September 6, 2025 • 19 mins
Last month, we launched a new newsletter series called Building TDA. The elevator pitch for this series is that we wanted to draw the curtain back on what it’s like to build a news company in Australia, and to share our experiences with our audience.
Today we’re going to be answering all of the questions you asked us about building TDA.
Sign up to the Building TDA newsletter here.
Hosts: Zara Seidler and Sam Koslowski
Producer: Orla Maher
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Today's podcast is brought to you by Employment Hero. To
be honest, if we had had this when we were
starting TDA, I know we would have just saved so
much time. It's the Smarter way to hire. With over
one point five million candidates ready to go hire smarter,
all in one place with Employment Hero already. And this
is the Daily This is the Daily OS.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Oh, now it makes sense.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Sunday,
the seventh of September. I'm Zara Sidler, I'm Sam Kazlowski.
Last month we launched a new newsletter series called Building TDA. Now,
I know that the name probably gives it away, but
the elevator pitch for this series is that we wanted
to draw the curtain back on what it's like to
build a news company here in Australia and in turn
(00:53):
to share our experiences with our audience. Turns out there
are lots and lots of young people who are interested
in how businesses are run or are even thinking of
doing it themselves. Because we've got a heap of questions
in response to our first newsletter. Now I'm going to
check the link to the newsletter in today's show notes.
(01:13):
But in the meantime, in today's episode, we're going to
be answering all of the questions that you asked us
about building TDA.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
It's so awesome doing this, Sarah, because we get asked
all the time how exactly this all kind of came
to be originally, but also how things work today, and
I think it's partly the kind of TikTok day in
the life. Yeah, observing how things are built.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
I do a TikTok Day in the Life once a year.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Yeah, it's great. Well, one of my first podcast loves
was how I built this yea.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Even the rest of the world.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Yeah, I know, super original of me. But yeah, No,
it's amazing that we're doing this, and I love being
here and doing this chat.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
So I'm going to ask you the questions. I've selfishly
looked at all of them. Cool, you haven't, So I
want to start off really easy with one that we've
got a number of times. We get it quite often, Sam,
Are you and I actually friends?
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Sometimes what day of the week I'm friends with you?
And I think that that's all that matters to me. No,
we are, We're very very very very close friends.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
We were something stopping you from saying best.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
We're best friend. We were the ring bearers at each
other's weddings, yep. And it's been a really amazing part
of this whole experience that we can do it as
best mates.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
I know, but we didn't know each other before.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
We didn't know each other. I knew your ex boyfriend, ok,
I played soccer against him.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Excellent. Moving on from my ex boyfriend, how did we
actually meet?
Speaker 3 (02:48):
So?
Speaker 2 (02:49):
I put up a post on LinkedIn saying I wanted
to start a news company. Does anyone want to do
it with me? And that came directly after I had
just had an appointment with my therapist who said that
I needed a project and needed something to sink my
teeth into. I was twenty two and I got one
reply yep, So I didn't have a huge man listening
to her. And then we met in a cafe a
(03:10):
couple of days later, and the dally Els was born.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
There you go, what a story.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
It was really cool because I think when we sat
down for that coffee, we both immediately knew that we
would be able to work together on this but also
be best mates. Yeah, and that's pretty rare, pretty very special.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Yeah, it's a funny thing sometimes. I know I've been
off the pod for a little while, but my favorite
comments that we get on a podcast sometimes are do
you hate each other? Or like, are you having an
off day? If the synergy between us isn't there, Well.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
It's sometimes hard to sound like you're best friends when
you're talking about really really heavy news stories as well.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Yeah, and also like we talk about work all day
every day and the news, so like, this bound to
be some ups and downs. But thank you to our
very observant audience for noticing that. Now going to change
gears a bit, because the next question we got was
how did you know it was the right time to raise? Now, Sam,
you had to teach me everything about what raising actually is,
(04:08):
So talk to me like I am Zara of twenty twenty. Okay,
what does it actually mean? And how did we know
what to do?
