John Yedinak is president and co-founder of the 10-year-old Aging Media Network Inc. The Chicago-based B2B media company may be the first to focus exclusively on the aging population and the organisations that care for it in the US: the $7 trillion ‘baby boomer’ industry of senior housing and healthcare. It all began when college dropout Yedinak and his brother George, who had both started their careers in financial services, spotted the need for more information on their prime target audiences. So, in 2006, John began Reverse Mortgage Daily as a blog, eventually growing it to become a leading B2B news service. Two years later, brother George launched his own online publication, Senior Housing News. They merged their businesses in 2012 to form the $12k startup Aging Media which now also publishes Hospice News, Skilled Nursing News, Home Healthcare News, and Behavioral Health Business. It sold Reverse Mortgage Daily in 2021. The company has some $10m of revenue (it increased by 40% in 2021) and employs 39 people. It is said to be solidly profitable and generates most of its revenue from advertising, although paid subscriptions are growing too.
How did your career start?
I originally wanted to work for a professional sports team or league like the NBA. I was lucky enough to network my way into a job at the Dallas Mavericks during my Sophomore year at Southern Methodist University. While it wasn’t the most glamorous job, I pretty much stopped going to class or showed up late because I was having such fun working. I enjoyed it much more than classes; frankly, there was a buzz about the place because Mark Cuban had recently bought the team. The energy was infectious.
About four months into the job, I showed up to my Italian class 10 minutes late – for probably, the fifth time – dressed in a suit, and my teacher said he needed to talk with me after class. He looked me dead in the eye and asked me: “Are you sure school is right for you? You enjoy working and seem to be good at it.” He was coming from the right place and, frankly, he had a point.
Long story short, for some personal reasons and that less-than-perfect grades wasn’t a good use of time, I moved back to Chicago and lived with my parents. Luckily, I got a job at a small bank (family business) and my boss was my older brother George (co-founder of Aging Media Network). We’ve worked together ever since.
How did you get get to launch the Aging Media Network?
I loved to learn about the latest tech and, in 2004 or so, I stumbled onto TechCrunch — it quickly became an obsession as well as others like Weblogs, Gigaom, and PaidContent.
One day I read an article about Michael Arrington (founder of TechCrunch) and how much money he was making selling ads. I was stunned. He was selling these tiny ads for 10k a month, and here I was a college dropout making 30k a year in banking. I thought ‘if I can make half that for an ad, I’d be rich’. At the time, I was reading American Banker and other trade magazines. But when the bank wanted to get into the fast-growing reverse mortgage business (what Brits call ‘equity release’), I couldn’t find much information for professionals.
Being a naive 24 years old with no journalism experience, I thought it would be fun to launch a TechCrunch kind of product for the reverse mortgage industry. On Thanksgiving in 2006, I bought a domain, got a free WordPress blog and, Reverse Mortgage Daily was born. It started as a way for me to share what I was learning and my hope was that it would be helpful for people in the industry. I used to sell to my potential readers in a different vertical for my job so I had a solid idea of what would be interesting to them. After two years of grinding, I got a call after work from the CEO of a large reverse mortgage lender and he wanted to advertise. He asked me to send him a media kit so he could have his team get in touch and I asked him “what’s a media kit?” He laughed, gave me a quick idea of what it was and said to send it over when it’s ready. I googled “media kit template”, created one in Microsoft word and – boom – we were in business.
It took me four years to figure out what I was doing and hire a couple of people but, by that point, my brother and co-founder had started Senior Housing News (SHN). It was more “pro-sumer” at the time and he was doing it at night because he was working in Washington DC. He came back to visit and – with RMD’s team of three and the industry growth starting to slow – we decided to form a “company” at lunch and named it Aging Media Network. With about 10k in cash between the two of us in our business account, our small team took over the day-to-day operation of SHN in 2011 and flipped it hardcore B2B with a focus on digital-first media.
