Max Kabat is the co-founder of goodDog, a brand consultancy. I first met Max and his partner Lisa Hyman way back in 2013, when they first hired me to partner on brand discovery for their client, Leesa Sleep. Since then, we have partnered many, many times, and I was excited to hear more about him, Marfa and his story.
Max is also the publisher of the West Texas newspaper The Big Bend Sentinel and owner of The Sentinel, a community gathering space in Marfa, Texas.
Max, very good to see you. Thank you so much for agreeing to be a part of this.
Yeah, happy to be a part of this, Peter. Always nice chatting with you, my friend.
Nice. So I start all these conversations in the same way, with the question that I borrowed slash stole from a neighbor here in Hudson. She teaches oral history. Her name is Suzanne Snyder. And I love the question so much, but it's so beautiful, I kind of overexplain it. I caveat it up front. So before I ask, I want you to know that you're in total control. You can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?
Yeah, I come from New York. I'm a New Yorker. I spent the first 30 something years of my life, mostly in the Northeast. I went to college in rural Pennsylvania. And yeah, that was where I sort of was born and bred and raised. And then I married, I met a cattle rancher's daughter from South Texas. And I moved to Texas in 2016, about eight years ago.
And you're from New York. So where did you grow up? Where were you?
Yeah, my parents are products of immigration of some sort. And they were both born and raised in and around New York City. I was born in New York City, in Manhattan, and then my parents moved up the Hudson River to Briarcliff Ossining when I was a two-year-old kid, and that's where I was sort of raised.
Yeah. And what do you have memories of, as a kid, what you wanted to be when you grew up?
Oh, I don't know, probably any kid during that era, I probably wanted to be a professional athlete. I think that all died quite quickly. I am athletic, but I am not very large and not very strong. And so yeah, that probably died pretty quickly.
Yeah. And what was life? What was it like growing up? And what do you say Briarcliff Ossining? Is that one of those adjacent?
Those are two towns. Yeah. But some people don't know Briarcliff Manor. It's now probably most known because Donald Trump bought the rinky-dinky golf course that was there and turned it into Trump National, probably in the last 20 plus years. Or it's also in Mad Men.
Oh, wow.
Oh, yeah. The main character, I can't remember his name at the moment travels up the Hudson. Don Draper goes to Briarcliff. That's where he lives. He commutes up to.
Oh, wow. What was it like growing up there? What was your.
Yeah. Suburban, you know, New York City, growing up this Westchester County, all the other, I think, counties that surround New York City in the Tri-State area. You know, people commute. A lot of people commute. A lot of people are involved in business and supporting business and all those kinds of things. And my parents didn't commute. They worked locally. But yeah, that was sort of the town I grew up in.
Yeah. Did you have a relationship with New York City? Did you identify as a New York?
100 percent. Yeah, 100 percent. I always said New York if I was in and around somewhere else, if somebody asked me where I was from, I would sort of start pointing towards the place, you know, and then or I was it's funny, I was growing up as a kid or even as a young adult living in New York City after college, I always took offense. Oh, you're from upstate. No, no, no, no. I'm not from upstate. Whereas now I live in literally in one of the most desolate places in the country. And, you know, rural America has a very soft spot in my heart. And I probably should have worn that more proudly as sure, I am from upstate technically north of the city would be up.
Yeah. Tell me about where you are now.
I'm in Marfa, Texas. It's in Big Bend country, the Big Bend region of far west Texas. I'm on the border. My closest city is El Paso, about 180 miles away. Or I live right in the middle of town. It's about 60 miles from the county that I'm in Presidio County borders as a port city. Ojinaga is the Mexico side. And Presidio is the U.S. side. And we're in a set of grasslands between two mountain ranges. Bottom of the Rockies. If you look at a map, the bottom of Rockies sort of spills out and goes actually all the way into Mexico. But we're at the bottom of the Rockies. So we're nine-tenths of a mile high in the high desert.
Yeah. And how do you describe Marfa to somebody who's not encountered it?
I think it's sort of an anomaly of a place. It's an island in the middle of the desert, as people call it. It's really hard to get to. It takes intestinal fortitude. It takes effort to get here, not just to live here. It takes an effort to get here. And so it's sort of a self-selecting kind of idea. And yeah, people. It's had a lot of change over the last bunch of years, the last hundred years, we should call it.
