Building; world first, user second.

I believe there are two types of founders; those who want to make money (a living or a fortune, it doesn’t matter)… and those who want to change the world.

I always thought I was the former. Perhaps I’m not?

As a founder I can tell you: it makes things pretty difficult being the latter, so I’d like to share a few of the things I’ve learned along the road, trying to build something which I hope, in time, might help change the world for the better.

Founder types…

The first kind of founder is easy to understand. These folk know their market size, they know all about the gap they’re filling, they can raise money, recruit, scale and sell.

So what happens if you’re the second kind? What happens if your primary motivation is to make the world a better place? How do you raise money and how do you find your market, much less scale into it?

At the start of 2019, after 20+ years running a successful digital agency, building other people’s dreams, I decided to build a dream of my own.

I did this because, like many people, I have come to hate our political discourse and our cultural relationship with the news.

I wanted to fix it.

Three and a half years on we’re still here but it’s not been an easy road and we’ve still got a long hill to climb.

So in the spirit of all those “Top 5 tips for startup founders” articles we’ve all read, I’d like to share my take on those usual aphorisms, for all those founders like me; who’ve started their business for all the wrong reasons…

1. No idea what your product looks like? No sweat!

When most companies start they know what problem they’re trying to solve for an individual.

Once you know that, you can decide what product you’re going to build for that individual… and from here, your strategy takes shape; competitors, features, positioning, differentiation, pricing, marketing etc.

For us, the problem we’re trying to solve is a social problem.

We wish to fix the way news is funded, edited and consumed. We want to do this because we believe that attention-economics is accelerating a global extinction of consensus and balance in favour of selling everything as a tribal dichotomy, because in the end, that drives more revenue.

This leaves us with a challenge; what problem can we solve for an individual that aligns with the social problem we’re really trying to solve?

Our natural starting place was providing more balanced news and we quickly discovered that everyone sees the lack of “balance” in news as a problem that needs a solution.

So that’s where we started; with our product, our marketing and our positioning. We got lots of early traction, lots of interest and generated lots of excitement … because there’s a section of society that really understands that this is a problem that needs a solution.

But there’s a catch.

While everyone agrees that everyone else needs a more balanced view of the world… very, very few people identify themselves as needing that solution. In fact, people almost always identify themselves as the exception to the rule.

I suspect you do too, don’t you?

Not quite knowing the problem — and therefore not quite knowing the solution — taught us three important lesson for building a social startup.

Everything is an Experiment

First and foremost, we’re not wedded to any idea, in particular. Our whole product, our approach, our code and our UI is all just an experiment.

Knowing that from the start has made our infrastructure flexible — but it’s also helped our mental health because it changes our relationship with the things we invest our time and energy into.

All our failures are a success; because we set out to learn, rather than succeed.

Few Metrics Matter

To run an experiment you need to know what metrics matter, how to measure them and which ones to care about.

We made sure, early on, that we had a robust, in-house measure of the things we care about; acquisition, retention & revenue.

There are lots of fancy stats packages out there but using a privacy-first package like Plausible and measuring all the other things that matter in-house has saved us a fortune over the years and it means we don’t have to start our relationship with end-users by talking about cookies!

Separate All Responsibilities

Many coders will recognise the idea of separation of responsibilities but for those who don’t, it’s worth saying that we would not have survived if we hadn’t built our product in small, independent chunks. Each chunk has a discrete task and doesn’t interfere with any other chunk.

By being mindful of this rule from the outset means we’ve been able to let parts of the project to die off and new parts to be added as our understanding of the product has evolved. Most importantly we’ve obviated lots of unnecessary rework cost along the way.

I use the random word “chunks” because this rule permeates not just our code structure but also our database architecture and warehousing, our marketing approach, even our customer facing product and available apps.

By building every step of our pipeline to be independent and by assuming everything might be temporary we’ve been exceptionally flexible to change and product evolution.

2. People don’t know they want what I’m building.

I find it easiest to think about what we’re building as though we’re in the business of modernising salad & veg.

Everyone knows they should eat more greens but none of us can’t help ourselves once we’ve had a bite of some yummy, highly processed morsel.

Processed food sells because it’s physiologically moreish. Just a bite can convince your brain to want more.

In the end, processed news is no different to processed food.

We’ve got so good at processing people’s newsfeeds with emotive headlines, photos and ideas that our brains make us keep scrolling even when we know we’ve seen too much.

Growing a startup that tries not to employ all the tasty tricks I’ve learned over the years — one with fewer pictures, with simpler headlines, one that knows what you’re interested in yet intentionally shows you something else, which doesn’t invite comments, has no remarketing pixels and sometimes doesn’t even take your email address when you register — can prove to be quite difficult.

This is probably the area that’s still hardest for us but there’s no doubt we’ve learned a few vital lessons that have kept us moving forward;

People have to give a shit, right away.

If you take away all the typical marketing tricks you’re left with only two things; your product and your mission… and people need to “get it” right away.

