How The Penny Hoarder Grew To 16 Million Monthly Readers
In this presentation Sam Parr (joined by a senior editor) explains how The Penny Hoarder grew from a one‑person personal‑finance blog into a digital‑media company with 16 million monthly readers and $20 M + annual revenue. The talk is organized around two pillars: (1) a clear, mission‑driven purpose – “to put more money in our readers’ pockets” – and (2) a repeatable, scalable editorial workflow. The speaker shows how the mission informs every decision (editorial, advertising, product, hiring) and how a simple question (“Does this put money in our readers’ pockets?”) is used as a decision‑making filter. He then walks through the evolution of the content creation process, from idea generation, writing, SEO, editing, formatting, publishing, and promotion, highlighting how roles expanded as the company grew. The talk details the collaboration tools (Slack, Flow, Google Docs, Parsely, Native, Google Analytics) and the feedback loops that turn performance data into editorial insight. Cultural practices such as employee‑owned processes, “sprints” for rapid headline generation, and a “Money in Your Pocket” reader feedback widget are presented as ways to maintain mission focus while scaling. The speaker ends with a call to audience members to define their own mission‑driven question and build processes that empower teams.
Chapters
So I missed it when Sam asked how many people have heard of The Penny Hoarder. Can you guys do that again? Awesome. That is so cool to see because if I had asked that question in a room this size 2 and a half years ago when you first started scaling the company, I would not have seen nearly that many hands. So today I'm going to share with you how we turned what started as a bootstrapped personal finance blog into a digital media company with millions of readers. The Penny Hoarder is a content site. We help readers earn and make money in interesting ways. And we use storytelling to do that. So we use storytelling to make personal finance fun. My background is in journalism. And while my day-to-day now doesn't include that much writing, I am a writer at heart, like many of you. How many of you guys are writers? Awesome. Cool. So I feel that with you. We got that in common. About 6 years ago, I left mainstream media to use my content creation skills in a different way, in a more entrepreneurial way. So I launched a content agency that helped other companies grow their blogs. And a few years into that venture, we brought on what we thought was a pretty cool client called The Penny Hoarder. It was founded by a guy named Kyle, Kyle Taylor, and over the next year and a half, our relationship grew when we were creating more and more content for the site, to the point where Kyle ended up acquiring my company and bringing in-house myself, several members of our team, and our processes around creating content. I also had a baby around that time, so it was a really busy year. When I first started working with Kyle, that was in 2014, and this is what the website looked like then. Very different from what it looks like now. A lot has changed since then. As Sam mentioned, I was the third employee, and we now have more than 80 employees. And actually this week on Tuesday, We announced via a press conference that we're going to hire more than 160 positions in St. Petersburg, Florida, over the next 3 years. We see about 16 million unique readers every month, and last year we brought in $20 million in revenue. This year we are on track to nearly double that. And because of that growth, the Inc. 5000 has named us as the fastest growing media company in 2016 and again this year, 2017. So how did we go from what started as really a one-man personal blog and turn that into a digital media company? Today I'm going to share with you two answers to that question. The first is having mission-driven content, and the second is developing the right processes so you can scale and create that content. My goal here really is to give you guys some actionable ideas and strategies that you can take back with you to grow your own businesses. Anyone here feel like your company has a strong mission? Let's see a show of hands. There's a few. Okay, cool. So having a strong mission is really important, especially for a content-driven company, because it's going to help you better serve your readers, and it's going to help you keep all of your content feeling really cohesive. But it's also good for your bottom line. Because having a strong mission helps you figure out what decisions you need to make for your company. This is our mission: to put more money in our readers' pockets. And while I just told you how much has changed over the last 3 years, well, this is something that hasn't really changed. We've really stayed true to this mission, and it's— I guess it's our guiding star, if you will. So if you walk around our hall— the halls of our new office in St. Pete in Florida, you will actually hear people asking this question: Does this put more money in our readers' pockets? I'll give you a few examples. You will hear this question in our editorial meeting. So every morning we have a number of what we call editorial stand-ups. They're quick meetings where the editors are going over what content we're going to cover that day. And we might talk about a pizza deal. There's a pizza deal we heard about. You can get free pizza. Is that going to put more money in our readers' pockets? And if the answer is yes, That might be something we'd cover. Likewise, we might hear about a woman who figured out a cool way to make some extra money on the weekend. And maybe she is collecting dog hair from around her house and making money with that dog hair. That is, by the way, a real thing that we have written about. Does that help put our more readers in— more money in our