RO Letters #4

Originally published on 04/09/2025

Hello everyone,

I hope your summer break was blissful.

Mine was, albeit short. Now isn’t the time to take long meditation trips to Nepal. I prefer my one-week, offline, burst of life, friends, family, and food hiatus rather than a silent retreat with monks who have no clue what MRR and KPIs are (losers).

Since I only took one week off, the 75% remaining August time was dedicated to building this little media conglomerate. Quite a few things happened.

Fundraise

We officially crossed the €50K raised mark, the total now sitting at €59K. We welcome Diego Magdelénat, a serial French entrepreneur, as our newest angel investor. Diego has extensive founder experience across three industries: e-commerce (last-mile delivery more specifically), coffee, and eye ware. He sold his first company to the French postal office. He’s accumulated a flurry of entrepreneurship lessons I'm already gobbling up.

I started out by setting a fundraising goal of €300K, closed by the end of August. Target missed, oops. As I suffer from extreme optimism founder delusion, I was convinced I’d get there.

An RO paid subscriber (Sorusch Amiri, GP at Geist Capital), warned me that fundraising is like pushing a boulder up a hill: it’s painful to get it up the hill, but you ultimately reach the top, at which point the boulder starts raveling down and everything gets easier. One of my favorite books is Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus”, which (to put it in my own pagan terms) says life consists of pushing boulders up hills for no clear reason (since we die anyways). But, Camus says, the pushing is the fun part!

As much as I love pushing boulders, one has to wisely choose which boulders to push. Most of what I set out to do in my original business plan, I can do with 100K. I believe I can still get to €300K (I’m sensing the top of the proverbial hill), but that it will take me till December. My time is better spent writing articles and selling subscriptions.

I’ve hence decided to close the RO’s first round at €100K, in the next few weeks. I have an additional €20K committed already, which brings the total to €79K. I’m missing €21K, which I’m confident I’ll tap from the great, parallel conversations I’m having with prospective angels. That being said, the round is still open (and will eventually close).

If you’d like to invest in the RO, please respond to this email. Minimum ticket is €5K. Read on for the exciting updates that will make you want to invest.

Revenue

I officially incorporated the company at the end of May. I’ve been fully focused on fundraising, not sales, since then. Still, the RO’s new company structure (I operated as a sole proprietor before) just cashed in its first €1K of revenue. Numerically anecdotal. But symbolically important for three reasons.

First, this revenue comes from four, €250/year subscriptions. That price-point is slowly getting validated by the market.

Second, they all bought the exact same product. No custom services added. No bespoke requirements. The same exact product. I’ve noticed that my confidence in the RO skyrocketed once I’d sold five of the exact same product to different people. These are the seeds of scale.

Third, the increasingly convincing thematic coherence, yet geographical spread of RO paid subscribers. Paid subscribers now include people at:

This week, I relaunched the RO sales pipeline. I’ve got a couple of sales calls lined up already. I’m fully focusing on VCs with emerging market exposure for at least the next 12 months. The RO is gradually becoming the gold standard for such VCs, and I want to foment snowballing word-of-mouth within that space.

If you’d like to buy a subscription for the RO, you can do so at the bottom right of the website here. If you’d like to purchase multiple seats for your team, reply to this email and we’ll discuss custom pricing.

Team

The fundraise gives the RO firepower. As shown above: we’re not “looking” for a product nor a market. We know what we’re selling and to who we’re selling it to. It’s time to put gas in the tank.

You might’ve noticed I refer to the RO as “we” in this letter. This is because we are now officially two people!

Aakash Athawasya joins as RO’s Asia correspondent. Aakash reached out to me a few months ago, and we started chatting. Then he started writing for the RO. Aakash is a gold mine and it was time to formalize our relationship.

Here’s what he’ll be doing as an RO correspondent:

Over the next few months, my goal is to recruit RO correspondents, with similar job descriptions, on each continent. I intentionally want to give these RO correspondents large operational remits for two reasons.

First, we’re building a global-first organization. We need active, locally-plugged relays in each region we cover. Not everything can happen from Paris (where I’m based).

Second, a qualm I often hear from established publications is that journalists pay little thought to the economic health or business model of their publication. Sales and marketing teams are a nuisance. They are journalists and want to write, report, and not deal with pesky terms like sales cycles, ROI, churn, etc. Not all journalists of course, but that does seem to be a common trope amongst the older guard.

