SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Frat Guy Takes 2K a Month Side Project to 10Mil a Year Media Company, EP 286: Madison Wickham
14 Jun 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
Chapter 2: How did Madison Wickham start Total Frat Move?
I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million.
Chapter 3: What were the initial revenue streams for Grandex?
He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
Chapter 4: At what point did Madison realize his project was a legitimate business?
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the $100 is Daniel Al-Soudini. He's based overseas.
Chapter 5: What motivated Madison to quit his job with a newborn?
He's an employee at a current company and can't wait to break free. For your chance to win $100, Top Tribe, simply subscribe to the podcast now and then text the word NATHAN to 33444 to prove that you did it. Again, text the word NATHAN to 33444 to prove that you did it. I give away $100 every Monday.
Chapter 6: How did Madison secure funding for Grandex?
Top Drop, good morning. You are listening to episode 286. Tune in bright and early tomorrow morning to hear from Kim Barrett. He's 27 and is actually making money, lots of money, as a social media consultant. In today's episode, you guys are going to hear from guest hosts, Yuri and Jacob.
Chapter 7: What revenue model does Grandex use for their content and apparel?
They're big fans of the show. They said, Nathan, we would love to do an episode. And I said, you know what? Go for it. So they're about to go live with you guys. I want you to text me at 703-431-2709. That's my personal phone number.
Chapter 8: What strategies does Grandex use to convert followers into customers?
And let me know if you think I should have Yuri and Jacob do more shows. Again, text me or tweet to me or communicate with me somehow and tell me if you think I should let Yuri and Jacob do more shows. Here they are.
Good morning, listeners. This is Yuri Rahimi. I'm joined here with my partner, Jacob Sammy, and I think you'll like our guest today. His name is Madison Wickham, CEO and founder of GrandX.
GrandX is a media company based out of Austin, Texas, most famous for their wildly popular entertainment content creating sites, including Total Prat Move, Total Sorority Move, Post-Grad Problems, and recently successful clothing lines like Rowdy Gentleman and Man Outfitters, offering unique accessories from bow ties to t-shirts.
Grand X was founded in 2010 and has since attracted quite a large social media reach, amassing millions of followers on various platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Madison, are you ready to take us to the top? Let's do it. So tell me exactly how TFM and Grand X started and take me to where you're at now.
Sure. Yeah. So we're going on about six years. So June 2010, a buddy of mine that I went to school with and was fraternity brothers with and roommates with, we were both about three years out of school. He hit me up with the idea for TFM, which was just a very simple one-liner comedy website where we
tried to capture the essence of college fraternity life and all its glory and absurdity in these one-liner comedy bits that would be very highly shareable on platforms like Twitter. So that was kind of the seed, the spark that got things going. my backgrounds in web development.
So the initial website that we were building was fairly simple and something I could handle with my limited skill set in web development at the time. So, you know, we viewed it as We very much intended to make a business out of it, but our business plan was extremely ambiguous. And, you know, it actually did not exist in any kind of physical form.
It was the idea in our heads was if we can capture an audience with unique content that speaks to a certain very specific group of people and we can get enough people engaged in there would be all sorts of opportunities to monetize. So that was the mentality. And as we got the initial iteration of TFM off the ground and it began gaining a following,
we were very opportunistic in looking at different ways that we could monetize that audience. So the very obvious way to monetize a digital readership or audience is advertising. So, you know, we, we did the basic, uh, throw a Google ad sense up and get a little bit of ad revenue trickling in. And that's how we made our, uh, first bit of money.
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