Send & Grow by SparkLoop

EP 46 - Geoff Sharpe
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Geoff Sharpe: [00:00:00] I think there is a trend of people sort of, especially in the local news space, being tired of sort of like clickbait headlines. Yeah. Just trying to drive as many page views as possible. I think people are really craving something deeper, a better connection with their, with their writers in the city and sort of An understanding of what's going on that gets beyond the sort of surface level information, and that's the framing that we've used a lot of our stuff to great effect.

Dylan Redekop: Welcome to episode 46 of the Send and Grow podcast. My name is Dylan Redikop, and one exciting element of my job at Sparkloop is sitting down with fascinating guests. In the newsletter space, and finding out how they're growing and monetizing their newsletters so you can learn from their journeys. Today I'm joined by Jeff Sharp, co founder of Lookout Media.

Jeff and his co founder seized the opportunity to launch a niche local newsletter in Canada's capital city of Ottawa. But unlike traditional media, they're not just reporting the news. They're transforming how local stories are told by focusing on high quality content that their [00:01:00] communities love to read.

And where traditional media relies on ads and sponsors to drive revenue, ads only make up 25 percent of Lookout Media's income. Listen in to find out how Jeff and his team are driving the other 75 percent of their revenue, the secrets behind their growth and retention strategies, and a peek inside their day to day operations.

Jeff, it's great to have you on the show. Can you start us off by sharing a bit about Lookout Media and what prompted you to start it?

Geoff Sharpe: Yeah, so, uh, we're about four newsletters now. We've been around for just over, a little over two years now. Um, yeah, it's called Lookout Media, uh, generally sort of filling a space in the local media.

Sort of area in Canada around newsletters, you know, I think it's a similar story that a lot of people have where they sort of saw what's happening in some of these places, you know, what Morning Brew is doing, you know, what Axios is doing and saying, Hey, there's an underserved market here and an opportunity to do something similar.

What we've done is sort of evolved a little bit over time as we've learned new [00:02:00] things, but definitely on the newsletter side, we saw an opportunity to do something where no one else was really doing it. And, uh, yeah, it's been really great and, you know, excited to chat about it.

Dylan Redekop: I was going to say, let's start at the beginning.

What prompted you to start a local newsletter? You mentioned that you saw an opportunity. Like, how did that come about? And I'll also just add in, you have a co founder. And so, you know, how did that relationship form? And, and you guys get started with this media business.

Geoff Sharpe: Yeah. So it started back, I, I've done digital marketing my whole life.

I, I do like, Newsletter consulting and digital media is my main business. This is all sort of us doing this part time, but I've done worked in sort of a nonprofit email space for a long time. A lot of similar stuff that you see in the media space, engaging members, things like that, and sort of realized that the newsletter space was becoming increasingly popular and I'm a big media person.

I follow stuff a lot. So seeing how these trends are evolving, I'd worked with Robert on a few different sort of media based stuff before. And so. He was sort of a person [00:03:00] that I knew and had worked with previously. And so we had a good working relationship in that regard. So it kind of made sense to be able to partner on this.

We identified Ottawa as a city that I lived there for a little bit. So I understood it. He lives there. And so we had a good sense of the market in terms of what was there, what isn't there. Canada and the US as well is dealing with a ton of sort of loss of local media. And so we knew this model works everywhere.

There's no reason it can't work in Ottawa. And so we just identified what was missing and just put it together, filled out the editorial, things like that. Robert being sort of the writer on it. I doing all the sort of digital marketing, audience, sales, all the other stuff that comes around the newsletter besides just writing it.

And so we've been doing that for a bit over two and a half years now. And now we're in Vancouver. We've expanded to sort of food writing as well. And we have someone in Ottawa doing that. So taking it in a bit of a different direction than we originally thought, but, uh, it's sort of the same process through, through most of it.

It's just refining what we do and adding more, I guess. [00:04:00]

Dylan Redekop: Yeah. Yeah. And, um, you know, Ottawa is an interesting market to start up because it's sort of a middle, a middle city. It's not like one of the massive cities like Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, but it's definitely a decent sized city that could benefit from something like that.

And so, I guess the question that comes to my mind is local newspapers have been around forever, right? And there's, there's a desire to have that local media. What are, what are some of the must haves for a local newsletter to really be successful? And you started the Ottawa Lookout, now you've branched out and, you know, gone to Vancouver.

