Dear investor (and any other interested party),
Last month, I wrote about our pivot to B2B. We eliminated our monthly subscription option, increased prices, and fully focused on selling annual RO subscriptions to two ICPs: VCs and universities.
We spent the month of April digesting that pivot. Aakash and I have started activating new B2B-compatible growth levers, which should bear (revenue) fruits in the coming months.
We’ve made some great progress on the university front. We officially launched our free trial with the Indian School of Business’ library, with very high initial uptake (70+ sign ups). I was in Boston a few weeks ago, meeting folks with MIT and existing RO readers at Harvard. I have a bunch of calls booked with other universities. Our PMF with universities is strong, we just have to break through these sales cycles.
I’m confident this B2B positioning is the right choice. It makes more sense to sell RO subscriptions to VCs & universities (who have budgets dedicated to publications like ours) than to individual subscribers paying with their personal money. I don’t want the RO to compete with someone’s rent, Netflix subscription, and groceries. But we can compete with the other publication subscriptions VCs & universities have. That competition is equitable.
In today’s RO Letters, I’ll explain our new growth strategy and give an update on the RO’s finances (would love your thoughts on that part).
But first, a word on our editorial production.
Professionalizing our writing
As a reminder, the RO publishes two types of articles:
Exclusive, written interviews with startup founders, VCs, LPs, and policymakers around the globe (written by Aakash and I)
RO Long Reads: long-form, deeply reported articles on topics pertinent to our niche (written by freelance writers and edited by me)
We recently published our second RO Long Read series, an 8,000+ word deep-dive on the state of Iraqi fintech. We worked with a writer in Iraq (Rabel Kaka), who spent a few months speaking to Iraqi VCs, Iraqi startups, and other relevant actors. The result is a qualitative, deeply-reported article on a sector that receives scant editorial coverage yet is pertinent to our niche. Exactly what these RO Long Reads aim to be.
The article is written from with a “realistically optimist” tone. As we cement it, this tone will give the RO its “personality”. Whether you like it or not, The Economist’s writing has a personality. I want the RO’s writing to have a personality too and Rabel’s article is a good example of what the early premises of that “RO personality” is.
Rabel and I went through a vigorous albeit enjoyable editing process. This was in parallel to me editing our first RO Long Read series (on the links between Japanese capital & African startups) with RO Correspondent James Mahon and our upcoming RO Long Read series on Europe’s VC scene with RO Correspondent Hélène Ghosn.
I’m honing my editing pen, setting up fact-checking procedures, and crafting an RO editorial process that can be replicated and transmitted to future RO editors and writers. The RO is seeking to build “The Financial Times for the global startup scene”. As such, we must build FT-grade editorial processes from scratch. This takes time but is crucial to our commercial success (just as it is to the FT’s).
This type of progress isn’t immediately reflected in revenue, yet it’s probably the most strategic progress we’re making as a company right now.
All three current RO Long Read writers said they wanted to write another article with us, even though I was anything but lenient while editing. The “respectfully demanding” nature of the RO’s burgeoning editorial culture is a great filter. If you want a smooth and feel-good editing process, you’re not for us. If you want to agonize over every sentence, expose your arguments to scrutiny, and painstakingly fact-check everything you write, welcome aboard. I’m enthralled by The New Yorker’s editing process (explained in this Netflix documentary) and wish to emulate those standards within the RO.
Another ugly truth I’m discovering: strong publications set high standards but high standards may come off as arrogant, elitist, pedantic. But we simply can’t cater to everyone, reader and writer wise. I recently found an old interview from my grandma, a Grammy-winning record producer , who said “we make records for serious listeners, not for people listening to records as background music”.
Same for the RO: we write for readers setting aside 30 minutes - 1 hour in a quiet room to read our articles, not people skimming to find “signal” and want stuff condensed into “bullet-points”. We write for serious readers. It’s in the family.
