Backstage w/ Matt Stone

Matt Stone Enterprises
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A backstage pass to The Bigger Stage, where host Matt Stone covers the behind-the-scenes lowdown on his journey to build The Bigger Stage brand, business, and show, and the business and life lessons he's learning along the way. mattstone.substack.com

  1. 4h ago

    We Follow People, Not Logos

    Matt opens November with two signals pointing the same way. First, from Digiday: SiriusXM signed Paige DeSorbo and Hannah Berner’s Giggly Squad podcast to a reported $160 million multi-year deal, and weeks later the pair sold out multiple nights at Madison Square Garden (per the piece). The eye-catching number isn’t the real story. It’s how SiriusXM now describes its model: fifteen years ago, podcast networks bundled shows and sold ads across them; today they build commercial relationships around individual creators and their audiences, across four connected channels, audio, video, social, and live. Advertisers want integrated creator relationships, not isolated ad reads, and video clips have become a top discovery engine (one cited stat: 84% of clip viewers say clips have at least sometimes turned them into regular listeners). Matt’s takeaway isn’t “start a media company.” Giggly Squad is an exceptional outlier, and podcasts are still hard to make profitable. The point is that the old mass-audience world (NBC Thursdays, the MASH finale) is gone, replaced by niche and personality. People don’t follow faceless brands, which is why company pages flop on LinkedIn. He follows Costco for the deals, but that’s not a relationship. You can “prepare the ground” with short-form so that by the time someone meets you, they already feel they know, like, and trust you. In a feed full of spam and nonsense, that earned relationship is everything. The second story, from the New York Times (Sarah Kessler, Oct 31), gave Matt, a JD and licensed lawyer himself, a jolt: “The New Hot Job in Law Doesn’t Require a J.D.” Firms, legal departments, and legal-tech companies are hiring “legal engineers” who combine legal knowledge, workflow design, and AI. Legora has built a global team of about 200 since 2024 (roughly 70 hires in the past year), and some roles pay $220,000 to $300,000, often without requiring a law degree. What caught Matt isn’t the job itself, it’s the bigger pattern: as AI reshapes how work gets done, expertise becomes valuable in brand-new ways. When you reinvent your company, you also have to reinvent yourself, and that’s a real market and marketing opportunity. There may be a whole new way to apply or systematize your skills that you’d never have imagined, if you’re willing to knock down a few walls in the construct you live in. And the engine that makes any of it run is communication: positioning and storytelling, told clearly in whatever medium is yours. To collaborate with people you wouldn’t normally reach, you have to get out of your routine, try new things, take a class, join a group, and keep sharpening how you communicate. Do both, reinvent and communicate, and you build the kind of relationships that carry you into the next chapter. P.S. — Sources Giggly Squad / SiriusXM (Digiday): “Giggly Squad’s SiriusXM deal signals a shift from podcast networks to creator ecosystems”https://digiday.com/media/giggly-squads-siriusxm-deal-signals-a-shift-from-podcast-networks-to-creator-ecosystems/ Legal engineers (The New York Times): “The New Hot Job in Law Doesn’t Require a J.D.” by Sarah Kesslerhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/31/business/dealbook/legal-engineer-jobs-ai.html This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

