9 Lessons From TBPN's $100M+ Exit

Today's guests are John Cougan and Jordy Hayes, the hosts of TPPN. It's actually the second time they've been on the show, but the first time since some major news broke in April that their show was acquired by OpenAI for hundreds of millions of dollars. Excuse me? Could you say that again? Yeah, it's pretty crazy. It was actually one of the most shocking things I've read in our industry. And probably one of the most notable things that has happened in the creator economy since its inception. One of the major reasons for that price tag is because they are two of the smartest marketing minds on the internet. These guys are truly incredible. This conversation comes from an event press publish LA where we covered the intersection of Hollywood and the creator economy. And what's interesting about these guys is they actually built the show in a studio in Hollywood. And they call themselves Neo-Trad Media, basically adopting traditional television techniques, like looking at this live stream show that looks and feels kind of like sports center, but bringing it into a new world using Twitter as the primary distribution, looking and feeling kind of like a live streamer. And honestly approaching the world of what maybe we consider podcasting in a completely different way, daily, live, no editing niche by design. Okay, so in this conversation, you're going to hear the nine lessons from John and Jority, all about how they actually were able to launch TPPN in a matter of just two years, sell it to open AI for over $100 million. These guys are truly some of my favorite people in our industry and some of the sharpest minds in media. So I think you guys will really enjoy this conversation. Here's our live episode with John Cougan and Jority Hayes of TPPN. What's up guys? We're doing well. Thank you for having us. So I don't know if you have confirmed the news, but I remember seeing the headline funny enough, it was on April 2nd that open AI bought your show for reported hundreds of millions of dollars. We thought about doing April 1st. We were ready to do April 1st, but that was going to be even more confusing than it already was even on April 2nd. So for people who haven't seen the show, because it is niche by design, explain the show where it's distributed hoots for all the above TPPN in a nutshell. Yeah, it's a live stream three hours a day from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Pacific, covers technology and business and with a focus on startups in the private markets, really Silicon Valley where Jority and I built our early careers. And then a little over a year ago, we were both in between projects and thought we should start a podcast. Very common people think there's an opportunity, but very quickly we realized that we had so much fun doing it and we had the opportunity to take it incredibly seriously. And so we sort of burned all the other ships and focused full-time just like it was any other startup and viewed it as an opportunity to build something not alongside something else, not in service of something else, but actually as a first class media product that was going to be our entire focus. And that really started to compounding very quickly. I think we were lucky in our category too because we weren't the first two guys in tech to say, hey, we should start a podcast. We're probably the million. But we had the benefit of the people in our category. We're using content purely as marketing. So they had a startup and they wanted a podcast to promote their startup or they had a venture fund and they wanted to get in front of founders and LPs. And so by coming in, it was very easy for us to take it 10 times, 100 times more seriously than everyone else and build a lot of momentum really quickly. So why don't we dive into lesson one? Yes. Because we've hooked the audience I think sufficiently with nine lessons. You started? Right, you guys are writing for the nine lessons or you're from the first time for the nine lessons. Number eight, number eight, number eight, number one was going full time. And I think that we talked a little bit about that. Number two was not being afraid to be niche. You've talked about this a lot, but we had an internal number. I don't know where we got 200,000 from. But maybe it's because I've been doing YouTube before and I'd seen videos go into the millions. And I felt the pull of, okay, I know what it takes to get a million views. And it's being more general talking about politics, talking about consumer. Like you just can't get millions and millions of views on an interview with a series B company that's doing HR software. But our audience, our niche audience is boring. Is that sounds to a lot of people? Our audience loves that. And so we said we're going to be okay with that. And we're not going to try and view Max. We're not going to try and be obsessed with the metrics. We want the metrics to be healthy. We want the audience to be there. We want the audience to be real. And then we sort of built the rest of the business model around that idea of a niche audience where we were never selling against, oh, there's so many views and we're going to go 10 times bigger next year. It's like, no, we're going to actually reach people in Silicon Valley that are pretty hard to reach. Yeah, and there's a, there's, yeah, going, I don't know where we got the 200. I don't know. I think it just sounded nice. I think they'd go, yeah, 100 pay would be sandbagging, but if you go any higher, it's a wide amount of wires. Yeah, there was a lot of stories in our industry that weren't being talked about at all on podcasts, even though the industry was spending a lot of time listening to podcasts. And we knew that there was roughly 200,000 people that were going to be very interested in that. But the entire rest of the world wouldn't care at all. And so the opportunity was to actually just commit to that 200K. And even today where we're at, we're still first and foremost committed to that 200K. And so if people ask me what I do and I say, yeah, I've got a live show. I oftentimes don't tell them you should check it out because I know that they're going to not find it interesting at all, right? Because it's only interesting for that. Right. 