’s a business, while it feels like it’s been 50 years that we’ve been doing it just because it’s been so much that we’ve been able to hash through.
It’s really only been a year and change since we got the investment and hired our first full-time person. We’ve even really had– it took us till really six months into us getting the investment to even have a full-time editorial team. We’ve had an editorial team for basically just a year. That’s why we’re so bullish on just actually finally getting everything and all of these pieces together because we can really take advantage of where we see this going. It took us a little bit, I was a first-time founder.
I was 23 at the time. Why does someone who I’ve met on Twitter and met in person once and had conversations with, over the course of the time, decide to give the 23-year-old some money to help launch the business after what we’d done to this day. I don’t know. I guess it’s worked out for everyone so far, but there’s just so much more work to be done or nowhere close to where we want to be.
Jacob: I’ve always believed that there is underlying value on Twitter that will never show up in their share price associated with being a true connector of people.
Adam: 100%.
Jacob: Some of my closest media friends, people who I really actually will classify as friends I’ve met like once, but I DM with them every day.
Adam: It’s a great equalizer. It’s a great equalizer. It’s crazy.
Jacob: If you don’t use Twitter in a clean way, you got to clean up the feed and stuff because they can get a pretty nasty just reading all the doomscrolling and stuff. If you treat it like a place to get good information and meet cool people, it’s really interesting. I want to jump into some really tactical stuff with you. We talked a couple of times now about Rising 25. I really want to dive into that part of your business, but before we do would it be fair for me to say that you are a predominantly advertising-driven business?
Adam: Yes, 100%.
Jacob: How do you sell these ads? Is it on a CPM basis or do you sell it more of like a time-based share of voice and why that choice? Whichever it is.
Adam: Yes. It really just depends on the client. Most of them are done on a CPM basis. It just depends some of the campaigns are when you want to get more creative, the brand campaign stuff, it’s more share a voice and what we value the creativity at. Like Anheuser-Busch getting a soccer team.
I don’t know how to put a value on that. Having everyone share it, I can’t even track some of the impressions. That’s just more unlike the idea we’re selling to. Traditionally, all of our straight media stuff has done been done off of CPM. Then because we’ve grown up being able to execute B2B media campaigns, which are all predominantly lead gen driven.
That’s a major component to a lot of them too. It really depends again, on the client. Someone RBC wants something different than someone like Satisfy Labs, which is an AI brand that works in sports directly. I think that’s traditionally what we’ve been able to lean on is that we’re going to sell it on a CPM basis or a lead gen basis and then be able to charge a premium for the amount of leads we can drive.
Jacob: Now I want to ask this next question just because it always made me laugh and I think when I first saw it on your site my background’s, obviously I work in crypto media. You had a podcast where you had Beatrix as the sponsor. Beatrix for those that don’t know, is a crypto exchange. You can buy and sell, probably 200 different assets. How did that deal happen? Then we’ll move on because I know it’s not the point of this conversation, but I just have to know.
Adam: It’s just like, this is the whole, I can’t tell you, I still to this day don’t know how we made it out of that first year, to be honest with you, of like, just all the shit we threw against the thing, the first year post-funding, all the shit we threw against the fan, hoping that for it to stick and some of these things sticking. The podcast, this is the crazy part, is the podcast– The only reason that we had Beatrix, and the only reason we really got the podcast was because of the fact that originally we had an NFL player who was into Bitcoin, was going to be the host of the podcast.
We were going to do a collaboration where he was going to be the host, he was going to interview people, and Beatrix was going to be the partner because he was into Bitcoin. That’s how y’all came to be. At the 11th hour, after we had signed everything, had built everything out for Beatrix, the NFL player pulled out. Me, knowing the value of a dollar, I don’t know what you want to qualify it as, a media startup, but as some a media startup that didn’t raise a lot of money, I was like “I’m not going to let this podcast or this dollar go away.” I was just like, “We’ll figure it out. I will do the podcast personally and we’ll just do all the guests we’d already booked.”
The thing was is the NFL player was based in Los Angeles, and so a lot of the guests we’d already booked were in Los Angeles. I booked myself a flight to Los Angeles. I spent a week in LA, I recorded a bunch of podcasts, I came back to New York, did a bunch more. The whole idea, and the whole reason why we did it, and we kept them, is because it was just a sizable check that we weren’t going to let go away. I was just like, “I’m going to do this.” I don’t know how we’ll figure it out, but we’ll figure it out. Luckily their people believed in it and loved it and were able to stick around with it.
