Welcome to a Friday edition of Unmade. Time (already!) for our second end of year update. Those who’ve been with us for a while will know this is where I share the behind-the-scenes story of Unmade as both a publication and a business. The idea is to tell you as much about what went wrong as went right. For those interested in business publishing, I’ve got plenty of both. For those who have a day job away from publishing, feel free to skip today’s (long!) effort.

Before I jump in, this is a good moment to let you know there will never be a better time to become a paying member of Unmade. The reason to do so today is that we’ve kicked off an end of year offer. If you sign up before Friday December 23, you’ll get a discount of 48% on our usual price of $650 - taking it down to $338. There’ll never be as big a discount again.

Get 48% off forever

Along with access to our regular paywalled content, including the Tuesdata archive, you also get discounts on attending our events. I’ll be telling you about our next one, further down.

Taking out a paying membership is also a great way for you and your company to support our independent journalism.

It was a very fairly good year

Every once in a while I see an image go past on social media.

On one side is a straight line graph of an arrow shooting smoothly upwards. On the other is a scribble, although the graph ends in the same place. The two images represent what success looks like from the outside, and from within.

Back in September, sitting at our table at the Publish Awards in Sydney, the graph came to mind. Sitting next to me was my business partner of the previous seven months.

In front of us were two trophies - Unmade had won launch of the year, and I had been named columnist of the year. Winning launch of the year mattered a lot for our credibility as a new player. Our first year of financial support from email platform Substack was about to come to an end which meant we were weeks away from being free to launch our advertising offering into a crowded and competitive market. 

It was already an unsettling night. It was my first time back at an event run by Mumbrella, the company I had helped start and was now, in some ways, a competitor. It was the same for my business partner; we’d worked together for several years at Mumbrella before he joined me at Unmade. Although we were made to feel welcome on the night, it was strange for both of us being audience members at an event we knew so well.

However, the night was far more bittersweet than anyone else in the room was aware at the time.

In July I’d arrived back in Australia after an extended stay in the UK (my plan to be based there for four years while doing Unmade had changed, in part because of a change in my relationship status). On my first morning back, over coffee at the Sydney Novotel, my business partner had told me he wanted to leave the business. He had not enjoyed the stressful process of helping start a small company.

Aware that I can at times be (unreasonably) demanding, I wanted to know if it was anything I’d done. That was not the case, he reassured me. 

It was a setback. From the start, I’d structured Unmade as a business, rather than myself as a sole proprietor. My plan was (and is) for Unmade to be much bigger than just me.

While I’d concentrated on writing, my business partner had focused on building the basic infrastructure of the business - getting our accounting set up on Xero, organising future staff employment templates, liaising with the accountants, developing sales contracts; all of the non-fun bits.

He’d also masterminded our first community building event, which we ran in a pub in Surry Hills, back in May. We’d focused on the subject of marketing in a cost of living crisis, which proved to be a good choice, given how inflation exploded afterwards.

Before he finished up as a staffer, he also led the development of our first media kit and advertising rate card, and sold in the sponsorships on our Sydney and Melbourne community events. He was a textbook good leaver.

By this point we had some early data to demonstrate our progress

As of yesterday, we’ve got 12,480 people on our email database.

By the way, the reason the graph above is flat for the first few months is that I originally launched this publication on Substack as a personal project called Fifth Day, which then went dormant while I wrote my book Media Unmade.

I gather that our database is now bigger than that claimed by MI-3, and beginning to close on AdNews. Certainly it’s the fastest growing, which is no bad thing for a media kit.

Typically we now get more than 10,000 successful deliveries when we send an email.

Usually, my Saturday Best of the Week post performs best, generally getting more than 5,000 opens. The best to date got 6,874; that’s about the same as the Best of the Week email I used to write for Mumbrella.

We also currently have 246 paying members. I suspect they have varying motivations for supporting us.

Some do so for reasons of rational self interest; they see value in the extra content they get access to, along with reduced price on our events, and receiving some of our emails before everyone else.

And I also have a hunch that a number of them do it simply because they want to support us. It’s been heartening to see senior executives from big players in the media subscription space walk the walk and support us through subscribing.

As you’ll see, our annualized subscription revenue now equates to $44,053. The three upward jumps on the chart are the previous occasions where we’ve offered a discount on our full $650 price. Even an industry that understands behavioural economics appreciates a time limited bargain.

People who subscribe get to lock in the original price when they renew. So if you are thinking about signing up to the current $338 offer, there won’t be a better time.

Get 48% off forever

In itself, that $44,000 isn’t enough to sustain a big business, but if it continues to grow, and sits along revenue lines for advertising and events, things start to look interesting in the medium term.

As a business owner, you always remember the first supporters who bet on you early. At Mumbrella, back in 2009, our very first advertiser was Nick Holmes a Court’s BuzzNumbers (which was later bought by iSentia).

On the permanent record this time is that Unmade’s first event sponsors were Howatson & Co in Sydney and Beatgrid in Melbourne.

