The Rebooting Show Brian Morrissey

I’m joined by Matt Cronin, founding partner at House of Kaizen, which works with publishers and other companies with recurring revenue businesses to align their business goals with audience needs through customer experience frameworks. Some highlights of our conversation:


Shift to audience-centric approaches: There's a significant shift towards understanding and directly engaging audiences rather than relying on platforms for traffic, which involves a fundamental transition to being audience-centric. A key part of that: Realizing an audience is not a monolith but different groups with different needs.


The importance of intentional audiences: Publishing became a (big) numbers game. That’s changed, as every publisher now much compete for “intentional audiences.” These are people  you have a real tie to, who subscribe to a newsletter, follow a podcast, visit your site directly. This is what Business Insider is after with its shift to focus on “digital go-getters.”


Looking beyond efficiency with AI: Synthetic content is about to overwhelm the internet. Many publishers are focused now on the efficiency gains of AI, as all businesses are and need to be, but stopping there is a mistake. AI needs to be harnessed to – you guessed it – provide added value to audiences.

On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke to writer John McDermott about his recent expose of self-help guru Jay Shetty and what it says about the chaotic Information Space. We delve into the paradox of influencer culture, where authenticity is a currency, even if the influencers themselves are as flawed as the general population. There’s often a blurry line between fake-it-’til-you-make-it and fraud.

Stephanie Kaplan Lewis founded Her Campus in 2009 with Annie Wang, and Windsor Western as college undergraduates. They saw a need for college women to have a publication made for them by other college women.

Her Campus has grown since then as a profitable, growing media business with 85 employees. Stephanie says Her Campus expanded revenue by 50% last year – and did it with an entirely ad-focused business model. Stephanie credits the growth in large part to building a long-term business that works in any environment rather than a specific environment, such as the easy-money era that’s now in the rear-view mirror.

The twist is that Her Campus is part agency, part publisher, with campaigns leaning on experiential and influencer marketing. This is a path many publishing models will go, as the economics of relying on putting ads on webpages or newsletters grow more difficult. Stephanie and I discuss:

The forced discipline of a bootstrapped model. Her Campus has been profitable for all 15 years of its existence. Imagine.

Not aging up with the audience. Her Campus turns its audience over by design, as it stays focused on college women. When it started, Her Campus was for millennials, and now it’s for Gen Z. 

Being part agency, part publisher. Her Campus ends up with other media companies as customers. 

Doing the basics well. In the media business, strategy is overrated. Execution tends to play a bigger role in separating winners and losers. That means doing the boring things well: Setting achievable sales goals and hitting them, excelling at client service, collecting receivables and such.

Matt Cronin is a  founding partner at House of Kaizen, a consultancy that works with publishers and other companies on recurring revenue growth.

House of Kaizen, which is a sponsoring partner of The Rebooting, uses research-backed experiments to foster audience-first engagement. This allows clients to turn total reader revenue into cumulative gains.

We discuss how publishers can become truly audience centric, what publishers can learn from other consumer companies and more

Mosheh Oinounou, a broadcast news veteran, started posting summaries of the news of the day during the early days of the pandemic. He found they were resonating, and over the past few years, Mo News has amassed 440,000 followers on Instagram for news delivered mostly through Instagram Stories. Mosh has since expanded to a daily podcast, a membership program that’s attracted 6,000 paying subscribers, newsletter and more. We spoke about the prospects of “creator journalists,” why his evenhanded approach resonates with his 85% female audience and the inherent challenges of building a business built around a “personal brand.”

 The Rebooting is launching paid memberships. All the details are on therebooting.com. In this episode, I speak to my collaborator Reid DeRamus, founder of Caddie Labs, which is working with me on implementing and growing memberships. Rather than discuss the benefits, we talk through the strategic and tactical decisions we made. Among the topic we cover:


Why sequencing your business is important – and realizing your “unfair advantages” is critical in that


The importance of first-party data in a niche media business


Orienting subscriptions for specific audience segments rather than the entire audience


Figuring out pricing


The challenge of “getting to start”