#014 "Polina Marinova - Prioritizing Your Audience"

The Brandon Zhang Show

Today, I am talking with Polina Marinova, founder of the Profile, a media company focused on improving your content diet by producing in-depth profiles on some of the most interesting people in the world. I read it every single Sunday morning. Polina has built a community of tens of thousands of readers who regularly attend webinars, Q&As and other workshops. On today's episode we talk about her viral article on what she has learned running the profile full time after leaving Fortune, how speaking different languages influence our mental frameworks, and the story of a janitor who made billions for Frito-Lay.

Links:

1. The Profile
2. Follow Polina on Twitter
3. Follow me on Twitter
4. Go check out my Website

Show Notes:

I just did a profile dossier, which is just the deep dive into an individual person on Troy Carter. And he talked about the very early days of building Lady Gaga brand. And basically, Lady Gaga started, she didn't have any fans, obviously. So their philosophy was, let's find the first 50 people who like your music, and they found those first super, super intense, loyal people in, in clubs, LGBTQ clubs in New York. So they double down on serving those people and making sure they were happy and they were satisfied with, like, what she was offering them.

Every time before I start reading A profile, I asked myself the question like, what, what do I want to learn from this person? And what do I hope to learn from this person? If approval doesn't really answer that question, it's not one to include in the newsletter because it's just a superficial thing of, here's what this person is doing.

But a lot of people are losing trust in institutions. And some of those institutions include large media organizations. So the reason that people are seeing such a rise in newsletters is because they're able to fill that nuance where Fox and CNN cannot.

I noticed myself thinking differently depending on the language I'm speaking. And I was like I wonder if this is the case for other people.

Don't confuse motion with progress. A lot of people are just like spinning in circles really, really fast. They're not going anywhere. So to me, it's like slow and steady, and sometimes, like, add something new when you feel there's a need to be met, but otherwise, stop moving that much.

There's multiple layers to each human, but also the fact that you can reinvent yourself and there's no label to define who you are, he was not a janitor. He was a man with an idea who made a company billions of dollars.