You built the app. It works. It might even be better than Dropbox. And six months later it's sitting in the same graveyard as every other product nobody ever heard of. Dan Koe keeps circling back to this scene because it exposes a chain most builders try to skip: you need customers, customers come from attention, attention comes from media, and media now lives on social media. Skip any link and the chain breaks.1
The counterintuitive core: there is no such thing as "a software business" or "a fitness business" or "a consulting business" anymore — underneath, they are all media businesses that happen to sell different things. The product is downstream. The attention is the business. And if you have multiple interests and keep wondering what to do with them, Koe's answer is almost rude in its simplicity: you should probably just become a content creator, because that's the one structure that turns attention into a living.2
"Every business is a media business" gets thrown around as a slogan. Koe actually builds it as a short logical chain, and the chain is what matters.3
Step one: to be self-sufficient you need a business. Step two: every business needs to attract customers. Step three: customers require attention — people have to know you exist before they can buy. Step four: attention comes from media. Step five: media now lives on social media. So a business that won't do media is a business that won't get attention, which is a business that won't get customers.4
Strip the mechanism bare and it's this: the bottleneck of any modern business isn't building the thing, it's getting the thing noticed, and the only scalable, no-cost way to get noticed is to produce media. Koe is careful about the platform layer — social media platforms "may not last forever, but something is going to take their place," and you'll have to adapt when it does.5 The platform is replaceable; the principle isn't. The medium changes, the need for media doesn't.
Here's the reversal that makes the idea bite. Most people think the hard, valuable work is building the product, and marketing is the annoying afterthought. Koe flips it. Building is the part anyone can now do — "anyone's going to be able to create anything." The scarce, hard, valuable part is being the one people know about.6
He makes it physical. You can have the greatest mobile app or SaaS product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, "it just ends up like every single other product or SaaS app that's been created in the past that nobody knows about, it just doesn't go anywhere."7 The product without media isn't a quiet success waiting to be discovered — it's a non-event. Distribution isn't the cherry on top; it's the cake.
This is why the media layer isn't optional even for businesses that don't feel like "content." A SaaS company that refuses to do media is choosing to compete on paid ads and cold outreach forever — renting attention because it never built any. The internal logic says: the company that produces media owns a standing supply of attention, and the company that doesn't has to buy attention by the unit, every single day, until it runs out of money. The media layer is the difference between owning a well and buying bottled water.
This page supplies the premise that several other pages assume. They tell you to build an audience; this one tells you why you have no choice.
It sits directly upstream of its sibling Own Distribution vs Manual / Bot / Borrowed: if every business is a media business, then owned distribution stops being a creator's luxury and becomes every operator's requirement. It grounds Attention as the Last Moat by explaining where attention comes from in the first place — media — before that page argues attention is defensible. And it gives operational teeth to Everybody Is a Media Company, turning a statement of identity ("you are a media company") into a chain of necessity ("here's why you can't opt out").
Koe runs one example all the way through, and it's worth following because it's where the abstract chain becomes a graveyard. He imagines someone who "vibe codes" a Dropbox alternative — builds it fast with AI, maybe even builds something genuinely valuable.8
Then he twists the knife with the part builders never price in. Without distribution or an audience, that person is "going to be putting in like a marathon's worth of effort into getting capital for it, into getting customers or users into finding talent and everything else that goes into building the business."9 The build was the sprint. The getting-noticed is the marathon, and it's the marathon nobody trained for.
The case study's real lesson hides in the contrast Koe draws with his own position. He has an audience, so if his next product flopped, he'd "have people who would be willing to invest or work on the team, or even just support the next product."10 Same product, two different fates — and the only variable is whether there was a media layer underneath. The vibe-coded app with no audience dies on launch; the same app with an audience underneath gets investors, talent, and second chances handed to it. The media layer isn't marketing for the product — it's the foundation the product stands on, which is why Koe says it "doesn't even cost you money to post content," while the audience-less builder has to buy every single thing the audience would have given for free.11
It's 8:00 in the morning and you're doing what you'd do anyway — reading about the thing you can't stop reading about. Today it's how storage encryption actually works, because you're half-thinking about that Dropbox alternative.
Old you would close the tab and keep the knowledge private. New you stops. You remember Koe's reframe: "just think of social media as a mechanism to do independent work. If you love learning, great, reframe it as research. And now that's literally your main job."12 So the reading isn't procrastination from building the business — it is building the business.
You open a blank post. You write the one thing you just understood that you didn't understand an hour ago, in plain words, the way you'd explain it to a friend who asked. You're "taking notes in public," exactly as Koe describes his own process — most of what he writes "simply come from me learning about my interests."13 You publish. You go back to reading. You didn't carve out a separate "marketing hour" you resent. You just spent the learning time you were already spending, in public, and now there's a media layer accreting under whatever you build next. The note in public is the foundation pouring itself while you study.
