Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is the focus of the content? What is the editorial strategy of Little Things?

Joe Speiser: The whole goal for Little Things – and what we’ve stuck with since the beginning – has been uplifting content – the opposite of what the nightly news represents. Our goal was to stop this constant flow of negativity. Everyday there’s a robbery, kidnapping, or murder but who wants to be constantly bombarded with that? Even though murder is down significantly in the US, the amount of reported news of it has gone up in the opposite direction. We’re now bombarded with more negativity than we ever had before, just because of the way the Internet is set up. Everything is at your fingertips and the notification just keeps coming through.

Every media outlet makes a lot of money off negativity. We thought we’d try something different with this and it’s been working. We’re literally putting out as much positive news as we can and people are actually interested in spreading good news. I think when you watch or read something that makes you feel good inside, you want to share that feeling with the people closest to you. That’s the emotions that we’ve tapped into here at Little Things. It feels good because for the first time, we’re getting tons of fan mails about how we’ve changed people’s lives – how this keeps their spirits up or how they’re struggling with one issue or another and they found something that they were able to relate to with the content that we’re putting out there. It’s certainly a very rewarding feeling to be able to, not just run a profitable business, but to also be doing something good.

Sramana Mitra: Your Little Things is positioned against Upworthy.

Joe Speiser: No, people had made that connection before. I actually don’t see that. Maybe in the beginning, there was a connection. But Upworthy is now all about cause-based marketing. They’ve become very heavy. It’s about gay/lesbian rights or obesity. They’ve gotten very political. These are very heavy topics that we don’t tackle. We’re looking for the stuff that makes you feel better than when you came to us. Something that boosts you up and not to make you feel uncomfortable and challenge your belief system.

Sramana Mitra: Talk about how that correlates with the Facebook algorithm change. You said your Facebook page was hit by this algorithm change. However, you’re still using Facebook as a key customer acquisition strategy. What can we learn from you on that?

Joe Speiser: When we spoke with Facebook in August 2014, they were very clear on what they were looking. They wanted to preserve the user experience both on and off the news feed, which means when someone clicks one of these links and they go off of Facebook, Facebook is now looking at what those pages look like and making sure that they meet a certain standard. What does that mean? It means that they want to ensure that there’s not more ads than content. The content has to be significant enough to warrant the advertisements. If you’re putting a five-second video of a puppy rolling over and there are 800 ads on the page, that’s a very poor user experience.

They’re looking for no more than one ad above the fold. They’re looking for a block in a lot of the campaigns that Facebook themselves doesn’t allow to advertise. It could be weight loss, muscle gain, or make money from home – all the shady type advertisements. In addition to that, they’re looking very closely at how valuable your content is based on how long their users spend time reading or watching it. If a reader clicks on your fan page and only spends 30 seconds on that site, Facebook is going to rank that page as poor and they’re going to lower it in the news feed because it’s not interesting enough to engage the user for longer than 30 seconds.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things
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