Digital Pond: EP#4 Benjamin Cohen — Setbacks Serendipity & Digital Success
In this episode of the Digital Pond, we’ve got a really special guest joining us.
Benjamin Cohen the dot.com entrepreneur, he’s best known as CEO of PinkNews. He’s got an incredibly interesting career, he launched a social network while in his teens, worked as a technology correspondent at Channel Four in his early 20s and he was even involved in a legal dispute with Apple and went to court over the domain name itunes.co.uk.
During the chat with Benjamin, we discuss how digital is evolving and why digital publishers are still at the mercy of tech giants. We’ll delve into his journey as an entrepreneur, look at his setbacks and how serendipity is shaped such a key part of his career.
We’ll also discuss about the role of editing in digital publishing businesses and why people are still the biggest challenge but also a business’s biggest asset.
You can listen to the webinar in full on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
You can find the full transcript for the podcast below.
Transcript
Danny Bluestone
Cool, So Benjamin Cohen. Hey, how you doing?
Benjamin Cohen
Hi, hello. Thank you for having me on.
Danny Bluestone
It’s great to have you here today. So, how’s the day been today?
Benjamin Cohen
How’s my day been today? Well, we are in the middle of moving or at least sorts of sorting out things. And I was just getting kind of realization of actually how much crap we’ve got to get rid of from the house that I don’t think my husband is quite anticipated given that we are entirely moving in a week’s time today.
Danny Bluestone
That’s brilliant. So hopefully, you’re moving somewhere more spacious and with lots of new opportunities.
Benjamin Cohen
Yeah, we’re moving so we’re currently in Canton and we’re moving to rather in Hartfordshire. Really, it’s actually in response to what’s been happening in the last year, we’ve worked really well, remotely and quite a lot of my team have actually either have moved out of London or central anyway, or thinking of… or we’ve recruited quite a lot of people from outside of London. So, because we’re doing that gave us the confidence to expand our property search area.
Danny Bluestone
I guess on that note, how important is like infrastructure for you and the business that you’re running, like digital infrastructure? And where do you think the government’s heading in this country with it?
Benjamin Cohen
So, internet infrastructure is really important and being helpful for our team to be able to connect wherever they are to upload content. So, if wherever the internet goes down in an area where one of the team who’s uploading the latest episode of one of our Snapchat shows lives and we had to delay it by 12 hours or a day or something, that has a significant impact on our revenue because that’s our biggest revenue source, by far.
I heard from a business perspective, the government within the budget is introducing the super deductible, they think it helps a business like ours, like we don’t really have any tech infrastructure, we have a website, which we’re leasing space from Amazon to host the whole thing like nervous and having to put in pipes and what cables and things like that. All of our intranet or whatever one would call it is on the cloud, we were not building our own content management system. So further, we have built in our own advocacy platform, actually through a Google funding. They have a stringent $50,000 developer in platform, but even say, you can’t use it, you can’t use the government secret deductible to pay for software development. It’s for no infrastructure, I’m not sure who’s going to be doing other than Amazon and Google anyway. I’m not sure they need much of a break in paying less tax because it’s not like they paid that much anyway.
Danny Bluestone
Hmm. That’s really interesting stuff. And so, tell me what made you an entrepreneur in the first place? Was it an accident or do you think it was by design?
Benjamin Cohen
It’s a good question. So, my family is very entrepreneurial. My dad as at when I was growing up, lawyer but also kind of property developer, also just doing lots of different bits and pieces. He, at the time I started my first business, he was running with my uncle, a online legal services business right at the beginning of the internet. The other side of my family, my mom’s dad, my late grandfather. He was Management Director at Ladbrokes for many years and Ladbrokes was owned by that side of the family, his uncles and cousins and things as well and my uncle. So, business has always been part of the conversation, I always had an expectation that I would be doing something in that vein, I guess my first business was actually buying and selling ice lollies, kind of act typical in my view, I don’t know like Bart Simpson like I did. But my first business, proper business, I started when I was in sixth form at JFS Jewish preschool, which was a Jewish community website, quite beginning of the internet. Frankly, if I look back at it now, it’s not online now but can find it from things like archive.org. I mean, it was very simple. And frankly, I should make a documentary freely for about this.
