9 Lessons From TBPN's $100M+ Exit
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How did TBPN go from startup to a nine-figure OpenAI acquisition?
Today's guests are John Coogan and Jordy Hayes, the hosts of TPBN. 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 was 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 our event, Press Publish LA, where we covered the intersection of Hollywood and the creator economy. And what's interesting about these guys, 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 SportsCenter. 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 Jordi, all about how they actually were able to launch TBPN and in a matter of just two years, sell it to OpenAI 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 Coogan and Jordi Hayes of TBPN. What's up, guys? We're doing well. Thank you for having us. 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 OpenAI 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, who it's for, all the above, TPBN in a nutshell.
Yeah. It's a live stream, three hours a day from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Pacific. It covers technology and business with a focus on startups and the private markets, really Silicon Valley, where Jordi and I sort of 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 the 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 were probably the millionth. But we had the benefit of the people in our category were 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 and 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. Let me start. Right, you guys are waiting for the nine lessons? Yes. It's time for nine lessons.
Number eight will shock you.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
How did TBPN go from startup to a nine-figure OpenAI acquisition?
0:00–11:03
2
What is TBPN’s niche format and why did they choose a daily live show?
11:03–17:07
3
Why did the founders commit to going full-time and avoiding fundraising?
17:07–21:43
4
How did niching down to ~200K users shape TBPN’s strategy?
21:43–30:02
5
Why is being daily, timely and live critical for a tech news show?
30:02–33:17
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from The Colin and Samir Show
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