When Robinhood went public in July 2021, its prospectus listed two assets most companies would never think to include: the Robinhood Snacks newsletter and podcast. The properties had a combined 32 million subscribers, the trading platform’s S-1 boasted.
Robinhood was telling the SEC that one reason to buy its shares was owned media.
Very few companies have made a similar claim. Others that could — notably, HubSpot and Figma — started building out owned media long before they went public. Casper did the reverse: it created a robust brand publication, Van Winkle’s, and shut it down in 2017, two years before it needed to tell its story to investors.
Jessica Liddell has advised more than 20 consumer IPOs at the communications firm ICR, with clients including Peloton, Shake Shack, and Canada Goose. When asked what the most common mistake companies make with their communications before going public is, Liddell was blunt: “Not telling your story.”
From readers to stakeholders
Robinhood bought Snacks — then called MarketSnacks — from two former bankers in March 2019. It was the company’s first acquisition. The readership was young: 85% were under 36, close to the profile of Robinhood’s own users, whose average age was 32.
When Robinhood went public, it sold shares directly to its audience through IPO Access, which let customers buy at the $38 offer price. Roughly a quarter of the deal went to them. The stock closed down 8% on its first day. The audience, though, kept its value: through IPO Access, Robinhood’s customers can buy into other companies’ offerings at the listing price, and Robinhood has since won approval to underwrite those deals itself.
To Liddell, Robinhood is a special case. “Robinhood is memorable because its customers and future shareholder base were, by design, close to the same audience,” she said. “Most consumer brands don’t have that dynamic.” For a typical company, she said, owned media should build understanding and trust among customers. If that feeds retail investor interest, “that’s valuable, but it shouldn’t be the primary objective.”
What owned media builds is subtler. It is not a stand-alone valuation driver, Liddell emphasized, but it “can provide supporting evidence that a company has developed strong customer loyalty and brand affinity, which is one piece of a very large puzzle.”
Content that builds a category
The best consumer IPO candidates use owned channels to educate stakeholders about their category and differentiation “years before a transaction,” Liddell said, so that by the time investors are evaluating the company, the channels “reflect an established story, rather than a new communications effort tied to a transaction.”
HubSpot spent years doing precisely that. By the time the marketing software company filed to go public in 2014, its founders had spent years on a blog, a book that named the category they were selling into — inbound marketing, the idea that companies should draw customers in with useful content, rather than chase them with ads — and an annual conference called UNBOUND.
HubSpot’s S-1 said so directly: “Our brand recognition comes from our thought leadership, including our blog, which attracts approximately 1.5 million visits each month.” Owning the category was the sales strategy, and at the offering it doubled as the investment case: every company converted to inbound marketing was a prospective HubSpot customer, and the blog and conference were where those conversions began.
The newsroom Casper cut
Van Winkle’s launched in June 2015 with a budget of roughly $1 million a year, a staff of five, and complete editorial freedom, said Jeff Koyen, the site’s founding editor-in-chief.
“We were a fully independent entity, a media company inside Casper. We were not filling the marketing funnel. We were not doing lead gen,” said Koyen, an award-winning journalist who now writes for both traditional and brand media. The site covered sleep — the science, health, and culture of it — with stories like a several-thousand-word investigation of PTSD and sleep deprivation in the military.
But what Casper wanted, in Koyen’s telling, was attention. “Their goal, in hindsight, was strictly brand-building — they wanted the Wall Street Journal coverage that they’re launching something.” Asked whether the IPO came up while Van Winkle’s was being built, Koyen said “not explicitly”: the staff had stock options like other employees, but no one framed the publication as an asset the company would one day take public.
“We always had the feeling that we were a bolt-on, because they were doing their own content marketing. They had their own Casper blog — that’s where they were doing their direct conversion and their lead gen,” he said. The separation itself is ordinary; many companies keep serious editorial endeavors separate from content marketing.
The difference, in Koyen’s telling, was that nothing connected Van Winkle’s back to the business at all. When Casper did spend with the offering in mind, he said, the money went closer to the point of sale: in 2017, the company financed the acquisition of Sleepopolis, a mattress review site it had sued the year before. Casper closed Van Winkle’s in November of that year.
When the company went public in February 2020, shares were priced at $12, with a valuation of roughly $476 million — about half the $1.1 billion Casper had been worth privately. By November 2021, the company had agreed to go private at $6.90 a share, with the stock at $3.55. The offering became a cautionary tale for the direct-to-consumer sector.
Koyen still believes the publication had room to grow into an asset. Sleep, he pointed out, remains an unclaimed category, and with a stronger connection to the business, Van Winkle’s “could have been spun off or just run under its own steam.”
A head start
Like HubSpot, Figma took the long view. When the design software startup filed, it pointed investors to what it had built. Its conference, Config, grew from 1,000 attendees at its 2020 launch to 8,500 within three years, and doubled as the company’s product launch stage. Figma’s S-1 named it directly, calling its community “unique” for a software company. The blog it had run since at least 2019 — relaunched as Shortcut in 2023, with reported features and interviews for an audience of designers — was the always-on version of the same idea.
When Figma went public in July 2025, shares priced at $33, opened at $85, and closed at $115.50 — a 250% first-day gain, the biggest on record for a billion-dollar U.S. offering.
The securities rules favor companies that start publishing early. Once one is in registration, the SEC’s quiet period restricts what it can say, but the company does not have to go silent, Liddell said. It can keep publishing as long as the content contains no forward-looking information and remains consistent — which is why a long-running publication can keep publishing through the window, while one launched for the occasion is likely to be read as promotion. “There [should be] a documented pattern and years of precedent showing the material wasn’t created in order to promote a transaction. The SEC doesn’t care what platform content appears on, only whether it conditions the market,” Liddell said.
A direct listing, however, skips the road show entirely. There are no shares to sell to institutions in advance, and no months of pitching to prepare for. Spotify took that route in 2018 and built its For the Record blog as it went. The first post, in April, covered Spotify’s listing.
The next chapter
The largest test yet is coming. AI giants OpenAI and Anthropic are now circling the public markets. Both already publish: OpenAI runs its own long-form podcast, and in April it acquired TBPN, the daily tech talk show described as “SportsCenter for Silicon Valley.” Anthropic publishes research, policy positions, and company news of its own. Both have gone on recent hiring sprees for writers, editors, and communications specialists. The way Koyen sees it, the AI labs need storytelling acumen more than Casper ever did. “AI companies have a desperate and pressing need to be perceived positively, and editorial is incredibly cheap on the P&L of life,” he said.
Liddell’s advice for a company a few years from filing is specific. Choose a subject the company can own — the way HubSpot wrote about the discipline its software was built for — and publish about the category, the mission, and what sets the business apart, not the coming offering. Keep a cadence the company can sustain, because under the quiet period, consistency is the protection: it serves as proof, when securities lawyers review the record, of routine publishing, rather than a campaign built to promote the stock. And pick a format built to outlast the offering, as Spotify did with For the Record, which is still publishing eight years on.
What investors look for in due diligence, she said, is “a consistent track record of media engagement and stories that illustrate the growth of the business, competitive differentiators, and the opportunity ahead.” A record like that cannot be assembled in the few months prior to a filing.
Snacks, HubSpot’s blog, and Config all existed years before the companies that owned them filed to go public, and each was built for its own reasons. Van Winkle’s had been closed for two years when Casper listed. Build the story early enough, Liddell said, and “the IPO simply becomes the next chapter in the story, rather than the reason the story is being told.”
