Making Media
How to build a media business by two outsiders learning the craft. Matt Reustle and Dom Cooke have decades of experience in investing but almost none in the media industry. In each episode, they talk to great media operators, document their own media building efforts, and dissect their favorite business content. Join these two content junkies in their fight to save long-form media against the attention span crisis. Join the resistance. Learn more and stay up to date at www.joincolossus.com. An entrepreneurship show, by entrepreneurs, for the entrepreneur.
Episodes
July 18, 2024 • 59 mins
Our guest today is Matthew Sherry, co-founder and CEO of Platform Media. Founded in 2021, the business is home to some of the UK’s biggest podcasts and was acquired earlier this year for an eight-figure sum.
The business was founded to solve the two biggest problems in podcasting: distribution and monetization. Through a savvy social strategy and bespoke partnerships, it has found unique solutions to both of those issues.
We get in...
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May 16, 2024 • 58 mins
Our guest today is Dan Shipper, the co-founder and CEO of Every. Every started at the beginning of the pandemic as a bundle of business newsletters written by different authors. While writing is still at the heart of the business, the model has shifted focus to a daily newsletter that is an essay on technology, productivity, or AI.
Dan and his team have also built adjacent business lines and even incubated a startup called Lex tha...
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April 25, 2024 • 84 mins
This week, we bring you two titans of the podcasting world, Tim Ferriss and our very own Colossus chairman, Patrick O’Shaughnessy. We’re biased, but I think these two are two of the best interviewers in the world, and they recorded this conversation on Invest Like the Best for the 10th anniversary of Tim’s podcast.
Matt and I thought you, our precious Making Media audience, would enjoy it too, as Tim touches on so many themes that ...
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April 11, 2024 • 57 mins
Our guest today is sports media veteran Mike Stricoff. Mike spent a decade producing live sports talk on national TV, first working at MLBN before moving to Fox Sports, where he helped launch Undisputed. Mike worked on that show alongside Skip Bayless, Shannon Sharpe, and others as the main line producer.
In 2017, he left national TV for tech, going to work at Snap where he led their sports and gaming content. And, more recently, h...
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March 21, 2024 • 63 mins
Welcome back to Making Media. Our guest today is Emily Sundberg. Like many of our most creative guests, Emily has a wide-ranging background. For her day job, she writes her newsletter, Feed Me, which tracks valuable early trends in the consumer and brand space. If you want to know what's going to happen six months from now, read Emily's newsletter tomorrow.
She also writes for New York magazine and GQ, she's been featured in the N...
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March 7, 2024 • 43 mins
Our guest today is Jack Davenport. Jack is the Managing Director and Co-Founder of British-based Goalhanger Podcasts. Goalhanger is the largest independent podcast network in the U.K. and likely the world outside of the U.S. Its stable of shows do 30 million downloads a month.
Goalhanger got its first big breakthrough with the excellent history podcast called “The Rest Is History,” and they've since grown into other verticals like ...
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February 22, 2024 • 46 mins
Our guest today is Peter Kafka. If you've listened to media podcasts, you've likely listened to Peter's Recode Media. It has been a fixture in the industry for years. Peter recently announced he's going back to Business Insider, which is notable because he was the first hire way back when it was known as Silicon Valley Insider in 2007.
Given Peter has seen a few cycles, we tried to key in on what is actually new versus what is cyc...
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February 15, 2024 • 59 mins
Our guest today is Ben Springwater. Ben is the founder of Matter, a reading app that pulls everything you want to read into one place with curation, audio, and more. There are constant frustrations with how we get served media, as there's infinite content, and it's harder and harder to separate the good from the bad. Ben is working to solve that problem.
He shares what it's like to build a product like Matter and gives insight int...
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February 12, 2024 • 50 mins
Our guest today is the preeminent aviation journalist, Jon Ostrower. Jon is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Air Current, which he started in 2018. It's an independent subscription media business focused on the global aerospace and aviation industries.
Jon started blogging about the airline industry as a 22-year-old while working in politics, but he quickly became consumed by his passion and went on to work for Flight Global,...
