Today's podcast is brought to you by Employment Hero. To be honest, if we had had this when we were starting TDA, I know we would have just saved so much time. It's the Smarter way to hire. With over one point five million candidates ready to go hire smarter, all in one place with Employment Hero already. And this is the Daily This is the Daily OS.
Oh, now it makes sense.
Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Sunday, the seventh of September. I'm Zara Sidler, I'm Sam Kazlowski. Last month we launched a new newsletter series called Building TDA. Now, I know that the name probably gives it away, but the elevator pitch for this series is that we wanted to draw the curtain back on what it's like to build a news company here in Australia and in turn
to share our experiences with our audience. Turns out there are lots and lots of young people who are interested in how businesses are run or are even thinking of doing it themselves. Because we've got a heap of questions in response to our first newsletter. Now I'm going to check the link to the newsletter in today's show notes. But in the meantime, in today's episode, we're going to be answering all of the questions that you asked us about building TDA.
It's so awesome doing this, Sarah, because we get asked all the time how exactly this all kind of came to be originally, but also how things work today, and I think it's partly the kind of TikTok day in the life. Yeah, observing how things are built.
I do a TikTok Day in the Life once a year.
Yeah, it's great. Well, one of my first podcast loves was how I built this yea.
Even the rest of the world.
Yeah, I know, super original of me. But yeah, No, it's amazing that we're doing this, and I love being here and doing this chat.
So I'm going to ask you the questions. I've selfishly looked at all of them. Cool, you haven't, So I want to start off really easy with one that we've got a number of times. We get it quite often, Sam, Are you and I actually friends?
Sometimes what day of the week I'm friends with you? And I think that that's all that matters to me. No, we are, We're very very very very close friends.
We were something stopping you from saying best.
We're best friend. We were the ring bearers at each other's weddings, yep. And it's been a really amazing part of this whole experience that we can do it as best mates.
I know, but we didn't know each other before.
We didn't know each other. I knew your ex boyfriend, ok, I played soccer against him.
Excellent. Moving on from my ex boyfriend, how did we actually meet?
So?
I put up a post on LinkedIn saying I wanted to start a news company. Does anyone want to do it with me? And that came directly after I had just had an appointment with my therapist who said that I needed a project and needed something to sink my teeth into. I was twenty two and I got one reply yep, So I didn't have a huge man listening to her. And then we met in a cafe a couple of days later, and the dally Els was born.
There you go, what a story.
It was really cool because I think when we sat down for that coffee, we both immediately knew that we would be able to work together on this but also be best mates. Yeah, and that's pretty rare, pretty very special.
Yeah, it's a funny thing sometimes. I know I've been off the pod for a little while, but my favorite comments that we get on a podcast sometimes are do you hate each other? Or like, are you having an off day? If the synergy between us isn't there, Well.
It's sometimes hard to sound like you're best friends when you're talking about really really heavy news stories as well.
Yeah, and also like we talk about work all day every day and the news, so like, this bound to be some ups and downs. But thank you to our very observant audience for noticing that. Now going to change gears a bit, because the next question we got was how did you know it was the right time to raise? Now, Sam, you had to teach me everything about what raising actually is, So talk to me like I am Zara of twenty twenty. Okay, what does it actually mean? And how did we know what to do?
So when you and I sat down for that coffee, we each owned fifty percent of the company.
We split it down the middle, a company that didn't make this exactly.
If you think about it as a puzzle with twenty pieces, you owned ten and I owned ten. And then to raise money or to raise capital is what they say in the big newspapers. It basically means that you say you're going to add some pieces to the puzzle, so you still have ten. I've still got ten, but now instead of a twenty piece puzzle, there's a twenty five piece puzzle. And in exchange for giving away those five pieces, you decide that this is how much a piece is worth.
And then you and I don't own that fifty percent anymore because now we've diluted, which is think about it like cordial to include more people around the table, and that gives us the money then to do what we wanted to do, which was to quit our jobs to make sure that we could still pay rent and have some mackers and try and build this thing and work it out. Because when we quit and when we raised that first bit of money, we didn't actually know how we were going to make this a business to be
able to keep hiring people. So the pitch to investors wasn't very attractive. It was basically back us, back us, and we think we can work it out, and it.
Worked okay, So just to run through that once again, so raising was basically we owned half the company each we realized that we needed to get some money in order to make this a real thing. We went to investors, so people who part of either it is their job or it's their you know, passion project to fund startups in Australia, we went to them. They gave us money in exchange for owning a little bit of our company. And when did we know it was the right time
to actually do that? Like, why did we do that? I didn't do it. You did because I had no idea what it was.
Why.
Well, I think Covid was the answer to that. So at the beginning of twenty twenty, we'd been doing it for three years, we had three thousand followers on Instagram and that was it. Yeah, and that is not that impressive. But then in twenty twenty, from about February to about December, we went from three thousand to forty thousand, and we could see that there was this real hunger for what
we were doing. There was Covid updates every day that drove a lot of traffic to new people especially, and then I remember the breakthrough moment was really that one of the bigger newspapers, the Australian Financial Review, wrote a piece about us, and it was funny having that newspaper in hard copy at the kitchen bench at both of our workplaces, where you kind of have to play this game with our then bosses of I promise, I'm doing my work here. I just have this thing over.
