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[on-hold music] We are not yet profitable, but we could be if we needed to be. Jonah Peretti told me that for like ten years. Yeah. Danny was like, "Well, we were profitable last year." I was like, "Which day?"

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I'll say this, though, in my own defense. Well, you, you can't throw that one out without having me explain. It... We've been very careful not to get ahead of our skis throughout.

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We've grown slowly, and I've told all the investors from day one, we're trying to build a hundred and fifty-year-old news brand.

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[on-hold music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I'm the host, Brian Morrissey.

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Doing this show from New York City, my former home, soon to be future home. Actually ran into a Rebooting show listener on the street, weirdly enough.

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I'd love to think it's because there's millions of them out there, but I think it was just coincidence. Anyway, thank you all for listening.

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And again, I always ask, but if you, um, do have an opportunity, please leave a rating and review on Apple if you get it from Apple because it helps people find the podcast and whatnot. So appreciate that.

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And if you have any feedback, shoot me a note. I'm just bmorrissey@gmail.com. I know I have not gotten the gender balance correct in, in these, uh, podcasts, and that is being addressed. Don't worry, I'll do it.

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Anyway, this week, I'm joined by David Skok. David is the editor-in-chief and founder, um, of The Logic, which is a tech news site focused on the Canadian tech scene, I would assume. David, welcome to the podcast.

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Thank you, Brian. You know you've made it when people are stopping you on the street in New York City. I know. It was exciting to have someone stop me. So whatever.

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My mom always tells me, "Take the compliment," although I'm just complimenting myself now. [laughs] Anyway, David, I wanna get into your journey.

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I always, like, get notes from journalist founders, 'cause usually people who are into journalism starting companies was like, I used to always think it was the biggest red flag.

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But now this is like the era of journalist entrepreneur, so I wanna get notes from you on it. Yeah, we're all masochists, I think, at the end of the day.

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It is interesting that you say that because there seemed to have been a, a generational shift.

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You know, those of us who started in journalism in the late '90s, early 2000s, very early on were, uh, awakened to the, the challenges of, of the craft and the business models of the craft.

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And so I think a lot of us came up, uh, we didn't have the church and state separation as much as others did in terms of understanding that, uh, the news industry is about as much product and business strategy as it is your editorial.

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And in fact, as I've always said, you, you could have the best lead or nut graph in the world, but if it didn't load on your phone in point zero zero one seconds, it was invisible to the reader.

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And so I think there's a whole generation of us that have kind of grown up- Yeah... and, and made it a lot easier to make that jump. Yeah. So let's get into it.

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You worked at, at The Boston Globe and at The Toronto Star, so you've had a long history in journalism. What did you see that made you start your own company?

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I had been a disruptor from within a lot of these organizations and had seen a lot of the same mistakes being committed or a lot of the same barriers to innovation happening within.

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What you didn't say there was I did a little bit of work with Clay Christensen at Harvard Business School on applying his disruption theory to the media and to journalism, and I could see a path for opportunity in terms of the industry and, and what was moving upmarket and what the opportunities were downmarket, and I wasn't seeing a lot of that having a lot of success in larger organizations, not because the effort wasn't there, but because they're large organizations, and they're, and they're slower moving.

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And so there was an opportunity there, particularly in the Canadian market, which hadn't had a lot of innovation in a while, to start something new.

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And that's, that was when the, we started The Logic in June of twenty eighteen. Uh- Mm-hmm... we've been going now for almost four years. Okay. And, and the focus of The Logic is on what?

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The focus is on Canada's transformation really from a resource economy to a knowledge-based economy.

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So I, I like to say it's a combination of the business model/product of the information meets the editorial focus of the Financial Times.

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Canada is a market that is fundamentally one driven business-wise by resources, resource extraction, and by housing.

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And if you take away those two things, there's not a lot of, uh, GDP growth that happens in Canada outside of those two things.

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And so we felt that there was an opportunity to do business coverage on the knowledge economy and on that transformation of Canada from a resource economy to a knowledge economy.

