Zero to $5 Million Exit in 3 Years

Mike Pinkus: Over the last 10 years at ConnectCPA, we've had the privilege of witnessing the incredible journeys of over a thousand businesses. We've been there for the thrilling highs and daunting lows of entrepreneurship. We've celebrated wild successes and monumental exits, and we've also stood by businesses as they've navigated the stormy seas, facing roadblocks and challenges that every entrepreneur encounters in their day-to-day grind.

Join us as we dive deep into the stories of these resilient individuals who dared to dream, who persevered, and who were a testament to the power of entrepreneurship. This is their journey, their lessons, and their triumphs.

Welcome to GrowthTales. I'm your host, Mike Pinkus, co-founder of ConnectCPA. Today, we have an awesome guest in Alex Blumenstein, co-founder of The Peak. In a market that's been incredibly turbulent with hyperinflation and strong headwinds, The Peak has stood out as a Canadian success story. Alex and Brett have managed to scale their business from nothing to a multimillion-dollar exit within only three years. Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard of The Peak. They have been, and continue to be, one of Canada's most innovative media companies and news outlets.

Alex, thank you so much for joining me, and thanks for coming on.

Alex Blumenstein: Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Mike. And before we go further, I should correct your introduction. It's Alex, Brett, and Taylor. Taylor, you know, is kind of behind the scenes. People don't really realize he is there, but he is so instrumental as one of our third co-founders. So I should make sure to point him out in any intro.

Mike Pinkus: Oh, thank you. You know, what's—

Alex Blumenstein: Along for the ride. And a big contributor too.

Mike Pinkus: Really, the—

Alex Blumenstein: Biggest contributor.

Mike Pinkus: I really, really appreciate you saying that. I've only met you and Brett over the years. Yeah. And I appreciate you putting that out. So thank you so much for putting that in, 'cause yeah, all co-founders contribute.

So first I just wanna start off by saying, Alex, like there's been—obviously, before we get into—I'm gonna ask you questions about the exit and other things. But before I get into anything of that nature, why did you start a media business? Like, what is the origin story of The Peak?

Alex Blumenstein: Yeah. No, that's a great question. So, there's a few reasons, kind of like why we started a media business. And the first one is that all three of us were very comfortable around media. We had worked in politics, which is very adjacent to media. We had worked in communications, public affairs, and had some media jobs in the past. So we've all kind of been in and out of media prior to our entrance into becoming entrepreneurs.

So it's something we enjoyed, we liked. We were kind of, you know, in the lore of media. I remember reading all sorts of books about media when I was younger and enjoyed the inner intrigue of it. So it was something we always enjoyed, something we were adjacent to.

And then how did we actually land on starting The Peak? Fast forward to the beginning of the pandemic, the three of us had another business that was basically winding down. In many ways, I'd say it had failed. We learned a lot of lessons along the way.

Mike Pinkus: Blah, blah. That's not failure.

Alex Blumenstein: Yeah, exactly. And we needed something to do, right? So we said, okay, we have a few options here. We can get jobs, or we can start something new. So we experimented with a number of things. And ultimately, we saw what was being done in the States with Morning Brew. They were growing really quickly, and we looked around at our peers and saw that a lot of them were reading Morning Brew, or wanted something equivalent for Canada.

So we said, hey, here's this great opportunity. Morning Brew—if the listeners don't know what that is—it’s a US-based newsletter and media business that has grown quite a lot. They were bought for, you know, 70 million dollars by Business Insider. And we said, hey, let's look at their model, let's take this model and apply it to Canada, and deliver never-boring business news for Canadians.

Mike Pinkus: That's incredible. And it's, I, obviously I'm a subscriber. I'm, I'm a big fan of what you guys do. And it catches you, like, the highlights, the way you underline things. Who came up with the design? 'Cause it seems like it was architected, like really well thought out, how you brought out that newsletter. Who came up with that design? Where is the origin of that?

Alex Blumenstein: Yeah, so I mean, I think the way the words are kind of architected is like, you read it and it's broken up into chunks. There's highlights, there's bullets, there's subtitles, and that allows the reader to move their eyes along. We did not invent that, right? This came from probably originally Politico, Axios, some of these other American media companies. Morning Brew had a similar style too. And it became kind of like the on-trend way of writing a newsletter.

I think this is the important lesson here—that’s where I'm going with this—'cause you're saying, oh, you guys are so smart, you came up with this, you came up with that. And we didn't really come up with a lot of this. The real lesson here is, don't reinvent the wheel when you know it already works.