    We Follow People, Not Logos

  2. 4d ago

    Relationships Over Ads

    Matt closes the week with two companies that quietly prove his thesis. First, a feel-good one from the Wall Street Journal: The Gund Company, a 75-year-old family-owned specialty manufacturer in St. Louis, has never conducted a single layoff, while averaging 18% annual growth for a decade, with about 1,300 employees and sales nearing $400 million. Its third-generation CEO credits a philosophy that puts employee well-being over short-term results, backed by a fast feedback loop and constant improvement. The website looks a little dated, Matt notes, but the homepage video of actual workers feels fresh and authentic, proof that behavior leads, not polish. It reminds him of the long-history Japanese companies he knew: culture reinforced through storytelling, updated by a real feedback loop. He wants to go find and tell more untold stories like this, and hints that’s where the next chapter of The Bigger Stage podcast is headed. The main event is Lush, the cosmetics brand. The headline says they quit social media, but Matt is careful: they quit social media ads, not social media. Back in 2021, over concerns about privacy, algorithms, and platform harm, Lush stopped posting and advertising on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Snapchat (and later X), and five years on still hasn’t gone back to paid. Instead they poured into creator partnerships, brand collaborations, in-person experiences, email (6 million+ subscribers), and their own app (2.8 million users), with collabs alone driving roughly £34 million in sales, on nearly 9.4% revenue growth. They still use YouTube, Pinterest, Bluesky, and Substack organically. What Lush figured out, Matt argues, is that if you just place ads you’re paying the platform to push glossy information at people, and that’s not enough to build a loyal customer who re-ups again and again. Relationships are. Partnering through creators and collabs, going direct, inviting people into real-life experiences around shared values, that feels different, relationship-centered rather than information-centered, and it even inoculates you a bit from over-associating your brand with the platform. The lesson for everyone: what you see others doing isn’t necessarily the best way for you. The question underneath all the jargon (influencers, collabs, experiences) is the same one, how do you build real trust with your people, unseparated by fancy graphics? That old glossy-ad way isn’t gone, but it’s not what builds something new today. The Gund Company (Wall Street Journal)“Bosses Want the Secrets of the Family Firm That Has Never Had a Layoff in 75 Years”https://www.wsj.com/business/management/gund-company-no-layoffs-family-business Lush (Digiday)“How Lush quit social media ads and still drove growth”https://digiday.com/marketing/how-lush-quit-social-media-ads-and-still-drove-growth/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

    Relationships Over Ads

  3. 5d ago

    You Don’t Need a Big Audience

    Matt threads three stories into a single through-line. First, the scale shift: YouTube captured a record 15.8% of all US TV viewing in August (Nielsen, via Axios), more than Disney’s 9.3% and Netflix’s 7.7% combined-distributor shares. Studios are chasing it, Netflix is building a science series with creator Mark Rober, Disney is developing content with Dude Perfect. What matters most to Matt isn’t the numbers, it’s why: people want to feel connected to the people they watch. On YouTube you can comment and maybe get a reply, a relationship (real or not) that polished network TV never offered. The lesson for business: know your style. Are you an entertainer or an educator? Match it to you and your audience, and create things that invite people in rather than leaving them passive. Second, the run clubs. Ahead of Sunday’s NYC Marathon, brands are partnering not just with the marathon but with small grassroots running clubs. One creator runs Sprint and Sip, a club with about 30 regular participants, and turns it into content for 85,000 Instagram followers, now drawing brand partnerships (nearly 30% of brands in running-related TikTok content this year come from outside fitness, up from 25%, beauty especially). Thirty people. Matt’s point: you do not need a large audience to change your world. Third, the deepest one: Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, an Ohio neurosurgeon whose brother’s death led him to medicine and whose 18-year-old son died in a drunk-driving accident. He began speaking at schools, then started explaining complex medical topics in plain language on social media, and has now reached millions and retired from practice to keep teaching. A perfect arc: personal story to deeply held mission to talks to bigger stages to a company. Matt threads all three together: start with something personal, something you love or believe in (running, science, wine, whatever), bring people together around it in a way that’s authentic and genuinely helpful, and build a community, however small. The opportunity is greater than ever, and it’s choose-your-own-adventure (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, an event) as long as there’s a real story and a real mission underneath. Do it, and the gravitational pull around you builds until you’re choosing who to partner with instead of sitting in the silence. His nudge: what will you build that invites people in? Start where you are, local first, and let it feed the rest. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