200,000 people. Was there someone else out there that was running somewhat of a similar niche play that gave you the confidence to do something with us? Was it us? Yeah, yeah, I learned a ton from you throughout the, I mean, I started doing YouTube in 2020 and watched every video you put out, learning to ton. And there were other, I mean, Doug Dumero has a great niche and cars and there's so many other creators. It comes and goes, whenever you pick up a new hobby, I feel like you find the pinnacle of that niche and you realize that there's a beautiful business there and there's a lot of people that would, you know, stop that person for autographs and there's a lot of people that would say, who is that person? And that's just the nature of the of the modern internet creator, I think. What's the most niche thing you guys watch, you think? Oh, most niche. I watched this guy on YouTube that just makes videos about submarines, H.I. Sutton. I can't listen to anything tech or business related at night, right? Because it just keeps me up because I'm thinking, now I got to get back to that person or we got to talk about that on the show tomorrow. And so this guy makes long form videos of like intricate details about submarines and I just love it. That's amazing. I love it. All right, what's three? Three. Three is be daily. Gotta be daily, timely and live. We talked about this. The content, barbell, barbell, either time, lee or time less. Time less? Yeah, time less. Evergreen. Content right now either needs to be time lee or time less. Time less? Yes. Yes. And I think you guys maybe originated that idea. We remixed it. And then someone else took it and ran with it and is probably going to write it. It's all over the source. Yeah, but in our industry, people were, and I think everywhere, people are using podcasts to understand the news. But in tech, almost every show was publishing once a week. And so your favorite podcast might record on a Thursday, but then Friday morning, they release, but on Friday, some crazy news happens. And so there was a joke that was like pretty widespread that was unfortunately, this event happened after the all-in podcast recorded. So I won't have a take on this until next Friday. We can talk about it then. And so for us, the daily element, the space is moving so quickly right now in large part due to AI. And so there is news every single day. And if you record a show by the time you release it, there's a good chance that it's no longer current and it's no longer functioning as like a news product. So do you feel like even if you're not live, the creators in here, like one of the requirements of this moment is to be available daily, meaning like Karim Rahmoh with Subway Takes. We talked about it earlier in the day. Subway Takes is available every day. It's a new episode every day on Instagram. Is that? Well, I don't know if people get their news from Subway Takes. I feel like I'm always scrolling the back catalog. Sometimes there's news timely items like a presidential run or a political run, but it's more for, if you're in this reaction to the news content, you certainly have to be available when the news breaks. I think more importantly, it's like the daily iteration and improvement. So every single day, every weekday we record. And the second we go offline, we're immediately talking about what could have been better. Like, hey, that 20-minute segment, that wasn't great. This guy just wanted to stay on his talking points. It wasn't a conversation. It wasn't interesting. That person shouldn't have been on at all. that person was amazing, it should have been way longer. We miss this story, we gotta get to it. The Kairan wasn't as snappy as it should have been during the news section, so the daily nature is, in large part, news driven for us, but I would say even more importantly, you can just improve much more rapidly because of that non-senitoration. - And the counterpoint to our show is the acquired FM podcast, which is once a month, actually I think they do eight episodes a year now, and they are incredibly timeless masterpieces, four hour episodes, deeply researched, and they can wait because the companies that they talk about are evergreen, and those episodes will have runs for a really long time. Their back catalogs really valuable. And so if we were a weekly show, you might be tempted to say, "Oh, let's go do a deep dive like acquired, but you're never gonna beat them at that, they're the best at that." So what's on the opposite end of the barbell? It's daily live instant reactions. - Considering you guys know us in our channel pretty well, if you had to advise us on either being eight times a year, or daily, where would you put us? - Well, I mean, what we were talking about before was, is there, so there