I Started a Site Last Year and This Is What Happened

Editor's Notes

1. Here I am (red pants!) at the Last Indie Media Camp in 2013, on a panel about social media. I mentioned that I’d just started a site for Gen-X, 40-something women — a “forgotten” generation, often eclipsed by Millennials and Boomers. And now a year later, my site’s up and thriving. Here’s how it all came together…
2. As a writer, you wait for the muse to hit you. It hadn’t hit me in a while. Since maybe, even, 1996, when I was a happy, 20-something cub reporter and editor at an alt-weekly newspaper in Philly.
3. Back then I wrote about music, style, the livers of conjoined twins — basically, whatever the heck I wanted, alongside a bunch of likeminded, fabulous crazies. Bliss.
4. Later, much later, I became an editorial director running lots of other people’s websites (Aol, Time Inc., etc.) In 2008, I started my own consulting firm helping brands and publishers with digital content strategy. I loved what I did (er, do), but I knew, in the back of my mind, that I wanted to unleash a larger creative vision. I just didn’t know what yet.
5. I’d been consulting for a content marketing start-up, stocked with people almost entirely under the age of 30. I began to feel weird, like I’d been plopped on another planet. For the first time in my life, I felt old. So, I wrote a story about it on Medium. I called it Dinosaur Jr.
6. The thing was, I didn’t really feel exactly geriatric (save for my knees) — but I also didn’t feel young. As my friends and I agreed, we felt “curiously young and old at the same time.” Super weird.
7. I discussed this over margaritas with Kat, my old — sorry — long-time friend and former co-worker from the Philadelphia City Paper; she was the art director back when I was the music editor.
8. “What gives?” we wondered. Our friends are still going to Arcade Fire shows, having kids or not having kids, working their asses off, making peak dollars, starting new relationships, traveling… yet we’re patronized to in the media, made to feel like we were clinging to the last breath of our best years.
9. The idea started to percolate. Maybe there was an idea for a website here? If I was going to do it, I wasn’t going to do it alone. As an ENFJ (see what the corporate world did to me there?) I need my people. I enlisted friends who were serendipitously freelancing or searching for their own “part two,” so the timing worked well. They all wanted in.
10. To enlist writers, I cashed in on a bit of good karma and asked top-notch freelancers and friends I’ve known over the years to contribute stories. I wanted to show their faces prominently on the site — this is the real face of Gen X.
11. I’d decided to stop consulting for at least three months and focus on it 100 percent. Why not? The time was now.
12. But when you make a leap, you need to make sure you have a solid place to land.
13. It’s easier to let creativity flow when you have solid structure: good design, a beautiful, strong logo, a hearty publishing platform, and clear, consistent workflow.
14. We started with the biggie — the name.
15. After many
16. MANY
17. iterations.
18. After many, MANY names, we decided on TueNight — a play on “tonight” and “Tuesday Night.” We would deliver our stories every Tuesday eve — a day and time that’s sort of unclaimed. Monday is the start of the work week. Wednesday is “hump day.” Thursday and Fridays are for going out. Weekends are for families, kids, and chores.
19. TueNight is your night. It’s an easy night for a conversation or a drink with a friend. The night you have your bookclub. It’s after you’ve put the kids to bed and take a minute for yourself. (To read TueNight, we hoped!) Oh, and it was available as a [dot] com — so that helped.
20. Rather than design our site from scratch, we used a Wordpress template, and then spent months hacking away at it to get the widgets and visual extras we wanted. (Even if three months later the guys who ran it disappeared. WPBandit, where did you go?!)
21. We ran it like a newspaper or magazine. Brainstorm, get pitches, assign an asset number to each story (titles change; asset numbers don’t), and edit thoroughly. We tracked everything on an editorial calendar in Google docs and moved stories and images from folder to folder in a Dropbox workflow.
22. I paid to have true photo guidelines created by a photo editor colleague of mine, knowing how important it was to create visual consistency and try to be as “legal” as we could. We use stock occasionally, but often one of us will just go out and try to capture something on our camera or iPhone. For a piece in our Tears issue, Danyel Smith wrote about crying over a honeybun. We didn’t have a photo, so I went over to Duane Reade, unwrapped a gooey honeybun, and shot it... And then, of course, I ate it. Perks.