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So everything from digital currencies to AVs, EVs, digital taxation policy, all the stuff that maybe wasn't at top of mind in the business sections of the country in twenty eighteen, now it is where we started our coverage.

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Yeah. But so you don't describe it as for tech exactly. 'Cause I'm always interested with tech because tech started as a vertical and technology, it's a horizontal. It cuts across every single industry.

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And if you're covering tech, you're covering everything. Yeah. We deliberately don't for that reason. You can't cover tech anymore without covering the future of everything, right? And it was a good... Early on, we did

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brand ourselves as a technology publication because it was a way in for people to digest what we were doing, but it was almost a Trojan horse, to be honest, in that it allowed us to get into people's inboxes, them understanding what our coverage areas were.

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But in fact, if you look at it, we're really about the future of the entire economy, not necessarily just tech. So how do you decide what you don't cover then? I mean, 'cause the knowledge economy is pretty broad.

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Okay, you don't cover resources, but, like, the knowledge economy is really broad. That's a great question. That's actually the hardest question, I think, because we are a prosumer business.

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We are not a niche business, and so we, we tend to cover a lot of what others cover. What we try to do is cover it through a lens of innovation and forward thinking.

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I'm reminded of Barney Kilgore in the Wall Street Journal, always thinking about what's gonna come around the corner and always thinking about the future of what's happening as opposed to the past.

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So we try to cover things through a lens of what does this mean or the future, uh, implications of what we're covering.

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In terms of what we don't cover, uh-It's less about that and more about how we can cover things in a unique way that you can't get anywhere else. So we're willing to cover anything as long as we can- Mm-hmm...

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tell you something that you didn't know, give you some original reporting. But mostly it's the original reporting piece that I think is the value. Yeah. I'm glad you used the word lens, 'cause I always use that, right?

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It's... Because there's a lot of... Everything is crowded, and like a lot of people will tell you, "Well, people are already covering this," like, but if you can have a unique lens, you're different.

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So e- explain a little bit more the lens. And Jessica Lessin has talked a lot about this, you know, how do you be 10X better than your competition, right? You have to make sure that you stand out.

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And for us, that really is, do we have unique access to someone or something? Are we telling you something original, breaking original reporting that you can't get anywhere else? Those are really the, the two things.

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We don't do opinion reporting at all. We don't have opinion columnists. All of our work is just based on original reporting so that we can define the agenda as opposed to follow it. And so that's really how we do it.

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We, we try and avoid the news of the day, although obviously in moments like this when you have, uh, the world's attention focused in some of our coverage areas, we can give a unique angle on that.

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So obviously digital currency and, and crypto is a huge part of how some of the sanctions are being done in Ukraine, for example, so we can provide a unique lens on that.

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But for the most part, we really do, through our reporting, try to define our work uniquely. Yeah.

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I mean, it's like the, the, the trucker protests, I don't know what we call them these days, but there's, your lens like has tons of inroads, so to speak, in- into that story.

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It's funny how when you try to think of setting that bar of doing original work, falls into place nicely.

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Last fall, for example, US president and the Canadian prime minister were in a bit of a tiff because of electric vehicles and NAFTA negotiation, supply chain stuff, and we had been covering that.

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We have a reporter dedicated to that beat. For at least a year we've had her. And so we led the agenda on that reporting at the time because we were able to kind of foresee what was coming.

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And what's interesting, it, it creates a different kind of pressure in a newsroom.

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Uh, a lot of the reporter, uh, you say, you know, to get ahead, maybe have a question, one of the challenges has been talent retention and recruiting and retention because it's a much higher bar of what you're trying to get out of reporters than what they're used to, where it was you can follow the news of the day and write five to seven stories based off of that hamster wheel approach versus, no, take two weeks.

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Don't get back to me until you have something original to report on this subject. Okay. Two weeks. Wow, you're more generous. That bar is a lot higher, 'cause I would do the same.