You know, there were World War bases that were out here. There were POW camps. This was the film Giant. Have you ever seen Giant was filmed out here. So this was sort of that at one point in time, even before that, it was Mexico? Was it the U.S.? Some people sort of made a border. And lo and behold, this was on the U.S. side. So, you know, it's part of the Chihuahuan Desert. The Chihuahuan Desert reaches starts in the state of Chihuahua, a little bit south of that in Mexico and comes up through West Texas, a little bit into Mexico, a little bit into Arizona.
So what is it? It's a place. It's an ecosystem. It has a border, but it doesn't. It was really great grazing and cattle country. And until it wasn't until it was overgrazed, it was the far reaches of desolation. It's known for really high-end art and sort of the father of minimalist art, Donald Judd came here in the 70s and sort of established himself and established the place. And so it's a lot of different things. An enigma, I don't know, might be a one-word answer, but a complicated but easy way to sort of explain that it's everything and nothing all at the same time.
Yeah. What do you think people get wrong about Marfa? There's an idea of what Marfa is, but people haven't really experienced it or known. But what do people not understand or get about it?
I think that it's interesting the last number of years, if anything changed in the pandemic, I think all the quote-unquote special places sort of got a lot more attention in the pandemic, especially if they were not in the middle of a city. People started exploring what it might look like to live somewhere else. And those places, everything drastically changed. I think it was sort of a lot of things went into turbo into overdrive. But. I'm sorry, your question again was I lost my train of thought.
What do people get wrong about Marfa?
There's probably an impression. Yeah, sorry. I remember where I was going with this. Thank you. I think people get wrong at everything about a place that they have expectations about what it's supposed to be. And they go in with these preconceived notions instead of just experiencing. And I think it's. That's what I would sort of hope people would be able to do as a visitor of a place, sort of experience what it is, take it for what it's worth. You know, if you go in with certain expectations, I think that sort of clouds your judgment. Not to say that that's not who we are as humans. We at our core. But when you go to a place and you have a preconceived notion of what it's supposed to be and the way it's supposed to be, you're probably stuck in a situation where it's not going to meet or maybe exceeds or. But I think it just sort of clouds the whole experience.
So I of course, we met through your work at Good Dog as a co-founder, brand strategy and growth strategy. You also have you're the publisher of the Big Bend Sentinel and the owner of the Cisco, which is a gathering space. How did let's start with the with Good Dog. How did you get into brand that kind of brand strategy work? When did you first sort of encounter the idea of brand and that you could make a living doing that kind of work?
Yeah. I had spent some time after college to go back to your early question. What did I want to be when I was brought up? I won't be an athlete. I really wanted to be in sports marketing. And that's what I thought I was going to do after college. And then two guys I used to caddy for in the summers offered me a job to go work on Wall Street.
So my first three years on were working on Wall Street at a broker-dealer firm and then at a hedge fund that was a client of the broker-dealer in trading equities, options, swaps, that kind of stuff. I didn't get an MBA, but I like to say that that sort of gave me an understanding of the way in which the business world works through a particular lens. But it just gave me a sort of a good understanding about business.
I didn't like where that was leading or what that was, what my life was like there. And I ended up spending a bunch of years at a media company that sold space, sold media to advertisers. They had an outdoor advertising business and a sports marketing signage and sponsorship business.
And it was sort of there, I like to say, that my education of the United States was I was spending a lot of time trying to ingratiate myself into the NASCAR community and sort of traveled around the country, not the coasts, the middle of the country and sort of realized very quickly that, oh, I am not from America. I might think that New York City is the center of the world and I might have all these ideas and ideals. But there's this whole other place called America that I don't know a lot about. And it made me sort of start to question a lot.
It was also after the 2008 crash, I was in college in 2001. So I think I was sort of already into this mindset of sort of questioning and thinking and realizing that we're, you know, the experience is short and we're all intertwined. And how do you leave the place better than when you started? And I realized that I think, you know, through that media sales, the company was called Van Wagner.
I realized that marketing had this awesome ability and advertising, this awesome ability to influence people and affect change. I was just sort of a cog in the wheel. I was part of the system. What happens if I could use the system to sort of do something different to start to sort of shift consciousness to a more conscious place? So that didn't work there at that media company.
