Every company is now a media company 📡

OpenAI just paid $100M+ for a podcast. Here's the $0 version.

Every company should have a podcast and a newsletter.

I know that sounds like a hot take from a newsletter writer, but the trend speaks for itself. In 2-3 years this will be as obvious as “your company should have a website”.

Last week, OpenAI put a price tag on what that’s worth:

They acquired media company TBPN for “low hundreds of millions”.

For context, TBPN is a live show that two guys started just 17 (!) months ago 🤯

A week earlier, Plaid ($8B) bought This Week in Fintech, a newsletter with 200K subscribers.

Same story, over and over:

• HubSpot bought The Hustle (2.5M subs) + Starter Story (800k subs)

• Semrush bought Search Engine Land + Backlinko

• Zapier bought MakerPad

• Stripe bought Indie Hackers

• Ahrefs acquired Detailed.com

• a16z acquired Turpentine

10+ acquisitions, billions of dollars. All because a trusting audience is the most valuable asset a company can own.

But there’s a cheaper path:

You don’t have to buy a media empire - you can build one for $0 👇

I think building a media brand around your company is the biggest arbitrage in marketing right now. It makes your company look 10x bigger than it actually is. It makes people trust you before they ever talk to your sales team. And it costs almost nothing compared to what these acquirers paid.

I’ve actually done it twice before:

At Wiz, we built a podcast that became #1 in cloud security using a tactic that takes us maybe 2 hours a month. I built this newsletter to 82,000+ subscribers with no team. Both on the side, almost no budget.

What if your company was THE media brand in your industry?

(It’s easier than you think.)

My practical “media empire” playbook 🎁

Let’s build a media empire from scratch.

I put together the most comprehensive guide I’ve ever written on this:

50+ real examples to copy, trade secrets from Wiz and Hubspot, the exact tactics I personally used, and a step-by-step guide you can start executing today with a single person and ZERO resources.

Here’s what you’re getting:

• 📡 Database of 50+ examples: companies running media empires in 2026 (with exactly what each one built and how)

• 🧲 The Substack growth hack that your company blog will never have

• 🤝 How to get the biggest names in your industry to create content for your media brand, for free

• 📈 How to 10x your content output with one writer and zero AI (a tactic I accidentally discovered while working with HubSpot)

• 📘 A step-by-step playbook for launching and growing a media brand with one person

Read more