Speaker 2 (04:16):
So when you and I sat down for that coffee,
we each owned fifty percent of the company.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
We split it down the middle, a company that didn't
make this exactly.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
If you think about it as a puzzle with twenty pieces,
you owned ten and I owned ten. And then to
raise money or to raise capital is what they say
in the big newspapers. It basically means that you say
you're going to add some pieces to the puzzle, so
you still have ten. I've still got ten, but now
instead of a twenty piece puzzle, there's a twenty five
(04:44):
piece puzzle. And in exchange for giving away those five pieces,
you decide that this is how much a piece is worth.
And then you and I don't own that fifty percent
anymore because now we've diluted, which is think about it
like cordial to include more people around the table, and
that gives us the money then to do what we
wanted to do, which was to quit our jobs to
(05:06):
make sure that we could still pay rent and have
some mackers and try and build this thing and work
it out. Because when we quit and when we raised
that first bit of money, we didn't actually know how
we were going to make this a business to be
able to keep hiring people. So the pitch to investors
wasn't very attractive. It was basically back us, back us,
and we think we can work it out, and it.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Worked okay, So just to run through that once again,
so raising was basically we owned half the company each
we realized that we needed to get some money in
order to make this a real thing. We went to investors,
so people who part of either it is their job
or it's their you know, passion project to fund startups
(05:51):
in Australia, we went to them. They gave us money
in exchange for owning a little bit of our company.
And when did we know it was the right time
to actually do that? Like, why did we do that?
I didn't do it. You did because I had no
idea what it was.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
Why.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Well, I think Covid was the answer to that. So
at the beginning of twenty twenty, we'd been doing it
for three years, we had three thousand followers on Instagram
and that was it. Yeah, and that is not that impressive.
But then in twenty twenty, from about February to about December,
we went from three thousand to forty thousand, and we
could see that there was this real hunger for what
we were doing. There was Covid updates every day that
(06:26):
drove a lot of traffic to new people especially, and
then I remember the breakthrough moment was really that one
of the bigger newspapers, the Australian Financial Review, wrote a
piece about us, and it was funny having that newspaper
in hard copy at the kitchen bench at both of
our workplaces, where you kind of have to play this
game with our then bosses of I promise, I'm doing
(06:49):
my work here. I just have this thing over.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
There that's just have this photo shoot actually.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Growing really well, and so that kind of sped up
the conversation, I think, And yeah, it was game of
me trying to convince you that we should take the
leap and just give it a shot.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
I think that that dynamic is interesting though, because you
convincing me basically came down to our risk profiles, and
so much of taking that leap into you know, turning
a side hustle into a full time business is.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Your I guess, appetite for that risk.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
And that's something that you've thought a lot about over
the last couple of years, is the gendered aspects to
risk and just how we define risk. Well, you've come
on a bit of a journey, so how are you
thinking about risks now?
Speaker 1 (07:34):
I just think that we only talk about risk in
terms of like very strict financial risk or you know,
behavior that is perhaps impulsive as risky, and there's so
many things that are risky, and you know, we both
quit our full time jobs, and it took a while
for us both to get there, but we took that
risk together. Even though I say I have a low
risk appetite.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
It did not take me a lot of time to
get yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
To that point though we did, I guess, lessen the risk.
By having that financial stability, we could pay ourselves a
modest salary when we raised money. Some of that was
or most of that was used to pay us a
salary so that we could still, as you said, pay
that rent and eat and whatever else. But then we
had the task of having to figure out how to
(08:19):
make money for the business, because raising capital shouldn't last forever.
That capital, like the idea is that you're meant to
invest it in the business and to grow the business
and then to start making money, and that's how the
business grows. We got asked a lot of questions about
how we make money. It's like the number one question
that people want to know, and specifically someone wanted to know,
(08:40):
how did you get your first sponsor or your first advertiser.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Okay, so we're going right back then to the middle
of twenty twenty one. Then, so we quit our jobs
January twenty twenty one, started full time February twenty twenty one.
Our first sponsor we sold I think in Instagram story
in about May time, twenty twenty one.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
And how much was that for, do you remember?
Speaker 2 (09:03):
I think it was about two hundred and fifty dollars,
which is non knuck to sustain a business. Put it
that way, how.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
Many two hundred and fifty dollars Instagram stories you have
to sell?