You can spot a business that's pretending it isn't a media business:
Koe hedges the prescription himself: "I don't want to just give a blanket prescription [to] everyone, but... you should probably become a content creator."17 [POPULAR SOURCE] The "probably" is load-bearing. The chain (customers → attention → media) is strong, but the leap to "therefore you should be a content creator" smuggles in an assumption that everyone's path runs through personal content — which isn't obviously true for, say, a local trades business or a deep-tech firm selling to ten enterprise buyers.
There's a tension with the platform layer that Koe acknowledges but doesn't resolve. He says platforms may die and "something is going to take their place," and "you're going to have to adapt."18 But if the platform is rented ground that can vanish, then "social media is where attention lives" is a moving target — and the only truly durable media asset (an email list) is the one Koe mentions least in this stretch. The chain's last link ("media lives on social media") may be the weakest, because social media is exactly the part you don't own.
A 🚩 motivated-reasoning note: Koe sells courses and software to content creators, so "everyone should become a content creator" is a conclusion that happens to expand his market. The logic stands on its own merits, but the convenient alignment is worth flagging.19
Koe and the Everybody Is a Media Company framing arrive at the same destination — but Perell states it as identity and Koe argues it as necessity. Perell says: recognize that you are a media company now, because the tools of broadcast are in your hands. Koe says: you must operate as one, because here's the chain of customers-attention-media that gives you no exit. The convergence is the claim itself. The productive difference is the mood — Perell's is an invitation to claim power, Koe's is closer to a warning that the alternative is the product graveyard. Read together, "everybody is a media company" stops being a flattering reframe and becomes a competitive reality you ignore at your peril.
Against its own sibling Own Distribution vs Manual / Bot / Borrowed, there's a tension worth holding. This page says "media lives on social media," but the owned-distribution page would point out that social media is mostly rented ground — borrowed and bot faucets dressed up as your own. The honest synthesis: every business is a media business, but the media that counts is the media you own, which is why the chain shouldn't end at "social media" but at "an audience and list you control." Koe gestures at this with the email-list point but lets the social-media framing dominate here, and the sibling page corrects the drift.
Plain version: this idea — that every business is really a media business — connects to two others: the claim that you're already a media company whether you admit it or not, and its own sibling about owning your distribution. Each connection sharpens what "media business" actually demands.
To Everybody Is a Media Company / The Sovereign Individual (behavioral-mechanics). Perell's page makes a historical argument: the technology of mass communication, once locked inside institutions, is now in everyone's pocket, so every individual and every business is functionally a media company. Koe takes that identity claim and runs it forward into a chain of consequence. The structural parallel is clean — both say the media function has collapsed into the business itself, no longer outsourced to a marketing department or an ad agency. But the handshake yields something neither states alone. Perell's framing can feel empowering and optional, a flattering new self-image. Koe's chain removes the optionality: if customers come from attention and attention comes from media, then refusing to be a media company isn't a stylistic choice, it's a decision to forfeit customers. Put the two together and you get the full force of the idea: "everybody is a media company" is true the way "everybody who jumps off a building is subject to gravity" is true — not a perspective you can adopt or decline, but a condition you operate under. The insight is that the media-company reframe is usually sold as liberation, but its sharper edge is obligation — the businesses that thrive aren't the ones who get to do media, they're the ones who realize they were never exempt. And the obligation cuts deeper than marketing departments assume: if the media function has collapsed into the business itself, you can't hire it away to an agency the way you once could. The founder, the operator, the person with the actual point of view becomes the media. That's liberating for the individual who wants it and terrifying for the company that wanted to keep its leaders invisible — which is exactly why so many businesses stall here, treating media as a department to staff rather than a function they themselves now embody.
To Own Distribution vs Manual / Bot / Borrowed (business). This sibling page sorts distribution into rented and owned faucets and argues only the owned one is a real asset. "Every business is a media business" is the premise that makes that sorting urgent — if media is now mandatory, the only question left is which kind of media faucet you build. The parallel: both pages reject the idea that a business can quietly skip distribution. The tension they expose together is the valuable part. This page says media lives on social media; the distribution page warns that social media is mostly rented ground. Hold both and a sharper claim emerges that neither makes alone: every business must become a media business, but a business that builds its entire media presence on rented platforms has merely relocated its dependence, not escaped it. The media graveyard Koe describes has two wings — products nobody heard of, and audiences that vanished when a platform changed its algorithm or shut down. The real instruction isn't "do media," it's "do media you own," and it takes both pages stacked to see that the obvious advice (be a media business) is incomplete without the unobvious correction (own the channel, or you're just renting your way to the same graveyard by a slower road).
The Sharpest Implication. If the product is the easy part and being-known is the hard part, then for most builders the rational allocation of effort is inverted from what they actually do. Spending 90% of your time building and 10% on distribution isn't humble craftsmanship — it's optimizing the cheap half and starving the expensive half. The marathon is distribution; the sprint is the build.
Generative Questions.