May 17, 2010
Susan Mernit: Product development basics pay off at Oakland Local
The founder of Oakland Local gives KDMC’s News Entrepreneur Boot Camp a list of stages of developing an online community news site
“Ideas are cool. Execution is everything,” Susan Mernit, a Web entrepreneur who founded Oakland Local last fall, told entrepreneur boot campers Monday. She explained how she applied what she learned as a product developer and how she used it to develop her online community news and information hub, which launched last fall.
“Product development sits at the intersection of business strategy, market opportunity, serving the user with a good experience and making money for it,” Mernit said. Being a “compulsive problem solver” made her a better product developer.
Mernit described six stages of building a low-cost boot-strapped community news site and how they’ve played out at Oakland Local:
1. Planning
When Mernit decided to start Oakland Local with a $8,000 grant from the Knight Foundation‘s New Voices program, she set aside three months for planning and discovery.
“Especially with a lean budget, it’s really important to plan,” she said. “It’s expensive to change your mind.”
This phase included defining the mission: To build community capacity and bring more people, particularly people of color and those working in under-reported areas, like environmental justice, into community discussions.
It included an audit of nonprofit community organizations to see what they were doing online and in social media because part of the mission of Oakland Local would be to build the capacity of community groups. Mernit also began recruiting partner organizations that might benefit from exposure on the site.
She also considered who else was publishing and asked how OL would be different—since there were over 1,500 blogs in Oakland. Many were personal or had a single point of view, supporting the idea that Oakland Local could foster more diverse viewpoints and serve as a platform around issues such as environmental justice, food and identity to drive traffic back to partner sites.
Writing and sharing white papers about strategy and plans is a good way to “fine tune the concept and attract partners,” Mernit said. “Get everything out of your head to where other people can see it.”
2. Building the product and the team
Mernit emphasized the importance of the product requirement document for Web development. “Every person in media should know how to write a product requirement document. If you don’t you need to learn.”
“Most developers don’t automatically give you what you need. They give you what they’ve built before” so it’s important to write up detailed descriptions of what you want the site to do, especially what you want users to be able to do on the site.
Taxonomy, the themes or categories that underpin the structure of the site need to be well thought through. Oakland Local, for example, is organized around topics, not neighborhoods.
Other deliverables for this phase: Wireframes for the site, an editorial plan.
Other advice: Make sure your developer provides documentation of their work for you so other developers can figure out what’s going on if necessary.
Role clarity is critical to building the editorial team. Oakland Local started with a core team of three people (Mernit, Kwan Booth and Amy Gahran) that is expanding. The site relies on a combination of paying freelancers and volunteer contributors.
Of the initial $8,000 grant, Oakland local used $3,000 to develop the site and set aside the rest to pay writers. “It’s important to me to have a core of experienced writers and pay them money.”
The team planned editorial work flow, using a seven-day grid, that set out who was responsible for what. Mernit says they try to adjust publication flow to frequency of visits and other metrics. “If they’re coming three times a week and you’re publishing 5 times a day, how can they keep up?”
3. Social media launch
Oakland Local used Facebook and Twitter to generate interest in the site. When Oakland Local launched, the team solicited connections to tweet and post Facebook updates and links during a window of time on launch day. The effort brought a lot of attention to the new site, including 1,400 visitors on the first day and three stories in trade news media. The site is active on both networks and now has 3,097 Facebook fans and 1,500 Twitter followers, well above what Mernit projected.
4. Building capacity and operations
The site has 35 nonprofit partners, as well as media partners including California Watch and New America Media. It has obtained additional grants, including a Renaissance Center grant to work on delivering news to lean (non 3G) cell phones and a California Endowment grant to train community organizations to use the Web. Mernit said she is always looking for funding. “It’s like a shark, always swimming.”
Mernit is beginning to hand more of the editorial operations over to her team so she can focus on fund-raising and revenue, particularly selling advertising, as well as training.
5. Metrics and revenue focus
In planning Oakland Local, Mernit believed she would need to attract about 10 percent of the city’s population, or about 40,000 unique visitors a month, visiting nearly three times a month and generating 120,000 page views.
She did not focus heavily on revenue. “In the first six months you don’t need to solve that problem. Recognize that’s an issue to build the product first.”
Mernit said she was “prepared for long slog where it would take a lot of time for people to find us.”
However, the site quickly took off. Seven months in, it has 109,000 page views a month, 32,000 unique visitors and average time on site of two minutes. Half of the traffic is returning traffic.
6. Looking ahead
Mernit says the goals for the coming year are to find a stable operating budget that will support two FTEs, develop mobile content and build partnerships with more groups in order to better connect with underserved communities, and develop a streamlined advertising sales process. She also wants to extend the site’s training/capacity building and keep providing quality storytelling and reporting. “We don’t believe you have to be a $3 million operation to do quality storytelling.”
She believes Oakland Local is developing a new model for community media, one that is both grass roots and sophisticated about technology and the Internet. She would like to be able to pay better, increase class diversity (the editorial team is very racially diverse) and publish bilingually.
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Tags: knight foundation, news entrepreneur boot camp, oakland local
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