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Our plans for the next few months

Our plans for the next few months

A special members-only update

Hi everyone!

It’s Sam. I’ve got a couple of exciting updates for you.

Up first: we now have 65 paying members.

Of course, that number might not mean much to a larger media organization. But to us, it means everything.

When you decided to support us financially, you bought into our vision. That’s why it’s so important to us to share updates on our progress and the  steps we’re taking to professionalize our operations.

Here’s what we’ve been up to recently:

💰 We’re working on finding advertisers who are a good fit for Madison Minutes.

  • We created a media kit, which has all the relevant details on what we can offer in terms of ads and sponsorships. It’s been downloaded dozens of times by folks in a wide range of industries.
  • Since I’ve never worked in advertising sales before, I’m meeting with a sales mentor once a week. We’re taking things slow on purpose, but hoping to ramp things up in the coming months.
  • My official assessment: prospects for 2022 look rosy!

🖊️ We recently completed two training programs.

  • The Google News Initiative’s Startups Bootcamp was an eight-week-long training sponsored by LION, an industry association for small publishers. Through this program, we have access to a team of coaches for another year. They can help us with questions about membership, product development, editorial projects, and more.
  • We also completed the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism’s Jumpstart Program. This program was more lecture-focused, but still helpful overall.

📈 There’s been a few bumps in the road, but overall, our growth has stayed steady over the past few months.

  • We’re now at 5,404 email subscribers and our open rate is holding steady at around 46%. Basically, one out of every two people opens Madison Minutes on any given day. That’s about twice the industry average.
  • If we were able to keep up this rate of growth, we’d be at between 20,000 and 35,000 email subscribers by the end of 2022. We’ll just have to see what happens!

🎤 Test, test, is this thing on? We’re doing a couple more live-streamed interviews before the end of the year.

  • We love trying new things! In October, we interviewed a local cover band before their upcoming Halloween show. Stay tuned for more Facebook Lives in the future.

🤝 We’re partnering with Tone Madison on events coverage.

  • Tone has been a friend to us since the very beginning, and we’re excited they’re interested in partnering on events coverage. Their team knows Madison’s arts and music scenes better than anybody else.
  • Starting with the next events post, you’ll see a few events marked as being curated by Tone. That just means that Tone flagged these events for us.
  • We hope to find even more ways to collaborate with other news organizations to better serve you.

👂 Three ways you could help us today:

Thank you for believing in us,

Sam Hoisington

Co-founder, Madison Minutes

Sam@madisonminutes.com

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