our plan to build Parlour™

When my co-founder and I sat down to come up with an idea to build a company, I can tell you that our first few choices weren’t to build a media company. Media companies are hard. Your content has to be interesting, the landscape is changing way too fast with AI, audience attention is shrinking, and you’re going up against a ton of competition.

But it was very meta on how it came about. We were like... wait a minute? That’s the idea there. Slow down, and soak it in. And that’s how Parlour™ came to be. What if we take people back to remember really interesting moments in pop culture that have easily been forgotten? We knew there wasn’t anything out there like it.

So in this issue, I’m going to tell you exactly how we plan on building it. From a high level, our goal is to create episodic-like content. Where we drop in-depth curated issues about some of the best moments in pop culture history (just like your favorite TV show drops episodes). What we want to do is write stories about these moments that capture the feeling of the past. And eventually work our way to documentary style long form video on YouTube that leads us to partnerships with Netflix, HBO, etc...

business strategy

Nearly half of Gen Z and Millennials are searching for nostalgic content daily. When we saw that stat it blew our fucking minds. Why are they doing this? And what’s the opportunity here?

What we want to do is capture that demand and create a community centered around shared cultural moments. Give our audience what they want from all angles. Not just with content, but with our partnerships too.

There are 3 ways we plan on monetizing. Advertising, D2C products, and licensing (which will come down the line).

advertising:

Media companies suck at advertising. Especially email-focused publishers. They don’t know what type of brands their audiences are interested in seeing, they have no idea what brands want, and they can’t execute and deliver on performance... trust me I know this first hand with my advertising agency Wittier.

We’re going to approach this differently. Think creative agencies building holistic campaigns. We’re taking that approach. And we’re going to charge a lot for it. That’s because we will come up with the campaign's overarching theme, build out the creative then charge for distribution throughout the Parlour platform. It’s a win-win for brands we work with because it’s hands-off and it will perform... And this will all be through the lens of what our audience wants.

d2c products:

There’s something to be said about brands that can create serious affinity. If you look at the model Poolsuite and Marty Bell have done over the last few years... it’s replicable. Build an audience through a free nostalgic product, then parlay a consumer brand (Vacation Inc.) off of it. We’re going to attempt to do the same. Build an audience based on nostalgia and pop culture's greatest moments, and then parlay nostalgic products off of it. And we think this will do well because we would have an audience built in and it will be a fully organic process. And we’re not just talking about merch. We’re talking about actual, usable, and branded products.

licensing:

This will be way down the line. We have a ton of work to do before we can get here. But our goal is to build a strong enough content and storytelling product that eventually leads to streaming platforms like Netflix and HBO licensing our content to tell stories visually through video and documentary-style films. This is taking inspiration from Pat Mcafee. A little bit of a different approach, but the same idea.

editorial

Our editorial process is a little more unique than your average media company. That’s because we’re meshing strategies of a clothing brand, a touring indie band, and a TV series. We’re going to carefully select pop culture moments from the 60s to the 00s, and dive as deep as we can into them. Visuals, interviews with people who lived there during the time, and video content that support these stories. And then we drop them like episodes from your favorite TV series.

The reason why we’re taking this approach is to create a scarcity mindset. Like I mentioned before there’s too much noise out there. People are busy as shit. And we don’t want to be a burden. We want to bring joy when our emails hit the inbox. We carefully made this decision because of my experience working with 20+ media publishers over the last year at Wittier.

Oh and the last point to make, this will be fully human-centric. And what I mean by that is a human will be writing these stories. We will use AI to help us come up with structure and potential ideas, but there will always be a human writing this. Because our readers are also human. And we need to stand out and make sure we’re connecting with them emotionally.

purpose and vision

We came up with the Internet Time Machine concept because that's exactly what we want Parlour to be. A place where we can transport our audience to reminisce or tell stories for people who have never lived during a major cultural moment. We want them to experience it like they were there. We want to make cultural connections that span all generations.

When it comes to communities, it’s tough. Community is a buzzword, and we know how much fatigue there is out there with this concept. Join this founder community, join this business community, blah blah blah. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t going to build a community around our media company. We know one thing... nostalgia spans all generations. So we’re going to take that, bottle it, and build a community around it.

And it won’t stop there. Our readers will have a major impact on how we build this company. We’re going to be audience centric, because well we know without readers/an audience we will be nothing.

design process

Our design process is something I’m proud of (thanks to Alec Nickell). When it comes to editorial, we want it to feel magazine-like (think Vogue and Rolling Stone) but we also want our media platform to feel nostalgic and modern.

When we went through the initial process of our brand, we went through so many iterations that it almost took us 2 years to land on something. If I were to tell you what our overarching pillar is, it’s that we want to represent a 60s film camera digitized. Both of us have very creative backgrounds. And we want to make sure we use that to our advantage. Which is very different than your typical media company. So if you were to put our design process into perspective, it’s like a creative agency and a media company had a baby. And we will evoke that ethos through the company. From our content to our products to our partnerships, and everything else.

our future

I’ve touched on this already, but in 5 years we want to license our content to streaming services like Netflix and HBO. That’s the ultimate goal. We know there are incredible stories that we can tell, and we’re never going to have the reach those platforms do. But remember we’re not going to depend on that. We’re going to build an audience of our own brick by brick, by telling incredible stories about pop culture's most unique moments in history.

We’re going to make it fun and interesting, sometimes do gimmicky things (like our Listening Room) launch cool d2c products, and continue to build around the the notion that we will always be nostalgic.

Thank you for reading. It really means a lot, and I hope you can join me on this journey as we build Parlour into a $20M - $100M media company.

I wrote this to hold myself accountable, and I hope you hold me to it too. I’ll continue to tell the story of our journey and I promise to be as open to it as possible (the struggles, the wins, and more).

see you soon,

shaan

p.s. you can check out Parlour here --> https://www.parlour.fm/

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