Latest / Startup Stories with Fexingo: Conversations About Founders, Funding, and Building Companies from Zero / How Atlas Obscura Turned Curiosity Into a Media Business
Transcript
- Lucas: So there's this website that catalogs the weirdest stuff on Earth. An abandoned Soviet submarine base in Balaklava. A museum of broken relationships in Zagreb. A giant concrete beaver in Oregon. Luna: Atlas Obscura. I've spent hours on that site. Lucas: Right. And what's interesting is that it started as a single email in 2009. Not a business plan. Not a venture pitch. Just a guy named Joshua Foer sending a list of oddities to a bunch of friends. Luna: Foer wrote the book 'Moonwalking with Einstein', about memory. So he's coming at this from a curiosity-driven place, not a media background. Lucas: Exactly. And that email spread. It became a website. A book. Then a travel company. By 2023, they were doing something like 25 million unique visitors a month, and they'd guided tens of thousands of people on trips to places like the catacombs of Paris. Luna: And they did it without the typical media playbook. No viral content factory, no programmatic ads choking the page. How did they build a real business around that? Lucas: Well, let's start with the economics. Atlas Obscura's revenue is roughly three-legged: advertising, but lightly; their tours business, which is a high-margin, high-ticket product; and membership, called 'Obscura Society'. Luna: I remember when they launched that. It was a subscription tier for the deeply curious. Lucas: Right. And here's the key number: by 2022, tours and experiences accounted for about half their revenue. That's a very different media company than one that lives or dies by CPMs. Luna: So they're essentially a travel operator dressed in media clothing. But they also have enormous content costs — writers, editors, fact-checkers — to maintain that voice. Lucas: They do, but they've been disciplined about content investment. Early on, Foer and co-founder Dylan Thuras ran the whole thing themselves. They didn't hire a big editorial team until they had revenue to support it. Luna: That's a hard lesson for a lot of media startups. They raise money, hire writers, and then scramble for clicks to justify the burn. Lucas: Atlas Obscura raised a $7.5 million Series A from some prominent angels — including Chris Sacca and Ryan Holiday — but they did it in 2016, seven years after starting. That's glacial by startup standards. Luna: Seven years? Why so late? Lucas: Because they were bootstrapping the core product. The site grew by word of mouth. Readers submitted entries. The book deal with Workman Publishing came in 2016 and was a bestseller. That gave them cash and credibility before they took outside money. Luna: So the book was actually a strategic move, not just a side project. Lucas: Absolutely. The book is essentially a productized version of the website, but it also serves as a marketing funnel. People buy the book, discover trips listed in it, then book a tour. That's a flywheel. Luna: Let's talk about the tours business specifically. How do you take a media audience and sell them a thousand-dollar trip to see the world's largest collection of toenail clippings? Lucas: Carefully. They don't just run a tour to a random oddity. They curate experiences that have narrative — a historian, a local guide, access you can't get on your own. The price point covers that exclusivity. Luna: And the margin on those has to be pretty good, compared to digital advertising. Lucas: Exactly. Digital advertising for a niche site like this might yield a two to three dollar CPM. A tour can easily be a thousand dollars per person with a high conversion rate on a loyal audience. Luna: But scaling tours is hard. It's people-heavy, insurance-heavy, and geographically constrained. Lucas: That's true. They don't try to be Expedia. They run maybe 200 to 300 trips a year, with an average of 12 people per trip. It's deliberately small. That keeps quality high and risk low. Luna: I read somewhere that their repeat customer rate is over 30 percent for tours. People come back because the experience is genuinely weird and well-run. Lucas: Right. And that's a business that builds equity over time. Compare that to a media company that chases the same viral story every week. Atlas Obscura's content has a half-life of years, not hours. Luna: What about the membership program? The Obscura Society. That's a recurring revenue stream. Lucas: It is. For around 50 bucks a year, you get a digital passport, a print magazine, and access to members-only events. It's not their biggest revenue line, but it builds community and gives them a direct relationship with the audience. Luna: That's smart because it also insulates them from algorithm changes. If Google decides to de-rank 'weird sights in Ohio', they still have their members. Lucas: Exactly. And look at the current media landscape. In the last two years, BuzzFeed shut down its news division, Vice filed for bankruptcy, and Vox Media laid off hundreds. What do those companies have in common? They all chased scale first, monetization second. Luna: Atlas Obscura did the opposite. They built a small, passionate audience, then slowly introduced paying products. Lucas: And they never raised more than about 20 million dollars total. Compare that to Vice, which raised over a billion and a half. Atlas Obscura is profitable — or at least sustainably break-even — and it's still independent. Luna: So what's the lesson for someone building a media business today? Is it that niche is better than broad? Lucas: I think the lesson is more specific: don't build a media company. Build a business that happens to use media as its customer acquisition channel. Atlas Obscura sells experiences and membership. The website is the funnel, not the product. Luna: That's a reframe. Most media startups think the content is the product. But content is cheap to produce and hard to sell. Experiences are hard to produce but easy to sell. Lucas: Right. And if these kinds of conversations have moved your own thinking forward in some small way, by the way, listener support is what keeps this show going. No ads, no sponsors — just people who find it useful chipping in at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a low-key way to help us keep doing this. Luna: Yeah. And we really appreciate it. It lets us stay independent and focused on the stories that actually matter. Lucas: So back to Atlas Obscura — the real takeaway, I think, is that patience is a competitive advantage. They spent years building a community before they ever asked for money. And by the time they did ask, the community was happy to pay. Luna: It's the opposite of the growth-at-all-costs mentality. They optimized for trust, not traffic. Lucas: Exactly. And now, as the media industry goes through its own reckoning, Atlas Obscura looks like it built the only kind of media company that actually works in the long run.