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I mean, this is 10 years ago, a- and we were building Digiday. The bet was like, okay, you only have to do one story a day, and you're really not gonna do one every day, but it has to be different.

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And to force it, we published at midnight.

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That was my way of forcing it, 'cause I'm like, "You can't follow the news of the day and just regurgitate what Mashable had, uh, because we're not publishing it until midnight." Yeah.

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It's, it's trying to give them the time and space and resources to do original work, and we only publish one or two stories a day.

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We sometimes go over that depending on the news cycle, but scarcity is our friend in terms of we're not really beholden to filling column inches like I used to be in my past life. Yeah. So 2018, different time.

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There's a lot more going on right now, and I think now everything is launching with subscriptions as the core of the model.

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How were you thinking of the business model in 2018 when it was a little bit less default for people?

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Yeah, it was hard to raise money because, uh [laughs] subscription or SaaS businesses in journalism were not a common thing.

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Now it seems like a lot of people are having a lot more, uh, success in getting that angel funding. It was really thinking about the tech stack more broadly.

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How do we build a tech stack that is fundamentally from the top of the funnel all the way through to retention, and at the bottom of the funnel, uh, how do we build a whole system primarily designed to generate subscriptions?

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So you started with subscriptions as the core of the model? Yeah. That was the entirety of the model, and email marketing was huge for us, and that direct relationship with the reader.

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But yeah, it was built as a subscription first model. And how about ads? Were ads part of it from the beginning or no? No. We didn't have ads for the first two years, and about 12% of our, our revenue now comes from ads.

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What's fun about a subscription business is it's almost a flywheel effect.

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The more subscribers you have, in our case, young and affluent, they're power brokers, they're corporate leaders, high household income, all of that's very attractive to an advertiser.

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So we're able to attract high-level sponsorships, not programmatic advertising, but direct sponsorships, and those direct sponsorships then fund more of the newsroom, which allows us to get more subscriptions.

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So it's really working nicely, but, but it all comes back to the subscription business, both corporate and individuals, providing the compound revenue growth so that we can feed it with the other things on top of it.

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Yeah, people treat it as an either/or thing with ads or subs, and anytime it's like an either or, the answer is always no. Yeah, and it's also the type of reporting you do, right?

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You know, I read your, your column this morning about different types of content being made in a Substack model or not, and my first reaction is, well, the creator economy is good for a certain type of reporting, uh, or a certain type of journalism, but it may not necessarily work unless you're more indexed on the institutional side for in-depth investigative reporting or the kind of thing where you need to make sure you, you get a libel lawyer involved and defamation and editing and, and all those costs that are not necessarily always thought about when you're writing your Substack.

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Yeah, that's fair. So e- explain a little bit like the size of the company. What are you gonna tell me here? You, you can do everything.

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We- we'll start with the number of people, and then we'll get right into like- I'm sure we will try, and I should say we're a private company, so you know how it goes.

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[laughs] Oh, that, that means that you can do whatever you want. You don't have any shareholders.

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Are we still doing this thing where we can talk about the subscribers being email leads as well, or is it now a harder question? We have a staff. So we started with a team of, of four people.

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I raised $300,000 to start this thing, and we had-Two or three months of runway at one point, hanging on by dear life, and then we've managed to build it up. We now have a team of almost 20.

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We have six news bureaus across the country, and we are not yet profitable, but we could be if we needed to be. Jonah Peretti told me that for, like, 10 years. Yeah. Danny was like, "Well, we were profitable last year."

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I was like, "Which day?" I'll say this, though, in my own defense. Well, you, you can't throw that one out without having me explain. It- we've been very careful not to get ahead of our skis throughout.

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We've grown slowly, and I've told all the investors from day one, we're trying to build a 150-year-old news brand. We're not chasing scale and hyper-growth to then scale back. Okay, so how many subscribers?

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Don't tell me email subscribers. Uh, I'm not gonna give you that number.

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But I, I will say, there's a Goldilocks moment for us that I talk about internally with the team, which is when our subscription revenue can cover all.

