This episode is a window into the process and vision of a brilliant young co-founder who has figured out how to do what everyone is wrestling with: commanding the attention of Gen Z.

Zara and I spoke about the behind the scenes of starting The Daily Aus, from the unplanned chaos of the early strategy to what they’ve built and what comes next.

I walked away with so many insights, perhaps the most profound of which was the idea that behavior change doesn’t always happen through disruption, but instead through the much more subtle and clever process of habit stacking.

This episode is full of rich insights and I can’t wait for you to hear it. Can’t even wait to hear it? The transcript is below…

MATT

Zara, welcome, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me, Matt. So let’s go back to the very beginning. Yeah. Zara and Sam are sitting, you know, at a dinner table, in a cafe, in the kitchen, whatever, and you’re talking about why don’t our friends care about the news? Yeah. Why did you care that they care?

ZARA

Huh, good question. Why did I care? Honestly, it was probably selfish. I think I cared because I wanted more people to be able to talk about it with and I wanted them to understand why it was so important and I think looking back the distinction I’ll make is that my friends then and my friends now do care. They didn’t have the right language to be talking about these world issues because the news wasn’t written for them, it wasn’t pitched to them. And so when I look back at it then, the frustration was why are people my age not engaged? But they are. It was just kind of the wrong packaging for them and that’s what we’ve been trying to build ever since.

MATT

So as you start to build and you’re trying to solve this challenge of engagement and relevance and trust, how did you process that? Were you thinking from the beginning, we’re building a business here, we’re a building a media empire here, just as one viewer, one listener, one audience member at a time, or were you just focused on how do we solve this creative problem?

ZARA

The benefit of you only interviewing me and not interviewing my co-founder is that we can have very different answers. So had you asked Sam that, he would have said from the beginning, yep, I’m building a media business. I remember he put it on LinkedIn that he was the co- founder of the Daily Oz and I laughed at the time and said, who cares? That’s not a business, that’s not for LinkedIn. I thought of it as just a kind of community project that was gonna get young people involved in the news. I never thought it would be a business. I didn’t believe I was entrepreneurial in that way, and I didn’t know anyone around me who was doing those sorts of things. But over time, I think the mission became so critical that there was a business case to be made around it, but it was only after consistently building that editorial integrity and that trust that we were able to make the business case. It certainly, I don’t think, would have worked had that business case come first. We were solving a really big moral question for young Australians.

MATT

Do you remember some of the things that you were doing in your first year that you look back now and go, we would never do that? But it felt right to try, but your model has significantly evolved from then.

ZARA

I mean, like we posted notes, apps, screenshots as story. Like who wants to read that? That is like the least design friendly thing on earth. But it was all that allowed for when I was on my way to work on the bus and taking screenshots and putting it up. So that built consistency, it built habit. It was something that was important. It looked absolutely hideous and thank God for Canva and thank god for what we were able to design down the track. But no, it was. It was awful, but it was the foundation. And all that mattered at the end of the day was the facts.

MATT

It’s really interesting, something you said before about you don’t ascribe too much sort of brilliance and genius, not your words, my words, to what you did in the early days. It is interesting though, isn’t it, how you sort of start to create these little senses of how things work and how the pieces connect together. So at Four Pillars, we used to talk about social doesn’t sell, and it kept us really honest about the idea that we use social media to create engagement and community to draw people closer, get them into our email list. An email would sell, and social would engage. And I watch all these brands these days just flooding their socials with sales push. And I’m like, you’re not building brand, you’re building audience. I asked you about the battle for attention and your response was basically, we don’t fight for attention, we fight for discovery in social, and then we pull people into this place of these owned audiences where we have their full attention. It’s really important, isn’t it, to have these little visual and sort of mental constructs of how our business works.

ZARA

I mean, the funnel matters for every business, not just for ours, but I think that for us, it’s how can you build an ecosystem? If we’re saying that news is so foreign to so many people, how can we build an eco-system that is kind of all encompassing? And for us that’s bringing people down the funnel, that’s bring people from that rented audience to that owned audience, and I think the same is true for other businesses as well.

MATT I see it a bit more these days, less of fun or more as like a benign death star, that you’re trying to draw people in with this tractor beam and it’s, they may come from many different directions and many different places. And just every time they touch you, you’re tryin’ to bring them a bit closer and a bit closure until at some stage they’re in the middle and they’re almost part and they see themselves as part of you. But I think what.

ZARA

But I think what’s important for us is that the way that other outlets have done that is through clickbait and that you draw them in and then they’re in and they feel trapped and for us it’s like no you know what you’re coming into you have full knowledge like we don’t have a paywall you are getting everything that you want on socials but it’s that you want more and that can have a deeper relationship with this brand and so I think the hesitancy and the trouble there is around clickbait and and bringing people down and attracting them perhaps on a basis that they’re not 100% bought into.

MATT

How important is it that news becomes a habit and how conscious were you that you weren’t trying just to create engagement and build trust, that you were actually trying to retrain people into the habit of becoming news consumers?

ZARA

The most important thing, habit and building routine around news. The number one thing that I heard from people was I’m not a news person. That that’s not a thing. You aren’t either a newsperson or not a news person, it’s just either in your routine or it’s not in your routine, and what we wanted to do was intercept those non news readers or those passive news readers and make them more active news readers. And so that meant showing up at the same time every single day, no matter what I was doing, where I was. And sometimes that was hard, sometimes that was easy, it depended on the day. But it meant that people could start to rely on us and depend on us and build in that consistency into their day. And I think that we were able to then convert a really significant cohort from being those passive consumers to being more active news consumers, which I think is pretty good for democracy.

