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Quick hits

A tank museum in England has amassed over 500k subscribers and 100 million views on YouTube. [NYT]

TikTok has minted a new generation of cookbook stars. [NYT]

Even the most successful Substack newsletters are adding advertising into their revenue mix. I can't help but wonder if someone at Substack is viewing this as a missed opportunity to diversify the platform's revenue. [Platformer]

Programmatic advertising has triggered a publisher "doom loop" in which publishers keep creating a worse and worse user experience to chase diminishing ad dollars. Abusive ad tech makes their websites more unreadable, which then hurts their distribution, forcing them to install even worse ad tech just so they can continue squeezing out the same amount of revenue. [The Rebooting]

Esports were supposed to grow into the next huge sports broadcasting juggernaut, but they haven't quite lived up to the investor hype. They've amassed huge audiences, sure, but they attract pennies on the dollar when compared to traditional pro sports. [Bloomberg]

How a blog about the VC industry generated over $1 million from online courses

Coming out of Columbia Business School in 2008, John Gannon had to choose between two career paths: launching a startup or joining a venture capital firm. While he certainly had the entrepreneurial bug, he also held a deep fascination with the VC industry. “I got interested in venture capital back when I was just a couple years out of college and started to read about VC firms,” he told me. “I remember in particular reading about Benchmark, which is one of the most storied firms in the world, and I don't know what it was exactly, but I kind of got hooked on the idea.” Ultimately, his choice was driven by the fact that he and his wife decided to start having children. “I thought, you know, venture capital is a little bit more stable than doing a startup.”

So in 2008 Gannon joined a $160 million VC fund that specialized in sectors like IT and digital media, and it was while working there that he realized there wasn’t much high quality information on the internet about the VC world. “I had people coming to me asking me how to break in,” he said. “I had a lot of empathy for them, because when I was in business school, I was reaching out to venture capitalists, trying to get them to spend time with me to tell me about the industry and to network and talk about jobs and stuff like that.” While it’s more common today for VCs to write their own blog posts or sit down for long podcast interviews, back then it was much more of a behind-the scenes profession.

That same year, Gannon launched a Wordpress site at johngannonblog.com and began writing about the industry. At first, he mostly curated links to outside resources, but over the next decade the site expanded into job listings, online courses, industry surveys, productized services, and multiple newsletters. In 2022, he left his salaried job to work on it full time, and to date it’s generated over $1 million in just course sales alone.

In a recent interview, Gannon explained to me where he found his initial audience, how he launched his courses business, and why VC firms now pay him to announce their recent hires and investments.

Let’s jump into it…

Pivoting to job listings

For the first few years of the blog’s existence, it attracted very little traffic. But in 2015, Gannon had the lightbulb idea to begin aggregating industry job postings, which at the time were scattered across various job boards and VC websites. At first, he simply created a new Wordpress page for each job listing, with the job title as the page’s headline and all the requirements pasted within the body. At the bottom, he’d link to the actual website where you could apply for the job. Eventually, he installed a specific Wordpress widget that signaled to Google that the page is a job listing and should be indexed as such.

The explosion in traffic came almost immediately. In fact, Gannon recently posted a chart showing how quickly it grew:

Given that Gannon still had a full-time job, he initially struggled to post jobs to his site more than two times per week. “Then I brought on a virtual assistant to do it so that it would be more reliable and at scale, and that's when I really saw the traffic ramp up.” To accomplish this, he formulated a checklist that involved visiting the major job boards, finding the appropriate jobs, and then migrating all the important information back to his website. Eventually, he added a Google form where VC firms could submit jobs directly to his site, and he also started segmenting the job listings by city. Within a few years, users went from stumbling onto his site from Google searches to visiting it directly to check if there were any new listings.

Expanding into newsletters

With so much of his traffic coming from Google, Gannon recognized that he needed to diversify his referral sources and also establish a more direct connection with his audience. He’d never had much interest in social media, but he did like the appeal of writing a newsletter, so he started embedding a signup form at the bottom of his job listings that promised to email subscribers when new jobs were posted.

At first, subscribers received a once-a-week newsletter called VC Careers. In addition to the new job postings, it also included a piece from Gannon giving advice on how to break into the industry. Eventually, that one newsletter expanded to several sent throughout the week, each focused on a different topic. On Mondays, for instance, he sends out a VC deals newsletter that rounds up publicly announced startup investments. On Thursdays, he produces a “moves in VC” newsletter, which mainly rounds up major hirings at VC firms. Rather than creating signup forms for each newsletter, he automatically sends all of them to every subscriber while also giving them the option to unsubscribe to the ones they don’t like. “I've seen no appreciable increase in unsubscribes or complaints or anything,” he said. “So in essence, I was able to 3X my ad inventory overnight by launching these additional newsletters.”

While Gannon writes the main anchor essays for the newsletters, he’s also amassed a team of contractors who help aggregate all the deals, announcements, and job postings included in them, and this helped him scale up his newsletter production and audience growth. He also began buying ads in other newsletters, which allowed him to pay as little as 40 cents per new subscriber, which is well below the industry average. 

A few years into his first newsletter, he came up with another key growth lever: audience surveys. Specifically, he began surveying his readers every year to collect salary data and other metrics, and then he’d publish the results to his website. It didn’t take long before this article began ranking high in Google results whenever people searched for VC salaries, and while the web article contained all the topline results from the survey, you had to enter your email address if you wanted to receive the full report. This served as a huge lead magnet that increased his newsletter signups considerably. 

To date, he’s grown his email list to 25,000 subscribers, most of whom either work in VC or want to work in VC. And as it turns out, this demographic is a financially valuable one to serve.

Launching online courses

Gannon didn’t set out with the intention of launching courses; instead, he kind of fell into it sideways. “I started with live experiences, either one-on-one coaching or trying to get five people to sit in a conference room with me and let me talk to them about venture capital.” This led to him conducting multiple live sessions on how to break into venture capital. “I recorded it one of the times, and then I had someone on my team carve it up and then create a Slidecast [presentation] out of it.” He then took this recording and began selling it on Gumroad as a VC Jumpstart course. He plugged it on his website and newsletter...