So there's a model that works, there's a style that works, but there's a market that's not being served by that style and that product, right? So what we did—our "innovation," and I'm using air quotes there—was to take all these pieces that were working and deliver them to a market that was being underserved by it.

That's not to say that our quality and content and our approach to it, in many ways, kind of was original—and we can talk about that—but I don't think we invented anything. And I think we're kind of proud of that, 'cause that informed how we ran a business from start until now. We said, we're not trying to make any big changes. We're just trying to stay focused, and we're not gonna go and invent new processes, new ways of doing things, when a great way of doing things already exists.

Mike Pinkus: Yeah. And you mentioned Morning Brew and all these companies. I believe they're all US-domiciled type businesses. Was—you guys were Canadian-centric, I think, from the onset. Is that correct?

Alex Blumenstein: Yeah, no, we were always super focused on Canada. Just for what I said before, that no one was doing this for Canada. And I think our approach was always to kind of view that line of being relatively proud of being Canadian—as well as not relatively—our slogan until recently was "Proudly Canadian." So we were proud to be Canadian.

And I think the way the style works is that we always added context to a news story, right? So the particular context that we were adding to the news story was: how does this impact Canadians? In certain instances, there would be a Canadian story, say about RBC, and that obviously is just impacting Canadians 'cause it's a big Canadian bank. But in other cases, there could be an American story about a big tech merger, and then we could say, okay, how do we zoom out and apply the Canadian lens to this?

So that's really what differentiated us—leaning into the Canadian angle. Otherwise, had we just tried to compete, then we would've been nobody, right? Because we would've just been another news source that Canadians can get anywhere. They could have just subscribed to Morning Brew, right? So we really had to lean into that in order to differentiate ourselves.

Mike Pinkus: And that seemed to work for you. So I'm curious, subscribers-wise, where do you sit today? I've seen the hundred-thousand, crossing-a-hundred-thousand marker. Are you guys way beyond that? I don't know where you're at today, and I might as well ask you that question.

Alex Blumenstein: Yeah, it's a good question. I'm actually gonna make sure I have the actual numbers in front of me. I wrote them down. So, we actually have, you know, I'd say four main products right now. We have two newsletters and two podcasts.

So the main hero product, The Peak, has 122,726 subscribers—that's as of yesterday.

The Peak Money, our personal finance newsletter, is at 34,233.

And our Peak Daily podcast has 119,775 monthly downloads.

And our Free Lunch podcast has 17,025 monthly downloads.

Mike Pinkus: Wow. That's incredible. And that's incredible growth, given your time in the market being so short. It's obviously had incredible traction.

And coming from a finance background, I'm gonna pivot a bit and ask you—I'm sure people are curious about this—the revenue model of The Peak. How did you and your co-founders sit down and think about, okay, we're getting all these subscribers, so many people are signing up to this newsletter. How are you thinking about, okay, we're building an audience, how are we gonna monetize this?

Alex Blumenstein: Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, I think what's interesting about our product is, we have a pretty large subscribership, but relatively speaking, it's not actually that big. We've grown quickly. But what we noticed as we were growing, especially in the early days, is that we were signing up a lot of high-quality subscribers. So high quality means high income, decision-makers in businesses, people who are starting and building businesses. And all of these types of people are high value to advertisers.

So, you know, there's a lot of advertising media businesses out there, and a lot of them are just competing for low-priced CPM advertisers. But we had the opportunity to say, hey, we have these really high-quality people who are reading our newsletter. We can charge a lot more for those people.

So we sold the size of our list, but we also sold the quality of our list. Early on, our target was not—well, I'd say this is the mid-period, this is when we really started to grow our revenue—when we started targeting B2B SaaS companies, American B2B SaaS companies. 'Cause we said, look, here's our audience: we have these really high-quality people who are decision-makers in Canadian businesses who you want to sell into. And they would pay a lot to reach those people. And that's when we really started to take off there and bring in a lot of revenue.

The other kind of key advertiser that we were able to target was investment products. So that could be just like investment advisory, to alternative investment products like Masterworks, which is how to invest in fine art, fractional fine art, or FrontFundr—like crowdfunding platforms, that type of thing.

And now that we've kind of grown a little bit more and broadened out our audience—as well as, it just takes time to sell into the banks—so now we have a lot of financial institution advertisers, which are fantastic and also really added another level of credibility to the business, I think in Canada especially, because they're the biggest businesses in Canada.

And I don't know if you want me to go into specifically what our ads are, but I can, 'cause there's some interest in that, I guess. So like, our newsletters have three ads in them. We have a primary ad, a secondary—

Mike Pinkus: I'm curious about that just because, sure, like now you could say, okay, people would advertise in The Peak, but now there's probably different ways to go about how you charge based on how they advertise or how many eyes they hit and the size. So what did that look like on the specifics? 'Cause I am curious about that.