There that's just have this photo shoot actually.
Growing really well, and so that kind of sped up the conversation, I think, And yeah, it was game of me trying to convince you that we should take the leap and just give it a shot.
I think that that dynamic is interesting though, because you convincing me basically came down to our risk profiles, and so much of taking that leap into you know, turning a side hustle into a full time business is.
Your I guess, appetite for that risk.
And that's something that you've thought a lot about over the last couple of years, is the gendered aspects to risk and just how we define risk. Well, you've come on a bit of a journey, so how are you thinking about risks now?
I just think that we only talk about risk in terms of like very strict financial risk or you know, behavior that is perhaps impulsive as risky, and there's so many things that are risky, and you know, we both quit our full time jobs, and it took a while for us both to get there, but we took that risk together. Even though I say I have a low risk appetite.
It did not take me a lot of time to get yeah.
To that point though we did, I guess, lessen the risk. By having that financial stability, we could pay ourselves a modest salary when we raised money. Some of that was or most of that was used to pay us a salary so that we could still, as you said, pay that rent and eat and whatever else. But then we had the task of having to figure out how to make money for the business, because raising capital shouldn't last forever.
That capital, like the idea is that you're meant to invest it in the business and to grow the business and then to start making money, and that's how the business grows. We got asked a lot of questions about how we make money. It's like the number one question that people want to know, and specifically someone wanted to know, how did you get your first sponsor or your first advertiser.
Okay, so we're going right back then to the middle of twenty twenty one. Then, so we quit our jobs January twenty twenty one, started full time February twenty twenty one. Our first sponsor we sold I think in Instagram story in about May time, twenty twenty one.
And how much was that for, do you remember?
I think it was about two hundred and fifty dollars, which is non knuck to sustain a business. Put it that way, how.
Many two hundred and fifty dollars Instagram stories you have to sell?
Yeah, that's a lot. So that came about because I think it was a friend of a friend, and often I hear stories from founders that are kind of similar to that that the first couple of breaks often come from somebody who might not be in your immediate network, but you might be one degree away from and having one advertiser and just being able to show another advertiser what an ad looks like made a huge difference. And the power of a case study is really important in
the game that get that in the deck. So from there it moved, but it was very slow. Tara, who's ouhead of commercial here at to the A, she was employee number one. Her and I were actually.
Doing out to Tara.
Shout out to Tara. Her and I were actually doing our last four years of accounting a couple of months ago and kind of tidying everything up and laughing at how tiny the work that we won was in those early stages. But you got to start somewhere.
Yeah, and then I guess the follow up to that is, how do you grow from those very small partnerships because people were taking a risk to partner with us, we had never done it before. Yeah, how do we get from those small Instagram stories whatever they were, to the really big partnerships that sit across all of our platforms today. Someone specifically asked, do they, being the advertisers, reach out to you or do you reach out to them.
It's a really unnglamorous story of how we got to where we are today, which is a really thriving news company that can bring lots of partners with us on this journey. It really is one, then two, than three, then four, than five minutes six. There was no viral moment. There was no moment where we suddenly grew exponentially overnight. I'm seeing a lot of that commentary around you AI companies of like it launched and then the next day it had billion hips. I know, So that is not
the game that we're playing here. So it's been very incremental and boring, but very predictable, which is great in terms of how we think about our growth as a company. In terms of the split of who comes to us versus us going to them, say, it's about eighty percent of advertisers come to us and land in our inbox in the middle of the day saying we'd love to work with you. Have you thought about doing a partnership
in this space? And twenty percent we go out and say, we think you'd be a really good fit and we think our audience would like you.
Yeah.
It's always a really fun task of trying to figure out who can we elevate the brand of and who can we be best suited to working with. It's really one of the joys of this business. Someone asked us, I guess in that vein how do you pay your team and invest in the business? And I guess that's exactly what we were talking about.
Right, Yeah, we pay them with money, which is a good start, and we yeah, we really think about sustainable growth. So a big trap that youth media companies have fallen into over the past say, fifteen twenty years, all around the world world is that they raise a lot of money, they make that puzzle that we were talking about the beginning really really big, and they don't actually know how
they're going to keep that going. And so when they go back to the investors and say, can we have more money for more puzzle pieces and the investors say no, they actually have to let employees go. And we never wanted to do that. So if you think about it with us, like when we think we have enough money for one more person, then we get one more person, and we keep reinvesting into the company, but making sure that we're doing so really responsible.
I guess this is a good segue to the next question, which is what have been your biggest failures and lessons in scaling?
Scaling being growing the business.
