John Yedinak on Running a Network of Aging-Related Publications

 Jacob Cohen Donnelly: Aging Media has been one of my go-to examples of B2B media since starting A Media Operator because it’s the perfect example of something so niche the average person has likely never heard of it. For people within the specific industries, it is a must-use resource. What is Aging Media and how did it come to be?

John Yedinak: Thank you for that quick intro. I always like to say Aging is not a niche. Aging is a vertical. [chuckles] Aging media, we are the largest B2B publisher focusing on the $8,000,000,000,000 aging services industry. We started about nine years ago. I started the business with my brother George Yedinak. The origin of the company even starts before that. I had started a website called Reverse Mortgage Daily. It was back when blogs were starting to get hot, and I was just a college dropout working in the mortgage industry, was reading about TechCrunch, and all these bloggers that were making a bunch of money and being the young naïve guy, I was like, “Hey, I think I could do that.”

I picked one of the coolest topics ever in reverse mortgages. I did that for about five years until I figured it out and started to make a few bucks. I hired my first employee named Liz Ecker, who is still actually with us today as our VP of Content. Got that going and during all that time period, my brother started a website called Senior Housing News. We were having lunch one day in a Cuban restaurant in Chicago and I said, “Why don’t we combine our companies?” I say companies very lightly. At that time, Senior Housing News was a bit more consumer-facing. What we did was we took it, spun it hardcore B2B, and it just took off. Since then, we have six different publications now.

We’re the largest publisher in senior housing, home health, skilled nursing, hospice, and then we recently got into behavioral health as well. Incredibly diversified. We make money in a lot of ways, everything from your typical digital advertising to in-person events, virtual events, we do some paid research, and then we’re getting ready to also launch a membership product across all the different verticals. It’s been a wild ride. I think we’re 26 full-time employees right now and our ambitions keep getting bigger and bigger as we get forward with this.

Jacob: We’re going to talk about all of that on this episode, but I do want to lean in a little bit towards when you two formed the company because for the first four to six years, it was just Reverse Mortgage Daily and Senior Housing News. Separate companies, two brothers talking about boring ass topics. Then you merged together and started to expand into these other verticals, all related to the aging space. Can you talk more about what made you realize that merging was the right approach, and then your strategy for identifying new verticals to move into? To expand on that even farther, what are the key variables you look for every new vertical?

John: With Reverse Mortgage Daily, the industry was growing fairly fast at that point, but with the mortgage or the financial crisis in 2007 started to face some headwinds, and so I was looking for other things for us to do because I had these two employees. With Senior Housing, we started to think just because they’re both in the aging and, to be honest, at that point we were still fairly new to the aging services market, but you always hear the term 10,000 baby boomers are turning 65 for the next 30 plus years, we figured it was a good place to start.

What really happened, and I’d say really the genesis of where the company got a lot more exciting in my opinion, was once we figured out on Senior Housing News and what we were doing because at that point there were still competitors in the market, but what we came to market with was a purely digital product. All of our competitors were typically more old-school B2B trade rags with print publications and some old-school investment letters that were still sending stuff out in PDF. What we found was if we come to market with a pure digital product that has better editorial and we’re publishing on a regular basis, typically daily, we can come in and clean the clock at old-school B2B media companies.

We did that in Senior Housing News, it worked. If you can do it once you’re lucky. If you can do it twice, I think you’re pretty good, but then if you do it a third time, in my opinion, you’ve really got something. What we did was we started to hear about all these senior living providers looking to get into home health and get into home care. At the end of the day, as you age, most people want to be in the home. We thought that was going to be a good place for us to get into. We made a mistake at the beginning actually. I would say we half-assed it but after that, we, my brother and I, were sitting down one day, we were like, “Hey, we either go and we do this, or we shut it down.”

At that time, we had half a reporter on it, and you can’t really do anything well when you don’t really dedicate the resources behind it. We decided let’s go, let’s do it. We put two reporters behind it and the thing just took off. Once we’ve done that, now home healthcare is actually our biggest market that we’re in. What we’ve really found is we have an editorial framework there we train our teams on, and having that editorial framework and that repeatable process that we can launch across, in my opinion, any vertical, not even outside of aging if we’ve so decided, but it’s one of those.