MATT

It is, and we’re gonna talk about democracy, because ultimately. That’s a small topic. It’s a smaller topic. Some of us think it’s important. But let’s stay on this notion of habit. We buy cars. We’re in the habit of buying a new car every, you know, whatever, four, five, six years. And I start a new-car company, I’m just trying to interrupt your likelihood to buy Volkswagen and buy my car, but I’m not fundamentally trying to change your habits. But then there are people going. No one’s sitting around going, I wish there was more news I could consume, and yet for you to successfully build a business, you have to create a new habit. I’m just interested in what you have learned that if you got dropped into another business, another category tomorrow, what has it taught you about how to build habits that didn’t previously exist? Because fundamentally your success relied on your ability to do that.

ZARA

Well, I think what’s important is that we identified what habits did exist in the cohort that we were trying to target. And what we knew existed was that young people were checking social media all the time. When we started, there was not really any news on Instagram. This was kind of a very novel concept. I remember having an early conversation with Instagram and them saying, we don’t want news on here. That’s not what this is for. So we were able to interrupt and almost collide with another habit. And I... This might sound a bit woo woo, but like this idea of habit stacking. So if you’re on social media and then you’re getting your news, you’re almost stacking the habit of doom scrolling with getting some important information. And I think that that’s a really easy way to bring something that is quite hard and quite limiting to new audiences. And so I think, that’s been important. And that’s being a really interesting learning for me is that you can’t pull people away from their existing habits or their existing consumption. You know, trends, what we’ve seen is that other outlets have tried to say, yeah, you’re on social media, but click out to this link and then click out to that link. Those don’t mimic the natural habits. And what we did was we brought it to them. We want to meet people where they’re at. And I think that works across any industry and any product. It’s, you don’t try to disrupt that. You try to build within the ecosystem that already exists.

MATT

I’m already obsessed with the notion of habits. I will now say, and I will, on the record here, I will credit you every time. Stack onto existing habits.

ZARA

Yeah, it works. There’s a lot of research. It works.

MATT

None of us have enough firepower to persuade people to build entirely new habits, but that notion of stacking, oh my God, I love that so much. Okay, so from habit stacking for your first users to starting to see that next wave of growth, and I can talk a bit about what I experienced in terms of stacking on the existing habits of drinking mostly, to be honest, Hendrix gin and shifting people to four pillars. There was a first group who were relatively easy to convert because they were already. They were so ready to be engaged, they were so hungry. They’re like, you know, the thirsty man in the desert. It’s like, okay, there’s, but then there was this next group that they weren’t waiting for us. And so I realized quite early on, we had to do different things to win them. Did you have that same moment where you’re like okay, the first group we’ve got are not gonna give us all the growth we need. We need to start figuring out how to reach the next growth audience.

ZARA

100% I mean the first so for a very long time it’s very easy to condense timelines when you’re looking back at the last however many years for the first three years no one bothered to care what we were doing we were building habit but it was very slow very minor no one really cared over that time we accumulated some 3 000 followers nothing to write home about But from there onwards, it’s like, all right, so maybe the people I know are connected to 3,000 people at a stretch, but how do we reach those new audiences who aren’t finding us? There’s no discoverability to what we’re doing. Influences turned out to be a huge part of that early growth. So we thought back then that what we were doing was almost a civic duty. We said, you’re all talking about all of this very important stuff on the internet. We’ve got influencers who are being asked to comment on say global conflicts, but have no facts and have no basis for what they’re actually being asked to talk about when they were Miss Universe and are now apparently, you know, a global conflict expert. And so we reached out to these influencers and it was Sam and I DMing people after work, just saying, hey, we can see that you’re being asked to comment on this. If you want an explainer that makes sense. And that other people can engage with and relate to, here you go. And what we saw was that these influences really took to it because there was something there that it wasn’t partisan, it wasn’t going to isolate certain audiences, it was just going to have an explanatory angle. And so we saw just exponential growth, particularly based on female influences who had extremely trusting relationships with people. And they were saying for more, you know, read the daily odds. And that’s where our exponential growth came from during COVID, during the US election, and then beyond.

MATT

And was that a conscious growth strategy? To what extent was it accidental and organic and to what extent, was it, okay, we’ve won this first 3,000 but what got us here isn’t gonna get us where we wanna go. We need deliberately to sort of punch out of our own bubble.

ZARA

Yeah, I I hesitate to assign any formal value to anything we did back then, because it was just like, let’s throw something at all and see what sticks. I think, and what I think has been so fundamental to our success is that I am a young woman who is trying to cater to other young women. I knew where I got my information from. I knew who I trusted and it was these creators. And so we were almost just translating this anecdotal evidence of my friends and I getting our information from one place. Is that a broader trend? And it turns out that part of the value of being the audience you’re trying to serve is that yes, that does have legs.

MATT

It was almost like you had the habit stacking approach, and this was almost trust stacking. You go, these young women trust these young woman, there is a trust-based relationship there. If we could insert our trusted contemporary approach to news into that, again, the habit and the trust, they all start to compound.

ZARA

And it’s unusual, like you don’t usually, I mean, maybe now there’s been a bit of a change and certainly in the last couple of years, but when we started influences and news in the same sentence was not necessarily something you were going to hear. And so it was again, trying to do something a bit different and trying to make the news a bit cool again, which I think it had not been for quite a while for us. We started as. An explainer page. And I think that just remaining true to that mission, which is that we don’t need to be first, we need to right and we need to be able to add value, not add noise to an issue or a problem or a topic. For us, that is where we add value. So we’re not gonna be first. We don’t have hundreds and hundreds of reporters around the world. What we can do is sit with it a bit longer and take the time to actually explain it and break it down for an audience. And so I think we’ve always been able to navigate the tension because. Our audience expects that of us and we know that that is our role and that is how we differentiate ourselves from other players in the game who can be much faster and have a huge number of resources that they can allocate to this sort of stuff and that’s what good journalism is about and that why we need an ecosystem with those legacy players as well as some of the newer players.

