How Barstool Sports' ex-CEO builds community and brand attention

Executive overview

Building an online community requires personality-driven content and the courage to invite reaction — not just polished authority. Erika Ayers Badan scaled Barstool from $5M to $300M revenue by embracing chaos, constant experimentation, and keeping the camera always on.

Food52 faces the same core challenge as any media brand: earn attention daily on a blank page. The opportunity lies in adding personality and humor to a food-and-lifestyle space dominated by perfection and authority.

The brands that win attention are those willing to be loose, opinionated, and relentlessly decisive.

Building community around personality

• Community is built around personality, not just content category or expertise.
• Barstool's edge came from reacting fast to headlines — content had to start fresh every day.
• Food52's equivalent: finding personalities with opinion and charisma around home, food, and design.
• Viral content (intern mixing Fluff and Coke: 830 comments) consistently outperforms polished editorial (Basque cheesecake recipe: 6 comments).
• The internet has democratized authority — a self-taught 24-year-old chef with a following matters as much as a credentialed one.
• Attention fragmentation makes it harder than ever to break new stars; diversifying personalities is the counter-strategy.

Navigating controversy and noise

• Barstool offended everyone indiscriminately — Erika chose to build a durable business rather than chase apologies.
• Running Barstool felt like a reality show: cameras always on, every decision visible to the audience.
• Public exposure builds thicker skin but also makes you more guarded — both are true at once.
• Condemnation by headline rarely reflects the reality inside a company.
• The inside reality: Barstool had an all-female executive team for most of Erika's tenure, which went largely unnoticed publicly.

The camera-always-on principle

• Keeping the camera rolling during pauses captures the unscripted moments that are often the most interesting.
• "Dogfooding" — doing the work yourself first — is the only way to understand what needs fixing.
• Erika filming a cooking pilot herself surfaced an immediate operational issue: the crew turned cameras off during breaks, killing the best footage.
• Walking the walk builds credibility and surfaces operational gaps that top-down management misses.

Saying no as a core leadership skill

• Saying yes to everything means doing nothing well.
• No is the second-best answer to yes — and often the better one.
• A fast no reduces anxiety, angst, and inertia across teams.
• Saying no signals clarity about identity, priorities, and what the brand is actually trying to achieve.
• Microsoft taught Erika decisiveness: things that linger between yes and no create the most damage.

The media business reality

• Media requires recreating the product every single day — the blank-page problem never goes away.
• Early bets on emerging platforms (podcasting at Barstool) drove outsized returns before monetization was obvious.
• The business model must reinvent itself constantly alongside the content model.
• Barstool sold twice in 2023: once for ~$550M, once for $1. The gap illustrates media's volatility.
• Sustainable media now demands personality-led content, multi-platform distribution, and the discipline to jump on the next thing before it looks profitable.