I’m the founder of Starts at 60, but I wouldn’t be here, managing this growing website, if it wasn’t for the community we serve, so I’m keen to invite you into the everyday life of Starts at 60. Here’s the nuts and bolts of how we do things and what I’ve learned on our four years so far.
If you missed it, read yesterday’s article about what lies Behind the Scenes of Starts at 60.
It’s a whole lot of fun here
It’s four years since I started Starts at 60 with a $40 off-the-shelf website and with a simple plan to bring news and products to over-60s in a way that respected your intelligence.
Now, more than 20 people and 400 community writers work for or with Starts at 60.
We’re now serving four million-plus pageviews per month to more than million community members, with a 75-plus percent return-rate (that means that people who click on a Starts at 60 ‘page’ are very likely to do so again in the future). We’re sourcing travel deals for a generation of people who love to travel. And we’re reaching 10 million people a week on social media with two million engagements every week (that means a whole lot of liking and sharing).
People talk back in enormous volume, making about 25,000 comments a day on our stories on Facebook, and come from all over world for these discussions.
It makes for interesting days, long nights, lots of fun, but also big obligation to reward the trust readers put in us by providing them something that is special.
It’s hasn’t been, and isn’t, easy
I can dress it up – just like I did above – with good marketing words, and everything at Starts at 60 sounds awesome. And it is.
But it’s also very hard work. I think it always will be, too. I know you understand because the Baby Boomer generation worked for all they achieved.
I worked nights and days for the first two years almost alone to afford to get this project off the ground. I wrote the stories, posted the blogs, learned how to use social media; defined, built and rebuilt the technology, sold the advertising; wrote the marketing materials, hired the people, liaised with our community and did the accounting.
I didn’t make any money doing this, so I also worked a day job for the first two years. There was many a day my husband found me curled up in a ball, exhausted after trying to secure enough money to pay for our increasing server requirements or a website rebuild.
Advertisers, from companies themselves to ad agencies, didn’t want to talk to over-60s. Meanwhile, over-60s themselves were piling into our community online, using the internet when everyone said they didn’t and never would.
At times I had no idea how I was going to afford to keep this site going, and although we now have some funding from an investor, explaining to advertisers that the 60-plus demographic is savvy, switched on and keen to explore online is still something we do every single day.
Sometimes, attitude matters more than age
Finally, after 18 months of 20-hour days, I secured my first decent-ish-sized advertiser, AVEO, the property company, and afforded myself the confidence to hire my first “part-time” staff member – something I’d never done before.
Digital media is the fastest moving, most exhilarating industry I have ever worked in. Everything is high tech, everyone knows more than you (most, you realise later, are faking!) and no one knows what will work next. The pace is relentless. And finding people who know what they’re doing or are courageous enough to find a way is like finding the proverbial hen’s teeth.
No traditional experience lends itself to transitioning easily into digital media, especially digital journalism; and, sadly, pure-blooded digital media people often don’t want to work in a company serving over-60s because they think there are ‘sexier’ options.
One in every two people we’ve hired we have found to be wrong for you (ouch!) – they either didn’t understand digital, didn’t want to understand the audience, or didn’t want to keep up in a workplace where we’re forced to relearn every day as technology and media changes. I remember my first crude lesson in this – when Starts at 60’s readers “virtually” threw out our second staff member only her third week at the company, when she wrote a piece opining that Dolly Parton was a bad role model for women. I warned her that she was writing the story for herself, not for you, and you concurred in the form of a wall of abuse. She soon left Starts at 60!
It was a great lesson in the need to find selfless writers – people who could serve over-60s, not tell them how to suck eggs. It’s a lesson that continues to serve me.
The good news is, every single person now working at Starts at 60 is a gem! They are ethical, want to be here for you, and have a solid understanding that 60-year-olds do it differently.
We’ve tried hiring people from many different age groups, and frankly, have concluded that it’s not about age – it’s about attitude. Ego doesn’t work here and those with a big ego quickly leave because you, our community of 60-pluses, don’t tolerate it.
We’re listening and learning. We now have a 4-in-5 success rate on hiring!