MATT

Every time I give a keynote or I give a talk or have like a fast side chat, people want to know this sort of, why did you sell Four Pillars? And had you planned from the beginning to build it, to sell it? And my honest answer is no, we built it to own it. And then I check myself and I go, wait a minute, we did raise investment at the beginning. So in the back of my mind, there must have been this sense that we’re gonna have to get these guys some money back at some stage. Like even if we three founders choose to stay in forever and pass the business down to our kids. There were 20 and then eventually 35 people had invested. So I’m like, in the back of my mind, that must have been there, but I think we were made better as a business because what dominated our minds was always how do we make better gin and how do build a better gin brand, not how do scale this to sell. And the reason I say this might not make it into the podcast is I’ve been thinking lots about this with all the fuss. About the changes or the proposed changes to capital gains. And I’m sitting here going, I don’t think the government’s got the design quite right, but I would never invest in a founder who in the early stages of their business was more concerned about the scale of their exit than the scale of the solution of the problem that they were gonna deliver.

ZARA

100%, and I mean, especially, I mean I don’t know about the gin business. You don’t invest in a media business to make a huge return. This is not a quick money sale, this is not what this business is about. As I said, the same thing is true of trust as it is about building a revenue model that works. It’s really hard and it takes a really long time and we’ve also raised investment, we’ve raised two rounds. And we’ve raised that from people who understand that very reason that it will not be the next after pay or the next Canva. This is something that they have invested in because their kids care about what we do or they can see the value and they believe that they wanna be part of that story. And so certainly not something that tomorrow will be worth a bajillion dollars. But yeah, we’ve we raised investment and that’s something you need to always keep one eye on.

MATT

I’m a big fan of this idea that great businesses are built on doing really difficult things, that this is not a world where ease is rewarded. Difficulty, pain is rewarded, and I think there were a couple of things at Four Pillars that we spotted that were hard to do. It was hard to get up every day and just put all of your folks into making a better product, because the whole world was like, well, just make the product as quickly and cheaply as you can, and then move on to marketing. We’re like, well, no, we’re gonna build a business around making. But the other thing that we saw, and this is a long time ago, I’m tragically old, is social media was just emerging and it was scary and difficult for the big legacy players to jump onto. But for us, we could build social first. What did you quickly sort of see or feel or intuit that you could do that the big legacy media players, the big legacy news organizations just either wouldn’t do or couldn’t do.

ZARA

I think being nimble is something that very few media companies can claim they are. We were able to you know take COVID as an example we were still not a real business then we were kind of still inside hustle phase. We we’re able to pivot we were able to innovate we were able to present information. In a way that we hadn’t previously because there was no red tape. There was nothing stopping us from that innovation. And I think what we’ve seen with media is that there is a disconnect between what audiences want and what execs want and what business models will allow for. And that really has a stifling effect on innovation. And so I think that was our early key and our early success. And I also think that we weren’t afraid to make mistakes which in media can be a difficult thing to own up to, Bye. If something didn’t work, we were audience-led, we were an audience first, and it meant that we could, again, be nimble, be responsive, and iterate, and I think that that’s a very underrated thing in the media, and something that should be adopted more.

MATT

So I want to talk about bothism. And I read something you wrote recently that we can create an environment where news-focused creators can do their own entrepreneurial thing and be their own person and build their own brand, but they can also do that with the support of a structure around them that provides fact-checking and editorial quality. And you ended up in a bit of like a tussle online with people going. I was going to say you.

ZARA

I was going to say, you found my LinkedIn fights. And I’m-

MATT

I find that very fascinating because I see so often in business that the real magic is in the end, is in the fact that we can do this and we can this and I can’t always figure out why other people don’t see that and is it because they’re too purist, they go well if you’re that you can’t be that or maybe it’s just that doing both is hard but I want you to start by talking a bit about bothism.

ZARA

Yeah I love this and I was quite surprised by the feedback to that because I think what I have built and what my team has built is that bothism. It’s straddling the old age and the new age of media and that has been almost a tension point because there are so many good parts of legacy media that need to be maintained, editorial integrity and you know fact checkers and editors. But there is something missing there. There is a huge trust deficit, and that’s what we bring from the new age. And I think when you can merge those to infuse those two together, that’s where the magic lies. You don’t need these things to be mutually exclusive. I think that there is huge benefit to having the best of both worlds.

MATT

But potentially there was an easier business to build that just lent into, let’s just build lots of trust by being engaging and building community and leave the fact-checking behind, whereas you’ve actually built the difficult business, right?

ZARA

Yeah, I mean, can you build trust that way? Or can you build long lasting trust that way, I guess is my question. I think what we decided and certainly what we found over the years of building is that trust is something that is very slow to build and very quick to lose. And we wanted to build the foundation of trust, so that, you know, they could go forward and form whatever opinions and do whatever they want with that information. But that takes a really long time. And sure, it’s certainly very attractive to have a hot take and a nice opinion on the internet, go viral and there’s your business. But I don’t think that has the same longevity as building a trusting relationship with a young audience who come to you for a specific reason.

MATT

When you hear the phrase post-truth, what does it make you feel?

