Strategy
To succeed businesses should avoid the competition
A good strategy is finding a high demand category with no competition. Shiny businesses such as TV news and national news attract more people. Andrew Wilkinson, founder of Dribble, built a successful local news business.
Andrew invested in Capital Daily, a local news website for Victoria in Canada. It employs five people. Most local news businesses survive on classified ads, local ads and using wire stories. As newspaper ads have moved to Google and Facebook, local news businesses are either shutting down or sizing down. Capital News saw the niche, and started investigative journalism. Instead of just reporting ‘what happened’, they also explain ‘why did a thing happen’? Today it has 40,000 subscribers. Victoria’s population is 3,67,000.
Andrew wrote on Twitter: Before we knew it, we had 5,000 subscribers.
Then 20,000.
A year later, we have over 40,000 subscribers.
The population of Victoria is only around 367,000, so 1 in 10 residents reads our newsletter(!).
We are now bigger than The Times Colonist, the 100 yr old daily paper…
The Shack take: There are three lessons for the small business. One, look for opportunities locally. Two, learn to use paid social to promote the business. Three, focus on quality over quantity. Also, aiming for profits is a good strategy.