Daniel Rodic
3K posts
Daniel Rodic
@DanielRodic
Angel Investor, Advisor & lover of life
Marina del Rey, CA Sumali Aralık 2010
1K Sinusundan779 Mga Tagasunod
I need a quick movie recommendation that an 80 year old woman and 12 year old boy would both enjoy watching. I'm coming up blank. I'm getting requests for Godzilla and Something's Gotta Give and I gotta find a middle ground pronto.
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I stopped drinking alcohol at the beginning of the year, and I am so bored of water, sparkling water, kombucha, and green tea. Hit me up with your best non-alcoholic options that are fun and tasty 🙏
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Shopify can add enterprise sellers and new categories.
LVMH, grocery, car dealers eventually?
It can get them into the app ecosystem, get their customers using the shop app and shop pay.
That’s the growth story.
What’s amazons growth story?
Where are their new merchants gonna come from?
….
Nowhere.
Hence the fees 🫠🫠🫠
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Daniel Rodic nag-retweet
I’ve talked about the lack of financial education in eCom before, so let's help solve it
Introducing Obvi Finance School:
15 pages of our approach to P/L setup, financial forecasting, and management reporting
Follow, Like, RT & Comment "school" and I'll DM it to you
GIF
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@businessbarista @LiquidDeath has the tattoo game on lock… love the stories @peterpham has told about the fierce brand loyalty they built
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My observations about media since 2015:
- If you’re B2C, you’re in the hits business. If you’re in B2B, you’re in the insights business.
- Advertising is a bad business model unless you’re a platform. But it’s a necessary business model to prevent information inequality.
- A healthy media business monetizes its audience directly as significantly as it monetizes its audience indirectly.
- Most great media businesses start with one, great hero product that is the sole focus of the business for a very long time.
- Content-to-commerce sounds great in theory. It’s very difficult in practice. It requires a highly engaged audience, deep understanding of why your audience trusts you, a great product that could succeed without your content, and a thoughtful promotion strategy.
- There are three types of content audiences: rented, owned, and monetized. A rented audience offers you scale & the opportunity to grow quickly. An owned audience provides unencumbered access to your audience. A monetized audience takes attention & converts it into direct dollars.
- The best media companies are relentlessly focused on high-value passion areas (B2C) or industry niches (B2B).
- My media Mt. Rushmore features Disney, UFC, WWE, The Atlantic, Netflix, Liberty Media, and Joe Rogan.
- An ad-based media business spends 95% of its time in a state of imbalance. Either content is trying to catch up to sales. Or sales is trying to catch up to content. Neither feels great, but the latter is healthier. And the remaining 5% is a state of blissful equilibrium. Savor it, because it doesn’t come often or stay for long.
- Messaging (via SMS, WhatsApp, Signal) offers a promising channel to deliver content & own an audience, but it hasn’t yet achieved one breakout success.
- It’s exceptionally hard to make a lot of money in media. Most investors shouldn’t touch it. Most buyers fuck it up. And most builders never really attract a sizeable, loyal audience.
- Distrust for mainstream media has never been higher. It’s a multifactorial phenomenon:
1. Media organizations are incentivized to do things that lead to distrust.
• To grow advertising you have to grow eyeballs. To grow eyeballs, you have to create content that attracts more, different eyeballs OR more of the same eyeballs.
• To attract more of the same eyeballs, you need to say more things your loyalists want to hear. This leads to echochambers, bias, and polarization.
• To attract more, different eyeballs, you need to cover more, create noise, be first, and create more. This leads to dilution, fake news, and sensationalism.
2. Traditional Media has been disintermediated by the internet & tools built on top of it.
• More tools = more media companies (institutions & creators) = more choice = higher bar for trust
3. Some writers have been sucked into being missionaries vs being truth finders & tellers
4. Platforms are magnifying glasses for the loudest voices in society.
- Before loud voices with strong views would be loud to their friend groups or visitors to their personal websites, but their feelings were relatively contained
- Platforms took loud voices and gave them ability to be heard by all
- Narratives used to be snowballs rolling down moderate hills. The extent to which they could grow & accelerate was capped. Now narratives roll down double black diamonds. Their ability to accelerate in speed through access to everyone & grow in size by others latching onto their narrative has never been more extreme.
5. Now that there’s no longer a monopoly on distribution, individual vs. institution is no longer like bringing a knife to a gunfight.
- Great creatives should be some of your highest paid employees. A few talented content creators have an outsized impact on the success of your business. A single voice behind your company social handle or a single face behind your brand youtube, can literally change the trajectory of your business overnight.
- The gap between quality & speed has never been larger. News organizations used to win by breaking stories first. Digital media companies used to win by creating on nascent platforms first. But two shifts have made speed & low value differentiator:
• We’re no longer early on any major content channel. Email. Podcast. X. Linkedin. Instagram. TikTok. Search. YouTube. Grabbing early market share is no longer a viable strategy on any of these.
• Consumers don’t care who’s first. They want content they can’t get anywhere else. Exclusive insights. Exclusive entertainment.
- Choice has made curation a highly underrated differentiator for creators & media companies.
- Personal brand is really important. But it has made company brands underrated.
• It is harder to build a company brand as individuals just naturally have more trust for individuals that share their views because it’s easier to relate.
• But given the amount of attention dedicated to the creator economy & personal brands, I believe people are discounting the value of building a great non-human brand
• Look at Liquid Death. Or Wendy’s on Twitter. Or Morning Brew the newsletter. It is possible to build a great company brand. It just requires that you have great people behind the brand that make the company feel deeply human.
• Said differently, the best way to build a company brand is for an individual to create a personal brand that just happens to have the company brand replacing it.