I didn’t trick anyone, alright, but people didn’t really understand the Internet in those days. So, I was able to build this website and the two Jewish newspapers didn’t have a website and there was this website that a kid was running, I had one and they didn’t have one. And they kind of felt well, they should have one, they should require mine. So, there was sort of a bidding war to do deals and ended up doing a deal for tuition, US merged the business into that and then a rival copycat emerged, and they voted on aim and we reversed into them. And all the same time, I was running a search business.
We early race before Google, we were doing Pay Per Click listings wasn’t quite pay per click actually, it was paid for inclusion on a kind of retainer basis. But you could alter the results, it was a very bad search engine. Certainly not as good as Google. But we did deals we had lots of internet service providers. And there were lots in those days, everyone from your bank to your supermarket was offering you internet, we had to deal with quite a lot of internet service providers to use our search engine instead of AltaVista or whatever. And we did build a business there and it was it was good but then obviously, Google happen. I was on the wrong side of the Atlantic. At that point I got involved in a legal dispute with Apple because we had a music search engine called iTunes. Apple wanted the name
Danny Bluestone
So, with that iTunes thing. Was that deliberate? Or was that just [crosstalk :00:08:12]
Benjamin Cohen
The accident. So, we had a music, we had a porn search engine, we had all these search engine we’re going to search all these different things and one thing’s to the music like an mp3 search engine, this is kind of immediate post Napster days, so people were looking for music, there wasn’t such a great place to find this before [inaudible:00:08:33] and that was our one and we wanted tunes and tunes wasn’t available in the whatever registration company we’re using, sort of suggested iTunes because that was available. iTunes wasn’t, there was a service called that. So, we have that and it was just there for years.
Later Apple acquired iTunes.com and they were branding their sort of music service as it was then, then they began legal battle against me, my business. But by that point, I’ve kind of wound that business partially down. It wasn’t really doing very much, wasn’t that exciting. But I lost the case during the battle I was into by the times and it just happened on the day of the times Christmas party and I got invited by the guy who invited me to the party there, I met lots of people, including the online business editor and he invited me to write a column, one off column and they enjoy it and so that was quite good. So, I ended up writing regularly every week or so, about the internet and from there a lot of other things happened the business an hour on pioneers exists really because I asked if I could write about them so LGB lesbian gay bisexual is the term was then before LGBT was used.
If I could write some content or column of the time for that one, they didn’t want me to. So, I just wrote it anyway and put it online on PinkNews and then I guess the rest is history. But then right at the start of PinkNews. I’d spent six years as a correspondent for Channel Four News, as the technology correspondent, ripping it as a side project and that was really exciting.
Reporting on the rise, I reported on the rise of Google in the times that reporting on it so properly at Channel Four News but also the likes of Facebook, YouTube, it was really interesting, got to meet lots of really interesting people but I ultimately felt that I wanted to make the business like really started, a success. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the last six years.
Danny Bluestone
So, there are quite a few doors slammed in your face. Like, obviously, with the court case that must have been tough for you as a young entrepreneur.
Benjamin Cohen
I wouldn’t say doors slammed to my face, literally nothing that’s ever happened to me I would considered to be particularly bad because I include that I live off a mess, it’s not great but it’s made me who I am, so everything that’s gone wrong, inverted commas has been helpful in getting me to where I am today and I’m very pleased and happy with where I am today. So had there not been a court case, I wouldn’t have met the times when it happened PinkNews wouldn’t have happen in Channel Four, is to have never be running like a really rubbish slow changes though, I don’t know. Business maybe but I like what I’m doing now.
