Brian Dolan On His Multiple Careers in Media

Jacob: Brian, when I saw John at Aging Media tweet that I needed to do a deep dive into what you had built, not just once, but now a second time, I knew I couldn’t actually ignore his advice. Tell me, who are you and how did you find your way to working in media?

Brian Dolan: Great, thanks, Jacob. It’s great to be here. My name is Brian Dolan. I am the founder and lead writer of a subscription only paid newsletter and market intel report site called Exits & Outcomes, and that’s focused in the digital health sector. I think of it as the third time around for me. I got my start out of school at a great little media company called Fierce Markets down in DC.

A lot of what I’ve done in the meantime, that was back in 2005, so really these past 15 years, a lot of that’s been building on those first couple years at Fierce. They’re still around. It’s a great company. I was probably employee number 12 there, and I think if your listeners have been a part of a small team before, or a company that’s sub 20 employees, you really get to learn quite a bit about how a business that size works if you’re there that early, so a lot of what I ended up doing was based on the experience of Fierce Markets.

Jacob: After Fierce Markets, your big initiative was MobiHealthNews, which we’ll abbreviate to just Mobi because that’s a mouthful. Then, so that was your first big play on going on your own with media, right?

Brian: That’s right. I had a brief stint at a market research and analyst firm called the Yankee Group. They actually recruited me from Fierce, so that’s what brought me up here to Boston. I’m in the Boston area. For about seven or eight months I worked for the Yankee Group and they were also focused on the mobile industry, which was the sector I covered at Fierce Markets.

During that seven, eight month period, I was really focused on building big B2B multimillion dollar type industry conferences and expos for them focused on the emerging world of the mobile internet. This was pre-iPhone, but what we call apps today, the original apps that we were trying to make work on things like Blackberry devices and early smartphones. It was really towards the end of my time there the recession hit, this was mid to late 2008, and we were starting to plan our mobile internet world show for the following year, and the question that my boss posed to me was, how do we reposition this show for down economy?

What parts of the mobile industry are recession-proof, are likely to still be interesting and growing in 2009? As part of that project I came up with a couple of different buckets, and the one that I was most excited about was this idea of the mobile industry intersecting with healthcare, so mobile health. Another one was I think what we call EdTech today, but it was the same idea, looking at education, technology. Then I believe the third thing that I came up with was government-related, but those were three areas that I thought in that recession would still be interesting and growing and had enough conviction in that that I ended up leaving Yankee Group to start a media company focused on mobile health.

That was for a couple reasons. One of them was they didn’t really like the pitch. I think they thought it was probably a little too ambitious, and the niches that I had picked there were all a little bit too small for them to build events around that year, which I think in hindsight is absolutely true. Also, I think I learned big B2B media events really weren’t for me, and I was much more of a journalist, and so I was really excited to dig back in and become a writer again.

Jacob: It’s interesting because when you were launching Mobi, you dove into a very niche play. I would never even have considered mobile health and the intersection as something to do, whereas the majority of people who were getting a ton of press at the same time as you were all chasing aggressive scale plays. I don’t know what the traffic numbers are at MobiHealth, but I’m sure if you had a million people hit your site in a month, that would be an insane amount of people versus the Voxes and the Vices and the Buzzfeeds that were raising tons of money. When you started were you clear that this was always going to be a very focused play, and did you have to pitch it to investors to get started? How did that all work out?

Brian: That’s a great question. Again, I think the experience of Fierce Markets was key to that. That’s what led me to pick a true niche. This wasn’t just healthcare. We call it now digital health, but it was looking at the digital transformation of healthcare, but in particular the healthcare experience. In some ways it was even a niche within a niche, so it was very small. Back in 2008 it also was fairly non-existent. We were super early. There weren’t really any events at all that were focused on this topic. Maybe one or two. They all used different terms.

Again, this was right around the time the iPhone had come out, but the App Store was just coming out, and so a big part of what fueled digital health was health apps and medical apps for various smartphones. Anyway, my experience at Fierce was in the telecom industry, and I was for a couple years anyway, their go-to telecom editor for launching new publications. The Fierce model was to take their larger publications and start finding ways to splinter out verticals within them to spin out a a new weekly newsletter. I’ve always been very newsletter focused, even back when I started at Fierce. They didn’t even have a website.

Their website was just a signup page for the newsletter, so I think I learned very early on the importance of email newsletters is the main driving vehicle for a B2B media company.

At one point at my peak, I think I was writing two dailies at Fierce and one weekly, so I was writing 11 issues a week. It was mostly a curation model. It did involve quite a bit of time on the phone talking to people every afternoon. I just always had the mindset that the way to build a B2B media brand was to find an emerging niche and build the dominant media publication that everyone in that industry needed to read that day or that week.

