Executive summary

Turpentine is a network of B2B podcasts, newsletters, and more, covering technology and business media—particularly influencing investment and purchasing decisions.

Our goal is to build other products on top of our owned audiences, leveraging the insights and distribution we get from building the media company.

Four full-time team members currently produce and monetize a slate of 21 shows, with a playbook to scale podcasts across every position (engineering, sales, etc) and every sector (healthcare, fintech, etc). We’re a happily bootstrapped company and we’re growing.

We are now expanding into new mediums like newsletters, events, and lists, and are excited to trail-blaze the paths to build a fleshed out media/data company this year.

— Erik Torenberg, Founder

Table of Contents

The rise of business creators

Over the past few years, we’ve seen practitioners in business-specific verticals build huge audiences, and with them, businesses—think Lenny Rachitsky for Product, Harry Stebbings for VC, or Packy McCormick for Tech.

This is just the beginning.

Our thesis at Turpentine:

What Lenny is doing for product managers will exist for every position (finance, engineering, marketing, etc) and every sector.

These verticals hold extremely valuable audiences, and we believe that they’re only going to get bigger. Media companies allow people to own their audiences instead of rent them. Especially in an AI world, distribution and acquisition will become increasingly important—and owning these channels will become increasingly valuable. ****

Not only will these outlets be valuable businesses in and of themselves — B2B media co Industry Dive sold for $500M to B2B media co Informa which is worth $10B — they’ll serve as incredible launching points for other products.

Just like we’ve seen with Ryan Reynolds, Mr. Beast, and Kylie Jenner, business creators will also build massive businesses on top of their content empires.

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Pre-AI:

• Deprecation of third-party cookies makes targeting on meta much worse.
• Digital channels are incredibly saturated… you’re bidding on the same ads as Coca Cola, Nike, etc. There’s no alpha.

Post AI:

• The cost of building software comes down. Start-up success is no longer rate-limited by engineering talent. What’s it limited by? Customer acquisition and attention.
• Trusted relationships become more valuable as cost of good content production goes down. You can make the case that the Turpentine audience trusts the “world leading experts in their fields.”

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Attention is all you need

“The next generation of B2B products will leverage or be built on top of loved, trusted, media products.”

Companies that monopolize attention in a niche earn the right to shoot “higher-multiple” products into their distribution channels. The value of a business will be maximized by something other than media.

Solving for distribution first de-risks the ceiling and floor of this business.

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By building a media company first, we get to:

• Make cash flow from building our distribution channels (negative CAC)
• Understand our target user deeply
• Create higher-value products with the target user
• Have a top of-funnel of customers ready to give our non-media product a chance (getting someone to give you a chance is more than half the battle in B2B these days)
• Have social proof to then sell our non-media products

(Credit goes to Anuj Abrol for the above framework)