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That's the moment when all the other revenue then just becomes cream on top of it, and it all feeds back into the newsroom, and, and we can continue to grow. We're about 75% towards that Goldilocks moment- Okay...

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in terms of that revenue being the primary driver of our business. Yeah. How big do you think the opportunity is?

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A lot of people are like, "Oh, the media business is terrible," but there's a lot of opportunities to build $50 million businesses. There are not many opportunities to build billion-dollar businesses.

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That era was a, a previous era. But, like, you can build a lot of $50 million businesses. So if you look at Canada, The Globe and Mail is the biggest.

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Well, actually, The New York Times, funnily enough, is probably one of the largest publishers in Canada in terms of subscribers, but so is The Globe and Mail.

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So I think the last numbers out of The Globe and Mail were 170,000 to maybe up to 200,000 now in terms of subscribers.

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Their cost base, with the traditional cost base of worrying about gas prices and print costs, the price of lumber, those kind of things, having been in that business, they can really eat away at your margins.

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The difference for us is if, man, if we got one-tenth of The Globe's subscriber base, we are an incredibly profitable business. And so- Yeah... you're right. The scale doesn't need to be where it's been in, in the past.

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Yeah. And, and I always say, media can be a great business once you, like, take out a lot of the costs, right? Maybe that's why y- you wanted to break off and do your own thing, right?

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Because when you're inside these larger organizations, it's pretty clear that it's impossible to grow your way out of this to some degree, because, like, you have to get the cost basis under control. Yeah.

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Yeah, crossing the chasm is the way it's always been talked about, right? And of course, everybody looks at The New York Times and says, "Well, they can do it." The Times had a massive ability to...

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But they had a lot of money, first of all, that they could sunk. Same with The Washington Post. If I had $100 million to invest in that crossing the chasm, it becomes a lot easier.

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And I think Boston Globe, my former employer, has done a great job of it as well. John Henry has deep pockets, and you need that in order to get some of those legacy businesses- Yeah... to make their way across. Yeah.

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And The New York Times is still smaller on a revenue basis than it was at its peak. Changing these businesses is really, really painful and hard.

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The, The New York Times is, like, the runaway success case, and they're still not where they were, like- Yeah... in, in the heyday of, like, 2000. And to your point, it, it's a cost structure challenge.

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These businesses are still making revenue. They're still generating real revenue. It's how do you cut the cost? It, it's the, it actually is the innovator's dilemma.

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You have an existing business with a high cost structure that has to transform itself. It's really hard to do that internally. Culturally, it's just really hard to move that ship. Yeah.

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So how do you end up thinking about layering on other revenue sources other than subscriptions? 'Cause I think a lot of peo- people focus on subscriptions.

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I think there's a lot of advantages to having one job to do, right? If you wake up and go to sleep thinking subscriptions, subscriptions, it's like the, uh, old, like, Dunkin'... Was it Dunkin' Donuts?

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Who was the time to make the donuts guy? [upbeat music] Time to make the donuts. Don't be a chump. Get a decent night's sleep for once. But all the nice folks will want fresh Dunkin' Donuts.

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It takes a lot of willpower to make Dunkin' Donuts fresh, day and night. But we think it's worth it. He had a very simple job, a very difficult job, and he had to get up very early. But he had to make the donuts.

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And if you, if your subscription, you gotta sell the subscriptions. But inevitably, you're gonna do more. So you've got ads. Are there other revenue sources you're doing now or- Yeah. We have corporate licensing.

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As part of the subscriptions, not only do corporate clients buy seats or subscriptions, but they also buy licenses to be able to share the Logic's material internally within the company.

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So that's a separate item entirely. Then there is also, uh, syndication. We syndicate to the Postmedia Network here in Canada, which is the largest newspaper chain in the country.

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Uh, their business section publishes our stuff. Not all of it. They get a selection of it.

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But it's been good partnership for both sides, 'cause they, they fill their column inches with, with great journalism, and we get our work in front of more people, which also helps the reporters make the case to a source.