ZARA

Depends what day you get me on. Do I think we live in a post-truth world? I do think that there are some elements to that that are true. I think what we were talking about before, this idea of unless a truth reflects back to you what you believe about the world, then it can’t be true. I think I’m seeing that more and more, and I think that is a really worrying trend. Do I think that we can come back from that? Yes. And I think there are signs that there is appetite for again, just down the line truth, which shouldn’t be controversial. But I think it’s really difficult and I think we are navigating through a really challenging environment, especially on social media right now.

MATT

And maybe gonna get more so. I always reflect on how, I don’t know if you know this, but I studied economics at university and I did both because I was bad at it, but also because of the things it missed out. So the one thing I didn’t study in my pretty not great economics degree, I didn’t study behavioral economics. And I feel all of us should be forced to do like a primer in behavioral economics because what it reveals, are these sort of fundamental weaknesses. Like if the human brain is an operating system, behavioral economics kind of shows you what are the backdoor weaknesses. And one of them is this notion of confirmation bias, that our brains are sort of ravenous for finding little bits of evidence that confirm what we already believe to be true. And you know this, and this is the world that we have. Navigated for a long time, whether it’s the world of Brexit or Trump 1.0 in 2016. This is not new news. When people talk about Facebook breaking democracy, they’re not talking about today. They’re talking about a decade ago. But now we’re heading into this synthetic world of AI and deep fakes and this sort of abundance and speed with which that confirmation can just be manufactured and not even need a human, not even a room full of you know, hackers from whatever country or how does that make you feel?

ZARA

Yeah I’m a little bit terrified. I think that it reaffirms though what we’re doing. I think it for me brings to the fore two main things. Firstly media literacy. I think that we have just as a society skimmed over how critical media literacy is. Every time I say this publicly I have teachers telling me that they are teaching it in schools. I certainly for one can’t recall a comprehensive media literacy module at school. And I think as we move through this very terrifying new world, there need to be the kind of critical analysis skills for people to be able to decipher truth from fiction. So I think that’s the first thing. I think the second thing though is that, and I guess this goes to the creator point before, we need to prioritizing as much as we can the human connection with the news. And so for us that’s, how can we show you the working out behind the story that we’ve done? How can we you show you? What it took to prepare for an interview with a politician. What can it do? All of those sorts of things, I think, bring back the human face of the internet and journalism. And I think that those two things taken together are the best antidote to what we’re seeing, which is obviously a huge disruption, not just to our sector, but to the entire world. And I feel really excited by the opportunity that those things together give us and allow us to do.

MATT

Couldn’t agree with you more on media literacy and the need for education. As things stand, what are you seeing emerge around how young audiences are at the moment deciding or using to decide whether a source or a piece of information is trustworthy or not? What do you think they are looking for? What tools are they using?

ZARA

I think at the moment, and this is probably kind of years in the making, there is just a kind of natural posture of mistrusting the source. So people aren’t coming to something with an intellectual curiosity. I think they’re coming with just a natural posture. This is wrong. This is false. This is AI generated, whatever it is. So I think that’s the starting point, which is an interesting starting point to go back from. I mean, we were always taught that you have to check multiple sources. But again, confirmation bias, that if you can find some verified account on X that is saying the same thing that you are saying, then somehow that goes as truth. So I think that the tools that were once available, especially to journalists, even now aren’t available to the general public. So it’s becoming increasingly more difficult. And for us sometimes, you know, we’ll get messages or comments saying, this was written by AI. And we’re like, no, no this was ridden by a human. But the fact that we have to... Set that out, I think, is the problem. And that the natural assessment is that this hasn’t been done by a human. That’s where the concern lies. That’s the starting point.

MATT

There’s a lot of conversation in the wider world of brand about the need to start to inject flaws almost deliberately, you know, go back to sort of badly overexposed flash photography because even though your product’s gonna look not great, at least people go, look, they took a photograph. They didn’t just generate that. But then you wonder how quickly the AI will be able to replicate that and those signs of authenticity as well.

ZARA

But I do think that taps into another trend, which is that my cohort have grown up on TikTok where that kind of unpolished brand and that authenticity is king or queen on those apps. And so I think that that actually taps into another consumption habit that we’ve seen that brands are certainly leaning into and does lend itself to other things we’re seeing play out.

MATT

Talking of the wider brand world, a conversation I’m having a lot with people at the moment is that we are in the process of leaving the age of search and entering into the age answers. That we’re not gonna say, right, well, I need to buy a house. Tell me who are the best real estate agents or who are best mortgage brokers and ask Google and maybe we’ll look at the first page of results. We’re just gonna go, what’s the answer? Like maximum short list of three, just tell me the answer. To what extent do you anticipate that people will start to consume their news that way, that they won’t seek out trusted sources, they’ll just ask Gemini or ChatGVT or Claude or other options are available, and say, just generate me a primer on this.

ZARA

I’d say that we’re already there. So we’ve seen with legacy media publishers who are reliant on web that they’ve seen somewhere between an 80 to 90% downturn in search traffic and that used to be the kind of prime of the business. And it’s now that young people are just reading the AI overview at the top. And so for us, it’s how are we surfacing there? How can we make sure that there is reputable fact there? Doing things, you know, GEO rather than SEO, that’s part of the equation that like, had you asked me a year ago, whether we’d be doing this, would have not known what GEO was. But I think that we’re already there. And I think we, as a business, need to be keeping up with these trends, not waiting for them to happen, because we need to ahead of them. And just like consumption habits change that put social media and news together, I think AI and news and search and news. Are seeing a huge transformation at the moment.