And ultimately, the last call, I don’t know, 20 years of my life nearly have all been like, following on from what happened then. So, it’s all good and that’s the thing that I think it’s important for entrepreneurs or anyone else to realize is, running a business and life doesn’t just run in sunlight, move halfway. You can be at the point that there’s some challenge, what’s going to happen to you? But serendipity is a great thing. You get to meet interesting people, I met my husband through serendipity of being at the old PinkNews office and you see fortunately he’s using Grindr, like my lunch break or whatever and he happens to be nearby, I would never have met him have I not been in there at on that day.
And you feel like serendipity is so important and I think that’s important for entrepreneurs to realize that there are setbacks, those are difficult things that happen. Facebook was a really big source of the traffic for PinkNews. It’s still was the important one but in 2018, Facebook, changed its algorithm that really affected us right at the beginning. And but I also met Snapchat at the beginning of 2018 properly, and that completely changed the business, massively impacted what we do the revenue that we generate and I could have been, I suppose that time I might not have pushed the Snapchat thing had Mark Zuckerberg not change the algorithm on Facebook. So, everything kind of works in that way to get to where you are.
Danny Bluestone
So obviously you embrace… it sounds like you embrace obstacles and almost like welcome them because you believe that it’s going to open new doors, correct?
Benjamin Cohen
Yeah, I guess it depends what type of person you are. So, look, I’m more of an optimist type of person. I try and like deal with a challenge. Sometimes it’s really annoying, if you’re running a business and like last year of COVID, when COVID air, oh my god, I just couldn’t sleep. It was just awful, because we ran the team quite a lot, at the beginning of last year before COVID aired properly. We’ve signed quite a number of Ad deals, annoyingly before the travel, we were planning the biggest and we do like PinkNews awards, so, like normal glitzy dinner and entertainment stuff. And we’ve signed for the biggest one, Amazon was our headline sponsor and I realized pretty early on, after watching what’s going on in China that this was going to happen to us here. So, I made some important moves, like I terminated our office right at like a week, we moved out like a couple of weeks before lockdown started. So, we made some enemies, but that period was really stressful but I wouldn’t say I’m glad that COVID happened but the truth, It’s been terrible for a lot of people, but the business that we have now is much stronger because we got through that and because we changed the way we’re working, we’ve recruited so many people during COVID.
Now, our revenue for last year was marginally down. But that’s all events related, our actual revenue minus events is massively up and our profitability was massively up last year. And the beginning of this year has been, what we’d hope it would be the strongest quarter ever because it’s got the highest expenses because we’ve got the biggest team. But it’s not only the biggest revenue, but the best profit we’ve made, I think we’re making the flooring for q1 of this year, we made around the same profit that we made a lot for the whole of last year. So that’s we’re in a really good position for growing the business and so coming over those obstacles, has made the business stronger.
And I’m not sure if COVID or some sorts of were challenged like that hadn’t have happened to us, I’m not sure we’d be quite as strong because it made us go back to the drawing board. We having higher business plan that we had to change because of COVID. But now, with the benefit of hindsight, I’m not actually sure how good that plan was. I think the plan that we’ve got now is better, that the pandemics forced us to sort of look very carefully at what we are doing, what the likely sort of successes because every decision that I’ve made, I’ve always done with the interests of our team, our heart for their economic well-being, their mental health, their physical health well-being and that forced us to change some of the things we plan to do because on the other things that maybe a bit more risky, we’ve been really prudent with everything we’ve done and it’s actually reaped a lot of rewards for us.
Danny Bluestone
So, tell me a bit more about the readers of PinkNews in the audience and how that’s changed over the years and influence some of the decisions that you’ve made.
Benjamin Cohen
For starters, I guess what’s changed is use the word readers so most people who consume our content are not readers at all. So, we started website, reporting the news. So just very much like other online news services, we’ve now evolved beyond the news and beyond written so the vast majority of our audience consume our content on social platforms like Snapchat, but also Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok. Snap is our biggest social platform and then they’re viewing our mini shows. So, we have nine shows on Snapchat with more to come and it’s not just news. So, it’s kind of in the lifestyle entertainment sort of genre, which also is beneficial to us because I explain the news industry is really, really challenging. And we are very unusual. We’re a non-VC funded, we’re entirely self-funded, businesses reaching 10s of millions of people every month. And the vast majority of our competitors are either large legacy publishers that have turned digital or they’re VC funded businesses like BuzzFeed provides for financial and financial gain nine, HuffPost was required by BuzzFeed recently, group nine.
