[Builder Kit] Caprock Local Newsletter Business Plan
$ 49
The full package includes:
- the business plan,
- the live financial model,
- the Investor business plan,
- the SBA Loan business plan,
- the SBA Loan Projections
- the grant application,
- the grant budget,
- the pitch deck
- the story mode – so you can revisit the story at any time and remind yourself how everything was built and how it’s meant to work,
- the How To Use doc.
Read the original story here
Description
Elisabeth’s first idea was the one most independent journalists start with. Build an audience, sell advertising, take sponsorships, keep the reader free. Run through the numbers and that model pays almost nothing until the audience is very large, which puts real revenue somewhere past month twenty. The targets here are month three and month twelve. It also hands leverage to the advertiser. A pipeline company or a wind developer buying ad space is a company with an opinion about your next story. The one thing Elisabeth said she wanted, editorial independence, was the first thing an ad-funded newsletter business plan takes away.
The advertising trap
So the ad model was cut. The Momo Hero method has a fixed order for fixing this: change the product line before you change anything else.
The niche that made the numbers move
A political scientist who wants to be an independent journalist is competing with every national outlet. The niche was narrowed hard: independent reporting on rural Texas, focused on land, water, energy and local government. Transmission lines and pipelines crossing private land. Groundwater district rules and low-turnout elections. The ERCOT grid build-out. Property tax. It is the world Elisabeth lives in, it has a large and growing set of paying readers, and it has almost no independent full-time coverage.
From one revenue line to three
The business was renamed Caprock Report, after the West Texas landform, and the model changed from one revenue line to three: individual subscriptions, a low-cost annual reference, and an institutional licence for the organizations that operate in rural Texas. The mix is the point. No single payer can set the agenda.
POSCO: pricing a newsletter business plan against real competitors
Momo Hero’s POSCO method scores real competitors on product, online presence, service, brand and offline factors, then uses the result to set a price. Five real publications were scored. Caprock Report was placed at its realistic month-two position.
Setting the price
The formula put the subscription between $6.60 and $7.75 a month. It was set at $9 a month, or an effective $7 on the annual plan, with the small premium justified by the beat focus, the local-government coverage, and an annual-plan discount on the reference product that the compared publications sell separately or do not offer. Price was never the barrier a weak plan assumes it is.
