Wirecutter: Brian Lam

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2022

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Brian Lam walked away from a high-profile job at Gizmodo to launch a product review blog, he had no plan for how it would make money. He just knew what he wanted: a user-friendly site with reviews that could be read in a few minutes, with the best products clearly listed, all backed up by meticulous research. But when he launched The Wirecutter in 2011, Brian’s business partners worried that the site’s posts were too brief and too infrequent to build an audience on the web, where clickbait was king. Eventually, Brian’s targeted approach paid off; users trusted his recommendations, he hired more writers, and traffic and revenue grew. In 2016, The Wirecutter was purchased for $30 million by the New York Times, where it was rebranded simply as Wirecutter.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What is actually going on with the economy nowadays?
0:04.1	The price of gas, inflation?
0:06.3	Are we in a recession?
0:08.0	I'm Jeff Quo, co-host of NPR's Planet Money.
0:11.1	Come along with our super team of Econ experts
0:14.0	as we delve into the stories that show you
0:16.2	how the world really works.
0:18.4	That's Planet Money from NPR.
0:23.9	I was so obsessed with just doing this service
0:27.2	and like say taking a two hour shopping experience
0:29.6	and making it a 30 second shopping experience
0:32.1	with the lead containing the thing we thought you should get.
0:36.4	I thought it was such a great idea that didn't exist.
0:39.0	But I also wanted to grow things really slowly
0:42.6	because I was so burned out for the first year.
0:44.9	I could only basically work 10 hours a week.
0:48.0	But I was not at all sure of how we were going to make money
0:52.4	ever.
0:59.8	Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs,
1:04.0	idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
1:11.4	I'm Guy Ross and on the show today, how Brian Lam built a blog
1:15.8	to review tech gadgets and gear,
	...

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