are creators that are bifurcating across the barbell into timeless or timely, but I'm very interested to see if somebody can do both. We were talking about Markiplier, both a live streamer, and also a filmmaker, made a real movie, did both, I believe his movie will be timeless, but his live streams are very timely. And I'm wondering where that comes together. I think it's a very personal thing. I don't think you can fit a one size fits all, but I do know that when something like the Markiplier movie happens, I would love to be able to get your take the same day instantly. And I noticed this today with, like, actually, I think tomorrow, this car pod with Doug Jimuro is going live, and I know he's going to have a great take on the Ferrari Luce, but it dropped on Monday or Sunday. And so I had to wait a whole week, and I'm just-- - And you heard that. - You've heard so many other takes. - Yeah, I wound up going to some other podcast to get more takes because I was so interested in that story. I know he's going to have great content, and if he just had the permission to release that show on a Monday, which maybe might just be, it's a weekly show, but we'll do an emergency episode. People do that. That's how we started. We were just doing emergency episodes five times a day. - I also think we have been very commercial from the beginning, as in everything-- - That's number seven. You're jumping. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm going to jump ahead. - Yeah, jump ahead. We're on full hour off for us. We had so many opportunities to go and make other forms of content. People would come up to us and say, do you want to make a new version of Silicon Valley, right? And we would just say-- - I mean-- - Sounds real-- - Yeah, the show, right. Sounds cool. We don't have time to do that, 'cause we're live three hours a day, but somebody should do that. Or somebody would say, do you want to make a documentary? And we're like, sounds cool. That's a good idea. Somebody should do that. We don't have time to do that. We're live three hours a day. Or, hey, could you come and shoot this video? There's a rocket launching. It'll be really cool. And we're like, that's really cool. Unfortunately, we're live three hours a day. We won't be able to make it. - Are you always in a bad mind on that? Or is one of you like, nah, we should go? - Yeah, we hate traveling. We get invited to go all over the world every single week, and we did just under 250 episodes last year. We missed one week day. That wasn't a holiday. And so we're very committed to just being at our studio working. And so for us, when the main show was working, so when we had all these other opportunities, they were exciting. But the best use of our time was always, stay focused on the main show. And my question for you guys is, which end of the barbell is going to be better for your business? Because the better your business is doing, the more resources you're going to have, the more things you can do over time. But our logic early on was like, yeah, let's do something like that in like five years. Let's get the reps in. Let's stay focused on the core product, make the core product great. And I would say if you're thinking, oh, I want to do long form, and I want to do real time daily, that's going to be super hard because somebody else in your niche will do long form full time. And someone else in your niche will do daily full time. And no matter how talented you are, I think if you're competing with somebody who is spending 80 hours a week doing something, and you can only give it 40, you're probably going to lose. And that's really painful. But part of it is making the choice and the sacrifice to focus, especially focusing in the short term while you get your business to the point, while you get your team to the point, where you can do multiple things. But doing multiple things is-- It's hard. It's only Andrew Russ Horkin has done it really. Because he's live daily on Squawk Box, but he also publishes a book once a decade, and then it gets turned into a movie or a show. Yeah, so we were with-- It's really hard. How do you-- And he's a part of-- Yeah, we asked him, how do you do it? And he said, I do TV on the way to work. So he wakes up at 4 a.m. he goes to the studio, does Squawk Box, does the market open, and then by 9 a.m. is the regular list stays free. So then he's writing and things like that. And so if you could figure out some setup where you could just do one type of content from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and then have the rest of your day free, that would be great. Morning, Leo. But I don't think that's for me. Yeah, no, he really showed us that there's levels to this game, because we were like, how we're exhausting. He's like, I do it on my way to work. Actually, I think of it as like a warm up. That's crazy. What's more? Branding differentiation on set design. Everybody has a slot wall. We went a very different direction with a bunch of-- we got a studio with it's-- it's all we call it the ultra dome. We even branded it like a football stadium, thinking about selling the rights to the stadium, and put a lot of effort into creating a differentiated look that would pop out on social media clips. So you would see something that started very early. One of our first growth hacks was we need things to talk about. So we'd react to the news. We'd react to people's posts on Twitter, whatever was in the news. We print out their tweets, wear a suit, film it with a 4K camera in