So what have you found that Those local, those local newsletters really could use to be successful.

Geoff Sharpe: So there's a few things. I think the big misconception on this stuff is you can basically just start something up, send, you know, five links or five events that are taking place in the city around, and that's enough to build a local news publication.

It might be enough to build a little bit of an engaged list, but you're not going to build a business, big business from that, or a, you know, sustainable thing [00:05:00] because someone can come along and do the exact same thing and maybe, you know, Optimize it a little bit. So the way we've sort of thought about it is like there's a few must haves.

I think the first one is on editorial direction. Having a unique differentiator that will allow you to create a moat that's different than what your competitors are doing. So understanding the landscape. figuring out what people are doing or what other publications are doing and leaning into something that you can do better than other people or an approach that's better than other people.

And that really does start from sort of having a clear sense of what you're writing, who you're writing to. And a lot of that, I think, like, you know, we talk a lot about growth and things like that, but having a really strong brand that You know, has clear things you talk about that's different than other places of voice to it as well.

I think one thing that we've found that works really well on the email side is that you're building a connection with leaders. And so people feel like they have a personal relationship with Robert in Ottawa because he's reflecting back to things that are happening. He's sharing stories about himself, but he's providing a utility to people.

So [00:06:00] I think when you thinking about what you need to have for a local newsletter, you It has to be something that is just different and and will create a bit of a hook and a moat that other places can't have, whether that's your brand, your voice, stuff that you take to it for us, it's it's our structure.

So we have a certain way of writing the newsletter that other people just haven't done. We bring a level of insight to it, so it goes beyond just regurgitating the news that's happening. But giving people insights about what it actually means and what it means for the future of the city and how to understand that in that context and not everyone can do that, right?

A lot of times it's just regurgitating that information and then the last piece for us anyways, making it accessible, something easy to read that people actually enjoy reading. It's not a chore. And through that, uh, all those things, you know, becomes a product that people enjoy reading and are unlikely to change if a competitor comes along.

And that's definitely, definitely what we've seen, even though there's other places that have newsletters that cover news, [00:07:00] because we've built a certain structure of doing things, a certain voice and things like that. It allows us to sort of retain our audience and my experience much better than than what I've seen from other other public.

Dylan Redekop: Yeah, and I was going to say with Vancouver, uh, with the Vancity Lookout and Vancouver, Vancouver's got, you know, um, Vancouver is awesome. And, uh, you know, Vancity Buzz, all these different sort of media businesses. Uh, I'm not sure what the market's like in Ottawa because I I don't live there, but I live a lot closer to Vancouver.

So like, how have you really, you know, positioned yourself against all those other media properties? And what has growth been like with that much competition? It's

Geoff Sharpe: a, it's a great question. I, I love having a little bit of competition. I think it helps refine what you're doing and really focus on the most important things.

What we found with Vancouver and This is I love talking about this stuff is that we had a theory in Ottawa about what people wanted. Okay. And the expansion of Vancouver was to understand is this model that we have in Ottawa where they just have a much less pervasive news market. There's much fewer [00:08:00] competitors.

Vancouver is a much more advanced news market. They have some great publications that are doing incredible stuff. And for us in May, you know, the Vancouver one was to figure out is this model replicable in another city. That has that doesn't have what we're offering, but already has a bunch of news outlets that are doing interesting things.

And so it was kind of a, um, not a make or break type thing. But, you know, if it works in a place like Vancouver, then that tells us that the model works basically everywhere, a place without a lot of local news, a place with a lot of local news. And what we found is Basically the same level of metrics that we have.

So we do a lot of bench, I do, I do a lot of benchmarking to see how each publication is comparing where they are at each different spot of the timeline. So month over month metrics, comparing those to when Ottawa started. Mm-hmm. . And it's almost the same, you know, slightly different, but being able to look back and say, we have this model here, we apply it here, looking at the similarities and things like that has been super [00:09:00] useful because we're basically hitting the same number of paying members, the same, if not better, sort of open rate.

Click rate that type of stuff. So basically, we've proven that because of the editorial direction that we've taken, because it's different than something like these other ones in the city, it's replicable in other places. And the last point I'd say is that the one thing I think that we've really hit in on, and I think A good takeaway for for other people, too, is that I think there is a trend of people sort of, especially in the local news space, being tired of sort of like clickbait headlines, just trying to drive as many page views as possible.

