Editor’s note: this interview is part of The Fix’s email course on audience building and engagement for editorial leaders by Emma Löfgren. You can subscribe for free to access the whole course.

There’s a lot happening on the European media startup scene with several initiatives exploring a new world beyond traditional journalism.

But sometimes it feels like there’s a gap between small news startups with innovative audience engagement and the media giants with most of the revenue and resources.

Zetland in Denmark is one of few that seem to have bridged the divide.

Founded in 2016, it now has more than 40,000 paying members to the awe of a lot of people in the business. Yet, it still retains a strong focus on its core audience.

In the media world, they’re probably most well known for their ambassador campaigns. In 2019, close to folding, they launched a massive campaign to get their members to help them recruit new members and ended up turning a profit.

I spoke with Zetland CEO Tav Klitgaard to find out how they took the leap from being a startup to a scaleup, and the challenges they’re still facing.

Hi Tav, could you tell me a bit about Zetland?

Zetland is a digital-born journalism outlet, which serves all curious Danes.

We are almost totally member-funded, and that means that whatever we bring to the audience is the value that we get. We started Zetland in 2016 and we’ve been profitable since 2019.

We publish fairly few things. On normal days we publish about four pieces, two of which are kind of current, and two of which are more long-form background analysis pieces.

The last thing that is important to understand is that we publish everything we do in both text and audio. Most of our members prefer to consume us via the ears, so we are actually more of an audio platform than we are a text platform.

You were one of the first media outlets that started doing that, weren’t you?

I think it’s fair to say that at least we were among the first ones to do it properly.

In Denmark, there were other newspapers also doing audio versions of their articles, but audio is not the same as working with text and images. It demands other things of your tech platform than text and images do. We were among the first ones to really nail the experience of listening.

The audio is done by your journalists themselves, isn’t it?

It very much is. What’s super important for us is the personality of the journalists and the trust that you can get by getting very close to the person.

It’s key to us that it’s always, as far as possible, the journalist himself or herself that will narrate the audio version. It’s not a person going into a studio and recording a manuscript. It’s someone going in front of a microphone and telling the story.

There’s a huge difference, and it’s one of the things that make our audio products stand out to competition, because it’s not manuscripts read by a robot or a professional reader, it’s actually a story told by a human being.

I’m curious about the way Zetland addresses the audience on the site. It feels very much to me like there’s a particular kind of Zetland way of talking to audiences. The language is chatty, but still quite precise and direct. Is that just the Danish way of talking or is there thought behind the communication style?

There’s a lot of thought behind that. All companies try to have a tone of voice, and we certainly do. The headline of all our products, be it digital or editorial, is that we want to create a human product.

That means that whatever communication we create should sound like it’s one of your friends talking to you. We don’t believe in this traditional way that media companies will say “we are Dagens Nyheter and we wear a tie and we are the authorities, so trust us”.

I don’t think that’s the way it works any more. You have to have a more personal relationship. Obviously if your tone of voice is very authoritative and “old school”, then you can’t really get to that point where you actually feel that you are doing this together.

We’re just 60 people trying to make the best newspaper in the world. We’re not some machine or some authority, we’re just trying out best, so our members have to help us. Conveying that feeling of being just someone doing the best we can is, I think, important.

*Zetland’s team. Courtesy of Tav Klitgaard*

We always try to think of ways we can be transparent or think of ways where we can admit that we fucked up because it really helps build trust.

What’s more trustworthy, a robot that does everything perfectly or a human being that sometimes makes mistakes? We certainly believe it’s the latter.

We’ve got to talk about Zetland’s ambassador campaigns. Can you tell me a bit about that?

The story behind the ambassador campaign was that back in 2019, we had a very serious management meeting and we were looking each other in the eye and saying, this doesn’t work. We’re growing, but we’re not growing fast enough. It’s not sustainable.

We decided to abandon our old marketing strategy, which was basically to try and see if we could look like a serious professional brand out there, with glossy TV ads and stuff.

Then we changed to a completely different strategy, which was to go out there and tell it as it was: we are going to die if you don’t help us. We communicated how hard it was to make this work, how stressful it was to be us and how much we just really tried our best but couldn’t make it work, and that something had to happen, and we put it out there.

We had an amazing response from a lot of people who were like “oh, I didn’t know that you needed my help, obviously I’m going to help you, how can I help?” And we said “there’s one way you can help and that is to tell your friends about us. Not just say it and not just post it on Facebook, but call your dad and your uncle and tell them about this thing”.

That really worked, and I believe there are three things you have to do.

