Secret Academy Episode - Ricardo PoupadaAs Co-Founder and VP of AskMen.com, the largest men’s lifestyle website in the world, he is responsible for managing the strategic direction and growth. In this leadership role, Poupada supports and guides a talented management team that includes editorial, sales development, business development, marketing, and engineering departments. Together with his team he seeks to increase AskMen.com’s content coverage and define its voice, work with advertisers on correctly targeting the male demographic, increase its readership, and generate new revenue streams. International expansion has been a key part of AskMen’s growing footprint and in the past years localized editions have been launched AskMen.com in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Turkey.
Since co-founding AskMen.com in 1999, Poupada has led the site to become the largest lifestyle portal for men online, reaching worldwide audiences of over 20 million readers a month. He has been a frequent writer on the site, interviewing famous faces like David Beckham and Hugh Hefner. Additionally, Poupada saw through the sale of AskMen.com to IGN Entertainment (now part of Fox Interactive Media) in 2005 for $13 million, and was a key component in integrating the site within IGN’s network, which led to its impressive subsequent sales and monthly audience growth.
- The dynamics of growing a content base site and selling it.
- The Askmen.com story.
- How a coffee shop interaction sparked a 13 million dollar idea.
- The evolution of a business at the brinks of the tech boom.
- Why broad was good, but niche is the new way to be noticed.
- The international expansion no one saw coming.
- How the roles of the founder and co founder changes after an acquisition.
- Why he continues to work at Askmen.com today as a Vice President.
- His best advice for today’ modern entrepreneurs.