That’s why originally– It was more of a brand fit when we had the NFL player who was in a Bitcoin, it became a little bit weird when we didn’t have the NFL player who was in a Bitcoin. That’s how the deal came about, but as any early founder will tell you, you just can’t let any money go. I was not about to let any money go.
Jacob: I appreciate that. It just, it always made me laugh when I saw that. I think when you and I first met the part of your business that really, really intrigued me was your awards franchises and you’ve got two of them right now, the Rising 25 and the Best Employers in sports. What intrigued me about this and I want you to walk me through this is, there are actually two components of this business. There is the actual awards component or the sponsorship of the awards, but then there’s also a licensing component to it. Can you walk us through how you came up with those ideas-
Adam: Yes.
Jacob: -how those two business models work either together or despite each other and how do you price it? Then I’m curious how you think other media companies could do this for their own industries.
Adam: Again, Rising 25 for us was really basically, like I said, just something that came out of the idea that we felt that if we drew a line at that age, we would have a dam for most people who were 25 and under who would come through. Then once we got them there, we would have brand advocates for life because it’s just– I can’t tell you, it’s so strange how much more meaningful it is to win an award at that age than it is anywhere other, because all you have these things from a premium side of things. You have the opportunity to basically advance your career, et cetera.
We were able to tap into that, which I think was the most positive part about Rising 25. The business model with Rising 25 getting into that is just, how do we align brand partners who want to be associated with a lot of young people who are doing really great things and a really cool franchise? That’s where Anheuser-Busch came in. Then once we got Anheuser-Busch, it was like “Okay, who else can we get?” This year we had Anheuser-Busch, RBC, Royal Bank of Canada, Indochino, Bose, and LaLiga. LaLiga is a soccer league. It was a little interesting, but because everything this year was soccer themed, that’s why it made sense for some of these.
Bose, we had as the official headphone. Indochino was the official style partner. We just really treated it as a true piece of property. I’ve always gone back to the thought of like, it’s so important to have what we believe is a hub and spoke model, where Front Office Sports is at the hub of this media business, then the spokes, are all of these other, what we like to call monetizable IP, that we’ve built off the fact that people trust and read and pay attention to Front Office Sports. As long as I have your attention on Front Office Sports, I’m pretty sure I can then either pivot that attention to other spokes like Rising 25, or we can build other things around it.
Rising 25 was our first spoke of monetizable IP. Then from there we went into Best Employers. Again, this was something that we had gotten a lot of feedback on, and I think you’ll probably see this common theme is that we’re just so close to the industry. People oftentimes tell us what they want to see and then we execute it. Best Employers came from the idea that people were looking for who were the Best Employers in sports, hence the name. They really couldn’t find out, they couldn’t find what was a non-biased list.
They couldn’t find what was something that was, is as about as data-driven and analytical as possible. I just happened to come across a person who used to work at Statista, who understood how all of their awards strategy works with Forbes and some of these other ones. We built Best Employers with the idea that everything was survey-driven. It’s 100% decided by the employees, no one’s going to be– there’s no pay. You don’t pay to get into the award. The idea with that is that if people win the award, then they have the opportunity to license their Best Employers in a sports logo. To be honest with you, first year did not go like we wanted to. I thought our brand was way more important than it honestly was.
I just think we overshot the moon. We charged too much for the license. It was a little bit herky-jerky because it was the first year we had done it. We had seen the success we had with Rising 25. I remember even the projections we had for the license business, it was insane. We’re like, “Oh, we’re going to crush this,” blah, blah, blah. “Everyone’s going to be paying.”
[00:51:00] You don’t then forecast, “Hey, it’s the end of the year award. People already had their budget spent. It’s a first-year award, people don’t really know what the impact’s going to be like.” That was the idea with that one and I think it’ll be interesting to see if we do more, or if we just really double down on those, because I still think that those can be really big franchises themselves between Rising 25 and Best Employers with the idea that our core business is content.
I want our focus to be a hundred percent on that, but with then the idea that these spokes become an area that creates stickiness, right? Rising 25 people are always going to be around, they’re going to help us in business, they’re going to help us in whatever it is, Best Employers in Sports, that’s going to be a nice database that we create that we can then sell to a branded partner conversation, create white papers, et cetera.
It’s changed a little bit, but Best Employers in Sports is on the licensing side, Rising 25 is on the brand side and we’re going to continue to experiment with those, right? I still think there’s an opportunity for Best Employers to be both a brand side of things, because I think a lot of brands want to be associated with something like that and a licensing play too. Again, as you can probably tell as someone who’s never been in the media, I just look at what all these other media companies do, and I say, “How can we apply that to our business that makes sense? Best Employers is not a new award.” Whatever Best Employers of X, everyone has it for the most part, but no one had it in sports and I was like “Well, let’s get out in front of it and do that as immediately as we can, so then we have that stake in the ground.”
