A column
Series Teardown
Content series that are unusual in format and have the evidence to show they work. One series per instalment: how it started, the mechanics underneath it, the production reality nobody posts about, and what a founder or a fund can take from it for their own show.
No. 11 · 15 Oct 2026
How Nas Daily turned a one-minute, thousand-day constraint into a company, and what it cost
One video. One minute. Every day for 1,000 days, with a finish line announced on day one. Nuseir Yassin quit a US$120,000 job to do it, failed for the first 270 days, and ended…
No. 10 · 15 Oct 2026
How Song Exploder cut the host out of his own show and got Netflix to buy it
One song. The person who made it takes it apart, layer by layer, in their own words. The host's questions are edited out so you never hear him. Twelve years, more than 300…
No. 9 · 15 Oct 2026
How Jerry Seinfeld built a talk show out of everything he hated about talk shows
A vintage car, a drive, a coffee, and one comedian. No desk, no band, no audience, no clips to plug. Seinfeld made 84 episodes of it, sold the lot to Netflix in a deal reported at…
No. 8 · 15 Oct 2026
How Between Two Ferns made 22 episodes in ten years and still moved a government website
Two potted ferns, a public-access set, and a host who is rude to famous people on purpose. Zach Galifianakis made about two episodes a year. One of them sent tens of thousands of…
No. 7 · 15 Oct 2026
How WIRED let the internet write the questions and built its biggest show without a host
A famous person, a board covered in tape, and the questions Google suggests when you type their name. No interviewer. Nine minutes. More than 300 episodes and, by its makers'…
No. 6 · 14 Oct 2026
How Wistia made the same ad three times and turned the receipts into a show
A video software company asked a question every marketer has: does a bigger budget make a better ad? It paid an agency to make the same ad for US$1,000, US$10,000 and US$100,000,…
No. 5 · 14 Oct 2026
How The Betoota Advocate turned a fake country newspaper into a real media business
Two blokes in character as editors of "Australia's oldest newspaper", filed from a town in far-west Queensland that has no residents. Twelve years on it is a beer, a book deal, a…
No. 4 · 14 Oct 2026
How Starter Story turned a founder's revenue number into a media company HubSpot bought
A founder, their monthly revenue, and how they got there. Pat Walls ran that one format for eight years, first as written case studies and then on YouTube, until HubSpot bought…
No. 3 · 14 Oct 2026
What Hot Ones actually sells
Ten wings, ten sauces, one celebrity, and questions that get more personal as the heat goes up. Everyone knows the format. Fewer people know that the show is the sampler and the…
No. 2 · 14 Oct 2026
How Subway Takes turned a MetroCard and a hot take into an Emmy-nominated show
A microphone clipped to a MetroCard, a guest on a New York train, one question: what's your take? Kareem Rahma built a show that is cheap to make, impossible to pad and easy to…
No. 1 · 14 Oct 2026
How Career Ladder turned a stepladder into the most copied format on TikTok
A man on a ladder guesses a stranger's job in two minutes. That is the whole show. Here is where it came from, why it holds, what it costs to make, and what a founder or a fund…