Jacob: That makes perfect sense. Obviously you and I are both newsletter writers, so we both share a philosophy around that direct to somebody’s inbox strategy. It’s much cleaner than chasing page views and things like that. When you started Mobi, I was looking at your LinkedIn and describing the various aspects of that, that was a traditional looking media company. You had a website, you had ads, you had events, you had webinars and all that. It wasn’t just a newsletter.

Brian: We saw the newsletter and I still today see that as the prime vehicle. What I do today is I publish the whole newsletter as an article, but for both at Fierce and at MobiHealthNews, individual articles within the newsletter were published as separate blog posts on the publication’s websites. Traditional in a lot of ways. Fierce became that way while I was there. I was part of the team that helped them create websites and start building out web traffic. It was always there for MobiHealthNews. As you said, main revenue streams both at Fierce and Mobi were really various whether it’s a newsletter-based marketing product or web-based marketing product all the ones that are fairly common as well as online webinars.

We would do both sponsored webinars and editorial ones, which had a sponsored component to them. I think in both instances, at both companies, there was not as much of a focus on live events as I think there typically is in B2B media. Fierce did many more than we did at MobiHealthNews, but they were typically co-located events at larger shows. At MobiHealthNews, prior to the acquisition, we never did a standalone event. They were always co-located and fairly infrequent, just a couple a year. I think we did many more online events like webinars than in person ones.

Jacob: The whole virtual component is less risky from a fixed cost perspective and easier to scale up and all of that stuff.

Brian: The first time you do a live event and you get the bill for the coffee is enough to scare most people away. It’s amazing what the markup can be in some of these convention halls. It’s a tough business.

Jacob: I think it was Rafat Ali over at Skift who wrote a piece about how the events business is going to change. I’ve never met Rafat, but I think the glee he feels knowing that hotels will not be able to extort his business this year especially on the food and beverage is just so extreme. I’ve done events in my full-time job and the costs are intense. How long did you do Mobi before the inevitable acquisition by HIMSS Media?

Brian: Well, I wouldn’t say it was inevitable. I think it took seven years to get there, which I think was the right amount of time. I had a co-founder. The two of us were equal founders, equal owners of the company. We said at the beginning, this is something we want to work on. We’re hoping to get it acquired within five to seven years, was the timeframe. We ended up hitting the mark. It was just shy of seven years. 2015, we were acquired. We were acquired by what was at the time, and I think this may still be true, the largest health IT media publisher, our biggest competitor also, acquired us. I wouldn’t say it’s inevitable. I think there’s a lot of media companies that don’t make it.

I’m really proud that we built it to a point where it was a product and a media business that somebody wanted to acquire. That was certainly a high watermark for my career, especially leading up to that acquisition. Those were some great years. MobiHealthNews continues on as a part of HIMSS Media, and my old number two managing editor is now running all of editorial at HIMSS Media. There’s definitely a little bit of a legacy there, which is great to see. Since the acquisition, HIMSS has also grown the footprint of MobiHealthNews.

It was always a global publication with more of a US focus, or 80-20 in terms of web visitors. 20% were from abroad, and HIMSS Media is owned by the big Health IT Association, which has a global footprint. When they did a recent survey post-acquisition, they saw that of all the media brands that they owned, MobiHealthNews was the one with the biggest brand recognition worldwide. They ended up really scaling that out. They now have journalists in various parts of the world in Europe and Asia. MobiHealthNews is really I think coming to its own is sort of a global publication covering digital health in a way that it wasn’t with the limited resources we had as a four or five-person startup.

Jacob: That makes sense. Did HIMSS come to you or did you go to HIMSS to talk about this acquisition?

Brian: That’s a great question. I was sort of both. There was probably about three years leading up to the acquisition, where every year a contingent of HIMSS executives in the media side would come to Boston because they are based all over, but they had a pretty big office up in Maine. They would come down to Boston and take us out to lunch. I think the first couple years that they were doing that, we got excited. We thought, “Oh, they’re looking to acquire us. This is really interesting.” I think at one of those lunches, they brought a financial advisor type person, making it abundantly clear. I think just chalking this up to inexperience, never having gone through this before, I think we blew those early meetings.

We just didn’t really say the right things. We really kept up a façade, which was true that things were going really well, we were really happy with the business, but we didn’t really give them an opening to start a conversation about an acquisition. We can talk about why maybe that was. It was probably the third or fourth year of that happening that my business partner and I had decided, after seven years, we had grown this company as much as we could and made it as valuable as we could and it was time to find an exit. We reached out to a few people, including HIMSS. In that case, in the final case, it was us that started the conversation.

Jacob: That makes sense. I’ve never been through an acquisition, but I can only imagine the amount of work that goes into doing that. The lunches, I’m sure are the easy part. It’s all the financial diligence, and everything that comes afterwards.

