Courier

Market

Target market

Courier is read by an interesting mix of urban professionals right across London and around the world. To be clear, Courier is not aimed purely at people in startups, but at a broader group of people fascinated by startup culture, stretching from the creative industries to technology, food, fashion and finance.

We've conducted some informal reader research to give us a sense of who reads Courier. Highlights:

• Our readers are almost evenly split male and female (55%:45% respectively) which is extremely rare for a media brand.

• Around 45% of our readers have started or are starting their own company. Of the remaining 55%, many of our readers intended to start up one day. However a large segment of our audience just enjoy reading the stories of modern business without any clear intention to one day start something themselves.

• The average income of our readers is £42,000pa.

Characteristics of target market

Business content has jumped from being restricted to specialist industry information to an area of broad appeal. The area of business (in a modern and accessible form) is attracting young, old, both genders as the stories of founders, changing business models and disruption in a variety of sectors driving profound curiosity.

The aspiration to start very modest businesses or epic all conquering ones has now fundamentally entered the mainstream consciousness.

Over 580,000 startups were set up in the UK last year and, in a study in July 2015, Bentley university found 66% of American millennials want to start a business. There are similar signs in the UK and in Europe’s major cities. Anecdotal stories of management consultants, bankers and corporates quitting to start their own, often small, startups are increasingly common.

Suffice to say it’s a phenomenon that’s not going away, and we believe it's one that’s missing a media brand at its heart.

Marketing strategy

Despite our initial success, we’ve only just scratched the surface in London, let alone around the world.

Our marketing strategy for 2016 is to scale up the distribution of the magazine and grow our presence in existing and new areas.

Courier has a twist on the free print model, where we use a quality print stock, but maintain a very select distribution model as opposed to the carpet bombing of freesheets at train stations. We have built our own network of 300 stockists (and growing) in London, chosen based on where we feel our audience live and work.

It’s allowed us to have neighbourhood-level insight on stockists and observe how and where best to optimise our print runs and distribution.
Each issue is read by approximately 45,000* readers based on a per issue print run of 25,000 copies.

Our distribution network has let us rapidly reach a critical mass of readers (according to our calculation we're already read by almost twice as many readers as Monocle in the UK despite only distributing in London). We believe our potential audience in London alone for the print title is in excess of 50,000 copies which would make us bigger than many commercial publications on sale in newsagents and supermarkets.

After promising trials selling Courier in Berlin, Stockholm, Amsterdam and LA, we will establish a stronger foothold in these and other cities next year, as well as execute the first phase of our digital and events plan.

*Print titles use a multiple of between two and five to infer readership from their print circulation. We don’t have specific data of our own to determine our true readership but we take an extremely conservative estimate that every issue is read by average of at least two readers.

Competition strategy

Business Media is increasingly a highly valued space, with a recent spate of monster investments in titles like FT, Economist, Monocle and Business Insider. We believe these underline the huge importance of trust and affinity with a business brand in today’s noisy media environment. An exciting prospect for us is that as far as we know none of those titles chime with what is arguably the most exciting audience, the most valuable and dynamic space currently available: modern business and startup culture.

Several media businesses have raised large valuations in recent years, proving the value in large and engaged audiences with clear identities.

We believe we are perfectly positioned to build such an audience, one that will be hard to replicate for established groups and other niche players.

Big media groups are burdened by their core editorial focus and fail to talk to the audience in as relevant a way. New challengers starting from scratch will have too much road to cover before they can catch up given the strides we’ve made with our editorial leadership and distribution network.

We’ve found a recipe that has had fantastic traction for an independent startup. Our plan to grow is to stay utterly focussed on delivering authority, authenticity and the Courier attitude. Expanding distribution, new digital products and other launches we’re currently keeping under wraps will grow our leadership in this area.