I want the RO team to understand that they work for a for-profit company. The goal isn’t to get them thinking like Citadel traders, but simply understand how the RO makes money and who we sell to. The more money we make, the more budget they will have for ambitious reporting, events, or other initiatives they want to launch. It’s virtuous to have them deeply grasp (and contribute their valuable ideas) to the RO’s business functions.

Also: the RO isn’t at a stage where it can afford team specialization. Everyone is a Swiss Army knife. I’m 25 years old, have never built a global media conglomerate before, and although I devour every media baron biography I can find (Pulitzer and Murdoch recently) and read every specialized publication on media building (AMO, The Audiencers, Niemen Lab) , I’m new to this. I need all the help, guidance, ideas, new perspectives I can get.

Reflections, in no particular order

Here are some thoughts:

“People don’t read nor pay for content these days, the RO won’t work”

Nothing irritates me more than this sentence. Not because I can’t take negative prognostications about the RO (said prognostications, if intelligent, are useful fodder for strategic readjustment), but because this sentence is so utterly devoid of preciseness, substance, and overall objective truth.

Let me be clear. If you don’t read, nor think that paying for hand-crafted written text (books, newspapers, reports) is worth it, we are simply not selling to you. We won’t even try. Increasing literacy isn’t the RO’s fight (it’s others’ fight, and it’s a worthy one).

The skeptic might retort “but people are reading less and less”. Maybe, maybe not. But Penguin Random House, a company that sells books, reported €4.9B in sales last year (up 8.5% from 2023).

In other words: there’s a sufficient supply of people reading and ready to pay for written text to turn the RO into a massive business. We don’t pay attention, nor sell, to people who don’t read.

Saying the RO won’t work because people don’t read is like telling someone opening a vegan restaurant that “a lot of people still really love red meat”. Okay, thanks, but that’s not who the restaurant is for anyways?

Having this strong focus on excellent, dense, written text, may also lead to positive externalities. For example: VCs who used to scroll LinkedIn for analysis realize that buying an RO subscription and accessing deeper content makes them better at their job.

To keep the previous metaphor: that vegan restaurant may attract curious meat eaters, who will gradually change their eating habits to a more plant-based one. But this is not the restaurant’s go-to-market strategy, rather a positive externality resulting from crystal-clear market positioning.

“The media business is so hard, boohoo”

I have a visceral distaste of cynicism. This could be the result of a gilded childhood and adolescence, basked in material comfort and emotional coddling from supportive parents. Since I’ve never had any reason to be cynical, I have a hard time understanding people who are.

Whatever the reason, my distaste for cynicism is very much present. It feels like an intellectual cop-out. Saying “they’re all corrupt" or “the world is fucked” or “the government is all clueless” or “PEOPLE DON’T READ ANYWAYS” is a light mental load to carry.

Encounter a complex topic? Instead of granularly grappling with it, discard it with one big negative, catch-all statement. Done. Cynicism shares a lot of common traits with racism.

Anyways, one occurrence of cynicism I increasingly encounter is when speaking to media old-timers. People who’ve been in the industry for decades. I can usually predict their incoming diatribe five minutes into speaking with them.

It usually goes like this: “media is a horrible business man, no one makes money, this sucks, this also sucks, social media took our business, no one invests in media, no one pays for content, yadayadayada”. A lot of these conversations feel like a downbeat exposé of everything but potential solutions to the enumerated problems.

My take is the following. People and businesses need quality information to make quality decisions in whatever endeavor they’re pursuing. That looks like perennial market demand to me. The permutations for how that information is delivered are infinite. Big publications who got their ad revenue siphoned off by Zuckerberg had a tough time, sure. But it’s time to move on.

I’ve met so many great, young media founders recently (David Adeleke from Communiqué, Jean-Christophe Boulanger from Contexte). I love speaking with them. They’re brimming with energy, ideas, fervor.

Media old-timers often sound like broken records, and I’ve integrated their main points by now (caveat: old-timers have invaluable, concrete operational advice for scale I need to heed).

But overall I’m looking to build, not reminisce. I’m looking for solutions, not post-mortems.

Asks

I saw this section in Tyler Denk’s monthly founder updates (which these RO letters are inspired by), so adding it here.

Below are some few open-ended asks from whoever is reading these letters. If you can act upon one of them, please respond to this email:

That’s all for this month.

I hope you have a safe, healthy, and productive September.

Yours,

Tim