Brian: Right, yes, it can be very stressful. Both my business partner and I were also having children around the same time. I think my second born was in the midst of finalizing that deal. My business partner Joe Malley, he had his first child, his son, about two months after. We had a lot going on. It was a very exciting time, but not a whole lot of sleep and a lot of stress that summer.

Jacob: Then you got it done. In your opinion, what went right with this acquisition?

Brian: A lot of things went well with the acquisition. I think, and I did, if you make a list of potential buyers of MobiHealthNews, I would put HIMSS Media at the top of the list. As I said, they were the biggest Health IT publisher and I think they still are the biggest health IT publisher in the market. It made a lot of sense that we would become a part of their portfolio of publications. They did have one that competed with us directly. That was a smaller initiative. We ended up replacing that and melding our brand with there’s a little bit but we really brought, I think, a ton of digital health subscribers and readers to HIMSS and the organization at large really saw the digital health space as the future of health IT.

We knew that we were helping to set up the wider organization for having a channel into what they saw as really the future of their industry. Then, as I said, just benefiting from the resources of a larger publisher. The most obvious one, to me, at the time was really seeing the expansion of the footprint and the readership. I think they doubled the number of readers we had within a year, year and a half of the acquisition. That just speaks to the resources of a big company like that, and their ability to focus on audience development and use all the lists and other things that they had at their disposal to run nurture campaigns to bring more people into the fold. It’s a long list of what went well. I think it was a great fit strategically for HIMSS. I’m very happy that MobiHealthNews still exists, it’s still thriving, and it still is the dominant publication for digital health.

Jacob: If someone were to come along, and we’ll talk about your new project in a minute, but if someone were to come along today and want to buy your new business out, what are things that you learned through this acquisition with HIMSS, maybe some negatives that you would try to prevent from happening the second time around?

Brian: I think this is more of a macro lesson that would have helped with everything else. One mistake that I personally think I made really from the start of MobiHealthNews, Again, I was 25 when we started this, so just to cut myself a little slack, I was talking to a friend about this earlier in the week, and they said it’s almost like I hermetically sealed-off. Me and my co-founder just went into this bubble, and worked on this publication and worked on this little business really on our own. As we added people, they became part of that bubble.

I did not reach out nearly enough to other media operator types or other people that I knew at Fierce, many of whom would go on to found really successful companies like Industry Dive, I worked with the three co-founders of that company when I was at Fierce, and then another one in the biopharma space, Endpoints News. I worked with one or two of those co-founders. I actually had a really great network, even just within my Fierce alumni network, that I should have gone to more. I did that very little. Just having those conversations and having that type of advisory board, I think, would have helped in so many ways. We mentioned leading up to the deal I had these meetings with a potential acquirer.

If I had had an advisory board around me that had gone through this process and was familiar with it, I think they probably could have helped coach me as to how to have that conversation with them earlier. In addition to that, I think there’s just so many ways that we could have grown the value of MobiHealthNews as a business. Again, if you look at Fierce or you look at Industry Dive if you’re more familiar with them, the way to scale a lot of these niche media businesses is to figure out a model that works for a publication and then scale it across different verticals, or even different mini verticals within your original vertical, I think would be the way that we probably would have done it at MobiHealthNews.

That would have required a larger team and many more resources. I think, had I been just better at asking for help and more secure in jumping on the phone with some of these old colleagues of mine and asking for advice, I probably could have figured out how to do that. It’s definitely a big lesson. It’s something that I’m trying really hard. I think so far I’ve been very successful at getting on the phone with a lot of those people and other people that I’ve come to know over the years, and just sharing the challenges and learning in real-time, as opposed to trying to figure it out on my own or after the fact.

A plug for what you’re doing too, Jacob. I think things like A Media Operator, that didn’t exist in 2008 when we started MobiHealthNews. A lot of the writing about this sort of business was at a different level. I had a sense of things, but I didn’t have a tactical sense of things.

Jacob: The reason I launched A Media Operator was specifically so that I could learn from people who were smarter than I was. I had actually intended on this being a podcast [unintelligible 00:20:48] newsletter, because the interview is I now get some of your time, I believe you’re smarter than I am in media. Therefore, I get to learn from you on what you’ve done. That was the whole idea behind the media operator, and it just took off from there. I think that for anybody who works in media, find your network of people. After doing this for a year now, I find that a lot of people genuinely just want to see us succeed, and they will give their time to make that happen.

I definitely agree with that, having that advisory committee. Let’s fast forward. Fierce was phase one of your career, Mobi was phase two. Now let’s move on. We’re now moving to phase three of your career, which is your current project. Tell us a little bit about what you do now, why you decided to launch, because it’s another health play, why you decided to launch this publication and why it’s different than MobiHealthNews.

Brian: That’s a great question. It’s different in a lot of ways. It is still in digital health, but my original concept was more a market research offering. I do have these long-form research reports that are between 4,000 and 5,000 words. I still think of that as the core value of what Exits & Outcomes provides, but I do have a weekly newsletter as well. I think what I’ve learned in a year of doing this is that people actually really love the newsletter and it’s, I think, of equal value. For some people maybe it’s of more value. It surprises me that that ended up being as big a part of what I’m doing as it is.