I had tried to rally support from senior leadership to say, hey, what would happen if I could do this, but stay here? And they weren't really into that. So I ended up going to work for an integrated marketing agency where I met Lisa, my business partner, good dog. She was my boss. And she had built this thing that was called Green Dog, Good Dog. It was, you know, sort of using integrated marketing's ability to influence people and affect change, but do it for good, for good brands and all these sort of this is 15 years ago, let's say.
So, you know, one of the only ways in which you could vote with your dollar was to do it via food and beverage. That was sort of the closest tie to there's a you can eat organic, you can farm a certain way, you can support a certain kind of lifestyle. And it's also healthy for it's, you know, it's good for you and good for the planet kind of idea. And so those were sort of the first products and services. And so I participated in that rode that wave. And Lisa and I eventually spun out of the larger integrated shop that was like 250 people when we left. And it's and it's a two-person Good Dog is now like a two-person, high-level thinking, high-level doing shop where we work with founder-built brands and mostly in the twenty-five to three hundred million dollar run rate work through growth plateaus as they scale.
Yeah. Can you tell I love can you tell me a story about that moment where you encountered America, as you said, at the NASCAR?
You know, I'm I don't I think you said you're you won't be able to see me, but I'm a if you're from New York, I'm a curly-haired New York Jew. That's what I look like. Right. And so I talked a different way. I looked a little bit different. I acted a little bit different. I dressed a little bit different. And here I was trying to figure out how to get on the inside of a community that I didn't know a ton about.
I didn't grow up watching NASCAR, but I quickly realized that the fandom was incredibly palpable and super powerful and brands were spending oodles of dollars to try to ingratiate themselves into that community and at the same time sort of create these kinds of experiences. And those were things that the company I worked at was really good at. And also, yeah, I just was trying to figure out where was there a place for me in business? And I did it for a bunch of years and became a part of sort of the business community in some sense. I would travel from race to race. I would hang out in the pits. I met some really fantastic people.
It was a really amazing experience. And, you know, there's nothing like standing on the track and feeling the actual weight of cars racing around the track and how it shakes you to your core and wearing headphones. And it's a pretty event. People in the states. It's the whole thing is a spectacle. It's an amazing, amazing experience that travels week after week after week. But yeah, I think that sort of gave me a better idea of, wow, I'm such a pompous idiot, I'm totally not from there's this whole other place called America. I want to learn about this. Yeah, that's how I think I experienced that.
What do you love about the work that you do? A good dog. What's the joy in it for you?
Yeah, it's a good question. I think that, you know, the joy is I didn't know this at the time, but I guess I always had somewhat of an entrepreneurial spirit, right? Having your own consultancy can be a whole other conversation. Consultancy agency. We're using the word fixer because that's what Lisa and I really do. We're sort of we're brand fixers.
But you're an entrepreneur in and of itself, you're running your own business and you're entrepreneurial. But I think until my wife and I sort of started Macy, not Lisa, my business partner, Macy, my wife, when we started this project in Marfa. I think I realized that I always had this want to help people make their idea sort of flourish. And when there's too many people and too many cogs in the wheel and too much distance between the big idea or sort of the heartbeat of the business that's driving it forward and sort of the people that are helping it flourish and they're looked at as more of minions rather than part of a team. I didn't like that whole idea. I sort of wanted to exist in sort of this is a capitalistic society. I was more interested in existing in sort of things that were more tangible and tactile. And you could you felt like you were really your ideas and your influence on helping somebody make their business better was actually making a difference rather than was just sort of part of the system.
Yeah. You said that you're calling yourselves fixers. When people ask you about what you do, how do you how are you talking about it? What do you what do you say when people ask you what you do?
Yeah. Lisa and I've been at this really long time. And I think that, you know, the thing we've baked a lot of cakes, as I like to say. We've helped people grow their business top line. We've helped them participate in equity events, pre post, raise money, exit a business. We've been at this for a while. And so there's a lot of people, I think the market that exists now from a consultant standpoint, there's a lot of people that are free agents. But what do they actually do? What is their experience? What have they actually built? How have they actually helped somebody sort of grow their business?