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Yeah, that's a lot. So that came about because I
think it was a friend of a friend, and often
I hear stories from founders that are kind of similar
to that that the first couple of breaks often come
from somebody who might not be in your immediate network,
but you might be one degree away from and having
one advertiser and just being able to show another advertiser
(09:35):
what an ad looks like made a huge difference. And
the power of a case study is really important in
the game that get that in the deck. So from
there it moved, but it was very slow. Tara, who's
ouhead of commercial here at to the A, she was
employee number one. Her and I were actually.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Doing out to Tara.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Shout out to Tara. Her and I were actually doing
our last four years of accounting a couple of months
ago and kind of tidying everything up and laughing at
how tiny the work that we won was in those
early stages. But you got to start somewhere.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Yeah, and then I guess the follow up to that is,
how do you grow from those very small partnerships because
people were taking a risk to partner with us, we
had never done it before. Yeah, how do we get
from those small Instagram stories whatever they were, to the
really big partnerships that sit across all of our platforms today.
Someone specifically asked, do they, being the advertisers, reach out
(10:29):
to you or do you reach out to them.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
It's a really unnglamorous story of how we got to
where we are today, which is a really thriving news
company that can bring lots of partners with us on
this journey. It really is one, then two, than three,
then four, than five minutes six. There was no viral moment.
There was no moment where we suddenly grew exponentially overnight.
I'm seeing a lot of that commentary around you AI
(10:53):
companies of like it launched and then the next day
it had billion hips. I know, So that is not
the game that we're playing here. So it's been very
incremental and boring, but very predictable, which is great in
terms of how we think about our growth as a company.
In terms of the split of who comes to us
versus us going to them, say, it's about eighty percent
of advertisers come to us and land in our inbox
(11:13):
in the middle of the day saying we'd love to
work with you. Have you thought about doing a partnership
in this space? And twenty percent we go out and say,
we think you'd be a really good fit and we
think our audience would like you.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
It's always a really fun task of trying to figure
out who can we elevate the brand of and who
can we be best suited to working with. It's really
one of the joys of this business. Someone asked us,
I guess in that vein how do you pay your
team and invest in the business? And I guess that's
exactly what we were talking about.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Right, Yeah, we pay them with money, which is a
good start, and we yeah, we really think about sustainable growth.
So a big trap that youth media companies have fallen
into over the past say, fifteen twenty years, all around
the world world is that they raise a lot of money,
they make that puzzle that we were talking about the
beginning really really big, and they don't actually know how
(12:06):
they're going to keep that going. And so when they
go back to the investors and say, can we have
more money for more puzzle pieces and the investors say no,
they actually have to let employees go. And we never
wanted to do that. So if you think about it
with us, like when we think we have enough money
for one more person, then we get one more person,
and we keep reinvesting into the company, but making sure
(12:26):
that we're doing so really responsible.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
I guess this is a good segue to the next question,
which is what have been your biggest failures and lessons
in scaling?
Speaker 3 (12:36):
Scaling being growing the business.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
I think the biggest failures have been when we thought
we could do something that we couldn't do, such as
true peoplewegh Taylor Swift tickets perhaps, and where we've kind
of shot a bit too high and look, they're nothing
has been critical. There's been no critical failures. But I
think this is my personal answer to this, not the
(13:00):
company answer, but I think my personal answer is when
I thought we could do something that we weren't quite.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
Ready for, as in resource wise.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Resource wise, knowledge wise, getting legal advice, all of that
kind of stuff that can land us in trouble. I'd
say that one of the other things that's been really
tricky has been trying to figure out how to keep
telling really original stories and keep working out how to
have big investigations and all of that, because that's the
most expensive part of journalism, and it's a really slow
(13:30):
process in keeping on investing in that. But I think
we're on the right path there, I.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Agree, and I hope our audience does. Sam.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
There are lots of other questions about, I guess, scaling
the business, how we make money, growing the newsletters, growing
the Instagram, and maybe we'll do another episode on that,
but I want to transition really quickly to some of
the more personal questions. And perhaps these are questions coming
from people who are thinking of founding.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
Their own company.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Were their moment, Sam, that you want to to give up?
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Not one?
Speaker 3 (14:02):
Wow?