We’ve been rejected by almost everyone, except you
As the fifth year of our journey starts, I consider that we are only at the beginning of it. Starts at 60 has a challenging journey ahead to deliver you a platform that truly serves your online needs.
Along the way, we’ve been told by decision makers in business and government countless times that “the over-60 isn’t online.” Many of the large brands targeting over-50s and over-60s still tell us you aren’t here. So just who is making up our community?
It’s scary to tell you how hard we’ve had to fight just to find the dollars to cover the costs to get here. And we’re quite sure we’ve got a huge fight ahead to build an ethical business with its community of readers at its core. We need you to understand what we are doing and why, so you can help if you want to, give us feedback that keeps us on track.
We must have commercial elements to survive
I want Starts at 60 to succeed and to do that it must become a sustainable business. My business coaches and mentors are incredible, ethical, financially-astute people who love their parents too (thankfully!) so they respect the honest approach we take in everything we do, but they also urge me to be realistic about the fact that getting into the black is the only way our site can continue.
I need your support in doing this.
We aimed to be large enough to work with only the best suppliers and advertisers in the Australia and New Zealand to bring you “great deals” and other things you need – and now we are. But Starts at 60 must continue to function to your benefit if we’re going to sustain this kind of growth until we’re making a profit.
So please always know that we are listening and that we want to hear from you. You can email me on community@startsat60.com. We respond to every email.
We need to say thanks more often
I’ve talked about the hard bits of building a media site a lot. But I haven’t applauded those who’ve supported us in getting here. We have an amazing network of advertisers and sponsors that we don’t shout about as often as we should. They are the people underpinning our ability to bring you the media and services we do.
Dymocks has been invaluable in helping us grow our Starts at 60 book club, support all our community writers in-kind by providing vouchers for two community bloggers per day to write for our site. Hachette, the publishing house, likewise supports the site enormously by providing books for our reviewers.
We’re partnered with Uniting New South Wales, a company with an enormous heart that wants over-60s to be fit and healthy. We’re supported by Dixon Advisory, which wants to help you get your investments right, and AAT Kings, which wants to help you travel Australia in comfort.
We also work with the NSW Department of Family and Community Services, which has mandated that ageing should be inclusive in 2017, and we’ve just welcomed Australian Hearing on board too. These companies and organisations should be applauded.
Companies like AVEO have been with us as an advertiser since the beginning, and Stockland, Specsavers, Challenger, Cruiseabout, Helloworld and many others take advertising on our site too.
We took investment from the company that owns Channel Seven a year ago, after heavily vetting who we felt would be “the right partner” for us. I would like to thank their staff, who are huge supporters of our ethical approach and bring us ideas, connections and technical capability we might not have afforded access to otherwise. They are funding some of our next stage of growth so we can focus on getting things right for you, and we applaud them for their support.
We’ll do it together, bit by bit …
Media as we know it is changing. It has a huge future in bringing people together, but the old business models need to change and we must find a new way to afford the delivery of the knowledge and entertainment that media creates.
It’s important to point out that in the next stage, as media business models change, our success relies on us bringing you products and services that you actually want to buy.
The investments we’ve made in technology will allow us to increasingly personalise these products and services, because we know from your online choices, your comments and your direct feedback what you like and dislike. We promise we won’t misuse this knowledge. It’s a business model called an affinity community.
We’re only just getting started with our affinity community project, first off in travel. In just four months, 60,000 people have signed up and are regularly seeking travel deals on travelat60.com through our hot deals club.
We know there are other areas in which you’re looking for solutions. We plan to address them next so don’t forget to keep telling us your issues! Yes, it does have to have a commercial element, but we hope you understand that we do so because we have your best interests at heart.
It’s Starts at 60’s fourth birthday this week so our founder, Rebecca Wilson, is bringing you several stories throughout the week about our site, our community and our learnings. One thing that we do ask is that you join our site properly by clicking the “login” button on the website, so we can welcome you to our community and provide the honest services we aspire to. This helps us help you.
Read yesterday’s article “Behind the scenes at Starts at 60”.