Jacob: I’ve certainly thought about that as a model. I’ve talked about that with some other people just because it’s an interesting– Allowing the HR department to license the Best Employer logo is just– it’s smart and it’s like– I can’t remember the name of the publication– I think it’s US World or something.
Adam: Yes.
Jacob: What they do with universities, that is a huge business. There’s a ton of money in that where they rate business schools and the number one business school gets to say they’re the number one business school.
Adam: Yes.
Jacob: There’s a ton of money in that.
Adam: Forbes’ business with Statista is massive, absolutely massive. That’s why I think in my eyes were a little bit big because I saw some of the IOs that these people were paying for Forbes and stuff, and I was like, “Woa, this is crazy.” The thing is that people have to remember is that, and I think this is where we got it wrong, is that you have to have a brand that’s really established before you do that, which I don’t think our brand isn’t established, but I just don’t think we’re at that level yet that we could charge, right? Like as much as we thought we could charge from a licensing standpoint. We’re still new. It’s our first year as a full-time business.
That’s the one thing I would say is if you want to get into that model, you just got to be careful and make sure that you feel like your brand is in a strong position to do so. Again, I believe there’s a lot of value in creating opportunities, especially from an award level, that people don’t have to pay for upfront because it creates, like Rising 25, anyone can win Best Employers in Sports, anyone can win. We had Best Employers and it just gives a better smattering or better picture of the true industry. We had a team, a minor league baseball team in Wisconsin win, Wisconsin Timber Rattlers. I had never heard of them in my entire life, to be honest with you, right before this, but I went and looked at all their LinkedIn profiles of all their employees, 15 years with the team, 17 years with the team, 16 years with the team. They had built something truly special and for them, that’s an award that I think really makes a lot of sense.
It was cool to see them win because the one thing that I’ve always been hesitant, and I haven’t liked, and again, this is feedback that we’ve heard, is that having to pay for stuff up front really limits the opportunities and my thought is like “Okay, if we can build something with an IP that’s creative enough, we can get a brand to sponsor it and we can do something with a licensing thing that if people want to take advantage of they can, and if they do that, we’ll make the money that we needed to make and we’ll keep it moving and everyone will be happier.”
I think that’s the one thing that again, it’s so easy to just say, “Hey, pay for this,” or “Hey, pay to apply.” I think from a brand value and a brand equity standpoint, and again, why we’ve been able to take advantage of some of these things is because everything we’ve done has been pretty much free, because I’ve challenged us with like “All right, let’s make it free and then let’s go sell it. If we can’t sell it, we shouldn’t even be doing it.”
My whole thing is we have to believe in a product and a piece of IP enough to then sell that to someone because we know that if we sell it to a brand and people can win it, and they don’t have to feel like they had to fill out a long application or they had to pay or there were some other forces at work, we would be in a good spot, and that’s how it all shook out.
Jacob: Is Front Office Sports profitable today?
Adam: It depends on what we’re talking about pandemic side of things. We should be. This year we definitely should be. We would’ve been more so without the pandemic, right? We got smacked in the face, everyone got smacked in the face. Luckily, we got smacked in the face in the sense that we didn’t actually have a truly built-out events business. We had Rising 25 Best Employers, but they weren’t fully built-out events, we didn’t get ads hurt there, but yes, depending on how the rest of Q3 and Q4 goes, we should definitely be in a good spot and we would’ve been far and away in a good spot if we would’ve not had the pandemic, but I would consider it a win.
We’ll still probably see revenue up in the revenue growth of 100% plus this year, which again is still great, but it wasn’t as high as we thought it was going to be. We just have to keep executing. Again, that’s all it comes down to at this point. We’ve gotten the early first-year kinks out. We’ve gotten the brand and the site to a place where we feel is premium and people think about it. It’s like, “Oh, that’s really professional. That’s on the level of the Politicos and the Wall Street Journals and the Bloombergs of the world,” and now it just comes down to, “Okay, can we sell this? Can we continue to execute it? Can we continue to grow the audience?” As long as we do that, we’ll be in a good spot.
Jacob: Let’s move past COVID. Let’s fast forward three years, where do you see Front Office Sports? One of the things that I’d like you to answer is right now you’re completely free, which there are some who say that media businesses need a subscription. There are others who say it, they don’t. Do you see Front Office Sports with a subscription?