To illustrate, below is a quote from Selim Tira, associate director at Shorooq Partners and recent RO paid subscriber:
“Working in alternative investments with a focus on emerging markets, I regularly rely on leading financial news outlets. That said, I often find that coverage doesn’t always go far enough in unpacking region-specific dynamics, particularly across finance, technology, and private markets.
The Realistic Optimist addresses this gap exceptionally well. Its content is rigorously researched, nuanced, and grounded in regional realities, offering perspectives that are highly relevant for investors. Personally, I particularly value the long-form pieces, which I tend to read later in the week or over the weekend when I have more time to engage thoughtfully. They not only allow me to benchmark my own professional practice against that of other private market practitioners, but also deepen my understanding of specific industries and geographies.”
The RO’s B2B-compatible growth strategy
We’re now priced at €300/year per seat, essentially eliminating ’self-serve’ subscriptions. We expect that we will need at least 1 sales call to sell a new RO subscription. RO growth initiatives are therefore aimed at booking us calls with VC & university prospects.
RO Ambassadors program
We have onboarded six RO Ambassadors (Venezuela, Peru, Pakistan, Kenya, Iraq, Saudi Arabia). RO Ambassadors are usually young VCs, who want to grow their credibility and network in their local ecosystem by harnessing the RO brand. RO Ambassadors organize local RO Events, introduce us to local VCs & universities, and take a 20% commission on the new RO subscriptions they originate. In return, they gain access to the entire RO network, a complimentary RO subscription, and support/financing from the RO team in organizing RO Events.
Phylis, our East Africa Ambassador, is organizing our first RO Event in Nairobi on May 21st. This event is based on our RO Long Read: the African-Japan bridge series. Phylis has put together a panel of relevant speakers on the topic and is convening a curated audience of 30-40 people. We’re thinking of printing the RO Long Read, so that participants can take it home with them. On top of hosting a valuable event, this will expose new qualified leads to the RO brand and RO writing, nudging them to book a sales call later on.
This RO Ambassador program has been fun to build. The learning curve has been steep, especially on maintaining the integrity of the RO’s tone as it’s relayed by people that aren’t part of the RO core team. Aakash is in total charge of this program and has been doing great work.
I firmly believe the RO Ambassadors’ network will become our distribution secret sauce. There’s a ton to do in terms of tooling, coordinating, and communicating with this network. I’ve become very interested in the concepts of “franchises” and how they figure this stuff out.
The RO Ambassador program is also a CAPEX-light way to grow, as RO Ambassadors are paid in career advancement and commission rather than a monthly fixed cost.
RO Webinars
I recently spoke to the CEO of ImpactAlpha, another B2B publication focused on the impact investing sector. He told me that as you scale a B2B media brand, you become the center of an “informational vortex”. People in the sector come to you with exclusive information and are willing to share exclusive information with you when asked. This exclusive information provides the fodder for your writing of course, but can also be leveraged for other marketing matters.
One of those is webinars. The aim is similar to RO Events: expose qualified prospects to the RO brand, nudging them to book sales call down the road. These webinars can also be used to provide more value to existing paid subscribers (improving retention and fostering word-of-mouth).
We’re organizing a couple of RO Webinars. One of them is a private Q&A between James (the writer of RO Long Read: the Africa-Japan bridge) with one of our paid subscribers (a collective of young African VCs). Another is a public webinar with two founders we interviewed (in Chile and Kenya), centering on collection processes for lending startups in emerging markets.
At scale, we can imagine a couple of RO Events running in parallel around the world, while the RO teams puts on consistent RO Webinars for a global audience. If done correctly, I fail to see how this wouldn’t translate into qualified pipeline.
Cold outbound
A classic, a non-negotiable.
I’ve launched LinkedIn sales sequences targeting our VC persona, and cold email sequences targeting university librarians. As I launched these a few weeks ago, pipeline is slowly building up but should accelerate as the sequences compounds.
