Patrick and I presented to eGroup in January on //SN’s first year and our options for the future. This has gone in unexpected directions…
We presented some key stats, which we’ll share here:
- Our highest readership was just short of 10,000 pageviews in August 2014.
- Our subscribers have steadily risen over the year to just over 500 now, which is about half our estimated regular readership.
- We think there’s about 2000 people in our target market in Perth, but nearly 30% of our traffic comes from abroad, primarily the US and UK (hello foreigners!)
- We’ve published 347 articles since we started, so approximately one per day.
- Our most-read single article is the Guide to Perth’s Startup Scene (which caused Charlie to promptly write his own version the next weekend!)
eGroup’s a fascinating place to talk about this sort of stuff, the critical mass of experience present never fails to throw up some deep insights. In our case, the discussions boiled right down to the future of //Startup News and what Patrick and I want from it. And it turned out that we want different things.
Patrick founded //Startup News after helping out at Morning Startup for a few years, and realising that the Perth Startup Scene just wasn’t getting the media coverage it warranted. He also wanted to have a shot at solving the broken business model for news. One year on and that landscape has changed (we like to think at least partially because we raised the profile and helped get the word out). We now see regular mainstream media coverage for startups in Business News, The West, the Sunday Times and even Today Tonight.
Patrick’s dream is to make something big, something that will eventually pay him enough to quit the day job. //Startup News is an interesting adventure in content marketing for him, and has been a great learning experience, but it’s become clear that he can’t achieve his dream with //SN in its current form, so he’s decided it’s time to move on. He’ll remain a shareholder and have an interest in //SN, but will stop being involved in the day-to-day running of the site.
So from now on, I will be running //SN on my own, and so the style and content will change a bit, and certainly for the worse while I sort it all out and try to learn all the things that Patrick did to keep this thing running.
Because of the time commitment involved in running //SN I’ve had to step down from my full-time job so I’ll also be focussing on monetisation this year, with the aim of raising enough money to make the organisation and creation of content a lot easier and not so time-consuming. You may have already noticed the Google ads running on the site: an experiment to see how much little this will actually raise. There will be other experiments through the year as I discover how this publishing lark works, and I’ll be announcing them in the near future as I work through various monetisation hypotheses.
Patrick has put in a year of hard graft getting this site together, and most of what you see here is his work, and his ideas, funded by his money, with his unflagging enthusiasm for startups. I would like to thank him for all his work, for putting up with my random opinionated arguments, and for everything he’s done over the past year.
I look forward to seeing what he’s going to do next… and this, of course:
Bands are startups too 🙂
