This Is How We Pivoted Our Startup

From sending out email newsletters to marketing companies online.

In the start of 2016, I came up with a startup idea: create a weekly email newsletter containing curated news from all over the web. During the time I was in the middle of my experiment of getting rid of the Facebook News Feed from my daily routine. It was my assumption that there was a group of people like me who was interested in cutting off social media time from their life to get more work done.

At first, I was set with just gathering as much subscribers as possible to turn them into frequent readers of the newsletter called the “Eight A Week — Weekly Digest”. The goal of the newsletter was to deliver value from Day 1 and eventually monetize the emails by letting small, unobtrusive ads show up on the email from weekly sponsors. In hindsight, it seemed like a good idea. Subscribers of the newsletter grew from just 15 subscribers in the 1st week to 106 in the 3rd week. At the time, we didn’t have social media accounts yet. No ads, no full-scale marketing, just plain word of mouth.

The goal was to get 5,000 active subscribers by the end of 2016 before we monetized, a feat we were determined to achieve with the right strategy and the right channels.

But along the way, parents happened.

Before, the team was made up of three people. Two part-time curators (that’s me and J, in charge of gathering up the news that comes up every week and sending the newsletter), and one part-time marketer (Paolo, in charge of sharing the newsletter and asking people to sign up if they fancied the concept of a weekly curated news digest).

During the course of the startup, J and I were still going through college. J graduated last May, while I’m set to graduate this coming November. Paolo on the other hand had been juggling different startups.

Under pressure from our parents, we needed to make money soon. And of course, online startups aren’t guaranteed to make money on day 1 unless you were a sales-focused business.

So that’s exactly what we did.

Forming a new concept

With the progress that we’ve made with Eight A Week, we wanted to see what data and what lessons we could use from our previous concept and transform it into an entirely new business model.

So far we’ve learned that:

• Almost 70% of our subscribers frequently (and are able to) open their emails. So much for the Philippines being a third world country with low internet access.
• News headlines with summaries made by the team are opened 23% more than headlines with just copy-pasted quotes from the main article. (Copywriting)
• Font sizes, colors, and layouts play a big factor when it comes to emails. (A/B testing)
• Analyzing data such as those stated above gives us a good guide to choosing which content to send out. (What the subscribers want.)
• Subject lines are the equivalent of an article’s post title. The more catchy it is, the more an email is likely to be opened.
• Not everyone opens their emails at the same time. Sending your emails out to everyone at the same time runs the risk of your subscriber not opening the email at all after it sits in their inbox for a couple of days. (Remember that time in the week where you receive 10 emails a day and you just procrastinate on opening all of them for a day or two? What happens to an email you send out if your subscriber receives it as his first email on day 1?)

With everything we learned from the weekly newsletter, we thought of ourselves as better email marketers as compared to other startups that just send out emails for the sake of it.

With that thought, I decided that we had to try out the data with someone else.

From Eight A Week…

With Paolo (a digital arts graduate) and J (a writer) on my team, I decided that we had to make changes in the startup if we wanted to make money as soon as possible.

So I decided to start calling up companies that were interested in making changes or renewing their website design, an approach that I came up with to see how brick and mortar companies worked with tech to market their businesses.

I landed my first client after a week of cold-calling random businesses. During my first proposal meeting with Manila Golf and Country Club, they signed the contract on the spot, making them our first client and our first sale.

Throughout the project, it was surprising to see how big companies were unable to keep up with current technologies without guidance from external consultants, an opportunity we saw and decided to grasp.

Right now we’re continually working with Manila Golf and Country Club, maintaining and optimizing their website, offering tech trainings for their staff, and, most importantly, helping out with their email marketing.

… to Eight Media Online Solutions. (Eight Media for short.)

Here we are today, a freelance collective and outsourcing startup handling everything from setting up and designing websites, photography, branding, digital design, social media management, and, of course, copywriting and email marketing.

From sending out weekly email newsletters, to handling everything a company does online, we felt that it was a far cry from what we envisioned from the beginning of our startup.

But that’s what startups do: they start with an assumption of what the market wants, then they keep proving themselves wrong until they find a solution that the market needs.

EDIT: Hi guys! Thank you so much for the positive feedback. This is truly overwhelming for me and I am very grateful. Unfortunately, I wasn’t expecting it to be THIS positive (lol). I’m only able to handle a handful of startups for now so I’ll have to cut my offer short (the one I’m offering below). I’ll only be entertaining the ones who commented above and messaged me through FB and email.
I’ll be posting real soon once my startup is in full swing with a big team to handle all your needs.
Again, thank you so much!

As a gift to the Startup PH community, I’m offering a month FREE of what we do best: our copywriting and email marketing services, perfect for product and service-related startups. Feel free to contact me at gerald@eightaweek.com if you’re interested and we could talk about how we could work together.

Thanks for reading!