And so yeah, I think Lisa and I are, we're always helping somebody sort of differentiate themselves. That's what we're helping a business do. And so if you can't differentiate yourself, that's as a consultant, I think that there's an inherent problem there. So everybody is a consultant, everybody's an agency, the barrier to entry to stand up your own thing, takes little effort and some words on a LinkedIn profile, and ta-da, you've hung a new shingle. So we're sort of in this moment of everybody's consultant, everybody's an agency, everybody says they can do something, what can they actually do? We're a fixer. We help you fix your business. We've seen a lot of these situations. And we've been on the inside a ton. And so how do we pull on that experience to help you sort of turn your challenge into a solution?
Yeah. I mean, I've had a one sort of angle on your work and seen you get amazing clients. The relationships I think I see you having with them are really strong and very honest and direct. And I was curious about how you get, if there's something about the moments that you engage with clients or the moments they come to you, it seems like you're really alive in these very transitional moments with clients and you really are helping them. And I just wondered how you how you think about the client and how you what those kind of conversations are like when you when a client reaches out to you and they're in a transitional moment. How do you help them understand what's needed to to move forward?
Yeah, I think that in transition, thank you for using the word in transition. Those are our favorite opportunities. And that's really when we're at our best. If everything's really great, probably don't call us. There's a lot of really great people that can make really lovely creative that looks a certain way and is creative for creative sake. Or you can have really lovely packaging that doesn't necessarily say anything.
But if you're in this moment where you're trying to go from one place to another, where what got you here isn't going to get you to that next stage of growth, if you created a category and the world sort of collapsed around you and you can't remember who you are, what you are and what your special sauce is, if you have a ton of innovation coming out, if you're in transition - those are really big, juicy problems that we love to unpack and help you figure out how to move the business forward.
Those are actually the best times to bring you in. You know, that's how we've really gotten to know each other over the last bunch of years. Because a key component of that is, for whom are you for? Really knowing, not just your current consumer, but your growth consumer, and getting to the nitty-gritty. These amazing insights is some of the favorite work that that we get to do with you. That's the best stuff and really helps drive our work forward.
And then building a story around that. And then once you sort of have that story, that unique, authentic, culturally relevant, resonant story, that's differentiated for the business built on the insights, then you're able to sort of pull that through. And that last part is obviously super important. And what does that look like from a, you know, if it's a CPG business, what does that look like from a sales and category management story? What does that look like from an innovation story? How does that work? How is your founder story told within the context of this? What's your do you have a thought leadership position or not? What does the creative look like on pack on your, you know, paid or known assets? And, you know, how are you doing business with whom are you doing business with?
And so, you know, if you sort of we've, we've, as I said, baked a lot of cakes and pull that through. So that's why we look at Yes, we do that. That very first part, that's sort of our special sauce of you need to, we believe you have to have a really good story, then you have to have a really good plan of how to activate that really good story. And then you have to have, you know, a really, really good creative, a really good way to sort of have that live in the world. And those are the sort of three markers that we believe super strongly about. And that's where we focus our time and effort. Yeah.
And I mean, I've, it's, we've, it's been over 10 years, I think, I think 2013 might have been the first the first time that we worked on Lisa sleep. But I remember I had an amazing client who one time I remember I, she always left me, she kind of left me alone, she sort of took my guidance, and she'd had very little feedback very often. And I asked her what that was about, because it was such a pleasure to work with her, you know, and she said, Well, I thought that the first sign of a professional is they let other professionals do their job. And I feel like that's the relationship that we've gotten into where you really do allow me to do my own approach. And I remember the first thing, Lisa, we showed up at the we didn't even interact until the presentation day, in which you guys were presenting your work, and I was presenting my work at the same time. And it was really a beautiful experience. And so I just say that, but I was curious about the role of qual when you're when you're talking to a client, when do you feel like you need qual? And when do you not need qualitative? What's the question for you when you when you want to make that kind of suggestion?
Yeah, I mean, a lot of this is sort of arts and science, right. And I think it's really interesting. We're working on a new piece of work, and this business, you know, it's less than $100 million. And they are so they are armed with so much data, and it's such good stuff. But I think that what we're realizing is that they're they're missing a little bit of the softer side of things. And, you know, data definitely tells a story. From a quantitative perspective, it's super helpful. They have a new they have segmentation, they have data back from retail partners, they have data back from their own channels.
