Small Teaser
Name:
Sector:
Legal form:
Country:
Website:
USP’s:
Interviewees:
Written by:
Founders:
Small Teaser
e - publishing
Public limited company
Belgium
innovative earning model, make publishing a community-event.
Ruth Janssens, co-founder of Small Teaser.
Yoshi Janssens
Ruth Janssens and Stijn Janssens
Summary
Small Teaser empowers communities by giving them the tools to publish a stunning digital magazine or news website. Everyone can easily contribute articles, photos and videos and best of all, thanks to our royalty-based advertising model, contributors are rewarded with a share of the advert revenue. With Small Teaser, people publish together and they earn together! (Smallteaser, 2016)
Background
The name ‘Small Teaser’ comes from the little teasers they place on the magazine. This is done to make the readers curious and are teasing them to continue to the full article. They use these small teasers on a magazine, the newsletter or social media.
Small Teaser is an online community publishing platform where anyone can start an online magazine. Whether you have a community (school, sports club, friends, etc.), want to be part of a community or want to start a community, your online community magazine starts here. Small teaser offers advertisement space to advertisers on these digital magazines
For example: You are very interested in skydiving and started a magazine. Other people who are interested in skydiving can read your online magazine. They also can send you some content for your magazine, which makes them a contributor. When his/her content gets published, he/she earns from the ads on the magazine. The more view the content gets; the more earnings the contributor will get. This is Small Teaser’s mission: ‘publish together, earn together’.
Ruth started Small Teaser in July 2015, because she got a request of an English publisher who wanted to publish her magazine online. This was the trigger to start building an online publishing platform for communities. Important for her was the possibility to publish content with colleagues and contributors, which would get a part of the revenues she got from the ads on the magazine.
The startup of Small teaser was financed through 1 years of bootstrapping and the savings of Ruth and Stijn. Then they got selected for the incubation program of Iminds. In this program startups can get a convertible loan. Recently LRM (Limburgse Reconversiemaatschappij) announced that they are going to invest in Small teaser.
Mission
Publish together, earn together. (Smallteaser, Home, 2016)
Business Model
Small teaser started with an older business model and renewed it. Digital publishing and earning from it already existed. The innovative part of the business model is the possibility to publish together, joined with the possibility to earn together. No other company in the world provides this service.
The revenue model of Small Teaser exists out of two sides while the publishing platform stays free. On the one side you have the advertisement revenues. Small teaser gets a part of the ad revenues a magazine generates. Small teaser also pushes advertisers onto your magazine based on keywords. In this part they get a higher commission because Small teaser itself does the sales. On the other side you have paid features like a tailor-made layout of your magazine.
Before starting this new online publishing platform, they got some help from Innovatiecentrum, Iminds, Agentschap Ondernemen, Corda incubator and Flanders Investment & Trade.
Small Teaser is still busy with the go to-market. They worked with a timeline. First they had a beta version, 2 weeks ago they opened their software for the public and now they are in the phase of promoting Small teaser in the market.
Growth
At the moment Small teaser is recruiting publishers through marketing campaigns: mainly digital inboundmarketing. The growth of Small Teaser is higher than expected. In 1 year they host 100 digital magazines, this growth is fully organic. Because they are growing faster and bigger they will hire 3 people.
Customers
The customer segments are very diverse. Every community can be a customer. A school, a sports club, people with the same passion, etc. can be a community. The legal minimum age to publish is 13 years old.
Competitors
The main competition comes from content-management systems and blogs. Theirs is no direct competition but, quite a lot of indirect competition from WordPress with google add sense. This also offers the possibility to make a community but where Small Teaser distinguishes itself from WordPress is the convenience of dividing the ad revenues. With Google Add sense it is a lot harder to divide the ad revenues amongst contributors. Blogger and other external advertisement servers are other indirect competitors.
Conclusion
Small Teaser an a-typical businessmodel. At the moment they have more costs than revenue, to counter this they are going for a first investment round. Other treats are possible upcoming competitors and finding investors.
The Netherlands and England are more developed in the field of publishing, which is an opportunity for them when going abroad. People are also more interested in the news of other people and want to hear or read the news from other people rather than one journalist going after every story. Nowadays, everyone wants to play journalist, which works in Small Teaser’s favor.
Ruth learned that you have to follow your own vision and road. Every community wants a voice and Small teaser is offering this with an online magazine or newswebsite for each possible community.
Everything evolves very fast and you have to take action immediately. Another thing Ruth learned is that Flanders is the ideal testing environment where you get a lot of useful response. To succeed you have to talk to a lot of people, but keep in mind the ones you want to work with. Of course you have to stay focus too.
Obstacles for Small Teaser at the start up were recruiting personnel. Linked to this finding good people is a real challenge.
Now Small Teaser is trying to launch as much publishers as possible and they want to start with global advertising as soon as possible. The eventual goal is to build a nice company which can be sold within 10 years from now.
Posted on 23/04/2016