MATT

I was consulting to Google, gosh, 10 years ago now on the launch of their early hardware and Pixel phones and one of the things we talked about a lot was that Google had started in search but it needed to really understand that in everything it did, it was a search business. It was a, the world is full of too much information. How do you quickly find what you’re looking for? How do search? And I think increasingly, and I was watching some of their IO developers conference this week, they are becoming an answers business. Anyway, it’s a whole. Huge change. So talking of changes, you’ve touched on it a bit, but I want to go a little bit deeper around sort of platform dependency. You know, you start with that brilliant habit stacking and habit hacking and going where the people are and going on social media, but you quickly realize that there is a fragility there. Talk about the moment when that fragility really sort of came home to roosting, like, okay, we need to deal with this.

ZARA

Yeah, so it was day one of being a business because we, so we raised that round of capital, quit our jobs, started our full-time jobs as founders of the Daily Ozz, just Sam and I, and on that day Facebook announced it was taking news off its platform and we had just taken…

MATT

Such beautiful timing.

ZARA

Oh, yeah, look looking back beautiful timing right then didn’t feel very

MATT

Did they send you flowers and champagne as well? I paid as well.

ZARA

It was amazing. We had just taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from people saying, we are gonna build something amazing on social media. And then social media said, no, you’re not.

MATT

And so- Quick sidebar, how many-calls from investors did you get as they read that news?

ZARA

What? They were actually amazing. We were sitting in an investor’s office at the time, because obviously we didn’t have an office. We were kind of sitting on the ground trying to make do. And I remember he poked his head up and was like, what happened now? And we were like, figure it out. And so we sat that day, we went down to the cafe in Paddington and we sat down that day and said, right, they’re gonna take this away from us. At that point, it wasn’t off on Instagram, but we knew that it was kind of a matter of time. And we... Created a newsletter that day. And again, it was just by pure necessity. That newsletter today is, I think, somewhere between half a million, what? Yeah, that newsletter today has half a million subscribers across a few newsletters that we run and brings in the most revenue of any product we have. And had that external pressure not happened, I don’t know that we would have pivoted. We needed that wake up call that, in fact, one call between Mark Zuckerberg and Josh Frydenberg can really blow it all up for us and that that was too risky and we’ve seen that sort of thing happen over the years. We’ve had to double down on those other diversification methods and all of those things I think taken together have been really good for the business and have made us much healthier.

MATT

I think we had a coffee not too long after that apocalyptic or near visualizing death moment, right? And I reckon if I’d offered you then a newsletter that had 100,000 subscribers, you’d have taken it. So to get to the scale you’ve got, and I look at the numbers and I think I saw the other day that The Guardian Australia’s readership has now started to outstrip some of the Fairfax and some of, you know, the traditional links. It’s amazing those shifts, and so to be at those numbers is extraordinary.

ZARA

And the newsletter is the best. Like I, there was this, I don’t know if it’s a myth or if it was just under research. There was an idea that young people wouldn’t take to newsletters because they weren’t on email. It wasn’t as sexy as socials. It is the most intimate form of relationship that you can have with an audience. And that newsletter audience is exceptional. And oftentimes when I run into people on the street they talk about the introduction. To that day’s newsletter. And I think that it is such a different type of relationship as this podcast. This is another very different format and we wanna be for everyone. So if you’re not a reader and you’re a listener, then you can get it somewhere else. We wanna be everyone.

MATT

But podcasts and emails, they’ve got something in common, which is they’re sort of, they’re permission-based, they’re sorta consent-led and they’re intimate.

ZARA

You’re choosing to engage with it.

MATT

Can you just give really quickly for anyone who’s trying to figure out how to use email the Zara Seidler 30 second TED talk on how to make email a positive weapon and not just be something that just gets unopened and chucked into the junk time again because I reckon a lot of people listening to this would be like my business sends emails no one ever reads them no one ever clicks on them and I know I get lots of emails that I never read and never click on.

ZARA

Don’t make it a marketing led tool, make it content led tool. For us, we are not aggregating marketing stuff. We’re not aggregated stuff that’s already there. We are writing this native to email. It reads as if it is written just for you and just for your email. And that is a very different model to just pulling all the stories, having some hyperlinks and taking people off it. Make it intentional because it pays off.

MATT

And make it a gift, not an ask. There’s little gift drops in your inbox every day.

ZARA

Yeah, like how lucky you get to read about how cooked the world is every morning at 7 am. Aren’t you so lucky?

MATT

When you put it like that. Hey, I just want to touch on something and just rewind to that day because you just triggered something in me, which is the importance of choosing great investors. It wasn’t something I planned to talk to you about, but I think it’s just, that moment is so critical because that moment also goes differently had you made different choices about who you would allow to invest in you slash had they invested for different reasons. And if you had had cynical people who’d invested in a business model and a fast path to growth. They didn’t really care about who you were, who Sam was, they just trusted in the model. And then on day one, they see the models potentially got exploded. That’s very different to a world where they chose you and you chose them and people trust people. And they’re like, you got this, you’ll figure it out.

ZARA

So different and I mean we were so lucky when we approached investors we had no revenue model to be spoken of. We had no idea how we were going to make money and again I think because these people were values aligned, they were mission aligned, it meant that they could withstand the pressures that came with investing in a media business and they took a huge risk on us. I mean, we were completely unproven. I was 21 like god knows what who I should have doing or what I would have been doing. And they believed in us and it meant that we could take the risks and try and experiment. Without that, TDA wouldn’t exist, without a doubt.

