Williamson chooses autonomy over a larger creator network

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:05:08

   content creation at This Week in Startups, which is you. And then you've got this advertiser set up, so you've got ad dollars coming in. How do you get leverage so that it's non-linear? Any great business has a non-linear scaling function. And in your business, you guys are limited, and this is something we've talked with Jimmy and Mr. Beast about, if it's just you making the content, you can only make X number of units of content per month, per year. So that limits the scalability of the revenue for your organization in terms of how big this can get. Do you ever think about creating leverage in the system where you do almost like what a Spielberg does with an Amblin Entertainment or any great director or producer does, where they scale up, they become the producer, they create a network, they create

2. 1:05:48

   a studio model, and then you have several content shows that are under your brand, and have you ever thought about that? Is that kind of the model where this is eventually going to go, where some of the great breakouts are going to end up realizing they can kind of scale up and build the next studio model? If you want to do that, then fine, but I have no desire to start managing a ton of other content creators. Managing myself is hard enough.

3. 1:06:08

   What if you still did your show, but you have others that you kind of bet on, basically? Perhaps, I guess. It just doesn't speak to me all that much, and I think a question is, what do you need this additional money for? Is it that you just need to continue to build more and more profit? Because I quite like where I'm at. I quite like the level of revenue that I make, the workload that I have, the fact that I get to spend a morning reading, and I don't feel like I should have been on more Zoom calls. So my ability to put my foot on the gas or take it off is exclusively on me, as opposed to having other obligations. So it's very much a lifestyle business. And I understand that that's going to cap the upside. Now, there's some things, I can start CPG, I can start to do some clever stuff with ads where that will begin to ramp

4. 1:06:51

   and ramp and ramp. But yeah, I'm... You've got unlimited upside with how you spend your time now that you don't have to do work 24-7. Absolutely. And, you know, there may be a day when I decide to press that button again, but it's not right now. But just to, like, before Jason jumps in, you've got YouTube AdSense, partners, Spotify partner program, which is brand new, and that's actually cranking quite a lot. And then the one area that I think way more podcasters need to look at, which is monetizing clips. So you do mid-roll ads on a long podcast episode, you know, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 50 minutes, 120 minutes into an episode. But you can also be seven minutes into an eight minute long clip. And you can crank clips out all the time. So you can be putting out one a day. So there's other points of leverage. Exactly. So you can look at, okay, how can we

5. 1:07:39

   be a little bit more innovative? We can put Instagram stories up, we can use newsletters, these sort of 360 deals and fill out all of the ecosystem where you can without obliterating the viewing experience and making the audience hate you. I think that's well said. And there's going to be international as well with AI. I don't know if you've experimented. We have a company podcast I stay. Dubbing stuff.