A founder reflects on Luminary's troubled April 2019 launch, including a misstep tweet about advertising and confusion over the platform's technology. Key lesson: own mistakes fast, communicate broadly to all stakeholders, and sometimes slow down to build better long-term.
We had a clear vision for what we wanted to do with Luminary. We have a great network of content creators we put together. Lauren had built out a great team of, you know, 70 people in a short amount of time. We even got a great New York Times story announcing that our company was launching and talking about our content network. On April 23rd, we launched, and these are some of the headlines that we got coming out of that. So not exactly what you dream of when you think about launching your company and getting covered by the press. The one saying Apple, Luminary, and Spotify in the podcast, that one's not bad. Good company. The other is not so good. So what happened? And we've spent a lot of time reflecting and thinking about what happened and what could we learn and what do we do different going forward. There's a couple things here that we'll talk about in some detail that are tactical and actual specific instances. But I think at a higher level, two things that we've really zoned in on. One, you need to proactively and clearly and succinctly communicate what you're doing to all stakeholders, not to some, not to the people you've had the time to get in touch with, but to everyone. And so that concept of clear communication keeps coming up and is something that, you know, is really important. And two, when you're moving really fast, sometimes you actually have to slow down so you can go faster. Sometimes you have to take a breath, look around, understand where you're at, and then accelerate from there. Because just constantly moving to the next item and the next issue to solve and the next thing on your agenda, you don't get always the proper time to think to understand the full context of the conversations you're having, and then to make the most informed decisions. So let's go through this. The tweet. So not sure if anyone in here has seen or read, my guess would be you have. The first tweet that came from our company's social media account was a tweet that was essentially negative on the ad market. It was negative on advertising in podcasts. As we discussed earlier, as we wrote in our blog post, that is in no way, shape, or form our belief. We actually built a model that tries to embrace both subscription and ad-supported content, and it was a mistake, right? It was just a miss. It was going too fast. It was not having the right processes in place to approve something before it came out from an official company account, and it was a mistake. Took the tweet down, we issued two sort of explanations, but we didn't really own it and issue an apology and say, you know, raise our hand and say my bad for a couple weeks after. And I think once we did that, and once we just said, you know what, we messed that up, that was a mistake, we actually were able to move the conversation away from it and people understood. So an interesting lesson there in one, sometimes you gotta go slow to go fast, sort of understand what you're doing, have the right processes in place. Very similar to a lot of what Lauren talked through on the people ops side. And two, when you do make a mistake, which in a startup you are going to do every day, sometimes you just have to own it and raise your hand and say, that was a mistake and we'll do better the next time. The second piece that came up through our launch is a conversation around licensing your podcast content and where does podcast content live. Historically, the space has been unlicensed. Content's been widely distributed. And because there was an economic model where distribution equals impressions equals ad revenue, everyone wanted their content on pretty much every service. But the space is growing up. Our entire business is about part of the space growing up. And our entire business is similarly about the value of podcast content. And so if you're a content owner or a content distributor, who values what you are creating. You may not want your content on all platforms, and you may wanna pick and choose where it is, similar to how things work in the video world today. You have some shows that are only on HBO, some that are only on Showtime, some that are only on Netflix, some that are on multiple of those services. And so there's a licensing conversation that is essentially, in our view, podcasting entering adolescence, adulthood, I don't know exactly where you draw the line on that, but the space is maturing, and so there was a pretty interesting conversation in the space about where and why content will live where it does. The third piece is on technology, and really for us, actually, how our technology appeared to the outside world, not what we were doing internally. This again comes back to communication. So we chose a technology architecture that looked a certain way. What was actually happening underneath and inside the company was something different, but we didn't do a good enough job proactively going out to the world and saying, here's what we're doing, here's why we're using this methodology to access your podcast content, here's how the data flows. And because we didn't, go out and clearly communicate. We woke up one morning at 4:00 AM. There was a tweet that said, I think, I think Luminary is doing this. But by the time we got in the office at 7:00, it was sort of widely understood that that was what we were doing. It was about the concept of caching and rehosting content. We were not doing that, but we hadn't proactively explained that. And we had made some technology architecture choices that made it possible for people to imply that. And so we spent the next couple days, one, explaining that publicly through the press and through social media, two, getting on the phone with content publishers and owners in the space, large technology players in the space, the hosting providers, and explaining what we were doing. And we had gotten a sort of clean bill of health sign-off and made progress to right any of the issues that we had. Very quickly, but because we weren't proactive enough about our communication strategy, the narrative had sort of picked up on itself, and it took us a little bit longer to win that back. We actually feel like now we've done a really good job of going out, explaining what we were doing, what we are now doing, and doing that proactively, but it did take some time and some pain to get the message out there and get it out there clearly. So going forward, what does it mean and what do you do? I think one, you communicate proactively. Two, every time we make a decision, we need to really think about all of the stakeholders it impacts, not just consumers, not just the creators making shows for Luminary Premium, but every constituent in the market and make sure that they fully understand what we're doing. And that might mean sometimes you have to go a little slower. Reach out and do your calls and your emails or speak at a conference and really articulate what you are doing to the market. But going slower and taking that step back gives you the opportunity to actually go faster and go faster in the long run.
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