The Walkley Media Incubator and Innovation Fund changed us.
Writers Bloc is an organisation run by a high-school teacher, a designer and two emerging writers and editors. We were honoured to be on the shortlist with other great organisations for the Walkley Innovation Fund, as well as taking the opportunity to soak up insights from a bunch of industry experts.
However, it’s fair to say that when we pitched our idea to venture capitalists, the head of the Walkley Foundation and employees of Google and Atlassian, we had a strong feeling of impostor syndrome coursing through us. But it shouldn’t have, really, because we’re building something we would use ourselves and something we think freelance journalists and writers will use every day.
Why is Bloc Boost Needed?
We know journalists and writers are finding it harder to get full-time work as places such as Fairfax and News Corp have cut jobs, and there’s pressure to support yourself as a freelancer or have something on the side in the gig economy.
What we will do is take the pain out of the pitching process with a platform that has up-to-date information on open callouts and contact details, allowing writers and editors to create portfolios and ensuring people are paid on time.
And we’re stoked to say we have attracted over 1,000 subscribers looking for freelance work and opportunities since December and had institutions such as the Walkley Foundation, Sydney Writers’ Festival, Archer Magazine, the NSW Writers’ Centre, BuzzFeed and more add jobs or opportunities to the first version of the platform.
How did we identify this problem?
About a year ago we started tweeting about writing competitions as well as publishing a monthly list of opportunities for writers on our blog. And they went gangbusters. We saw a big spike in traffic and signups on the site, as well as positive feedback through social media or landing in our inbox.
And having open rates above 43 per cent and clickthrough of over 40 per cent in our emails tells us that writers want this information and there’s potential here for a platform like Bloc Boost.
How have we changed since being shortlisted by the Walkley Innovation Fund?
Writers Bloc has always been a community for writers, a place to read new voices, to get feedback on your work. However, the S Word kept coming out of our mouths — sustainability. While we pay every writer and person who works with us, we couldn’t answer this constant question. How are we going to make this idea sustainable? We’ve tried a lot of different things to find potential revenue streams including:
- Working with affiliates like Booktopia and Scrivener (book writing software) on our website.
- Events such as book swaps and food and story evenings as well as monthly #WriteHere sessions at 10 venues around Australia
- Patreon funding
- Seeking funding from AusCo, Copyright Agency, City of Sydney and Arts NSW
- Selling diaries and stationary through our online store
- Online courses
- Premium subscription services for latest job opportunities and competitions.
We’ve had a moderate amount of success with most of these and Writers Bloc has always had momentum, albeit slower than we’d like. But Walkley ambassador and BlueChilli’s entrepreneur-in-residence Alan Jones helped us get to our eureka moment.
He simply said, “Speak to 50 people,” and listen. There was more to it than that, but not much. Essentially, he asked us to call the people we want to help and find out what their pain point was.
We adapted his questions for our own community to be:
- What are the three most difficult things about being a freelance writer?
- Have you tried anything to help you with these problems?
- Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?
It sounds simple, right? Well, it is, but these conversations often ended up being 30 minutes long and gave us a much deeper understanding of why we should build Bloc Boost and what it should be.
It seems obvious that we should speak to people about what they do, but up until that moment, we’d been developing things on our assumptions about what writers and journos would want to use. While we’ve been lucky with some of these stabs in the dark, the simple mantra of “listen to your customers” has fundamentally changed what we do, and we make an effort to email or chat with our community each week.
Some of the key problems writers told us:
- Freelance writing is lonely and competitive
- As a freelancer, you feel like you can’t take holidays and are worried about where the next job will come from
- They’re not comfortable repeatedly asking for payment from the same person that decides whether to publish you
And editors told us:
- My inbox is overflowing
- It’s hard to track who needs to be paid for what
- Commissioning cycles are so fast, I’m always thinking of the next thing to be published and working with writers
Where to from here?
As I write this, I’m sitting in a repurposed warehouse space in Ultimo called Fishburners. They describe themselves as Australia’s largest network of start-ups and our one-week trial coincidentally happened at the same time as the exciting announcement that the NSW Government is creating an 11-storey space in support of Sydney’s burgeoning startup scene. Our goal for the next six months is to secure seed funding and join the community. Seriously, the enthusiasm and supportive conversation here is infectious.
We’ve got our fingers and toes crossed for success in the Walkley Innovation Fund. But, if we’re not successful, we’re confident that we have learned the skills and confidence to develop a platform freelance writers and journos will use everyday and to reach out to investors and collaborators.
Our next step is to design and build a beta version of Bloc Boost and test it with our community. Here’s our Walkley pitch if you’re interested and if you’d like to give some feedback or get involved, please get in touch so we can make the best platform and community for freelance writers and journos out there.
