GoodBed.com, an independent mattress shopping resource, is pleased to announce the launch of its new podcast, Mike It Up, hosted by GoodBed’s own Mike Magnuson and Jeff Cassidy. Targeted to mattress industry professionals, with a particular focus on retailers, the show will be a series of discussions that will highlight key strategic issues and offer actionable recommendations for its listeners, based largely around data relating to the rapidly changing consumer journey.
“One of the most extraordinary things about GoodBed is that we sit right at the crossroads between consumers, retailers, and manufacturers,” says Magnuson. “We interact directly on a daily basis with representatives from all three of those constituencies, spanning across the full spectrum of online and brick & mortar channels. This exceptional vantage point allows us to collect both hard and soft data that would never otherwise be available,” Magnuson continued. “Having done this for over a decade, we are fortunate to have a truly unique view of this industry and how it’s changing over time.”
Magnuson is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events, but he and Cassidy realized that GoodBed needed an outlet through which they can share information more widely and consistently, and in greater depth. “The nature of the podcast format allows us to delve deeper into the ‘why’ and ‘what’ of a particular topic, which tends to reveal some of the most important and interesting insights,” Cassidy explains.
“Mike’s talks are loaded with important and actionable take-aways, so people are always following up with us afterwards to get more information,” says Cassidy. “With this podcast, we want to give people access to more bite-sized chunks of those insights, in a format that can be both in-depth and light-hearted at the same time. I think our audience will get a lot of value from it, and enjoy it.”
The first season of the Mike It Up podcast, available in its entirety at
mikeitup.com and on all major podcast platforms starting February 23rd, contains 8 episodes. Topics will include how COVID-19 has impacted the mattress shopping journey, key threats to the mattress industry, and whether brick & mortar mattress retail is “walking dead.”
The show will also tackle topics that have larger strategic implications across the industry, such as return policies. In this regard, Magnuson aims to provide a forum for retailers and manufacturers to acquire a shared baseline of understanding about such issues, and to propose real solutions to help get the conversation started. “This will be a way to facilitate collective discussion amongst industry leaders around key forward-looking issues that affect not just their company, but the industry as a whole,” says Magnuson.
Magnuson and Cassidy have been friends since the beginning of their respective careers, when the two were hired by the same management consulting firm. Their job was to analyze large sets of data in order to provide business advice to corporate clients on key strategic issues. Back then, they never could have imagined that this skill set would one day lead them to start a podcast in the mattress industry. But as Magnuson explains, it’s the combination of GoodBed’s unique data set with their particular skill set for drawing insights from such data that makes it all work.
Upon leaving the consulting firm, Cassidy went to Harvard Business School, after which he helped grow a successful information security software company. Magnuson headed to Stanford for business school, which then led him to Wall Street, where he became a private equity investor. With an investment focus in the media industry, he saw an opportunity to build online consumer information resources for under-served product categories, like mattresses.
After a harrowing experience with his wife shopping for their first “real” mattress, Magnuson realized that no one on the internet was providing information to help people choose the right mattress. So he decided to take this on himself. Shortly after, in 2008, Magnuson quietly launched GoodBed.com and worked hard over the ensuing years to build his content and audience, as well as to make industry connections.
In 2014, as Cassidy was starting to think about his next career move, Magnuson contacted him about helping with GoodBed. “It was serendipitous timing,” says Cassidy. “Neither Mike nor I had any prior history in the mattress industry, it was just two great friends who were excited to work together to build a company that could help both consumers and the industry.”
Likewise, that’s what you’ll find when listening to the Mike It Up podcast: Two great friends having a fun conversation. In this case, the conversation just happens to revolve around impactful insights for the mattress industry that can’t be found anywhere else.
About GoodBed.com: Since its founding in 2008, GoodBed.com has become one of the leading websites in the mattress category. Built around the core nucleus of its mattress-specific consumer review platform, GoodBed has grown to encompass in-depth editorial coverage of both online and offline options, the most robust database of mattress-related information on the market, and sophisticated proprietary software, such as the GoodBed Match Quiz. GoodBed is also the only online mattress guide that works with both online retailers and brick & mortar stores in order to offer the best and most personalized options for the individual needs of each consumer.