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Yeah? And I was listening to an interview with that
Stephen Bartlett, who does the director the CEO, did with
Jimmy Fallon, and Stephen Butler said to Jimmy Fallon was
there a moment where you thought you wouldn't be on SNL,
And Jimmy Fallon was like, no, there's never been one moment.
And then Stephen Butler said, well, what would you have
done if you didn't get on the show, And Jimmy
(14:24):
Fallon said, I don't understand your question, Like, I don't. Actually,
I can't concede, I cannot compute. I can't compute what
you're saying. And I kind of really resonated with that,
where I never I can't even explain the idea of
this not working working. Yeah, it doesn't. It does not
even exist as a shadow. And I don't know whether
(14:45):
we should do that confidence. Yeah, I don't know whether
we should back this up with some cognitive behavior therapy
or what. But that's where I'm at.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
You actually just took my next question, okay, which is
how do you manage mental and physical health as a founder.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Thing that you and I speak about very very often.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
Yeah. Look, I don't do a great job at that.
I would describe myself as a workaholic. Yeah, and it's
because of the last answer. You know, I get a
lot of joy and I have an innate determination to
do an amazing job with TDA. I think my happy
place and I'm sorry for this answer, is actually watching AFL,
(15:25):
Like I just find a sense of calm and peace
and enjoyment. And it's the only thing, really, besides spending
time with my beautiful wife that doesn't kind of make
me feel like I want to go on two screens.
Like if I'm watching a show on Netflix, I still
want to go on my phone.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
And we love shows that can be watched while scolling to.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Oh, subtitles if it's subtitled. But AFL just grabs me
and I really love it, and that's where I find
a lot of happiness. And music is where I find
a lot of happiness as well. Okay, what about you?
How do you kind of decompress?
Speaker 3 (16:00):
I think I do a better job than you do.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
You do, Yeah, I'm better at boundaries and therapy. Therapy
is very helpful and physical. It's been a work in
progress because I do pilates because I'm basic. But I
was doing this thing where I was taking my phone
into the pilarate studio and like trying to text or
(16:21):
read a news alert while like doing my forty five
minutes of six am. You know me time and That's
been a big lesson and a big wake up call
to me that that's actually the least sustainable thing. And
I can put aside forty five minutes. I'm not saving
anyone's life here. Yeah, So I'd say that it's just
about prioritizing well being and knowing.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
When you need to.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
Can I share one analogy that I think about a lot.
That's my latest mental health analogy. I'm trying to work
out how to get out of this mindset where I
feel like Simone Biles in the middle of the air
and like, where do.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
You feel like, really greatest athlete of all time?
Speaker 2 (16:56):
Yeah, triple flips man. So we're doing a lot of
complicated moves in the air and we're looking great and
we're doing really well, but we need to kind of
stick it. And that feeling of like constantly being in
the air twisting and trying to figure out what does
even stick it mean has been really interesting. So that's
where I'm at.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
Okay, I love it, you know what, let's end the
podcast there.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
I don't know how we can really compete with that,
But Sam, thank you for being so transparent and so authentic.
Thank you for listening to another episode of The Daily Ods.
We will be back as normal tomorrow, but until then,
please feel free to send us any questions you want
answered in the next episode of Building TDA.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
Have a great day and chat to you tomorrow.
Speaker 4 (17:43):
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda
Bungelung Chalcuttin woman from Gadigol Country. The Daily oz acknowledges
that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the
Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the
first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Look, we got pretty lucky with our first hire, Tara,
who's our head of commercial now. She actually messaged us
and wouldn't take no for an answer.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
Well, she messaged you relentlessly.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
You met her for a coffee that I forgot about,
that you forgot about, but you told her on the
spot that she had a job.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
She just had the vibe of she could help.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
And then she met me for a coffee. She thought
the job was sealed done.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
And I thought it was an interview, and there was
a bit of mismatch, but hey, it worked out.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
It did work out, and it isn't always that easy
to find your first hires.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
No, Sliding into DMS is not a perfect science.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
No, and it can kind of go unanswered six times
before they respond. But that's where employment hero comes in.
So they've got over one point five million ready to
hire candidates in their marketplace.
