This post is an overview of how I started and scaled my first business from my university bedroom to a team of 20 based on Oxford Street London with revenues in excess of £2m.
Before I jump into this blog - I want to thank the team at Oversubscribed for helping me pull these blogs together and support with my social content creation. If you are interested in raising your profile online, head over to Oversubscribed.
How was the idea born?
Before I started the university paper I tried to set up a business with my sister called UniHive - the aim was to have a daily deals website similar to 'Groupon' but for the student market. We had seen Groupon grow from nothing to a valuation of £11 billion within three years and thought we could follow a similar model but within the student market. I quickly learned when you were only making a few pounds per deal sold that you would need huge amounts of traffic to create a viable business. At this point I had no idea how to attract a user to the website, never mind convert them into a paying customer.
With no marketing budget, I decided to create a newspaper containing discounts from local Nottingham businesses. The aim of the paper was to drive traffic to the website. After creating the first UniHive paper, I soon realised there was a far greater desire from the local businesses to pay me to feature them within the paper as opposed to the website.
Once it became clear that I didn't have the knowledge or money to make www.unihive.co.uk work I decided to go back to the drawing board. When reflecting on what had worked with UniHive, I decided to rebrand the newspaper element and in January 2013 the first University Paper was created.
For the first 8 months following this, I worked within my bedroom creating a monthly publication while studying full time. The business model was very simple - I sold advertising spaces to local business - I worked with journalist students to help me write content - I designed it using indesign - paid to get it printed and distributed to students as they were walking around campus.
The finances were equally as simple.
I got £5,000 to £10,000 worth of advertising revenue per edition/month
I paid £200 to students to help me write content and design it (usually through food or beer)
I paid £1,500 to print 10,000 copies
I paid £1,000 to companies / friends to distribute it (doing most of it myself)
Leaving me with £2,300 to £7,300 profit per month
"While it was really hard balancing university and starting the business - it was such a learning curve that it was enjoyable. For the first time I felt like I was doing something different."
How the expansion started
After growing the Nottingham newspaper to 30,000 copies and £10,000 revenue per month, I was approached by my friend Ben who had seen what I was doing. He had just graduated from UWE and wanted to run the Bristol version of the paper. I put together a lengthy guide on everything from how to get local advertisers to design / print / content / branding and gave Ben a couple of weeks of training. Following this, Ben went away and made The University Paper Bristol just as successful.
In exchange for me doing this, I got given a percentage of his profits as a royalty deal. As I was going into my final year of study we now had two newspapers - Bristol and Nottingham.
"Between us we ran Nottingham and Bristol successfully for another year until I graduated in June 2014"
Scaling from 2 newspapers to 16
At this point both papers combined were turning over around £150,000 a year which seemed good at the time. However, after running it for almost two years and knowing exactly what to do I started to get bored. The problem was that it was so time consuming to run all areas of the business that I couldn't spend my time doing anything else to grow it further. I have some pretty big goals and these two papers had stopped taking me closer to them.
"I raised money in a very unconventional way and scaled the business to over 16 newspapers within the summer of 2014"
Building the team
From this point on we started to build a team eventually reaching 20 full time staff within our London office. We had 4 departments - Sales, Editorial, Operations and Accounts. We implemented a number of systems that allowed us to produce a newspaper almost every working day within the month. Operations had got us over 1600 distribution points across the UK, printing 250,000 copies per month. By 2016 we had grown revenues to over £750,000. Ben had joined the team in London and ended up running our sales team until leaving the business mid-2017.
Pivot to digital
The print model was full of problems as it was far harder to scale and far more expensive than first predicted. While it was successful, it was hard to scale further and meant we couldn't put the focus we needed to on the digital platform with the limited resource we had.
In October 2017 we took the hard decision to stop printing in all 16 cities and switch everything to 100% digital. This came with huge challenges in terms of the team skill set and a lot of unknowns for me. During 2016 and 2017 we had been treading water and hadn't taken any further investment.
"We successfully pivoted to digital with over 1m monthly pages being read on our localised geo-targeted website that we had developed"
Growing our digital platform
Once we had successfully moved our readers and advertisers over to our digital platform we then got to see the possible scope. We had managed to maintain revenues but reduced costs by more than 40%. We had more readers, could show clear ROI to our advertisers and were gaining traction.
"We then decided to seek further funding to grow our users and commercial teams"
It soon became apparent that the original agreement I had signed would make it very difficult to raise money because the original investment was sitting on the company as debt in the form of a loan (I didn't know much about anything at the age of 21). By mid-2018 I had a number of investment offers but all on terms that I couldn't get over the line.
This left me with two choices - not grow any further and continue to tread water without being able to invest to improve our digital offering (letting it slowly die) or spend my time working on other brands.
At this point the decision was made to focus on other brands and explore other avenues that were more aligned with my longer term goals. This wasn't an easy decision with a great team and clients.
"With digital media if you aren't improving it feels like you are going backwards because everyone else is improving their offering, content and products showing better ROI for advertisers"
Following this I wanted to put this website together to reflect on the five year rollercoaster journey and to help me process the good and the bad. It's not as straightforward as this article makes it sound, with a number of moving parts that affected a lot of decisions along the way and cost the business hundreds of thousands. I go into some of these challenges within this site.
"Over the 5 years we had over 35+ full time staff members, 800 student contributors and 1,200 advertisers - I am truly grateful for the support and all the hard work every single person put into the business. None of it could have been possible without it"
The biggest lesson I learned was to gain attention for your business through digital marketing and a well run sales team to onboard new clients. But make sure you are in the reorder business not the sales business.
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