One of my favorite entrepreneurs is John H. Johnson. He was a publishing entrepreneur who created Ebony and Jet magazines. Both were iconic magazines in the Black community for several decades. Johnson bootstrapped his company, and by 1987 it was doing over $174 million in annual revenue—almost $481 million in 2024 dollars. Johnson’s autobiography was one of my favorite reads last year. I bought several copies and wrote a five-part deep dive on it (see here).

I wanted to learn more about Johnson and found Empire: The House That John H. Johnson Built, a biography of him. It was written by Margena A. Christian, who used to work at Johnson’s Johnson Publishing Company.

I’m still reading the book, but a few things have caught my attention:

• Start-up capital – Johnson “borrowed” the customer list (20,000 names) of the insurance company that employed him. He then wrote a letter to every customer asking them to prepay for a subscription to a magazine he hadn’t created yet. Three thousand people agreed to pay $2, giving him $2,000 in start-up capital—more than $100,000 in 2024 dollars. This biography highlighted Johnson’s copywriting in that letter. He worded the sales letter in a highly effective way and made people want to buy, sight unseen. Johnson noted that this letter was so unique that he could never replicate those results.
• Curation – Johnson’s first magazine, Negro Digest, didn’t include any original articles. He aggregated all its articles from various publications about Blacks. Making information readily available in a single place made his first magazine successful.
• Cloning – Johnson didn’t try to reinvent the wheel or create something new. He “borrowed” from successful magazine formats and used them to communicate to the Black community. Life magazine was a picture-based magazine that was wildly successful. Johnson used that format when he launched Ebony magazine.

Those are some of my early takeaways from the book. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of it.