Today’s conversations: CJ Gustafson of Mostly Metrics joined me on The Rebooting Show to discuss the practitioner media opportunity. And on People vs Algorithms, we discussed the rise of retro digital.
Welcome to a rare Friday edition. Axios co-founders Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen published a reflection on the path forward in the media business that highlighted the rise of individuals over institutions, framing it around journalists. But I believe a bigger opportunity is in practitioner-led media that focuses on high value sectors. Those people are, as CJ put it, Ns of one. We will see CJs pop up in most business areas, without a doubt. And institutional B2B media will get new competition.
Also: On PvA, we discuss retro digital, as we rediscover standby formats and business models.
The N of one
I’m often asked what media companies I find most promising. I tend to skip the obvious ones and point to Mostly Metrics.
Mostly Metrics is an indie media business started by CJ Gustafson in 2020 that breaks down corporate financial issues for CFOs and those who aspire to be CFOs. CJ isn’t a journalist. He’s a numbers guy and former CFO who can write and podcast and convene. It’s a rare combination, and I’d argue one that’s the most valuable in media now.
Mostly Metrics did about $3 million in revenue last year. CJ has no full-time employees, and he makes more in profits than Semafor, which just raised at a $330 million valuation. The economics of these kinds of businesses are simply terrific.
“I’m probably in the 80th percentile for CFOs. I’m probably in the 80th or 90th percentile for writing. And I’m probably in the 80th or 90th percentile in business sense. You take those three things and stack them together, and my goal was to be an N of one.”
There are many Mostly Metrics-style businesses to be built. Lenny Rachitsky, a former Airbnb product manager, paved the way, with a 1 million subscriber newsletter, popular podcast and event. I think of CJ as the Lenny for CFOs, which are fewer in numbers than the armies of product managers but have higher value. What’s more, they lend themselves to business lines like angel investing and, in CJ’s case, executive recruiting.
CJ and I discussed building Mostly Metrics as a side hustle until the growth made clear that the opportunity in running Mostly Metrics as his full-time business, and the the lifestyle flexibility that comes with it, outweighed the typical CFO path.
My takeaways from CJ’s success:
B2B is decentralizing.
I often focus on the decentralization of the Information Space in consumer media. But the same shifts, particularly in trust moving from institutions to individuals, is happening in B2B.
The difference is that in B2B, the “creators” are peers. CJ has credibility as a former CFO that a journalist or analyst will not have. He knows the issues because he’s dealt with them. That peer-level footing is leverage.
“I’m a practitioner of the craft that I write about. My whole background is helping companies budget their resources to get the most money out of it. Along the way I picked up all these playbooks on how to budget for your business, how to figure out how many sales reps you have to hire, what metrics you should use to gauge success.”
In my own area, I see this happening with a property like Marketecture. Ari Paparo is the Nerd King of Ad Tech. His writing on programmatic is going to have a different impact than trade industry reporters. (There’s room for both, of course.) And that’s why Marketecture is fast-growing and will stress incumbent trade publications in the space.
The same goes for LinkinBio’s Rachel Karten, a former Condé Nast social media executive who now has the top business bestseller on Substack.
Subscriptions are a nice base, but not where the money is in B2B.
CJ ran a typical Substack business for a while. He was successful in getting subscribers. But the value of CFOs is greater than a $150 membership.
B2B is something of a cheat code. A single conversion can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you have a connection with a high value audience, the lifetime value of subscribers can be many thousands of dollars. This is not a volume game.
“Everything goes through the CFO. And what they’re buying are usually tools that have a really high sticker price to them. These things start at $25,000 a year, but on the higher side they’re paying hundreds of thousands to million-dollar plus for these products and services.”
In just two years, sponsorships have become 90% of the business. Mostly Metrics works with companies like Brex, Mercury and Tipalti, and is already sold out for 2026 and is working on 2027 deals. The business breaks down to 40% newsletter ads, 40% podcast ads, 10% private dinners, 10% research reports.
What I find most impressive is CJ has built this strong of a business without doing events, which he’s wary of becoming an events company. He wants to keep the Main Thing the Main Thing.
Staying lean is a structural advantage.
For now, CJ is focused on keeping Mostly Metrics as lean as possible. He jokes his goal is to never have full-time employees.
This is becoming more common. I have also gone down this path, mostly because it preserves optionality. These businesses, if set up correctly, do not require the same layers of coordination and administration that tend to bloat media companies.
The knock on those types of creator businesses is they lack enterprise value. Maybe. But I believe that misses the point. You run a business not to sell it. You run it as part of your overall life, and instead of looking for a big lump sum, you focus instead on cash flow. Mostly Metrics should generate several million dollars a year in profits. There’s no need to sell to PE when you have those kinds of economics.
“Everybody celebrates the guys who sold their media business for $75 million, but nobody celebrates the people who are clipping off $5-10 million a year and get to keep it forever.”
This week on People vs Algorithms, we dig into the idea of retro digital: the return of events as the primary revenue engine; newsletters as the new pamphleteering; sponsored segments that look more like mid-century TV; and the reappearance of classifieds through curation. We talk about Semafor’s event-heavy model and what it says about where sustainable media economics are actually coming from.
We also unpack why changing legacy institutions like CBS News is so difficult, the limits of institutional reinvention, and why “generic” news utilities no longer work. Other topics include YouTube overtaking traditional broadcasters on TV screens, the growth of FAST channels, Reddit’s resurgence as a context-rich alternative to feeds, the rise of micro-dramas and micro-payments, platform risk in affiliate media, and why trust continues to migrate from institutions to individuals.
Media is rebuilding around formats, behaviors, and business models that worked before algorithmic-driven scale broke them.
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