You can’t build a great company without solid distribution (marketing, growth hacking, sales...whatever you want to call it).
Between Joe and I (this is Sam typing), we’ve have literally billions of points of data.
Here’s how:
Joe ran an ad network that reached 200MM+ people. He sold it for $116MM in 2005. Then he started PetFlow, which scaled to $70MM in <2 years. As a side project, PetFlow spun out a blog called LittleThings, a viral website that scaled to $65MM in <3 years, and was one of the most shared websites on the web (100m+ users a month). Now he buys and sells SAAS co's (like Brax.io which just sold).
I started The Hustle, a daily business news email with ~2m subscribers (we’ve sent ~1 billion emails!) and recently sold it to Hubspot.
So what’s that have to do with distribution, but how does it help us invest in small startups that (hopefully) will become big companies that make lots of money?
Two ways.
The first.
We’ve run successful advertising businesses. Meaning, we had to profitably get millions of people to come to our websites and turn them into loyal fans. We used paid marketing, blogging, search traffic...everything...to make it happen.
We also worked with thousands of different advertisers and saw what types of companies can quickly grow and, more importantly, which ones struggle.
Second.
A successful media company then, by definition, means having a big audience. And with a big audience comes access to a lot of interesting, powerful, and unique people. In other words...internet fame.
We’re using those advantages to find and vet early stage startups.
We aren’t sticking to one type of company. B2b, b2c, whatever.
The thesis is simple: use our audience and network to source and then invest in early companies today that will be worth a whole lot more in a few years.
Our personal angel investing over the years has already yielded some really interesting returns and businesses, and we are just getting started...
Twitter, my podcast, newsletter, our personal deal flow, YPO and the VCs with which we are close.