Ryan Gàllego
Ryan Gàllego is the founder of Media Pouch, a video production company he started in Austin, Texas, in 2018 while working at AmazonAmazonAmazon is a publicly traded U.S. technology and retail company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, with its principal corporate offices in Seattle. Its businesses span e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment, digital advertising, membership and entertainment services, consumer electronics, and Amazon Web Services cloud computing.Open the full entry; it later opened podcast and video studios in East Austin that use live-editing software.
Contents7 sections
Key facts
Early Life: Photography and University
Gàllego picked up a camera at 14 at a sports photography company in St. Louis, where his mentor Paul Bryant taught him business basics; at 17 he ran his first “unofficial” photography company.[1]
He completed a double major in economics and finance at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.[1]
2018–2020Founding Media Pouch While at Amazon
After college he moved to Austin, Texas, to work at Amazon. About a year and a half into the job he came up with the idea for Media Pouch, which was founded in 2018 as a side project; in May 2019 he resigned from Amazon to run the company full time.[1]
He spent time in Sydney, Australia, launching the business abroad and returned to the United States in November 2019 to scale it nationally. Media Pouch offered real-estate, product-branding, drone, automotive and business video production; the company says its videos drove $1.75 million in revenue for clients in 2020.[1][2]
September 29, 2022Guest on the Pain In My Cass Podcast
He appeared on Cassandra Jean’s Pain In My Cass Podcast as founder of Pouch 6 Studios, discussing his move from corporate finance to creative entrepreneurship; the episode description said he planned to open the first autonomous podcast studio in Austin.[3]
April 9, 2026Interview with Hard Knocks Business
Hard Knocks Business published the long video “Day in the Life of a $1M/Year Entrepreneur!” and the short “He built a $1 MILLION podcast studio.” on the same day, following him through a day at Media Pouch’s studios. In the video he said the most he had personally made in a single year was $650,000, that the studio had been open for three and a half years and averaged about eight bookings a day; on the day of filming Bill GurleyBill GurleyBill Gurley is a venture investor, author and podcast host who spent many years as a Benchmark general partner, investing in and serving on boards of technology businesses including Uber and Zillow. He moved from computer engineering to securities research and became known for internet marketplace investments, the Above the Crowd blog and the career book Runnin’ Down a Dream.Open the full entry and podcaster Chris Williamson were recording in the two studios.[4][5]
He said the first studio cost $30,000 and was bootstrapped, while the second cost about $60,000, or about $100,000 all in with construction. Equipment such as Sony cameras is standardized across studios; he said the second studio was made white and airy because many women found the black studio too dark and masculine.[4]
He said the studio’s proprietary software live-edits podcasts during recording, so clients only book, pay, show up and tap a smart button; the first version of the code was written with ChatGPT, a software developer refined it in phase two, and phase three would use AI to read facial expressions and movement. He said AI had replaced the live-switching job but that the added capacity required more studio managers and customer specialists.[4]
He recalled that the company started in high-end video production and editing; in 2021 he saw brand budgets shift from production companies to influencer-made UGC, so he opened a studio to keep a share of the media market. He said both studios together had a trailing six-month average of about $3,250 a day, which the host put at $900,000 to $1 million a year, that they had served more than 4,000 clients in three and a half years, and that paid marketing was limited to SEO, AEO and GEO.[4]
Advice Shared on Hard Knocks Business
Trust your gut: he said past mistakes taught him to recognize red flags, so he now fully trusts that feeling (video at 05:43).[4]
Treat setbacks as lessons; he has a tattoo on his back reading “Never a failure, always a lesson” (video at 06:06).[4]
Early on, business can feel like one step forward and two steps back, but it turns into two forward and one back, then ten forward and one back; the key is patience (video at 06:28).[4]
Provide a great deal of value first and get paid afterwards; he said many people do it backwards, wanting payment before delivering value (video at 11:54).[4]
His life motto is “Create more than you consume,” applied to health, life and business: start creating and consume less (video at 02:49).[5]
Related Organizations, Websites, and Public Accounts
Media Pouch: Official website: https://mediapouch.com/ (opens in a new window).[1]
Media Pouch podcast and video studio: Official website: https://pouch6studios.com/ (opens in a new window).[6][3]
Sources
- About Us (opens in a new window)
- Austin Video Production Company (opens in a new window)
- Ryan Gallego on Building a Media Empire, Leaving Corporate Finance, and Revolutionizing Podcasting (opens in a new window)
- Day in the Life of a $1M/Year Entrepreneur! (opens in a new window)
- He built a $1 MILLION podcast studio. (opens in a new window)
- Podcast & Video Studio in Austin, TX (opens in a new window)