If we’re going to be in media for the next 10 years, we need to understand how to give people what they want. Find out where the gaps are. Define the problem. Test a solution. Make it valuable.
Free lessons on building your viable media business, from Splice
“The most useful piece of advice I'd give someone starting a media company is that you're not supposed to do this alone. You're building for a community and you're building a product they need. So bring them into the process with you. They are your stakeholders and they will help you build and grow deliberately and meaningfully.”
Rishad: I so agree. That's our friend Masuma Ahuja on building product WITH your community rather than doing what most of us do, which is build alone. In secret. In the dark. Masuma is so cool, right Alan?
Alan: Yes, she's amazing. She runs Girlhood, a platform for girls around the internet to tell their stories. And that brings us to our second School of Splice Foundation class: How to create a product strategy that serves your audience.
R: The School of Splice wants to help you build a viable media business. I’m Rishad, one of the cofounders of Splice.
A: I’m Alan, the other cofounder. If you’re building a media business, you need to start thinking about what your products are. And for that, you need a product strategy. We’re here to help you with that.
For Masuma, her product IS her community.
School of School works like this. You can listen to all of this in one go. But you might also want to break it up. Hit pause whenever and come back later.
Some of this stuff is pretty easy, so you can lean back, or take the dog out for a walk. Or just wash those dishes.
Other bits require more involvement — like if we're suggesting you write your thoughts down. So you'll need a notebook and pen. 📔✍️ And coffee. ☕️
R: Alan, I thought a good way to begin might be to see how other businesses think about product, and why they do what they do.
Netflix did not kill Blockbuster. Ridiculous late fees did.
Uber did not kill the taxi business. Limited access and fare control did.
Apple did not kill the music industry. Being forced to buy full-length albums did. I only wanted three songs!
Amazon did not kill other retailers. Poor customer service and poor customer experience did.
And Airbnb wasn’t about killing the hotel industry. It was the limited availability and pricing options contributed to that.
They gave people what they needed.
A: Technology itself is not the disruptor. The biggest threat to the business is failing to give people what they want.
If we’re going to be in media for the next 10 years, we need to understand how to give people what they want.
Find out where the gaps are. Define the problem. Test a solution. Make it valuable.
R: And that's your first step — your default mindset — to building a successful media product.
By asking people what they want, and then translating that into a unique, useful, relevant, and VALUABLE solution.
A good way to think about this is to pretend you’re Henry Ford, who famously said this thing that nobody can really verify: he said “If I’d asked the people what they wanted, they’d have asked for a faster horse.” He saw where the gaps were, he translated that to a solution, and called it the Model T motorcar — or so the story goes. And the rest, of course, is history — and the climate crisis.
But remember how WE'RE defining product here — it's anything that uses content to serve a person’s needs or wants.
A: So let's take a moment here so you can make some notes for yourself. Hit pause. Write up what you know to be specific needs that are unmet in media, and what you think you can do about it. It can be rough, don't worry. But take a moment to think though it, and come back later.
Use a worksheet
A: Welcome back.
Those of us who work in media often describe what we do as a calling, as a duty and responsibility to society.
Great media products come from thinking about what you do as a service — not just to those you speak for, not just to those whose stories you tell, but to those who actually read, watch, listen, and scroll through what you do.
They do this because they want to be informed, or entertained, or because they need to make better decisions about their life.
Great media products come from understanding how you can be of service to your audiences.
But in order to think about service, you need to find a problem to solve.
R: How do you think about user problems?
Here’s a great rule of thumb. It’s about the user. A user problem is NOT “How do I bring more people to my website?” or “How do I get more listeners for my podcast?” Those are YOUR problems.
They are valid problems, but what we’re saying here is that you can’t build a product strategy around them.
Focus on what you’re hearing in the community around you.
So what does a user problem sound like?
Maybe they go like this: “My government just announced a new budget but I can’t figure out how it affects my family.” or “How do I find other single parents who have figured out how to raise their kids AND have a career?” or simply “Where do I figure out which vaccine to get?”