It’s different from MobiHealthNews in that it’s not a daily, it’s not tracking all of the digital health in a comprehensive way. If you were to only read Exits & Outcomes and not read MobiHealthNews, I think you would probably not know a lot of what’s going on in the industry. It’s really positioned as sort of a premium version of MobiHealthNews. I think it sits well on top of MobiHealthNews. If you’re looking for more, if you’re looking for additional context and deeper cuts and analysis, as well as market research, I think Exits & Outcomes is a great addition to your weekly read. As a product, it’s different in a lot of ways. It’s not a straight news industry tracker based on press releases and interviews.

It’s really the foundation of what I do today, and the writing that I do is really more market research-oriented, and it’s not based on the weekly cycle of announcements from the industry. I can talk about the specifics of the content at length, but maybe it’s not as tactical. Suffice it to say, there’s so much information about private companies on the internet today that did not exist in 2008. Most journalists are not spending their time watching every YouTube video presentation that a company founder that they’re writing about has given, or listening to every podcast that someone has given.

There’s so much information out there. These companies are parsing it out in lots of different ways. One of the things that I have done in my long-form research is just, in a very comprehensive way, I pulled together every little insight and data point that a private company shares across the web and pulled that into a long-form report. You learn a lot more about a company than you would if you only followed what was put into their press releases over the past couple of years.

Jacob: Would you say that your clients or your readers are executives at other digital health companies? More on the investor side? A blend of both?

Brian: Yes, it’s a blend. I would say it’s probably primarily three groups in my audience today. I should say that another way that I’m different from MobiHealthNews is I’m a little bit more focused, and this is an initial thing. I’m going to broaden it out a little bit, but I’m really focused more on the pharmaceutical side of digital health. I write about startups that are creating digital health products that are basically either prescribed as if they were pharmaceutical products or they are prescribed along with pharmaceutical products as sort of a digital adjunct to them, so they help increase the positive patient outcomes of a drug.

Or it’s a behavioral therapy that can actually produce their own positive patient outcomes. They can help you manage your symptoms, and that’s proven through the same way that a pharmaceutical product has been proven with randomized trials and whatnot. Anyway, given that I’m a smaller niche, my audience today is really a mix of digital teams at large pharmaceutical companies, investors, so VCs that are really investing in these startups or hope to, and then the startups themselves. I think across the board, it’s a C-level audience. It’s mostly the founders of those startups and their strategy leads or their commercial officers, kind of those three.

Then within the pharma groups, as I said, it’s really their digital team so there’s a mix there. I think those three are the key. There are a number of large tech firms, the biggest companies in the world that are really interested in digital health. I think many of them take a similar approach in looking at some of their products, anyway, as being these digital therapeutics. I have a number of those companies on as well. For all these larger companies and pharma companies, most of them are subscribing as enterprise subscribers so they have the ability to make the site and the newsletter available to their entire company.

Jacob: That’s an interesting model. It’s a model I thought a lot about. I think it’s a model that Endpoints News also takes where you effectively provide a single license and then everybody at the company gains access. Do you believe that that has given you more revenue than you would otherwise get from these companies? Or do you think that it handicaps the amount that you can grow because you’re effectively giving– If a company’s got 1,000 people, you’re giving 1,000 people access to content for a relatively small per-user price.

Brian: No, it’s a great question. It really depends on the company. I’d say for the ones that have purchased that sort of subscription, for the most part, they are companies that few of their employees are actually focused on this digital piece. In the instance of a pharmaceutical company, obviously, the vast vast majority of that company is not interested in reading Exits & Outcomes, but they do have a team that’s focused on digital health and I’m happy to have that entire team reading the publication. I have found that it’s not like 1,000 people end up signing up. It’s more like, I think, at the most dozens of people end up.

That’s a function of my industry and how big a team is that’s focused on this at a larger company. No, I think it’s great. I think just enabling someone who’s in a management role to make the decision that their team should be reading this, especially in these early days of a company, it’s a great thing. It helps, I think, increase the larger subscribership because it becomes just a part of their culture. It’s something that hopefully most of them are reading on a weekly basis, and now that they all have access, they can all talk about it. This shouldn’t be a surprise but my two biggest sources of new paying subscribers, number one is word of mouth, forwarding the newsletter.

It’s just purely my current subscribers reaching out to colleagues and getting them to subscribe. Then number two is via social media. I just think in these early days getting as many paying subscribers as I can, if that includes an enterprise deal, I think it’s a great way to grow. It could change. Maybe this is something I just do for now, but I think it’s a good model. Maybe one other point, you mentioned Endpoints.