Speaker 3 (18:52):
Hey, that makes a lot more sense.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
It's just more efficient and the best bit is that
it's all there. So you've got hiring, onboarding and all
in the one platform. Businesses have already made thousands of
hires with zero cost and zero weight.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
That sounds like something we should have done back in
twenty twenty one. But hey, you can't rewrite history, but
you can be smarter in future, highre smarter, all in
one place with employment Hero.
Today's podcast is brought to you by Employment Hero. To
be honest, if we had had this when we were
starting TDA, I know we would have just saved so
much time. It's the Smarter way to hire. With over
one point five million candidates ready to go hire smarter,
all in one place with Employment Hero already. And this
is the Daily This is the Daily OS.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Oh, now it makes sense.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Sunday,
the seventh of September. I'm Zara Sidler, I'm Sam Kazlowski.
Last month we launched a new newsletter series called Building TDA. Now,
I know that the name probably gives it away, but
the elevator pitch for this series is that we wanted
to draw the curtain back on what it's like to
build a news company here in Australia and in turn
(00:53):
to share our experiences with our audience. Turns out there
are lots and lots of young people who are interested
in how businesses are run or are even thinking of
doing it themselves. Because we've got a heap of questions
in response to our first newsletter. Now I'm going to
check the link to the newsletter in today's show notes.
(01:13):
But in the meantime, in today's episode, we're going to
be answering all of the questions that you asked us
about building TDA.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
It's so awesome doing this, Sarah, because we get asked
all the time how exactly this all kind of came
to be originally, but also how things work today, and
I think it's partly the kind of TikTok day in
the life. Yeah, observing how things are built.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
I do a TikTok Day in the Life once a year.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Yeah, it's great. Well, one of my first podcast loves
was how I built this yea.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Even the rest of the world.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Yeah, I know, super original of me. But yeah, No,
it's amazing that we're doing this, and I love being
here and doing this chat.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
So I'm going to ask you the questions. I've selfishly
looked at all of them. Cool, you haven't, So I
want to start off really easy with one that we've
got a number of times. We get it quite often, Sam,
Are you and I actually friends?
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Sometimes what day of the week I'm friends with you?
And I think that that's all that matters to me. No,
we are, We're very very very very close friends.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
We were something stopping you from saying best.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
We're best friend. We were the ring bearers at each
other's weddings, yep. And it's been a really amazing part
of this whole experience that we can do it as
best mates.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
I know, but we didn't know each other before.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
We didn't know each other. I knew your ex boyfriend, ok,
I played soccer against him.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Excellent. Moving on from my ex boyfriend, how did we
actually meet?
Speaker 3 (02:48):
So?
Speaker 2 (02:49):
I put up a post on LinkedIn saying I wanted
to start a news company. Does anyone want to do
it with me? And that came directly after I had
just had an appointment with my therapist who said that
I needed a project and needed something to sink my
teeth into. I was twenty two and I got one
reply yep, So I didn't have a huge man listening
to her. And then we met in a cafe a
(03:10):
couple of days later, and the dally Els was born.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
There you go, what a story.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
It was really cool because I think when we sat
down for that coffee, we both immediately knew that we
would be able to work together on this but also
be best mates. Yeah, and that's pretty rare, pretty very special.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Yeah, it's a funny thing sometimes. I know I've been
off the pod for a little while, but my favorite
comments that we get on a podcast sometimes are do
you hate each other? Or like, are you having an
off day? If the synergy between us isn't there, Well.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
It's sometimes hard to sound like you're best friends when
you're talking about really really heavy news stories as well.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Yeah, and also like we talk about work all day
every day and the news, so like, this bound to
be some ups and downs. But thank you to our
very observant audience for noticing that. Now going to change
gears a bit, because the next question we got was
how did you know it was the right time to raise? Now, Sam,
you had to teach me everything about what raising actually is,
(04:08):
So talk to me like I am Zara of twenty twenty. Okay,
what does it actually mean? And how did we know
what to do?
Speaker 2 (04:16):
So when you and I sat down for that coffee,
we each owned fifty percent of the company.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
We split it down the middle, a company that didn't
make this exactly.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
If you think about it as a puzzle with twenty pieces,
you owned ten and I owned ten. And then to
raise money or to raise capital is what they say
in the big newspapers. It basically means that you say
you're going to add some pieces to the puzzle, so
you still have ten. I've still got ten, but now
instead of a twenty piece puzzle, there's a twenty five
(04:44):
piece puzzle. And in exchange for giving away those five pieces,
you decide that this is how much a piece is worth.
