Rule #62 Like Dave Portnoy, Just Be Too Good To Go Unnoticed

Once upon a time a guy would stand outside the Boston subway stations handing out pulp copies of a sports rag. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it had a pretty good following. It was an alternative to the Boston Globe, and it was more raw. It was a sports paper written from a fan’s point of view.

One reader of the paper had a problem. The problem wasn’t with the paper. While standing outside a station in the financial district the publisher meets one of his biggest fans. However, the reader was about to move to New York. This was a local paper, and he didn’t want to quit receiving it. Turns out the reader was pretty tech savvy. He didn’t want to lose his ability to read his favorite sports rag and made the publisher an offer.

He told the guy he would build him a website at his expense if the publisher would put the paper up so he could read it from New York. Free website? Sure dude. The fan was Ian White who would go on to become the Chief Technology Officer of Business Insider. The publisher was Dave Portnoy. The newspaper was Barstool Sports.

And so began Portnoy’s digital sports media empire. Love him or hate him you are hard pressed to not notice Dave Portnoy the direct talking, New England accent spewing founder of Barstool Sports.

To learn about Dave is to learn of a guy who knew very early on what he wanted to do as well as what he didn’t. He did not want to work for someone else. Good lord. Could you imagine having Dave Portnoy as an employee? He would need a team of HR reps surrounding him at all times. What he did want to do was work in sports communications and own his own business. He has crushed it on both counts.

The point is this. Dave Portnoy created a market. It was simple. The legacy papers were leaving a vacuum. They weren’t delivering the type of reporting a fan like Dave wanted to consume. So he created it.

He put out a product so good someone was willing to bankroll him just to make sure he was able to keep consuming it. It’s like Bobby Axlerod buying the pizza joint in Billions just so he could still go there to get his favorite pie.

This just confirms what Foo Fighters founder Dave Grohl once said, “If you do something good enough for long enough someone will eventually notice.”