231: Building and Selling a Profitable Content-Based Business with David Thomas Tao

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When you do have those moments of even fleeting clarity and those moments of hey, I wish I was spending this time doing something else, those are really important. Don't necessarily think of those as just flukes. Like hold onto those moments and think about them, even jot them down. When you wish you were spending time doing something else at the business, that could be the only sign you get from yourself and from your own subconscious. So use it and leverage it.

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Welcome back Free Timers. Jenny Blake here with a very special guest, David Thomas Tao, somebody who I first met a decade ago in New York City through mutual friends who are CrossFitters. David is an entrepreneur and writer still based in Brooklyn. He's the co founder and former CEO of BarBend.com, the world's premier strength sports and strength training media platform. David is a proud Kentucky native. He's a Forbes 30 under 30 list maker, Kentucky Colonel and a noted Whiskey and spirits writer and judge appearing yearly on national tasting panels. Bar Ben was recently acquired in a thrilling deal that included hiring all employees and even the executive team chose to stay on as well to be part of this new venture and new direction. David wrote a great blog post about this that we'll link to in the show notes and is here to tell us that it's not all bad in the media landscape out there. David, welcome to the show.

Jenny, thanks so much for having me. It is an absolute pleasure and that has me reflecting. We met 10 years ago. I think it was almost exactly 10 years ago if I really think about it and what a journey both of us have been on since.

And we have to give a shout out to Adam Chaliachi, previous guest, who's also the co founder of the branding agency behind Freetime and Pivot, and Beau Bobenko, who Adam and I affectionately call Bocepts. And Beau had me on his podcast recently. So it's really exciting to see this group of friends, those kind of loose connections through Julie and even Brooke Seam as a guest on the Pivot podcast, talking about her new book may cause side effects. It's just really cool to cross paths in random ways and then wind our way back together for conversations like this one. So I really appreciate you being here.

I mean, the best connections you make are the connections you keep. And it's been fantastic. And Adam was actually a Bar Bend investor, so he's part of our story on the business end as well. He was a very early supporter and it's been really, really cool to have a very thrilling outcome for those who believed in the company, like Adam.

Even though you and I haven't been in direct contact, I was hearing updates along the way from Adam saying they're doing really well. It's so exciting. As you said, he was an early friends and family seed investor and so it's been fun hearing from the sidelines. It's just incredible that all I hear on business and media podcasts lately is that it's a hellscape out there. Media is a dying business and it's impossible to make a living doing this. And yet here you are. Having founded Bar Bend in 2016, you grew incredibly quickly. It started delightfully tiny, as I like to say, and you've now had a successful acquisition where you're super excited to be part of the parent company. So I guess the place I want to start is.

A big zinger of a question, which is how did you do this? If everyone else is saying how hard and impossible it is, like, what was the mindset that made you even have hope that you could do this? And then what do you think it is that you have done differently that has put you in this position?