I think people are really craving something deeper, a better connection with their with their writers in the city and sort of. an understanding of what's going on that gets beyond the sort of surface level information. And that's the framing that we've used a lot of our stuff to great effect, both on sort of the news side, especially, but especially on the, on the food side, where we're not just doing sort of like top 10 pizza places.

It's very [00:10:00] deep reviews on this stuff, different model and writing than what we do on the news side. But what it's shown is that people want a certain type of thing. As long as we stick within that framework, You know, there's a lot of different things we can add to that. So lots of information there, but suffice to say, yes, it has worked really well.

Dylan Redekop: Uh, Jeff, what this, this really makes me think of is, you know, differentiating, um, yourself based on kind of the incentives of the reader, right? What we Typically see with these local media properties is the incentive to really monetize the on page experience. So when somebody goes on their phone and they're swiping through, you know, the top 10, like you said, pizza places in Vancouver to eat at, they're just bombarded with all these ads and they have to scroll through and, you know, close all the video ads at the pop up displays and all that stuff.

Whereas, Like you said, when the content is, you know, if that's what's leading your growth, is the quality content, something that's written for a reader. That's not just incentivized to get as many people on the page with, you know, a clickbait title and listicle. I really think that's [00:11:00] serving the community a lot better.

And so it really is an interesting topic around business models for media properties too. Because if you're talking about something that's a paid subscription, the content's got to be good. It really doesn't matter if you have a clickbait title, if the content. doesn't serve people, they're going to either not subscribe or pay for a subscription or cancel their subscription.

So I really like the business model with that sort of that sort of angle.

Geoff Sharpe: Yeah, the business model is an interesting one too. I'm not sure if that exactly is it was your question, but I think talking a little bit about that's interesting because we are a little bit different than maybe other publications, especially newer ones.

About 75 percent of our revenue comes from memberships. We're almost at 2000 paying members a little bit, a couple more months and we'll, we'll be there. But about 75 percent members, 25 percent ads. So there's lots of room on our side to grow from local ads when that's where most of the revenue comes from.

You can't really do membership without good quality content. I think that's where a lot of local publications have struggled recently is shifting [00:12:00] from a mindset of page views to quality content and content that people are going to pay for. There's different reasons people pay for, especially on the local news side, you know, B2B is very different.

It's a, it's a very big utility function. I'm getting something that's helping my job. Local news is a little bit different. The hook for that, because it's a consumer B2C type thing needs to be different. And we've definitely identified like a few different hooks. There's not just one, there's people who support local news and care about the mission.

And that's a really great hook and other places do that really well too. But we've also focused on more exclusive type of content. So deeper city hall reporting that you just, you know, maybe you can get somewhere else, but it's in a way than a structure that's easier to understand. Right. So the utility function for some people there is very useful.

And then on the food side, it's, it's sort of getting the content that you can't find going back to that. Point you made about sort of 10 best pizza places. Um, I think the problem there is that a lot of that stuff is going to be automated in the future with with AI [00:13:00] and just scraping information. And if you ever go to Google these days and just search best pizza place in New York or best pizza place in in wherever.

It's not usually the best or it's information that everyone already knows. And so what we're trying to do with the food stuff, especially is take a little bit deeper, go to these places, do these reviews, hopefully talk to the owners. But again, it's that relationship that's being built. So there's trust there.

You can't do an AI review of a pizza place of like, what does this pizza taste like? What are the feelings and emotions that I'm getting from this? What sort of insights am I drawing from the pizza community in Vancouver that readers might want? In a lot of ways that type of stuff is kind of AI proof and, and I think really interesting in the future.

Whereas publications that are just going for the clickbait stuff, I think are really gonna struggle when AI is just gonna serve this up in a, in an algorithm query. I think it's just

Dylan Redekop: that kind of content is going to, um. You know, people have wisened up to it to a large degree already. But, uh, I think it's [00:14:00] just gonna, like you said, it's, it's commodity content at this point.

And so you have to differentiate, which is, which is smart. So thanks for sharing that. That's, it's really insightful. And it's a interesting business model as well, going, like you said, about 75 percent memberships versus 25 percent ad revenue. One thing I spoke about recently with the guys from WhoSponsorsStuff, Ryan and Jesse, they're basically talking about how you can have advertising as your main revenue source.

