You have 100,000 esports professionals sitting inside a venue you don't own. LinkedIn rents you their attention and decides when to charge rent. We move them onto land we own and build the operating layer the entire industry passes through. Owned audience. Owned brand. Owned events. Owned cashflow.
Every mature vertical has a media franchise sitting between its operators and its capital. Software has Stratechery. Sales has Pavilion. Climate has Heatmap. These are not blogs. They are operating layers with newsletters as the surface and events, intelligence, networks and advisory underneath.
Esports has none. The existing media (Dot Esports, Dexerto, The Esports Observer's remains) is fan-side coverage of matches, drama, and meta. The professional class of esports, the people who actually decide where the money flows, has no central rail. That's the gap.
Your 100,000 LinkedIn members are exactly that class. Executives, agency leads, sponsorship buyers, team operators, broadcasters, betting and crypto money, hardware brands, publisher business affairs. The buyers. Not the players, not the fans. Which means lower volume, much higher willingness to pay, much higher ad value per impression.
We are building the Stratechery of esports B2B, with a live event layer welded on because esports operators travel and want to be in rooms together.
Razer, Logitech, HyperX, Red Bull, energy, betting, crypto, FaaS, GPU. They already buy in esports. They have nowhere clean to reach the buyer side. Slots priced per engaged subscriber.
Quarterly 50-person dinners in LA, Berlin, Seoul. Year 2 we anchor a 300-person summit. The mixers fund themselves and seed the summit's reputation.
Year 2 launch. $749/yr. Weekly deep briefings, private Slack, deal flow, member-only events. 300 paid members = real revenue and the strongest moat.
Top orgs already pay recruiters $20k per senior hire. We offer a $500/post job board and a $5k/mo always-on subscription. Boring, sticky, high margin.
Run the LinkedIn extraction pipeline (8 weeks, slow + safe). In parallel, lock the brand name, register domain, build the v1 landing page, set up newsletter + Discord infrastructure.
First soft-cold outreach to the extracted list with a real opt-in. Weekly newsletter goes live. Discord opens with vetted entry. LinkedIn group keeps broadcasting at the top of funnel. Convert cold list into a consenting subscriber base and a live community.
Run the first invite-only dinner in LA or Berlin (whichever has more reader density). Land the first 2–3 newsletter sponsors. Set sponsor pricing and inventory.
Push newsletter to 25k. Quarterly events become a rhythm. Industry intel pipeline ingests Twitter, press, deal databases, and our own Discord chatter. Synthesizes weekly briefings only insiders see.
Launch paid membership ($749/yr) for deep briefings + private network. Anchor the year with a 300-person industry summit. Job board goes live as passive income layer.
By here we have a real asset. Options: stay independent and compound, sell the media to a publisher, spin up advisory/equity arm investing in esports orgs we already cover. We pick when the time comes.
Extract LinkedIn members, enrich via Apollo + Prospeo for both email and direct phone, dedupe, segment by role and country.
Newsletter via Resend or Beehiiv. SMS-grade outreach for high-value sends. Domain, deliverability, opt-in monitoring all owned.
The live layer. Industry-only Discord with vetted entry, topic channels, weekly threads. Where reaction and signal happen in real time.
John's existing LinkedIn presence and group stay as the public surface. Every piece of owned content points back. We do not abandon the reach.
Editorial cadence, voice, fact-checking. One long-form per month. Contributor network optional after year one.
Continuous ingest of esports signal across X, press, and our own Discord chatter. LLM synthesis into weekly briefings only members see.
Light event ops: invites, paid tickets, attendee comms, post-event nurture. Stripe plus a simple UI on our domain.
Brand pipeline, slot inventory, insertion-order tracking, people graph for warm intros. Same infrastructure Orbis already runs for BD.
My team handles all the actual scraping, enrichment, segmentation, deliverability, and brand build. You set up access on your side and re-establish a daily LinkedIn rhythm for one week. Total time on your calendar: roughly fifteen minutes a day for week one, then near-zero until first content drops.
Your account has been quiet, and a dormant account that suddenly runs scraping tools gets flagged immediately. One week of normal-looking human activity restores trust. No tools involved yet. Just you, logged in, acting like a person who uses LinkedIn.
Both tools have to live on your LinkedIn account, which means they live on your card. Run them for roughly six weeks then cancel both. Approximate tooling cost: $300 total. Reimbursed off first revenue if you want to track it that way.
Send me a short list of every group you own. Then pick how you want me running extractions on your account. Both options are real, pick the one you're comfortable with.