Well, Jenny, thank you for asking that. And I want to say I think a lot of the doom and gloom in the media landscape comes from stories of really big call them, catch all, write about everything media companies doing poorly. Two examples that come to mind recently, Vice recently declared for bankruptcy. Ironically, we actually used to share a building with Vice in Dumbo in Brooklyn and, you know, would see a lot of folks from that company actually did some work with that company and they have famously gone bankrupt. After at one point reaching a valuation that was nearly $4 billion. I think another example is the fact that Buzzfeed has been performing very poorly relative to expectations when they IPO'd years ago. They recently shuttered BuzzFeed News, which was very unfortunate. And these are real cost to these media changes in that a lot of people lose jobs, they get laid off, and it's a real human impact. And those things are reported on as they should be. But because these are really big, famous media companies that a lot of people have been following for decades, that is getting a lot of attention. What is not getting so much attention, I think, are the smaller, more niche media companies. Barbed is very much a niche media company. I want to be clear. We are much smaller than either Vice or buzzfeed at their peaks, and we have found success in our category. And there are a lot of niche media companies that have found success in their respective categories. And that's really, really cool. But those don't get reported on as much because they are not as big as the Vice medias of the world. So Bar Bend, which is a company of even post acquisition, we've been hiring a company of, oh, just over 20 people full time. That being a success story is not going to drown out or really stack up against the fact that Vice, which is hundreds and hundreds of people, maybe thousands of people, actually, they might have more rounds of layoffs and they need to find a strategic buyer to stay afloat. So I see success and I see growth in the media landscape in these smaller categories where people can really define their audiences more narrowly and then really grow those audiences over the years. The thing that really contributed to our success is that we had a lot of patience. Bar Ben sold almost exactly seven years after we went live, like, almost to the day. I was actually hoping it would be on exactly the day. It wasn't quite. But one thing that really helped us was that we had to grow slowly. We knew we were not going to raise millions and millions and millions of dollars. We were never going to raise tens of millions of dollars and hire a lot of people without working on our business fundamentals. And frankly, when we did raise money in 2017, about a year after we started, we weren't able to raise any institutional investment. We got turned down by every single venture capitalist that we approached. And so we had to raise a smaller friends and family round. And what that meant was, well, we didn't think there was more money coming. We had to focus on profitability and revenue diversification. Very early on, we Were not able to focus on growth that wasn't tied to revenue. It wasn't tied to making money. We had to get profitable before that seed round ran out, and it felt like our backs were against a wall. But ultimately, I think it helped us build a business model that was sustainable and could grow on its own merit. And, you know, every person we hired at Bar Bend after our first few editorial hires, every person we hired, it was a conversation on, okay, is this role going to have an impact on revenue such that the company can continue growing? We could never hire anyone and not know where the money for that salary was coming from. So ultimately, I think our timing was good, and I think we were able to take what we thought was a negative in fundraising and turn it into a positive because it really forced us to approach the business in a way that a lot of media companies raising venture capital didn't. And now I think they're paying the price for that. So a little bit of luck and a lot of patience along the way.

There's so much I want to ask you about, including those early days. I also want to come back to the actual business model that propelled you to success that you figured out. As you said, having a friends and family round, there's some discipline involved because it felt like that would be your only raise. And so you had to get it to be profitable and to pencil out. And you probably also felt a real obligation. These are your friends and family. That seems like a very pivotal decision to get funding at all versus to stay independent. You say that in the beginning, building it was a blur. You were the only one really creating a lot of the content. And I think at one point creating 30 articles a week. Is that true?

Yeah. Some weeks it actually ticked up over 30.

Oh, my gosh.

It was a slog. It was a slog.

So how did you make the decision to get capital at all to get funding? Cause you raised almost $800,000, if not a little more. How did you make that decision versus to stay independent, as so many indie creators do? I think they would be nervous to take in money if they didn't have a strong business model behind it.

The good news about the way we raised our round was we could stay independent. You know, with the founders, we still called all the shots and made the decisions. We didn't give away so much equity or we didn't sell so much equity to investors that we couldn't really control our own destiny. And I think when people raise venture capital, you know, that often comes with giving away Board seats and things like that, we were able to basically avoid that. So we were able to stay independent. But the money allowed us to hire full time staff and to scale content. When it was just me and my co founders, me being for the primary editorial firepower behind that, it was very difficult to scale content. It was difficult to write more because we just didn't have enough time. Jenny. There wasn't enough bandwidth. And we knew that to grow, we had to have a content team that could churn out content of increasingly high quality at a faster rate so that we could cover more. If we wanted to become the biggest and best in our little corner of the Internet, we had to have that capacity. And it became very clear after I'd say probably five months, I'd say five months into bar bend, we knew we had some traction. We, we were gaining some SEO traction. We were getting tens of thousands of readers a day and that was a really good sign. And we knew that to level up we would just need more firepower. And for us that meant having to raise money. You know, we didn't have enough money. We could pull from other places. We didn't have enough money. We could kind of pull from our own pockets. We were still doing some client consulting work as well to kind of keep the lights on and you know, pay for our office and pay salaries to ourselves. We knew we couldn't keep splitting time that same way. And it was really, our personal bandwidths were completely shot. And I was also really burnt out. I got burnt out within about six months of founding Barb End and realized it was a completely unsustainable pace. And founders have to deal with burnout for their entire careers. Right. It's a delicate balance. And, and when I got burnt out that quickly and I realized I couldn't keep working at that pace on a week to week basis, that was a sign that we either had to shutter the company and like, hey, that was a nice try, but we're not going to continue or we had to get some capital and some resources to actually bring on employees who could help shoulder that editorial load. And we did the latter and I'm glad we did. And here we are.

