John Coogan
Episodes
Notes
The Social Radars · John Coogan, Co-Founder & Host at TBPN
-
How Do You Cover Tech News Without the Right Guest?
John Coogan had no idea the show would be live, no idea it would be daily, and no idea it would amount to a modern television show.
He had a bunch of ideas, and many of them did not play out. One was a huge opportunity for a show with no guests. A thousand guests came on last year, so that idea was proven wildly wrong. Talking back and forth fills a lot of airtime and creates flexibility when the perfect guest is not available at the right time. Founders who already came on get acquired and then say the communications department does not want them on, because a public company owns them and runs a different process. The reporting still gets analyzed and commentary still goes out, so the audi
-
Why Did John Coogan Stop the Documentary Sale?
John Coogan stopped climbing toward a sale of a documentary to Netflix or HBO because the money was not enough and the film would become a hit piece. The creative direction, the soul he put into the work, and his view that business is good would leave. The film would be edited in a bad way because a hit piece would be better for their business. He found the prospect soul crushing and decided not to climb any further.
He still wanted to stay in media and do interesting things, so he tried other media products. He started a solo podcast that did similar work without a script. A teleprompter and a written script made the work more soul crushing. He liked the process of writing and found readin
-
Why Did Lucy Gum Grow So Slowly?
John Coogan says Lucy gum took 10 years to reach the size of Soylent because marketing stayed much more targeted on purpose, which meant way lower growth rates, and the company did not really want to be mega viral. Nicotine gum is age-restricted and FDA-regulated, and the claims a brand can make are very important, including whether anyone can say the gum helps you quit smoking. A lot of things cannot be said. Soylent was a food product, generally recognized as safe by the FDA, and people can decide what they eat all day.
He worked very closely with the co-founders for almost a decade, is still on the board, and is still working with them. They grew the business a lot, but Lucy never went v
-
Why Did John Coogan Leave Soylent?
John Coogan left Soylent because the company was pretty mature, he was running e-commerce, and the business no longer needed a software team. He wanted other work while Soylent pivoted to retail, a make-or-break move for a direct-to-consumer brand that started online.
VCs crowded in because online growth was so strong, and many believed e-commerce was the future. E-commerce still grows slowly, so the brand eventually grows at the rate of e-commerce. E-commerce is maybe 10 or 20 percent of overall commerce, much of it TVs, books, and other goods that ship easily, while a lot of groceries are still not sold online. Soylent had penetrated the total TAM of online protein powder supplements and