My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/

Ben McCarthy didn’t set out to create a media company focused on Salesforce, he just began blogging about his use of the product as a way to document the various use cases he encountered. As it turned out, there were thousands of other people who were encountering those same use cases, and via Google searches they began landing on Ben’s blog posts.

Fast forward 10 years, and he now runs a 20-person media company that generates over 1 million pageviews per month and is the most authoritative resource for Salesforce customers.

In our interview, we discussed why there’s such a huge audience for Salesforce content, how he monetizes with webinars and white papers, and whether he wants to launch more media outlets centered around other cloud technologies.

Get $100 your CEX tickets by entering the discount code OWENS100

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/

When Joe Pulizzi launched The Tilt in 2021, he already had a pretty good idea of how to build a successful media company. Back in 2017, he had sold his previous media startup, The Content Marketing Institute, to one of the world’s largest event conglomerates.

Joe ran The Tilt with a very similar playbook – first starting with a weekly newsletter, and then expanding into an in-person conference called The Content Entrepreneur Expo, or CEX. The venture was so successful that he sold it to Lulu Press in 2023.

In our interview, Joe talked about his newsletter growth strategy, what it takes to put on a successful conference, and why he prefers the term “content entrepreneur” instead of “creator.”

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/

When it comes to knowing all the intricacies of real estate investment, few are more knowledgeable than Brad Hargreaves. In 2015 he founded Common, a company that manages rental properties and consults with real estate investors on building design.

And then in 2022 Brad decided to begin sharing his knowledge through a paid newsletter called Thesis Driven. Within a matter of months, it was generating six figures in revenue, and he decided to step down from his role at Common so he could focus on building out a data platform geared toward real estate investors.

In our interview, we talked about why he launched Thesis Driven as a paid only newsletter, how his content is differentiated from most other real estate journalism, and why he think there’s an opportunity to build a Bloomberg Terminal for real estate investors.