And then you and I don't own that fifty percent
anymore because now we've diluted, which is think about it
like cordial to include more people around the table, and
that gives us the money then to do what we
wanted to do, which was to quit our jobs to
(05:06):
make sure that we could still pay rent and have
some mackers and try and build this thing and work
it out. Because when we quit and when we raised
that first bit of money, we didn't actually know how
we were going to make this a business to be
able to keep hiring people. So the pitch to investors
wasn't very attractive. It was basically back us, back us,
and we think we can work it out, and it.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Worked okay, So just to run through that once again,
so raising was basically we owned half the company each
we realized that we needed to get some money in
order to make this a real thing. We went to investors,
so people who part of either it is their job
or it's their you know, passion project to fund startups
(05:51):
in Australia, we went to them. They gave us money
in exchange for owning a little bit of our company.
And when did we know it was the right time
to actually do that? Like, why did we do that?
I didn't do it. You did because I had no
idea what it was.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
Why.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Well, I think Covid was the answer to that. So
at the beginning of twenty twenty, we'd been doing it
for three years, we had three thousand followers on Instagram
and that was it. Yeah, and that is not that impressive.
But then in twenty twenty, from about February to about December,
we went from three thousand to forty thousand, and we
could see that there was this real hunger for what
we were doing. There was Covid updates every day that
(06:26):
drove a lot of traffic to new people especially, and
then I remember the breakthrough moment was really that one
of the bigger newspapers, the Australian Financial Review, wrote a
piece about us, and it was funny having that newspaper
in hard copy at the kitchen bench at both of
our workplaces, where you kind of have to play this
game with our then bosses of I promise, I'm doing
(06:49):
my work here. I just have this thing over.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
There that's just have this photo shoot actually.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Growing really well, and so that kind of sped up
the conversation, I think, And yeah, it was game of
me trying to convince you that we should take the
leap and just give it a shot.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
I think that that dynamic is interesting though, because you
convincing me basically came down to our risk profiles, and
so much of taking that leap into you know, turning
a side hustle into a full time business is.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Your I guess, appetite for that risk.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
And that's something that you've thought a lot about over
the last couple of years, is the gendered aspects to
risk and just how we define risk. Well, you've come
on a bit of a journey, so how are you
thinking about risks now?
Speaker 1 (07:34):
I just think that we only talk about risk in
terms of like very strict financial risk or you know,
behavior that is perhaps impulsive as risky, and there's so
many things that are risky, and you know, we both
quit our full time jobs, and it took a while
for us both to get there, but we took that
risk together. Even though I say I have a low
risk appetite.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
It did not take me a lot of time to
get yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
To that point though we did, I guess, lessen the risk.
By having that financial stability, we could pay ourselves a
modest salary when we raised money. Some of that was
or most of that was used to pay us a
salary so that we could still, as you said, pay
that rent and eat and whatever else. But then we
had the task of having to figure out how to
(08:19):
make money for the business, because raising capital shouldn't last forever.
That capital, like the idea is that you're meant to
invest it in the business and to grow the business
and then to start making money, and that's how the
business grows. We got asked a lot of questions about
how we make money. It's like the number one question
that people want to know, and specifically someone wanted to know,
(08:40):
how did you get your first sponsor or your first advertiser.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Okay, so we're going right back then to the middle
of twenty twenty one. Then, so we quit our jobs
January twenty twenty one, started full time February twenty twenty one.
Our first sponsor we sold I think in Instagram story
in about May time, twenty twenty one.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
And how much was that for, do you remember?
Speaker 2 (09:03):
I think it was about two hundred and fifty dollars,
which is non knuck to sustain a business. Put it
that way, how.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
Many two hundred and fifty dollars Instagram stories you have
to sell?
