They say that a lawyer who defends himself has a fool for a client. The same might be said for a publication design studio that starts its own magazine.
After you’ve spent a few decades in a service industry—and that is what a design studio essentially is—successfully working for other people begs the question, “Why not skip the middleman and control your destiny.”
No more swimming like a shark to find new clients. No need to sublimate your creative aesthetic to please someone else. No one telling you what they really want after you produce comps to meet what they said they originally wanted. Having a self-sustaining project that has the potential to outgrow the client work is a tremendous incentive. We wanted to launch a fun, informative, and creative magazine for magazine professionals—designers, writers, publishers—full of content to inform, inspire and amuse them.
There was a secret weapon that I was sure would make the new magazine successful—me. I have always been inspired by clients who had their “passion project” and were excited to use themselves as an audience-of-one to prove the value of their concept.
That’s what this new publication was going to be for me. After consulting on and designing more than 70 magazines and preaching a gospel of the proper way to launch a publication and keep a readership, why not put that philosophy to the test? I wanted to put together a magazine using the methods I used for dozens of clients, but filled with stuff I would enjoy reading. I was making the magazine for a person with my interests and passions—and maybe arrogantly presuming there were many people like me out there.
There is a lot of money and time on the line—but even worse is the blow to your credibility and self-esteem if things go south. Only a handful of magazine start-ups make it to their second year. It requires investing heavily upfront, producing the entire product, and building the whole organization before you can even begin to court subscribers and bring in revenue—all on the bet that your vision is compelling enough to attract lots of people.
I had already been through a start-up with a client who, after years consulting with restaurateurs helping improve their operations, sharpen their concepts, and focus their menus, was convinced he could leverage his knowledge at building successful restaurants to start his own. He was confident he could avoid the issues that often doom passion projects by following his own advice to his clients.
A new restaurant, like a magazine, must spend most of its investment before it opens its doors and leaves enough reserves to cover the inevitable losses before the place finds its clientele. Owners must be realistic about projected operational costs and revenues, and it’s easy to be overconfident that the former will be low and the latter will be high.
This one, in Bethesda’s central business area, had a big opening and good reviews. AURAS designed the branding and the menus, and the food was interesting and tasty. Yet, after two years, the restaurant closed. What happened with the owner’s brilliant plan? Maybe overconfidence in budgeting or too ambitious alterations that diluted the original concept was at fault. But most irrational—but perfectly understandable—could have been the assumption that because you are so convinced of your concept, people will simply show up. Years before it was a thing, he felt confident that his restaurant would “go viral.”
I know I felt that our magazine would “go viral” if I could get it into the hands of enthusiasts that loved magazines as I did. Knowing the odds, I tried to avoid overoptimism. Our business plan began with a “run-flat” bottom line, assumed we wouldn’t make any money the first year, and expected only 2,000 subscriptions. Since Print, ID, HOW and Communication Arts all had circulations around 25 thousand, and we bought their subscriber lists for our marketing effort, we expected at least 1% of the readers to give us a try. We budgeted $250,00 for the start-up. It seemed like a reasonable amount, considering the studio was profitable and could absorb most of the design and production duties.
Our conservative business plan didn’t expect the magazine to be profitable until year three when we would make money from increased subscriptions, a conference, and an awards program. Take a look at the business plan. The business model seemed prudent; the money was in the bank, so we hired an editor. While working on the still-unnamed prototype, we used the term (FPO)—for position only—a standard placeholder for content “to come.” That’s when it occurred to us the term was both geeky-insider-ish, apt for the content, and had design potential as a logotype.
We were going to launch [FPO] Magazine at the 2007 Folio:Show in New York. We bought a booth in the Exhibit Hall to sign up subscribers and give away copies of the premiere Issue and arranged to present a session at the show. The session had pretty good attendance in a larger auditorium, and at the end of the presentation, which we played straight to the topic, we ended with a copy of the cover. There was a nice smattering of applause.
Afterward, the publisher of Folio: came up to me. I figured he was going to give me a “good luck and welcome to the club” kind of comment. Instead, he grabbed me by the shoulder and said, “How dare you launch a competing publication at The Folio:Show! You’ve got a lot of nerve.” I was so surprised, all I could mumble was, “You haven’t read our book. It really doesn’t overlap yours at all. In fact, it’s complementary.” He should have known better. The session was called “How to Start Your Own Magazine from Scratch.”
We thought we had figured out how to make my passion project a reality. We were willing to risk a lot of money and prepared a business plan to accommodate the worst-case scenarios. I really thought that [FPO] would be a big hit. But there was one thing on the horizon that nobody saw coming…