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When you're getting in the Logic, you're not gonna be behind a paywall and just in front of a, a smaller group of people. You're gonna get the mass audience. That's a big one for us.

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And then sponsorships, but also events as part of that. We are just really exploring that period now. We've done events for a while, but we haven't really sold a lot of them.

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We're moving into that space more now and seeing some traction, and partly because it's all built on the back of that subscription business, as I said earlier.

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But I think the pandemic was interesting because my approach, Brian, is I don't wanna be dependent on any one line of revenue, period. 'Cause subscriptions could stop. Interest rates are going up.

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Discretionary spending is going to slow down, and man, I, I don't wanna be caught flat-footed with a subscription business that all of a sudden can't bring in any new customers. Yeah.

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No one talks about the churn spirals. Like, if you get in a churn spiral, it's, it's not fun. It's kind of like inflation.

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I guess most people are too young to have remembered inflation, and, and now they're finding out it's really painful.Yeah, it is. One of the things we did early was we didn't do monthly.

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We came out of the gate with annual subscriptions only, and that was a necessity 'cause we didn't have the cash flow at the time.

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But it's actually worked out to be a, a really good decision because it's helped reduce churn rate dr- dramatically from my past life in other publications. Yeah. It's funny with the, the monthly. I, I...

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We'd never done monthly, but, like, we found the, the three-month was actually more profitable for us. We, well, we generated more revenue

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by emphasizing the three-month subscription because people typically had it renewed once or twice and then went into the annual.

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So we would realize far more revenue in the first year from those people than, than, um, the annual. Subscriptions, I mean, they're fascinating because there's so many different mechanics you have to learn.

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There's a behavioral science element to it too. And when you can dial up and dial down, we're always thinking about our con- our funnel and the levers we have to use.

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So there are some stories where we will decide this one's a lead gen story.

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It's not gonna drive subscriptions, so we're gonna just make sure we can capture as many emails from people as possible and then drive them through the funnel as we go.

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And our, our data has shown that funnel takes nine months to convert someone once they first give us your email address, right? It's a whole nurturing relationship that has to be fostered. Yeah.

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It's funny, my former colleague, Jack Marshall, wrote about this today about the idea of incentivizing, um, the journalists for their work driving subscriptions, and it's sort of a dangerous thing with how you end up doing it because you can start to incentivize the wrong things, basically.

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And, and my biggest problem with a lot of that is it's like Google. It's like the easiest thing to measure is the last click, right?

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But if you're just incentivizing last click, you're not taking into account all of that work that took place in those eight months that led up to that last click. Yeah. That's right. Yeah.

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Our editors communicate with our reporters all the time saying, "You need to do at least

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two stories a month that are specifically in your beat that are really interesting, so that the reader that's interested in your work will come back at least twice a month to read that stuff."

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Whether they subscribe that time or not i- is, is irrelevant, but I think to your point, Brian, it's sending the message that it isn't about just one story.

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It's about that ongoing relationship of reminding people we own this subject. Yeah.

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And that's why you go to some business news sites and you see the forty-five marketers to watch, because someone's up against their quota.

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So it's sort of a double-edged sword, but you're going to end up leading the editorial down a path. So everyone complained about the perverse incentives of ad-funded media.

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Those can still exist on a subscription side, and you see it. It's, like, plain as day. I... Maybe I'm the only person who reads where I'm like, "Oh, someone's coming up against their quota." [laughs] You do see it.

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We don't provide our reporters with a lot of that data. Actually, they want more data. Right. We felt that it doesn't incentivize the right behavior. The behavior that I wanna incentivize is FOMO from our customers.

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So if a CEO is reading The Logic and their CMO is sitting in an executive meeting around the boardroom table and the CEO says, "Did you read that article in The Logic?"

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And the CMO has no idea what they're talking about, I can bet you the next day the CMO is gonna enter their email address to start to read The Logic.

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Getting the influencers in first and then making it trickle through has been our organic growth. We have not spent a lot of money, and most of our success has come from organic growth. Okay.