Yes. I love how you say your mission was to build the ESPN.com for strength and convince everybody that they could lift weights at all levels.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Tell me about the business model pre seed round and then post did it change? And how did you ensure that the business model could yield an ROI at all for you and the founders and that you weren't just going to burn through all that seed funding? And because, I mean that is the story of a lot of media companies too, and it's not easy necessarily to build an ad based business. So I'm hearing a lot about SEO, but just take us behind the scenes to the business model itself and how that evolved over the years.

I do want to be very clear that when I say we had to build our business fundamentals, it still took a lot of patience and there was still risk because we didn't create significant revenue. Our first year pre seed round, we knew how we would try to create significant revenue, but in content you need to have that traffic and we wanted to grow it organically. We did not want to do paid traffic arbitrage. And because of that we knew it was going to take time and we knew we kind of had to trust ourselves that we could get eventually millions of readers per month. And we eventually we were our first year we had 1.4 million readers for the year. In 2022 we had well over 30 million readers for the year. So we were able to get to that point. And also I want to be very clear, and I talked about this in the blog post you referenced, Jenny Barbad wasn't really profitable until 2020. So for us, as revenue increased, but before we hit true profitability, we had to be very careful about how quickly we went through our seed capital. So that was a big kind of question mark was how are we allocating that? How many years can that last us? And it ended up lasting us nearly four years, certainly about three and a half years. But the business model, early on we knew it was going to be multifaceted. We knew it Was going to be, of course, advertising revenue that is a cornerstone of any organic content machine, especially one that's producing as much content as Barbone. Hugely impactful, programmatic display ads. That's not a new game that's been around for a long time. We knew that was going to be very important. The product, more traffic you have, the more time people spend on the page, obviously, the better you'll do in that realm. So that is a core, fundamental part of Bar's business plan and our revenue model. Second, we wanted to do some direct advertising. We knew that that would also take a significant audience, right? That would also take an audience that was in the millions per month. So getting to work with very cool large brands. I remember one of our first significant direct brand partnerships was with Under Armour when they were launching a new shoe and apparel line. They. That was very eye opening. We got to take a peek into how a company on that scale really worked, how a public company wanted to leverage niche content, niche audiences like ours. So that was very cool and something that we've continued since then. So those direct partnerships, still extraordinarily impactful and I think will become more and more impactful as Barman's traffic continues to grow. Because as we capture more of the strength community, bigger brands, well, they want access to that. And then the third part of our revenue model, and again, something that takes a very long time to see results in, especially if you do it organically, is affiliate revenue. So we have a section of the site, I kind of liken it to the wire cutter for people who lift in that we have reviews on individual products and product categories, and those are obviously disclosed and disclaimed, but monetized through affiliate links. Very similar to what you would see on, say, the Wirecutter, which is a New York Times property. So that's been very impactful and has really helped us diversify revenue because all of those revenue points and all of those revenue types, they fluctuate a lot. They fluctuate seasonally. We report on a lot of sports, right? And sports. Well, certain events happen certain times of year and that creates a seasonality. We, we're in the fitness realm. And January is New Year's resolution time, and that's a much bigger time for us than March. And then the summer kind of picks up again, right? And then you have the holiday buying season around November, December, also a very big point for us, a very big time of year for us. So there's a seasonality to all of these revenue streams. And I think diversifying and really focusing on that diversification in the first few years of the company's existence was really, really crucial. Because the more diversification you have, as I'm sure you've talked about with many of your guests, the better you're able to weather any dips, ebbs and flows in general business cycles.

The two main parts that underpin those revenue streams seem to be having a really clear niche. As they say, the riches are in the niches and a big enough platform so that no matter which monetization strategy you use, it actually produces revenue. You know, because with a million viewers, it's different running programmatic ads or affiliate partnerships than having a thousand visitors a month.

Oh, right.

What ended up working to grow the traffic as much as you did? It sounds like SEO was part of it, but what did you find? Were there any go to leapers that you eventually ended up on that was like your 8020 of how you grew the fastest?

