David Perell
speaker
63 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard May 2025
David Perell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, it's funny. It's been one of these things. People have asked, what is the impact on the Wall Street Journal profile? And it's hard to disambiguate the two things that happen concurrently. That piece, which is the best encapsulation of what Acquired is that has ever been published, There's sort of been two canonical pieces.
David Lidsky's wonderful piece in Fast Company last year following the production of the Nike episode really dives into the making of an episode and what that is all about. And this one is kind of like, what is acquired today and how did this thing come to be? And what happened is when that article came out, Acquired became the number one podcast on both Spotify and Apple charts in the world.
No. And what that led to is number one has staying power, because if anybody opens up Apple Podcasts right now and hit the browse tab, you can very clearly see the number one podcast is the one centered on your screen that you're curious about checking out. So all of the goodness that came from the WSJ piece was then massively amplified over the course of weeks and months.
because we just stayed the number one podcast in this self-fulfilling prophecy way across both giant podcasting platforms. So to just add some numbers to that, because we've gotten the question so many times, we were thinking we should just talk about it on air.
317,000 new subscribers or followers, depending on whether you're using Apple or Spotify's parlance, have followed the show since the Wall Street Journal piece went live. And for context, in January coming into the year, we estimated our listener base was about 500,000 people. It was a major event. Yes.
And so, David, I had always sort of been of this belief, especially when I'm working with startups, like don't count on a single press article being trajectory changing for you. That's generally true, except when it isn't.
Yeah. So part of this is a welcome to all of you who are new listeners to the show. You know, David and I have been doing this for close to 10 years now. The audience has grown slowly and it doubled organically every year for the first nine years. And one way to think about that, because we don't really do paid marketing, what that means is
the whole audience base, on average, told one friend who stuck around and listened to the show every year. So in some sense, that's almost nothing to write home about. But on the other hand, it actually just kept happening.
And the cool thing is, it meant that it built the audience base that we really wanted, because everyone personally recommended it to a friend rather than having an explosive growth moment. And so that's why the Slack is such a wonderful and civil place. You know, it's not like this community that sort of showed up out of nowhere.
It's this community that's been slowly building organically by inviting other people who they know in from the real world over time. And then if I could say, what would be the single best growth event if we were going to have a outsized external force that brought a bunch of audience? The Wall Street Journal is the exact right audience to join the rest of you.
WSJ subscribers are among the most well-educated, thoughtful business people in the world who love nerding out on this stuff. We're delighted to have anybody here who just found out because you read the WSJ.
The dirty secret behind Acquired is every episode is about the exception. Every company we talk about is the most extreme outlier. I often find myself wondering, even though we have this playbook and this lessons learned, is the real playbook that you can't learn any lessons because they're such extreme outliers? You know, these big tech companies, they're all monopolies or near monopolies.
in the largest and most profitable markets in the world. Well, like no one else's business is that.
And so the lesson you can draw from a cash gusher that is extremely difficult to disrupt, some of the things you can apply to building your business, but it's much more interesting, which is of course why we do the history and facts, to go look at them in their first few years of life to understand how they catapulted to the position rather than trying to learn something about the companies as you perceive them today.
Yeah, part of this takeaway for me is it's sort of unclear if and what would ever be a large outsized growth event. Like when you look at our chart, it's perfectly smooth for almost a decade until there's this one point where you can see, whoa, something clearly happened and numbers jumped up from May to now. And I don't know that you can ever really plan for those.
So a PR person emailed me, how did you pitch that piece to the journal? And I was just laughing like... We didn't, yeah. There's no way you could possibly anticipate something like this happening and then execute a PR strategy to try to make it happen. Maybe other people know differently, but I've never once seen that be the way that things like this happen. Well, let's see.
Things we wanted to do today, chat about the arena show. Oh, one other note on that. A few people have emailed us and said, my whole company is coming. We even had a parent email us and say, my 13-year-old wants to have his birthday party by bringing all of his friends to the live show, which is the coolest thing ever. Coolest thing ever. Crazy, that's real.
If you're interested in something like that too, email us hello at acquired.fm for big group ticket buys. And there's a special office that we can hook you up with that helps deal with that.
The other thing that we wanted to do, we've got one more sort of announcement on show structure and then carve-outs. So the show structure thing is, as you may have guessed or observed, the thing that makes Acquired episodes unique is the format of David and I...
sitting down, doing the hundreds of hours of research, coming together with separate prepared minds, with separate understandings of the history and with separate beliefs about what made this business work, and then doing our four-hour format to tell the story and unpack why the business worked. And...
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