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So you don't do much in, in terms of paid acquisition? We've done very little. Our CAC is fourteen dollars. Our product is a three-hundred-dollar product, so our LTV is a lot higher than fourteen dollars. Yeah.

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We will probably experiment there more, but again, I didn't wanna build a subscription-based business on the backs of Facebook traffic. Yeah.

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With paid acquisition, like, it just felt like a lot of stuff, we didn't have enough data to even make it work, like, 'cause the numbers were too small.

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You know, one of the most interesting companies, the acquisitions that Axel Springer has made, right?

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If you look at Insider, Politico, Morning Brew, they're kind of taking the whole full funnel corporate strategy and acquiring media companies at each different layer of that stack, and I, I, I suspect at some point they'll start to drive people through that funnel, through those products to get to conversions.

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We made a small investment in a Canadian Morning Brew equivalent called The Peak for that reason.

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We see other top of the funnel media companies out there, free curated newsletters on the business of the day, as a great way to introduce people into The Logic.

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So I think that's a more sustainable approach than some of the, the, the s- the social acquisition that's been done out there. Yeah. So what are some mistakes? I always like to hear about mistakes.

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Last, what has it been, four years?

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I've come to realize I was never an entrepreneur, never saw myself as an entrepreneur, but I apparently now am an entrepreneur, and the delusions of grandeur of an entrepreneur are that you don't think about them.

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You just move forward. [laughs] I, I think actually going down the, um, the acquisition, uh, approach a little bit, I thought we could do, uh, that, like Facebook acquisition and would- Yeah...

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immediately see success there, and it hasn't happened.

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And we've had to be more deliberate and strategic in terms of using our owned audience to convert people and drive them through, which has turned out to be better with the cookie changes and everything else.

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It's a better way to, uh, build an audience.

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We now have audited financial statements thanks to an incredible COO that, that we hired a year and a half ago, who reminds me every day of the mistakes that I made as an early entrepreneur.

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You mentioned journalists running media companies were not good at certain things, and I think having a little bit more awareness of my failings on that side earlier on would've been helpful for everybody involved. Yeah.

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That's fair enough. Yeah, having things, like, super organized certainly is a challenge on my end. I don't know [laughs] about you, but it's generally not the thing that journalists are the best at.

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We're good at other things, I guess. I think underestimating the ability of our competitors to try toSidelined us. The, the fierceness of the competition, I guess.

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I was kinda myopic thinking, well, journalism is in a hard place, and everybody wants to see more journalists hired and doing great journalism that makes the world a better place.

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Well, it's still a business, and there's still competition. And make no mistake, it's been incredibly difficult to get other outlets to cover us and to help amplify our, our brand in Canada.

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We've had more success, funnily enough, in the US. Canada, the rap on Canadians is that they're super nice and polite and all that. Super nice, but it's- [laughs]... you know, the competitiveness of the business.

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Uh, and I think now there's this whole, there's government subsidies in journalism, and now big tech legislation coming to Canada, and those two things, uh, I think I was a bit myopic on that one, too, thinking that we could have a principled stand and, and kinda step away from it.

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But in fact, I've had to muck in and get involved in that because it's a competitive disadvantage if you don't play the game. Are you against the subsidies or for 'em? I was... I am against government subsidies.

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Uh, I think that it's, you know, for the reasons that we're seeing in Canada, where, um, you know, hashtags trending, Justin Journos. Justin Trudeau is our prime minister.

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So, um, it, it's really distorted the trust and, and eroded the trust. I have a fiduciary duty to m- uh, my shareholders and, and to the company to, to make sure that we can compete in a level playing field.

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And so when subsidies were then awarded, we had to make sure that The Logic would have been included in that. Otherwise, it, it tilts the playing field in one, one side.

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The same thing is happening with the big tech legislation. It's, that's parallel to the Australian model, where big tech companies are, are probably going to be legislated in having to do deals with Canadian publishers.