Once you have the editorial framework and you know who you are as a company from an editorial perspective, all the other stuff really starts to fall into place. I think that’s what makes us different. I’m not saying we’re the only B2B media company out there that’s like that, but it’s one of those editorial is our biggest asset that we have. We invest heavily into it and we see it as such an important part of our core and who we are that it fuels all the other business lines that we get into. I know there was other questions. Help me remember. [chuckles]

Jacob: Yes. When you do decide to expand into other verticals, what are you looking for from an audience perspective or from an advertising-based perspective? What are the key things that tell you that that is the right vertical to expand into?

John: Great question. We typically look for industries that are really big, really complicated, and this third one’s a joke but it’s also true is we look for things that are unsexy. What I mean by that is typically if you’re picking things that are really big, obviously there’s a huge market there. I like stuff that’s really, really complicated. I like I stuff that’s complicated because I think we can add a lot of value. Typically, if there’s a lot of government regulation, if there’s a lot of technology disruption, that means that we can provide our audience with a lot of tools on how they manage that.

When you talk about government regulation, it’s changing so much on a regular basis that for these companies to really keep up with it, it’s so difficult. For us from an editorial and just a company standpoint, we can really help people navigate these really complicated markets. The value to them for us just continues to get bigger as we go through it. I’d say, those are really the three things we look for. The unsexy one is a joke, but I like markets that nobody else really wants to be in. Everybody laughed at me when we got into hospice and I always use that as a perfect example because $26,000,000,000 a year is spent on hospice today, but there was nobody covering it on a regular basis.

That just blew my mind. We got into that while everybody was laughing at us and that’s actually been our fastest vertical that we’ve gotten to profitability in the history of the company. It’s one of those where we have a model now. It’s one of those we continue to look for different verticals. I think we got at least one, maybe two, on the list here but we’ll typically try and launch one vertical a year.

It’s nice because from the growth of the company, it’s one of those where each time we’d launch a vertical, it typically takes us about two years to get it to break even. Maybe a little bit more depending on which vertical, but we continue to have those pops so once the vertical hits a certain critical mass, we then add different products to it, whether it’s in-person events, paid research, lead gen, things like that. We have a playbook, and it just takes time to run it but if you do it right, it works.

Jacob: We’re going to talk about the team structure because I think that there’s an underlying component of that that supports the playbook you’re referencing. Can you expand on the editorial framework? What does that look at Aging Media?

John: Everything we do is our editorial ethos, for lack of a better term, and it’s exclusive news and analysis that people can’t get anywhere else. When we started, it was a little bit more [crosstalk] vulgar than that but at our core, that’s really what we do, and we walk people through in terms of what that looks. We have examples of stories that we’ve written that we would classify as ANNA. That’s where we have our A stories, and we have our B and B+ stories. We really classify what type of story is this, who is it reaching, and what does it need to become an ANNA?

As long as we’re creating those stories that people can’t get elsewhere, everything else falls into line because that’s why people sign up because they’re not getting it from all these different sources. Frankly, at the end of the day, we’ve shied away from writing for press releases and different stuff like that. Don’t get me wrong, there’s the time and a place for it but historically, in my opinion, the majority of B2B publishers are just writing on stuff that’s sent to them, whereas we actually go chase. I would say that’s the other characteristic. We don’t always just catch. We don’t just catch news coming to us. We go chase it.

I think that’s one of the things that, from my perspective, it also puts us at a competitive advantage because it’s really hard and frankly, it takes time and not everybody wants to put in that time and put in that effort in the editorial, but for us, it’s our ace in the hole where it’s look, we’re going to do the hard work and we’re going to outwork you. Not necessarily just from a time perspective, but we’re going to do the hard stuff that you’re not going to do. To all my competitors I just say bring it.

Jacob: Let’s expand a little bit and talk about the team composition because you have six different verticals. Does each vertical have its own dedicated editorial team and its own dedicated sales team, or do you centralize specific operations across the verticals?

