Sifted launches membership programme for startup development

Till now, it has been funded through advertising in its newsletters as one of its central editorial offerings

Tech and startup news website Sifted has launched a membership programme as part of its startup development.

The publication was launched in 2019, backed by The Financial Times, which is Sifted’s largest shareholder. It was founded by John Thornhill who worked with the FT earlier.

Till now, it has been funded through advertising in its newsletters as one of its central editorial offerings. It also produces sponsored content and webinars as the coronavirus pandemic prohibits real world events.

The membership indicates a more stable way for revenue and an opportunity to learn more about the preferences, behaviours and habits of its readers. For now, roughly a quarter of Sifted’s content will become member-exclusive and those who sign-up will receive more investor surveys, in-depth market analyses and online events.

However, what is free, and how much is free, is subject to ongoing experimentation. Sifted itself is a startup which reports on entrepreneurship in Europe.

One of the things startups are really good at is focusing on the end-user and working backwards, says Michael Stothard, editor-in-chief at Sifted. It’s something you have the luxury of doing because you can iterate very quickly, you can find out what is working, what people really want and change the direction of the company in terms of its reporting quite fast.

The product cycle can sometimes be a matter of weeks. One of the advantages of being a startup is that you are nimble, that’s what non-media startups always say and we have taken that to heart and try to be extremely reactive and engaging with our users, Stothard said.

For example, Sifted reported on funding stories, and how much capital companies had raised.

These are the lessons you get quite quickly. When there’s no institutional memory, you can change these things overnight, Stothard continues.

He said that the other thing startups are obsessed by, and we’re obsessed by, is community-building and looking after your fans. When you look at startups like Monzo, in the early days they managed to create this buzz and excitement and they had these ‘Monzonauts’, real fans of this bank, which is amazing because banks are normally quite boring.

We’ve tried to do that by creating two-way conversations, really listening to them. We get a lot of emails, DMs and engagement and take that seriously because those early users are our champions, ambassadors and we care about them. That’s a startup way of thinking, Stothard said.

Sifted has developed 65,000 subscribers on its main newsletter, 550,000 unique visitors across its website and 2 million impressions a month on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in its two years of operations.