Alex Blumenstein: Sure. So, I mean, basically, the way our advertising worked was we would sell a primary ad, which had a logo and about 125 words, a secondary ad, which was lower down inside the newsletter with 75 words, and then a Peak Pick, which had 25 words. I don't know why I'm speaking in the past—you can still buy these, folks!

And obviously, our pricing was more modeled towards what an advertiser would pay versus what they were worth. Because if you actually look at the numbers, a primary, a secondary, or a Peak Pick—depending on the advertiser and depending on the ad—could perform just as well. And that's because it's all about the context that these ads are in.

We take the pen on all of the ads—an advertiser comes to us, they tell us what they want to talk about, and our copywriters write them. So our ads are in the same style, tone, and voice as the stories. When somebody's reading it, it really does feel native and it feels interesting. It's written in a way to hook you in and keep you reading. And that is true from the intro through the ads.

So advertisers actually got a lot of value from those ads because people read them and clicked. And the other piece that makes our ads compelling is when advertisers—I'm gonna be honest here—when they actually listen to us and provide value for our readers, as opposed to just, "Hey, buy my product." Because what I like to tell advertisers is that our readers are in learning mode. They're not in shopping mode. They're not Googling "how do I buy my next SaaS software" or "my next insurance policy" or whatever. They're reading because they want to get smarter about their life and about their job.

So if you can position what you're selling in that context of "here’s something to make you smarter," your ad is gonna do well. If you're saying "buy my product," your ad is not gonna do as well. So our advertising products are highly contextual and very native inside of our newsletter.

Mike Pinkus: Yeah. That's incredible. And what I'm curious also about—you mentioned, and it was Taylor, the other co-founder I missed, correct?

Alex Blumenstein: Yeah.

Mike Pinkus: Yeah. So I'd only met you and Brett prior to this. But when you, Brett, and Taylor were designing—you just went over the revenue model, and I know you probably have all different core competencies—were you designing a business to scale, to sell, to be a lifestyle business? When the three of you got together, what was the original plan? And did that change when you guys started to get traction and started to grow?

Alex Blumenstein: Our goal was always to make money, right? That's one thing I can be honest about. This is not my baby. Once we sold it, I've always been just like, okay, the new owners can tell us what to do. They own it now, right? I'm not hung up on these things.

We definitely built it to be sellable. We were kind of open to all avenues at the beginning, but we were really focused on making sure it was a business that could be sold. To do that, we made sure to document everything. We have guides for every part of the business—everything that we do, it's all written down, step by step, videos recorded. That way anybody who was interested in buying us could look at that and say, hey, good, they are clearly legit because this is how this works. And also, they could get rid of us—or we could leave, right?

Mike Pinkus: Also, the processes were there.

Alex Blumenstein: Exactly. Every process written down, here's how it all works. And that also would've given us the opportunity to walk away and put a professional manager in charge if we decided to take that direction.

So yeah, we really had the idea of finding a way to be successful in making money from this business from the start. And we were very conscious about that as we built it—to make sure to document what we were doing.

Mike Pinkus: And I'm curious also, 'cause when you look at value—so Alex, you guys were—there's businesses with zero revenue that build communities and subscribers. And at the volume that you guys were at—crossing a hundred thousand in under three years—the trajectory of growth, you can make an argument there's substantial value, even if it wasn't monetized. How did you and Brett and Taylor think about the value of your business as you went through every inflection point from year one to two to three? How much do you think of that value was in the fact that you had this massive subscriber base of, like you said, really well-known businesses and key logo marks versus actual revenue and ad revenue and monetization? It's a tricky—

Alex Blumenstein: I think that, yeah, it's a tricky one. I think without a doubt, our list is valuable. An engaged list is valuable. So there's a lot of value in that—they were opening the emails and reading the emails and all of that.

But I think from our own past experience, where we had a business that was theoretically valuable as well but had no money, we didn't want to go down that road again. So a little bit of backstory—the business we started before was a cannabis-focused venture fund and accelerator. What we did was we raised a micro venture fund of about a million dollars and we invested that into early-stage cannabis-focused startups.

We had a community, we had a mailing list, we had meetups in different cities, we had deal flow, we had a great brand, we had a ton of media. We had all of those things where you could say, hey, this is a valuable business because of these intangibles. But we never could figure out how to actually get a return on it, make any money from it, or anything like that.