So, they’ve raised a lot of money, the challenge they’ve had is that because they raised them, they spent all their time trying to raise more and more money but not actually much time, I think making sure that they’re profitable. I mean, they’re trying to do that now. And that’s why Buzzfeeds are quite tough post has had to make a lot of people redundant. It’s kind of closes news operations in the UK and other countries. BuzzFeed did the same thing to its own business in the UK last year. We’ve never had to do that. We’re constantly hiring people and I’ve had some people who’ve joined from some of the publications that have had financial challenges, whether that’s legacy publications or some of the digital publications. So, we’re just that bit different because we have to be nimble. If we don’t make money, I can’t pay people, I’m not going to not pay people and I want to pay myself. So, we have to make sure we sell more than it costs for the business to operate. It’s like really simple.
Don’t know why all these VC funded businesses couldn’t quite work this out. You can’t just continually raise money on overinflated valuations. At some point, you actually have to sell some advertising or sell some products and then people have to want to see it and that’s the difference for us and what has enabled us to grow so much over these years is making that transition from written to video. Also, just as a subtle thing, but news Germany has a quite short lifespan so for a new story to be published on PinkNews website today, people will read it for like 24, 48 hours, maybe 36 hours, you may have a little bit of traffic if people researching something from like a year ago. But most of the traffic is really quite instant. What we’ve been moving to more is longtail pieces of the content that can deliver our audiences over time. Like snapshot and other digital media shows. We are creating IP assets that we may reuse, repurpose them in other channels or put them on other platforms. And that’s about delivering long tail value. So, one piece of content has been made by the team might be reused five or six times in different formats, which is a bit harder to do for a written news story, the thing is one of the stories today on the website that is like big is the LGB Alliance, which is the way thy called the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Alliance, but there’s like anti transgender, that oppose the trans right. And it’s very controversial but posed by most people in the LGBT community, they will grow into charity status today. Now, the articles we’ve written about that are very relevant till today. And people may look back and be linked to from Wikipedia I’m sure but they have a very limited lifespan.
Whereas I’m aware that we’ve got an episode going out of one of our shows on Snapchat, which is about the influencer JoJo Siwa. And that piece of content contains archive bits of content that we’ve made about Jojo Siwa before. So, we’re reusing some of the same things that we’ve done before. There’s a little bit of new content in there but that’s just what it was that long tail return on investment for the content production which you just can’t get in like classical news coverage.
Danny Bluestone
And how important is your website is, a channel because obviously, you’ve mentioned snap?
Benjamin Cohen
Yeah.
Danny Bluestone
Where do you see the future of the web as a publisher?
Benjamin Cohen
Right. So, the web is really important. We don’t make as much money and I think like the money that we make on Snapchat or even for other content distribution deals that we do, but the website does facilitate some of our other wider partnerships and we’ve recently been joined by an excellent brand partnerships director who sort of acts her sex [weapon]? Who is getting quite a lot of publishers for us for the website. So, the website is incredibly important, we just need to monetize it better.
The content is on the web and it’s open, it’s free, it’s not restricted by the walled gardens of the social platforms. And that’s what changed the world. It was on PinkNews website, the Nick Clegg first former deputy prime minister, then the Liberal Democrats, David Cameron and Prime Minister, then legal conservatives both said that they were… well…Nick Clegg said he would support introducing same sex marriage on StringReader questions in the 2010 general election and David Cameron said he was open to it. And then a bit well… during the Labour Leadership election in 2010, said that his supporters it there. At least from that website, from those articles that then further say, my friend, the Minister for equality at the time we live down, went to Theresa May, showed her the printouts from PinkNews and said, look, all the parties we supported, should we actually just push this as a policy? And that was the genesis for same sex marriage actually being a coalition policy in the 2010, 2015 Coalition, I chaired the Alpha marriage campaign for equal marriage.
