Acquired never disappoints. For folks reading this comment, there are many episodes which overlap with HN interests.

Having recently listened to TSMC as well as Costco, LVMH, and Hermes, there's something available to every member of the HN audience in every episode, no matter how "unrelated" you may think it is.

On the other side of the table, as a former sponsor of a season or two: it was the best marketing we (Crusoe) could have done. We had more high quality inbound from our audience than any other channel, by a long shot. They deeply understand their audience and target appropriately. Strongly recommend to anyone trying to reach a decision making audience (customer and investor).

How did you measure that? Podcast ads seem almost like old school TV in that a lot of listening is offline, with no call to action or method of measurement. Despite racing and resonating deeply with an audience.

Two things:

1. I believe they require that you have an acquired specific landing page (e.g. crusoe.ai/acquired), which we saw directly as conversions through to our waitlist. The volume was lower than other channels, but the signal was much, much higher.

2. To @scarface_74's comment, "you talk to customer and you can ask them where they heard about you from" is mostly why I made the claim. In particular, when fundraising, basically everyone I talked to said, "I heard about you on Acquired, really interesting business model that I hadn't considered, let's talk more about it."

Sponsorship isn't cheap (I would go so far as to call it expensive), but relative to spending an equivalent amount on search or display ads/billboards on 101/etc., I think it was the right choice at the time.

My only analogy for this is what I call "cruise missile marketing" where you're investing a lot of time/money in building something that is very specifically targeted at high value buyers. It works really well for large, infrequent transactions (raising capital, selling GPU clusters, etc.) and less well for commodity SaaS or B2C products where volume >> everything.

You’re thinking about B2C ads. B2B has long sale cycles where you talk to customer and you can ask them where they heard about you from.

It’s not for everyone. Relative to the length, the level of detail is fairly glossy and the narratives about the companies aren’t complex or surprising. It’s frustrating already knowing a fair amount if not in the mood for entertaining banter.

If they had separate behind-the-scenes episodes with B-side detail and research discussion, they’d be the total package.

Not saying it isn’t well done! And it’s clearly landing with an educated audience. I know many fans.

Yeah I was disappointed with their RenTech episode, despite it being hyped up on HN. Think I learned more from the Jim Simmons numberphile (I think) interview.