And with newsletters, it's different because it's not an interruptive experience with advertising. They even recommend like, if you have a paid newsletter, there's no reason why you need to, you know, your, your value proposition for paging newsletters, you're not going to serve ads because, you know, a lot of people in your demographic that are willing to pay, A, may have the funds to, you know, actually Purchase what you're advertising for.

So you're kind of cutting out that demographic. And also, if an ad is done properly, it's going to be beneficial to the advertiser, to yourself and to your audience. Everybody wins because there's something that the people that are reading your newsletter and paying to read it [00:15:00] will actually also benefit from if there's a proper alignment there.

So I feel like there's an opportunity for even paid newsletters to such as yours, you know, to, I don't want to say double dip, but Take advantage of the opportunity to advertise even in a in a paid edition as well, let alone the free edition that you guys are running.

Geoff Sharpe: Yeah, and I've never heard of, or I shouldn't say that, I heard a great podcast, I think it was either Perpetual or Rebooting, um, one of those two.

They interviewed someone and they basically said, in all the research we've done, This is a publisher. We've never sort of seen on the newsletter side, at least, I think it was see anyone that, uh, you know, said that a benefit of membership was not getting ads or having an ad free experience. Now that might differ on a website that is 15 pop ups.

Maybe it is worth paying for that, but those places are probably not doing membership. Yeah. And so, yeah, I think the big thing in the media space is having Multiple lines of revenue, right? If for us, it's right now, membership and ads. And I mean, you could throw like, you know, spark loop up scribe and the beehive network in [00:16:00] there as sort of another revenue generator, but there's a lot of other places that you can make money from, especially on the local news side, right?

So I think the biggest thing on the local news side is you are building trust, right? There's a trust element that, that gets built up with that. And that's the same with any sort of like newsletter in that space. And leveraging that trust to launch other products is very interesting. So, you know, you could launch an event listing board.

Dylan Redekop: Yeah.

Geoff Sharpe: You'd launch a job listing board. Obviously, events are a huge opportunity there that a lot of people are doing. There's a lot of different sort of spaces there. Maybe even on the real estate side that I can't remember. I think it was Jacob Donnelly from Media Operator had a great story on that.

Potential revenue there. So once you have that trust, you have that relationship, you know, you can turn that into other products that by the very nature of you being that trust source can benefit from. Obviously, that comes with time and scale and things like that. And I think, you know, you don't want to get too far away from what you're doing at the very beginning when you're you're resource [00:17:00] limited.

But Once you have that audience, they're locked in. There's a lot of things you can do with it down the road on the revenue generation side.

Dylan Redekop: Yeah. And I was going to ask you about that. Uh, like what other monetization opportunities for local newsletter, but you just kind of answer my question right there.

And so those were, those are some really good examples. I want to talk to you about growth because you mentioned how, you know, one of your, your duties is growth for the newsletter. So what have you done? To grow both the vancid lookout and the Ottawa lookout and the growth strategies, the same growth strategy work in each, I guess, area.

Geoff Sharpe: Yeah, I have a distinct viewpoint on this, which I think maybe other newsletter people may disagree with.

Dylan Redekop: Oh, I love it. Let's hear it. We'll be right back to this conversation after a quick word from our sponsor. This episode of the Senegal podcast is brought to you by Sparkly. Back in February, we launched our biggest affiliate competition ever.

We're giving away a free two person trip to Cancun. The good news? There's still time to win. Just head to your affiliate dashboard in your SparkLoop account [00:18:00] and share your link with other top newsletter operators. When they earn, you earn. It's the easiest way to generate thousands in extra revenue for your business.

Become our top earning affiliate through the end of April and you'll win a free trip to paradise. Get started before it's too late. And now back to the episode. I want to talk to you about growth because you mentioned how, you know, one of your, your duties is growth for the newsletter. So what have you done to grow both the events aid to look out and the Ottawa lookout and the growth strategies, the same growth strategy work in each, I guess, area.

Geoff Sharpe: Yeah, I have a distinct viewpoint on this, which I think maybe other newsletter people made. Disagree with? Oh, I love it. Let's hear it. They don't think it's controversial. Oh, okay. But, uh, I, I think this, well, maybe a little bit, I think this whole idea of like focusing on organic growth at the very beginning is the wrong strategy and really like spending a lot of time on it.