Following that, and none of that would be possible without the website, you wouldn’t have that impact, actually, on things like Snapchats talking to different audience. So the website is really important. It’s independent is ours. Of course, we’re like, impacted by Google algorithm changes and Facebook algorithm changes but there are hundreds of thousands of people who visit our homepage every week. So those people are really important to us, our email subscribers and that’s what we actually want to build more.
We’ve recently launched new iOS and Android apps. And that’s about building a closer relationship with the users. The people who come by the app, read five times as much content as the people who come on general mobile work, they come more frequently, they respond to push notifications, we want to get as many users within our kind of ecosystem as possible and that’s why the web is still important and we’re building more commerce marketplace and affiliate things at the moment. We’re still quite early in that, that’s something we don’t really…we do a little bit of Commerce on Snapchat, but there’s quite a lot you can do on the web that you can’t quite do elsewhere. So having a strong web presence is really important. And it is the case though that right now, the websites more like breakeven, I would say. Whereas we’re building kind of super profits on math and across video and that’s being used to subsidize the growth and will be invested in the growth that we’re doing on the web, with the aim, obviously, of the web becoming a stronger kind of financial model for us as well.
Danny Bluestone
Yeah. How are you guys feeling? With all the changes in like cookies and Google Analytics, is that something that you’re having to deal with at the moment?
Benjamin Cohen
Yeah. I don’t want that for cookies. Really interesting what’s going to happen to the affiliate module. So, we’ve only been doing affiliate stuff for them, It’s really interesting. So, we’re moving a bit to a marketplace model in the future but with facilitating tens of thousands of pounds of transactions every week anyway, at the moment. And that is based on Google reliance on cookies. So, I’m concerned what’s going to happen to them. There’s obviously the Google algorithm changes that have been pushed back a little bit, but coming later on in the year, that may well have an impact and may be needing to do some work to improve ICA.
Danny Bluestone
Yeah, the core were vitals, right?
Benjamin Cohen
Yeah, they pushed it back by a month or something, they’re still quite a lot of works to do, we don’t know how it’s going to impact anyone else yet. And there’s algorithm changes that happen all the time so with snapchat which is an important source of our revenue. They’re constantly refining the content recommendation algorithm because they would operate a walled garden but they’ve got more content on there than they used to do and there’s more competition for eyeballs, and you might publish something and it gets seen by no one. And you might publish another thing you don’t expect to do really well and suddenly, that’s being seen by millions of kids on their way to school ever in America.
So, like algorithms is a constantly vassal having to play, you can’t get it right. Even with the app, we’re building our own algorithm for showing deciding what content to show to people. But you know you’re also at the mercy of the apple algorithm and the Google algorithm for deciding whether they’re going to show your app to people. I mean, It’s, great when Apple keeps putting the app of the day or like featuring us, but they make that decision that’s kind of beyond our control, I guess we’re making a nice app so they want to show it but all those things are kind of beyond our control. It’s one of the challenges for publishers and why we’re building our email database and our wanting to have more app users we can send push notifications to but ultimately, you’re operating in an ecosystem that is fundamentally controlled by the tech giants and you have to expect your place, you can’t be like something that’s on the outskirts, you have to play the game and we do play the game and I spend a lot of my time basically, being nice, executives have a different platform, you have to do that.
Danny Bluestone
And what about user research? How do you learn about your audience? Is it through the data that you get from analytics? Do you run sort of interviews to understand?
Benjamin Cohen
That’s a really good question, I don’t think we do a good enough job at this yet. So sometimes we are making decisions on what we think users want, rather than what they actually want and that then sometimes leads us to choose the wrong thing to concentrate on and not what is popular. But we are obviously looking using analytics as the guide for a lot of what we’re doing, but we are in the process of setting up a bit more of a closer relationship that we’re building of our users being able to have a subset of users that are feeding back to us on a representative level to tell us what they want.
