Fully Baked #27: Sports Pod

💡 A media idea hiding inside a Harvard case study

🔬 We validated this idea - here's what we found

🚀 The go-to-market playbook for this product

🤑 What do the unit economics look like?

⚔️ How the competitive landscape looks

❓ Our verdict: is this a go or no-go idea

We’re huge fans of the Acquired podcast here at Half Baked (we reference them so much you probably already know that…). Their multi-hour business deep dives are incredible and Ben and David have built an amazing business.

This got me thinking…could you take the Acquired model and apply it to another vertical? You may think the last thing the world needs right now is another podcast. I disagree. Here's what we’re thinking.

A long-form, obsessively researched podcast that breaks down the history and business of big sports franchises.

You pick a sports franchise (The Cowboys, The Yankees, Manchester United, etc.) and deeply research them. You then record long form podcasts (3+ hours) giving the definitive guides to the biggest sports franchises in the world.

You build up your listenership and monetize like all podcasts do - through sponsorships.

Sports is the fastest-growing genre in podcasting. It already accounts for 14.7% of the global podcasting market, and Grand View projects the sports segment to grow at over 29% a year to 2030, the fastest of any category.

The audience for this content exists, it's just being underserved right now. Joe Pompliano's Huddle Up is at 134,000+ subscribers and #4 in Sports on Substack, read by team owners, athletes and investors. That's a proven appetite for this kind of content.

Interestingly, Acquired has already done episodes on the NFL, the NBA, F1 and the IPL. This is the strongest possible demand signal for this kind of content, just going a level deeper into the franchises and clubs themselves.

A few months ago Harvard Business School published a case study on the Acquired podcast itself. I bought it and read it. Some highlights from the case study:

This is an incredibly lucrative business since their ad rates are so high. Why can they charge so much for ads? Because their listeners are incredibly valuable and hard to reach (the majority of the C-suite at NVIDIA, Apple, Google and Meta are listeners, for example). Ben and David have built trust with their audience, something you’d want to emulate here.

Start by recording episodes on the biggest franchises across different sports, share them across socials and do your best to get engagement from the clubs themselves. Share it among their fanbases in forums, wherever you can to get some early listeners.

Try to get shout-outs from other sports-related creators and publications - Huddle Up, Front Office Sports and Sportico. Start sharing on the sports-biz corner of LinkedIn too, which is unusually active.

Clipping is your best friend here. Clip highlights from episodes, share across socials and that’s your top-of-funnel for new listeners.

Outside of clipping, scaling here is all about consistency. Keep posting, improving the content and over time you will be able to scale.

Season sponsorship: ten to twelve episodes per season, one presenting sponsor plus two mid-rolls. Free to listeners, always.

Realistic year one: $20,000-30,000 for a presenting slot at 20,000-30,000 listeners an episode. Acquired's own first deal was $2,500 for ten episodes. Nobody starts at the top.

Target CAC: effectively zero. The cost is time though, and it's savage. Two hundred hours of prep per episode at twelve episodes a year is 2,400 hours before you press record.

LTV: the back catalogue is the asset. If the Acquired pattern holds, older episodes drift towards a third of downloads and a quarter of revenue, so every episode you ship becomes an annuity rather than a one-off.

The number that decides it: you need roughly 20,000-30,000 listeners an episode before a $20K season sponsorship is defensible. Acquired doubled its audience annually from a tiny base and still made nothing until year three. Remember that.

Unofficial Partner: the serious one in Europe. Around 500 sports business conversations in the back catalogue and roughly 10,000 downloads a week. But they ship twice a week, every week - nothing there is getting 200 hours of research. Volume is their game.

Sports News Competitors (SBJ Morning Buzzcast, Bloomberg Business of Sports, Business of Sport): daily shows chasing whatever moved in sports business that morning. All of it is landfill in a fortnight. Nobody in this category is building a library, which is the big opportunity.

Leagues have been covered. Clubs and franchises haven't. The Cowboys, the Yankees, Madrid, United, the Packers - each is a company with a century of strategy behind it and no definitive audio telling of that story.

Have an idea you want feedback on? DM me to discuss it or book in for Office Hours here.

Looking to sponsor Half Baked? Just fill out this form and we’ll get back to you asap.