And we just sort of looked at all this stuff and started talking to this particular client. And, you know, the place that they were hoping to that they want to hang their hat on from a messaging standpoint, we felt could it could be deeper, it could be more intentional. And so that's a really great place for a qual to sort of tie there's, we all have our assumptions, we're all humans, we all go to retreat to our certain corners and have our ideas. But I think that from a qualitative perspective, that sort of insight that you're that you're able to drive in our work, it really helps us. It really helps us drive the whole idea forward. You know, it's great.
Yeah, I love that word intentional. When you say that you felt like there's a need to be more intentional on the client side.
Yeah, I think, you know, when you're talking about founder-built brands, when you're talking about sort of middle-stage brands, everybody's doing everything. It's all hands on deck all the time, it sort of feels like and, you know, building relationships with CEOs or C level, the C suite and boards, that's that's where a lot of our all of our work sort of starts.
I think you need to be super intentional, and they're coming to you for expertise and understanding they know you've, they've done a lot of reps and so have you and so how are you going to sort of make sure that the recommendations that you're providing are intentional? It's not we're not saying, you know, tactical marketing for the sake of tactical marketing, but none of this is everything has to be intentional. We're not talking about Verizon budgets. We're not talking about, you know, everything has to be about ego or it has it has to be about driving the business forward. So everything has to be intentional.
Yeah. It also feels like on a number of these experiences I've had, it might be the first time they've really done qual or they've really you've led them into an experience that they haven't really had before. And I'm really curious about that, like what that conversation is like, and how that works.
I think that there are a lot of people do quote-unquote brand strategy or messaging or positioning. I don't know what you want to call it. A lot of people are consultants. I think the situations where we find ourselves in sort of the in the dating phase that first sort of feeling each other out, are we going to be right for each other phase is if people want to do the work. If they want to do the hard work about questioning what exists. If they've recognized that everything isn't so rosy. Because nothing is ever rosy. We as humans know that nothing is ever 100% amazing.
If they want to lean into that, then they are the kind of person that wants to understand in a different kind of way. They want to make decisions based on something that might feel a little bit intangible to somebody else. That’s why I think our work together has been has been so fruitful for the both of us. Because those people are sort of attracted to us, right? They're attracted to Lisa and myself and our line of thinking and our experience. And so, when we say, hey, we want to learn more about this thing, we're sort of leading the horse to water of they're they're trusting in us. And we're bringing them a solution that we think is going to make the work product better. And yeah, I don't, that's, that's how I think we get there so easily.
Yeah, yeah, it's really wonderful. It's wonderful, creates wonderful experiences. I had another question. I wasn't sure how. I have had experience in sort of not for profit space journalist space, which I kind of, I guess I'm laying on top of a B Corp mission-driven kind of culture, like that there's a cultural maybe skepticism about brand marketing, because it's attached to sort of corporate marketing strategy stuff. And I just wondered if that's something that you encounter or no.
I think 15 years ago, that was totally the situation. I think, you know, when Lisa and my early work together, you know, one of the biggest pieces of work we worked on when we first started was with the Nature Conservancy, one of the largest, oldest environmental organizations in the world. And we were trying to get them to answer really hard questions.
And even then, there was too much bureaucracy. There are too many layers. And they didn't, they didn't want to necessarily do it. They were sort of just like, where's the stuff? Where's the where's the creative? Where's the thing that we're putting into market? And we're like, you are not answering actually the first questions, like, why does somebody give a shit about nature? Right? You got to answer that question. You can't just make somebody care. Because it's not a good hook.
No one, no one is going to give a shit about if you don't know how to tell somebody or talk to somebody or engage somebody about giving a shit about nature, why is somebody actually going to care. And so I think all organizations and all that kind of stuff has sort of evolved over the years. But I don't know, I mean, I think I got to a point where in my career, you know, I'm married to a Macy's award-winning photojournalist and documentary filmmaker, her most recent film, Zorowski v Texas just premiered at Telluride a couple weeks ago, to rave reviews. She's really good at what she does.
And so when we were living out here in the middle of nowhere, in Marfa, we got to know the folks that owned the paper, it's almost good. It's gonna be 100 years old. And in 2026, they were running it for 30 years, and they wanted to retire. And they sort of asked, they propositioned Macy and I do you want to take it over? You're a marketing brand person, advertising person, and you're a journalist. We've been living out here for a couple years. You know, and we said yes. I think the main reason we said yes, was because I was helping businesses influence people and make change using capitalism and wanted to take that idea and apply it myself.