this very austere wooden room that didn't really look like any other normal podcast set. And then we would quote tweet the post, whoever originally posted the take or the news item. And we would quote tweet it with the video. And you would get a notification. You get a lot of notifications. So 10 people liked your post, 1,000 people liked your post. It all just becomes random numbers at a certain point when something's going viral. But if someone quotes tweets your post with a video, you have to watch that video. And so you watch the video-- The video of two guys in suits and 4K with printed out tweets. And they're like, why? This is so much above just a repost, which takes to one second and a like that takes half a second. And so that really created this brand world of bringing this analog to the digital tech community. We're wearing suits. Tech people normally wear t-shirts. Why are these guys in suits? That's weird. But it's actually a more welcoming environment for a Fortune 500 CEO. So it wound up working out in the future. And then there were a lot of other of these little branding elements that came through Jordy Wilson. Yeah, visually. And early on, with our first sponsors, I pitched them as we're building a Formula One team. So you're going to sponsor an entire season. You're sponsoring the next 12 months. Locked in, fully contracted. You're not getting out of it. Technically, you could maybe not pay us, but it was very solid. And then we're just going to put you everywhere. So we weren't afraid. A lot of people in tech will have a podcast, but they don't run ads because they're like, I'm a hotshot investor or a founder. I don't need this lowly ad revenue. We took the opposite approach. I love advertising. I think it's the economic engine of the internet. It's amazing. It allows great products to be free. And so we really leaned into that and built the aesthetics of the show around with that kind of energy in mind. So we made racing jackets that had all of our sponsors. We put logos everywhere. A lot of now I see more shows kind of following in our footsteps. And I feel a little bit bad because it makes the internet a little uglier. But at the time with advertisers, it was like, hey, you could go sponsor a podcast where you're going to get one mid-roll ad. And there's going to be no evidence that your ad is in the content and less somebody sees that exact moment, or they scroll into the description and look around for it. And so we just really leaned into that. And it created its own brand. And so thinking about the business side as really part of the content, I think, is important and really resonated with advertisers and gave us permission to just be loud and proud about our sponsors, which our sponsors loves. And I've worked with creators in the past where advertising is a necessary evil. I wish I didn't have to do this, but I got to do it being apologetic with their audience. And your audience should want you to be selling advertisements. So you have more revenues. So you can make better content. And so we just embraced that and made it part of the product. Really quickly, can we give a run of applause for all the sponsors that press publishes? Yeah. No one's going to run applause. They make it possible. Thank you, Gemini. Yeah, can we get them up on the screen? No, we got them on the screen. Gemini, yeah, this is the misstep. Sorry, don't be. We got them. I want to see your applause. You're not sponsoring this. Get on it. So yeah, number five. Number, we ready? Pretty like a show. Not a podcast. Podcast is sort of a narrow box. It needs to be-- People have concepts of what it is. One interview a week. It can only be one guest per show, per podcast episode. And I think once we opened our mind to it's a show, it's live, it can be 10 guests for 10 minutes each. It can be one guest for two hours if we want. It can just be us. We've been no guests. We can take it on the road. We can do whatever we want with it. That really helped. And then also it gave us permission to pull best practices from television, pull best practices from other media products that didn't feel like we had to fit in a narrow box. And then that also made us a different product to add to it. Yeah, when you're making a show, you're in the mindset of a performance, which is I think quite different than the mentality of going into a podcast, which is, all right, let's sit down, turn on the microphones. It's very calm. But John and I, in the hour leading up to the show are like, shugging Andrew Hewerman's "Your Ramote." Like, tons of nicotine. We're getting like, really, really high energy. We're leap up all every single day. I want to be like exhausted when the show ends, because I'm going to go home and sleep and do it again the next day. And so that mentality of like, you're making a show, this is a performance. People are giving you their time. You need to like, you're there to entertain. And we function as like a new source, but we want to be the most entertaining new source. I think another thing that I love about this concept of treating it like a show, and maybe this will come up a little later, but I want to pull up this image of, I think there's a La Brea, the billboards that you guys have up all over LA right now, like, if we don't win, we're fucked. [LAUGHTER] I'm kidding. That is another element of treating it like a show. Like, there's billboards all over LA for your Emmy considering-- Emmy champagne, yeah. Yeah, and this was another way to differentiate it. Another way to