And I think there's a few reasons for that. I'm not saying it doesn't have its place, but I can tell you right now, the amount of organic growth that we've focused [00:19:00] on is absolutely minimal. So, And our open rates are, you know, 58 percent plus 12 percent click through rate uniques. Like they're very engaged audience.

And the reason I say not focusing so much on organic, if you have the money to be able to spend on paid ads, that is what I would spend almost all resources on. Now caveat is you need to be good at buying ads and, and that type of thing. But I would say 90 percent plus of our audience has come from paid growth.

Okay. Part of it is you need to have a validated idea. If you spend 100 on ads and you've got really good engagement, that's a clear sign that you should go all in on this. And I think the reason I say starting paid growth is really important, especially if you're getting good engagement and that type of thing.

Is because all of this is a time frame problem. If you start paid growth six months from now, that's six months lost of audience acquisition. Because if your revenue is a function of the size of your list and the engagement of your list, if you can take your 20, 000 lists that you have at the end of the year and [00:20:00] put that at month three, Like that's just all this more extra revenue and runway that you're going to have.

And so I take a bit of a different stance on it. Like I don't have time to meticulously write up a Reddit post or tweet out stuff organically, you know, or reach out to places and ask to do blog posts. I got to write my newsletter. I got to, you know, deal with projections. I got to deal with the sales that come in.

It's almost like taking a salary of a person and putting that into paid ads. Yeah. And that's just how we've grown our audiences. And the good thing about local is like a very engaged group of people, much more so than from other channels that I've found and other publications. You're getting a really engaged group of people that care.

Caveat again. Your editorial needs to be strong and it needs to be really good. But I think the growth side of stuff tends to be focused a little bit too much on and where I think people need to spend more of their time is on retention and editorial. And when someone comes in, how do I grow that? And how do I engage that [00:21:00] person?

And keep them around if I can reduce, you know, the churn rate on a subscriber by 30 to 40%. That's ad revenue that I could revenue I can respend on on growth, right? So I think there's a lot of talk online about zero to 10, 000 subscribers, things like that. I would just plow your money into Facebook ads, best targeting available, grow your list, and spend more of that time rather than worrying about growing your list, worrying about retention.

I think like there's so many functions for growing your newsletter now. You know, spark loop, referral network, beehive referral network, you know, these don't work well locally, but they work well in other spots. My theory is, and again, people might disagree, is that on the growth side, it's actually never been easier to grow But it's never been harder to retain those people that you grow.

So I think from that perspective, I would focus less on like, how do I, how do I grow, stick to some specific tactics, and really work on retaining that audience through strong editorial, a good onboarding series, audience [00:22:00] segmentation, surveys, things like that. Because your ad spend and your resources will go a lot farther.

So I don't know if that's controversial, but that's my take on it. I have, I have an opinion, I guess. Yeah.

Dylan Redekop: Yeah, yeah, no, that's great. And I think, you know, people will either have time or they have money. If you're really fortunate, you got both. But what it comes down to is how quickly can you actually make money from the audience you're growing, right?

Because if you're still looking to year out, then you may not be able to afford to be spending, you know, 2, 3, 5, 10 K a month on growth if you're not going to be monetizing it anytime soon. And you may have time, Maybe you are, you've got all this time for whatever reason and you can do all these organic tactics to grow your newsletter and you'd rather do that than sink money into it and, you know, power to you if you can and some people can do that, but I think like you said, if you can basically put the cost of a growth marketer's salary.

Into into meta or Twitter or wherever that might be to grow your newsletter that much faster. Like you said, that's a huge time [00:23:00] leverage in getting, um, where you would be 20, 000 subscribers at the end of the year to month three. Like that's massive.

Geoff Sharpe: Yeah. And that is definitely the caveat. Like if you have the resources to do it, there's no doubt about it.

If you don't have that, then you gotta do the organic stuff. But if you have a validated idea, And you've got engagement and things like that, I would pull the trigger, try to pull it really fast and especially if you, if you've got a model for making money, you know, without that, it's obviously a little bit tougher, but for us, like, we've seen the model, we know what there is, you know, I had some benchmarks.

You know, maybe a bit of a different situation for us, but I think for a lot of newsletter operators, if you've got some of that stuff dialed in, I would start just trying to grow your list as soon as you can. Yeah. On the paid side.

