Whitepaper.mx
Business news from México
On our new Stack
We have been running a parallel operation with our new stack (WP+Memberful+Mailerlite). And before turning the switch off substack, we want to test it for a month or two.
So far, we have 6K-ish subscribers in Memberful and 12K-ish on substack. While there are a few Zapier integrations we are missing from Memberful, they have covered most of our needs. They have been quite helpful offering guidance with API tutorials, but we have been quite busy to code them in house.
Other than the current WordPress theme, I'm quite happy with the new stack.
Twitter Ads
We were running Instagram Ads to acquire signups to our free trial. Since we have a very well-defined niche (business people in México who pay for premium news), we depleted our addressable audience on Instagram quite fast.
Two weeks ago, our newest team member started testing Twitter Ads. We had high hopes, given the nature of Twitter where compared to Instagram, news are more commonly shared and engaged with.
It didn't disappoint. Our current CAC to free trial has plummeted to US$0.93 at it's the most expensive point and US$0.51 at it's lowest. We reached the lowest point by launching 20-ish different ads and a/b testing the hell out of our variables.
Preparing to Scale
We will now prepare to scale by documenting our processes, defining principles and values and carefully growing our team. Shout out to Sahil Lavignia ( @sahil ) for helping me get back to basics with his new book. (looking forward to his course)
We managed to export and import the content to both webflow and wordpress.
Given the nature of our operation (media) webflow didn't quite adapted to our daily publishing and editing needs. We decided to stick with Wordpress for now.
Hopefully by summer we will have the time to build a custom CRM that doesn't come with the complications presented by managing wordpress.
we still need to work on the fronted, but you can take a look at
https://beta.whitepaper.mx/
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“webflow didn't quite adapted to our daily publishing and editing needs”
What issues did you have with Weblow so you decided to switch to WordPress? My main tool is Webflow and I work with it extensively — I know that it is not a perfect solution for every other, and that makes sense because there is no ideal tool but I’m genuinely curious what kind of obstacles for you have with Webflow. Maybe I can give you a few tips how you could’ve overcome them.
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Hi Georgy, thanks for your help offer.
Tl;dr:
We have a daily news operation.
The writing experience wasn’t very usable for the content team and we had challenges integrating it to third party paywall solutions.—
The main challenge is the text editor. It’s extremely limited, and while just like substack it helps not to fuck up the content design, it’s not designed to have a good writing experience.We;ve tried several solutions but the content team simply didn’t feel comfortable with them.
That being said, they don’t like the wordpress experience either. (And i personally find the platform overwhelming )
Ghost on the other side is a good middle point, but lacks of the metrics we are expecting. (Same as substack).
What I did love about webflow is it’s simply visual editor and no-hosting approach. Also, conecting it to different API is extremly appreciated (unlike substack)
Finally our paywall/membership providers didn’t have an out of the box solution to manage subscriptions and protect content.
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Why did you switch away from substack?
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TLDR: It’s not designed for media brands, rather for single journalists.
There for it lacks most features a media company needs. Particularly the lack of an API is extremely painful and expensive (given all the tools and processes we need to run manually)
Also, it gets pretty expensive once you start to scale.
I personally hate the editor, as it renders terrible code and copying content from substack to anywhere is time consuming given all the cleanup it requieres. (For example, to our iOS app)
Substack has been a great tool to launch and validate our publication.
But it’s dead weight now that we need to scale.
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What are the complications presented by managing Wordpress in your case?
What tech stack will you build the custom CRM in?
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My most common headaches are server management and security and front-end flexibility. You need so many plugins to get the proper experience that it becomes clunky and overwhelming.
Even getting the theme looking right can be time consuming (we end up using elementor and custom theme functions).
Yet, it has a good balance between writing experience and API + Plugins.
What we haven’t been able to solve is a seamless minimal writing experience (just like medium) inside Wordpress. I remember there where some plugins but seem to stopped working with new versions of wordpress.
(If you know of one I would greatly appreciate the recommendations)
As for tech stack, Im not sure.
But I do know we would go headless in order to have a single source of data and push it to website+email+mobile apps.Right now we have a spaghetti of zapier + third party services + humans on slack managing the entire workflows. Not ideal.
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Well, the time has come to look for better alternatives.
Substack is somewhat costly and still lacks tons of features that we need to increase our growth.
We are currently looking for a new tech stack to help us grow faster and most importantly provide better content experience to our paying subscribers.
The project is more than a year old, but I haven't been active in the community.
As we prepare for growth, I thought it would be nice to update the community and keep track of our milestones.
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Could you share some more on what tactics you used to build your mailing list?
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Most importante above all:
High quality relevant content that you can't find elsewhere.Paid acquisition helps too
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to make this content did you just use normal journalism tactics to your niche? Or was there something new being used to create content?
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We used the opposite if what is normal in the industry.
The most important things are:
• the founder and editor belongs to the same target audience as our subscribers
• and understands what is important wand
• take away the fluff, straight to the point, and no journalese.We also have our own version of 'smart brevity' which after 2 years has been improved a lot.
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