differentiate is like, yeah, we're not a, we view ourselves as like interactive entertainment news product. It's not a, we don't want to be in the podcast category. And then with this too, it's like, we maintain the mentality the entire time of being super scrappy. We partner with a company to get all of these billboards. We did ads for their billboard company. And they did. Let's billboard. We got it. I think let's just think there's sponsors of Fred. There's sponsors. Yeah. Let's get them back up with the Fred. The barter deals are underrated. They take it to all of our sponsors. Yeah, but-- But it's underrated. Figuring out a way to get Tanner even 20 billboards. I don't know how many there are. With zero dollars out of our pocket is just like maintaining that mentality. Because there's no way we ever would have run a campaign like this if we had to. I mean, it's completely ridiculous running a billboard campaign for a niche live show. I think that also links to number eight. We're sort of jumping around. We'll get back to it. But we're running out of time. Yeah, we're used to three hours. Yeah. So sort of this idea of like a lot of people in tech have had sort of a hostile relationship with the media. They've seen themselves as like disruptors up in Silicon Valley, Hollywood's this other thing. We bind virtue of the fact that we have families here with Build Our Show, our studio is in actual Hollywood. And we always saw what legacy media does is amazing and incredibly important to how we do the show. I read the Wall Street Journal of Cover to Cover every day to prep for the show. And some of the best journalism is still being done in legacy media. The creators in this room are doing amazing things that are extremely entertaining. But that doesn't mean that the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal of Financial Times aren't incredibly valuable sources. And so something like this is sort of a way to just take seriously everything that is great about Hollywood. And we did this across the course of the show where we would engage with the media and Hollywood having New York Times reporters come on the show, having Vanity Fair reporters come on the show, and then also saying yes to doing profiles. A lot of tech people are like, oh, it'll be a hit piece. And there's always risk when you let a real journalist come and hang out with you for a week. You might say something that you regret. They could always take a quote out of context. But we realize that there's a lot of mutual respect there and that they're trying to tell a story to their audience that's worth telling. And we wanted to be a part of that. And so we never came at it as like-- Yeah, we were never in outspinning-- --aggidistic. --never-integidistic. --tech has always been about disruption, building an ex billion dollar company, taking down incumbents. And so I think people expected us to say things like, we're coming for CNBC. And we're at no point. Like I like everyone at CNBC. We have friends there. We were just trying to best serve these 200,000 people. We don't care if other people are also trying to serve that audience. That's great. But being hyper collaborative with every different player in our category served us really well. Where are we, John? How many people have had that? Number six. We're on number six. We're on six. Six is you can't buy an audience, even though we talk to venture capitalists all day. And we've raised money for previous ventures. We didn't raise money for this venture, even though we saw it as serious as a startup. In fact, we probably worked harder on this than some of the previous startups that we've run, just because we were in the right pattern of life. But we didn't raise money because fortunately, so much of the equipment and tooling that's necessary to actually produce a great media product has been democratized. Your phone can film things. And even higher end camera gear can be offset with brand deals at a certain point. It's hard to take a venture capital dollar and turn it into a real fan. It's just very, very difficult. And so I think that there's some people that see big deals and think that that's a prerequisite. And I don't think it is at all. Jordi, did you have anything else? Yeah. I mean, part of it is that we have probably one venture capitalist on the show every day. And again, that probably sounds crazy to some of you guys. But yeah, we're constantly fielding offers, probably daily offers. OK, can I invest? And every single time we just early on, we're like, what would we do with the money? And we could not find a single thing that would actually make the show better. Like we really, really tried. And part of that was if we were trying to go after something other than serving that 200,000 people, there would have been things we could do with the money. But if you actually had that, again, like, staying true to how do you make the best daily media product for those 200,000 people, we couldn't find anything. And so that just helps you stay aligned with why you started it in the first place. We have number nine. The last one. 30 seconds left. We already did it. Seven was, was be commercial prioritize annual brand deals. I think we got her in it. Nine was this idea that we had early on that you should be channeling the mind of a golden retriever. Which is, why is the golden retriever successful? Why are people like golden retrievers? Because they're hot, friendly, and dumb. And so-- Like, nine really will shock you. Yes, nine will shock