Breaking News: Innovation is Saving Media

Media startup founders told us how they created products people will pay for by focusing on lucrative users with a clear unmet need.

Harlan Milkove
Jul 21, 2017 · 5 min read
(left to right) Zoe Leavitt from CB Insights; Sandeep Ayyappan, Founder & CEO at Wiser; Tarikh Korula, Founder at Katch; David Hoffman, Co-founder at Next Big Sound (Pandora)

Last week, we continued our exploration of product-market fit by looking for inspiration among established and emerging media technology companies headquartered in NYC.

  • David Hoffman told us how Next Big Sound found product traction without writing a single line of code, and was ultimately acquired by Pandora.
  • Tarikh Korula, founder of Katch, told us how he thinks a startup coach would have saved his wildly popular, but financial tenuous, product.
  • Sandeep Ayyappan, founder of Wiser, described how to unpack small sets of user feedback to win at enterprise software pilots.

The Challenging Demands of Media Technology

The media content space is a tough nut for a startup crack. There’s a trifecta of competitive challenges that must be addressed in a never-ending struggle:

  1. The age-old battle for fresh and inspiring content
  2. Unforgiving consumers that expect novel ways to experience that content
  3. Underlying technology that delivers that content faster and better

Additionally, in the face of the Ad Block Armageddon, venture capitalists have become increasingly harsh towards digital media products (which have historically been free to use and are supported by advertisers).

VC dollars are becoming harder to come by in media technology. (source: CB Insights vis Bloomberg)

As advertising revenue in the the industry has tanked, startups have quickly moved towards subscription services as the answer. However, this business model requires that companies not only deliver enough insight and value to attract eyeballs, but also that those eyeballs become paying customers.

Zoe Leavitt, technology analyst at CB Insights, led our most recent panel in an engaging discussion about how to create media-centric experiences so good that users will fumble for their credit cards.


Massive Growth isn’t a Panacea

Startup life can be difficult even in what may seem the rosiest of scenarios. Tarikh Korula of Katch, told us how even 1.3MM MAU he didn’t have enough traction to satiate the demands on mid-stage VCs. As an on-demand interface to experience live video streams from user-contributed services such as Meerkat and Periscope, free usage and viral growth simply weren’t enough. The popular service shut down in May of 2016.

I should have gotten a coach. I was too cheap and that was a mistake. — Tarikh Korula, Founder of Katch

Investors and advisors aren’t always as involved as we’d like as founders. Stats that seem to indicate product success can lead to a false sense of comfort if they aren’t also indicators of business viability. “B2C products takes forever to monetize, and there’s not a lot of usage data in the very beginning,” Mr. Korula lamented. In addition to having a reliable confidante involved in strategy, he encouraged founders to hold themselves accountable to their insiders through regular newsletters which include updates on vital KPIs.


How to Best Leverage Your Early Adopters

Wiser is a product intended for an entirely different type of audience. Sandeep Ayyappan told us that his killer feature is a DIY newsletter builder that lets teams share curated news briefs with their colleagues. “B2B products might seem more lucrative,” he told us, “but the standards for a first product offering are very high.”

“When you only have a handful of feedback you need to unpack it to find out what’s going on.” — Sandeep Ayyappan

Wiser didn’t deliver this winning feature on its first attempt. The need was discovered through a customer advisory board Mr. Ayyappan assembled. Divining meaningful feedback from closed-door corporate pilots is notoriously difficult, but people in his program liked working with him and were more engaged. By offering product discounts to its participants, they were able to compel advisory board customers to open-up about which features were underperforming and which they liked best.


Learning Big Things from Small Data

David Hoffman mirrored this sentiment as he spoke about Next Big Sound’s early days. He and his co-founders started the venture, in 2008, to answer a single question: how does a band become famous? They noticed that they could scrape listening stats, including listener locations, from structured data embedded in Myspace — which had become the go-to destination for fans of up-and-coming bands. They decided their data insights would be most interesting to band managers who depended on knowing in which regions their bands were gaining popularity. After calling a few, they learned that managers were having interns track the same information through manual data entry in spreadsheets.

“Without writing a single line of code,” the team created a prototype to prove they could improve the lives of band managers. Their first version was a “beautiful report” sent by way of PDF attachments in e-mail, but they had very low readership. After speaking with their pilot users, they learned that managers were constantly on the road and their Blackberry mobile devices couldn’t open PDFs. The next week, they sent the same information in mobile-friendly plain-text. Recipients couldn’t get enough of the new version! 9 out of 10 recipients wrote back to thank them, ask for additional functionality, and to request that other managers be added to the mailing list.

The next challenge for the team at Next Big Sound was figuring out who would pay for their product. Their strategy, Mr. Hoffman said, was simply asking users what they wanted to see. Following these basic principals in user testing eventually led to their acquisition by Pandora in 2015


This event was also streamed live via Facebook.


Finding Fit is a community of entrepreneurs, experiencing different stages of growth, exploring how they are finding product-market fit. Finding Fit regularly hosts events for the startup community in New York City.

Foundational, the organizer of Finding Fit, is a consulting agency, consisting of former startup founders, that augments teams with engineering and product design expertise to build compelling user experiences.

Harlan Milkove is a product-minded software engineer and veteran startup founder. He has led initiatives across several ventures to launch flagship products via individual contribution and by forming high caliber teams. His most notable venture, Reonomy, has secured over $20MM in funding and has recently expanded its research platform for commercial real-estate professionals nationally.

Finding Fit

Finding Fit is a community of entrepreneurs, experiencing different stages of growth, exploring how they are finding product-market fit.

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Harlan Milkove

Written by

Managing Partner @FoundationalNYC. Repeat Startup Founder, Advisor, and Investor. @Reonomy @Toblytools

Finding Fit

Finding Fit is a community of entrepreneurs, experiencing different stages of growth, exploring how they are finding product-market fit.

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