1. The starting point is that you have to create a product that people actually love. What we did to begin with was to look at our NPS, the net promoter score, and we noticed that it was through the roof. People loved the product – the problem was that not enough people knew about the product. So if you don’t have a product that people love, you’re not able to turn people into ambassadors, but that’s not enough because they won’t do it themselves.

2. Then you have to make it very, very easy for people to help you. There needs to be nicely designed tech, a digital way for people to share your content. People need to understand that they should do it and how to do it. There needs to be a lot of buttons and a lot of communication.

3. Then the last thing, as I usually say, is that people also need a kick in the butt. It’s not enough to have a great product that people want to refer others to and a lot of buttons. You also have to say that now it’s serious. It’s not on Sunday, it’s today. You have to do it now. Call your uncle now. That’s always a bit tricky to do, but that’s what works for us.

Since 2019 when we ran our first campaign, which was very successful and took us to a positive annual result, we’ve repeated it each year.

Each year, we think it’s going to be hard to do it again because the story is different, but we’ve managed to create that buzz each year saying “OK, now it’s time to help Zetland”. It turns out a lot of people want to help us. It’s also something that gives people a social capital because it feels great to help.

The narrative is still that “we need your help”. It’s not like “please, we’ll give you two euros if you help us” but it’s “we need your help – please, please help us”.

The beautiful thing about the ambassador campaign is that last year we recruited about 8,000 new members in three weeks and the effort was shared across, I believe, 2,500 different people. So it’s a lot of people recommending it and attracting one new member, which is just great.

It’s an army of salespeople that you will never be able to recruit in any other way than just asking people for help to do it.

What’s your growth rate like in normal times when you’re not doing these big campaigns? How do you think about your day-to-day marketing?

8,000 new members is definitely a lot for us in three weeks. In normal weeks we basically lose as many customers as we get in, but then we have these bursts of campaigns where we get a lot of new members in.

We had a couple of years in 2020-2022 where we would grow like 40 percent year on year, but those days are long gone. Now we’re back to a more steady and slow growth.

I was wondering if you could talk to me a little bit about your onboarding packages for new members, how does that work?

First of all, it’s very difficult for us to explain the product. That’s a big issue. It’s a different type of newspaper, but we still sell it as a newspaper, and the need that we fill among our audience is the need of a newspaper. But then the problem is when you sign up. Maybe you expect to see [an old-school traditional newspaper like] Dagens Nyheter and this is not Dagens Nyheter. It’s something else.

We know that the biggest issue for people is to get into a habit of listening to news, and that’s why in our onboarding we try to make people try the audio, because we know that if people listen, there’s a much bigger chance that we will retain them – so the onboarding very much consists of “download the app”. Once you have the app, we will work with you and tell you how to use it.

We try to stay away from emails as far as possible, which is because we send a lot of people a lot of emails when it comes to getting readers’ daily attention to the stories that are in the app.

How open or closed is your paywall?

The paywall is interesting because it’s both pretty closed and also totally open. The deal is that if you are a paying member, you can share an article and then all people who click on your specific personal link can read the article for free or listen to it for free.

We’ve actually also pretty recently opened up the app. So you can just download the app from the app store and get started for free. At some point you hit the paywall. That’s a dynamic paywall, so I can’t say that it’s three articles or ten or two, it depends on our testing and whatever works.

How do you work on the pricing?

The pricing is interesting and hard. There are basically three ways to settle on your pricing. One is to look at what it costs, the other is to look at competition, and the third is to look at the value of your product.

Obviously number three is the right thing to do, but it’s very hard because the value of this product is sometimes a little bit fluffy to people, because some of the value is also “well, I want this product to exist”. So we use a combination of the three.

Right now we can see that because of inflation, the product is much more expensive to make than it was three years ago, so that’s a signal that we should raise the prices.

On the other hand, it’s very important for us to be so cheap that most Danes could afford it. It’s always a balance, and I think it’s a big challenge to figure out what is the right price.

You obviously look at Spotify, you look at other legacy newspapers, and then you try to kind of fit somewhere. We of course also ask our members what they think is the fair price, and usually they say a number significantly above what the price is today, which is great (editor’s note: scroll down to the fact box to see Zetland’s current prices).

Do you work with promotional campaigns, like 30 percent off?

We use intro discounts quite a lot. Specifically a pay-what-you-want price in the first month. In the ambassador campaign the communication is basically “whatever you think it’s worth to try this out, pay that”. And that can also be zero. That’s OK with us. We just want you to try it. There’s always a sign-on discount, but of course there’s also the normal, standard price. This is not a cheap product. You have to pay.

