The call came in late winter of 2013 from a New York City number I didn’t recognize. I had relocated to North Carolina two years earlier, but recruiters were still trying to lure me back to the Big Apple. I wasn’t remotely interested. The South had become home much faster than I ever expected — the people, the weather, the pace of life, the exponentially lower blood pressure.

The woman on the other end of the line introduced herself as Kate Lee. I had been recommended to her by someone in digital sports media, she said, and her company, something called Medium, was a recently-launched digital platform that was looking to incubate promising publications.

(Translation: She needed content. Good content.)

To that point, I had done a little blogging for the New York Times and Major League Baseball — more as a side hobby than anything else — and built a relatively small, but loyal social media following. No journalism degree. No experience as a Publisher or Editor-in-Chief. My coverage of the New York Knicks had led to a few guest appearances on WFAN-NY and ESPN Radio in New York, but I certainly wasn’t well known in the industry.

Five-thousand dollars a month. For three months.

That was the total funding Medium offered to conceive of and execute my vision for a sports website that would ultimately become The Cauldron. With just a three-month runway, it certainly wasn’t a lot of time or money to launch a national media startup. (And it was the primary reason why someone a lot more proven than me hadn’t already taken them up on the challenge.)

I had been working as a Wall Street lawyer for over a decade at the time, so it wasn’t about the money. Anything Medium paid me would be invested directly into the business. To be fair, it wasn’t even really a “business.” Not at first, anyway.

It was more of a scatterbrained concept:

Finding the time and energy to make a legitimate go of it would be no small feat. My wife was also working full time and sharing the demands of our toddler son and newborn daughter. And yes, there was my pesky day job as in-house counsel to a global investment bank to attend to, but no matter; I was determined.

We launched The Cauldron on June 1, 2014.

By we, I mean Andy Glockner and me, along with the dozens of freelance writers we initially commissioned to write stories and create content for us. Back then, our design sensibilities were, shall we say, nascent.

The practical reality was that The Cauldron never should’ve survived beyond the initial three-month run. Consider the competition we were up against: ESPN’s aforementioned Grantland, VICE Sports, Deadspin, and countless other fully-staffed and fully-funded media outlets with resources and distribution we had no way to emulate.

In fact, our funding was stretched so thin at inception, we couldn’t even afford an image license. Instead of posting pictures of the athletes and sports we were covering, we sourced nondescript royalty-free photos and clip art.

Still, even Deadspin’s resident wiseass noticed.

Somehow we managed to beg and borrow just enough content from sympathetic and hungry freelancers — some of whom had already established themselves in sports media, others who just wanted the opportunity to have their work seen on a national level.

Notice how I didn’t say steal, though. We paid our experienced contributors as best we could; some getting $50 per post, others up to and exceeding $1,000 per month in exchange for a weekly column. We also published aspiring amateur writers, too. The vast majority of them were unpaid, but we worked tirelessly to help them hone their craft and ensure that their work would be seen by a larger audience.

Andy and I published content at a breakneck pace; at least five 1,000-word-plus pieces a day (and often more than that), doing our best to not make any egregious errors — all while trying to ensure that our product was different than anything else out there.

It didn’t hurt that 20 or so of our better-known contributors trusted me with the keys to their social media feeds, allowing us to post “organic” links to our content directly from their accounts. People like Robert Silverman, Kevin McElroy, Howard Megdal, Greg Hanlon, the Kamenetzky Brothers, Colin McGowan, T.D. Williams, Tim Ryan, Tim Baffoe, and many others.

Can you imagine giving someone carte blanche to post from your Twitter account to build their business? Hell-to-the-no. Those writers’ collective faith in Andy and me enabled us to hit the ground running, and in retrospect, I’m not sure The Cauldron would have become what it became without that access.

Our use of writers’ social media accounts for distribution was never a secret. It was something we needed to do to succeed, and we never abused the privilege.

Andy and I dumped virtually every penny of the $15K of Medium funding into operations during those first few months. And while we started to gain some traction — we averaged around 250,000 unique monthly users by month three of the initial deal — it became painfully obvious that reaching Medium’s performance benchmarks was going to be next to impossible.

Back then, prior to the first of Medium’s endless company pivots, Ev Williams was focused on something called the total-time-read metric (“TTR”), a worthy, if ultimately fleeting content strategy designed to lure brands by touting how engaged the platform’s readership was. You see, if people spend a lot of time at Medium, then they surely will buy the products your company is hawking. Or something.

The problem with Medium’s TTR, however, was that The Cauldron’s traffic, however strong, wasn’t worth much to our bottom line unless people were spending significant time reading each piece. While that may seem like an insignificant detail, the rules surrounding Medium monetization at the time meant that we could only cash in on long-form pieces. Unlike other sites that relied heavily upon short-form aggregation of news and/or poaching content creators’ original work as click-bait, we couldn’t simply duplicate the seemingly successful business models of USA Today’s For the Win and The Big Lead, or Deadspin.

Posting real-time, short-form content simply wouldn’t have created revenue through the Medium arrangement.

In hindsight, though, we should’ve spent fewer resources on publishing so much daily long-form content. At the time, our audience just wasn’t large enough to digest five or more 1,500-word articles each day. And while it felt great to be paying journalists and aspiring bloggers to write, we were essentially lighting our meager funding on fire.

Investing exclusively in athlete-direct and viral videos would have given us a lot more bang for our buck.💡

Making matters worse; though we had demonstrated clear growth since launch, it was communicated to me by Evan Hansen at Medium that unless we exceeded certain TTR expectations by the end of our second three-month term, the Medium funding would not be renewed. Six months had come and gone in an instant, and we were essentially finished before we even had a chance to get started.

And then it happened.

Former NFL punter Chris Kluwe, unbeknownst to him, singlehandedly saved The Cauldron.

You probably saw it. Everybody in the tech and gaming world sure did. Kluwe’s epic, expletive-laced breakdown of the Gamergate controversy, published on October 21, 2014, went viral, garnering over 1.5 million page views.

I paid Chris $2,000.00 for that story. It was the ultimate gamble, mainly because that money represented the very last of the funds in The Cauldron’s bank account. Medium had planned to pull the plug on Halloween, just 10 days later.

Only, The Cauldron’s demise was not meant to be — not then, anyway. That one story paid out a $40K return on investment(!), and in an instant, Andy and I went from bankrupt to flush with cash to fund November operations and beyond.

We were literally that close to going out of business.