By the time my colleague finished up as a staffer, we had our first advertisers locked in for our October advertising launch. ThinkPremiumDigital was first, quickly followed by Paramount and then Southern Cross Austereo’s Listnr. Ask me again in a decade, and I’ll still remember who was there at the start.

Meanwhile, I suggested a new arrangement to my former business partner. Although no longer a staffer, he would stay as a director of the company (I’ll get to the significance of that in a moment) while I weighed up whether to apply to the bank for an overdraft facility.

And he would still work on our future events on a freelance basis. That would include our first community building event in Melbourne, and our first full conference, early in 2023. With retail media beginning to explode, it struck me that it was tine for the channel to get its own local event.

It wasn’t a perfect arrangement, but it was a decent way of keeping momentum. Until it wasn’t.

Incidentally, this article isn’t going quite where you might suspect. 

You have probably noticed I haven’t mentioned my former business partner by name here. That’s not because of any antipathy (there isn’t). He deserves much of the credit for helping set Unmade on a path to success. We wouldn’t be where we are without him. He has seen this piece prior to publication.

Those in the industry, will already know who I’m talking about - it’s not a secret. However, out of respect to protecting his name from the vagaries of search engines, I’m not using it here. You’ll understand why in a moment.

Here’s what went wrong. The first bit was just business. The second, a bit messier.

Diversified, the owner of Mumbrella, poached him back with an offer too good to refuse. Good for him, bad for me, but that’s the snakes and ladders of startups.

Although he did a diligent handover, Diversified insisted that although he was not going back to Mumbrella a few weeks, he should immediately drop his work for Unmade, a kind of reverse gardening leave.

The main inconvenience of this was that he had already put in significant work into the retail media event. It meant that our new curator - and I’ll come on to that announcement later - would have to ask some of the retail media community’s key industry players to talk to us for a second time.

Diversified is perfectly entitled to put its elbows out a little, by the way. Publishing is a competitive industry, and there’s nothing wrong with taking the opportunity to inconvenience a rival. I’ve enjoyed doing it myself in my Mumbrella days, so I’m not going to whine about it.

In the space of a couple of days I’d gone from thinking I had an events plan for the next few months, to my former partner’s resignation as a company director sitting in my inbox.

Although I had zero concerns about his honesty, we began the steps to remove him from the company bank account. He called ANZ himself, and was told I’d need to do the honours in my local branch.

I say local - being in rural Tasmania means it’s almost a two hour round trip to my nearest ANZ. Imagine my delight at the first attempt when I rocked up at 4.10pm to discover they closed at 4pm. The next day I tried again, showing up with a printout of his ASIC form showing his resignation as a director, just in case.

It was another unsuccessful trip. The ANZ staffer informed me that actually, I could not remove my former colleague from the account - I would need his signature too. He gave me a form to get my business partner to sign and return.

It wasn’t as if this was a disgruntled employee, so although it seemed odd, I took the form and emailed it to my ex-colleague, who immediately signed it and put it in the post.

What happened next was unfortunate timing to say the least. While it was still in the post, he took a phone call…

The caller identified themselves to him as a member of the ANZ fraud team. Unfortunately, the voice on the phone told him, as an Optus customer, his account details had leaked onto the internet and his personal credit card had been used at an Aldi in Perth.

My ex-colleague informed the caller that everything looked fine. While they were talking, an SMS arrived. It seemed to come from the usual ANZ text number. It said that somebody had just put through a payment for a Netflix subscription in Perth.

This professional sounding man, with a British accent, kept him on the line as, in real time, he apparently helped to protect the bank account.

Over several calls they battled this apparent attempt to compromise the account. At one point the caller urged my ex-colleague to Google the bank’s number and confirm that was indeed the number he’d called him on.

The man on the phone told him that they needed to max out his daily transfer limit of $25,000 before the scammer could. He told him he was creating a new, safe bank account in his name.

Because ANZ had not allowed me to remove him, my former colleague still had access to the Unmade bank account, so he transferred $25,000 out of it, as coached by the man on the phone.

In a brief respite, he called to update me. As it happened, I was about to step on stage for Unmade’s event in Melbourne so was pressed for time.  He told me I’d see $25k move from the company bank account, but not to worry, it would be back in the morning.

The next day, after flying back home to Tasmania from Melbourne, I instead saw another $6k had vanished from the account, which was now just about empty.

I called my former colleague and he told me the whole story. When he got to the part about knowing the caller was genuine because the phone number matched, my heart sank. As you may know, phone numbers can be spoofed. Call ANZ himself just to be sure, I urged him. He was still confident that everything was above board, but agreed to do so. 

I did the same. It took me about an hour to get through to someone, which is something of a flaw in ANZ’s service levels when fraud is afoot.

As you’ve no doubt already guessed, it quickly became clear that the voice on the line to my business partner had been the real scammer. Because the transfer was in the previous working day, most of the money was gone, and hasn’t come back.

As it happens, there was another small twist.