MATT

It’s kind of amazing, isn’t it? It is. And I look back and go, why did people invest? Would I today, I hope that I would have had the wisdom to invest in Four Pillars or the Daniels. And I looked back and got the only reason for them to do that was because of the people. And because of people and the talents and the energy and the vision we brought to it. Not the business model.

ZARA

No, they believe in founders. And we heard that time and time again, they believed in Sam and Zara, and that is a huge honor and a huge respect. And we just have to work every day to make sure that that was the right investment for them.

MATT

You’re now diversifying quite a lot to the point where you have multiple different newsletters. You’ve also got this sort of new, almost like consultancy arm, where you’re trying to educate businesses and leaders about young audiences and how to deal with them. How are you, what are you doing? And how are you? Not what, what’re you doing, but what are, what you doing and how are choosing what not to do? Because there must be so many tempting paths that you have to say, no, no. That is too far from the mission. That is not gonna help us to get where we wanna go.

ZARA

Yeah I think what we are doing is choosing what is our unique value proposition and as we’ve spoken about at length it’s trust and so we’re building ecosystems around that trust so for us the original business model was advertising um that is how a lot of you know media businesses survive thrive whatever it is um but we realized quite a while ago that we were also building this machine and this vehicle of trusted behaviors, attitudes and ideas of young people that other people didn’t have, wanted to know but couldn’t access. And so with future proof that our way of building that up and having young people’s voices heard is can we spin out a consulting arm that is separate to TDA but uses the insights to really make. What Gen Z is saying and the future generations, and bring it to the C suites at, you know, the biggest companies in this country because they’re trying to make decisions about what the next generation want, both with their wallet and with their employment, but they aren’t using contemporary information. And so we’re just trying to plug that gap because we’ve got so much of that data at our fingertips.

MATT

It’s really interesting, isn’t it? It’s almost anywhere where there is a trust deficit, where there’s an engagement deficit, where there was a relevancy deficit. It doesn’t mean that you’re always going to fix all of those deficits, but you can at least add value and provide a view and a perspective.

ZARA

Correct, we’re not fixing it for the big four, we’re just trying to create again, almost this foundation of fact, it’s don’t work on assumption, work on fact. We can tell you what they’re thinking about AI, we can tell what they thinking about working from home. You don’t need to have these multi-month long surveys, we’ll tell you and then work with that foundation of fact to create good policy at your organization.

MATT

What is the number one thing about the business that exists today that surprises you that you really couldn’t have anticipated when you began?

ZARA

I think the fact that I have close to 30 people showing up and sharing in that mission, I think it felt like a very personal mission to Sam and I. And the fact it is not so personal and that it is shared among people who have taken a huge risk, quit their jobs in very established media, in very establish newsrooms and come to work with us. I think had I thought about that on the day I quit my job. I could have never conceptualized it and I think there is nothing more gratifying than having a shared mission and I thing so much of what we’re trying to do is build community and the fact that we’ve even been able to build community internally at our organization is my greatest source of pride and something I could’ve never expected.

MATT

And to go back to the start, it’s a both community. It’s the fact that you’re pulling in incredible content creators and influencers who want to become more authoritative and trusted, and you’re putting in people from traditional newsrooms and sort of legacy media organizations who wanna join. What do you hope will surprise you in 10 years’ time? Which is a weird, stupid question, because if you can expect it, you can’t entirely surprise you. But what might be the biggest surprise or gift that the future gives you?

ZARA

Well, I think that there is a, there is a fear I think, that we consider around, we don’t want necessarily the audience to age up with us, that we think that, there’s a lot that services older generations and we want to be for everyone, but we think, young audiences are really under represented when it comes to media. And so I think I would just be so thrilled if the next generation of 15 to 18 year olds, who are currently, you know. 10 are reading what we do then and that we have managed to continue to serve as this Incredibly under serviced group. I think I’d be thrilled with that

MATT

And I think you are just a phenomenal example of a leader and an entrepreneur on a mission and doing amazing things. And you happen to also be an extraordinary woman. So thank you, Zara Seidler.

ZARA

Thanks for having me.

My conversation with Dom Pym was only supposed to go for an hour. We wrapped up almost 90 minutes later, and I immediately knew my decision to start a podcast was a good one. Even if the last thing this content-saturated world apparently needs is another content creator.

I interviewed Dom because I wanted to understand how he built Up bank, one of Australia’s most dynamic fintech start-ups. But the more he talked, the less it sounded like a fintech story and the more it sounded like the culmination of decades of maverick thinking about how to build a category-reshaping business. In fact, key to the success of Up was that Dom never told himself he was building a bank. The story he told himself was instead about using technology to change people’s relationship with money.

Dom is the first guest on StoryWork, my new podcast that explores the role story plays in building businesses, leading organisations and making change happen. He describes himself as a “30-year overnight success”, which is a good line but also a useful reminder about the way we tend to misunderstand entrepreneurship.

Cursed with survivor bias, we focus on the company that worked, the funding round that succeeded and the exit that cemented the dream. We rarely see the decades of relationships, experiments, odd diversions and divergent capabilities that eventually collide at exactly the right moment.

Dom had been at the forefront of successive waves of technology long before fintech became fintech. He built enterprise software, worked in financial markets and built some of the earliest apps in Apple’s App Store. But he also spent years around music and creative culture and, crucially, kept working with many of the same people.

When Dom and his team decided to build Up, they made a decision I haven’t stopped thinking about since our conversation. As I see it, if you or I were setting out to build a new banking business, a start-up in one of the world’s most heavily regulated industries, the conventional wisdom would be to fill the room with banking people. We’d hire people who understood banking products, regulation, technology and risk, and who could reassure everyone involved (especially investors) that we knew how banks worked.

