Publish2: pivoting, thinking big, and identifying the enemy
Publish2 announced a major evolution in their business model yesterday at the Techcrunch Disrupt conference. When Publish2 originally launched a few years back, the essence of the business model was that they would be a "Digg" that contained content curated by journalists, leading to higher quality curated news. Like most startups, Publish2 went through several evolutions in the last few years. Raising $2.75 million in 2008 gave them a significant amount of runway to try to find their "product market fit."
This latest Pivot is a significant one: Publish2 wants to be "The New Associated Press of the 21st Century" as CEO Scott Karp writes in his company blog. he describes the business model as:
"With Publish2 News Exchange, newspapers can replace the AP’s obsolete cooperative with direct content sharing and replace the AP’s commodity content with both free, high-quality content from the Web and content from any paid source.
With Publish2 News Exchange, we’ve created what the AP should have become, but can’t because of a classic Innovator’s Dilemma. The New AP is an open, efficient, scalable news distribution platform. We’re enabling newspapers to benefit for the first time from the disruptive power of the Web, and from the efficiency of content production on the Web."
I like this move for a couple of reasons. Publish2 is thinking really big. Of course thinking big comes with skeptics who will ridicule the ambitions of the startup, but that is the nature of startups that ultimately disrupt the big incumbents. They are never viewed as a threat when they are starting out.
From the perspective of the entrepreneur - you put so much into the endeavor emotionally and often financially, you may as well fight the good fight and go after something big. It's hard to justify the sacrifices of entrepreneurship if you are thinking incrementally.
The second reason I like this move is because they are courageously pivoting into a new business model but based soundly (as far as I can tell) on the learnings and proximity they have had with publishers and journalists in the last few years. It doesn't hurt that their CEO is a domain expert and that they have a strong advisory board. I believe in lean startup thinking but I don't believe that pivoting blindly will usually lead to success. Domain expertise is still important to really understand the nuances of what hole you are trying to fill. Customer Development requires that you understand the motivations and pain points behind the words that the customers use. If you simply act on the explicit feedback of customers without understanding the underlying issues you can iterate yourself into oblivion and never get anywhere.
The third reason I like this move is that Publish2 is clearly identifying the enemy, and the enemy is big. This is a great way to motivate your team and clarify your objective.
2 comments
May 25, 2010
Greg Linch said...
Thanks, Darryl! We appreciate the feedback.
May 25, 2010
Darryl Siry said...
@Greg - best of luck!