John: Great question. All of editorial is separated. Our trifecta, is what I call it, is our perfect mix, is we have an editor that’s the leader of the site from an editorial perspective, obviously. Then they typically will have two reporters under them. What we’ve found is that’s all we need in order to really cover our industry, is at the depth that we think is sufficient and frankly more than our competitors.

With three people dedicated to each one of our verticals, that’s really where we want to be. Now, we’re not quite there on some of the verticals. They have to get to a certain revenue size before we start to do that, but we’re there on the majority of them. The editors are the leaders of the site and the face of the site and they really direct the editorial vision, along with me as they report to me. We define that going into it and then they execute on that plan with my oversight. Our editorial teams are fantastic. Our editors are really the leaders and the face of that site and then the reporters report under them and that’s really how we have that set up.

The nice thing about it is everything else runs out of the central op system that’s run by my brother. My brother runs all of the revenue and operations side, and so all of our marketing, and so in terms of our branded content and our lead gen and our webinars and stuff like that, that’s all run from a different side of the house but they can service all of our different verticals from a relatively small team.

It’s nice where the business really does start to scale where editorial has to be separate in my opinion, just because with our verticals they’re so niche and we go so deep that it’s hard to find people, frankly, that can cover more than one and cover it well. Again, editorial is fairly separate in terms of how we structure that, but all of our ops and marketing, that’s all totally centralized and they support all the different verticals.

Jacob: I want to pivot the conversation and talk a little bit about technology because part of the reason that vertical media companies can scale to multiple verticals is because they tend to share the same tech. By and large, what is the technology stack that your sites are built on? Then with exception, you have one I believe that is built on HubSpot. Why haven’t you moved every site to HubSpot or this tech stack that you use for the others?

John: No, so the tech stack fits into our model. The tech stack at its core, our most important part, in my opinion, is our email obviously, which is where typically on our verticals almost 60% of our traffic every day comes from our daily email list, which is core and so important to us. At the end of the day, our tech stack in terms of our website is all WordPress based. It’s run off WordPress MU. It’s one install. The nice thing about that is if we want to launch a new website, I can typically get it launched in about an hour and it looks the exact same as all of our other verticals.

Typically, the colors are going to be a little different, but when your technology stack is run off all the same things, you start to have all these competitive advantages over other people, is that all of our ads are the same and so anybody can sell across any of our verticals if they needed to. All the ads that are running are the same, all the different options are the same. It’s one of those you have a repeatable business. Even our media kits and stuff like that look pretty much the same, just with a different brand on it. The tech stack is really core to what we do because it scales because it’s replicable and it’s one of those, once you have a good foundation, you can then launch it into new verticals really, really easy.

At that point, it really becomes a people business. I look at media, it’s like the tech is the simple part, in my opinion for the most part, where people is the hard thing. We can get a lot better at that, but I’m really proud of what we’ve done. Media and media people is the hard part. The tech stack is much easier. In terms of your question on HubSpot, I love HubSpot. It’s what really got us going in terms of getting into lead gen and stuff like that. It’s not really what we’re going to be doing long-term. They know that, but they’ve been a great partner. It’s just it doesn’t scale and it gets too expensive for us.

Jacob: I want to now talk about audience development. In part because I think as a creator myself, I’ve run a newsletter by myself and I have to manage the entire operation, whereas the benefit of a media company is that audience development is its own function. How has your audience development strategy evolved over the years and do you now have a playbook that you deploy for every vertical when you launch or is it unique to each launch?

John: Typically, it all starts with the editorial that we produce. That’s always been the fuel of our audience development where we’ve gotten better at converting people from the site. I remember when we got started, our average conversion rate was going to be 0.02 because we didn’t really know what we were doing, but we’ve gotten better. You can get people converting at 2%-4% on a regular basis and it starts to move faster. I would say if there’s one area where we’re really starting to invest and we’re looking to make some fairly big moves is how do we scale audience development and get it going faster?