SEO was huge. For us, it is still our primary traffic driver is organic search based traffic. It's still our primary traffic source. And for us, we decided early on that we were seeing results from news, from reporting, and we needed to double down on that. Now, Barbin does create a lot of different types of content. We create evergreen content, training content, reviews, like I said, nutrition content, we have op eds, opinion pieces, pieces on the history of lifting weights and physical culture. But early on we saw that initial traction from reporting on what was going on in the strength world. So that could be events like World's Strongest man, the Olympics, the CrossFit Games, or it could just be news. Here's a world record that was just hit. It could be something as simple as the announcement of a new federation or the announcement of a new competition. And then following that through all the way to actually covering that competition, we found our earliest and most significant traction from that sort of reporting. And we approached it as real journalists. You know, we verified our sources. We were often not super quick to publish if we could not verify the authenticity or accuracy of something. And that became what we were known for early on. And we were very much rewarded in the Google machine, as I like to say, but really across all search platforms because we started ranking in the results. And the moment for me that I really saw the impact of this was actually during the 2016 Rio Olympics. I was basically glued to my desk writing and verifying event results for every single weightlifting category in Rio in the sport of weightlifting. And I started noticing we were getting this influx of traffic and we were getting these link Notifications. And it's because Wikipedia's editors were using us as a primary source to report results from the weightlifting categories at the Olympics. And I was like, oh, that's very interesting. And then we started seeing inbound traffic from places like Sports Illustrated who were also linking to us as primary results because we were actually verifying the results. We were writing about them and reporting on them like real journalists. So that was a real signal to me that, you know, for the first few years at least, we really need to focus on news. And we've continued that news focus while growing other parts of our content business.

Amazing. It's incredible what you've built. And to go from zero to then selling it and even being excited about who you sold it to in this next phase to do that all within these last seven years is so incredible. Before we talk about the acquisition itself, looking back on the first seven, were there any big mistakes that you made that you learned a lot from that? Now, looking back, you could tell another founder or business owner to watch out for 100%.

One that we do joke about. It's far enough in the past where it's not so raw. So I do joke with one of my co founders, Kenny, about this. We thought we were going to not just be ESPN.com, but be ESPN for strength. And we thought that would include live streaming, the events that we covered. And we've actually done a little bit of that since. But in the early days, we did hire up a camera crew and we partnered with certain events and weightlifting events. And we took our entire small team, our delightfully small team, our delightfully tiny team, as you would say. And we decided to try and learn how to live stream strength sports events. The first sport we started with was weightlifting. Cause it's very controlled and all the action kind of all happens in one place. And while there were cool results at the time, and while we learned a ton, we also learned it was so difficult to monetize that and it was so difficult to actually integrate that as part of our content business. So much so that we realized it would have to be a completely separate business. And we wasted a lot of our own personal money and a lot of our time. Not wasted is the wrong word. But we spent a lot of our own personal time and a lot of our own personal capital. This is pre fundraise on those efforts. And live streaming is extraordinarily expensive, it is extraordinarily labor intensive, and it's just not where our core competency was. And after doing that A few times we realized, well, we have to change this up. This is something we're not going to do. And as interesting as the early results were, as many eyeballs as we were getting, we had to say, we're going to shutter that part of the business. We're not going to continue to do that. And that was really hard to do because that would have been another big, potentially big business, but it would have been a separate business, and it wasn't what we're the best at. And so the advice I would give to founders is if you find that thing, even if it gains a little traction and you just continue struggling with it, you're like, we're not very good at this. We're not very good at this. We're not set up for this. Sometimes it's okay to kill something that's promising if it's not what you're best at, and if it's not what you've built your team to be best at, maybe it's a separate business entirely. And so that was difficult for us, but something we had to look in the mirror and admit to ourselves we weren't the best at it. There are people who are much more qualified to do this, people who enjoy it more, and people who can scale it, and we are not that team. So don't be afraid to kill the shiny new object. That shows some promise if it's not what you think you can scale at, even if you think it could scale.

