What's up, everybody?

This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.

On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes.

How do they get to where they are today?

How do they make decisions, both of their companies and in their personal lives, and what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own profitable internet businesses. If you've been enjoying the show and you want an easy way to support it, you should leave a review for us on iTunes. If you're on a Mac, the easiest way to do that is just go to NDhackers.com slash review.

There's been a lot said on this podcast about how if you want to build a business that makes enough money for you to quit your job and be your own boss, it's helpful to build an audience first. And recently, that's gone a step further and to actually, don't just build an audience, build an entire media company, a media brand. And I think that's obviously the most extreme version of building an audience. So instead of just talking to amateurs about this, I wanted to talk to a pro, someone who's actually done this and gotten paid to do it as their job. Alex Wilhelm is the senior editor at TechCrunch. He was also the editor-in-chief at Crunch-Based News, which he started from scratch. And it's worth listening to Alice's experiences and advice because he knows what it's like to build an organization that drives millions of page views rather than more simpler content marketing efforts that only get a few hundred or a few thousand page views here and there. At the end of the episode, we tried to distill Alex's advice into a bullet list or a playbook of sorts that you can follow, but I really recommend listening to him elaborate on each of these principles during our conversation,

just because I think that's a much better way to really understand what he's getting at.

Enjoy the conversation. I know you've had at least two different stents where you were charged with building an entire media organization from scratch, one at Mattermark and one at Crunch-based News. Yeah. And that's a huge responsibility. And I know also they turned out very differently. So let's start with Mattermark. What was going to your head when they gave you that huge responsibility and how did you approach it? Going to Mattermark was interesting. It's a little bit of a personal story, more than a work story.

I was at TechCrunch before Mattermark, and I had a little bit of a drinking problem.

And so I thought that I was miserable in my job.

It turns that I was just miserable in life.

So I quit TC.

I went to Mattermark.

And the idea was, you know, like you said, it was to build a little media company led by me, kind of focused on my kind of financial startup, the venture capital type stuff, kind of my bread and butter that I've written about for a while. And it wouldn't, it went medium bad until I went to rehab. And then it went medium good until I quit. It's kind of the breakdown of 2016 for me. Mattermark didn't in the end have the resource base required to do what our ambitions wanted. And that's kind of a, it's not a diss in any way. Startups are always resource constraint. They're always making priorities. And so as Mattermark's business didn't quite proceed the way that we had anticipated, my resource base kind of got diminished until the point when it's kind of like, okay, this is not going to work. But I sure learned a lot. I mean, as a personal year, huge in terms of just learning a lot of stuff, getting my life back together, getting my health back together and all that stuff. So it was super useful as a year, a tough one, though, not one that I would be super excited to do again.

It's one of those four mediviers where you learn a lot about yourself.

Yeah, you know, I really hate how most of the life is falling down a staircase and learning how to fall down better the next time.

but it seems to be a trend, at least in my life.

What I'll say the way is, if you've never worked at a startup,

it's a really interesting environment,

and there's nothing quite like it,

given the sheer lack of rules and kind of like formality.

And so for me, going from TCc which was owned by aOL effectively when i was there and then

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