Dylan Redekop: Yeah, I think that makes sense too. If you have the business model and it's validated like you've done, you took it from Ottawa to Vancouver and it's worked, then it makes sense to bring it into market number three, four or five.

And you know, Generally speaking, if I'm spending X amount of dollars to acquire a subscriber, I'm going to be [00:24:00] able to earn this much back in this timeframe and so on. So it's, it's a little bit safer. It's de risked a little bit.

Geoff Sharpe: Yeah. And if there's no, like, especially if you're competing against a lot of people, like you may not want to spend a lot of money because you haven't validated your idea yet.

But if you have a model that you've seen work in other places, and that's what we did with local news stuff, we know it theoretically would work and we had the execution. And after a few emails, we knew people liked it. It was a no brainer to pull it. And so maybe you don't pull it right away. But I think people wait too long before they do that.

I think would be maybe the caveat I would add to my, uh, my tape.

Dylan Redekop: Okay. Fair enough. So you have the two local newsletters, um, that we've talked about and there's yourself and Robert, you've mentioned as a co founder, you guys publish these, uh, as if five days a week for each.

Geoff Sharpe: No. So it's, well, sort of five days a week.

It's a bit of a different model per city. So the Vancouver one, we publish a food one once a week, We have the three news ones that go out. And then we have an insider that goes out once a week. So theoretically, we're writing, I'm writing about five [00:25:00] days a week. And then Robert has a news one. He writes the insider every so often.

And then we have a food guy who writes two a week. One is free, one is paid. So the model differs per city. We're sort of experimenting with that. But, um, yeah, it's a, it's a fair bit of product.

Dylan Redekop: Okay. Yeah. I was going to ask, like, I can't imagine, you know, operating a high level. Local newsletter, even that goes out necessarily like once or twice a week, but you're doing it in two cities with some help, of course, but walk us through what a daily process looks like for the newsletters.

Like what is, um, you mentioned you're responsible for growth, but you know what is entailed with, say, a food edition for Vancouver versus like a news edition?

Geoff Sharpe: Yeah. So on the process side, we've got templates for each one that the writers work from with each person. There's a bit of change and stuff like I'll do.

I'm confident enough in what I do that I can change up a few different things. But there's a template that people work from. If we bring someone new on to write it, we've got a whole process of like, we've got a [00:26:00] wiki of all the information of our audience, of the approach that we have, our vision and values, you know, what each section of the newsletter is and what goes there, so it's very clear what people are working on, doesn't, it differs a little bit by week, but generally the main structure is the same, and there's an approach to writing that everyone has to follow, at least on the news side.

In terms of how we write that and the food is a little bit more creative on that front, but on the new side, there's a clear structure. And so editorially, it's, it's pretty simple. Like, you know, either you start it a couple of days before or the, you know, the day before you're writing and pulling all the content that you want.

You know, my process and Robert's maybe a little bit different as we pull in all the content. Put it into the different slots where I think it could go and then identify what I think could be like a major story that day. We have like a major story, a sub major story, extra section of like links that aren't big enough to be stories but are worth covering.

Again, our content's a little bit more like journalistic than maybe like non journalist people would be writing for. Okay. [00:27:00] That's fine. That's just the approach we have. And then we have like an event section and things like that. So we have the resources and the places that we're pulling content from consistently.

And basically, you want to build in opportunities for creativity, but you also want a clear structure. Because if you're changing the structure all the time, the time to do it is just going to take so much longer to do. And if you change it all the time, and you have a different approach everywhere, Then the replicability of that is very difficult, at least for us.

We're worrying about replicability because we want to expand right. So as we narrow down the process and things like that for our one city, we can then apply that to other cities and other learnings and things like that. But there is a clear structure of how it works. We'll both write our content, we'll send the newsletter to each other to review from an editing standpoint, add comments, things like that in Google Docs.

Once that's done, all the stuff's approved, we'll upload it into our Beehive Publishing, and then we'll schedule it and send it off. I will do a last review to add content. growth opportunities, get the ads in there, [00:28:00] maybe a call out cross signups to the food newsletter, things like the marketing side of it, right?

So I think building in the opportunities for different lenses on it is really important. So we put the editorial stuff in. And then on top of that, we're testing marketing metrics. Either built out in sort of like, um, pre done or things that I'm adding at the end of the day, as I think about them. Our process could be a lot better, I think, you know, but we are part time and so it's dealing what we, you know, what we can.