But there’s a slight challenge that any publisher has is, I’m always in this debate with my team is, do we tell people what we think they should want to look out? Or do we just give them what they want. And if we just give them what they want. I know we’ll make a lot of money, but I’m not sure necessarily helping the world that much because basically, what users want is like on Snapchat and other platforms, Twitter and things. They basically want trash and a lot of views on trash and gossip about celebrities about influencers and they don’t want serious stories that much and equally on the web. We find some of those same things, we can do a really in depth, really important investigations transphobia and that will just not get the same number of clicks as some salacious story about some only fans star or something because the only fans are not doing really well on Facebook. And we honestly don’t really put stuff like that on Snapchat because it’s a younger audience, there’s this kind of battle. And one of the really helpful things for me to try and understand this, I was listening to a podcast from Audible last year that David Dimbleby did about history of Rupert Murdoch. And the thing that Murdoch really understood is that you kind of have to give people what they want, so you can’t just tell them all the things you think it’s important, or what you do is have different titles to do different things.
So, the times is telling people what you think they need to know and all the facts that exist and taking a quite, hopefully impartial, not always unfortunately, on issues like transgender we found, but you’d have the sun to be more populist and kind of give people what they want and at the time they wanted page three and things like that and that’s why the sun grew in popularity. And that’s what we’re trying to do so on some of our brands we’ve launched in the last few months, we’ve launched a gaming brand initially on Snapchat and the web, we’re growing that our core game, will do it, we’ve got fitness brands on Snapchat, that’s showing people what they want. We also have a show on Snapchat called Now Slay, now if you tried to ask me to explain what is Now Slay? That is literally what people want. And what do people want? Some people want to watch satisfying content like a plastic cup thing on fire because that’s what they really want to see or like someone’s scratching their hand through slime or they might want to and we just also described that Shannon was the hottest team that’s on the internet. So, they might won the biggest gossip that’s being talked about on Twitter and other social media.
So, understanding what people want and then we have other channels, where we have a show called The Quick catch up on Snapchat, we are telling people genuine news stories, all the things they might have missed from the last week, so you’ve got to understand that you have this constant battle and we have provided the editorial team with people saying, this is a great story people really need to know then you’ve got to say to people, well, maybe no one wants to actually read it and they don’t want to search for it and so who’s going to see it.
That’s the challenge and actually just a reason I’m giving lots of analogies and things. One of the big advantages that newspapers have that doesn’t really exist online, is serendipity. So, it’s like my favorite word but if you’re reading the time and you didn’t even get this if you’re reading like the iPad edition, or tablet edition, but you’ll see the story on the front page and that might be the reason you’ve opened it. But you will then swipe through or turn the pages and you might find something that you never expected to see. But it’s just there, that doesn’t really happen online because we’re making much more about informed decisions. So, although there were like content recommendation units below articles where you might get sent to different things or Facebook might suggest something. Generally, you’re seeing what you want to see, the things you’re already interested in and then you’re making a conscious decision to read that one article or watch that one episode of one of our shows. And so, we’re on a constant like battle of marketing individual pieces of content, but knowing that you might have a lot of other things that are really good and people might really want but they might just never see. And that’s a challenge of digital media, unfortunately.
Danny Bluestone
Yeah, running your business sounds like it’s quite a challenging from an editorial perspective, that’s probably where you have the most challenges. Is that correct?