So true and so well said. I did an episode on diminishing Returns on exactly that. That even with something as simple as a podcast, as soon as you add video, it 10x's the cost, the complexity, the process. Oh, sure, that's not to say people shouldn't add video, but in my case, personally, it would probably stop me from wanting to do this at all. You know, by the time I snowball, all the costs and complexity kind of sucks the joy out. It's definitely not my zone of genius. And so I could imagine that streaming was a hundred X of that even.

It's so funny you say that for the Bar Bend podcast. We used to also publish video and we stopped. We stopped publishing video for the Bar Bend podcast because it was just too complex. Now, spoiler alert. Now that we are part of a larger company and we have some more resources and our team has grown, we might be bringing video back as a component of our podcast, but we started our podcast almost four years ago and did video for the first year and then stopped. And we now we might be bringing it back, but only years later as our resources have grown significantly. So you saying that that resonates with me on such a deep and personal level.

Yes. Going back to that streaming experiment when you realized you needed to shut it down no matter how shiny it was, even though it had some promise, you realize this is not the thing that we are best at, that we've trained our entire company to do. What clarity did it give you on what you were best at? Mike Michalowitz calls it your queen bee role. What did you clarify from that moment? That, hey, this is our thing and we need to stay in this zone.

It's so funny because I remember distinctly the last event we live streamed was in late 2016, and I remember thinking, hey, this is just taking away time from writing and editing articles. And that was a good realization, right? Because what I was best at at the time was writing and editing articles. What we had built our team to do was to write and edit articles. And I'm sitting there doing this thing and getting a lot of eyeballs on it. But all I really want to do is take the editorial team back to the office and do what we originally set out to do, which was create written content. So I think it can be difficult to be objective about oneself. But when you do have those moments of even fleeting clarity and those moments of, hey, I wish I was spending this time doing something else. Those are really important. Don't necessarily think of those as just flukes. Like, hold onto those moments and think about them, even jot them down. When you wish you were spending time doing something else at the business. That could be the only sign you get from yourself and from your own subconscious. So use it and leverage it.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Eventually you build on this momentum. You get the company to a point where people are looking at you for a potential acquisition. I love how Cal Newport adapted a phrase from Steve Martin the comedian's book Be so good they can't ignore you. I think about this constantly because especially with a content based business, I call mine a delightfully tiny media company with my two podcasts and three books and whatnot. There is this uphill climb of trying to get attention and audience and advertisers and it's uphill, uphill, uphill until you're so good they can't ignore you. And it sounds like you got barbend to that point where all of a sudden companies are kind of coming out of the woodworks saying, hey, we might want to acquire you, which is a big deal, and you can tell us if it's something you had in mind all along. How did you ultimately know that Pillar four, the company who ended up acquiring you, was the one? So I want to start there and then we'll get into some of the behind the scenes of the due diligence process, which I've also heard can be kind of a nightmare. But I'm just curious to take us to that moment where you actually start getting so much traction that you're getting attention and sometimes it's not easy to decide if and when to sell the entire company to somebody. So I'd love to know the emotional behind the scenes of that.

