Digital News Accelerator

A Scale-Up, Not a Start-Up

From the very outset, the programme was designed to be distinct from a typical incubator, focusing on helping organisations that already have a certain level of maturity to scale up. The scale-ready digital news media organisations that were chosen had established services, products, customers, and revenue streams. These included ThePrint, Behan Box, The News Minute, and The Current. Quicksand’s primary objective was to work with these mature businesses to expand their operations, market share, and workforce capabilities. Core principles of design thinking guided our approach, emphasising user-centric and experimentation-driven methodologies.

The organisations were onboarded through a series of design thinking workshops that helped sharpen the problems they were looking to address under this program and define clear, measurable goals with accompanying work plans to help achieve them.  Our focus was on delivering a highly customised and flexible programme, thereby tailoring it to the distinct context of each participant. This included:

• Bespoke process: A custom approach designed around the specific challenges identified for each participant, which comprised a range of activities covering research, design and monitoring & evaluation.
• Bespoke set of activities supported by a dedicated team with relevant skills.
• Access to industry mentors and experts specifically matched to the startup’s context

Implementing the Incubator

The aim was to coach and advise teams one-on-one over 12 months, providing subject matter expertise, a deep dive into “best practices”, and substantial cohort-based support. The initial months of the program were critical in setting direction and accelerating the learning on the fundamentals of user-centered design. Below are some key considerations of how the program was implemented:

Cultivating a Product and User-thinking Mindset: Many media organisations lack a product mindset, and user-centred thinking despite being digital-first businesses. Most companies invest little in understanding digital behaviours of their users, operating mostly in traditional ways while having an increasingly online presence. The challenge was to help these start-ups build digital products that people love by applying user-centred design thinking principles. We spent the initial month helping organisations articulate their objectives and challenges better through a co-design sprint. For instance, almost all participants faced the challenge of building sustainable revenue models, getting people to pay for content in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. Through our design-led process, we helped these organisations take stock of their challenges and develop plans to tackle them over a year. Through co-design workshops, we helped the startups understand their audience, brand positioning, and their key value proposition. Rather than making decisions solely based on business economics and industry trends, we encouraged a user-centred inquiry to understand audiences better. For example, Behanbox opted for an invite-only membership to build confidence in its offering rather than launching a full-fledged subscription model. This approach, focused on experimentation and iterative processes, is innovative in an industry that prioritises maximising paid subscribers. Hands-On Support Phase: The programme included a hands-on support phase over 6-7 months, which included  regular check-ins, problem-solving, and user research facilitation. It also included workshops on vision articulation, business modelling, and revising pitches for further funding from the Google News Initiative (GNI).

Behanbox, a young feminist outfit, benefited greatly from our business modelling canvas. We helped them list their key target audiences, sources of revenue, and organisational goals. This structured approach significantly improved their pitch to GNI, resulting in successful funding. We also conducted UX/UI audits for ThePrint and The News Minute (TNM), providing feedback on their websites. We assisted TNM, ThePrint, and Behanbox with user research to better understand their audiences and inform their subscription offerings. This phase was crucial for all participants, leading to well-articulated and thought-through objectives. Bespoke Engagement: Each engagement was bespoke. For example, while with Behanbox the focus was on people’s willingness to pay for specialised gender news content, with TNM, we conducted a UX audit and assisted with their subscription model. On the other hand, The Current, a Pakistan-based start-up, needed strategies to drive website traffic and implement Urdu content.

We also explored how these publications approach social media. Media consumption happens significantly on social networks, and platforms like The Current and ThePrint have robust social media strategies. However, they often need guidance on managing their consumer base across different platforms and converting social media followers into paying subscribers.

Curating a Mentorship Network

A major value proposition Quicksand offered was mentorship sessions that exposed participants to insights from adjacent fields. A key aspect of this was leveraging our own professional network, which enabled us to bring in experts to share their experiences and strategies.

For instance, despite the programme being focused on news media, we had the founder of Tata 1MG, a digital healthcare platform, share his insights on subscription models, discussing the subscription funnel, referral strategies, and Care Plan experiments. These lateral inspirations proved valuable for media start-ups to learn from.

Similarly, we facilitated a session on subscription and language strategy with the Indian Express, a leading print newspaper. The highlights included an in-depth look at the subscription mental model, the Indian Express's subscription journey since 2019, and various subscription experiments they have run since then, such as metered, premium, and hybrid subscription models. The session also covered the impact of these strategies and the learnings of them, particularly in regional languages.

Towards the end of the program, we hosted a session on UX and design with Miranj, a strategic web design and development studio. This session focused on the importance of offering good design and user experience. Key takeaways included the significance of content, raising the UX bar, enhancing organic discovery and reach, and making websites search engine friendly. The session also delved into the need for a robust information architecture (IA), explaining how it can unlock future flexibilities and possibilities.

These mentorship sessions were highly beneficial for the participants, offering diverse insights and learnings from industry experts, which are crucial for fostering innovation and growth in their respective fields.

A Design-Focused, Practice-Led Incubator

Our approach to this project, similar to our other incubation projects, was design-led. We are a practice-led incubator, backed by a design studio that actively builds proof of concepts and new ventures, offering a ringside view of what it takes to innovate. This practical experience is a significant differentiator from other incubators.

We prioritise understanding user needs, going beyond standard market research practices. In this program, the goal was to provide the cohort with tools and methods to deeply understand customers, craft strategies as smaller experiments, and develop prototypes. This design-led process is fundamental across all our incubation projects.

We also helped participants craft narratives around the success or failure of their experiments, what they learned, and how best to present these learnings to the wider GNI ecosystem. This was also crucial for securing further funding from GNI, as they needed to hit certain milestones before moving on to the next stage.  Ensuring pitches are backed by evidence and compelling stories is a key area we support.

In summary, our design-led incubation offers capacity building, practical experience, and a user-centred approach, making it highly relevant for today’s media platforms.

At the end of a rigorous 12-month programme, the project successfully drove a change in mindset among the participants, helping them approach decisions with a user-centred lens and fostering a culture of innovation within their organisations.

As part of the project wrap-up, we created a case study that highlights key themes, broad learnings, and examples of what publishers attempted and their impact. The purpose was to create a sector-specific toolkit, that can be a resource for the wider news ecosystem, sharing learnings and experiments that others can benefit from.