Benjamin Cohen
Yeah, I would say that the biggest challenge of running a business is you can employ lots of people who will in different stages of their life and have their different needs. So, I was having a mess and I was having a relapse at the beginning of the year. That ought to do what we’re unable to do might have another member of the team who I had another one of my senior team was just ill with a mystery kind of virus wasn’t COVID for a few weeks and I just meant they weren’t able to do the things that they would normally do with these people, is the biggest challenge. The challenge then when you add editorial and is if the editorial team and the team really wants to do a story that you’re just not really sure you can do so either doesn’t make sense commercially or a piece of content beyond the story, might be that they really want to do it, may not make sense commercially, or there may be other things involved where you can’t do it, defamation acts and copyright acts are really important things that we have to think about all the time, like a big challenge that my business has is the majority of our audiences is in America, where basically UK, we are subject to the UK’s defamation act and we are subject to the UK’s copyright act, the defamation act and the Copyright act of far stricter in the UK than equivalent legislation if it exists in other countries like the United States, where you have constitutional rights for the free press that we don’t actually have here and free speech. So, we sometimes there’s a story that you know is true, you really know it’s true, you really want to tell the story, but you just can’t because it’s too risky, someone could decide to begin bringing a defamation proceeding against you that even if you know you’re going to win, in the end, there’s going to waste a lot of time for you to get to that point. And that’s like a challenge that I guess I have to navigate or this business has to navigate that some other digital businesses don’t. And certainly, I would find that non-UK based digital media aren’t really concerned with some of those things. It’s something that when I was at Channel Four News, I remember reporting about the government then, the coalition government was talking about reforming the copyright acts. And to make it more in line with the United States, hasn’t really happened.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is the US legislation is far superior so if you inadvertently infringe someone’s copyright, which can happen all the time from user generated content, or whatever else it is, there’s a takedown procedure. So, the copyright owner tells you, you must take it down within a certain period, you take it down, that’s in Germany the end of the argument, whereas in the UK, they’ll say, take it down, but by the way, you will have to pay me like x thousand pounds. And that’s a challenge for a business like ours, which is dealing in user generated content all the time, where someone may get permission but the person you’ve asked to get permission may not actually be the person who should get permission and it’s just as complicated and you’ve got those kinds of legislative challenges that make running the business that little bit harder here. And that’s now unfortunately, I would say added to that the changes in the budget to corporation tax, make the UK a less attractive place to run the business like mine.
We’ve always like offset the difficulties with legislation with the actual low tax regime that we had, as the tax increases, it kind of adds additional ticks and reasons why some of the operations or publishing should be done in a different jurisdiction.
Danny Bluestone
Cool, amazing. So, it sounds like the international expansion is a consideration.
Benjamin Cohen
Yeah, so most of the users are in the US and around the world. So, the UK is really quite small overall for us. But it’s still where a lot of our homepage visits come on the website. We currently have all of our team are based in the British Isles in the UK or an island, but we are carefully thinking about how to grow the team so it cover different time zones better and take advantage of other local legislation or tax and investment credits or whatever there might be in different countries.
Frankly, the pandemic has also helped us understand that we can work remotely. So that makes it easier to recruit people overseas. Now, we are intending to have a kind of hub office type thing in London but given that you already have quite a lot of people who are not based in London, they might be based in other parts of the UK, we’re not going to be saying to those people, right, Okay, you’ve now got to move to London just because the pandemics over when you’ve been doing a really great job for the last year, whatever it is. So, we know that the future of work for us will be different because it’s going to be different and because we build as everyone else has hopefully, built that kind of skill set in remote working and distributing team that would allow us to have team members in other countries and that’s also important. So, we are content based business to get different perspectives. Like it is challenging for my team who are based here, or islands, there’s only a couple of people who are American, basically talking a lot to an American audience and they’re just having to be Americans who are living in the UK. So, we want to have more voices that understand the kind of cultural nuances of the different markets that we’re operating in. It’s small for us in terms of revenue but we have a growing audience in India, but we don’t have anyone actually based in India and so it can make decision mistakes and then in the content that we might not want, we definitely don’t want to make. So having being able to be closer to our audience is important and the way of working now makes that easier for sure.
Danny Bluestone
And in terms of people hiring people development, what sort of tips can you give to other entrepreneurs, and bosses out there?
