In the previous articles in this series I have written about the beginnings of my company ‘Next For Me.’
Next For Me publishes news and resources for 50+ audiences. We host events across the country to discuss work, financial wellness, and what’s next.
Why We’re On The Road
I had a meeting with my coach Roy Burstin earlier this year. I was proud of our efforts to grow our subscribers by hacking around in the Facebook ad platform. He cautioned me about becoming too dependent on Facebook. He also told me that if I came to his firm looking for money he would be much more likely to take a meeting if I had spoken to a thousand people in our target audience than if I was just good at making people click on Facebook ads.
Another of our advisors, Firas Bushnaq, said to me that Next For Me was a community play. He continued, that if I had to spend money acquiring users that what we were publishing wasn’t what the audience was looking for or they would be sharing it and our numbers would be growing organically.
I had to shake myself out of the cemented approach I had in my head and that I had diligently been trying to force. I should have known. The Facebook approach never felt right for so many reasons. I was sending messages to get clicks that were designed to get at the fears and insecurities of potential subscribers. It used the ethical lapses and exploitation of data in Facebook’s platform to build our audience. Eww.
So we turned to what felt more natural. We’d develop a program of events across the country to gather people over 50 to discuss work and financial wellness. This was our bet. We know that there is a lot of pain around these topics and people were looking for safe environments to discuss them. It also played into my history of creating online and real-time communities, something I was comfortable with and believed in.
The approach was to provide tools and resources for private get-togethers. In your dining room, you invite friends over who are also facing the issues of age insecurity in the workplace and the subsequent financial consequences. We’d record and publish the results.
The vision was to nurture the local gatherings into organically growing ‘chapters’, where the enthusiastic groups are supported with materials and organizing tools from us. We will open the publishing platform too. Giving the local groups a platform to chronicle their events and tell their stories.
We promoted the idea in our newsletter and got a lot of interest in attending such events and some for hosting. Wrangling commitments for an actual date for hosting an event has been more challenging. We persisted with a growing spreadsheet and follow-ups.
While speaking with like-minded entrepreneurs in our space, the notion of public events emerged as a way we could collaborate and have a larger impact. Our more expansive business plans describe public events as a path to revenue and impact on more people.
With the commitment phobia of those who showed an interest in hosting events, maybe we just were going about it backwards. Maybe we should lead with public events and through those offer the tools for local organizing. Or maybe it’s a combination of both and we see what emerges.
A Bigger Impact With Partners
We have new partners with Silvernest and Age Without Borders through a series of introductions and the zeitgeist of what’s happening with businesses addressing this huge audience.
We agreed to host an event together in Denver in the fall. Silvernest had been discussing the power of events in their plans and Age Without Borders offers online events addressing some of the same topics.
Together we assembled a group of guests who would join by pre-recorded video. They include two Next For Me advisors (or partners). Chip Conley, author of ‘Wisdom@Work: The Making of a Modern Elder’ - his book will have launched two days before our event, so we get to ride along on the campaign for his book, and Karen Wickre, who’s book "Taking the Work out of Networking: An Introverts Guide to Making Connections That Count" will be published on November 28th. Also joining in is Sally Abrahms a widely published writer and author of topics related to the “Longevity Economy”.
Silvernest is at a later stage than we are. They just announced a $3 million investment, so they have some of the resources we would have to cobble together if we were operating on our own. They have senior people in marketing and public relations on board. Things as simple as creating graphics for the promotions are something they already have in motion. By combining our resources we are exponentially more effective.
Without a lot of formal arrangements we have divided and conquered the tasks and because there is trust and shared goals it seems we’re on track.
Content Squared
As publishers, the creation of content is at the heart of what we do. We publish a newsletter which contains summaries of articles and interviews on our platform. We publish podcasts of our newsletters and interviews. We publish videos of our newsletters and interviews. It’s a ton of production work and we hope to get the most out of each story and conversation we have. We atomize each piece in any number of ‘pushes’ out to draw existing and new audiences back to our brand. We also publish articles on, uhm, Forbes, about what we’re doing. We appear on other podcasts and those hosts appear on our podcasts. You see what I’m getting at.
The events are a goldmine of content. When we did a beta test for the events in the spring, we got audio and video recordings of the proceedings, transcripts, articles and insights for our next events.
We are lucky that our co-founder Drew Domkus can edit, narrate, and publish media content in his sleep. As a pioneer in podcasting (he’s actually in the ‘Podcasting Hall of Fame’) he’s been doing this continuously since 2004. He’s coming to Denver too with a carload of gear and the instincts to know what to capture and how we’ll use it after the event.
Understanding Our Market
These events are a dream for marketers. That’s what we’re hoping anyway. In January we’ll publish a trend report on what we’ve learned from a year of publishing and speaking to 50+ audiences who have a vested interest in the topics of work and financial wellness. Marketers have generally ignored this huge audience (now 120 million US) and spend less than 5% of their budgets advertising to them, even though they control 70% of disposable income.
We’re betting that marketers will want to know more about them as their numbers grow in the coming years. We’re betting that we’ll be ahead of the curve in understanding them and will be the brand and resource they come to.
Roy was right. Facebook hacking is so ‘Election 2016’. Understanding your users (and owning your platform) is what matters.
You should sponsor one of our events - Get at me.
Previous articles in the series:
- A Conference Talk Leads To What’s ‘Next For Me’
- The Story, The Advisors And The Team
- Putting A Legal Structure In Place
- Spreading The News And Early Investments
- Testing The Facebook Ad Waters
- The Modern Elder Academy
- Can Your Startup Start A Movement
- Meeting Matter.vc
- Becoming A Caregiver Statistic
- Talking To Our Audience
- Making Assumptions And Forming Hypotheses
- How To Cope When You're Alone Again On The Startup Journey
- Developing The Brand Architecture
- Raising An Angel Round and Perception
- A Fellow Entrepreneur Offers Guidance
- The New Pitch
- Gracefully Radio Interview
- Ready For Anything, Even Wait And See
- Always Be Publishing
- Getting Out Of Your Head
- Activating A List Of Investors
- In The Details Of Subscriber Growth
- Interview: StartOut
- Keep On Connecting
- Backing Away From Facebook And Twitter
- Sell Your Product, Not Stories To Investors
- Building An Event Business
- Finding Comfort With Agility
- The Zen Of My Company
