When Alex Blumberg was trying to raise money for his startup podcast company he eventually understood the importance of his pedigree—his professional background. Blumberg realized that his “unfair advantage” was spending 15 years in public radio working alongside radio producer extraordinaire Ira Glass producing quality radio programs. Simply put— knows how to put together quality stories. His Planet Money Makes a T-shirt special series raised $600,000 from viewers and the documentary won an Emmy, signaling to investors that Blumberg not only had creative talent, but had an entrepreneurial side as well.
He partnered with Matt Lieber who brought a business backbone to the company. It was important to investors that while Blumberg had spent a career in public radio that he wasn’t against making money. He and Lieber honed their business plan and pitch over time and started to get FOMO (fear of missing out) and raised over a million dollars. They reached out to listeners in season one of their podcast StartUp for the remaining $200,000 needed for the initial goal of hitting $1.5 million dollars.
The company launched in 2014 and by 2015 their ad revenue was over $2 million dollars. In August of 2016, Max Willens of Digiday reported Gimlet Media had a “A $6 million round of funding raised late last year, from a group of investors led by Graham Holdings, fueled that expansion (the infusion valued Gimlet at $30 million).”
So out of the gate Gimlet Media is seeing solid ad revenue, continues to bring in investment dollars, and is building a relatively “small but meaningful” group of listeners. (That’s small verses traditional media giants, but Gimlet says their podcasts are “downloaded seven million times per month by listeners from nearly 190 countries worldwide.”) And some of that fan base is willing to subscribe to a $5 per month membership where they in return gain early access to programs (and a Gimlet t-shirt if the pay for the entire year up front).
Yet, Gimlet Media is still not running a profit. It takes a lot of people to run a company. What started with just Blumberg and Lieber quickly became four people in the first few months, and then was up to 16 people by its second year, is now a team of over 60 people. (For what it’s worth, the Brooklyn-based Gimlet Media team appears from their website to be approximately 66% female.)
And that team has helped produce four programs that last month were in the top 100 podcasts in the U.S. according to iTunes.