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Yeah, that's a lot. So that came about because I
think it was a friend of a friend, and often
I hear stories from founders that are kind of similar
to that that the first couple of breaks often come
from somebody who might not be in your immediate network,
but you might be one degree away from and having
one advertiser and just being able to show another advertiser
(09:35):
what an ad looks like made a huge difference. And
the power of a case study is really important in
the game that get that in the deck. So from
there it moved, but it was very slow. Tara, who's
ouhead of commercial here at to the A, she was
employee number one. Her and I were actually.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Doing out to Tara.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Shout out to Tara. Her and I were actually doing
our last four years of accounting a couple of months
ago and kind of tidying everything up and laughing at
how tiny the work that we won was in those
early stages. But you got to start somewhere.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Yeah, and then I guess the follow up to that is,
how do you grow from those very small partnerships because
people were taking a risk to partner with us, we
had never done it before. Yeah, how do we get
from those small Instagram stories whatever they were, to the
really big partnerships that sit across all of our platforms today.
Someone specifically asked, do they, being the advertisers, reach out
(10:29):
to you or do you reach out to them.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
It's a really unnglamorous story of how we got to
where we are today, which is a really thriving news
company that can bring lots of partners with us on
this journey. It really is one, then two, than three,
then four, than five minutes six. There was no viral moment.
There was no moment where we suddenly grew exponentially overnight.
I'm seeing a lot of that commentary around you AI
(10:53):
companies of like it launched and then the next day
it had billion hips. I know, So that is not
the game that we're playing here. So it's been very
incremental and boring, but very predictable, which is great in
terms of how we think about our growth as a company.
In terms of the split of who comes to us
versus us going to them, say, it's about eighty percent
of advertisers come to us and land in our inbox
(11:13):
in the middle of the day saying we'd love to
work with you. Have you thought about doing a partnership
in this space? And twenty percent we go out and say,
we think you'd be a really good fit and we
think our audience would like you.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
It's always a really fun task of trying to figure
out who can we elevate the brand of and who
can we be best suited to working with. It's really
one of the joys of this business. Someone asked us,
I guess in that vein how do you pay your
team and invest in the business? And I guess that's
exactly what we were talking about.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Right, Yeah, we pay them with money, which is a
good start, and we yeah, we really think about sustainable growth.
So a big trap that youth media companies have fallen
into over the past say, fifteen twenty years, all around
the world world is that they raise a lot of money,
they make that puzzle that we were talking about the
beginning really really big, and they don't actually know how
(12:06):
they're going to keep that going. And so when they
go back to the investors and say, can we have
more money for more puzzle pieces and the investors say no,
they actually have to let employees go. And we never
wanted to do that. So if you think about it
with us, like when we think we have enough money
for one more person, then we get one more person,
and we keep reinvesting into the company, but making sure
(12:26):
that we're doing so really responsible.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
I guess this is a good segue to the next question,
which is what have been your biggest failures and lessons
in scaling?
Speaker 3 (12:36):
Scaling being growing the business.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
I think the biggest failures have been when we thought
we could do something that we couldn't do, such as
true peoplewegh Taylor Swift tickets perhaps, and where we've kind
of shot a bit too high and look, they're nothing
has been critical. There's been no critical failures. But I
think this is my personal answer to this, not the
(13:00):
company answer, but I think my personal answer is when
I thought we could do something that we weren't quite.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
Ready for, as in resource wise.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Resource wise, knowledge wise, getting legal advice, all of that
kind of stuff that can land us in trouble. I'd
say that one of the other things that's been really
tricky has been trying to figure out how to keep
telling really original stories and keep working out how to
have big investigations and all of that, because that's the
most expensive part of journalism, and it's a really slow
(13:30):
process in keeping on investing in that. But I think
we're on the right path there, I.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Agree, and I hope our audience does. Sam.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
There are lots of other questions about, I guess, scaling
the business, how we make money, growing the newsletters, growing
the Instagram, and maybe we'll do another episode on that,
but I want to transition really quickly to some of
the more personal questions. And perhaps these are questions coming
from people who are thinking of founding.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
Their own company.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Were their moment, Sam, that you want to to give up?
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Not one?
Speaker 3 (14:02):
Wow?
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Yeah? And I was listening to an interview with that
Stephen Bartlett, who does the director the CEO, did with
Jimmy Fallon, and Stephen Butler said to Jimmy Fallon was
there a moment where you thought you wouldn't be on SNL,
And Jimmy Fallon was like, no, there's never been one moment.