readers' pockets? Is sharing her story and giving the tips of how she managed to do that, is that going to help our readers? And if the answer is yes, That's something we consider doing. You'll also hear this question in our advertising meetings. So we get approached by a lot of advertisers who want to work with us to reach our readers. And they want to, they want to tell our readers about their products or their services. And so our business employees, they might say, should we work with a certain advertiser? And this is the question that they'll ask. They'll ask, is this going to help our readers? Is this going to put more money in our readers' pockets? One of our advertisers, for example, is Lyft. Lyft is a driving service. And so when they— we first started thinking about whether we should work with them, this is the question we'd ask. Is this actually gonna help our readers make money? So our goal when we work with advertisers is we're not asking our readers to spend. We're asking them— we're helping them to make or save money. Because our readers really trust us, right? That's why this whole business works. They trust us to give them great information that's going to help them in their life. So we have to make sure that when we decide to work with an advertiser, it also meets this threshold. And finally, we talk about this on our product team. So we're always trying to think about what new features do we want to add to the website. And we just added a new feature that is very much in line with what I'm talking about today. Internally, we call it "Money in Your Pocket." If you go to the website and you scroll down on any blog post, you will see a bar at the bottom that says, "Does this article," or "Did this article put more money in your pocket?" And the reader can choose a thumbs up for yes or a thumbs down for no. And when we were thinking about this feature, we asked this question: Is this gonna put more money in our readers' pockets? And the answer was yes because it lets us collect data that helps us do our jobs better. So when readers answer that question, it's a way for us to get direct feedback from them, and we can use that feedback loop to continue to feed them the information that they want and they need. So having this question around your mission, it can— it's amazing if you lean into that how it can help you make decisions. I want to show you what a mission, a good mission, looks and feels like. So this 60-second video, it shows you a number of our staffers, and they're reading notes from our readers. So we often hear from people around the world who have used Penny Hoarder information to make a change in their life. And that's what we're talking about in this video. So have a look. I love this website. You guys are amazing. I cannot tell you how much I learned. And the different leads you have provided that have helped me— helped me— Help me. Thanks to you, I have been able to save and make extra cash. Thank you, The Penny Hoarder. You saved me $277 on an EpiPen. Wow, that's a lot of money. Just wanted to say thank you. Your post on companies hiring work from home led me to a great company that I started with 3 days ago. I have to say thanks to The Penny Hoarder. Just got $128 from a class action lawsuit. Nicely done. We just received a settlement check for almost $50 thanks to The Penny Hoarder. Because of The Penny Hoarder, I was hired for one of the full-time work from home positions. And just started working for LeapForce. Love the Penny Hoarder. Thanks so much for sharing, and we love you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Come on. Gracias. Thank you. Thank you. That's the first time I've seen that on the big screen, and it gives me goosebumps. You notice at the end, Kath, one of our employees, she's actually here with us today, She kind of got choked up at the end because our employees feel really passionate about this mission of helping our readers put more money in their pockets. And that's, I guess, a bonus of having a strong mission. It will lead, it will drive your business, but it also helps with employee morale, and that means you're going to be able to retain your top talent. So what is your mission-driven question? That's something I want you guys to think about. What question can you ask at your company that's gonna help you make decisions? And while it's awesome if you're making decisions, the leader of the company, you also wanna empower your employees to make decisions. So if you have a question that they can use to make decisions on your behalf, that's even better. Once you have that question, what do you do with it? How do you create, how do you develop the workflow to create amazing mission-driven content? That's what we'll talk about next. We do that at The Penny Hoarder through process, by having a really defined workflow that helps us create great content. And the, the example you're seeing here today, this is a really personal example to me, because this is the process that we used when, when my company was acquired by The Penny Hoarder. And my company was not purchased because it was the biggest agency. It was certainly not the most well-known. The reason why The Penny Hoarder was interested in us was because we had this really good process that was scalable and that we could use to get bigger and bigger. So what you see here, this, this is what we started with and this is what has become the foundation for a growing editorial department. And I'll walk you through it. We talk about creating an idea and writing the content and editing the content. At the beginning, most of our content was written. So we always thought about it as a text— with a text laser focus. After writing, we would optimize for SEO, format in WordPress so that the post looks great, add photography, publish, and then promote on social or email marketing. Having a process like