So going into this, we said, okay, how do we make money and get dollars in the door right out of the gate? So it really started—going back to the origin story—it was a bright spot of COVID that we started writing this every single day. We probably wouldn't have done it if it wasn't for COVID, if we didn’t have anything else to do. So the three of us were writing it, and we decided to raise a little bit of money to basically allow us to start paying ourselves and hire a writer.

But we were never gonna raise a lot of money, try to build something unprofitably, and not have a clear path to success. We always knew—even if we couldn't sell for a multiple—we would have income coming in. And we were pretty sure that's what we had to do this time around. We weren't gonna do some sort of speculative business that could pay off one day. We were kind of over that.

Mike Pinkus: How much of your success at The Peak do you think is attributed to the fact that—you called it a failed venture, I call it lessons to learn by—but it looks like you came in with a lot more intention and design. Not only in The Peak and the newsletter itself, but the way you went about monetization, the way you documented the processes. That’s not an amateur, first-time entrepreneur type of mindset in how you guys as co-founders came to this business. Do you attribute a lot of that success to the fact that you did start the cannabis venture first and it didn’t work out?

Alex Blumenstein: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a huge—that had a huge impact on how we approached our next business. But I think also just more generally, we're all people who learn from our entire lives. Everything you do is an accumulation of knowledge, accumulation of lessons, of everything you've done along the way.

So sure, our overall approach was informed by our venture before that—Leaf Forward—and everything we had done prior. But I think there’s also just a lot of smaller things that you learn too. In terms of how to handle conflict between each other, how to handle conflict between partners, external partners. How to handle employees generally, how to work with people.

I think we thought—and this may be a bit of a commentary on the cannabis industry—I think it kind of left us a little shell-shocked and a little bit like, oh, everyone's out to get you, and business is hand-to-hand combat. And I think we grew up quickly once we started this and started seeing how things worked in a normal industry, and when things are going well.

And that allowed us to act a little bit more maturely. And I think once we had traction, then we said, okay, how do we make this work? And that’s when we started applying all of these processes to it and taking a focused approach.

Mike Pinkus: No, that's awesome. And yeah, I can obviously relate to the fact that those accumulations of lessons make a huge difference. But you mentioned dealing with conflict, dealing with stress—I haven't asked you about under the hood. No one knows the challenges other than you, Taylor, and Brett. Day to day, it's not easy when you're growing that fast and going from zero to a multimillion-dollar exit in only three years.

You were moving quickly, meaning I would imagine there was pressure and stress and challenges. When did the three of you decide, we're gonna sell? Like, we’ve built this company—were you approached, or were you looking to get out and find a buyer?

Alex Blumenstein: Yeah, so I think—first, I’m gonna share my most controversial business opinion, which is: it shouldn’t be that hard. If you have a good business, it actually shouldn’t be that hard. And for us, things just clicked, right? And I’m not saying we didn’t work hard, and I’m not saying that we’re not smart people—we are—but in a way, everything clicked, everything fell into the right place.

So of course there’s stresses, of course there’s all that, but when you have something that works, it’s not as hard as when you have something that doesn’t work. If you hear about people struggling all the time to make something work, then it’s probably just not that great of a business most of the time. That’s my most controversial opinion.

And then in terms of selling it—I think we all enjoyed doing this. It’s not our life’s work, and it’s not our passion. So from the really early days, really as soon as we got traction, there were people kind of circling around. We got offers pretty early on—not good offers—but we got offers.

So there was always interest in it, and I think that comes with being such a public-facing company, because everyone knows what we’re doing, 'cause we have subscribers. People see us every day.

We just kind of got to a point where we were like, okay, let’s start shopping around a little bit more. There were people who had come to us before, people we had talked to before—there had just been back and forth. And then one of them came back to us and said, hey, do you guys want to talk again?

Obviously, that was Zoomer—the people who bought us. They had bought blogTO and then Daily Hive, and they were kind of on a buying spree. And yeah, so we got into talks with them. We did end up getting one offer, but their offer was just much more compelling.

We had all talked before about what we would want to personally take home to make this worthwhile for us, and that’s where we got in the negotiations. So we said, sure, let’s do this. I mean, it’s good—especially in a business like media—to take the money when you can. And it gives you a lot more opportunities, right?

There was no way The Peak was gonna become—obviously we could have held on longer, built it bigger, made something else—but there was no way The Peak was gonna become a billion-dollar business. It’s just not the type of business that can do that. So once you have more cash in your pocket, there’s more ways to make more money.

