NewsWhip’s CEO and co-founder, Paul Quigley, writes about how 2014 went for NewsWhip, and points out some lessons learned along the way.
NewsWhip had a cracking 2014. A small group of dedicated people did amazing work and built a company out of nothing.
You can imagine how it was. This was us in January 2014:
By December, we were more like this:
Sometimes it’s hard to stand back and appreciate what you’re learning and how far you’ve come. But comparing where we are now with January 2014, here’s some big lessons we’ve learned that I’d pick out.
1. Build a Company, Not a Startup
This is the big one. By January 2014, NewsWhip was starting to go places, but was still a startup, finding its purpose.
We had some promising traction with Spike, our professional offering. Meanwhile, we were experimenting with widgets, our free trending news site (then NewsWhip.com), and our mobile apps. We were figuring out how to put all these things inside one house, and of course we planned to succeed on every one of these many fronts. After all, we’re a startup, we can do anything!
By a couple of months into the year, we got realistic about our multi-front war.
Sure, our app was pretty special, at least we thought so. And a three-month old news app with very limited traction had just been acquired for $30 million (remember Summly?!) But could we beat Facebook for stickiness, Flipboard for UI, and Candy Crush for addiction? Could we compete with every other media company out there and their own native apps? And even if we do get decent traction with consumers, how do we make any significant revenue? Most importantly, did we build all this technology just to sit around and hope to get acquired?
Meanwhile, the business-to-business side of NewsWhip was kicking off. Media companies, PR firms and brands were coming in the door and subscribing in growing numbers for access to Spike, our API and other data outputs we generate. They wanted – really wanted – to know exactly what content was getting traction in multiple markets, in detail consumers would never need.
Time to make a decision. It was clear enough: we’re building a cloud software and data company – and based on demand and market trends, potentially a major one. By the second quarter of 2014 we pushed everything we had into Spike, our API, and Insights, our big data offering.
Going from Startup to Company is a change in psychology. Here’s some examples.
2. Value is in the Eye of the Beholder
We were not sure at the start of the year how important or useful our data was.
Consumers have a passing interest in our data. It’s chewing gum at the bus stop – “Oh look, here’s what’s trending.” But media companies, publishers, buying agencies, brands and our other customers know “trending” is a powerful shorthand for where human attention is. They want to know what people are talking about on Facebook and Twitter now, in exact quantifiable numbers.
Today, our customers can improve thousands of editorial, spending, hiring, and strategic decisions each day with our data, the same data that is only vaguely interesting to a consumer.
The same data, more or less, but a different market. Go where you’re valuable!
3. We Might be Inventing a New Industry
So what’s NewsWhip? Nielsen for social distribution? Bloomberg terminals for the world’s content? Next generation media monitoring? Social media monitoring?
2014 was the year we got lost coming up with analogies for what we do, and ways of explaining it with respect to other services. NewsWhip shows where the world’s attention is moving, as it happens. It does so for 2 billion social network users, content in 25 countries, 12 languages, and thousands of niches.
When we try and summarize what we do against existing companies and industries, we sell ourselves short.
In fact, we think we’re among the first movers in a brand new real-time information industry – one defined by real time big data about where human attention is, and where it’s going. Our industry doesn’t have a name yet, or even a half decent analogy with an existing industry. We’re going into uncharted territory, but isn’t that exciting?
4. Build Trust
Why does no-one talk about trust in startup-land?
It’s the ultimate currency. It’s what allows two people (me and Andrew) to work away on NewsWhip for months in the beginning. Today, it’s what allows big US media conglomerates to buy our data, access to our platform, and rely on them for their day-to-day business. Even if our data was good, it would be useless were it not trusted.
The whole team does that type of trust building at NewsWhip today. We do it through our product, showing via the UI why every story is ranked as it is. We’re meticulous and transparent on our methodologies when we publish our data.
I didn’t start looking at things through the lens of trust until a couple of months ago. Once you realise how central it is to brand-building – and all the ways you can earn it – you can’t ignore it.
5. Outsiders Can Do Great Things, Even in Media
Media is 60% of our business, and is currently our key customer base.
It’s also supposed to be an impregnable industry. Picture the challenge of meeting senior people in 30 Rockerfeller, the headquarters of NBC. Or the Hearst Tower, or Condé Nast, or Disney. Earlier this year many media industry people we met told me that we would need to “know people” to get places in the media world, and offered introductions, at a price. After all, we are a group of outsiders, mainly based in Dublin, with no media-savvy investors or contacts.
It turns out media is quite penetrable. The formula is easy. First, build a really useful piece of technology. Next, put it out there for people and make it easy for the innovators within each media company to discover it. When you meet those innovators, you’ve already found your internal champions. They tend to be the people within each company that the senior VPs are paying attention to. In no time, you’ll be pitching the VPs, or even the CEOs.
The starting point remains – build something useful!
6. We’re Heading the Right Way
In 2014, media companies, PR firms, consumer brands, publishers all focused seriously on the shift to Digital-Social content distribution, and kept their focus there. Digital-Social is a fancy way of describing the phenomenon that people are replacing the newspaper boy or the TV tower by “distributing” media themselves: sharing, instant messaging, tweeting, and emailing. Today, Facebook sends over 30% of the traffic to many of the world’s biggest news sites.
The numbers and forces underlying all that sharing are becoming critical for everyone who cares about understanding human attention and information spread. Fortunately, we just happen to be here to help.
We seem to be on to something. I’m curious about what we’ll learn in 2015.
And this year everything will be a smooth and normal ride for us, right?
Right?
Follow Paul on Twitter, or email him directly: paul.quigley@newswhip.com