23. Other than those guidelines, we decided not to over-scrutinize what we were doing but to launch this sucker and evolve it from there. And so, we went live the last week of August 2013. I say this with not much fanfare because as any content person knows…
24. How are you going to keep the site humming along? What’s a process that you can realistically and consistently stick to? How are you going to plan for upcoming content?
25. We also employed a lot of spaghetti throwing.
26. After the first week, we discovered an organizing principle — many of our pieces were naturally fitting into “themes.” So a la Radio Lab or Narrative.ly, we incorporated a unique theme every week, a topic that resonated with our demographic. These were subjects we were already gabbing about in person, on the phone, on Facebook, and were broad enough that they could spark ideas for writers.
27. One of our better, more highly trafficked themes has been our 38 Over 38 issue, which highlights some of the women — over the age of 38 — that we find truly inspiring.
28. But not all of our themes have been as successful as we wanted. There was Shart Week, an idea we couldn’t stop laughing about. If you don’t know what a shart is — may I direct you to Urban Dictionary.
29. The idea: Let’s have a week dedicated entirely to stories about poop! Moms oversharing baby poop on social media! Inside a colonoscopy! However it wasn’t totally a lost cause: Shart Week was responsible for our first “sponsorship.” PooPouri — the hilarious toilet spray — loved what we were doing (who the hell else was writing about this shit?)
30. In October 2013, we did experience our first viral hit with Tamar Anitai’s “Silly Things People Say to Me When I Tell Them I’m Not Having Kids,” which continues to be the story that keeps on giving — pageviews that is.
31. And of course vehement detractors.
32. We were asked to syndicate it on the Huffington Post, which is a great traffic driver for us. We’ve also shared our content with other niche like-minded sites such as Modern Loss, Daily Worth, Mash-up Americans.
33. And then we thought, maybe this could become a franchise… Silly Things People Have Said to Me When I Tell Them I Don’t Want Pets! I Don’t Want to Travel! I Don’t Want Salads? But it wasn’t the format that worked, it was the story itself. You learn.
34. You’re probably wondering, OK, OK, we get it, passion project — but are you making any money on this? Are you paying your writers? Well, no and yes — a little. We pay for anything that’s a series but generally haven’t been able to pay for one-off essays. One of our 2015 goals is to pay all of our writers something.
35. We do have a regular Google ad exchange ad that makes us a tiny bit of cash (like $125 a quarter).
36. So after the first three months, and thousands of dollars and time invested, the site started humming along, and… I went back to consulting part-time. An advisor told me, “If you week is theoretically 40 hours, 20 should be spent on consulting, 10 on editorial, and 10 on distribution and traffic-building.” The idea is that it takes a long time for a site to really take off.
37. This was hard because my balance was much more shifted to the editorial of the site, and the advice was to pull back and focus on traffic and getting the word out. So I had to slap my own hand every time I wanted to over-edit someone’s story. On balance, it just wasn’t worth it. We focused a lot more on distribution and social than we had been.
38. In the spring, we were beyond thrilled to get a Webby honorable mention in the Best Cultural Blog category, after only six months. All of our hard work had been noticed, and it was a big mid-year boost to keep us going. We can’t stop now.
39. At a party, a friend introduced me to a 40-something woman who, when she learned I’d started TueNight, turned into a super fan. “I am obsessed with TueNight. It totally speaks to me. No one is writing about us.”
40. In October we celebrated our first year with a few hundred women and booze, food, tote bags, and Tattlys. But the best part of the evening: we had actors read some of our stories aloud. People laughed, they cried, they loved it. Made us think — huh. Maybe we should have stories read aloud on a regular basis?
41. We crafted a book including some of our favorite stories.
42. The Talk TueNight events have become a regular thing for us.
43. She was right. So after a year, we’re making a business plan. We’re going to buckle down and figure out our priorities.
44. We’ll see. We’ll let you know what we do next year, in year two. But to wrap things up, here are a few things I’ve learned in year one.
45. And finally… Beware of Shart Week.