you. But this idea of-- there's a lot of people that are overly adversarial. You want to just be friendly. You want to be-- you want to look good on camera. You show up every day, try and be healthy, and not try and be an expert in everything. And so actually letting the audience know when you don't know something is something that typically in scripted content that gets edited, you edit out all the places where you're uncertain. And you fact check everything. But in a live show, we found that actually taking someone on the journey with us of our skepticism, of our-- where is our frontier of uncertainty around this particular topic? Was actually a benefit. Wow, I actually-- I like that. I like that. There was this funny mindset. And when people are-- I'm sure many people in this room have had the experience of being completely copied or knocked off. Early on, we started-- there were big, big media companies in the first six months that created a TBPN clone. And I get really briefly worked up about these things on maintains the Golden Retriever mindset. The Golden Retriever is simply focused on getting the ball, chasing the ball. You're not really worried about anything else going on at the dog park. They just want to get the ball. And so maintaining that, reminding yourself, just channel that and focus on the ball. Don't focus on anything else. What do you think the deal that you guys made signals about the media industry, if anything, at all? Like having a niche tech livestream be acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars. What is that signal to where we are in the creator economy? Was it signal to where we are in entertainment? Yeah. I think about it as-- so just to set the table, like the show's still editorially independent. We do the show exactly the same. But we do provide advisory services. We advise on different topics that come up on the show. We flow that back to the team at OpenAI. And we've also done this with our sponsors for a long time. Oh, you're running a Super Bowl ad? We'd love to chime in on that because we react to all the Super Bowl ads. And we see what ads work in technology. And don't. We'll give you a bunch of-- Yeah, we fully delivered the concept for Super Bowl ad that ran last year. It did really well. And we also ran our-- We'll add. Ever took-- Yeah, I don't want to take-- I don't think it's fair to take credit. We can take credit for our Super Bowl ad. which we also ran a Super Bowl app. - We did, but we ran it in a small market, but we designed it to go viral, where we included the logos of basically any company that had been on the show, got their logo in a mosaic pattern. So we put your logo in the Super Bowl and everyone was very happy. It was like a community, a love letter to the community. But I think what this might say, if it says anything, is that TBPN was very much like an audition tape for what we can do that then was a reason to want to work with us. And the way to work with us was with this type of deal, but I can imagine, like every time I see Doug Dumero talk about the design of some car, I'm like, why doesn't Ferrari buy this guy's company? Or like, why doesn't he work with Range Rover? 'Cause he's complaining about it, he's making good points. He should be, he should have a voice in the board or he should be sitting on the board of these companies. 'Cause I think he's really talented and has great points. And this is just the way to actually flow things back. - Yeah, I think the other thing is we had built like truly, it was such an incredible business. We did an interview with you guys and people started doing math on, they basically made somebody made a spreadsheet based on like one thing that I had said in that moment and extrapolated our revenue from it. And I was relieved because it was like 80, 90% lower than what it actually was at that time. And so the business was doing so well that we didn't even really want anyone to know. And so during the process with OpenAI, we didn't go out to sell the business. We never intended to sell the business. And there were multiple times in the early discussions where we basically said like, hey, look, like if this doesn't make sense for you guys, we're happy to keep running our business. And we really meant it. So there was no point. We never companies, I think the biggest lesson or, it's not my quote, but companies are bought not sold. So if you go out and you try to sell your company, you have no leverage, you'll get beat up on price, you come across as like needing something. Whereas we truly had the mindset of just we're just gonna do this for 30 years and eventually we'll retire on the mics, right? And so having that leverage of full independence, we were making money, we didn't need to do. Any deal allowed us to get the outcome that we did. But I think that yeah, it shows that niches are incredibly valuable and you shouldn't be afraid to stay in your niche, right? Again, every person in this room wants to see the number go up, right? Humans in general are number go up machines. You just wake up every day, you want the views to go up, you want the followers to go up, you want the bank account, all these things. But you need to figure out, make sure that you're not like working on the wrong number. And our outcome would have been a lot different if we were doing something like just optimizing for views and not saying true to that core community. - John Cougan, Jordi Hayes, everybody. - Thank you guys so much, Ravi. - Appreciate it, boys. (upbeat music)