The ANZ staffer on the fraud team informed me that his colleague in the Burnie branch had been wrong in telling me that I could not remove my colleague from the account; they should have done it when I first went in. My signature alone was sufficient authority. He told me to go back again to my branch in the morning and get my business partner removed.

That’s one of the impacts on businesses of being scammed, by the way: the sheer amount of lost time involved in the bureaucracy when otherwise you’d be focused on the business. That week Unmade went a couple of extra days without publishing anything.

So I headed out for another long drive to ANZ Burnie to shut the stable door. What happened next was beside the point, but left me astonished. I explained to the cashier that my company bank account had been emptied, and I urgently needed to remove a signatory, so she fetched a colleague.

This colleague informed me that she was in the middle of another appointment and couldn’t help. No problem, I said; I’d wait as long as necessary. Not possible, she told me. I’d need to make an appointment. The next available one was 10am on Tuesday. At this point, it was Thursday. Disbelievingly, I made the appointment, and left, with the stable door still swinging in the wind.

The next part of this story is in limbo. I’ve formally complained to ANZ, arguing that as it was their mistake that left my colleague able to access the company account, they should make good the fraud. Three weeks on, I’m still waiting to hear the outcome on that. There’s always the Australian Financial Complaints Authority if the ANZ complaint does not go my way.

It’s been more stressful than you might think. It is, after all, only money, and it didn’t actually risk the viability of the company. Nonetheless it has cost me sleep.

With my colleague departed, I didn’t have staff salaries to pay (thank goodness). Eighteen months in, other than making payments into my super fund, I haven’t yet taken any money out of the business. Mind you, thanks to that first year of support from Substack, I haven’t needed to put any in either, which I’m quite proud of.

The ANZ fraud changed our trajectory a little though. I decided to pause my attempts to hire an additional journalist this side of Christmas.

And I’d been weighing up whether to directly hire a sales person, or to use a sales house. As you’ll have seen, we’re now being repped by Peter Wiltshire and Jane Stucci’s We Think Media.

More by accident rather than design we’ve become a company with a lot of outsourced help.

I spend an hour a month on the phone with a professional bookkeeper who coaches me in the complexities of Xero and payment platform Stripe and helps me think aloud about the direction of the business.

The Unmade Index is updated each day from the UK by Rosa-Lee Oster, who built the thing in the first place.

All of our audio content is produced and edited by Abe’s Audio. Even when I (regularly) mess up my recording settings, they somehow manage to make it sound good.

The curation and organisation of our next event is taking place on a similarly outsourced basis. The curation of our March retail media event is being led by Cat McGinn (cat@unmade.media). We worked together on Mumbrella way back in the day. Amongst other events, Cat was the creator of the CommsCon conference, which has stood the test of time because she dived deep into the community when she first curated it. Cat will work alongside experienced B2B marketer Belinda Cusack (events@unmade.media) who is leading the logistics of our retail media event.

We’ll be launching RE:Made shortly.

That will be the signal for Unmade to start looking forward again. I can feel all that old event excitement returning. The thing I used to love doing at Mumbrella was to spot an emerging trend and help bring a new community together. That’s the case with retail media (which is not to be confused with Mumbrella’s Retail Marketing Summit, by the way; despite the similar names, it’s a different subject area).

Hopefully you’d like to support Unmade in the next steps of our journey. My aim is for us to be a thoughtful, alternative voice in the sector, rather than yet another conduit of the same press releases.

The idea is that everything we do with Unmade contributes context and analysis not available elsewhere.

There are a number of tangible ways you can support that.

First, please tell a friend or colleague to sign up to he free email. Much of our growth so far has come via word of mouth.

And, as I said earlier, you can move that to the next stage, by taking out your company credit card and become a paying member. 

Get 48% off forever

More tangibly yet, if your business is in the business of talking to marketers and the wider communications world, then give us an opportunity to respond to your next brief. Trade marketers who want to talk to the industry’s freshest database are welcome to reach out to unmade@wethinkmedia.com.au. I’m not just saying this: our premium ad slots for the next quarter are beginning to fill up.

It’s been a bumpy year, even for a startup. I’m ready for the holidays, and to come back refreshed for 2023.

Despite the startup pains, I’m confident Unmade will make it. Win. or lose, it’s going to be a great story to tell.

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Unmade Index: Down again

The Unmade Index of ASX-listed media and marketing stocks saw a significant fall for the third day in a row on Thursday, dropping by another 1.84% to 659.4 points.

The biggest faller was Seven West Media, down by 3.37% yesterday.

The Market Herald, rocked by boardroom turbulence including the ongoing attempt to oust founder Jag Sanger, recovered slightly yesterday after losing 10% when trading resumed on Tuesday.

Beyond the Bass

Time for me to leave you to your Friday. Qantas permitting, I’ll be somewhere over the Bass Strait, heading back home to Tasmania from a work trip to Sydney, as you receive this.

I’ll be back with Best of the Week tomorrow.

In the meantime, thank you for supporting Unmade just be reading. I don’t take it for granted.

Have a great day.

Toodlepip…

Tim Burrowes

tim@unmade.media