Most companies buy advertising to drive sales of their products, but Andrew Curtin’s first sponsor mostly bought out of pity. It was May 2022 and he had just launched Construction Wave, a B2B outlet that covers the UK’s construction industry. He had absolutely no audience, but a major crane manufacturing company bought a $10,000 sponsorship anyway.

That $10,000 allowed him to hire his first editor, and over the next two years they built Construction Wave up into one of the leading publications in its sector. Its website is mainly monetized through high-priced sponsorships, and this year it hosted its first conference geared toward construction CFOs.

In an interview, Andrew explained how he got interested in the sector, where he found his initial readers, and why he thinks there’s an opportunity to launch a subscription data product for his industry.

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Transcript

Hey, Andrew, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me on. I've been listening for the last few years, so delighted to be a part.

So you currently run a B2B media company that caters to the construction industry, but you didn't grow up working in construction, right? You initially started your career in advertising and marketing.

Yeah, my professional career, I guess, coming out of university, was in advertising. But I spent six summers with the tool belt on. So my dad was a small local contractor in the southeast of Ireland. So I've done a couple of summers there just with the tool belt on. 

So you do have a background knowledge of construction because it sounds like you worked with your dad and in his contracting business.

Yeah essentially. Dad just threw me in with the toughest guys and just said, learn your trade. Yeah, it was a small local business. So just helping out here and there. And yeah, I guess there's a big correlation between the Irish and construction. As you know, in America, we like to say we're the hands that built America. That's what the old Irish guys in the pub like to think. And it's the same here in the UK. So it's kind of in our veins a small bit, you know.

Yeah, now that you say that, I have a relative who owned a construction business in Boston, and I was visiting him, and every single guy on his crew was Irish. I completely forgot about that. I didn't draw the correlation.

Yeah, if you go through London, all the contractors are Irish.

Huh, interesting. But so you decided to go, after university, into marketing. Was it at a marketing agency? Were you working in-house somewhere? What were you doing?

So my first job, when I finished my master's in marketing, I did a graduate program with a butter company called Kerrygold. You might have seen their butter in Whole Foods and I think it's in Walmart and Mariano's in Chicago and stuff like that. So I was based in Evanston, just north of Chicago.

And yeah, I spent a year in-house working there, which is a great working holiday. First time in the States, just out of university. I then got a job with an ad agency in in London and worked there, and to be honest maybe six to nine months into that job – I play Irish sports over here, hurling if if any of your listeners ever heard of hurling, so I played sports over here and all the contractors are kind of tied to that sport, and I eventually started just doing freelance marketing consultancy for the contractors on their personal business websites and stuff like that. I was paid like two grand per website and just like maybe some powerpoint presentations. It was basic, but it paid the rent and I could go out for a few drinks on the weekends. So it was good fun. And it kind of set me up for what we're doing now.

So you start doing these side gigs. Did you turn that into a full-time thing where you were doing content marketing consulting for like contractors or construction companies or anything like that?

Yeah, that was exactly it. I was doing long hours. Like an ad agency is a tough business. It's like long hours, low margin. It sounds sexier than what it is. And then the contractors came along and it was probably... making 4,000 pounds, whatever, $5,000 per month. And I was like, okay, I can live on my own terms here. It's freelance. It's not exactly on my own, but I can do it freelance and I can live a life. And that's how it started.

And you quit your ad agency job to do that full time.

Yeah, I couldn't wait to get out of there in the end. It was tough, but I always wanted to do my own thing. And looking back, it was actually great training because... It's just a high paced environment. From a content perspective, you could see what worked, what didn't work. We worked on some cool stuff like the NBA Europe. So it was like looking at content every single Monday and Tuesday, doing the analytics. So it definitely, looking back, was a great learning curve.

And like what kind of content were these companies getting you to do? Were you writing blog posts, articles, videos? Like what were you doing?

I think it started off with tender presentations. I hope your listeners have some coffee for this part. Basically, in contracting, to tender for a project, you have to have a presentation about your company's history and case studies. Times were starting to change in construction where new buyers required a bit more design and just a bit more information,a bit more quality. So I started doing these presentations just like case studies and putting them together so it would help with their tendering and then went into website development. These contractors had no websites, so like they thought I was a genius coming in and doing a five page website. I used to charge like two, two and a half thousand pounds per website. 

And so you're doing this freelance for several years. Were these mainly just companies that were in the UK that you were working for?

Yeah, all the UK.

Yeah. And so how many years did you do that as a freelance content marketing consultant?

End of 2018, right up till maybe end of Q1 2022.

So would it be safe to say that you made a lot of contacts with the industry? Obviously, you had this background working with your dad, but it really gave you a holistic view of the business of construction and all the different intricacies of it and stuff like that?...