Dom and his team took a different path. They recognised that Up didn’t need to reinvent every part of banking to reinvent the experience of it. The partnership with Bendigo Bank provided the institutional capability, regulatory infrastructure and trust required to operate, freeing Dom and his team to concentrate their energy where they could create the greatest distinctive advantage.

That strikes me as a seriously underappreciated form of strategy. We celebrate founders who want to own everything, control everything and take credit for everything. But sometimes the more powerful question is: what are we uniquely good at, and who is already better than us at everything else?

In Up’s case, that also meant building a team from a wildly divergent collection of worlds. As Dom described it, Up brought together “multimedia, graphic designers, product people, engineers, user experience designers, video production, special effects” and drew on cultural influences including “surfing and skateboarding and music and anti-culture”.

Again, not the obvious ingredients for a bank. But that was precisely the point. The team had deep technological fluency without being trapped by a lifetime of banking assumptions. They understood what technology could do but were equally fascinated by how things looked, felt and made people feel. Dom himself had repeatedly been early to technological change, yet he doesn’t talk like someone besotted with technology for its own sake. He talks about people, experiences, design, emotion, culture and even love.

One tiny story from our conversation captures this beautifully. Dom talked about how, as money has become digital, we have lost much of our physical relationship with it. A $10 note once had weight. You held it in your hand and felt yourself handing it over. Spending money involved a physical act that made its value tangible in a way that tapping a screen often doesn’t.

So the Up team became obsessed with how technology could restore some of that feeling. One of the details they created was haptic feedback that made it feel as though coins were moving around inside your phone like a digital piggy bank. It’s a tiny feature, but it tells you an enormous amount about the business they were trying to build. They weren’t simply digitising banking. They were thinking about people’s relationship with money, then using technology, design and a little playfulness to change how that relationship felt. The innovation wasn’t the technology itself. It was the imagination to ask what a bank could do with it.

Up emerged from a collision of technological possibility, institutional expertise and a deeply human sensibility. Bendigo Bank provided capabilities that would have taken years, enormous amounts of capital and considerable risk to recreate, while Dom and his team concentrated on reimagining what the experience of money and banking could actually feel like. And that led to perhaps the biggest strategic shift in the whole story. Up stopped benchmarking itself against banks.

Instead of comparing the Up experience to those provided by CommBank, ANZ, Westpac or NAB, Dom’s team looked to apps from other categories that people actively chose to put on the home screen of their phones. In the process, they stopped asking how to build a better bank and started asking how to build something people might actually love. And the love for Up is real with Dom telling me that more than 80 per cent of Up’s growth came through word of mouth.

I started our conversation wanting to understand how Dom Pym built Up. I finished it thinking about how badly we tell founder stories. We tell them backwards. Once someone succeeds, every previous step becomes evidence of inevitable progress towards the thing we now know they built. But real careers and real founder stories aren’t that neat. Perhaps that is what makes “30-year overnight success” more than a good line. We notice entrepreneurial success when its financial value suddenly becomes visible. But by then, the more interesting forms of capital (like taste, culture, knowledge, experience and relationships) may have been compounding for decades. Dom eventually turned all of that into Up.

There is so much more to his story than I’ve shared here. Not least how Dom has now invested over $100m of his own money into Australia’s innovation economy (while helping to unlock billions more). I hope you’ll join me and Dom on the podcast to listen to the whole conversation for yourself. And, if my instincts are right, you’ll agree that maybe the world did need another podcast after all.

You can watch every episode of StoryWork right here on Substack (and enjoy my wider writing on the power of story in business, brand, culture, leadership and life). Or you can watch and listen wherever you prefer to get your podcasts. All the links you need are at www.storywork.com.au

In order to avoid the weirdness of me interviewing myself, I asked my old friend and professional journalist Amelia Adams to join me in the studio.

We talked about my career, my experiences, my learnings and where my ever-growing belief in the power of story has come from.

Fast forward to this week and my return to the Sydney winter after three weeks in the South of France (don’t hate me, one of those weeks was spent attending Cannes Lions). Once again, I have something new to launch.

Don’t panic. I haven’t decided to take on Aperol or Whispering Angel, and I certainly haven’t decided to start another gin brand. But I have decided to enter another category of abundance. Yes, I’m dedicating myself to solving one of the least pressing problems of our time: if only there were more podcasts.

Today, the first episode of my new podcast, StoryWork, goes live. It’s a conversation with Dom Pym, founder of Up bank and now one of Australia’s most significant start-up and fintech investors. So I guess I can add podcast host and “creator” to my self-indulgent LinkedIn bio. In my limited defence, one of the most persistent messages I heard at Cannes was that the future belongs to creators. So, at an age when I really ought to know better, I have decided to join the creator economy.

Beneath the apparent opportunism, however, the podcast has allowed me to address two more serious thoughts that have been bothering me. I think of them as the category error and the credibility chasm. Let’s start with the category error.

Story should come before strategy

I’ve spent most of my career working with stories. After a brief and inglorious stint in military intelligence and economic analysis, my career really got going as a political speechwriter. The challenge in politics is helping politicians understand the extent to which words, signals and emotions matter, not just clever policies and being “right”. If you want to make change happen, you’d better be comfortable with storytelling as a key part of your job description.

I moved into brand experience and ended up leading strategy at Jack Morton Worldwide in New York. The main lesson from my time there was that what brands do, and how they make people feel, matters even more than what they say. Story matters, but storydoing is even more important than storytelling.

