10 Amazing Benefits of Being a Tow-Knight Entrepreneurial Journalism Fellow (Part I)
By: Michael Rain
Tags: Digital Media Strategy, Accelerator, Entrepreneurship, Business Model Innovation, Journalism

Where I Was Before Tow-Knight

For context, here is where I was with my venture. When I applied to Tow-Knight in 2016 ZNews Africa was less than two years old. We are a media+ tech company that began with an Android Mobile app that was built in-house. It is best described as “Flipboard for Pan African news.” We later launched an email newsletter and website publishing original content.

We experienced some great early traction. At the time we had about 30,000 users (now approaching 100,000) on our mobile app and our newsletter was growing steadily. We developed great media sponsorships with premier Pan-African-focused conferences at Harvard and Wharton, and were selected as members of Facebook’s Fb Start and Google’s Launchpad and recruited for Microsoft’s BizSpark accelerator programs for tech startups. We built an advisory board of experienced professionals and had been pitching and talking to a range of investors.

Even with this progress we weren’t getting very far. We had not monetized any of our products and were bootstrapping. We also did not raise money.

We felt we had so many components to the myths and narratives told about the kind of folks who raise capital and succeed with startups. Our team met in college. We graduated from an Ivy League school. Our founder is a techie. We had an MVP with traction. The team was professionally experienced in our roles and we have worked for and with some of the best companies in the world.

Despite all of this we didn’t raise money. We were also getting some “interesting” feedback when we spoke with VC’s and others in the “Silicon West” startup space (more about that in a future post).

I learned about the program when I attended a Tow-Knight panel event in the Spring of 2016. I was invited by one of the speakers who was an alum of the program. I mingled with the attendees and former fellows and discussed my startup. Several of them suggested I consider applying. I honestly couldn’t see what I would gain from it that we hadn’t already been told in countless feedback meetings, emails and advisory board meetings.

I decided to ask. I approached Jeremy Caplan director of education for Tow-Knight. I don’t remember what he said but he listened to me. He tried to understand our product and mission and offered useful advice. I liked him immediately and thought that if I could just get that kind of consistent and thoughtful feedback the program would be worth it.

The experience turned out to be so much more. It was four months of fast-paced and intense learning, experimentation, challenges and growth. My goal was to grow ZNews. The result was a major growth in my skillset, experience and knowledge. I learned what we were doing right, wrong and poorly. I learned about things we weren’t doing at all.

I came out of Tow-Knight with the knowledge and confidence to launch anything into the world and to innovate within any organization. Note that most fellows in my cohort did not enter with a venture, but an idea. You don’t have to know exactly what you want to build or solve to apply. Part of the beauty of the group was the mixed stages and observing how many pivots, adjustments and changes you all make as you learn and try new things.

This is my TK17 cohort. I’m hiding somewhere in the back, hehe. (Video by Jeremy Caplan)

Here are some of the benefits, in no particular order:

1. Specific insights and guidance for emerging media companies and ideas

Much of the information that exists about startups are focused on non-media companies looking to raise millions in venture capital. Many of the suggestions and solutions may not work for you if your goals are to connect, inform and serve a niche community of people.

Your vision may not be to build a venture that serves billions of people. You might just want to start something that delivers value for a few thousand or hundreds of thousands of people in a specific place, or for a specific interest. You may also want to innovate within an organization or transform the process of a legacy publication.

These aims don’t require you to become a sexy target for venture capital. It requires you to build something of value that is sustainable. Throughout the program, all of the knowledge and information will be tailored for a media enterprise. And your vision for what a media venture can be will expand.

2. The road to success starts with solving a problem for a community because “Mass is Dead”

The easiest way to know whether you’re working on a vanity project versus something people will use is to determine whether your idea solves a problem. This is now common thinking in most entrepreneurial circles. However, for media ventures the key is really focusing on a community that shares an affinity or pain point and serving them.

Part of the program is a New Business Models course taught by Jeff Jarvis, director of the Tow-Knight Center. Over the duration of the course he will explain to you why mass media is dead.

The days where millions of people are limited to a handful of national channels and publications are long gone in North America and Europe. Building for the audience of everybody is a pathway to failure. Along with this is the outdated thinking regarding media startups focused on scaling big and fast and trying to win with ad dollars based only on clicks and views.

Today the goal is to cultivate and serve a community and win their trust. You will generate revenue by monetizing access to your community, charging a fee per use tied to solving the problem and / or a subscription or membership model of some kind.

In the program you will identify your community and work on a product or service to address their problem and then monetize it.

For ZNews our communities comprised of people of the Pan African diaspora looking for news and stories that were about more than war, poverty, disease and despair. The major pain we are addressing is making it easier to find and enjoy these other stories. You can become a member and support us here.

Your community to serve could be unified by other factors. In my cohort, fellows worked on projects to serve politically active techies, VR journalists and content developers, Black travelers, aviation industry professionals, food makers, LGBT people in China, lovers of street music performers, and more.

3. How to better understand your audience through design thinking and consumer research methods

Early in the program we had a design thinking session led by the experience studio Median. The goal was to design a wallet for someone else. We were paired up and then instructed to interview our partners, listen to their needs and wants and try to figure out their pain.

We then used an array of colorful construction paper, Post It’s, markers, tape and more to build a prototype of our wallet solution and introduce it to our partners for feedback. We took the feedback and made adjustments to the prototype. We did this again and again until we came up with a basic concept they liked.