For us, since it’s George and I and we own the company, I would say we’re fairly patient in terms of how we build sites and it’ll take us anywhere. Every audience pretty much that we start starts at zero. If we’re launching into an adjacent market that has some overlap, that’s always nice because we can announce it on one vertical and then get people to sign up to give us good base. At the end of the day, I always joke I’m the first one to sign up for each of our email lists and then we grow it one by one and we earn every single one of those subscribers. Up until about two months ago, we had never paid for any advertising or marketing to grow our lists. It’s all been organic.

Again, it’s one of those, I’m a big proponent of quality over quantity. I’d rather have 1,000 of the top CEOs in our markets than 10,000 lower-level people. I can market that list a lot easier in my opinion than the list of 10,000. Again, the goal is to get these lists bigger and to do it faster. I think that’s where our business starts to get really, really exciting as we’ve done this all organically and we’ve done it, I don’t want to say slowly, but we’ve done it the hard way.

What happens if we come in and we start to invest some of our resources into growing those lists faster? What if instead of a vertical taking me two to three years to get to profitability, what if I can get it there in 12 months? Then instead of launching one, what if I launched three? I think that’s where our business gets really exciting and that’s where we’re starting to go. We’re starting to make those investments to make that a reality faster.

Jacob: All of that leads us to the way that we pay the bills, which is the commercial operation. I have a variety of questions on this. First things first, Aging Media is by and large an advertising-driven business. Can you walk through the various products that you offer and how you price them to your clients?

John: Yes, so it’s going to be different in each market. Some markets are bigger than others, but at our core, we’re about I’d say 40% to 50% typically your digital advertising. That could be everything from display ads to email ads, which are our best performer. It could be a simple text ad calling to an asset that, hopefully, we produced or a client had produced. I think we’re about 20% to 25% in-person events, at least we were until COVID. Then the rest is going to be branded content and lead gen. The nice thing about coming to a company like Aging Media is that typically if you’re going to be in aging services, you’re not typically just in senior housing.

You’re going to be in senior housing and you’re going to be in skilled nursing. It’s one those where we’re unique in the sense that people can come to us and we can service them in multiple verticals. From a commercial standpoint, I don’t want to say we’re a one-stop shop, but I want to be. We do have competitors, but none of our competitors play in all the markets that we do. You can come to aging media and you can say, “Hey, I want to take X amount of budget and I want to put it towards senior housing. I want to take X amount of budget, and I want to put it towards home health. Oh yes, you guys are also in hospice. We’re about to launch product there. Let’s talk about that in Q4 when we have extra budget.”

It’s one of those where we really take a much more consultative approach with our clients because you’re not really just in one of these markets, you’re typically looking at all of them. From a competitive advantage standpoint, it’s really hard to compete with us. Not only do we have all the reach, but then we also have our branded content team, which knows these markets. I think that’s the thing that people always look at aging and we’ve had some competitors trying come into space every once in a while and it’s not easy to learn these markets.

We have this in-depth knowledge that our marketing teams have that not really many people can compete with. It’s that in-depth knowledge, our audience reach into all these different verticals really sets us support from our competition, and how we execute our business every day.

Jacob: How have you been thinking about the expansion of your branded content team? The reason I ask is earlier on another show I had Sean Griffey, the CEO of Industry Dive, and they’ve obviously been making a ton of investment on their branded content team. Where do you see that team and that product evolving across your verticals?

John: I’m not taking as big of a bet as Sean, but I also don’t have as big a backing as Sean. [chuckles] We do see huge opportunity there, but for us it’s lumpy. What I mean by lumpy is that it’s one of those I’d love to staff up on but we need to make sure that there’s enough demand there. We do see demand in our branded content services and we’re seeing it continuing to grow. It’s just one of those where we’re always careful about adding headcount. We should do it the right way in my opinion. It’s one of those where we see a huge opportunity in branded content. It’s just we’re not ready to bet the house on adding a bunch of headcount there. We’d rather continue to invest in editorial.

There’s ways that you can grow branded content faster. I think especially with COVID coming people need leads. When I think about branded content, I really think about it as a lead gen source for people and that’s something that I think we’ve excelled at and it’s taken us a while to get good at it. We did our first white paper seven years ago on HubSpot. That’s really what taught us but it’s when as we’ve gotten so much better at it, when COVID hit and people needed leads, I’d like to think we were the first people they came to.

