From 42 subscribers to 23,000: Lessons from Communiqué’s first two years
I left journalism in July 2019, and for over a year, I ruminated on the idea of a publication analysing the media business in Nigeria. On May 9, 2020, in the middle of lockdown, and with all the time in the world and infinite mental bandwidth, I launched Communiqué.
I’d considered publishing it as a column on a tech blog or in a legacy newspaper. My friend Fu’ad Lawal convinced me to try Substack. It’ll give you more editorial control and creative freedom, he said. And he was right.
Communiqué edition zero, as I titled the maiden essay, went out to a massive list of 42 subscribers and was read a whopping 310 times. At least a third of those views came from my close friends, family members, and people within my professional circle. To be honest, I didn’t have any big dreams. I just wanted to run an experiment. I wasn’t sure how long it would last.
I wasn’t sure if the market needed or wanted that kind of analysis I was keen to provide. I also wasn’t sure if anyone cared about the stories I wanted to tell. I wasn’t sure, but I wanted to find out.
Two years have passed, and I’m a lot more certain now. I know exactly what Communiqué is and what it can be. I know exactly who it is for and what it means to them.
I’ve learned a lot from publishing this newsletter in the last two years. The team has grown (we’re now three). The newsletter is now a company, and it’s generating thousands of dollars in revenue. That initial list of 42 subscribers has mushroomed to over 23,000, including readers from Google, Twitter, TikTok, Goldman Sachs, MTN, Multichoice, etc. Our community consists of a healthy mix of entrepreneurs, media and tech professionals, and academics.
So, what have I learned from publishing Communiqué in the last two years? What has worked for us as we try to build a billion-dollar media empire from scratch? What hasn’t worked? And what does the future hold?
What has worked
1. Publishing infrequently
Many of the people I’ve sought for advice about growing Communiqué tell me to increase the frequency of publishing. Make it weekly, they say. I kept getting this advice, so I decided to try it out.
I attempted weekly publishing in October 2021, and I can say that I’m not trying it again for a very long time. It turned out, as I’d suspected, that increasing the frequency of publishing would affect the quality of the newsletter: more essays = watered-down insights and less subscriber engagement. In November, we cut it down to twice a month. In December and January the following year, we published only one essay per month. Still, the performance of the November, December, and January essays exceeded that of the October essays.
I learned from that experience that conventional knowledge and practice aren’t always right for you. For me, it’s more important to understand what people expect from the newsletter and how they prefer to experience it (through our product survey) than to take advice from people who know better than me but won’t always be correct.
2. Balancing storytelling and insight
In a parallel universe, I can pack all my ideas and insights about a topic into an essay and dump it on the Internet with no regard for style and presentation. But in this universe, that’s a recipe for disaster. It’s the easiest way to make your work unremarkable and forgettable.
You can have all the knowledge in the world. But if you don’t know how to present it, if you don’t know how to sell your ideas, you’ll be handicapping yourself.
With Communiqué, I’ve learned to balance the quality of insights shared with the quality of storytelling and style. Thankfully, the audience sees it too. For example, our product survey revealed that while roughly 73% of readers enjoy the quality of insights above all else, over 57% of them enjoy the writing style, and 55% enjoy the choice of topics.
3. Expanding coverage
When I first launched Communiqué, I focused on analysing the business of media in Nigeria. However, as I explained in this episode of the Media Voices podcast, the longer I looked at the Nigerian market and the more often I interacted with people in other markets, the more obvious it was that I needed to make the coverage more continental.
Six months into publishing the newsletter, I also realised that there was a gap for analysis at the intersection of media, tech, and their impact on business and culture, both locally and globally. This pivot led to top-performing essays like Paystack’s media threat and How to think about Africa’s creator economy, both of which were inspired by the performance of my essay analysing Netflix’s strategy for the Nigerian market.
What hasn’t worked?
1. Publishing weekly flopped
As I already mentioned, a brief trial at publishing one essay per week didn’t turn out well. For one, the quality of insight and storytelling wasn’t quite as good, negatively impacting our reader engagement, which dropped significantly.
2. Our social strategy still sucks
Our social media strategy has mainly been arbitrary and unstrategic. This is evident in the poor quality of our social media-related growth figures (barring LinkedIn, on which I already have a significant following of nearly 80k).
What will Communiqué look like going forward?
Without giving too much away, I’d like to share a brief roadmap of what Communiqué will look like in the near future with you.
1. Format expansion
Communiqué as a newsletter is just one product; there will be more. Expect the content to come alive in many other related and unrelated formats soon.
2. Deliberately designed live events.
In April, we hosted our first-ever live event in partnership with the Creative Economy Practice at CcHub. Over one hundred people showed up.
You can expect more events like this in the future, designed with specific topics and audience interests in mind.
3. Spin-offs.
Soon, we’ll be expanding into other familiar industries. For example, we’re launching a new publication for marketing communications analysis soon. In time, we will also have a special publication dedicated to the creator economy in Africa. Think of a future where there’s a Communiqué for every relevant industry, and you’ll see just how big this publication can be.
I’m thankful for the two years this newsletter has been alive, and I’m excited for what it will become. I’m grateful for the team’s support — Susan Akinade and Martha Apeh have been instrumental to Communiqué’s growth. I thank every member of my brain trust — every person who’s stayed up late at night and spent hours and days helping me strengthen and refine the points in the essays. I thank the readers and subscribers who are the life and soul of the newsletter. It only gets better from here.
If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do so here. It’s worth it, I promise.
