Dear reader,
We recently sold our second university subscription (which I can’t name). Considering who we sold our first university subscription to (which I can’t name either), we’re steadily proving our value on the university front. We’ve got a few more university prospects in the pipe, with multiple trials starting in September.
That pushes the RO’s 2026 revenue over €11,000.
100% of this revenue comes from RO subscriptions. Every additional sale costs us virtually nothing (we just grant RO access to new email addresses + incur some modest customer service costs). If we do a good job, most of this revenue is supposed to renew yearly.
I like the mental clarity that comes with selling one product (annual RO subscriptions) and pouring our undivided focus into making that product the best it can be.
The topics we’re exploring today:
Setting up the revenue engine for said RO annual subscriptions.
Early musings on the RO ethos.
RO revenue engine
As mentioned, we sell a single product: RO annual subscriptions. These cost €300/year per seat. Preferably, we aim to sell group subscriptions. We target two well-defined ICPs: VCs investing in emerging markets and university libraries (particularly universities offering MBA programs).
The more I grow as a founder, the more I realize business is… simple? I mean that the path to making a business work is simple: make a product, sell it, and spend less money than you make. There are endless micro-decisions to take once you embark on that path (those are difficult and subjective). But the actual “path” to business success is crystal-clear.
In our case, to increase the RO’s revenue, we need to:
Book sales calls with our ICPs (VCs & universities).
Convince them that buying an RO subscription is valuable to their organization.
Once the subscription is sold, provide the value we convinced them of, so that they renew their RO subscription.
Here’s how we’re going about all three:
Book sales calls with our ICPs (VCs & universities).
Running direct LinkedIn outbound campaigns to our ICPs.
Sending direct cold email to our ICPs.
Sending LinkedIn messages to people who liked our posts/sent us a connection request that fit our ICPs.
Holding two RO Events per month. Post-event, sending emails to attendees who fit our ICP profile.
Periodically asking our network (readers, RO Ambassadors, people we’ve interviewed) for intros to people who fit our ICP profile.
Sending emails to people who start free trials on our website, who either fit our ICP profile or know people who do.
Our CTO Paul is doing valuable work on making it easier for website visitors to create a free trial (and for us to better understand who creates free trials and why).
Soon, we’re launching an SEO optimization campaign to increase traffic to our website and subsequent free trial creation.
Attending events that our ICPs attend and prospecting there.
Done consistently and put together, these activities increase the number of sales calls booked. Then, we have to convert those sales calls into new RO subscriptions.
Convince them that buying an RO subscription is valuable to their organization.
Speaking to current RO paid subscribers to understand the value they gain from their RO subscription, honing our sales pitch.
Reading about B2B sales best practices & adapting our internal processes adequately.
Analyzing and discussing our sales calls transcripts, to understand what resonates (or not) with prospects.
Iterating on our post-sales call processes (curating sample articles to send to prospects, following-up diligently, understanding why prospects say no).
We’ve set-up a professional CRM (Bigin) to track our deals more efficiently. We use Granola to analyze our sales calls transcripts.
Once the subscription is sold, provide the value we convinced them of, so that they renew their RO subscription.
Publish consistent, exceptional, unique writing pertaining to the sector we cover (the global startup scene).
We’re investing heavily in this, with James Mahon (an RO Correspondent who penned our first RO Long Read) joining us part-time soon to work on scaling and improving our interview format. We’ve also set a goal of recruiting five new RO Correspondents this quarter (three so far).
As far as roles go, Aakash is gradually taking the lead of the sales/growth aspect, while I hunker down on the editorial side.
Early musings on the RO ethos
This isn’t fully-formed in my brain yet, but there’s an emerging RO ethos. This ethos appears in the way we work internally, the tone of our articles, the type of people who want to work with us, the vibe at the events we hold, our official communications…
This ethos is semi-intentional, semi-organic. It has roots in the initial vision I had for the RO but is now enriched by the great people the RO gets to work with as well as how the RO is perceived by outsiders.
This RO ethos is fluid around the edges but seems to possess key pillars:
A reflective yet intentional choice of optimism as a mental framework.
Insatiable intellectual curiosity and comfort with ambiguity.
High-standards, with ourselves and others, regarding the quality of work produced.
As I warned you: still ill-defined. But I believe that anyone who reads us, works with us, or interacts with us gets what I mean without being able to put words on it either.
There’s a saying that goes: “culture isn’t what you say, it’s what you do”. That applies here. The RO ethos isn’t something I want to codify, yet it is something we’re intentionally crafting. I also believe that the RO ethos has been, is, and will be our greatest asset for as long as the company exists.
Other notable updates from last month
Our East Africa Ambassador (Phylis Atieno) successfully held our second RO Event in Nairobi.
See Phylis’ LinkedIn post about it for more details
Got a couple of calls/meetings regarding the remaining €20K we need to raise to unlock our €50K bank loan, but nothing signed yet. European summers are horrendously slow on the work front (but yay paid leave, don’t come at me).
If you’d like to invest or know someone who does, please email me [email protected]
The loan agreement expires September 1st so this is time-sensitive.
Many more updates (including a super-hire I’m buzzing to announce). But I’m not sure what I’m allowed to share, so I won’t.
On that note, enjoy your August and I’ll correspond with you again next month.
Tim