And we also looked at the at the stats, the dew and gloom, the demise of our democracy is contributed by the fact of that local and regional voices are fading with local journalism sort of struggling to find a sustainable business model.
And so why am I telling you this story? Because what we did was we sort of leaned into this concept of community, we thought that newspapers have always owned through a macro, through a macro lens, they've always owned this concept of community, but they've just sort of manifested itself through news and information and print and digital. What would happen if we sort of went backwards to go forwards? What would happen if we created a physical space where people could interact and exchange information and participate in capitalism and commerce in the name of getting provided more information?
We thought it was ownable because it wasn't, you know, the local newspapers and local journalism writ large is not going to do any good job of fighting the digital fight in comparison to everyone else that doesn't have the capital and the know-how and, but something that we did think we had was sort of leaning into this concept of community. So we did the work, what was, you know, what was the product market fit? What did the community need? And how would we sort of fill that need and sort of thread the needle?
And, and for us, it was providing a third space for people that live here and visitors to interact with and serve them coffee and food. And we have a retail shop and it's event space. We do anything from the prom to a hoity-toity wedding that blows through town. And so all of that is to say, we took journalism something that, that I think really struggled to figure out it's over the last 25 years, it's, it's just been a battle and hasn't really done a good job leaning into the concept of brand. And we just, we just owned that idea. We just sort of took unlocked value out of what existed iconography that's been around for, you know, almost a hundred years. It's almost the oldest business in town and in the region.
And, and yeah, that was, so to get to your, back to your earlier question, I don't know that everybody has necessarily done it incredibly well, but we happened upon a place that no one was playing, doing the brand play. And we sweat, we, you know, we went headfirst firmly into that and sort of have found a lot of success and a sustainable business model and a better, a better news product by doing so.
How are things at the Sentinel? How long has it been now?
It's been five years. Yeah. We, we, we opened our doors July 4th, 2019 and published our first newspapers. There's a bilingual paper called El Internacional that's Presidio, the port city, as I said earlier, and the border paper. And yeah, we published our first two papers on July 4th, 2019. Got a really good headstart of nine months before the pandemic hit. But, but yeah, five years later, it's, we've grown top of line revenues, you know, 500%. We have almost, from a couple of people, we've employed 20 people full-time, part-time between the cafe, retail, restaurant, and newspaper. We have more journalism. We're paying people a higher wage in a small town. I know 20 people doesn't sound like a lot, but when your population is less than 2,000, it makes you a decent-sized employer pretty quickly.
Yeah. And you used that phrase, third space, right? And I feel like more people are talking about third space all the time now, right? And what have you learned about what that means? You know what I mean?
Yeah. Yeah, totally. You know, I think that, I think going back to that, that, that part, I was just saying that, that as the world becomes more digital, it's, it's like, it's a freight train, right? We're not stopping that. And we all participate in it and it's making our lives better. It's making us more connected in some capacity. But I also, I also think maybe this was just a Luddite in me, but I always felt that it was making us more disconnected. And, you know, you look at the rise of experiential marketing over the last X amount of years like that's because creating sort of a physical experience that can be shared somewhat on social a hundred percent, but like creating that physical experience, that's, that's like a memory. That's something that sort of happens in a different kind of world versus the doom scrolling or the, you know, the flash in the pan of reading a something or something that happens online. It's, it's just, it's different.
Something I have been thinking about is there's a very large difference in my opinion, between audience and community. And I think we've, we've sort of conflated the two. Community is about a place and its people. Audience is about not, it doesn't have to be sort of place and people specific. And local journalism is about recording the history and telling the stories of a place and its people. If it's, that's, you know, monetize, when you say monetizing audience, you don't talk about monetizing a community. Yes.
The Sentinel has done that. We've monetized, you know, figured out a way how to monetize all that stuff. Cause the reality of the situation is news and information is free as, as humans are considered and people don't want to pay for it. And so we're, but people want to pay for experiences and $7 matcha lattes and, you know, all that kind of stuff and being together with people. And so that's sort of, I think that's a big difference for me is that audience is like, you use your users, you're monetizing them. It's, it's, it's not a two-way conversation. It's a one-way conversation. Whereas community is about sort of building and interacting. It's, it's a different kind of thing.