It had become clear to us in the last year of Bar Ben Pre acquisition that we could only grow so big by ourselves. Now that didn't mean we were shopping the company around. We very much were not. Pillar 4 approached us, but a lot of companies had approached us and the offers were, to be frank, not the most enticing. And there are two parts to it. There's we think the company is worth xyz, though these other companies are not offering that. In addition, we didn't necessarily love what we thought the other companies were going to do with barbed. It's a brand we still very much care about and it's a team of people. And a lot of media acquisitions in niche spaces involve taking websites and basically scrapping them for parts. And that was not an option for us because we had a team, people who had staked their careers to us, and we were at a point to where we didn't have to Sell Barb End. We weren't under the financial pressure to where we had to sell so we could wait for an inbound acquisition offer that made sense for the business, for the brand, for our investors, our founders, but also for our employees. Pillar 4 is a company that we knew of. We had an existing relationship with them. So when their CEO reached out and their exec team reached out about acquiring Bar Bend, the conversation very quickly progressed to, okay, what is your vision for Barbent? What is your vision for the team? And ultimately, they really led with, hey, we love your team. We love how you guys are growing. We want to add more gas to the fire. We want to add more fuel, but we don't necessarily want to change everything, and we actually don't want to change the basics of how you all are growing. And when we knew that our entire team would be coming over, when we knew that there were was room for the founders if we wanted to come over, you know, we don't have to stay there, but we knew there was room if we wanted to be a part of Pillar 4 and a continued part of Barbin's growth. That really solidified, for me, at least, that this was an offer that we would be silly to not really dig into. And I kind of called it close to a storybook ending. I don't think there's any such thing as a true storybook ending, but for us, this is pretty close. Our investors are thrilled. As a founder, I can say I'm very happy. Our employees, everyone kept their jobs, and we've actually been hiring. We actually have several new employees who have joined the team since the acquisition, which is very, very cool. It really just makes so much sense. And Bar Bend is still its own brand. And I look at the initiatives we have on the calendar for the rest of 2023, and I get so excited because these are things that we would have never been able to do this year and if not for the Pillar 4 acquisition. So I can't go into all of them in detail, the things that we kind of have in the pipeline, but it makes me really, really excited. And I think Pillar four's emphasis on the human element, on, okay, here's what we want to do with the company, but here's also what we want to do with your team. That was really important to us. And I can't tell you how off putting it was to get offers where it's pretty clear they don't care about the brand, the ethos, or what we've built. They just kind of want the website traffic and they want to redirect it elsewhere.

Horrible. Yeah, it's like private equity where they just come in, take on massive debt, carve out the entire company and then sell it for parts. Just carnivorous private equity industries and those types of deals. We should also say that we're recording this in June 2023 and this just happened in April 2023. So it's very recent. What was it like in terms of the numbers? I know you're not going to disclose because the numbers are private, but was there a lot of back and forth, a lot of negotiation? Was their first offer already compelling enough in addition to the values that they expressed and their vision? And how did you work through just the logistics of this, like getting into the same ballpark of what numbers make sense all the way around? And then was it really hard on the business back end? You sound very organized, but was it hard on the back end to get them everything they needed to see as well to go forward with the deal?

I mean, there's obviously a negotiation step in any acquisition. This one was relatively pleasant. The cool thing about digital content businesses is they are very data oriented. You're kind of able to look at shared numbers and I would say the negotiation aspect was relatively straightforward because the numbers don't lie. We could really look at the data and say, okay, this is how big Bar Bend is. This is how it's grown. That's everything from revenue to EBITDA to website traffic, et cetera. So I think it's a type of business where you can really quantify relatively easily and relatively quickly, which I think makes negotiations smoother than potentially a lot of other businesses. But again, I've been in this space for a while, so I don't have the most experience with other acquisitions outside the digital content space. So I don't want to speak to those. The due diligence period is stressful for any founder and any business owner and any executive. And that's not because you're fighting with the other company. Right. It's not because you're disagreeing on anything. Because again, the data's all right there. You can all see it in one place. It's because there is just a lot of it. Over seven years, Bar Bend produced well over 10,000 pieces of content. I mean, well over. We had at the time nearly 20 full time employees. We had our own internal projections. We had tons of partners on the advertising and affiliate sides. It just became really complex. And in due diligence, the whole point is to take the complexities of the business and understand them. Right. So that integration into your new business, into the acquiring company is smoother. And our due diligence process, we really took our time on it and really dug deep and tried to dot all the I's across all the T's so that the transition period for our employees would be relatively smooth, so that their day to day operations would change as little as possible. So yeah, the due diligence period was very stressful. One of the most stressful periods of me and my co founder's business careers. My co founder Kenny moved mountains during the due diligence process and I will never be able to thank him enough for that. Ultimately, we got where we needed to get to and we got to a point where before the paperwork was signed, we knew that there was going to be a planned and relatively smooth and straightforward transition process for the team. And that was what was also very important.

Now that you've just been through that looking back, because so much of that has to do with systems and documentation being very organized in the bones of the business looking back, is there anything you would have done differently that would have helped that be even smoother or even integrating with the new company be even smoother?

Oh, there's just so much. There was just so much data. There was just so, so much data. We changed HR systems a couple times over the course of Barbin's history. I would have not done that. We actually changed HR systems change from one to a different one and then back to the prior one. And that actual switchover did create a lot of complication both at the time and, and during the due diligence process because we had to basically reconcile different types of records when it came to everything from payroll to contracts. So that did create some complexity and in hindsight I would not have made that switch.