Here’s a quick note on design thinking — it has nothing to do with what something looks like, it's how something works.
A: So design thinking is a process that seeks to solve complex problems in a user-centric way. Design thinking for viable media is also known as #@!%ing giving people what they #@!%ing want.
So how do we think about what our audiences want?
How can we build products that meet those needs?
And how do we build something that’s valuable enough to pay for?
R: Let's take a quick minute to understand why building good media products is such a big deal right now. In a crowded marketplace, your competition isn't the other publication with that competing podcast or website. It's everything that competes for your user's attention — right on her phone, including texting, social, games, and apps.
Our friend Jane Mahoney, who runs reader revenue at Crikey in Australia, has this perfect insight.
"...whether readers are consciously aware of it or not, they're comparing our product to every other online experience that they're having, whether that's provided by an organization that has, you know, millions of millions of dollars in their budget or one that only has a few thousand."
A: That's right — EVERY other online experience is your competition. There's more from Jane coming up later, but let's look at how people in other newsrooms are thinking about products and in their markets.
We have four super-quick case studies.
1. How the New York Times thinks about products
In a job ad they put out in 2019, the NYT had the following job description for an entrepreneur-in-residence:
The person had to “Identify, define and build the essential products to meet the market opportunity”
They had to “Define the product and business model, to build the team, and devise and manage the overall execution plan.”
“The ultimate product will blend utility with editorial value and stand alone as a business.”
The product had be global, and it had to have "organic growth potential”.
And I thought this was interesting: The product needed to quote — "maximize frequency through utility and habit building”.
R: So, to summarise:
Find a problem or market opportunity,
build product-market fit by creating a product to solve that problem
Make sure there’s a sound business model in place
Hire the right people to manage this
Make sure it can grow globally
Make sure the product is useful — I mean, they mention the word utility TWICE.
I think that job ad is one of the best descriptions of how we should think about building media products.
A:
2. Let's look at how The Information in San Francisco thinks about products and services.
Their main offering is basically a tech news subscription.
And from that comes a membership model that gives you access to commenting on their website.
They also have org charts of the tech companies they report on so that you can see how these chains of command work.
There's also a Slack channel for insiders, regular conference calls with their reporters and people they're reporting on, and of course, events.
R: They figured out that their user-base is segmented into people who want different things — access, validation, data, community, voice, insights — all in different formats that have been repeatedly tested and iterated for these user groups. Intriguingly, while original tech business news is the backbone of their business, it’s NOT the only product.
3. Let's talk about how our friends at Frontier Myanmar think about products
In Myanmar, media organisations like Frontier are struggling, because they’re unable to rely on advertising revenue or high circulations. It's a familiar story: This affects their ability to resist pressure from the government, commercial partners, and readers, all while trying to maintain editorial independence. And with the double whammy of Covid and the coup, it became even more urgent for them to diversify the business away from an ad-driven model to safeguard that vital editorial voice.
A: So what do you do if you’re Frontier? You already have a community; now you build a membership program. How do you build it? You ask the community!
So in 2019, they ran a bunch of focus groups with their users, and discovered a few things about what people want from them — it sounded like this bit from one of their focus group sessions in Yangon.
You're making sure that certain voices are heard. And giving people a voice here is quite challenging at times, particularly in digging out and deciding on the right people to speak to. One of the things is that you're actually doing a lot of the things that we'd like to do. And the question is how can you do it even more successfully?!
— Frontier focus group, May 2019
A: What did we learn? We realised that members buy into a mission: they wanted to support the independent journalism of Frontier, especially in a country where this is an increasingly rare commodity.
So Frontier began work on 3 newsletters designed specifically for their audiences’ needs:
daily news,
local media monitoring translated into English,
and parliamentary proceedings.
R: How are these newsletter products designed for Frontier's audience? Because they actually asked people about products they wanted before they set up their membership program, and then tested relentlessly.