Liberal unpaywalling strategy
Since we don’t really expect anyone to buy an RO subscription without speaking to us, we can be very liberal in how we unpaywall articles. The goal isn’t to “block” someone enough that they pay to unlock a specific article. Rather, the goal is to expose RO writing to the largest number, for them to be “warm” when they attend one of our events or receive one of our cold outbound messages.
Paul has developed an “unpaywaller” feature, that transforms a paywalled article’s URL into a “magic link” enabling someone who isn’t subscribed to read that article. We’re redesigning the website to encourage free trials. Paul is working on smart paywalling tech, where new IP addresses visiting the website magically see some RO articles unpaywall for their eyes only, while returning IP addresses are nudged to book a sales call. As a side, Paul also developed a functioning single-sign-on (SSO) feature for our Indian School of Business trial. Fantastic stuff.
Meeting humans
We sell to humans and humans tend to buy from humans they trust. AI doesn’t change that.
On the VC front, I’ll be more active on attending VC conferences, while RO Events will probably yield tons of promising interactions.
On the university front, I’ve been deep-diving into the world of university librarians, who are the ones making purchasing decisions for publications like the RO. I’ve been trying to understand this space, and even earned a place on a business librarian’s blog this week (see here). What I’ve learned so far:
Every librarian has their own methods. Some want free trials, some don’t. Some reply to cold emails, some don’t. Some let students/faculty guide what resources they buy, others make more vertical decisions about what they believe their library needs.
It’s a tight circle. Librarians attend the same conferences, reference check new vendors, join librarian groups… Breaking into that world is hard but once you’re in, maintaining a quality and credible reputation can do wonders (ie: intros galore).
As a result, I’ll be spending much more time speaking to librarians, attending university librarian conferences, potentially organizing librarian-only RO Webinars to present what we do… This will also take a few months before it yields concrete revenue but once again, the harder and longer it is, the more defensible it is.
An update on RO’s finances
Long sales cycles are fine and dandy until they hit the reality of cash-flow.
We’re got around 50K in bank, enough for ~6 months of runway if we hypothesize that we make absolutely 0 revenue over the next couple of months. I don’t think that’ll be the case (we’ve made a little over 5K in 2026, with a few big potential deals in the pipe). But as David Senra from Founders podcast (my bible) says, “only the paranoid founders survive” so let us plan for the worst.
We’re still in the J-Curve’s downward slope but I’m not certain when it’ll peak up. 2 months? 4 months? 6 months?
We’re burning around 8K a month and our 2026 goal is to become profitable at the end of the year. That goal hasn’t changed. The open-ended question is whether we raise a small “seed extension” round to elongate our runway and give us some breathing room.
I’ve been speaking to a French bank about a 50K loan, and they said they might need a slight reinforcement in our treasury to be comfortable extending it. We could raise a 100K seed extension (50K equity, 50K debt), enabling us to comfortably get to profitability on our 8K/month burn base. Once we’re there, we’ll be able to decide whether we continue the “seed-strapping” route or use that traction to raise a consequential $1M-$3M round.
I don’t know if this “big” round will be necessary yet. I’m not dogmatically attached to the bootstrap/seedstrap narrative and we’re not building a lifestyle business over here, we’re building the FT for this sector.
From benchmarking other FT-style publications, raising significant amounts of cash does seem to give you an edge (if you know what you’re doing and have a solid business model). If beginning of 2027, we’re making $10K-20K a month, all on annual subscriptions, we can definitely raise a solid round and I’ll have a really good idea of where to spend that cash effectively.
But I also see the argument of, if we reach that point, growing slow and steady whilst keeping full editorial freedom. But as we scale, won’t we need a boatload of cash to recruit the best talents? Will we be able to build a generationally-relevant financial publication on a seedstrapped budget?
I have no clue yet. But in any case, that conversation won’t happen until we get to profitability on our current cost base. We’re focused on that.
If you have an opinion you’d like to share on anything you just read, please respond to this email. I’d love your takes.
Until next month,
Tim