Blockworks' Revenue Evolution

A story about how Jason Yanowitz and his cofounder bootstrapped Blockworks from sending hundreds of LinkedIn messages to hosting major crypto conferences.

"Mike and I were just roommates at the time, we were 23 when we launched the business. We'd wake up at 4 AM and jump on LinkedIn. We had no media business experience, we didn't even know what media was. We just wanted to host an event because we went to an event and realized they made $5,000 - that was big money to us.

We would send like 300 messages every morning on LinkedIn. 10% of those people would reply, that's 30. We'd get like 3 out of the 30 to actually buy a ticket. Our first event in February 2018 had 220 people and we made $12,000 in top line revenue. That's when we were off to the races.

We ended up building the media company backwards. We did events, then linked up with Pomp for podcasting. I would go into Pomp's office 7 days a week, including weekends. I would put the mic in front of his face, learned how to use GarageBand, edited the podcast, produced it, designed things on 99designs, and sold the sponsorships.

Then COVID hit and 80% of our revenue got wiped out overnight because events were 80% of our revenue. That's when we pivoted into media. Now our biggest conference, Permissionless, did well over $10 million in revenue last year."