Frontier’s membership program continues to iterate and grow, and it’s quickly become not just a significant source of revenue, but a profound shift towards a user-centric, product-focused mindset in their newsroom.
Here's super-quick case study number 4:
4. How Radio Ambulante in the US thinks about products
Daniel Alarcón, the co-founder of this journalism podcast, saw a curious trend in his audience data: 20% of their listeners were using their stories to learn Spanish. He wondered what they could do to better serve them.
So they end up building an app called Lupa. Lupa is an app that does this amazing thing: it helps you learn Spanish by using the journalism of Radio Ambulante. You're learning Spanish as it's really spoken!
But why would a news organisation build a language app?
Because it gives an entirely new potential audience a chance to hear the amazing journalism that Radio Ambulante does. Also, you’re offering people a way into your core news product by giving them a solution to the problem they already had: learning Spanish while you listen to the news.
A: So Rishad, that's like the New York Times — some of their biggest drivers to bring in new PAID users are their crossword and cooking apps.
Ok, a good way to summarise here is by asking the right questions.
Who is this content for?
How do I reach that person?
What do I want that person to do with that content?
How do I start a conversation with that person?
How do I include that person in a community of loyal customers?
Alright that's a lot to digest. So hit pause, and take a moment to make some notes for yourself.
Use a worksheet
R: This product stuff is often quite hard, mainly because it's so easy to miss that one vital component: your audience. Us media founders have limited time, money, and bandwidth, and it's easy to get a product strategy wrong because it isn't always obvious.
We often tend to focus on what the cool kids are doing: We should do a podcast — everybody's doing a podcast! Let's do Clubhouse — everybody's on Clubhouse. Who are we making our stories for? Everybody! But "everybody" isn't a good description of how users and interest groups and problems and niches behave in the real world.
Our friend Patricia Torres-Burd at Media Development Investment Fund says it's all about purpose:
“The one thing media founders often get wrong when they approach investors is not fully understanding the audience they serve, and to my earlier point, the competition they face. You cannot be all things to all people. Finding your niche and purpose provides added value if you think about your audience first and foremost.”
—Patricia Torres-Burd
A: Alright... almost there.
So let's ask some really **inconvenient questions to help you figure out niche and purpose as Pat described it.**
First, why do people read/watch/listen to you?
What do people need that only you can provide?
Would people notice if you weren’t around tomorrow?
Let’s break down the process of building your media product.
Where do you begin?
You begin by asking questions, and by listening.
R: Remember that rule of thumb we spoke about earlier?
It’s about a service to the user. It’s about the user’s problem. Not your problem.
Not your website or podcast. The user.
A: Making great products is all very well, but who actually does this?
Does every newsroom need a product manager?
Or is that person actually right there in your team and you didn't even know?
It's pretty simple to describe what a good product manager does: it's someone who speaks for your audience. They are the voice of your user in your newsroom.
Jane Mahoney again, nailed it here:
“So what role does a product manager play in media? Ooh, this is a big one because product manager can mean so many different things. But I think what all product managers have in common, particularly in newsrooms, is that they're an advocate for the audience. You know, we know that the business model in a lot of news orgs have changed over the last 10 years.”
Who speaks for your audience in your newsroom? Some of the best product managers we've seen aren't always trained in the role — they're journalists that are just way more user-oriented than a lot of us. We'll have more on this in Stack 5 of our Full Stack Course, which is all about careers.
R: Let's revisit what we said earlier on about what threatens your media business. It isn't AI and VR and bitcoin. In fact, technology itself is not the disruptor. The biggest threat to your media business is failing to give your audiences people what they want.
If we’re going to build a viable media business, we need to understand how to ask people what they want, and translate that into utility, relevance, and value.
“I think media companies these days are starting to adopt a product mindset, which is great. Remember that unlike a news story where your work on it is done after you've published it, a product has a much longer shelf life. So the question you ask yourself is how do I continuously improve it and how do I make my users come back to it again and again?”
— Yan Oak