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Those deals have already happened in private, and some of our competitors have gotten a lot of money and are using that money to compete aggressively for our talent and for our readers. And so

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I've had to step up and make the case for why that is not ideal and how we need to make sure we can keep the playing field level. Yeah. So are you optimistic about the future of, like, independent journalism? I am.

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Disruption theory shows that you start off cheaper, faster, good enough at the bottom of the market as a disruptor, and then at the top of the market, you have the department stores who have overshot the consumer.

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And at some point, the disruptors move up market and become themselves large and important players.

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I think we're in a really hard moment where people tend to view it in a snapshot in time and say, "Journalism is in a lot of trouble." And it, there's no doubt it is.

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But we also need to make sure that we can foster and support and feed the, the independents who can grow up and, and do some of that great work. Yes, there's no question at, at the coastal level it's happening.

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The amount of money that's being raised by media companies on the coast is phenomenal.

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But I do think that eventually that will trickle through to the flyover country and the news deserts that obviously everybody's really concerned about. But you can't say that there's not money- Yeah...

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for media right now. There's so much money around for media. Yeah. I just think it's good that people are starting new things for the first time in a while, and that's a sign that there's vitality there.

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And I know everyone goes to the local news, but if I had some sort of far-out prediction, it would be that we're actually gonna see some traction on the local front. It's never gonna be perfect.

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It's gonna be, you know, how the United States handles healthcare. [laughs] Like, it's, like, totally backward, totally patchwork, and stuff like this, a variety, very inefficient.

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But, like, I do think between some of these nonprofit and foundational models and also some of the, like, lightweight journalistic models, uh, that we'll get better. We also need to rethink the definition of local news.

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Take Stat, for example. Stat is not by the traditional definition a local news outlet, but when the pandemic first hit, h- without Helen Branswell, who was doing that work?

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That, to me, was a locally relevant news, no matter if you lived in Duluth or in Detroit, you know?

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So the idea that local news has to be city hall based functional, that definition itself of what is local leads us down a prescriptive path that maybe should be- Yeah... rethought and paradigm changed a little bit. Yeah.

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No, I mean, I think what was smart about Stat, it was just they saw the license for them to get into the health sciences because so many of these companies are based around Boston- Yeah... and Cambridge.

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And so that sort of gave them a plausible entree into an area that is... Obviously, it's, it's national and global of reach. But then I think there needs to be that kind of thinking at the local level, and unfortunately,

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when you're run by these private equity firms, you're not gonna have that thinking. That, they have different type of thinking, not that thinking. Yeah. Local leadership, local editorial leadership, is hugely important.

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We, here in Canada, we, as I said, The New York Times is here. Wall Street Journal is here. Politico is here. Bloomberg is here.

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The ones that have been successful with those satellite offices are the ones that don't rely on New York or Washington editors to inform what's being assigned and what's being covered, but in fact cover what's important locally.

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And so when you think about what is happening in Miami or Austin or Sacramento that is uniquely theirs, if you cover that really well and you're really deep on those issues, they become relevant.

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Now, as Stat has shown, what happens in Boston on life sciences absolutely matters globally.

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Okay, so final thing, 'cause there, there are a lot of, like, newer sorta journalist entrepreneurs out there that are starting out. Give me a piece of advice for them. Don't focus on growth.

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You know, the old adage sounds so cheesy and trite at this point, but surprise and delight 100 people first. Then surprise and delight 1,000 people, and then surprise 10,000 people, and work your way.

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Really focus on getting it right with that hundred. And by getting it right, it means do something that you simply cannot get anywhere else. And then the rest should take care of itself.

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And really make sure you take care of your financials and your bookkeeping, and don't leave it, uh, too late, 'cause, uh, that one will bite you later. [laughs] Okay. Awesome, David. Thank you so much.

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I really appreciate it. Thanks so much, Brian. Okay, thank you all for listening. Again, if you have a chance, leave a rating and review. We'd really appreciate it, and we'll be back next week with a new episode.

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