Adam: Yes, I think if we execute it right, we really will be considered a Politico of sports. I hope someone from Politico listens to this because like I say this with my whole chest, I really do believe that our model and what they’ve created for politics is something that can be replicated in our space. Maybe not to the, I would say, the same level politics is obviously a much larger play, but I think there’s still something there. If we do have a paid product, because right now our competitive advantage is being free, I love that competitive advantage. It allows us to scale, it allows us to grow audience. It allows us to build our brand much further and faster than we would be if we had a payable site.
If we have a paid product, it has to be something that is truly a product or truly an offering that is not fully baked and based in content. I personally never want to, if we get to the point in my opinion, where I or we have to turn on a paywall for content and we say, “Okay, you can only read three articles, and then you have to pay.”
I don’t think we’ve done our job well. I think we can go out and figure out ways to drive revenue by building other franchises, by doing different things in where we can keep everything free. If we’re going to build a product, I want it to be a paid product that’s feels more like Politico Pro then just what would be a traditional content sub to like a Wall Street Journal or a Bloomberg or something like that. That’s the approach. I think if we do it right, it’s crazy, but outside of, really today, if you look at it outside of ESPN, which they’re linear or their website property is just really part of something that helps support their linear business.
Their linear business is the big business. ESPN, Bleacher Report, and a few others athletic. There’s Yahoo! I guess there’s really not that many national sports sites anymore. Sports Illustrated, I guess, but it’s very different than it used to be. There’s really not very many national sports sites. I think in three years there’s an opportunity if we execute to be one of the top 5 to 10 national sports sites in the US both from the way we do it, from the business side of things, I think that’s really fascinating.
I think that’s where things can net out. It just comes down to, as we’ve discussed at length, execution. If we can stick to the fact that we’re building something that’s a prosumer brand that’s not just for people who are professionals, but that we can build it for the consumers too. I think that’s going to what’s going to take us the farthest, but if we don’t get that right, that’s also going to be what keeps us smaller than where we think we can get to.
Jacob: All right. Last two quick questions. First thing is, what is one thing you wish you had known when you got started that you now know?
Adam: It’s going to take a lot longer than you think. I think that’s the one thing that media as a whole, and it’s been proven time and time again, is that it’s just in the early days, it is a slog and it takes a lot longer than you think and that it’s a very interesting world and the fact that it’s one of the weird businesses where you have to build an audience before you can sell anything. It’s not like you can build a product and sell the product immediately and then I’m like, “All right, cool, I’m getting money.” It’s like you have to spend time building an audience. That’s one of the things I would do, I think I would have focused a little bit early on too, just more focused on a tradition on two or three things. We launched a digital studios for absolutely no reason in 2016 because I was just trying to do anything and everything.
It’s just it was a waste of time. If we would have focused more on launching a newsletter earlier, could it have been better writer, or what it was, so I would say patience and focus. Because I think, really good strong media brands, I would say, take 10 years to really get to a point where they feel like a strong media brand, before they even start to become more so super influential. Because especially when you’re in nowadays like you’re dealing with so much noise, you’re dealing with so much opportunities, people getting content from very different places, it takes a while to break through, it takes a while to become a habit, and then just it becomes a habit, it takes a while to become a trusted source.
Then once you’re a trusted source, then you have a really good spot, but to go from a media company, to a habit for people, to a trusted source that people are reading for 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 times a day or a week. That takes 5, 10 years. That’s just the truth. It’s just the fact of the matter. I think those are the two things that would have helped a little bit more, and then controlling what you can control. I think I spent a lot of time in 2017 when I was trying to get it all started, just looking at what everyone else was doing and comparing myself and being like, “Oh, we can do better. We can do this, we can do that.”
At the time it was like “You have no money and you’re working three jobs, how much can you actually do?” I think that was the other thing too is that you just got to you got to do that. I guess maybe if you want a fourth thing, and they asked for two things. The fourth thing is I got so lucky in having Russ, who I mentioned previously, who is my number two. He was the only person who ever reached out to me through Miami, we’ve been doing it since Miami, we just had such a good professional relationship. You just got to find someone else to be there with you in the trenches.
I quite frankly, I can’t say enough about Russ and now the rest of the team that we’ve added. You just have to find people who want to be in the trenches, it’s not sexy, it’s a day-in and day-out grind. Those people as long as you treat everyone well, it’s going to be some of the funest years everyone gets to accelerate their careers, take on more responsibility. Like we have a great example, Paige our client access– she’s now doing clients– she was our events person, pivoted to the client success because there was no more events, really, with COVID. We were planning to launch other events. Pivoted to client success is absolutely crushing it for us. I just think that’s the one thing too is the adaptability of the team and making sure you put them in a position that– that was never something that her background was and quite frankly, she’s done an amazing job at it. I know that was again, more than two things, but I think all important.