I think what’s really interesting about their model is, I believe, I shouldn’t speak for them, but I believe that even though they have the enterprise package, they’re still selling marketing products around that so there is some level of advertising or sponsorship in the product that’s premium, that’s paid for. That’s an opportunity too. I think if you can get an entire digital team at a big company that a lot of other companies are trying to reach, down the road maybe that’s a good way to create the right bundle of readers for a really targeted marketing product.

Jacob: I’ve got a lot of thoughts about that and I want to come back to that. As we think about, again, A Media Operator, $200 a year, I do group subscriptions, I’ve sold a couple of those. When you started this, what was your strategy on coming up with a price?

Brian: I’ll admit not super sophisticated. I really just looked at comps. I think everyone’s go-to, especially a year ago, is Stratechery, Ben Thompson, and his is $100 a year so I started with that. I see what he’s doing as far less niche than what I’m doing. For starters, I think there’s something a little bit more focused and exclusive about the content I’d be providing. It’d be a smaller audience and, et cetera, et cetera. Just looking at other comps that are a little closer to what I’m doing, the TimmermanReport was a big one. I think his price point is a little bit higher than mine. I just rounded up three or four of those and looked for a spot in the middle that made sense. I have to say, it’s been a year.

I have had one single complaint from a potential subscriber, someone who I actually thought was going to subscribe. It may be the only one wondering why I cost more than Stratechery, and they even specifically referenced that. In every other case, the only time this comes up in a discussion, most people wonder why I’m not charging more. I’m okay with that. I understand there’s a good chance I’m leaving money on the table, and I’m not opposed to raising the prices at some point, but if this is where I’m at, where for the most part people are finding a lot of value on what I’m doing and they’re willing to pay it and I can make it work on my end, then I think it’s a good place to start. I’m hoping to continue to add value, and I think there could come a time before long where I decide it makes sense to raise the price.

Jacob: Yes, when I decided to go paid with A Media Operator, I was originally going to charge $100 a year, and then literally, the last minute, I just put a 2 in front of the 1. There was no thought whatsoever- there’s not that much difference between $100 and $200. If I can provide one useful piece of tactical or strategic knowledge to somebody, it’s worth the $200. I have also received that comment that people feel I don’t charge enough, but there’s a balance, right? I would rather have a decent number of media operators have access to the content than only the most successful that can afford it. I was trying to find that balance.

Brian: Yes. That gets down to an ethical, philosophical way of viewing your business. I think another way that I’ve seen it posed is it’s easier to serve a smaller group. If you find a price point that works for your business, but it’s on the higher end, and it makes it a much smaller group, that group may have more in common with each other, and it may be easier to really serve them at an even more valuable way. I see the logic in that too, but I think if, and this isn’t true for everybody, if what you’re doing has a journalistic backbone to it, then some kind of a scale and reaching a larger audience is typically a part of that. That’s certainly true for what I’m doing. I’m hoping to have a larger audience, increasingly larger audience as time goes on. I don’t think my strategy will be to shrink it at a higher price point.

Jacob: I agree with that. I put out two pieces week. One free on Tuesdays, one paid on Fridays. You’re 100% paid as far as I could tell.

Brian: Yes.

Jacob: You mentioned before word of mouth, social media, but do you struggle with audience development when all of your content is behind a paywall?

Brian: That’s a great question. I think there’s a few reasons that I do it the way that I do. I think anyone in this position is going to feel like they could be growing faster, especially because it’s all behind the paywall, but I think one way to think about the position that I’m in is I had a very large audience that for many of the years I was at MobiHealthNews, were reading what I was writing. I was the main writer up until the last probably two years that I was there, prior to the acquisition. My name was very strongly associated with the brand and a lot of people still think of me as the original digital health reporter.

There’s this audience that I no longer have the assets that MobiHealthnNews had. Obviously, I can’t use an actual list. I think of it almost like a nurture campaign of I’m trying to reconnect with a portion of my old audience. I’m not creating an audience from scratch in the same as someone would be if they were creating a new media business in a new niche or a new industry. I think because of that, I have something of an established reputation among my potential subscribers. It’s really just making it clear to them that what I’m doing is different, it is more premium, it is deeper. As you say, it’s not something they’re going to see somewhere else.

Every issue of Exits & Outcomes has, I think, a number of mini scoops and surprises, whether it’s an acquisition that was hidden for six months from a big company, or I get some signal that shows a company is working on a particular product and I can share that. There’s lots of little things that a typical media company isn’t tracking that I put in there. Really, I think it’s the difference between keeping up and getting ahead. That’s one way that I think of it is MobiHealthNews will absolutely help you keep up, you’re going to be on the same page as everyone else in the industry.