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February 1, 2024 • 69 mins
If you make a podcast or like sports, you will enjoy this episode. Spike Eskin runs all of the programming at New York's WFAN, the original and biggest sports talk radio station, and he's only the second person ever to have that job. Now you're probably thinking, doesn't everyone just listen to podcasts now? Well, the answer to that is no, but don't worry. He's also got a podcast, a big one, and his podcast, The Rights to Ricky San...
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January 25, 2024 • 55 mins
Our guest today is Adam Hansmann, co-founder of The Athletic. The Athletic launched in 2016 when the idea of paying for content was still considered contrarian and newspapers & local coverage of sports was dwindling. Yet Adam and his co-founder built something that they wanted, solving a problem they experienced in their own lives and riding this massive market expansion.
Adam shares a lot of the lessons that he took away from his ...
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January 18, 2024 • 51 mins
Our guest this week is CBS Sports Writer Kyle Porter. Kyle writes and podcasts about golf for CBS, and he has done so since 2012. In 2021, Kyle wrote his first book, "Normal Sport," which was born out of a running joke with his audience about the absurdities of golf. He has now written and self-published three books and writes a newsletter under the same branding.
Even if you’re not a golf fan, there are so many interesting areas t...
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January 11, 2024 • 29 mins
We reflect on Making Media's inaugural year and 2023 as a whole for the podcasting world. From shifts in the macro podcast environment to our most memorable recordings, we round up our first year and look to the next.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page HERE.
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Making Media is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Making Media, visit joincolos...
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January 4, 2024 • 63 mins
Today's guest is Craig Fuller, Founder and CEO of FreightWaves and CEO of FLYING Magazine. We get into some of the early observations that Craig had when he was building out FreightWaves, which is a software data business with a media empire sitting around it. He shares the challenges associated with fundraising for a media business and why the market doesn't put a value on audiences.
In the second half of our conversation we get i...
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December 28, 2023 • 54 mins
Our guest today is Jonathan Becker, Founder of Thrive Digital. Paid growth is a complex topic and it is something that we reference quite a bit on the show, but we've never really dug in. Jonathan and his team at Thrive have deployed over $3.5 billion in paid acquisition budgets on behalf of their client base. Naturally, that makes him an ideal guest to dig deeper.
In the conversation, we draw on parallels to investing, how Jon and...
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December 21, 2023 • 54 mins
Today, we’re joined by Kaki Orr, the Creative Director for Branded Content at The North Face. After a career as a professional skier where she was sponsored by The North Face, Kaki joined the company and has since led the charge to create mesmerizing films of their athletes skiing, climbing, and running across many of the world’s most remote and breath-taking mountains. We’ve talked a lot on this show about content to commerce but ...
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December 14, 2023 • 51 mins
Part of our mission with Making Media is to highlight great content across the internet. Today, we're sharing our favorite pieces of media from the past year and to help us sift through the deluge of content, we have a special returning guest - media aficionado Web Barr. Web is a multiple-time Webby Award and Communication Arts-winning producer at National Geographic magazine, he was Head of Content at Meet Cute, and is currently b...
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December 7, 2023 • 58 mins
Our guest today is Tammy Winter, the Commissioning Editor of Stripe Press. As the name suggests, Stripe Press is a division within Stripe. Founded in 2010 by two Irish brothers, John and Patrick Collison, Stripe is a payment processing business with a mission to "increase the GDP of the internet".
From the surface, there doesn’t seem to be great synergies or reasons why a payments business would incubate a publishing arm – particul...
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November 20, 2023 • 70 mins
Today we are talking Marvel. It's the cinematic universe that's made over $30 billion at the box office (and that's just the Hollywood piece). Our guest today is Joanna Robinson, Podcaster and Culture Critic for The Ringer. Joanna wrote "MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios," a revealing behind-the-scenes history of the cultural phenomenon.
We cover the history of Marvel from the pre-Disney days through what led to the explosion of wha...
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November 13, 2023 • 56 mins
Our guest today is Amy Astley, global editorial director and editor-in-chief of the Iconic Architectural Digest. It's rare to find a brand like AD that has a hundred-year-old history and effectively balances that rich heritage while still being the pulse of the market. Amy talks about the cultural currency that exists with the AD magazine and what that represents to the people featured inside. We also dive into how the business mod...
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