Jacob: Moving to another product that you offer on some of the verticals, you offer some awards products, like a rising leaders product, and things like that. How do you decide when it’s time to introduce an awards product for one of the verticals and what is the business model for these because it’s not always cut and dry?

John: The business model is typically pretty simple. There’s an entrance fee that’s charged in order to submit your project or to submit your candidate and in my opinion, that’s very justified, because, frankly, they are a lot of work to put on. As far as the awards products that we see, it’s really about community and it’s one of those where we got started with awards, and it was our architecture and design awards back probably six or seven years ago, in Senior Housing News. Anytime we do anything, we would just throw it up against the wall, and we’ll see if it sticks.

I’ll never forget it because it was the first time we had ever done it. My brother and I, it was back when we were probably five or six people, were like, holy shit it’s two days before it closes, and I kid you not I think we had one entry. We’re getting all nervous, we’re like, “All right, we might have to close this up and act like it never happened,” but all of a sudden I’d say about 36 hours before, we started to get a couple of entries and we started to get a couple more entries and it’s like a drug, you start to get these entries and they come in and then all of a sudden, by the end of it, I think we had 72 entries.

We had over 70 entries come in in the last 36 hours. All of a sudden, we were like, all right, there’s something here. The coolest thing for me, at least with the award stuff, is that we’ve seen our awards badges in SEC filings when people get acquired, we’ve seen it up on stage in not only our events, but also huge national events with these people saying how proud they are because they won one of these events. We’ve taken I’d say inspiration from our Senior Housing Architecture and Design Awards, and we tried to apply that to our other verticals and that’s one of the things that I love about B2B and especially vertical media is that, once you do it once in one vertical, you can typically do it in others.

We’ve done that with a little bit of our awards but rather than launch individual awards on each of the publications at this point, what we’ve really done is we started to make the Aging Media brand bigger and more prominent and we started to wrap our awards under the Aging Media brand, where part of the value that we bring to our industry, in my opinion, is because we’re such a player in all these markets, that everybody typically does work together a little bit but when you look at health care, everything’s moving to a value-based care world, and everybody’s starting to play together.

What we’re really trying to do with Aging Media is bring these different verticals together and help them do business and help them execute on care plans for the aging population together and, frankly, save people money. With the awards programs with Future Leaders, we launched across all the different verticals under Aging Media brand and then we were going to throw a big party for al these people in Chicago at an in-person event and then, of course, COVID happened. We weren’t able to execute on that as well as I would have liked but going forward, that’s really where we’re taking Aging Media, where not only are we covering all these individual verticals and going deep, but we’re going to start bringing everybody together.

I always joke that we’re trying to create the Davos of senior living, and, everybody jokes and laughs at me but I’m dead serious. We’re going to bring together the biggest and baddest of all the people in aging and help them connect and help them do deals and really help them take this industry forward. That’s really, at its core, where the awards come in. It’s about community. It’s not just about winning the awards. It’s about bringing people together and helping them do things, and making sure everybody’s successful.

Jacob: Talking about people being successful, I’m interested in the job board that is on Senior Housing News because in my career I have launched and failed at building two niche job boards. Does the job board have a material impact on the business, and if it does, do you intend on expanding to the other verticals?

John: No, it doesn’t have a huge material impact on the business. It’s there. It works. I always joke that we like to sell stuff that’s a little bit more expensive, to be frank. There have been times where we poked around getting into more of the executive recruiting stuff because there’s an opportunity there but we’ve never pulled the trigger on that. No, I haven’t figured out job boards either, Jacob, so don’t feel bad about it. It runs, we fulfill the contract and we do what we do.

Jacob: All right, let’s talk about what’s coming for Senior Housing News first, but then also the rest of the verticals because it appears that you’ve introduced and you’ve said it before, a membership component. When I first wrote about Aging Media, it was September of 2019, I believe, you didn’t have a membership component. What is the membership and how did you come up with the price for that because pricing can be a little tricky, and how has it been working thus far?