Then I spent a decade helping build Four Pillars Gin. We used the story we wanted people to tell about Four Pillars to influence every business decision we made, from the gins we distilled to the people we hired and from the partnerships we built to the big bets we made. Through all of that, it has become blindingly obvious to me that story and the clarity it brings belongs at the heart of strategy, leadership, decision-making and culture as well as brand, marketing and communications.

But that’s not how story shows up in most businesses. Usually strategy comes first. Then product development and business modelling. Then organisational design and culture. Then leadership decisions and growth strategy. Eventually, once the serious people have finished doing all their serious things, someone from marketing is invited into the room and asked to tell the resulting story.

This has always struck me as completely backwards. Story is so much more than how we explain what we have done. It is one of the fundamental ways we decide what to do in the first place. We use stories to turn complexity into meaning. To imagine futures that do not yet exist. And to convince others to join us in making those futures real.

Strategy is a story about where we are going, the path we will take and the choices we need to make to get there. Leadership is the ability to make people believe in that story strongly enough to act and align them strongly enough to keep the business on the right path. Culture is the collection of stories an organisation tells itself about what it values and how it needs to behave. And a strong brand is what happens when enough people encounter enough consistent evidence to believe and share your story and make it their own.

A better question

All of this has led me towards a question I find much more interesting than “what story do we want to tell?” A better question is “what story are we trying to make true?” The difference is critical. If your story is simply something you tell, marketing can own it. But if it’s something you’re trying to make true, everyone needs to own it. The product becomes part of the story. The customer experience becomes part of the story. Culture and leadership decisions become part of the story. The things you choose to do, and refuse to do, all become part of the story.

So the first itch I hope my podcast will scratch is addressing this category error: the miscategorising of the art and power of story. I want to unearth lived experience and evidence of its power beyond the narrow marketing and communications frame of “storytelling”, starting today with the brilliant Dom Pym.

A new dynamic around proving good thinking

Which leads neatly to the second itch: the credibility chasm. I have spent much of my professional life writing speeches, strategies, presentations, a book and now this column. For most of that time, good writing was a reasonable proxy for good thinking. If you encountered a well-argued piece of writing under someone’s name, there was at least a decent chance they (or, in the case of speechwriters, someone who worked for them) had done the intellectual labour required to produce it.

That contract has now broken. Today anyone can produce an articulate thousand-word article in seconds. Or a very sincere Linkedin post about the five leadership lessons they learned while assembling an Ikea wardrobe. Sure, the words may be perfectly serviceable. But increasingly they will tell you very little about whether the person behind them can actually think, or what beliefs drive their thinking.

Writing has become less reliable as evidence of expertise and credibility. The world is filling up with content that has no real story or authority behind it. And this matters because, at the exact same time as polished expression is becoming more and more abundant but less and less persuasive, we need leaders to use their powers of storytelling and influence more than ever.

Build credibility before you need it

I thought about this recently when I received a generic-feeling mea culpa email from Telstra CEO Vicki Brady after their latest outage and national outrage. It was hard to know whether the email was really from her, or in her words, because I’d never heard her speak. I hadn’t heard her think out loud. At a time when brands increasingly need to be personified by credible human voices and faces, it’s too late to start building that credibility at the exact moment you need it to do the heavy lifting.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the creator economy and long-form content are exploding at exactly the same moment as generative AI is eroding the value of generic, short-form content through endless slop. As content becomes abundant and easy, provenance and friction become more valuable. Show me where it came from. Show me who made it. Let me see the thinking, the craft and occasionally the mess behind the finished product.

This is true at a brand level too. I recently visited the Sydney headquarters of jeweller Fairfax & Roberts and met its recently appointed CEO, Joshua Rogers. Josh walked me past the workshop where Fairfax & Roberts continues to make its fabulous pieces by hand, using tools dating back to the mid-1800s. I was captivated. Within seconds, I went from being an ignorant brand agnostic to a brand fan. Not because Josh had told me a better story about craftsmanship. But because I had seen the evidence. I had witnessed the working.

So yes, I have a podcast to spruik and some seriously fascinating conversations to share. But StoryWork is also an experiment built around these two questions I can’t stop thinking about. What happens if we stop treating story as something we tell after the important work is done, and start treating it as part of the important work itself? And, in a world where anyone can manufacture the appearance of competence and expertise, how do we make the real things more visible and persuasive?

Perhaps both questions lead towards some version of the same idea. Make the story true. Let people see the working behind it. And, in the process, earn a little more belief.

I have no idea whether the world needs another podcast. I do think it needs better ways of understanding who to believe, which stories are worth paying attention to and how those stories become true. So that at least seems worth talking about.

Dom’s story was the epitome of what I wanted StoryWork to shine a light on…

The power of capturing business strategy, vision and purpose in the form of a story that aligns and animates every effort and decision.

The importance of feelings, design, emotions and experiences to business success.

The opportunity to make sense of diverse opportunities, ideas, influences and talents.

The need to look beyond your category to create a different story of what an industry (in Dom’s case, banking) could feel like.

It’s an amazing story and an awesome conversation. Have a watch or listen here, or wherever you prefer to get your podcasts.

And make sure you subscribe to hear every episode (there’s a genuinely astounding list of interviewees on the way) and to get extra bonus content, including a future director’s cut of the full Dom interview in all its extended glory!

Ok, so it’s not The Odyssey or the new Spiderman, but it is an epic trailer. At least it is for me. It’s the trailer for my new podcast, StoryWork.

If you’re in the business of growing something, anything…a business, a brand, an organisation, a movement, a career….and you want to learn more about how to leverage the power of story then you’re in the right place.