Benjamin Cohen
I guess my biggest tip is hire really great CFO. So, my CFO, Alex has been with the business for like two and a half years, actually a bit longer they joined us to a maternity cover because our then… I talked with a head of operations went on maternity leave, who’s like my family, we were going really well. She went on maternity leave and just had another baby she was going to come back. Alex joins with that and then has grown that and a function quite significantly. Alex has been promoted during that time to the Operations Director announced it, it’s hard as the CEO and the founder to make some of those decisions, because it gives off this actually having someone else who can say, but I think you’re making a really bad decision with the hiring strategy or consult just do that stand back. But Alex’s also introduced quite a lot of important policies for us and processes so with our performance reviews, which I hate, or like HR paperwork and stuff like that is definitely not my thing. But I can see why it’s been really important for people’s career development and the training that we’ve been introducing, as well as important things such as we’ve just launched the transitioning work policy, were very unusually for a small business, we’re offering up to one month per year of paid leave for transitioning related surgery and recovery time, which the vast majority of SMEs just don’t offer anything like that for trans employees, they might be doing things like… or suggesting people use their annual leave or something like that. But people actually need annual leave to just recover from work and having a break. And you definitely don’t need to be using your time for
[inaudible :00:42:28]
So, we wanted to do that and obviously, a business like PinkNews as well, LGBT heritage, we have probably a higher proportion of trans and non-binary team members than other organizations do. But we think it’s really important for other businesses and that whole process, I wouldn’t have been the right person to try and out what the policy should be, to be consulting with your team, I’ve also got other things to do. So having someone that’s dedicated to that sort of function is so important because, as I said, the challenge of a business, but your biggest asset is your team and your people that work in the business. So, if you don’t invest in having the right infrastructure, I don’t know if you can build as good a business. And I definitely think when I think back to how my business was five years ago before
[inaudible:00:43:16]
In a business, you know, we’re pretty scrappy, weren’t making the best hiring decisions, we definitely weren’t doing like performance reviews, and probation plans and all the things that our business really needs to do. And if you want to grow up and become like a bigger business you need to invest in that kind of infrastructure and that’s been a really important lesson for me over the last couple of years and I definitely don’t think that the transition that we made to remote working and all of the things we had to do in the last year, would have been just possible to do without someone who also has a team working with them, to be able to deliver those things to actually make it easy for people to do their jobs. Just one example. We were really quick on making sure everyone had the right equipment to work from home, the right desks and the right chairs, and it astonishes me when I’m on calls with some really big companies or I’m listening for my sister works at a really large investment bank. She’s not being given a chair, though. I mean, that is a bank that’s turning over billions or bigger numbers.
She had to borrow a chair from my dad’s office and get a desk that’s not really suitable, but we made sure everyone has a kind of a workplace assessment for home remotely, to make sure they had all of the right equipment that they needed. If their internet’s not that great and they do have 4g signal, which I do and then they have a booster box connecting on 4g, because yeah, if the internet is connected and actually work, it’s also just to make it less stressful for individuals to have to work and be having all of that infrastructure and having like a team that does that and a team that sends out things when it’s people’s birthdays and sends everyone an Easter egg and sends everyone pancakes for troves, cheese then sends everyone a Christmas surprise and Uber Eats vouchers and things like we do regularly in a [inaudible :00:45:14] Christmas. That’s so important, but you need to have people that do it because I don’t think the CEO has enough time to do that themselves.
Danny Bluestone
Thanks so much for listening.
If you’re interested in hearing more from Benjamin, find him on Twitter on @BenjaminCohen all in one word. Also check out PinkNews, It’s a really great website. They’re also on all major social media channels like Snap, sharing fantastic content.
You can also find Cyber-Duck on social as well @cyberduck_uk on Twitter, also on Instagram @ cyberduckuk and on LinkedIn just by searching for Cyber-Duck. Our website is cyber-duck.co.uk. We’ll have some amazing guests coming up soon. So, make sure you tune in and see you soon guys.
The Digital Pond Podcast is brought to you by Cyber-Duck.
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