John: You’re good, man. You’ve done your research. We quietly launched SHN Plus on Senior Housing News about two, three weeks ago and what we’re looking to do there is to service art, to bring community together, but also provide them even more in-depth and exclusive reporting and analysis that they can’t get elsewhere. We call the paywall, but initially, to launch it, we had been doing these individual paid reports, and it was actually pretty successful for us. It was a six-figure business, multiple six figures actually, for us in Senior Housing News but what we found when we were creating the individual reports is that it was really hard to pick winners.

For example, we would launch, let’s just say, eight reports in a year and these were really in depth like 5,000, were really well researched reports, and we would release one and it would kill it. I’d sell $50,000 on the report. Then we would release another and I’d sell five of them. It was like releasing a music album where you were going to have two hits that just killed it and the rest were the duds. The challenge with that was we were trying to pick winners and not do research that the industry really needed and go deeper on subjects.

We had to appeal to the masses, and not necessarily a certain segment and do the reporting, at least in our opinion, that we think needed to be done. With the membership, I think it takes obviously the cyclical nature of that and the highs and the lows and helps, hopefully, make it a much more sustainable business going forward. If we can offer a ton of value for somebody and it allows us to take a longer-term approach and not have to only release hits every single time that we think, might not necessarily be the best stuff that we should be doing.

I think that’s a good business long term. Our vision for the membership program long term, again, is to foster that community that we know we’ve had, and we’ve built, and we’ve seen it at our in-person events, but how do we bring that online? We’re running the playbook that I think you’ve seen at some other places where we’re going to have typical webinars where you’re going to get access to our editorial teams, where you’re going to be able to ask them questions. We’re also going to do individual one on one chats with really high-level executives that a lot of people don’t necessarily get access to and so you’re going to get to be able to ask these men and women questions that typically people wouldn’t have access to.

We’re going to pull back the hood a little bit in terms of how we do editorial and really provide more access to our editorial teams. That’s one of the interesting things that we’ve found over the last 6 to 12 months is that we’ve had people come to us that have wanted us to do consulting work. We’ve looked at that as a business, and how do we add I want to call a proper research and consulting division to the company. While we’re not quite there, we do see this as the first step because people can come and get access to our editorial teams and be able to ask them questions, and they’ve never been able to do that.

Initial results have been really positive. Again, it’s three weeks old, and I don’t want to say we hacked it together, but we bootstrap everything here. We got it up and running and, I think, we sold probably about 35 memberships, I think, in the first 2 weeks, so there’s something there. We’re going to continue building on that and the goal of this, and again, with everything we do, is we do it once on one vertical and then we roll it out to all the others.

We already have a game plan and a roadmap to launch it onto other verticals but, again, we want to make sure that what we do is successful on one, because typically what we do, and again, I really truly believe this, if you do it right on one vertical, it applies to all the other verticals. At the end of the day audiences, no matter the vertical, really want that exclusive news and analysis they can’t get elsewhere. They want in-depth research, they want access to your editorial team and be able to ask questions, and at the end of the day, they really want that community. If we can prove it on one vertical and make it a good business, I know we can bring it to the others and that’s really where it gets exciting.

Jacob: You’ve mentioned COVID quite a few times on the show and that makes a lot of sense because a decent part of your business has been events. How has your strategy evolved since COVID-19 hit? Then discussing the business model of your events, are they mostly sponsor-driven or is there an attendee revenue component as well?

John: Great question. Events are a big part of our business. I think they were 20% or 25% of our business last year. I think we saw that growing a little bit, but nothing crazy. I think COVID has impacted us from a standpoint of we had to take all those events and convert them to virtual. Virtual’s taught us a lot in terms of what people want and what people are willing to pay for. We typically can launch a virtual event really quickly and get it up and get speakers. Speaker acquisition is a lot easier, obviously. Our goal with virtual has been to test out all these different models and so we’ve done everything from a paid virtual event to a totally sponsored one to a mixture of both.

Our transition to virtual worked really well. I have to credit my brother who was instrumental and, frankly, just did whatever he needed to do to get it done and did a fucking amazing job. We wouldn’t be here without him and his team doing that. Going forward, in terms of how we look at events, we always like to say we’d rather be small and expensive and so we want to be exclusive. We don’t necessarily want to cater to everybody. It comes back to my Davos of senior care. If I had any direction of where we’re going, that’s really where it’s going.