If there’s a discount, is it the same discount for everyone or is it dynamic, so that I get one offer and my mother gets another offer?

Sure, you could get a different price than your mother. We’re trying to be smart about that. Being a subscription business, it’s not whatever you pay the first month that matters, so we do use differentiated intro discounts.

How do you marry that with transparency?

By being transparent.

There’s always this thing when there’s an intro discount and your existing customers will sometimes say “why don’t I get this discount?”

The answer is pretty straightforward and most people actually understand it. It’s because it’s also to your benefit if we get more customers in. So actually your price will also stay down. I don’t think here’s anything controversial about that.

Two of Zetland’s co-founders, Jakob Moll and Lea Korsgaard, have both written viral pieces in the past about the challenges of running a media company and asking members for help. You mentioned that even today your message is “we need your help”, but now you’re at a stage where you’re a serious player in the media landscape, not a tiny little startup any more.

When you scale, how does that change the conversation that you have with members? Is there a point when “it’s really hard to run a media company – we need your help” becomes disingenuous?

I totally understand the question, and we’ve also obviously been concerned about that.

I think what we’ve learned is that it’s still true. It hasn’t changed. We actually are very much in need of a good ambassador campaign. If we don’t have that annual membership push, we’re not going to grow – and we have to grow in order to make better journalism and to reach more people to fulfil our mission to have a real impact on our democracy.

It is a numbers game. We need to grow and we don’t have money to grow in an ordinary way – and also we don’t want to – and what we’ve found is there’s actually no difference between being personable to 40,000 than being personable to 3,000 people, which is still more people than you can talk to.

Obviously if we just made loads and loads of money for our owners, then I would probably change that communication, but that’s not the case. What we’re trying to do is to make more money so that we can produce more journalism.

We still haven’t paid our original investors back for whatever they invested ten years ago, so it’s not that someone is being super rich somewhere. We’re making money to make journalism and we’re not making journalism to make money. I think because that’s just super honest, that’s just the way it is, we are able to just communicate that without trying to hide anything. There’s nothing really to hide.

I’m curious about your internal structure as well. It’s fairly easy to manage staff when you’re just a tiny startup. But as you grow, you need more permanent structures for internal communication. How do you make sure that you can manage to keep this audience engagement going and keep everyone on the same page as you scale?

To be honest, that’s super hard, because we get new employees in and they’re not used to it and they don’t understand the basics. But in employee onboarding, that’s basically the only thing we talk about and the culture in our office is very much centered around that.

Culture is a very hard thing to talk about. It’s almost something you have to experience. But we do have a lot of “cultural artifacts” in our office and when people experience it, they’re like “oh, now I get it”. That’s why you can onboard people.

The thing we always end up talking about is the morning song. We sing a song. All 60 employees every morning at 8.45am, we sing a song. That’s one of the ways that we try to maintain a culture where we always help each other and where we’re always transparent.

I believe very much that the culture we have in the office is also the culture that we will reflect in our content, our product. I realise that when we talk about it, it gets a little bit fluffy. But usually when we have people visiting us in the office they’re like “oh, OK, now I get it, this is why it works”.

But it’s not like magic, these things do not happen unless you have a very clear strategy – and also, we as founders and managers, we have to go first and allow ourselves to be transparent, use emotions and be real people.

I think in many ways that has proven to be fairly successful for us. I won’t say that we don’t have cultural issues. We definitely do. And it is hard as you grow to keep the original sense of mission, but I think that’s something we’re very conscious about.

Also, now we have around ten managers in the company. That’s a lot. Neither Lea nor I meet everyone every day. Sometimes, to be honest, it can be hard to know the names of the most recent employees. That’s just a different thing than when you’re 20 and everyone is just in the same boat.

We use quite a lot of energy trying to keep the hierarchy flat, but I realise that, as they say, from the top all pyramids appear flat. It’s a challenge to keep that thing going, but I think so far we are fairly successful, and I think if you asked our members, they would also say that they feel pretty close to us.

We don’t feel like a brand or an institution or an authority. Well, yes, maybe an authority, but it’s not because we put on a tie. It’s because we are human beings.

What are your long-term future plans for Zetland?

They’re magnificent. We have three legs in our strategy and the first leg is that we are not done at all.

We need to continue to develop the product that we know as Zetland. We also think that we can continue to grow quite a lot in Denmark. We actually think we can double the size in Denmark over the coming three or four years.

