Hi, again. I took the month off from the podcast but I wanted remind you that I’m working with founders, CEOs, and industry experts to turn what they know into an audience and, more importantly, real influence.

I’ve been doing this with a handful of founders already, mostly through informal coaching. The setup is simple. We talk once a week for about 30 minutes, figure out what you should be saying and where you should be saying it, and then work on making it happen.

That can include Substack, blog posts, press releases, media training, SEO/GEO, social media, media outreach, and general marketing. The point isn’t to throw content onto the Internet. It’s to make sure the right people know who you are and why your work matters.

Let's Meet

I’m doing this with my friend Neeraj Bansal, who handles the operations side. Between us, we have more than 60 years of experience in startups, media, and entrepreneurship.

So far, I’ve helped people build newsletters with 25,000 readers, grow Twitter accounts to more than 500,000 followers, create huge Discord communities, land international press, and host dinners with journalists at major industry events.

I’m not trying to become your PR agency or your full-time CMO. Think of me as a coach and an extra set of experienced eyes. I’ll help you figure out what works, what doesn’t, and what you should be doing next.

The introductory package is $1,000 per month in which we do a 30 minute consult and build you an Substack and media strategy with one post per week. Given what most marketing and PR firms charge, I think that’s pretty reasonable. More importantly, I want this to be useful for founders who are still building.

There’s also a more complete option for people who want us to handle much more of the actual content production and posting. That includes roughly 22 pieces of content each month, including newsletter articles, LinkedIn posts, and short videos for TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

The introductory rate for that package is $1,500 per month.

Let's Meet

That option is for founders who know they need to be publishing regularly but simply don’t have the time to do it themselves.

The bottom line is pretty simple. I want to use what I’ve learned over the years to help smart people get noticed, while also making a living as a freelancer.

If either package sounds useful, email me at john@biggs.cc. I’d be happy to talk.

Bloop! Bloop!

You remember the sound. It was a cross between a bubble popping and a robot burping, a noise that meant you were about to watch The Daily Show, even if it had aired the night before. It wasn’t live, but it didn’t matter. You had a TiVo.

Today, that seems almost ordinary. Every streaming service remembers where you stopped watching. Every phone can record video. Every television comes with apps. But in 1999, TiVo felt like science fiction.

Before TiVo, television followed a schedule. If your favourite show aired at 9 p.m., you were in front of the television at 9 p.m. If you missed it, you hoped for a rerun. Some people programmed VCRs, but most people remember that experience as a collection of blinking clocks, confusing menus, and tapes that somehow always ended before the final scene. You knew that time mattered, and if there were commercials, you had to sit through them or go grab a sandwich.

I still remember the terrible days before TiVo. We would watch prestige TV — Grey’s Anatomy or The Sopranos — and have to sit still. Nobody was on their phone. Nobody was half watching, half browsing TikTok. Hell, TikTok didn’t exist. Instead, you were glued to the set at a set time and didn’t get to leave until the show was over. It was torture.

TiVo changed that relationship completely. Television stopped being something broadcasters controlled and became something you controlled.

The box, devoid of buttons, sat quietly beneath your television, recording hours of programming onto a hard drive. You could pause live television, rewind a scene you had just missed, or skip commercials with a few taps of the remote. Those features sound ordinary now because they became the standard. At the time, they felt almost magical. You had a collection of shows you could keep forever. There was that one episode of Friends you liked. Or that documentary that you were going to pop back into. It was right there, waiting on a spinning hard drive.

TiVo also did something even more interesting. It learned what you liked. If you watched enough documentaries or late-night comedy, it would quietly record similar programmes it thought you might enjoy. Long before Spotify playlists and Netflix recommendations, TiVo was already trying to answer a simple question: “What should I watch next?”

The TiVo knew. But how?

The TiVo story

There are only a few examples today of what TiVo meant to the culture at large. Google took over search, and billions of people knew the verb. OpenAI has far fewer users and is barely a blip in the zeitgeist. But to TiVo… to perform the act of TiVoing? That was something special and rarified and global.

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