Recreate the local newspaper in digital form, by creating a simple daily newsletter focused on Victoria, Canada, my home town 📰
I hired a journalist and we started sending out a quick summary of what’s happening every day at 7AM...
Something you can skim over your morning coffee, like the front page of the newspaper, to feel more informed.
I figured it would be a short lived goofy experiment...
Nope. Not at all...
I’ve been involved with all sorts of flashy companies, but for the first time I got stopped in local cafes and people gushed about Capital Daily, our newsletter...
Then 20,000.
A year later, we have over 40,000 subscribers.
The population of Victoria is only around 367,000, so 1 in 10 residents reads our newsletter(!).
We are now bigger than The Times Colonist, the 100 yr old daily paper...
So what made this work so well?
A few things:
The job to be done was: “something to skim that gives me a rough sense of what’s happening”...
3. Most importantly: we used cheap digital advertising to build up our audience. We spent about $200k on Facebook and Instagram with almost zero competition.
Think about this: I could have gone and bought the local paper for $5-$15MM.
Instead, I spent $200k on FB ads, $50 on Mailchimp, and $60k on a writer and BOOM!
I expected to burn money, but now advertisers are lining up and we’ve realizing it can not only break even, but be profitable...
So we’re going to keep pounding our profits into hiring more journalists, and I’m continuing to inject cash to grow faster..
Hopefully we can do some good and start to re-engage people in local issues.