When investors showed hesitation about the creator market, Beluga Labs framed it not as their only market, but as a strategic asset. By building deep relationships and solving creators' most complex problems, they are turning these influential users into a powerful, built-in distribution channel for future expansion.

Instead of relying on generic databases, the most effective way to find relevant B2B influencers is to go to the source. Ask your existing customers which newsletters they read, podcasts they listen to, and experts they follow to build a highly targeted list of potential partners.

Successful journalists combine platforms. They use legacy media for brand credibility, editing, and infrastructure, while direct-to-consumer platforms like Substack allow for faster publishing and capturing a much larger share (70-90%) of the economic value they create.

With AI-driven research, content authority is paramount. Every piece of content, from a blog post to a report, must begin with a distribution plan. This means securing partners, practitioner quotes, and social amplification *before* creation to ensure the content is seen and valued by AI models.

Influential voices with dedicated audiences have a greater impact when engaging their community directly on native platforms like Substack. These owned channels can drive nearly as much traffic as a campaign's primary website, demonstrating the power of concentrated, high-trust audiences over broad, traditional media reach.

The newsletter's value comes from covering companies where little public information exists. Publishing a single deep-dive report makes it the definitive online source, creating immense value for subscribers and driving strong organic search traffic for highly specific terms.

A key future growth strategy involves distributing free research directly on the Bloomberg Terminal's research section (BRC). This unconventional move bypasses typical social media channels to place content directly within the workflow of his ideal audience: 400,000 financial professionals who use the terminal daily.

A marketing agency acquired its industry's largest trade publication not to become a publisher, but to create a powerful lead generation engine. Owning the trusted media source for his target clients (real estate agents) provided an unmatched top-of-funnel strategy, driving high-quality leads directly to his agency.

The TBPN hosts view LinkedIn not as a stuffy professional network, but as a frontier for engaging tech news content. They're actively hiring to understand and optimize for its unique algorithm and culture, seeing it as an "unwashed mass" ripe for education.