Interview with Jon Housman, CEO of Jungle Interactive

MBA Jungle is a magazine as well as a website that targets current MBA Students and those individuals who have graduated within the last five years. We are targeting a group of people ages 25 to 35, 70% men, who are generally high-income earners.

Our mission is to give them an edge in everything that they do. A good part of the editorial focus has to do with career, how to get ahead in one’s career. It is presented in such a way that is easily digestible at that sophisticated level.

There is also a very important lifestyle component. These are people who work hard and play hard. They very much have two sides to their brains. They are out there climbing the corporate ladder and starting companies; at the same time they really enjoy fashion, the latest gadgets, hot new places, trophy vacations, etc. We provide everything that pertains the overall MBA lifestyle.

That is right, we produce it all in-house. Our Editor-in-Chief is a gentleman by the name of Bill Shapiro and I can tell you he is one of the best editors that I have ever worked with, and many people consider him one of the best in the country. Before he came to MBA Jungle he was Executive Editor of Maxim.

Which was one of the fastest growing magazines in US history. Before that he was at a Parenting, so it isn’t like he is some fraternity wise guy. He is an amazing editor that knows and understands the needs of the readers and steps into their shoes to build and package fantastic content.

He has secured some excellent writers and an editorial team that produces a fantastic production in every issue. They are able to cover everything from what you body language says during an interview, to what people are wearing in the fall, to hot new technology trends.

The first issues launched in September of 2000, and we started the company about seven months prior to that. We only had those first seven months to get that first issue out the door, which was not very much lead time, and we have just published our seventh issue.

Two things, both different sides of the same opportunity. On one side I am a recent MBA graduate, I also teach at an MBA program currently. Both of my partners are also recent MBA graduates, and we had this feeling that as MBAs that there wasn’t anything that really speaks to us. Both on the subjects that we want to hear about and talk about, but also in the voice that we are used to.

The voice is extremely important, there is a very different and distinct feeling when you open up a Forbes or Business Week and when you open up Jungle. Our publication is really meant for someone in their late 20′s to early 30′s and not in their 50′s. It speaks with a sense of humor, with a sense of fun, and style.

At the same time there is a lot of news out there that we need to provide. There is a real opportunity from a reader side in this area.

The other side of the coin as you mentioned earlier, this is a very attractive demographic. These are individuals who are making six figures a year. In the magazine world, that is extremely attractive. To give you a comparison GQ has a household income of about $40,000, we are talking two to two and half times that. If you are Hugo Boss and you are wondering who is going to buy your $1,500 suits, and if you Mercedes and wondering who is going to buy your C class automobile, then we are their channel.

It is more of a controlled circulation. You can divide the magazine business into two areas; consumer (Maxim, Vogue, etc.) and controlled. Controlled is where readers receive the magazine for free, but usually give up some type of demographic information that allows for greater advertising targeting.

It is an advertising based model. What a lot of people don’t grasp is that the advertising supported model is a lot more profitable than a subscription based model. Unless you are a Maxim or Oprah, and have phenomenal sell through rates, you will end up losing money on the news-stand.

Well that is where the hybrid comes in. We are a controlled model, which means that we generally distribute for free to qualified MBAs, however people do come to us at the rate of about 100 per week an subscribe online. Also, about six months ago Barnes & Noble asked us to stock their stores.

Yes, but not all stores. All stores in major cities or near colleges now stock MBA Jungle. This totals about 800 stores nationwide. This is not our majority business model, but does help. We are about 90% controlled circulation.

Actually, their distributor, Ingram Publications came to us. I am not sure how they heard about us, but at that time, about 6 months ago we were in the news a lot. We had hired the publisher of the New Yorker, Esquire, had raised a significant amount of money, as well as a few other things were driving our press.

The guy from Ingram liked our product, called us up, mentioned that he is the one that spotted Red Herring, and that he felt like this was another huge opportunity.

Well, one of the headlines in the New York Times was that this is one of the worst advertising markets since the depression. It has reached the level where a number of people are saying that this is the worst times we have been in.

