An actual email to the troops, this morning, where I was drawing a parallel between my new company WatchMojo.com and my old company, AskMen.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Ashkan Karbasfrooshan <ash@mojosupreme.com>
Date: Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 10:07 AM
Subject: Clusterfuck to the Poorhouse, indeed… and the silver lining
To:

 

From Bloomberg:

“First-time applications for U.S. jobless benefits rose to the highest level in seven years as more Americans were thrown out of work in the aftermath of the Gulf Coast hurricanes and employers cut staff to meet slowing demand.”

New jobless claims is one of the most accurate indicators of the economy’s health.  So admittedly, this is not good.  One would think this would affect our prospects, and indeed, no one is immune to the economy.  However, there is a silver lining to it all:

Eight years ago, in 2001, 9/11 hit and companies scaled back their investments.  This was coming on the heels of the dot com bubble which destroyed any support for online media companies.

On the Web, this all actually helped AskMen build up their lead.  One company called TheMan, who had raised $17M in funding, ceased operations outright.

Maxim (our main competitor) suddenly stopped investing in the Web and simply decided to focus on magazines.  GQ, Esquire, Playboy etc., didn’t even have websites.  By the time they realized this was a bad idea… we had become the largest player in men’s lifestyle content, with 35% market share.

Long story short, while we do need to remain careful with costs, expansion and what not, this is the best time to keep the pedal to the metal and build our lead as the de facto supplier of premium video content to other media companies.

Of course, I am preaching to the choir, we shot/edited/published/syndicated a whopping number clips in September and with our new network set up, we should be able to boost productivity.

But the point is: with text content, you can technically throw money at a startup and ramp up fairly quickly.  With video content, no one can really match the library’s quality and quantity in a short time span… so as long as we stay on the ball… we should be fine and even thrive.

All right, enough for today’s history lesson…

More to come.

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