The GC Minute

First up, what is it?

The GC Minute is a weekly newsletter based on the Gold Coast that pulls together the week's top hyper-local city stories and trending internet content in a fun, brief, and direct way. It is emailed out every Thursday at 4:20 p.m. and also published online.

Leading up to each Thursday, I sift through a stack of local and trending media, focusing on summarising business, tech, local news, and critical Gold Coast city insights—areas I know the town has heaps to offer but are sometimes hard to find. Then, it’s boiled down into a single email you can read in a few minutes.

I like to think of it as a digital and more modern version of a local paper or magazine that takes only a few minutes to read, without the daily inbox spam, an overflowing letterbox or a paywalled website.

Where the inspiration comes from

I’ve never been a journalist or worked in a media production business (aside from helping to write my year four school newsletter in Brisbane..). However, I’ve always been good at finding content and keeping up with local, national, and international media.

After being stood down in 2020 due to COVID-19 and about ten years working in corporate marketing and eCommerce roles, I built a small eCommerce and digital services business to help keep the bills paid. As this business grew, I helped clients in liquor retailing, wine, craft beer, and sporting goods industries build and grow multi-site eCommerce extensions of their business. Over a few years of doing this, I recognised that I could use these skills to build some product for myself one day.

Looking back to 2020, everyone was incredibly dialled into local media on a whole new level. Living a few hundred metres away from the border in Kirra, all media was consumed with border pass updates and which special services could cross, amongst heaps of internet debate and chatter.

Wanting to know more about what was going on further afield, I built a small hobby website (abovefoldnews.com), mainly for my interest. It would pull together top headlines from the largest, centre-focused media in Europe, America, Australia, and South America. This was an attempt to get a quick live snapshot of how things were evolving worldwide, and I suppose it was my first attempt at building a media utility. It wasn’t pretty, but it served a purpose. As the Covid times disappeared, so did the need for it.

I've been in the digital space for years and have been closely following content of all sorts, especially newsletters. I’d been regularly following the Morning Brew out of the US. These niche content channels often focus on business, tech, local media, and startups, which got me thinking about trying something here.

On the local digital content front, I’d say Inside GC is probably the crew killing it on the Gold Coast with their focus on food, bars, hospitality trends, and events.

Unfortunately, not long after, I found some of the versions I was reading; even though they were still young and growing, were bought out and changed quite a bit from how they started.

As I read more of these trending and content newsletters, the glaringly obvious need in the Gold Coast market became evident. As Australia’s sixth largest city, we only had the Gold Coast Bulletin. Sure, it’s a beast and runs an actual paper as well, but online, it is totally paywalled, something I wanted to try and avoid when doing this by focusing heavily on our newsletter approach.

Here’s how we grew our subscribers and one hard step we had to overcome

I didn’t know what to expect initially; aside from that, giving this a shot would be a total grind and an uphill battle to get some traction, as we were coming from a zero base. This would require a solid commitment over a few months to see if I could make this thing seem interesting to at least a few people.

I knew of the successful models that inspired some of the content I read, so I started out the same way: letting a small group of friends and family and a small network of local business owners know and getting them to sign up.

From here, dropping some posts into good local Facebook and Reddit communities helped. People were really positive, supportive, and constructive in their feedback 99% of the time. The internet can be tricky, and someone will always love or hate what you do, but overall, it seemed like people were keen to just have another option, and the data and engagement coming through were really high.

Subscriber growth hit a bit of a wall at about eight months in, however. I remember calling businesses and cold-emailing them to let them know about us and see if they would be keen to sign up. I tried to keep pace, writing back to every Facebook comment and sharing to my social media profiles despite not having much of a following of my own.

When I started out doing this, though, I’d promised myself to stick with it for at least 12-24 months and see how it goes. The data told me the product-market fit was there; it just had to keep going.

Finally, in December 2023, I experimented with contributing financially. I took a small portion of what we were making from my small digital services business and put it into paid ads, which instantly increased our subscriber numbers.

We haven’t looked back from there regarding using social media as our most significant growth driver and have an effective framework to work off. However, as a small, bootstrapped media brand, we don’t have much more than a few hundred dollars a month and have had to take it easy and not overextend ourselves. I’ve got no doubt that one of our writers’ links or articles will tick a box and get shared with some sort of local virality, but until then, we think we've found a winning formula with social media to help get the word out to more locals on the GC.

What hasn’t been difficult is the unwavering support of my wife, Jess, despite having 2-year-old twins and another on the way. She hears me talk about media all the time and backs my commitment to it as I think she can see that I might be able to turn this into a business that becomes bigger than what I’ve been doing.

Plans for 2024 and beyond

I’ve always seen our newsletter as having more of a hyper-local digital media or magazine-type content style approach. This style simply made it easier for readers to get a quick take on the week’s local happenings by summarising and linking outward to the content in full where needed for a deeper read. Still, as it has evolved, the newsletter has enabled us to bring on local contributors and journalists to enhance the hyper-local media focus, particularly from differing points of view.

Accordingly, Courtney Mulder and Marshall Hall, both incredibly talented in their own right, came on board earlier this year. This extra dynamic and their contributions have only added to The GC Minute, given their passionate community, hinterland, technology, and business focus and experience.

It would be great to get more local contributors and bring a deeper hyper-local focus to the content, but it takes so much time, and given that we don’t pay a paywall, advertising is vital. Maybe some type of subscription option will be possible in the future, but for now, our readers like what we’re doing, especially our polls, so we’ll keep doing just that.

Earlier this year, following some requests in my close network, we also built other versions for a few local Queensland areas, namely up in the Redlands, Brisbane's eastern suburbs, and Toowoomba. Aside from a few very early speed bumps with the increased load, it seemed to work, so we’ve stuck with it.

Overall, the product market fit feels like it’s there. We are at 30,000-40,000 monthly reads across the newsletters alone, not including the websites, with the Gold Coast Minute being the largest, and we are looking forward to maintaining the momentum so that locals continue to enjoy the read.