The Perth startup community is really starting to achieve its potential this year, and //Startup News will continue being part of that, with your help.
We’ve had a wave of accelerators launching, we’re starting to see some local community members make some real headway, and we’ve got WWW2017 looming on the horizon (more on that in another post). The future’s bright for the community, and great things beckon.
//Startup News is assisting in building this community by providing a voice for the community – a way for startups to be heard both within Perth and nationally where all too often Perth is ignored or forgotten and startup culture is misunderstood.
//Startup News has thus far been run on a voluntary part-time basis, but after recent events that’s no longer possible. Keeping //Startup News operating at the level that it needs to maintain to support the community takes too much time to also have a full-time job; there are too many meetings (and meetups!) and too much time engaged in interviewing, writing, organising events and mentoring to be able to contribute effectively to a full-time team. I had to make a choice between full-time work and //Startup News, and I choose to see where this road leads.
Making //Startup News Sustainable
Obviously I’m going to work out a Lean Canvas for it, because that’s what we do, right?
It’s obvious that my first hypothesis needs to be around whether the community will support it directly. A few validation tests (asking people if they’ll pay money to keep //SN going) were positive, so it’s time to experiment…
So, this is the hypothesis: That the community (that’s you) wants //Startup News to continue, and will therefore pay to support it.
This is the experiment: The support page is there to take your money if you agree that //Startup News is worth supporting.
If enough of you agree then we’re good to go, and I can start working on building more into the site and making it serve our purposes better. If not, then I have to work on another hypothesis and //Startup News may have to change to accommodate that customer base.
Some numbers to help with the decision making:
- My target for the year is to raise $50K.
- There are approximately 2000 people in the community, and around 500 subscribers to //Startup News, so assuming every subscriber contributes then the average monthly payment will need to be $8 to hit this target.
- //Startup News will pay me $500 for any week in which I manage to produce a story each day (cost of $26K assuming I make every week).
- Any funds left over will be put towards community events and projects (like Startup West last year), and will form a “community chest” fund.
