How a blog about the VC industry generated over $1 million from online courses

John Gannon built an audience with VC job postings and then monetized through a mix of online courses, productized services, and sponsorships.

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Coming out of Columbia Business School in 2008, John Gannon had to choose between two career paths: launching a startup or joining a venture capital firm. While he certainly had the entrepreneurial bug, he also held a deep fascination with the VC industry. “I got interested in venture capital back when I was just a couple years out of college and started to read about VC firms,” he told me. “I remember in particular reading about Benchmark, which is one of the most storied firms in the world, and I don't know what it was exactly, but I kind of got hooked on the idea.” Ultimately, his choice was driven by the fact that he and his wife decided to start having children. “I thought, you know, venture capital is a little bit more stable than doing a startup.”

So in 2008 Gannon joined a $160 million VC fund that specialized in sectors like IT and digital media, and it was while working there that he realized there wasn’t much high quality information on the internet about the VC world. “I had people coming to me asking me how to break in,” he said. “I had a lot of empathy for them, because when I was in business school, I was reaching out to venture capitalists, trying to get them to spend time with me to tell me about the industry and to network and talk about jobs and stuff like that.” While it’s more common today for VCs to write their own blog posts or sit down for long podcast interviews, back then it was much more of a behind-the scenes profession.

That same year, Gannon launched a Wordpress site at johngannonblog.com and began writing about the industry. At first, he mostly curated links to outside resources, but over the next decade the site expanded into job listings, online courses, industry surveys, productized services, and multiple newsletters. In 2022, he left his salaried job to work on it full time, and to date it’s generated over $1 million in just course sales alone.

In a recent interview, Gannon explained to me where he found his initial audience, how he launched his courses business, and why VC firms now pay him to announce their recent hires and investments.

Let’s jump into it…

Pivoting to job listings

For the first few years of the blog’s existence, it attracted very little traffic. But in 2015, Gannon had the lightbulb idea to begin aggregating industry job postings, which at the time were scattered across various job boards and VC websites. At first, he simply created a new Wordpress page for each job listing, with the job title as the page’s headline and all the requirements pasted within the body. At the bottom, he’d link to the actual website where you could apply for the job. Eventually, he installed a specific Wordpress widget that signaled to Google that the page is a job listing and should be indexed as such.