What I’m trying to do with Exits & Outcomes, is for those paying subscribers, they’re going to be a couple of weeks or a couple of months ahead of everyone else. It’s a little bit different, I think, because I have this latent audience that I’m trying to reconnect with. I would say, as I mentioned before, there are two obvious ways that I’m doing that, and that’s social media. I still have my personal Twitter account. That wasn’t part of the acquisition, so that’s been a really great source of reconnecting with old readers, and then LinkedIn as well. It’s a smaller number there, but I think as many people have experienced, LinkedIn is a pretty great source for media companies today.

I do find a fair number of paying subscribers who are coming from posts or other people’s posts about there. I get your point. I’m not ruling out launching some kind of a free version of Exits & Outcomes in the future, but I think for now I’m still growing quick enough that this strategy is working and because I’m a one-person operation, I think every minute that I can put into increasing value, and keeping up the quality of the newsletter that I’m offering only to paying subscribers, I think that’s really still priority number one. I’m carving off a small amount of time to figure the rest out. I would say 95% of my day is really focused on the product and on serving those paying subscribers that I have.

Jacob: That makes sense. Are you willing to share how many subscribers you have?

Brian: It’s a little early. I’m not ready to share numbers. I think it’s still early days, but I’m happy with the growth. I think my expectations were pretty open-ended just because I hadn’t done this sort of thing before. I hadn’t had a subscriber-only product. Now that it’s been a year, I have a better sense of what growth could look like and should look like. Probably more willing to talk numbers in year two, but yes, I think for now, I’m going to keep that quiet.

Jacob: All right, we’ll come back to that in year two. Speaking of the first year, because I’ve got from other people I’ve talked to who their subscription products hit that one-year mark, and it’s, “My one-year paid mark will be in January.” I can only imagine there’s got to be a little bit of stress that starts to build up as you get closer and closer to that because you’re coming up to that point of renewal. What was that process like? Did you see a lot of churn? Knowing that churn is a natural phenomenon in media, did you deploy any tactics that would help reduce that churn?

Brian: I have not deployed any tactics to reduce churn specifically. I think one thing that, again, may be different from others’ experience, when I launched this, it was in May 2019. I launched with one of these long-form reports. Really, it was an attempt to more or less write a summary of what an S1 document would look like for a big name company in my space that was about to go public. This was before they filed for their IPO. I just pieced together different sources of information about the company and put this research report together. I launched with that, knowing that it would be of interest to a lot of people in digital health, and it was, so that was it.

I didn’t make an announcement. I didn’t send out a here’s what I’m doing now update to all of my contacts. It was soft-launched on the strength of that report as really a content marketing type play. As a result of that, they trickled in. It did get around and I think people in that space, it was a diabetes-focused company primarily. I started to see that company, their competitors, their investors, and others like them start subscribing. Anyway, just to make the point, it’s now the end of July we’re talking. Those first couple of months, I only have data on the churn rate for the people that signed up between, really, end of May and end of July now.

This isn’t that helpful because I’m not going to talk about the denominator, but I’ve only had three people fail to renew. It’s a small enough number that I can look into exactly who those people are and what happened. Of the three, I think two of them left the industry, and one of them may have retired. It’s pretty easy to rationalize that at least in most cases, it probably wasn’t because of the quality of anything that they were sent in the past year. I think in the final case, the one other person, they clearly signed up to read this report. I think that gets back to my pricing being low.

If you read a report like that, it may be worth $200 to just sign up just to read that one long-form report. There is a small contingent of people that that’s true for. When I start to see, I think, more meaningful and actual realistic numbers around my churn rate, probably in the next four or five months, that’s something I’m going to keep in mind is just, well, and I’ll probably try to reach out to some of them, what are the chances that this person didn’t renew because they just signed up to read one of the initial market research reports that I put out. It convolutes, I think, what the data is really telling me because my mix of products is not the same as just a straight paid newsletter subscription.

Jacob: That makes a lot of sense. I get an email every time someone churns. It’s a painful exercise to see that, but at the same time, it’s to be expected. Whether I dive too deep into niche, or I sometimes talk a little broader, maybe people don’t want to pay, it’s fine. I’ve also found actually, and this is an interesting thing, that you haven’t, I’m sure because I offer a monthly subscription, I have found that people will sign up to read everything, and then just unsubscribe immediately afterwards. That is also an interesting thing. I’ve thought a lot about just going yearly to prevent against that.

Brian: That’s one reason I don’t offer the monthly. I think if I was just a newsletter, I may have been more likely to offer that as an option. I think because now if you sign up, you get 10 or 11 long form research reports, as well as I guess there’s one database that I have behind the paywall. I don’t know if you’re familiar with 2PM. One of the great features on that publication that I love are these embedded- I think they use Air Table now. They used to use a WordPress plug-in called Table Press that’s what I use.

It’s almost like an embedded Air Table on the side. It’s like a mini database. They have all these different ones. It’s more or less a list, but you can search it and sort it. I started putting those together too and I think my subscribers seemed to really like those. I’m going to do more of those as well. Anyway if you could sign up for one month, and you get all of that research and those databases, it doesn’t seem worth it to me to offer that. For $200 I think getting access to that is a pretty sweet deal even if you’re just wanting to read it one time.