- The best test for differentiated content: if you can cover your logo & people still know that the content is coming from you.
- The best test for audience loyalty:
Good: if someone will pay you for product directly
Better: if someone will wear your logo in public
Best: if someone will get a tattoo of you
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Daniel Rodic nag-retweet
99-
Financial projections need to come from the CEO.
But they cant just be "hit this number because I want it"
You need to understand your business well enough to build a 13 week cash model, and end the 13 weeks within 10% of projections.
To build a cashflow model:
List all revenue sources
Project revenue by channel each week
Then build all variable costs BY CHANNEL
Different cost to sell on amazon vs wholesale
Gotta include marketing as well
Now add in fixed costs
And supplier payments.
This needs to be full encompassing.
Interest, content, fees, etc.
A 100% snapshot of your business.
Build it.
We just ended the first run of 13 weeks...
I was within 2% of projections.
Get to know your business and own your cashflow.
Sean Frank@Seanfrank
98- “Your equity is more valuable than anything, don’t raise, use debt” “Your equity is worthless, until proven otherwise” Both common pieces of advice when growing a business. In the event of an exit, your equity is how you win. That’s your payday. In any other case, your equity is worthless until you do a distribution/dividend On the other hand, debt is the only way you go bankrupt. Owning someone money, that you don’t have, but they want, is what kills businesses. This is a classic case of “it depends” 100% of zero is zero. Not selling equity, and instead running your business off debt can lead to smaller outcomes, or no outcome. On the flip side, selling equity sucks. You can lose control of your business, you could end up being pushed to do things you don’t want, and worst case, you raise money with strings, and end up selling for $$$ but getting nothing. The tip here is: Million ways to play this game. Million ways to win. Blanket advice like “never raise” or “go do a round” is misguided. Understand that most equity, 99% of all privately held shares, end up worthless. And understand that debt is the only thing that can kill you. I have seen great founders get great outcomes doing both
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Reason #8939 why @rishabhmjain is the best boss ever.
He sent me a bottle of my favorite Japanese whiskey 🥃.
What an absolute top floor human!
Also...we are hiring ;)
jobs.ashbyhq.com/fermat
P.S. The send a gift through Uber eats is a pretty magical experience BTW.
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@seanfrank Please spare us your pontifications. You sell wallets dickhead. Stay in your lane
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77-
Investment Bankers:
This will be a few tips over a few days...
Going back to the doctor analogy, there are as many types of "bankers" as there are types of doctors
What I am going to describe is M&A investment bankers, focusing on consumer brands in the mid market
There are tech bankers, commodity bankers, etc
There are small market bankers (anything below 50m)
And corporate bankers, doing deals above 1b (used to be 5b)
In between is the mid market.
So what does a banker do?
The banker sells your deal.
You built a company worth a lot of money.
Someone wants to buy that. Maybe you have an inbound offer...
The bankers job is to package your company up into a neat little book, with all these cool graphs and images. (a CIM)
They bring a level of legitimacy to the deal making process. They speak the same language as the broader finance world, and will know what to hone in on to get people excited.
Then, they shop the deal around.
You have an inbound offer, but that offer sits in a vacuum, without competition.
They bring competition to the deal, through a "process"
They will go out to all the relevant buyers in the space, people you dont know or have never heard of.
They will run this process down, getting all the deals, and running point for you.
They will go back, ask for more, play hardball, etc.
They will also manage your entire go to market strategy.
They will prep you for meetings with buyers, set up the dinner invites, tell you how to dress and where to go.
Think of the best real estate agent you know, times 10.
But why do they do all this work?
Well they can make a fuck ton of money.
You know how realtors are fighting over 6% commission... not uncommon for these guys to try and get 6%... on a billion dollar deal LOL
Tomorrow, pricing!
Sean Frank@Seanfrank
76- When selling a business, there are two external vendors you will need to consider: A business lawyer and a banker/broker A business lawyer is a MUST. Its a non negotiable. Tomorrow we will dive into bankers, what they cost, should you hire one, etc but the lawyer is needed FULLSTOP It is different than your general council and your IP attorney. Its the same type of difference between a foot doctor and a brain doctor. Both went to medical school, but their careers diverged the day they graduated A business attorney SHOULD know all recent/relevant deals across their industry. They should know multiples, what are new standard asks, where buyers have room to budge They provide a lot of value because if they are at a large firm, they have clients on both sell side AND buy side. Where your banking team will be hyper focused on sell side, lawyers roles tend to be more malleable and will do both sides of a transaction The going rate for a top 30 firm, to get you ready and through a transaction completely, is 1% of deal value 1m on a 100m deal. 5m on a 500m deal. If your deal is sub 50m, Id just be ready to book a flat 300k regardless of size Why is this role so important? Because the details matter so much. The bankers just want the biggest number. They will try to bully you into the biggest number, because they get paid on deal value. The lawyer will optimize for your goals and outcomes. Sometimes the smaller number pays more...
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Age yourself by naming an NFL quarterback you grew up watching.
I'll start, Donovan McNabb.
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Age yourself by naming an NFL Defender you grew up watching.
I'll start, Charles Tillman.
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Friend wants to start a podcast, what are all the best tools now given all the AI out there?
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Daniel Rodic nag-retweet
25K SGP’s
+477
Njoku 50+
Flacco 2+ TD / 200 yds
Browns 1H / Game
+482
Evans TD / 80 yards
Mayfield 1 pass TD
Bucs to win
(10-1)
Stafford 275 yards
Kupp / Nucua 60+ yards each
Rams win 1H / Game
(10-1)
Pitt +4.5
Harris 50+ yards
Warren 40+ yards
Warren over 18.5 rec yards
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