I think the biggest failures have been when we thought we could do something that we couldn't do, such as true peoplewegh Taylor Swift tickets perhaps, and where we've kind of shot a bit too high and look, they're nothing has been critical. There's been no critical failures. But I think this is my personal answer to this, not the company answer, but I think my personal answer is when I thought we could do something that we weren't quite.
Ready for, as in resource wise.
Resource wise, knowledge wise, getting legal advice, all of that kind of stuff that can land us in trouble. I'd say that one of the other things that's been really tricky has been trying to figure out how to keep telling really original stories and keep working out how to have big investigations and all of that, because that's the most expensive part of journalism, and it's a really slow process in keeping on investing in that. But I think we're on the right path there, I.
Agree, and I hope our audience does. Sam.
There are lots of other questions about, I guess, scaling the business, how we make money, growing the newsletters, growing the Instagram, and maybe we'll do another episode on that, but I want to transition really quickly to some of the more personal questions. And perhaps these are questions coming from people who are thinking of founding.
Their own company.
Yeah.
Were their moment, Sam, that you want to to give up?
Not one?
Wow?
Yeah? And I was listening to an interview with that Stephen Bartlett, who does the director the CEO, did with Jimmy Fallon, and Stephen Butler said to Jimmy Fallon was there a moment where you thought you wouldn't be on SNL, And Jimmy Fallon was like, no, there's never been one moment. And then Stephen Butler said, well, what would you have done if you didn't get on the show, And Jimmy Fallon said, I don't understand your question, Like, I don't. Actually,
I can't concede, I cannot compute. I can't compute what you're saying. And I kind of really resonated with that, where I never I can't even explain the idea of this not working working. Yeah, it doesn't. It does not even exist as a shadow. And I don't know whether we should do that confidence. Yeah, I don't know whether we should back this up with some cognitive behavior therapy or what. But that's where I'm at.
You actually just took my next question, okay, which is how do you manage mental and physical health as a founder.
Thing that you and I speak about very very often.
Yeah. Look, I don't do a great job at that. I would describe myself as a workaholic. Yeah, and it's because of the last answer. You know, I get a lot of joy and I have an innate determination to do an amazing job with TDA. I think my happy place and I'm sorry for this answer, is actually watching AFL, Like I just find a sense of calm and peace
and enjoyment. And it's the only thing, really, besides spending time with my beautiful wife that doesn't kind of make me feel like I want to go on two screens. Like if I'm watching a show on Netflix, I still want to go on my phone.
And we love shows that can be watched while scolling to.
Oh, subtitles if it's subtitled. But AFL just grabs me and I really love it, and that's where I find a lot of happiness. And music is where I find a lot of happiness as well. Okay, what about you? How do you kind of decompress?
I think I do a better job than you do.
You do, Yeah, I'm better at boundaries and therapy. Therapy is very helpful and physical. It's been a work in progress because I do pilates because I'm basic. But I was doing this thing where I was taking my phone into the pilarate studio and like trying to text or read a news alert while like doing my forty five minutes of six am. You know me time and That's been a big lesson and a big wake up call to me that that's actually the least sustainable thing. And
I can put aside forty five minutes. I'm not saving anyone's life here. Yeah, So I'd say that it's just about prioritizing well being and knowing.
When you need to.
Can I share one analogy that I think about a lot. That's my latest mental health analogy. I'm trying to work out how to get out of this mindset where I feel like Simone Biles in the middle of the air and like, where do.
You feel like, really greatest athlete of all time?
Yeah, triple flips man. So we're doing a lot of complicated moves in the air and we're looking great and we're doing really well, but we need to kind of stick it. And that feeling of like constantly being in the air twisting and trying to figure out what does even stick it mean has been really interesting. So that's where I'm at.
Okay, I love it, you know what, let's end the podcast there.
I don't know how we can really compete with that, But Sam, thank you for being so transparent and so authentic. Thank you for listening to another episode of The Daily Ods. We will be back as normal tomorrow, but until then, please feel free to send us any questions you want answered in the next episode of Building TDA.
Have a great day and chat to you tomorrow.
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bungelung Chalcuttin woman from Gadigol Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
Look, we got pretty lucky with our first hire, Tara, who's our head of commercial now. She actually messaged us and wouldn't take no for an answer.
Well, she messaged you relentlessly.
You met her for a coffee that I forgot about, that you forgot about, but you told her on the spot that she had a job.
She just had the vibe of she could help.
And then she met me for a coffee. She thought the job was sealed done.
And I thought it was an interview, and there was a bit of mismatch, but hey, it worked out.
It did work out, and it isn't always that easy to find your first hires.
No, Sliding into DMS is not a perfect science.
No, and it can kind of go unanswered six times before they respond. But that's where employment hero comes in. So they've got over one point five million ready to hire candidates in their marketplace.
Hey, that makes a lot more sense.
It's just more efficient and the best bit is that it's all there. So you've got hiring, onboarding and all in the one platform. Businesses have already made thousands of hires with zero cost and zero weight.
That sounds like something we should have done back in twenty twenty one. But hey, you can't rewrite history, but you can be smarter in future, highre smarter, all in one place with employment Hero.