this will work, will help you, will benefit you no matter how big you are. Can I see a show of hands? How many people in this room are one-man or one-woman shops who do every piece or almost every piece of this on your own? Wow, that's awesome. This is a room of hustlers. That's how I started my agency as well. So when you are a one-person shop, your time literally is money. Having a process like this that's efficient is gonna help you do things more quickly and better. But it's also good once you've grown. So at The Penny Hoarder now, we have a number of people for each of these roles. We have lots of writers, lots of editors, an entire SEO department, a PR department, social media department, um, and having a process like this helps all those people work together. So everyone knows what their role is in the process and how they can contribute to it. Just because you create a great process doesn't mean you can't change it. In fact, you should really change it as you grow. So as you learn, as you improve, you should make tweaks to your process. And these are a couple examples of how our process has changed. You see the first step is different in both of these examples, right? In one, we now sometimes start— we start the story— the idea of the story comes not from a writer, but from other parts, other content creators amongst the company. For example, we sometimes do photo essays. So one of our photographers wanted to feature a work-from-home mom and what is it really like to work from home when you have kids running around. It made for some great photos. And it was very mission-driven. So she started that story. It started with photos. And then she worked with other members of our team to add the text and other components. And likewise, on the right side, you see sometimes now we actually start ideas from our SEO department. So previously, we used to optimize for SEO after the content was created, and now a lot of the ideas that we execute, they come into us from our SEO folks. And our lead SEO guy, he's awesome. He has an editorial background. So he's able to make sure that that content is really mission-driven while also helping us appear up higher in search results. And I'll give you a quick example. He noticed that we could rank for, um, "best cars for college students," and so he suggested that to the editorial team. They ran with it, created a post around it, and now that ranks on the first page of Google. So right now, If you're the leader at your company or a leader in some fashion, um, it's probably up to you to create these processes, right? You're thinking about what workflow do I need to create? But the real end game is to create a culture where all of your employees want to participate there too, and they want to be the ones who are creating the processes. And that's what I'm so proud about The Penny Hoarder is we have really a process-dominated culture where the employees are the ones without being prompted to say, we need a process for this, or we need a better way, better workflow for, for this piece. And it's really cool to see that because when that happens, it means that you have specialists around your company who are creating the processes for what they do every day instead of the person at the top dictating how it should look. They know their job better. They know their job best, right? And so they can create a better workflow and a better process for it. It also gets immediate buy-in. Sometimes it's hard to get employees to want to follow processes, but if they're the ones who create it, they're gonna be really enthusiastic about following that to a T and training others on how to follow it as well. These are some of the tools that we use to communicate within our process. Some of them are probably familiar to a lot of you guys. Slack, I know, is a popular one. We use Slack to get out of email for all internal communication. Communication, and a few ways that we use Slack to communicate throughout our process is we have different channels for each of our editorial teams. So our editorial team, we basically operate like a newsroom. We have teams of writers and editors, and they each have their own channel in Slack where they can discuss topics, talk about where in the process each post might be, what elements it needs before it can go live on the site. But we also have company-wide channels. So for example, we have a channel that we call Ideas, where anyone across the entire company can drop in an editorial idea for content. And the editorial team will have a look and see if it makes sense to turn that into a story. So it can be half-baked. It can be a seed of an idea. It doesn't have to be well thought out, because it might be coming from a developer developer, or someone who isn't really even a primary content creator. But that allows us all to keep our eyes out for great stories wherever we are and share that with our editorial team. Flow is a task management tool. And I think we probably used Flow in a way that it wasn't really meant to be used, but it has worked for us. We create a task in Flow for each story. And because Flow is collaborative, Once a writer creates a task for their story, they can tag anyone across any other department so that person knows that they can be utilized in that story. For example, a writer might tag a videographer and say, hey, I think there's potential for video here. And it would be the video team's job to say yes or no, it could work. But then they'd know that there's an opportunity there. Same if we need a graphic or if there's a social component that we could we could loop in. So that helps us all talk to each other throughout the content creation process. Parsley is a content performance tool. It's similar to Google Analytics, but it is easier for media companies to use. So it's actually created with media companies in mind, which means