Flavorpill Founder On Change & Rebirth

Mark Mangan, founder of the culture email news service Flavorpill, has a candid piece about the changes he and his partner Sascha Lewis have had to make with their business. He says that with the downturn, online advertising has been hit along with everything else – and that they team had to make a change and innovate in a big way. Despite having spent a lot of time developing sub-brands like Artkrush, they realized that it was time to consolidate and bring everything under one roof:

As the heavy clouds rolled in, we looked at all options. Which were seemingly none. We’d been there before, staring in the face of a big ominous wall which says none shall pass. This time, a sizeable monthly nut and slowing ad revenue. With no action, we were going down. And with that realization, we considered the unthinkable: shutting down or selling our beloved culture pubs, our subbrands.

They were fantastic brands and pretty good businesses, but they were too heavy, and as separate brands, they required extra, specific attention and love. It was as if we had five children instead of one. They all had to be fundamentally reinvented, or let go in favor of something new – faster, lighter….

The unthinkable idea ultimately evolved into the consolidation of the pubs into a single, lightweight, daily email, under the name Flavorpill, which gives people a quick recommendation every day, across all our cultural genres: music, film, books, etc. With one deliberate stroke, we consolidated four workflows, four teams, four schedules, and four products to sell into a single, easy-to-understand, easier-to-sell product which costs a tenth to produce and generates three times as much ad revenue and becomes our largest distribution by double.

Richard Branson ~ Business Stripped Bare | Richard Branson’s Official Website & Blog » The (sometimes) painful birth of innovation