Good to know. Which one did you end up going with that was your favorite?

I really enjoyed justworks personally. That's just me speaking from my personal experience. Pillar four is not on justworks. They have a full time HR team and a very different HR system. And it's great having Pillar four is big enough to where there's a dedicated HR team, which Barbin never had. Like I kind of was the dedicated HR team and then I used justworks and I relied on justworks quite a bit and I really enjoyed it. Now we're at a much bigger company with much more robust HR systems and that's also a really big relief.

So I know fancy schmancy now a whole HR team. Wow. Thank you Pillar for this is so interesting to hear your experience. And by the way, we should say for listeners, Alexis Grant is the founder of theygotacquired.com she's a previous guest on the show. They're going to be doing a feature on David and Bar Bend as well coming up. And I also really like Built to Sell Radio for precisely conversations like this, talking about exits of all different sizes. And John Warlow, he's an author, he's written some of my favorite business books, including Built to Sell. He's so good at getting into the nitty gritty of these moments in acquisition. So right now I was thinking I feel like I'm channeling a mix of John Warlow and Patrick o' Shaughnessy of Invest like the best because they're really good at just getting into all these details, which I'm less familiar with because I haven't been through it myself. So David, as we start to wrap up, if you could give fellow business owners, perhaps even in the media space, permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

You warned me about this question and we kind of touched upon one thing earlier in the recording, but I don't want to repeat the same thing twice. So I would say if you are really bad at business development and business partnerships, you can delegate that. And I think that there is a hesitancy among founders to delegate or to hire someone to help with business development and with relationship building because there's this stereotype that founders have to be the face of the brand and they have to be the ones going in, making the big deals and creating the big partnerships. But sometimes that's not the core competency of a founder, right? Sometimes it's building a product, sometimes it's making sure the focus stays on the end user. And so I see a lot of founders, myself included, who are very slow. In my case, I was very slow to hire someone who could really lead business development and partnerships. I wish I'd done it earlier. It's a no brainer that I should have done it earlier because I really wanted to focus in on the content. And I think it's something that stereotype is, oh, it's a big deal creating a new partnership. The founder has to be the one to negotiate it. That's not always the case. And there are so many great qualified folks out there who have experience across industries who are so good at creating partnerships and actually closing these deals. And they're not founders. And if your company gets big enough, eventually you're going to have to hire those people. Maybe consider hiring them sooner rather than later. That's my big piece of advice.

That is such good advice and that in itself could be an entire podcast conversation. Those early crucial either full time hires or I've even experimented with trying to delegate partnerships or onboarding high touch high corporate clients and not being the one to do it all. Because I think it actually conveys a lot of professionalism as well to those potential clients and partners that hey, it's not a one person shop over here.

Very much so. Very very much so.

David, thank you so much for sharing all that you have in your detailed blog posts. In this conversation you have a podcast as well. Just tell listeners where they can find you if they want to learn more and keep in touch.

Sure. You can find us@barbend.com youm can also find the Bar Bend podcast anywhere you find great podcasts, just like Free Time with Jenny Blake on Spotify and Apple podcasts and all sorts. So we also have a link to the podcast on the Barbed home page and you can listen actually right on the site. So thank you for asking Jenny, and it's been an honor and a pleasure to be here. I'm such a fan of what you've built over the past 10 years and beyond and the fantastic founders and delightfully tiny companies you've highlighted. And I really hope that anyone listening to this, if they think that media is all doom and gloomy, maybe their opinion changes just a little bit.

Oh I love that. And huge congrats to you. Believe it or not, I've been almost 20 years at the website content building game, so it's so crazy to say that I'm like, how am I even that old? But it changes so much and watching you enter the space and build as fast and with as much integrity and values as you have and to help the whole team land in this new place and be in this new part of your journey alongside everybody else. The joy comes through your blog post about this. It comes through your story. It came through what you're sharing today. We need you, David Tao. We need this optimism. So thank you again for being here and sharing with us and I can't wait to follow the next leg of the journey.

Have a great one.

You too.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

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