But, uh, I think we've got a good process and we're always monitoring metrics and things like that to see, you What the response rates and things are and having that opportunity to change. It is important, but I would recommend having a clear template and a process that's outlined as clearly as possible.

Dylan Redekop: Totally. That, that makes things so much easier. I guess you mentioned that you're doing this part time, but what's the, what is the mission, what's the goal for, for lookout media? Are you looking to expand into multiple? And at what point do you make this a full time thing?

Geoff Sharpe: Uh, full time soon, hopefully. I've got, uh, we've got our yearly goals.

And by the end of the year, I'm hoping to be on it full time would be sort of the [00:29:00] ideal thing, or at least 80 percent of my, of my time. I think there's a risk involved in all of this type of stuff. Maybe not if you're just doing one newsletter, but with the network that we want to do that you scale too fast.

And so, you know, there's a growth side of things where, you know, We could probably take a bit of money and expand it really fast and launch in other cities because I'm pretty confident that the model that we have works in almost every sort of like midsize to major city. But the question becomes, how do you grow it in a sustainable way?

Are you finding the right people? And I think that's the challenge for us is balancing the two. I think this could be the default go to local news publication in Canadian and maybe American cities. You know, I, I think everything applies. To that, but you have to do it in a very like structured way in a smart way.

So you're not growing too fast. You know, we're not. Very transparent about this stuff. Like we don't have any outside investors. We started this on our own. Like, um, so it's, you know, as, as quickly as we want to and can and can do it's just I think the [00:30:00] for what we do the hardest part is finding the right people and the right journalist partners so I mean if any journalist is listening to this please feel free to reach out uh but uh it's the finding the right people is really difficult and I've seen lots of places fail because they just don't have the right people in the right seats and so for us we're only going to expand when we find the right person to be able to to do it and have the runway to be able to do it sustainably we know you know Based on our internal tracking, you know what we need for different cities, and it's it's a little bit slower than other places because we don't, you know, have the resources to do things like a major publication would, but I'm pretty confident in it just based on what we've seen in both cities.

And it's just a matter of. Deploying it in the smartest way in the smartest way possible, but I feel very positive about it. I think, you know, the media space is a weird spot right now and really tough here in Canada. Lots of journalists being laid off. So it's uh, it's really sad, but I do have hope in the Some of the stuff that we're doing other places are doing that, [00:31:00] um, new things will come of it.

And it, it, it will create a space where journalists can do and people who care about this stuff can do really interesting things.

Dylan Redekop: Yeah. And we could go on about maybe the whole media business model and the reason why journalists are, you know, being laid off and stuff, but we can say that for another day, I think because we could go on and on about it.

I'm sure if somebody is thinking about starting up a local newsletter, they, they're listening to this chat with you, they think, Hey, I'm passionate about my, you know, my city, my town. I think I could do this. First question is, is there a market size, a minimum market size where you think this is viable?

Geoff Sharpe: I don't know about minimum because if you look at historically local news place, local news publications have thrived in all sizes of towns.

And there's, there's a couple of great companies up here in Canada that are launching, you know, Tiny tiny communities, right? 20, 30, 000 people. So the question is more like, can you create something big and sustainable tougher to say the bigger the audience size, the easier it is [00:32:00] for sure. The smaller the audience size, you go, the higher your ad costs are going to be right.

I've consulted on it. You know, cities, they're as big as 100, 000 and, um, you know, ad costs tend to be, you know, more expensive and the revenue is slower and things like that, but maybe you can build a better network of people. And there's that word of mouth thing. So I wouldn't say that there is a limitation, but it's certainly easier.

The bigger the audience there is, and especially if there is No clear competitor if someone was doing the exact same thing we were doing, I probably wouldn't launch it, but we're trying to do something unique. So we're not dealing with that. So for people that are doing their own thing, I would say the audience size matters less than is it a unique value proposition that you can reach people and and it's something that people want, right?

Hard to know that without testing it. Yeah. But um, you know, if you're doing a 5, 000 person town, probably pretty difficult. But I would say like anything above 50, you know, I think you can make a real go at it. Will it be 100, 000, 200, [00:33:00] 000 venture? Tough to say. But uh, yeah, I think any size would probably work.

Dylan Redekop: So let's say you are in a town that is 50, 000 plus. You're thinking about starting up a local newsletter. What are your, what are your say top three pieces of advice for somebody with this idea? Who wants to run with it for them to be successful?

