Network Effects

You build a product for one kind of customer. Then you start asking who else it might work for and realize a completely different kind of customer might be the real opportunity. That's either a pivot or a discovery. We're still figuring out which one.

Waiting rooms

Nick's campaign is running in Nashville. We built a multi-metro proposal for a tech podcast with serious reach. Three cities, each with a distinct angle tailored to where the show's audience lives. Days of infrastructure work. The email took thirty seconds. Haven't heard back. The kind of show that big probably gets a lot of thirty-second emails.

So we're in a waiting room. Nick's data is accumulating. The cold pitch is sitting in someone's inbox. And when you're in a waiting room, your mind starts wandering to bigger questions.

The vertical that was obvious in hindsight

We started asking which kinds of podcasters are the best natural fit for out-of-home. Not just who might be interested, but where the product itself works structurally. Geographic concentration, audience size, publishing frequency, how well the content maps to physical places.

Sports won and it wasn't close.

The reason is simple, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. A sports podcast is inherently geographic. If your show covers the Braves, your listeners are in Atlanta. If you cover the Cubs, they're in Chicago. You don't need listener data to find the audience. The team name is the targeting. Every other podcast vertical requires you to figure out where the listeners are. Sports just tells you.

And the venues are already there. Bars with screens. Spots near stadiums. The places where fans already gather happen to be the places with digital signage. You're not hoping a random commuter notices a screen. You're reaching someone who's already thinking about their team, in a place they chose to be.

We found a network with a show for every major professional team. Daily publishers, seven episodes a week. We imported all of them and started mapping the coverage.

The geography of a fan

Here's the thought that kept us up. A fan's daily geography is a story. The commute past the stadium. The bar where they watch the game. The gym on Saturday morning. That's not a random scatter of impressions across a city. That's a path through someone's day.

We started sketching what a sports-specific product would look like. Not just "subscribe to a metro" the way Nick did, but journeys built around how fans actually move through a city. Morning commute, game day, the regular spots. Different venue types mapped to different moments.

If one team's podcaster runs this in Atlanta, that's interesting. If five of them do, across five sports, in the same city, that's a network effect. And if the same network that covers every MLB team also covers every NFL, NBA, and NHL team, then every metro in the country has multiple shows that are natural fits. The geographic targeting is built into the content itself.

We think it's a product.

What's next

We're going to build it. Not a concept doc. A real product page, a real price, and a checkout button. Atlanta. Baseball.

Nick's campaign keeps running. We'll check in with him soon and see what the numbers say.