that if someone's a writer or an editor who doesn't always— isn't used to creating content on a regular basis, isn't used to looking at data on a regular basis, 'cause they are creating the content, they can easily go into Parsely and find what they need, the data that they need to move forward. But Google Analytics is— maybe some of you here have experienced this. It's not always the easiest to use. You can't always find exactly what you're looking for if you're not used to digging in there. One other cool feature of Parsely that we use a lot is it allows you to pull metric reports for authors. So we have a writer named Dana, and if Dana wanted to see what all of her— how her posts performed last week, she could pull a report that just includes posts that she wrote. And that's harder to configure in Google Analytics. So they make it really easy for you. And we use that data to close the feedback loop. So we have this process, and every time we create content, we're able to look at how it performed. We're able to look at the data, and then it helps us figure out how to create more content going forward. And that's what we use Native for as well. It's a feedback loop for us. Native is a testing tool. I think actually they have a rep here today. But it allows us to test different variations of the content that we've created on Facebook before sharing it with our Facebook page. So if we write a post, there's lots of different headlines we could try, lots of different images we could try. We might test different variations of that piece of content with a lookalike audience on Facebook and determine what is the best performer, and then we'd share it on Facebook, on our page so that ideally, the idea is then organically it will perform better. So all these tools have helped us really work together as a team and communicate better throughout the process. We're also big users of Google Analytics. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, of Google Docs. Google Analytics too, but Google Docs. I love Docs because they're so collaborative, and they let everyone jump into any piece of content whenever they need to. So what you see right now is something, a piece of our process that we started way back when, and we still use today. It's what we call the editing funnel, and it's simply a list of folders in Google Docs and we can move posts within those folders depending on what step in the process they're in. So you can see we start with step 1, that's when a post is getting edited, it goes on to a second editor, then it gets formatted in WordPress, and then it's complete. And we did start this funnel with step 1, by the way, but over time we tweaked that process and we realized we actually needed a step 0 because we needed a place where we could put docs that included ideas and posts that we are getting ready to assign. This works for us because everyone can see where in the process different pieces are. So it really allows for collaboration amongst the group. And finally, once you have a solid process, look for ways to innovate within that process. One way that we've done it at the Penny Hoarder, and this is— I love this, it's really fun— is through sprints. We call it a sprint. I mean, we made that up, but it's, we call that internally whenever we have, whenever we want to get a group of people together and achieve a lot in a short period of time, we call it a sprint. So it might be an hour or 2 hours. We put on everyone's calendar, anyone who's gonna participate, bring different players together to achieve a common goal. And I remember the first sprint that we ran was at our old office back when we had probably 12 employees. And we were, we had a lot of content coming through our funnel. We had a lot of writers and we were working with a lot of freelance writers, but we hadn't yet hired enough editors. And so we had a bottleneck where we needed, a bunch of our posts needed headlines before we could publish them. The way we do headlines at The Penny Hoarder is we have a Google Doc and we all write in lots of different variations of headlines. So we all give ourselves freedom to fail. They can be terrible headlines. But the idea is if you write a lot of them, you can go back and choose a few that you think might work to test. So in this headline sprint, we got all of the content creators we had in a room. It was probably half a dozen of us then. And we all worked on the headlines for this group of posts that were ready to go live besides the headline. And if you do that in Google Docs during a sprint, the cool thing is everyone can see what everyone else is doing. Like, you can actually see the headlines being created, and so everyone learns. Like, you might learn, oh, this editor is really good at this piece, and how did he make that work, or how did he use that word in a headline? It gives you ideas. You can feed off of each other. It's also really good for training employees. And when you're at a fast-growing startup where you're always trying to train people, if you put a new employee in a sprint, they're gonna see how everyone else operates, and it's a great way to kind of get them up to speed really quickly. So in closing, I'm hoping that you can think about how these things apply to your business. What is your mission? And what mission-driven question can you ask at your organization that's going to help you create awesome content? And finally, what processes can you develop that will make that content creation possible? If you already have some processes in place, this is a great opportunity to come back and redefine them, make sure that they are as strong as they need to be, peel back some layers, go a little deeper. Create a place where all of your employees can participate. If you do that well, you will put yourself in an awesome position to successfully achieve your mission. Thank you.
