Here are my notes on Brad Flora’s (@bradflora) Social Dev Camp presentation on his experiences with Windy Citizen. He’s a great public speaker: funny, articulate and he’s got a great story to tell.
Windy Citizen
- Effectively Digg For Chicago
- founded in 2008
- current iteration is not the first idea we had
- it’s like “idea number 47″
- doesn’t have an engineering background
- spent no money on advertising
- did not have help from the local media for the first 1.5 years
- if you have an idea, take comfort that there are people who have done this without a strict technical background
Environment in 2008
- trib + sun times had just declared bankruptcy
- city blogs on the rise (chicagoist, gapers block)
- dozen of youn, unemployed writers
- started with a naive take that traffic = money, content=traffic
- WC originally looked like typical web mag
He learned…
- building a local audience is REALLY hard
- single threaded business = death
- 1:1 growth:effort means you’re doomed
- single point of failure means you are doomed
- traffic would disapear when he wasn’t working
- had one point of failure and that was him
- the idea that you can just publish stuff and people will find it is not true
No point of view on the internet is death
- Huffington Post has a point of view
- The important thing is not that you agree with the huffpo, it is that you know that it has a point of view
- original windycitizen had no point of view
- The internet: where sane people go to read and expeience crazy things
- You need a point of view or you will die
- You have to make something people want
- Public enemy number one: assuming a demand
- “Local public affairs reporting is important. Thus, there is a demand for it”
- “I don’t do local politics. That shit is boring. Have you heard of groupon?”
PLAN B
- Make WC a Place to share your fav local links
- addressed a single threaded problem
- people can still be posting to the site to make it work
- site grows even if Brad isn’t posting new content
- Addressed point of view problem
- point of view can evolve as the community evolves
The Year
- phase one: the routine
- wake up. post 20 links. email to local bloggers.
- phase 2: ads
- called local businesses. all of them said no, get lost.
- how to make ad sales in a market when stuff is slumping?
- phase 3: sell, sell, sell
- brought on independent ad sales rep
- since march 2010 – citizen is profitable and sustainable
- now makes a small profit
- brought on community editor last month who runs site day to day
- site now it looks very much like digg
The Pivot – Changing The Way Ads are Sold
- no one ever wants to buy an ad, people hate ads
- had to make two sales – had to sell WC and then sell the ad
- No banner ads! learned they won’t work for WC
- Pricing is terrible
- small biz in chi have negative view of buying advertising
- audience was too small for large ad network
- ad networks serve very irellevant ads
- How do you add value to an add? Targeting.
- Targeting is really where the add is going.
- Give control and greater convenience to the advertisers…
Real time ads
- Effectively selling a place to put your twitter feed
- launched first one in sept.
- price it on negotiated monthly basis than cpm
- improved the design
- numbers steadily improved.
- we’d ask “how many followers they had on twitter?”
- whatever that number was, we’d laugh at that number.
- We’d ask “do you want more”?
- The answer is always “yes”
Knight News Challenge
- Annual innovation challenge
- $5m to new ideas for the news industry
- funded everyblock
- in 2008 applied with idea for windycitizen
- didn’t make it out of first round
- applied again in 2009
- made it to final round, got cut
- applied again in 2010 – this time it was a business, we were making money
- this time we won
- two months ago we won $250,000
Nowspots
- @nowspots
- www.nowspots.com
- providing real-time advertising tech to newpapaers and other local publishers
- People are good at talking about themselves on twitter
- We tell them “just keep doing what you are doing”
- people are following you, we just want to help you do that
- going to save newspapers by giving them better, smarter tech
- no one wants to buy banner ads this days
- Started digging for gold and realized the shovel sucks.
- Built a better shovel and then started selling it to other miners.
- will just be working with a few publishers in the beggining
Conclusion
- Your first idea really does probably suck
- Single thread in business does not work
- You have to have a point of view
- If people aren’t reading and sharing your content, it’s probably because it sucks
- The only thing worse than making these mistakes is chickening out for fear of making mistakes
- While working on your less great ideas, you might come up with much better ones.
Q: how did you eat for the first 1.5 years of windy citizen
- did some consulting on the side
- built wordpress and drupal sites on the side
- flat ran out of money three times during the first year
- “as someone who went to princeton, you don’t really expect to open your bank account and have seven dollars.”
- asked WC readers to contribute to the “keep brad alive fund”
- raised $1600 from readers in $10s and $20s.
Q: any plans to francise windy citizen to other markets?
- alot of publishers want to meet to talk about social media ads
- Chicago has been seat of our pants
- have plans to start sites in other cities
- joint ventures? ad shares? licensing tech? dunno yet.
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