No one can deny this, and say that it has been easy going. Ad to that, the Industry Standard used to be a client of ours, one of our paid advertisers. We were very sorry to see them go for more than one reason actually. In spite of that, our market has never been the technology companies; it has been a pretty diversified mix of different brands in different categories. Our customers consist of top end brands in the Liquor, Car, and Fashion categories, and a lot of Investment Bank and Recruitment customers. We get a lot of ads from the Merrill Lynchs and Goldman Sachs of the world. These are people who really value what we are doing, and they realize that no one else truly reaches this audience.

If you are Hugo Boss, you have a lot of outlets, if you are Goldman Sachs you don’t have a lot of channels for reaching your audience.

There are two areas that we are focused on. One is growing vertically, within the MBA Jungle brand there are different layers of business that we can add on to the magazine. There is also the horizontal, in that there are a number of different verticals that we can add as well.

By this I mean that the in the vertical dimension MBA Jungle has a magazine which makes money on ad revenue. That has led to the creation of a website which also makes money from ad revenue. We also have a website called Rhino, which is a recruiters information network and it kind of like a mini-Monster specifically for MBAs. Rhino makes money off companies subscribing and posting jobs to it. Another aspect of expanding the MBA Jungle vertical is that we just put out a book called “The MBA Jungle B-School Survival Guide” which was just reviewed by the New York Times and Fortune favorably. It has been released here, and Random House will be releasing it around the world in a couple months. We expect to release at least one book a year under the MBA Jungle brand. Further, last year we had a National Business Plan competition under the MBA Jungle umbrella, which raised over 6 figures in sponsorship.

Under the MBA Jungle brand, which we have worked hard to build value to, on the base of that you can build all these other things on top of that.

Shifting to other Verticals, we launched JD Jungle six months ago, and that has been on a similar growth trajectory. You can imagine that JD Jungle has a lot of similar opportunities that MBA Jungle has, and that you can image doing that for other areas as well.

In the space for readers, which is very different from advertisers. In a sense MBAs could go to any of those. However, do those other places compete for Hugo Boss, Nautica, Ralph Lauren, and Lexus I don’t think so.

Online there are a number of different options for advertisers to target, but that is not so in the print world. We have found that they are willing to advertise on a lot of different sites, but that they are also looking for a print medium, and that is where the market is much less competitive.

In the advertise world, when we talk to a Hugo Boss, they are also working with GQ and Esquire and we don’t compete with either of those two publications.

The main vehicle that we reach them is through partnerships with the leading B-Schools nationally, and internationally. They have been convinced over time that this is an extremely valuable resource and they therefore help facilitate distribution of MBA Jungle and dotcom through email messages and other types of postings.

We do a number of number of other things as well, you mentioned MBA Depot, the Wall Street Journal and others. We license our content quite extensively, and we are known as one of the best in the business.

You asked about the competitive areas in students and advertisers. On the student side, the response has been tremendous. It is quite difficult to quantify in that we can’t say this many dollars or pages or revenue was X was generated by this enthusiasm. We know it is there, because of the tremendous volume of letters and email messages that we receive. We have generated almost a fanatical following; MBA students from across the country, recruiters, etc.

My challenge is to bottle this enthusiasm and following back into the business and to communicate it to the advertisers. We must do this faster and better, and that is what we are focused on.

We reach 98% to 100% of the MBA students at the top 100 B-Schools in the country and around the world.

Jungle came about after we paid tens of thousands of dollars to designers to come up with any number of different names and designs, and in the end the Jungle and the monkey logo was designed in house by one of my business partners, Sean McDuffy who came from Goldman Sachs and has an art background, and was published in Marvel Comics.

In the end we all came together, and blindly put the different names and logos together, and everyone chose the monkey logo. The lesson is that you need to trust your guts; you don’t necessarily need to go outside of the company.

It also corresponded well with the old adage, that it “is a jungle out there”, and it is a lot of fun.