Jacob: Yes, for sure. I’ve thought about doing similar sorts of deep databases into niche media companies and trying to figure out what their revenue is, their employee size, all of that. I’d have to change my pricing model. To do one of those, I haven’t done one yet, I’m sure it’s months of work. For someone to gain access to that for $20 just doesn’t feel right to me. My last question, really about the tactical stuff and then I want to kind of go future-looking.

You mentioned that you’re built with WordPress. You and I launched in a similar time. You opted to go with custom build, I went with Substack. What was your rationale? I guess this might be because the newsletter wasn’t the first point. How did you build the actual site? Did you do it? Did you hire somebody? What does your stack look like? Then the final question is, how much time do you spend handling the technical side of things, versus being able to focus on just the content?

Brian: Great. All good questions. I love Substack. I love that they built a platform. I know you’ve had this debate, are they a tech company or are they a media company? I think of them as more of a tech company, as a platform for journalists and other writers. There’s just so few companies that have done that in a way that’s sustainable. I think Substack is doing well and I think is going to be a sustainable business. It’s just exciting to see that there’s attention being paid to journalism from that sort of company. It’s a very good thing for media. For me, honestly, they just lost me at the 10% revenue fee. The numbers just didn’t make sense to me.

I think if you’re going to get to a certain size and you expect to, it is less expensive to just hire even a somewhat expensive shop to build you a site. It was as simple as that, but also, just long-standing policy based on some advice I guess I got long ago was it’s not typically a good idea to tie your fortunes as an upstart to another startup. Substack, I think had been around for a little while when I launched in May 2019. They didn’t have anywhere near that momentum they have today. I think it was probably just starting to develop around the time that I launched. I was already well into building Exits & Outcomes.

To your other question, I did hire a great design and development firm, to build it called Electric Pulp. It’s a company that I bookmarked many years ago. They were actually the same firm that designed the initial build of Skift. You mentioned Rafat Ali. I think, like everybody, I’m a big fan of his. I used to read his paid content, newsletter and site back in the day. Just the fact that he chose them, I think, was a really big signal to me that they were probably worth looking at. Then I talked to a few others, but I really loved their pitch, and they were a great group to work with, and I continue to work with them.

For now, anyway, they host my site. They built it on WordPress, as you mentioned, and the rest of the stack is very similar to and maybe exactly the same as Stratechery. It’s WordPress, Memberful and MailChimp are the key pieces. As I said, they’re hosting it. That’s probably the key pieces of the stack anyway. Then, in terms of time, it’s not a whole lot. I’d say I spend, as I said, maybe 5% or less of my time on things not related to developing the market research and the newsletter itself, the content.

I heard this from Ben Thompson in his early years, one thing that can add up is the customer service elements of just dealing with someone’s account not working or trying to add a new team member to their enterprise subscription, and that sort of thing. I find Memberful especially their customer service is great. If I can’t find it in our help documents, they can typically help me really quickly. Probably more than dealing with any kind of technical issues with the site, it’s really more about the customer service issues related to memberships. At the same time, I think Memberful has evolved. They’ve added these team subscription options since I’ve launched probably halfway through six months ago.

They probably offered that up, and it’s made it a lot easier, it’s a little bit more hands-off for me. I used to do all that manually. I someone wanted to add a team member, I had to do it myself on the back end. Now Memberful makes it so you can just empower somebody on that subscription to be the manager of their team. You tell them how many seats they get, and they can just swap in and swap out new colleagues as they see fit within the maximum that you set. It’s great. That has worked I think in almost all cases. There’s a few customers that would rather I do it, and I’m happy to, I’m not forcing anybody to. I think to a certain extent I’m able to provide some white glove service if need be. So far so good on that front. As things get even bigger, maybe that gets harder but for now it’s manageable.

Jacob: Speaking about Exits & Outcomes getting bigger where do you see the business in three years? Do you think it’s still a subscription business? Do you do start to maybe copy a little bit of what Endpoints has done and start introducing some marketing components to it? You mentioned before niches within niches, so three years from now when we do our third or fourth interview, and you tell me that you’ve got tens of thousands of paying subscribers what do you envision it looking like?

Brian: Right, I see a couple of ways to go. I haven’t made a set decision on any of them. In all honesty, part of that is just we’re in the midst of this pandemic, what’s going to happen with the coming school year? I have two little kids, one just starting kindergarten, one going to first grade. That does have an impact on how ambitious I want to be as a one-person team for this coming year. I’m keeping an eye on that. I think in the next few weeks, my school district for my kids is a little bit I think, behind the ball in giving us a plan. Tthat may dictate how much time I’m able to put in addition to the time I’m already putting in.