It’s those exclusive high-end events at really nice places where people can come and get access to speakers that they typically wouldn’t get, but also be able to relax, let their guard down, and hopefully do some deals. At the end of the day, B2B is about community more than anything. All these people that you’re bringing together, they’re all working together for the most part. They’re doing M&A, they’re doing transactions and they need to get business done. I think if COVID has taught us anything, it’s not that we were doing these huge events before with expos shows because I’ll never do those, at least not in the foreseeable future, but it’s brought us back to say, hey, what’s the most important thing about events?

Again, it’s really focused us on the community aspect of it and helping people do transactions because, at the end of the day, that’s what keeps people coming back. It’s not necessarily the trade show booths with all the crap on the floors and all that stuff. That doesn’t get me excited but doing the Davos of senior care, I can get excited about that.

Jacob: Putting on our fake epidemiologist hat here for a second, with two vaccines announced over the past couple of weeks, at what point do you anticipate people feeling comfortable returning to physical events? When that time does come, how do you see your event strategy evolving? Do you think it’ll be a hybrid approach?

John: It changes every day. Even before this, my brother and I were talking about whether we needed to move into that. It really is a moving target and if I had the answer, I’d be a very, very wealthy man here. We’re looking at it, we’re not taking any huge swings on in-person events next year. I think we’re looking at most of the stuff coming back in September but it’s tough. I’m really glad we’re not a total events business because I feel for all the people that are. There’s a lot of really good people that are primarily event-driven, and how you time this is really tough but I do think there’s an opportunity for people. You can take a swing and if maybe in June your people– It might work.

I will say this. I know just from the conversations that I have in our market, people want to start traveling again. People want to start going to conferences. It’s just a matter of when they’re going to be allowed to from a corporate standpoint and when they’re going to feel safe. We’re not making any huge events or huge bets on events for 2021.

2022 is a whole different story. We already have everything planned and lined up and I think that’s one of the things that COVID has given us. That’s a chance to reset, but it’s given us a chance to rethink how we look at events, and, frankly, we’re more prepared and more ready to execute than we’ve ever been on our events. Again, I have to credit my brother and his team Christina and Sophie. They’ve been fantastic.

Jacob: If we look forward three years, we’re post COVID, you’ve got your playbook for verticals, where do you see Aging Media evolving over the next few years?

John: I think we keep doing what we’re doing. What we do works. I think we over the last three years we’ve really figured it out and we’re like, “All right, we’ve got this. Let’s keep going. Let’s go faster.” When I think about how Aging Media evolves over the next three years, we continue to execute on what we do but we do it in a bigger, and I’d say more elevated way where us bringing all of our communities together is going to be core to our business going forward, that news and exclusive analysis that people can’t get elsewhere, that’s the hook. How do we take those people and we bring them down the funnel and start to offer them different services that they need?

I don’t think everybody needs workflows and stuff like that. I think one of the funny things I always see about B2B is everybody wants to offer people workflows and all this stuff. Again, there’s a place for that, but that’s not really our strategy. Where I think the stickiest thing that we can provide is that community and bringing people together. I think that’s really where you’ll see us go in the next couple years. Again, our playbook works and so I think there’s an opportunity for us to– With the right capital maybe the right partner or how do we make that go a lot faster? I think that’s one of the things that gets really exciting and how big we want to make this.

My brother and I didn’t know anything about media when we got into this and so that’s why it took us a while to figure it out but I’m pretty confident we’ve got some of them figured out now and so how do we take that and how do we grow faster? I think that’s the most exciting part of our business. We’re in a great spot. Let’s take this and let’s make it go faster.

Jacob: Let’s step away from Aging Media for a second. You’ve actually spent a decent amount of time on Twitter talking about the rise of all these creator-led newsletters and the need for media companies and how hard audience development is. On one tweet in the beginning of the month, you actually retweeted my new boss discussing the idea of creating a company that helps creators launch new products like podcasts, grow audience, expand into events so they can do things like All Things Digital or Recode. You even said you’d put the first money in. Hypothetically, what would the business model of said company actually look like and how would it work and how would it help these creators?

