Erik Torenberg's Playbook: How to Bootstrap a Multi-Million Dollar Media Empire

The Startup Ideas Podcast — Greg Isenberg interviews Erik Torenberg

The B2B Creator Thesis

Erik Torenberg noticed something during the pandemic: creators like Lenny Rachitsky, Packy McCormick, and Harry Stebbings were building deep, niche audiences around specific business verticals — product management, tech investing, strategy — and then monetizing those audiences through products, services, or funds. Torenberg saw this as just the beginning. "What Lenny is doing for product managers will exist for every position — for finance people, for engineering, for sales, for marketing," he says. "And it also exists for every sector."

His bet: instead of trying to build the next TechCrunch for everything, build the next TechCrunch for a specific category. That became Turpentine, a podcast network that today runs 13 shows — each targeting a narrow B2B vertical like CFOs, HR leaders, or AI practitioners. None of the shows are huge individually (under 1,000 downloads per episode in some cases), but they monetize well because companies will pay to reach those audiences. Torenberg says each show does roughly $30K–$40K per month in revenue, and the network as a whole does about 350,000 monthly downloads across all shows.

Why Podcasts First