    You Don’t Need a Big Audience

  4. 6d ago

    Story Before Platform

    Matt threads two stories that look unrelated and aren’t. First, AI is changing how people find you. The Daily Mail is running experiments across the US, UK, and Australia to see whether publishers can help brands show up more often in AI answers, and building a commercial “generative engine optimization” (GEO) offering around it. They map the questions buyers ask AI agents, track which brands and sources get cited, then create material to lift a client’s visibility. One early test reportedly moved an unnamed finance brand’s prompt visibility from about 50% to 75%, though Matt notes that’s encouraging, not proof of causation. The most revealing bit: one brand found Claude drove just 0.1% of its tracked referrals but roughly 11% of its conversions, a reminder that AI’s influence hides in the gap between clicks and outcomes. Forbes is reportedly doing similar advisory work. Second, Tommy Harper, the producer behind Star Wars and Top Gun: Maverick, is shutting down VeYou, his six-month-old app that aimed to be the HBO of microdramas. His response isn’t to quit the content business, it’s to keep producing and distribute through TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms. The reason: when the big platforms already own the audiences, competing with them for attention is prohibitively expensive. (And the ground is shifting fast, Owl & Co. found that roughly two-thirds of microdramas released outside China last quarter were AI-generated, up from 3% at the start of the year.) He chose to supply the platform rather than fight it. Matt’s link between the two: both are really about story before platform. Getting caught up in platform-versus-content is cart before the horse. There are behemoth platforms you can’t out-fund, but you don’t need a platform to work on the power of your story, you can tell it at the Rotary Club, Toastmasters, your networking group, or for free on YouTube. The more you work the narrative, the more chances you get to tell it, the better it resonates, and only then do you have a real foundation if you ever want your own platform (Oprah started a channel, not a cable company, which is essentially what YouTube gives you for free now). And it’s true for AI visibility too: a clear, credible, compelling story is what the tools crawl for, so Matt would rather sharpen the narrative now than chase every optimization tool. You need both, but if you do one first, it’s the story. A deep enough personal story is unique by definition, because no one else has your exact combination of experiences. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

    Story Before Platform

  5. Oct 26

    Real Beats Scripted

    Matt opens the week connecting his tagline to a hard trend. New research cited in TopRank Marketing’s B2B report found that 96% of B2B companies are largely invisible in early-stage AI discovery (a visibility-index finding, he’s careful to note, not that 96% never appear in AI answers), even as buyers increasingly ask chatbots for shortlists before they ever visit a website. The old SEO game of blog after blog stuffed with keywords is over. What helps buyers find and evaluate you now is independent interviews, third-party mentions, credible collaborations, and recognizable expertise. Which is exactly why Matt’s interview-first approach exists: media that demonstrates a real point of view is becoming an AI-era discoverability strategy, not just a branding play. If you want a bigger stage, you need a voice. Then the Backstage report. Friday he recorded his first multi-guest podcast episode, with fractional CMO Gauthier Sezgin and PR founder Ryan Walker, both of whom he calls genuinely authentic, and he’s now working out how he wants to produce more collaborative formats. He also caught the afternoon of Entrepreneur’s “Impossible” conference in Brooklyn, and the real lesson came from the contrast on stage. Gary Vaynerchuk delivered his usual (post constantly, free social media won’t last forever, use it), which is fair even if most people can’t match his output. But the standout, to Matt’s own surprise, was Megan Thee Stallion. He’s not a fan of her music per se, but as a presence she floored him: no scripted lines, real thoughts in real time, vulnerable, warm, and completely believable, a model for building genuine connection with an audience. Telling contrast: Gary posts hundreds of times a day, while Megan said she stays largely off social media for her mental health and lets her team handle it. Then Robert Irvine closed by reading from a script he clearly hadn’t internalized, and after Megan’s realness it landed flat. The takeaway Matt keeps coming back to: real beats scripted, every time. Authentic speaking is simply more powerful, and that’s the whole game. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

    Real Beats Scripted

  6. Oct 22

    Don’t Sleep on the Boomers

    Matt closes the week on a Business Insider piece with a counterintuitive lesson. Research from Morning Consult (run for Business Insider) and Edelman shows a big generational split on influencers: only about 31% of boomers trust influencer recommendations, versus roughly 62% of Gen Z and 64% of millennials, and only about a quarter of boomers follow content creators at all, compared to the vast majority of younger people. Boomers are also more likely to say they trust influencers less than they used to, have never bought anything on a recommendation, and find the content annoying. Matt, a self-described forgotten Gen Xer, can relate, though the lawyer in him wants to pin down what we even mean by “influencer.” He means the professional kind, the person whose whole business is taking pictures of themselves and building a following to tell you what to buy (think the LinkedIn influencer whose entire business is teaching you how to make money on LinkedIn, a bit of a closed loop). Here’s why the “problem” is actually an opportunity. Boomers account for about 42% of spending among affluent US households (Visa), yet marketers pour tens of billions into creator partnerships aimed at much younger audiences. Some agencies even report stronger conversion from older, more experienced creators, while brands stay reluctant to use them. So two takeaways. First, don’t sleep on the boomers, depending on your business, there’s a whole market of healthy, financially capable people, often on their second or third career and moving to the next thing, that service businesses ignore at their own expense. Second, invest in real relationships. Matt’s clients range from Gen Z to boomers, and his advice is the same to all of them: don’t judge yourself against social media influencers. Your opportunity is to build trust the slower way, show up in person and online, do the one-on-ones, sow into the soil and fertilize it for real, and build a loyal community. With so much nonsense flooding social media, the differentiator is simple: don’t be nonsense. His questions for the weekend: who do you actually follow, does the word “influencer” even matter to you, and what’s your honest relationship with all of it? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