We also feel that we need to prove Zetland’s worth as a concept outside of Denmark, and that’s why we have opened an office in Helsinki now and hope that the Finnish public are interested in what we’re trying to give them. That’s what we’re currently trying to find out.

And then the last leg is to try and continue to be innovative. We now have what we internally call an incubator and last year we created a new company, a tech spin-off called Good Tape, which works with transcription. That has been wonderful because it’s a way to pay back our investors by not selling journalism, but we can sell tech.

Obviously it would be great if we could create such a company more than once. We also created a publishing house last year to try and see if books could be a part of the Zetland package. And we also sell for example our distribution technology, the app, the website to other publishers who are trying to get into the same kind of numbers that we have.

So those are the three legs: growing in Denmark, growing outside of Denmark, and then innovating outside of the core.

Could you tell me a bit more about your venture in Finland? It’s not the same brand, is it?

No, it’s not. It’s not going to be called Zetland. We’re going to ask the Finnish public what it should be called.

Here’s the basic idea. We have what I call a product market fit in Denmark, there’s a product here that people are willing to pay for, and which will move us closer to our mission to support democracy. Once you’ve seen that, it becomes obvious that it should not only be for Danes, and we strongly believe that there is a gap in the Finnish market.

It’s not going to be us. We don’t know Finnish. We don’t know the Finnish market. But we have found four people who we believe in and who are trying to figure out whether there is room for a media outlet like Zetland in the market. But it’s up to the Finnish public to say.

Again, we need their help. We don’t have anywhere near enough money to just go in and say, here it is. So we need them to basically tell us that they want it. And if they tell us that, we are super excited to try and see what it means to be Zetland-ish in Finland.

This interview will presumably be read by a lot of news leaders who are where you were a few years ago: they have an audience base, but now need to get revenue out of them to be able to thrive or even survive. What are your recommendations for someone in that position?

It depends on what their challenge is, but what I see a lot is that people when they’re struggling compromise on, for instance, their business model and they say “OK, let’s run some ads” or “OK, let’s hire some freelancers instead of doing the journalism we really want to do”. It’s easy to say and very hard to do, but I think that’s the wrong strategy.

I think that there are way too many media entrepreneurs that are like “OK, let’s see what we can do with two people in the basement”. I think what we did right with Zetland was to say no, it’s 30 people in a proper office and then we will lose some money.

If you have the right business plan and if you are savvy enough, my suggestion would always be to see if you can talk to an investor or your bank or something, because you need to start bigger.

If you want to create a habit among people, you can’t do that with a Substack newsletter that comes once a month. It’s just not going to take you to that very intimate relationship with the customers where the member comes back each day and trusts you to deliver their daily or weekly news cycle.

That’s probably the thing I see the most. People just start too small and are also not serious about the fact that journalism is an experience, not some content that is distributed in a void. You have to think about the full customer journey of how do you sign up to this? What’s the experience when you consume the product? Is it audio? Is it video? Is it text? Is it a hologram? You have to think about those things, because it’s not enough to have great journalism. It has to be delivered and packaged in the right way.

And then I think the last thing is try to be a human because that’s actually what people will pay for in the future.

Is there anything that you’ve done wrong along the way? You mentioned talking about failures, so what’s your biggest failure?

I mean, we fucked up so many times. The marketing that we did in the first years was a failure. I think we actually probably did start too small, that was a failure. We should have been even bigger from the beginning.

We messed up when we initially tried to launch video in our app. It didn’t work. People didn’t want it. We spent way too much time figuring that out.

We’ve been through a couple of shit storms in Denmark, that’s not a good way to talk to your customers. We hired the wrong people, we fired the wrong people. I mean, it’s just going to be one huge highway of fuck-ups, and it certainly has been for us.

I think what we’ve learned is that it’s true that you can turn a mistake into an upside for you if you just dare to communicate about it transparently. Our members react positively when we say “OK, we messed up, sorry”, because it builds trust.

Media companies are usually not very good at admitting their mistakes, but you always have a lot of mistakes that you could admit.

Zetland in facts and figures

How big is Zetland’s staff? Around 60 people, including 32 on the core editorial teams, five on visuals and social media content production, six on the product team, six on the growth team (including Zetland Live), and administrative roles.

How big is Zetland’s audience? More than 40,000 members.

What’s the revenue model? This year the forecast is approximately 85 percent direct member payments, ten percent government grants and five percent tech sales etc.What’s the price of membership? Standard €18.6/month, family (four seats) €22.6/month, 1 year = 10x monthly price, student €6.7/month, four students €10,7/month.

Source of the cover photo: courtesy of Tav Klitgaard

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