Mike Pinkus: No, for sure. And I think—who knows? I mean, maybe expansion and like you said, you were centered on the Canadian market. Were all the co-founders on the same page? Like, were all three of you aligned on an exit?

Alex Blumenstein: Yes, like there was no—we were very aligned. There was no kind of hemming and hawing. There was no convincing anybody. We’re pretty easygoing guys. And especially because we’ve gone through this before, gone through failure together, I think we just know we’re aligned now. And we know how we work. So we’re pretty easygoing with each other and have a pretty good understanding of where we sit.

Mike Pinkus: Yeah. So what’s next for The Peak, and what’s next for Alex?

Closing Thoughts 

Alex Blumenstein: Um, so The Peak is—you know, it's great, part of Zoomer.

Mike Pinkus: Obviously, I should’ve mentioned that. I mean, in the new environment, what's next for The Peak?

Alex Blumenstein: So we’re here, we're part of Zoomer Media. And we are—I mean, well, this is gonna come out after—but our Big Bet on Canada events are next week: Calgary, Vancouver, and then Toronto. So that’s very exciting.

But something that will still be relevant when this comes out is we’re launching a new vertical, our Peak Tech vertical. So we'll be covering more specifically tech, as Peak Daily has broadened out to just be Canadian business generally. So that’ll be pretty relevant, especially for your listeners.

And we’ll probably continue to add new verticals as time goes by. We’re also looking at new ways to collaborate with the other properties here at Zoomer—BlogTO, Daily Hive, the other digital properties. And hopefully, we'll have more integration there in the future to talk about.

For me, I’m here for the time being.

Mike Pinkus: No, no, I understand that too. And I’m here. And that’s amazing. Yeah. Alex, I don’t have any more questions, but I would say that in the time we've known each other, I am so happy for you guys and the success. And apologies to Taylor, 'cause I had never met Taylor prior to this.

Alex Blumenstein: He likes not to be met. You know, he’s gotta get credit when you're giving people credit!

Mike Pinkus: But to you and Brett—and obviously to Taylor as well—like, a huge congratulations on an exit. Like I said, you guys did this in a really short window of time, and I think that’s really commendable because, really, there’s headwinds in the market right now and hyperinflation, all those things that I mentioned. The fact that you guys exited at a really good time, given what's happening in the market—

But it sounds to me, just final question—you guys, as co-founders, it seems like you were fairly close. Is that fair to say? In that you guys looked at each other and knew it was time to do that next thing? Or was this something—yeah, I’m always curious—what was that light switch where you realized, you know what, if offers are coming in... you would’ve entertained them in year one or two, but at year three, where you’re at that new revenue level, was it just time to go, okay, now’s the time?

Alex Blumenstein: Yeah, I think it really was. We always knew the amount we wanted to sell it for within the time. If we had been doing it for 10 years, the amount would've gone up. But given the timeframe and the amount, the numbers were just aligned, and they were willing to do what we said we wanted to do. So we said, great. It’s really that simple.

And that’s what we set out to do. So we really did accomplish what our path was.

Mike Pinkus: That’s awesome. That is really, really cool. And like I said, congrats again to you and your co-founders. And thanks for joining me. I know you’re a busy guy—post-acquisition, you’re probably still busy—so I do appreciate it.

Alex Blumenstein: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I know you said this isn’t really about promoting ConnectCPA, but I do really want to thank you for the help of you and your team through our acquisition—and still through some of this integration. Truly a fantastic experience. I think the best professionals we've worked with—our lawyer on this deal was fantastic too—but you guys did such a good job.

So key in helping us understand what the process was like. We're not finance people. We never really understood it. And also, you did some good work fighting for us over certain things—a lot of great work from your team, and it was really appreciated.

Mike Pinkus: I really appreciate that. It’s been awesome working with you, Alex, and your team and The Peak. We service the same audience, so it was really cool to see you guys work with so many common companies with us.

But like I said, really appreciate you hopping on. And yeah, we’re looking forward to keeping in touch and seeing what you guys do next. And if any other passion projects pop up, we’re gonna be following you to see what’s next for you and your co-founders.

Alex Blumenstein: For sure. Yeah, we’ll let you know. Thanks so much for having me.

Mike Pinkus: All right, thanks so much, Alex. Take care.

That was Alex Blumenstein, co-founder of The Peak. Alex and his co-founders managed to take their business from nothing to a multimillion-dollar exit in only three years.

One of the most important takeaways from the conversation with Alex is: there are no real failures if you learn from them. Alex’s first venture did not pay off, but it allowed him to use those lessons to build The Peak to what it is today.

That’s it for today. Until next time—keep scaling up and breaking barriers.