The Story of Time Twister - 2020 Update
By: Frontier Research
Tags: Newsletter, Efficiency, Time Saving, Time Efficiency, News

Before Time Twister..

Our team members would spend an inordinate amount of time searching for up-to-date news on the latest Economic, Financial and Political developments, which is a key aspect of any research based firm. Every team member at Frontier used to go through several news sources individually for very similar information, which, in retrospect, was not the best use of our time as a team.

The early days..

We set up a system for some team members to browse through a few critical news sources which were then categorized and prioritized. The news was compiled into a newsletter which was then shared via email with the rest of the team. Interestingly, it was initially called “Amal’s Daily News Update”.

Some fine tuning required..

The email newsletter was a hit, and we started introducing it to our close friends and clients. We received great feedback, which helped develop the product to what you see today. Some of the critical changes that were done include:

Expanding our sources — We found out that many of our clients are starved for information and like to see different perspectives on news stories. Hence our Time Twister newsletter provides an exhaustive coverage of the Economic and Financial market related news which includes almost all the English language Sri Lankan news sources. We then expanded it to include a few key Sinhala and Tamil newspapers to capture stories which may have been overlooked by the English language news media. Early Delivery time — All our time twister news products are ready and waiting in your inbox by 8 a.m. which is one of its most appealing factors for its readers. We even have an “Early Daily Time Twister” which is sent out before 6 a.m. for those clients who prefer to get a head start on the news Customization — We learnt that different readers have different information needs. Some like it in one long email, others prefer it split into two emails. More recently, we have introduced a Special edition which includes a table of contents at the top of each update.

Time Twister Now..

While our news products may have changed and become more diverse since the days of “Amal’s Daily News Update”, our mission to filter out the noise and give you the most important news in a timely and convenient manner is unchanged.

We call it Time Twister because of its core purpose of saving time. But the name is also reflective of how we “twist” work hours, well away from the norm, to bring you Time Twister as early as possible each day.

Time Twister in numbers..

8 Time Twister team members ensure that you get the news you require, delivered to you 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

1 of them stays up late to capture comments on equity forum discussions, 2 others are up as early as 4.00 a.m. to get the basic version of Time Twister ready, and 1 other is ready at the considerably less peculiar time of 6.00 a.m. for a final source check and update. To ensure that we can overcome any hiccups, we even have a couple of team members acting as the ‘back-up’!

Looking to the future..

The good news is that we’ll keep improving, taking feedback from team members, clients and friends.

Some of the exciting new developments we are looking into introducing a summary version of Time Twister, WhatsApp alerts, covering news stories in Twitter, magazines & videos and even an AI-enhanced version!

Feel free to send us an email or give us a call if you have any suggestions.