Because we don’t re-market (that is to say; we don’t let Google & Facebook onto our site to leave cookies so that we can advertise to you tomorrow) we have to consider every visitor as a one-hit-wonder.

So we need to make sure everyone who visits believes in our mission and understands what they will get out of our product right away, in three seconds flat.

Since our brains are incapable of understanding something complex in just three seconds we need to make our visitors feel something — something relevant — in those first three seconds.

Sometimes we get that right and our acquisitions rocket… and sometimes we get things wrong and visitors come and go, never to return.

Sometimes it feels like we’ve got that right (like with Charlie) but when we look closely we realise we’ve built something novel enough to get attention, but not good enough to retain people for more than a day or two.

As our product evolves, so does our success in moving our messaging from a successful novelty to something that appeals to a mainstream audience.

What I would say though is that if you can’t win over a customer in three seconds, stop what you’re doing everywhere else and focus on just that until you get it right.

Everything else is pretty irrelevant till you get this right.

Find the pain.

If you’re building a product to solve a problem you already know what pain-point your addressing. If, like us, you’re coming at things backwards you need to work hard to identify a pain-point that you hook your messaging and communications onto.

As I’ve mentioned, while most people agree on our “world” problem (that news is polarising and divisive), reading the news isn’t immediately painful.

What we’ve come to realise though is that our product does solve lots of other little pains and this is helping us to identify niches where we can draw an audience.

One of the most promising (and rewarding) areas is around mental health, where we’re able to win back folk who are disaffected by the news with a much more calm, measured and limited daily news roundup that doesn’t cause stress and anxiety in the way a traditional news app might.

By identify real points of pain that we can address, we’re finding new audiences at a fraction of the cost. This is our next area of focus — finessing our messaging for exciting niche markets where our product easily solves a real problem when presented correctly.

3. I can’t raise VC money and stay true to my cause.

You come up with an idea. You raise a little “friends & family” finance. You build a prototype. You visit a VC. They give you a billion dollars. It’s easy. It’s the dream. Right?

Sure. We started down this path. We had the idea. We bootstrapped. We raise £100k in a crowd funding “pre-seed” round. This was just before Covid and everything was looking rosey.

But as we moved from our youthful beginnings to the early adolescence of having a product in the market and started to chat to the VC scouts that approached us we hit a roadblock… of our own making.

What if we don’t want VC money? How do we scale? How do we take a successful little product and come up with the funds to properly market it?

Okay — you’re probably wondering — why on Earth wouldn’t we want investment and I should clarify; we want investment… but we’re going to have to be exceedingly choosey and we have to accept that we may not find anyone suitable.

The reason is that our business is based around providing actively balanced, depolarised, slow, calm news that doesn’t deploy all the tricks that make things addictive, viral, catchy and dramatic.

Our priority is mission; first and foremost.

As soon as you have a major investor on board your priorities inevitably change because however charming your investor is, they want to see a return on their investment.

So what have we learned?

Know thy self

There’s no doubt, had we realised this sooner our approach would have changed. It never occurred to us that there wouldn’t be a regular, traditional investment path available to us until we realised that we were probably going to be even more picky than the investors we’d be speaking to.

If the soul of your business would be compromised by the wrong investor, figure that out now so you don’t waste time when they come knocking.

Take charge of the conversation

Once we realised that a VC’s priorities might conflict with our core principals we were able to massively reduce the time spent with VC scouts because we were able to take charge of the conversations, challenge them and prequalify many of them out of the conversation.

It felt counter-intuitive at first but if your principals matter — take charge of the conversation you have with these folk.

Trust the crowd

If we do another funding round then the reality for us is that running another “crowd” round starts to make a lot of sense. It’s an enormous amount of work, like anything worth doing, but having a crowd of 200 investors who invested specifically because they want to see us fulfil our mission is a massive help.

We’re not sure what a bigger crowd round would look like just yet but we feel that by not having a single investor with the capacity to demand that we compromise our principals, we will maintain the hard-earned trust with our readers that is fundamental to our mission and our survival.

4. I’m not going to be ready to scale for some time.

Whatever your investment plans, you might actually not be ready to scale.

So many of you, I suspect, are bootstrapped and for whatever reason — where your product is, where you are in your life and so on — you’re actually not ready to seek investment and scale.

That’s absolutely fine: Longevity is a sign of strength!

For us, our focus right now is getting the product just right. What we do is, computationally, exceedingly complex. We’re running a constant stream of thousands of new articles through an evolving AI model all day, every day, on a shoestring and trying to make sense of it in a different, personal way to every single reader.

That doesn’t even take into account the complexity of communicating to a reader why we’re showing the stories we’re showing in a way they understand — when their expectations are so habituated by regular news apps to expect hyperbole and the latest “Breaking!” story.

Getting something new, different, complex or nuanced “right” takes time.

I refuse to believe that diminishes the value of what we’re trying to do — in fact, I think it enhances our value. Nevertheless it makes life difficult when cash is burning.

There’s no way we would have survived if it wasn’t for following a few of these rules.