And then Stephen Butler said, well, what would you have
done if you didn't get on the show, And Jimmy
(14:24):
Fallon said, I don't understand your question, Like, I don't. Actually,
I can't concede, I cannot compute. I can't compute what
you're saying. And I kind of really resonated with that,
where I never I can't even explain the idea of
this not working working. Yeah, it doesn't. It does not
even exist as a shadow. And I don't know whether
(14:45):
we should do that confidence. Yeah, I don't know whether
we should back this up with some cognitive behavior therapy
or what. But that's where I'm at.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
You actually just took my next question, okay, which is
how do you manage mental and physical health as a founder.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Thing that you and I speak about very very often.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
Yeah. Look, I don't do a great job at that.
I would describe myself as a workaholic. Yeah, and it's
because of the last answer. You know, I get a
lot of joy and I have an innate determination to
do an amazing job with TDA. I think my happy
place and I'm sorry for this answer, is actually watching AFL,
(15:25):
Like I just find a sense of calm and peace
and enjoyment. And it's the only thing, really, besides spending
time with my beautiful wife that doesn't kind of make
me feel like I want to go on two screens.
Like if I'm watching a show on Netflix, I still
want to go on my phone.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
And we love shows that can be watched while scolling to.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Oh, subtitles if it's subtitled. But AFL just grabs me
and I really love it, and that's where I find
a lot of happiness. And music is where I find
a lot of happiness as well. Okay, what about you?
How do you kind of decompress?
Speaker 3 (16:00):
I think I do a better job than you do.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
You do, Yeah, I'm better at boundaries and therapy. Therapy
is very helpful and physical. It's been a work in
progress because I do pilates because I'm basic. But I
was doing this thing where I was taking my phone
into the pilarate studio and like trying to text or
(16:21):
read a news alert while like doing my forty five
minutes of six am. You know me time and That's
been a big lesson and a big wake up call
to me that that's actually the least sustainable thing. And
I can put aside forty five minutes. I'm not saving
anyone's life here. Yeah, So I'd say that it's just
about prioritizing well being and knowing.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
When you need to.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
Can I share one analogy that I think about a lot.
That's my latest mental health analogy. I'm trying to work
out how to get out of this mindset where I
feel like Simone Biles in the middle of the air
and like, where do.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
You feel like, really greatest athlete of all time?
Speaker 2 (16:56):
Yeah, triple flips man. So we're doing a lot of
complicated moves in the air and we're looking great and
we're doing really well, but we need to kind of
stick it. And that feeling of like constantly being in
the air twisting and trying to figure out what does
even stick it mean has been really interesting. So that's
where I'm at.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
Okay, I love it, you know what, let's end the
podcast there.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
I don't know how we can really compete with that,
But Sam, thank you for being so transparent and so authentic.
Thank you for listening to another episode of The Daily Ods.
We will be back as normal tomorrow, but until then,
please feel free to send us any questions you want
answered in the next episode of Building TDA.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
Have a great day and chat to you tomorrow.
Speaker 4 (17:43):
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda
Bungelung Chalcuttin woman from Gadigol Country. The Daily oz acknowledges
that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the
Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the
first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Look, we got pretty lucky with our first hire, Tara,
who's our head of commercial now. She actually messaged us
and wouldn't take no for an answer.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
Well, she messaged you relentlessly.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
You met her for a coffee that I forgot about,
that you forgot about, but you told her on the
spot that she had a job.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
She just had the vibe of she could help.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
And then she met me for a coffee. She thought
the job was sealed done.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
And I thought it was an interview, and there was
a bit of mismatch, but hey, it worked out.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
It did work out, and it isn't always that easy
to find your first hires.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
No, Sliding into DMS is not a perfect science.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
No, and it can kind of go unanswered six times
before they respond. But that's where employment hero comes in.
So they've got over one point five million ready to
hire candidates in their marketplace.
Speaker 3 (18:52):
Hey, that makes a lot more sense.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
It's just more efficient and the best bit is that
it's all there. So you've got hiring, onboarding and all
in the one platform. Businesses have already made thousands of
hires with zero cost and zero weight.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
That sounds like something we should have done back in
twenty twenty one. But hey, you can't rewrite history, but
you can be smarter in future, highre smarter, all in
one place with employment Hero.
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