The Rebooting Episode 2

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Thanks for the notes following the debut of The Rebooting Show. You can subscribe now on both Apple and Spotify. We’re working hard to improve the audio quality, and I’m going to make sure the episodes get shorter. I’m always interested to hear your feedback. My email is bmorrissey@gmail.com. One request: If you like the podcast, please rate it and leave a review.

This week’s episode features Julia Noran Johnston, founder and president of the Business of Home, a vertical media company focused on the interior design industry.

I wanted to speak with Julia for a few reasons. I’m always interested in speaking to former journalists who are now running businesses, since I tend to think they build differently than those who come from the sales or operations side. The other reason is the category. B2B is often knocked as boring, but there are many areas that blend consumer elements. The home is one of those.

Julia’s advice for those building new media businesses: “Find your community. There has to be a community to support what you’re doing. Find a place that’s relatively untapped because that gives you the advantage and opportunity for success.”

Here are five key takeaways from the conversation: 

Finding your niche

Building a business media brand means finding an underserved audience, ideally one with buying power. In the 2000s, Julia had shifted from journalism to a marketing role at Condé Nast’s Veranda magazine. What she noticed was that many requests for proposals listed interior designers as their target. “They were the volume buyers of the product,” she said. “In some cases, they were 100% of the buying base. I started to realize they were very valuable and what a premium audience that was, and at Veranda we weren’t isolating that audience.”

Community > audience

The most sustainable media brands focus on communities that share an interest and want to connect with each other. That’s why some of the most successful media brands -- Complex (streetwear), Barstool (bros who gamble), Hodinkee (watch collectors) -- are built around communities. Going to many interior design events in New York, Julia recognized that designers were a real community. “I was hanging out with designers, it was a real community that existed and there wasn’t a publication serving that community at all. I saw the opportunity for the community to have a hub.”

Be ready to pivot

The reality of most businesses is the path you plan to take isn’t usually the one you end up taking. For BoH, the initial business plan was built around assembling a database of designers with projects to match with product makers and bloggers covering the space. “It made a lot of sense on paper,” Julia said. But there was a problem: As BoH (then called Editor at Large) grew as a news source, the database business didn’t match since it was a PR play. Inevitably that would dent the credibility of the news content. In 2011, the company changed course. “We started to focus on that more because that’s what people wanted and where the demand was,” Julia said. “It’s much easier to meet demand than push something that people are resistant to.”

Growing a sales team

Getting sales right is critical to any sustainable business. BoH has relied heavily on in-bound leads for advertising, but is now building out its sales team and breaking into new categories. But that comes at a price: The need to add more infrastructure and processes expected by advertis