None of the traditional B2B players in our markets had good digital products so we were able to quickly build a name and audience with scoops and original reporting/interviews — different than the press release rewrites that were typical for most b2b media companies. At that time, it was a fun but small business, maybe doing 500k in revenue. To grow we needed to launch into a new market and home health was just starting to take off. We saw there was no media company or news source for this $200bn (at that time) market and it was a great fit with our senior housing knowledge base and audience. After a couple of years of building, Home Healthcare News broke even and only at that point did I think we were onto something. Launching two publications from scratch and making them profitable… maybe we were lucky. But doing it three times in a row proved our editorial and business strategy worked for digital. Now we had a repeatable model. We aimed to launch one new publication a year, and the business took off, and it hasn’t slowed down since.
What was the breakthrough?
I think everyone’s definition of success is different. But seeing the business grow so quickly through Covid proved that we had something special. We put in the work but it proved how amazing our team members are and how resilient a diversified and best-in-class digital B2B media company can be. When we had a full room at one of our Home Healthcare News events after the initial COVID shutdown, it was one of those “holy shit we made it” moments. I will never forget it.
What has surprised you most about B2B media?
How slowly it was in shifting to digital and how little many media companies were investing in editorial teams and the product they put out daily. We see editorial as an asset and investing more into that high-end/exclusive product drives everything we do – ads, events, paid subscriptions, and even our branded content teams. Our editorial strategy and framework is simple: create exclusive news insights and analysis that executives can’t find anywhere else. Executing it every day is the hard part, of course, especially as you add new verticals. But we keep getting better as we grow.
How do you and your brother work together in the business?
We set expectations for each other early on and, frankly, I think most people would agree that our strengths are very complementary to each other. I oversee the editorial teams and strategy and George manages operations and revenue growth; it works for us. Together, we set the vision and strategy for growing the business and each of us needs to execute for us to be successful. At the end of the day, we do what’s right for the business… not John and George’s egos. It’s pretty simple.
What’s special about Aging Media Network?
We proved that you can bootstrap a fast-growing and profitable digital b2b media company; there haven’t been many in the last 10 years. Most traditional B2B media execs thought we were crazy and that’s fine. We are part of the next generation of B2B media, and it’s hard not to get excited about what the next 10 years looks like for us and the industry. Also, the fact that George and I have done it together… hard not to be proud of that.
What’s your primary role in the company?
My primary day-to-day role is leading editorial strategy and looking at launching into new markets/events. Building stuff is fun, and surrounding myself with ambitious people who get excited about building best in class media brands is the best part of my job.
Why did you sell Reverse Mortgage Daily?
Selling RMD was more of an emotional thing that took a while to decide to sell – because it’s what got Aging Media started. However, over time it became such a small part of the overall business and not strategic in terms of how we wanted to grow the business, so it was the right time to find a good longterm home for it. I honestly just picked up the phone and called the CEO of HW Media who is a friend. We did a fair deal in a short time.
What’s your vision for the company?
The market for aging services in the US is over $8 trillion annually and will grow exponentially for the next 30 years based on demographics alone. To meet the needs of the market and our ambitions, we need to grow along with it. We have a repeatable process and playbook for launching new verticals and scaling audience development faster and more predictable than we have in the past.
New markets are part of the growth story, but continuing to add more value to our audiences and marketing partners also plays a huge role. We want to bring our audiences together in more meaningful ways through in-person events, structured networking, and paid membership products have been a really good avenue for growth as well. Also, being a digital-first b2b media company gives us an advantage because we can use our highly engaged audiences and first-party data to serve our marketing partners better than traditional media. We’ve invested heavily here and will continue to in the future.
Last but not least, we recently got into the behavioral health market and it’s exploding in terms of awareness and investment. It could be a new media company for us at some point but we have never been more excited about a new vertical, it’s just a massive opportunity. It also proves we can build from scratch outside of just aging services; that’s exciting and opens up a lot of avenues for growth.
What’s the best career lesson you have learned?
Work hard, be humble, take care of people, and do what you say you’re going to do.
Which companies do you most admire?
Hard not to admire what my friends at Skift and Industry Dive have built – amazing people and brands that we have learned from along the way. I’m a big fan of Endpoints News and Stat as well, all high quality B2B media at its best. I’ve been studying events companies a lot over the last few years and have fallen in love with World50’s model and entrepreneurs like Anil D. Aggarwal and Jonathan Weiner. They have a proven model and execute so well at a large scale— it’s impressive what they’ve been able to do and do it in so many markets (Shoptalk/Money20/20/HLTH).