Anyway, this is just spitballing but I think the big swing would be taking inspiration from Fierce and Industry Dive and looking at this model that I’ve been creating for digital health with a paid newsletter and some market research and considering doing the same thing for a handful of other verticals outside of digital health. That would absolutely require more people and a different set of resources. I do think that a lot of what I’m doing has created a competitive advantage, at least in terms of the content itself. I hear from my readers and subscribers and I just know, because know the digital health media space pretty well, that no one’s really coming up with the insights that I have.

I think the way that I’m doing it could be used to do the same thing in other industries. That would be really fun. I’m not sure that that’s the direction I’m leaning in. I think the more likely course is, as you mentioned, finding more niches within digital health. As I said, I’m not serving all of digital health right now. I think there’s two pretty obvious things that I can add to really serve most people working in digital health today across the board. It’s a big industry. Healthcare is huge. If you’re taking on the digital layer of digital transformation of all of healthcare, there’s a lot of potential readers there. That’s a more likely way to go.

I think it’s possible that I could do that still as a solo printer on my own, depending on how much I build that out. I do think there’s room to have not just one weekly newsletter, but maybe there’s three weekly newsletters. The idea would be you could pick and choose. Maybe you’re happy with the way things are, you’re very pharma-focused, you’re going to stick with just what I’m offering today. Maybe you’ve got an interest in some of these other verticals that I’m thinking about, and you want to go two out of three or three out of three, and that would all be inclusive in your $200 annual price. It’d really be about growing the pot, not adding new revenue streams.

Jacob: That makes perfect sense. The buzzword over the past couple of months has been bundle, but you effectively the bundle is both an offensive play to try to add new subscribers, but it’s also a defensive play where you use it as a way to ensure people don’t unsubscribe. If you suddenly double the high-quality insights that they get, they are less likely to ultimately unsubscribe, which the whole game is keeping your current subscribers and then adding new ones. If you’ve got to constantly get new subscribers, it’s hard to grow.

Brian: That’s right.

Jacob: This is the first episode I’ve ever done with this podcast. I really appreciate you hopping on board doing this. I think it went absolutely flawlessly. I do have one final question. One of my hopes with this podcast and with the media operator overall is that people start to look at these niche media companies as really good opportunities to get into the media business. Not everything has to be a mass media scale play and, honestly, most things shouldn’t be. The past decade is full of companies that thought they could build The New York Times with venture capital and it has clearly failed. If someone were thinking about launching their own publication today, and you’ve done it twice now, what’s some advice that you would share with them to set them up to be most successful?

Brian: That’s a great final question. I have a few things. I think the first top-of-mind piece of advice is you can’t be joining a similar company to the one that you want to found as a primary step. I think my almost three years at Fierce Markets were invaluable to everything I’ve done since, especially because that company was so small. I got to know the sales team, the marketing team, the events team. I helped each of those functions within the company in some way from the editorial side and you really get a sense of how all those pieces fit together. If you’re more interested in the subscription side, join a successful but small media startup that’s doing that if you can.

I would absolutely do that first. I think that starting completely from scratch is very difficult. People do it, some will succeed, but you’re going to find not only a great network that you should take advantage after doing that but just so much experience is gained in those small company settings. That’s absolutely number one. I think number two, I have had probably about a half a dozen conversations with people that are trying to start companies. Most of them are Substack endeavors. The thing that has stood out for me among probably about half the people I’ve spoken to is that they don’t have a background in journalism.

I take for granted a lot of that. I didn’t study journalism in school but I took enough classes that I almost did and I did have some internships. I had that experience before I started at Fierce. It’s surprising, it shouldn’t be, but it’s surprising to hear what some of those insecurities are among people that have never done this work before. If you’re the one that’s trying to write and you’re doing something that’s more of a journalistic type, Substack or newsletter, not just an analytical one where you can just sit back in your armchair and think and write which is great. If you can do that, I think that’s a great way to go these days.

If you’re trying to talk to people and you’re trying to figure out what’s going on in the industry, there’s a skill set there, and you need to develop it. You may be able to do that on your own, but you can’t be afraid to get on the phone with people. You can’t be afraid to talk to as many people in that industry that you’re trying to write about as you can. I have found in most cases, if someone doesn’t have a journalism background, they seem to be afraid of that initial step of just trying to get people on the phone to talk to them because that’s a scary thing if that hasn’t been a part of your professional life to date.

Those two things are key. Just think about your skill set and make sure if you’re trying to be a journalist, you have some experience there and then more on the business side. It really helps to join a company that has had some success in the model that you’re thinking about pursuing. You’ll be surprised how much you can learn if it’s a small enough company. Again, I still think back to some of those early years and make adjustments just based on things that I’m not doing right today and that I’m like, “Oh, that’s the way they used to do it. Maybe I should think about that.” It really does pay dividends for probably the rest of my career. I think it will.