Geoff Sharpe: Yeah. So first thing I'd say is do a bit of a competitor analysis.

What are these other places doing? Is there any competitors even there? Right. And especially on the newsletter side, most of the larger companies are not sophisticated. So they may have a newsletter that sends out 10 of their stories, like just with headlines, images, and links. That's not a newsletter.

That is a traffic generator for their website. So as long as you think you can create something that's You'll be in a pretty good spot to do that. And so just, I would say like starting off, the most important thing is to define like, uh, your editorial direction. What are you going to do that's different?

What's the unique vision? I would say putting yourself a little bit more front and center is very useful because if you don't have a brand at [00:34:00] the beginning, the way to build a connection with readers is through a person. You sometimes person starts and then you turn it into a brand. So I would start with that, you know, thinking about the editorial, what's your new value proposition?

How can you do something different and break down sort of the, a lot of ways I say is like breaking down the traditional barrier that exists between a faceless media publication and the reporters that are doing it or the people that are writing it. You don't need to be a reporter to do this, obviously, but, uh, I'm, I'm not a journalist and I, you know, I do it.

Yeah. But it's, uh, it, it, it definitely helps again, having that unique value proposition. What's your editorial structure? How's it going to be different? What can you create that's going to be emote and define that's different than what the other place is doing? Putting a bit of personality on it. I'm just listing things off now, but that's what I, that's what I'd say.

Dylan Redekop: This may, it's probably going to be published by the time people are listening to this, but we had Ryan Sneddon from Naptown Scoop on, and he had mentioned that really just like having his face and, you know, just having, when he went out, he'd have a jacket that said Naptown [00:35:00] Scoop on it for, for Annapolis in Maryland.

So very different, uh, US market compared to the ones we're talking about and only about a 40, 000 population town. Yet he found that like, That was a huge marketing piece. A huge piece of the brand was just like his face because people related that to him. And then he mentioned, you know, people love to, they put more trust in people's faces over like corporate brands, right?

They want to hear from people and not from these big faceless, uh, media entities. So I think that's, that's really, really sound advice as well.

Geoff Sharpe: Yeah. Ryan's doing a lot of really good stuff from like the local connection angle. And I would say better than we're doing in terms of building that deeper Personal connection with people and so I I love reading his stuff because he he's got a good handle on in a way that i'm always Learning things to we, we probably take it a little bit of a different approach where our brand we try to put our brand more front and center because we have a theory about like, you know, people in Vancouver also care about potentially what's happening in Toronto and, [00:36:00] you know, from the food side of things that they're traveling to a Canadian city, they might, you know, You know, want to learn more about that.

And people who are civic minded care about that stuff. So for us, the brand is as important as the as the person, which I think maybe a little bit different than the way Ryan approaches it. But he's done just incredible stuff on engaging the community in a way that like we're still scratching the surface on.

Dylan Redekop: I think, uh, different strategies will work for different newsletters and different operators too, so it's not always a one size fits all either. So, Jeff, this has been great chatting to you about, uh, all things local newsletters. I want to give you the opportunity to let people know, uh, where to check out everything you're, you're publishing and, uh, where to find you online.

Geoff Sharpe: Yeah. So, uh, I'm not a big, uh, uh, person online, but, uh, Jeff underscore sharp on, on Twitter, uh, the local news, uh, Ottawa, Ottawa, lookout. com, fancy lookout. com. You know, if you're interested in doing your own local newsletter stuff, reach out, happy to chat through stuff. Like I said, I do digital marketing on the side too.

So if you ever want to [00:37:00] chat about that type of stuff, doing a bit more on the newsletter stuff, feel free to, uh, to reach out, but, uh, yeah, no. Great, uh, great chatting. Super interesting stuff.

Dylan Redekop: Thanks for coming on, Jeff, and all the best in 2024. Thanks a lot. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Send Grow podcast.

If you like what you heard, here are three quick ways that you can show your support. Number one, leave us a five star rating and review in the podcast app of your choice. Number two, email or DM me with some feedback with your questions or with suggestions for future episodes. And finally, number three, share your favorite quote from the episode on social media and tag both me and our guest.

All of the links for that are available in the show notes. And whatever option you choose, I am really grateful for your support. Thanks and see you next [00:38:00] week.