Announcing deep dives sponsored by Tegus

Historically, I’ve gotten lots of offers to sponsor the blog. While I’m not opposed to sponsorships at all, writing this blog is, by necessity, secondary to my day job, so I wanted to make sure any sponsorships didn’t conflict with my brand standards or detract from the blog. That includes the obvious (I had one real estate firm that wanted a sponsored post that included the line “guaranteed 20% annualized returns”, which is an obvious no go) and the subtle (most sponsorships are simply line breaks buried inside a post that pitch a product, which I don’t mind but aren’t exactly value add to the reader!).

A few weeks ago I had a post asking how people used expert networks. I got lots of feedback from that post, including from the team at Tegus asking about sponsorship opportunities. I already use and love Tegus (you can probably tell from my Twitter account!), but I wanted to do something more than just have the typical "take a break during every post to mention Tegus” thing. So I proposed something a little different, which they accepted and we’re going to do a trial run for the next few months. If the feedback is good, I’m hopeful this can become a permanent feature.

What is that different thing? Every month, Tegus is going to give me a handful of free expert calls. I’m going to use those expert calls to dive into a company or industry, and then I’ll do a write up during the month highlighting the learnings from those calls (backed up with quotes and highlights from those expert calls as well as other things like earnings calls, 10-Ks, etc.).

My hope is that this model is the most beneficial to all parties. For me, it lets me ramp up on an industry or company while highlighting a product I use extensively. For Tegus, it’ll let users and potential users see exactly how powerful a few expert calls can be (if you’re not a user yet, I believe they’re giving a free trial to people coming from the blog; certainly worth trying!). And, for you, the reader, it’ll mean free industry or company deep dives backed by expert calls; in general, those types of industry deep dives would be pretty expensive if you were trying to price / buy them, so just getting them for free is hopefully a good deal. Even better, because I’m a complete generalist and always interested in learning new industries (or revisiting old ones), it means that these deep dives can be responsive to what readers want (assuming the subject interests me; I’m not going to research industries or companies I have no interest in, though those are probably few and far between). For example, let’s say a ton of readers email and say “dang, there was a really interesting merger between two auto suppliers this month” Well, awesome; next month I can use the Tegus calls to do a dive into both the merger specifically and auto suppliers in general.

Anyway, this is a new venture for me, but I hope and expect it’ll be a fruitful one that brings a lot of value to everyone (and a model for potential future sponsorships; I don’t think I’m going to do ads on the blog, but if I can find other sponsorships that create value for everyone I’m open to them!). I’d love to hear your feedback if you have any (and suggestions for industry / company deep dives if there’s something you’re interested in; the first deep dive is coming later this month!).