Yeah. And I feel like you and I have had exchanges about how that word community has been really, you know, co-opted or, I mean, marketing we're in sort of a community era where brands are building community. You're talking about community. How do you, what are your, how do you think about community in the, in the, in those two worlds that you occupy? You've got people in the brand space probably asking you about community and you're actually building a, be in place.
Yeah. I mean, I think I have a very adverse reaction to when people in the brand community are like, it's my community. It's like, No! I'll show you community……We've had such a conversation about digital isn't what it used to be, you know, Facebook, Instagram, all these sort of community aspects. They don't work like they used to. And people are looking for differentiation. People are looking for, you know, a deeper connection.
In the last couple of weeks, Columbia, we have some gentlemen from some, some folks over at Columbia that are professors published a paper about, about third space and you know, what building a third space has done for, for places economically and the, the benefits and what that sort of spurns off up from an entrepreneurialist thought, which is really interesting, you know, and then you have brands like I saw Faraday, which is like a men's clothing line. The people that started it, two brothers from the Jersey shore went and took over an old post office and built this third space and are serving coffee and food and home goods and all that kind of stuff, sort of looking for a place to sort of like for people to interact.
And I think it's a really interesting place for brands to play. I just wonder, my question that I'm sort of grappling with is like, to what end and like, and for what, right? Like, were this, this business, this idea that we happened into is about, about a place and its people. It's about journalism. It's about providing, you know, some, what some people call a public good for the community and sort of a symbiotic relationship. If you support us, we're going to support you kind of deal. I don't know how it plays out with, with other brands that are like not a coffee shop or not like an actual third space business that are trying to play into it. It feels more pop-uppy and feels not as more like more audience, an idea more about audience rather than community. That isn't to say like the people from Faraday might be like, we want to do something special for the place that we're from. And now we have the capacity and the monetary wealth to do it. Like, I think that's really awesome and great. But I don't know. I'm sort of, I'm trying to figure out like what this moment we're in, what exactly is it?
Yeah. So we're kind of near the end of time. What's next for the Sentinel and the other paper?
Yeah. So, you know, the first five years have been about building and, and establishing the foundation and, you know, iterating and iterating, you never stop iterating, but iterating to a place of like, we know we have a really good business model. We know what works. We've, we figured out a way how to, how to really make it sing. But there's a ton of value for us to, to really unlock out of the brand and the business moving forward. And we haven't gotten to everything. You know, we're still sitting on a hundred years of archives of Far West, Texas, Pancho Villa, you know, came through this area. There's like, there's some really amazing, awesome stuff that's happened through here.
We've, you know, we haven't published, we were a content engine, but we haven't gotten into the game of sort of publishing and, and creating experiences besides obviously like the daily coffee shop for a weekly newspaper, the daily and sort of the weekly things that sort of have a bit more reoccurring revenue. Yeah. So there's a lot of ideas. It's the great part is, this is a marathon, not a sprint.
And yeah. And I'll at the same time, a lot of conversations about when you do something in a, in an industry that is not so into change and doing things differently, such as journalism, even though they report on change all the time, how has that happened? You know, when I think we started, people were like, those guys are crazy. There's been many moments through local journalism's last 20 years where people have said like, wow, that's a stupid idea. And that's crazy. But I think people looked at us as sort of crazy and insane. And, and five years later, it's like, well, we did it, you know? And so how do we use the, the insights and understanding and, and learnings to help other folks do what we've done? There's a lot of conversation going on about that too.
Yeah. How has the journalism world responded to you guys?
Yeah. I think now they're, they're like, they're pretty excited about it. You know, we still don't fit the mold. I'm not a journalist. I'm like a still, I've been doing this for five years as like a quote-unquote publisher, you know? So yeah, it's still, it's still, we're looked at as sort of outsiders to a degree, but that makes sense, right? All entrepreneurial thought is really looked at as, as outside the comfort zone. I like to say that like the journalism world isn't necessarily comfortable with being uncomfortable yet. And that's, that takes time and hopefully it'll happen sooner rather than later.
Beautiful. Thank you so much for your time, Max. It was a pleasure speaking with you.
Yeah. Nice to chat with you too, Peter, as always. And nice to chat about something besides, besides the working on a piece of business.
Max Kabat on Community & Brand