How I created a celebrated brand with a full-time job & no money
Positive Black News Network
In January 2017, I launched ‘The Positive Black News Network’ app. The premiss of the app was simple. ‘Deliver a slice of feel good knowledge about the global black community every week’.
It’s been a busy year since the launch and I’ve haven’t had much time to share my thoughts on how the Positive Black News Network (PBNN) was made, what I have learned from that process and where I’d like to take the brand in the future.
So this is the first of a series of posts detailing the start, current and future state of ‘The Positive Black News Network’.
If you’ve downloaded The Positive Black News Network thank you for making the app a reality. If you have no idea what PBNN is keep reading!
Getting started — Creating a Brief
The idea for The Positive Black News Network became fully formed on a flight back from Norway in late October 2016.
I was already building a side project called Willow which pre-launch, was very much in the early stages of development. Taking on another project seemed risky. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that my friends, my family and most of all I, needed this app (to read more about the origins of The Positive Black News Network please see this post).
Thank god for on plane wi-fi, a brief call with friends convinced me to find away to make PBNN work. I decided if the app was going to become a reality it had to be small, focused and built very fast.
In order to give that focus I listed a bunch of questions that eventually went on to create a brief.
- MVP — What is the minimal value I can deliver and still be considered a service?
- Designing for the time-poor — How do I design for small time investments which won’t inhibit the quality of the content?
- Bit-size but in depth — Can the app represent the way I like to consume information?
- Designed to Share — With no marketing spend can I design the app to be inherently viral with little to no barrier to adoption?
- Avoid the haters — A positive black news brand is almost guaranteed to attract negativity. Could I avoid the racist B.S every social media app has to deal with?
These limitations helped create clarity. Next up was to answer the briefs most important questions through R&D and prototyping.
Great Designers Steal — Designing a ‘micro service’
Part of the inspiration for the Positive Black News app came from a Silicon Valley ‘success story’ — Yo. The premise of Yo was simple, send a ‘Yo’ notification to someone in your address book, …yup, that’s the only function of the app!
Yo was equally ridiculed as an example of the tech gods hubris (The app went on to raise $1 million dollars pretty soon after launch) and heralded as a new type of one dimensional micro-service. While having very little utility, Yo’s simplicity was intriguing and I wondered if I could bake a similar directness into a different type of app.
The one dimensional aspect of ‘Yo’ influenced my decision to make PBNN a one way communication tool — I post the news and people read it. PBNN has no commenting functionality which means no potentially racist B.S, allowing me to solve the ‘No haters!’ issue highlighted on the brief.
There are only two ‘Call To Actions’ in the entirety of the app. The primary CTA is a ‘Share some positivity’ button allows users to share an article — in hindsight this CTA should have used clearer language. In order to understand the virality of the ‘Share some positivity’ button I installed Branch a link attribution service which highlights which posts are shared and when a download occurs because of that shared link. This data also helps shape my understanding of what type of future content is likely to be highly shareable .
The secondary CTA allows people to interact with PBNN according to their interest level. A ‘read more’ button links to a long form article on each post giving the ‘6. Bitsize but in depth’ functionality I required in the original brief.
The first version of PBNN had no sign up, no comments, no onboarding and no racist B.S.
Designing for small time investments
Whilst creating PBNN I worked full-time on the creation of a design system for Lloyds, Halifax, Bank of Scotland and Scottish Widow (You can read about that project here).
Working in a challenging day job, meant creating a product with low overhead and asynchronous management. To meet this demand I designed a BAU (Business As Usual) framework for PBNN allowing me to estimate how much time was needed to run the app day to day.
- One post a week — This decision allowed me to commit to a realistic target for high quality content.
- 5–7 hours research a week — I researched potential PBNN articles by reading for 1 hour every morning. I had this habit before launching PBNN which meant I wasn’t creating any additional time commitment.
- 3 hours scheduling and editing — I decided I’d only work on PBNN on weekends with a total allocated time of 3 hours maximum.
Once I had a rhythm, three weeks of PBNN posts took a couple of hours to setup. Less than your average Marvel film! However, without baking in the commitment limitations into the product above there’s no way PBNN would be alive today.
Defining a Brand Voice
The ability to avoid feature creep and cap my workload, came from the belief that PBNN would be serving an emotionally valuable, but poorly serviced need in the black community. If the PBNN brand resonated with my audience, this assumption meant that people might be happy with fewer features.
Beyond that ‘make or break’ hypothesis, the Positive Black News Network brand is driven by a list of personal assumptions. These guesstimates differentiate PBNN from existing black media news outlets and create a basis for my learnings. Here’s what I wanted to understand:
- Global — Would the black community see value in positive news stories not only from African-Americans — but also from a global perspective that links black people beyond nationality or geography?
- Quality over quantity — would high quality, low frequency content be enough to sustain an audience?
- Avoid the obvious — Would people appreciate a news platform which actively does not highlight music and sports personalities or accolades (a traditional ‘black media’ stronghold)? I felt that the black community had an overrepresentation in music and sports with plenty of quality news outlets covering those topics.
- Fun damn it — In opposition to the ever-present doom and gloom of the mainstream media at least once a month PBNN content had to be fun.
These questions helped to define not only the voice that PBNN would have to live or die by, but as a by-product, they also created a scope for the brands success. Being true to PBNN’s principles meant being comfortable with alienating a potential audiences. And had only my immediate family and friends downloaded the app, I would have still seen the Positive Black News Network as a success.
After gathering quotes and developer recommendations I found a team in Ukraine who matched my budget. The first version of The Positive Black News Network was launched 1 month after initial inception with a total £700 spend.
I shared the app with my cousins and a few friends and the response was exciting! This feedback gave me the confidence to launch an Android version and exactly one month later I was featured in wired magazine as one of ‘The men and women blazing a trail in STEM and modern culture’, 5 months later I was granted a double-page spread in the worlds no.1 magazine for people of colour ‘Ebony’ and in March this year PBNN and the New York Book Review collaborated to launch the amazing ‘Yellow Negroes And Other Imaginary Creatures’ graphic novel through the app — each of these successes occurred entirely through word of mouth, to this day I’ve have never spent a penny on marketing PBNN!
What I have learned
Take on a mission not a start-up
A lot of Venture Capitalist and smart folks advocate entrepreneurs to take on missions rather than business ventures. This was certainly the case with PBNN and it allowed me to take risks that otherwise might have inhibited it’s development. People often ask me how I make money with the app, I don’t.
Making money is great and there are plans to monetise PBNN (Patreon is part of this please, check the PBNN page Patreon here). But taking on a mission, give me the energy to focus on what matters right now, sharing high quality under-exposed good news.
Minimum valuable product not a minimum viable product
I’m not the first to re-define the Minimum viable product (MVP) terminology, nor do I believe that semantics will solve your business challenges. But delivering value as quickly as possible to users is imperative, especially in the highly competitive world of mobile apps. ‘Minimum Valuable Product’ is a reminder of this mantra and helped to focus my mind on my user's satisfaction rather than my own.
What I could have done better
Building an Android app without having an Android phone isn’t particularly smart and to this day the Android version of PBNN isn’t on par to the iOS version. I’ve since picked up a 1plus 5t for a pretty good price so PBNN android users bear with me I’m saving cash to make an update soon!
