Online media company Broadsheet launched with a passion for unearthing the best places for entertainment and five years later it is going strong
When Broadsheet founder Nick Shelton returned to Melbourne in 2008 from London, he realised something was brewing – and it wasn’t just single origin pour over coffee. The city was undergoing a cultural boom, firmly centered around where people liked to eat and drink.
“It’s all people wanted to talk about – what cafe they were going to, where they had dinner last night, what they were doing on the weekend,” he recalls.
Shelton had already come up with the idea for the online media company in London, where he struggled to find a definitive guide to ‘living like a local’.
“I didn’t want to just be another Aussie living in London. I wanted to know where to go to get a good cup of coffee, what good restaurants to check out, or where to take a date. There were things like TimeOut magazine, but it didn’t really give me what I wanted as a young 20-something guy. And I particularly wanted to find the information online.”
The opportunity to fill this gap in his home town proved irresistible, and in 2009, the publication Broadsheet was born.
“I set the site live with about 150 profiles of restaurants and bars. The idea was that it was always a directory and an editorial site, so you could enter criteria like a suburb and whether you’re looking for a cafe, restaurant or bar, whether you’d like to sit inside or outside, and it would provide results. We’ve got about 5000 venues on there now,” he says.
Shelton very quickly figured out that he wasn’t cut out for writing, editing, photography, design or sales.
“I’m not great at the core functions,” he concedes. Instead, he’s learnt to surround himself with talented people, and he supports them to do their very best work.
“I’m the person who sets the vision and my job is about finding the best people I possibly can to do those things,” he says.
It’s this humble approach that has made Broadsheet so successful. The business has grown from a full-time staff of one to 15. The site’s editors set the tone and direction for the site, and a freelance base of approximately 100 contributors help supply content.
“In the early days the team had to do lots and lots of different little jobs. As we’ve grown we’ve been able to take on more people and the departments have become more formalised, for example, we now have senior editors and junior editors,” explains Shelton. “It’s really important that everyone can do a lot of different jobs, because we still have that mentality, but people are more specified in their roles which means I have confidence the team know what they’re doing and I’m free to manage and run the business. I work ‘on’ the business, rather than ‘in’ the business.”
Of course, Broadsheet’s growth hasn’t been without its challenges.
“There’s no playbook for a business like Broadsheet. There’s no ‘this is how you run a startup online magazine in Australia’. It just doesn’t exist here or anywhere in the world,” says Shelton. “A lot of it has been about working that out, from day one, facing each challenge as it comes and saying, ‘how can we address this’ and ‘how do we make it work for us?’.”
One of business’ biggest challenges, then and now, is to grow a national audience. To help with this, Shelton launched Broadsheet in Sydney in late 2011.
“In media you need a national footprint, and we knew we’d never have that without a Sydney-based publication – it’s been a really important part of our growth,” he says. “Even though the publications are based in Melbourne and Sydney, we now have regular traffic and visitation from places like Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide.”
Broadsheet has a satellite office in Sydney with two editors on the ground.
“It was really important to us that the Sydney publication was a Sydney publication in its own right – it wasn’t Melbourne people trying to interpret what Sydney’s doing. Broadsheet is really about understanding a city as well as anyone and it had to be authentic if we were going to do it,” he recalls.
The site’s authenticity has clearly resonated with the Australian public. It now boasts 600,000 unique monthly readers, and Shelton’s blind faith in the product has been rewarded. He says there’s never been a day when he doubted it would work, although it was a huge risk when he put up his own money to get the business started.
Like all small businesses cash flow has been a challenge, but Shelton says it got into a positive position in the early days.
“Cash flow is all about cost discipline. In the early days it was about making sacrifices, for example, I didn’t pay myself a wage. There’s always the temptation to spend money, but I was really disciplined with my costs. You have good months and you have bad months, but for me, getting cash flow positive was always a really big goal.”
In spite of – or perhaps because of – this success, Shelton’s number one priority remains the reader.
“We want to be known as Australia’s best digital publisher, but we’re nothing without our audience. Every day, I ask myself, ‘is the audience being catered to? Are we creating content they want to engage with? When they come to Broadsheet, are we giving something they want?’ For me, that’s number one. You’ve got to take care of your audience.”
Writer: Megan Gamble
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