    Don’t Sleep on the Boomers

  7. Oct 21

    Into the Ditch

    No articles today. Matt’s still turning over the Your New Opening Line pilot in Denver, a small but mighty room of people each refining the opening to a talk, and he pulls out three lessons (plus a bonus). First, going blank. When you’re performing to a camera or working a talk, the harder you push, the more you get in your head, and it feels like driving straight into a ditch over and over. Get back in the car, start the engine, aim down the road, and it’s in the ditch again. Grinding the same way never works. You have to break the pattern: throwaway rounds, a joke from the person behind the camera, walking away, goofing around, anything that takes the pressure of performance off. One participant came out of the gate strong, then got in her head, and what finally worked wasn’t pushing through it directly, it was disengaging and re-entering later. Instead of driving, fly. Instead of driving, skip rope. Second, you can’t see your own diamond. It’s easy to spot the story that shines in someone else, the one that explains everything about them, and almost impossible to see it in yourself. The things most central to our own story are the ones we take for granted or never bring up, especially when telling them feels promotional or like cheapening them. It takes other people in the room saying no, no, tell that story again, that thing about your father is the gold, not what you were focusing on. That happened over and over in the session. Third, how you think beats what you think. The way you came to an idea, what informed it, is more useful to other people than the conclusion itself. Matt’s version: how you came to know and believe something is more interesting than what you know and believe. It’s why “most people think X, but here’s the truth” posts fall flat, and why human narrative is so powerful, because even if someone disagrees with your conclusion, they can have mad respect for how you got there. The bonus thought: this format would be a phenomenal, indirect team-building experience for leadership teams, because engaging with each other’s stories builds trust and familiarity fast. His questions: what’s a throwaway fact in your story that others found fascinating, and what are you working on that would benefit from a group for a while? Nobody sees their own blind spots alone. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

    Into the Ditch

  8. Oct 20

    From Discovery to Retention

    Matt opens with a reflection from the Denver pilot of Your New Opening Line: the blank. When you’re working on a talk, you hit a point a few rounds in where it stops feeling fun and you start fighting it, right before it becomes fully integrated inside you. One participant lived it in real time. The fix isn’t to grind harder, it’s to break it up, let go, tell your mind you’re done with it for a moment. Same trick works on camera, “this isn’t the real take, I’m just going to riff,” and then you nail it. Totally normal, part of the process, and you keep going until you get free and easy with it. Then the signal, and it rhymes. A Digiday piece reports that The Verge has rebuilt its audience team for “Google Zero,” the post-search era where Google referral traffic dries up. For years publishers chased search optimization, social distribution, and raw traffic. Now The Verge organizes around three audience groups, anonymous visitors, registered users, and paying subscribers, and specialists in newsletters, community, and analytics, with each person carrying a growth target instead of a page-view number. The whole aim shifts from discovery to retention: turning occasional visitors into people who intentionally return. Tellingly, more than half of their subscriber sign-ups now come from readers going directly to the subscription page, a deliberate decision to buy, not an incidental one while reading an article. That’s the difference from the old model, Matt notes, where you put bait on the hook (a blog, a PDF) to capture an email. This is building a relationship first, so that when someone’s ready, they come find the sign-up page themselves. He maps it straight onto building a business with media: yes, you want attention and short-form discovery, but never at the expense of giving people reasons to come back, things to do, multi-phase offerings, exclusivity. He points to his own show’s regulars, the ones who comment and quote it back to him, as the equivalent of paying subscribers, client or not. His question: what’s the one thing you could offer on an ongoing basis, exclusive to people who join at a deeper level, that pulls them into your fold? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

    From Discovery to Retention
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About

A backstage pass to The Bigger Stage, where host Matt Stone covers the behind-the-scenes lowdown on his journey to build The Bigger Stage brand, business, and show, and the business and life lessons he's learning along the way. mattstone.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Matt Stone Enterprises
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    335
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Matt Stone Enterprises, LLC
  • Show Website
    Backstage w/ Matt Stone