John: Great question. I’m super excited by the- everyone’s calling it the passion, the creator economy. I think it’s great because I see it when I started R&D almost 13 years ago. It was a pain in the ass to launch a site. I was running WordPress, I was running that. OpenX was an open-source ad server. It crashed all the time. Again, while I wasn’t a developer, this stuff was tough. Now the ability that people have to be able to launch a Substack or even I saw Square Spaces getting into membership and all stuff, that part is easy now. The hard part is the editorial and doing all that. At a certain stand or a certain point, I think all of these individual creators are going to realize that time is their biggest asset.

That asset, in my opinion, should be focused on creating that editorial that’s going to help them get new subscribers. There’s a lot of ancillary businesses that they can add to that but you can’t do that to yourself. I think I’ve pitched you on it before where I think there’s an opportunity for these people to launch in-person events and to launch podcasts and stuff like this. Do you have the time to do it? Not only do you have the time to do it, but do you have the time to do it well because if you have that paid audience that you’re catering to, I think they start to expect a certain quality, and while it doesn’t need to be NPR podcast quality or anything like that, it does need to be good enough

If there’s a company that can help facilitate all those things, whether it’s in-person events or a high quality podcast or helping with audience development, which, again, I think is the hardest part, especially for the people that don’t have the huge followings, there’s a business to be had there. It’s funny that one little tweet has led to a couple interesting conversations that I’ve had and how the business would be set up.

I don’t know. I think there’s opportunities for joint venture structures and stuff like that where the nice thing about media is that, again, if you do it once and you do it well, you can take it to a new market and you really just do the same thing. Again, I think it’s like you look at some of the best media companies out there, in my opinion, people like Morning Brew, who you work at, whether it’s Industry Dive, and I’d like to say we’re pretty cool too, but we all have playbooks and I think we’re all starting to launch those in different markets.

I think that’s what gets exciting where who’s to say you can’t do that? The creator of passion economy for individuals who, frankly, there’s only so much one person can do, but I think the biggest thing that all these people have to come to grips with is do they just want to have a newsletter and hopefully make a good living, or do they really want to build a brand and build a media company? I think that’s the thing that I don’t know the answer to, but if there’s anybody that wants to build a media company, after this let me know.

Jacob: I want to finish with the same two questions I ask every single person on this show. First, looking at your career, what is a mistake you or the organization made and what did you learn from it that made you better professionally?

John: Oh, man, there’s been so many. I think the biggest thing my brother and I have learned is if you’re going to do something, do it right and make the investment and do it the right way. As a small bootstrap company, we have to make certain decisions, but you can’t half-ass anything that you do. At the end of the day, media is a people business. We continue to try and get better and take care of our employees and I’m proud of what we’ve been able to do, but especially with the markets that we cover, what we cover is niche and we need to really groom the people that we bring in.

We have to teach them about these industries. It’s hard work. Retaining our employees and making sure that they’re happy with their jobs and making sure that they feel like they’re productive every day is really important to us. We’ve made every mistake in the book but I I  would say the one thing is if you’re going to make investments, you got to do it right and just hire the right people, teach them how to do things and then just watch them flourish.

Jacob: If you could offer a current or prospective media operator some advice to succeed in, not niche media, but vertical media, what would that advice be?

John: Oh, good question. What would that advice be? Go deeper than your competition. Do things that they can’t do. I think one of the things especially is that if you look at media, a lot of it feels the same. If you’re going to look at different websites, a lot of people are reporting on the same stuff. There’s a race to do what everybody else is doing, but I think the more that you figure out what sets you apart and what makes you special and really double downing on that, I think you’re going to find your audience and you’re going to find those people that are going to become your fans or your paying subscribers or even free email subscribers which are incredibly valuable. Don’t get too caught up in the hustle of building these large email lists. Just start small and continue building and I really think you’ll see progress over time and that starts to build and it starts to grow a lot faster.

Don’t get discouraged if you’re starting from scratch. It’s hard but keep going, you’ll get there.