Go super-easy on easy solutions

It’s so, so very easy to go crazy bolting the latest toolset into your fledgling product. The billing system, the online chat, the analytics and so on. All these things *burn* money.

Yes — they are often fantastic but if you want to survive for a long time there are only two ways that happens: you earn more from your customers… or you burn less of your capital. The latter is far, far easier!

Build what you can in-house. Invest the time once on building things you then don’t need to pay for monthly… and as I said earlier, don’t over-do the clever analytics. Only build what you really, really need. Know your KPIs and remember; “you don’t fatten a pig by weighing it”.

Love your users

It should go without saying but many of your early adopters are really volunteer staff. Treat them as such. Communicate. They are the very, very best people to have on your team. There’s simply no way that OneSub would be where it is today without the constantly intermittent support of our readers; reporting bugs, having ideas, sharing our work, pushing us to succeed and holding us to account.

Whatever you do (and try not to use an expensive tool!) make sure that your users feel empowered and entitled to speak to you directly — any time.

You will not succeed without them. Period.

Assume nothing. Test everything.

Building mission-first makes everything uncertain.

As I mentioned earlier our experimental approach makes it easier to cope, emotionally, with building things that may not see the light of day — or survive long — but the experimental approach goes deeper if you’re going to make your cash flow further.

When you make no assumptions about what’s going to work you become far more circumspect about your roadmap planning, your coding cycle and your release schedule.

These days we’re running three different apps across mobile, desktop and both AppStores in alpha, beta and live with a flowing lifecycle that allows us to tweak, test and experiment with a real audience engaged with us personally at different intensities.

We’re only a tiny team — but it allows us to test ideas quickly and make small incremental improvements that can have a huge impact down the line.

Eat your own dogfood

You know this one.

If you don’t you should!

Walk your user-routes constantly. Delete everything, close all your own accounts and go back to Google (or wherever you get your users) and re-tread the exact steps your users take. (.. and find a way to obscure yourself from your own KPIs so you don’t invalidate your stats).

It’s so very easy to assume everything is working — but unless you see life through the eyes of your greenest visitor you will miss out massively on all the things you really, really wish you’d known.

5. Who are my customers, anyway?

In the end, all of this is completely academic if you don’t have customers isn’t it? This isn’t the Field of Dreams and it doesn’t matter how useful your mission might be; if you genuinely don’t have customers then it’s all for naught.

Not having any potential customers is a problem… but having potential customers for a noble mission and failing to identify them is just heartbreaking.

So how do you identify your customers when you’re not sure what your product really is?

As I mentioned earlier, what we’ve realised is that while we can’t define our customer with the traditional simplicity of an ad-platform; age, gender and so-on — we have identified dozens of niches where our solutions ring true.

The truth is, now the mechanics of our news-modelling is mature enough to present real value to readers, we are bringing our experimental attitude to identifying market segments.

For us, there is no single patch of the world we serve. These are the approaches we’re finding really work.

Communication is Key

I’ve mentioned how important getting feedback from users is, especially as a small team wanting to invest time in the most important areas. You also need to understand who your sticky customers are, what makes them tick and why they’re hanging around. Your users are not just a line in the database — you have to get out and meet them.

Keep Refreshing your Perspective

When you work on a product for a long time — especially when it’s a passion project — it’s so easy to get fixated on one aspect of your creation.

The truth is everyone who sees your product will have a different perspective on what it is, what it does, how it works and — crucially — why it matters to them.

It’s imperative that you work to refresh your perspective on your product; your messaging, your UX, your mission and your workflows.

Hand your app to strangers. Watch their reactions. Watch them work through your sign-up. Listen — really listen. Then ask them about themselves.

Correlate your experiments. Work out what correlates the success, intrigue and interest between different strangers. What is common amongst them?

The reason you set out to build your product and the reasons people love it are unlikely to be the same. You have to understand the mindset of strangers to understand your customers. Dive deep.

Wrapping Up

We set out, back in 2019, on a mission to fix the way we consume the news.

Our mission is an impossible mountain to climb — we know that — for so many different reasons. Nevertheless we’re going to try, one step at a time.

Changing people’s habits, offering a healthier option against a sea of addictive, enticing alternatives is tough.

But the reality is that there are so very many people in the world that the challenge is never “will anyone find my product helpful?” Of course someone will.

The challenge is always “where are those people that will find my product helpful?”

Building a product you know you can sell to a definable market is no doubt the more sensible, commercially viable and predictable way to go.

I believe strongly though; that if you really, truly want to change the world for the better, you’re going to have to accept that you’re not taking the easy route.

You have to find a way to convince people of the value of what you’re doing by appealing to a logic and long-term relationship that goes beyond modern, attention grabbing antics.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling solar panels, whole foods or slower, more balanced news.

If it’s worth doing you need to find the grit to persevere in the face of more exciting distractions because somewhere, there is an audience waiting for you… and when you find each other, believe me, it makes absolutely everything so very worthwhile.

Whatever your project is; good luck with it — and don’t ever give up.