Iașul Nostru (Romania) is a newsletter-first publication writing for and with the community in the city of Iași in the east of the country. The newsroom aims to inform residents through their solutions-focused weekly briefing and to ensure representation of marginalized groups within their community. They joined the Accelerator with the goal of growing its product offering to reach and engage new users. Here’s their explanation of how the programme helped them.

Going into the Transition Accelerator, our main challenge at Iașul Nostru was that our organic rate of growth was not fast enough to reach product-market fit before the end of our initial funding from the Substack Local program. In order to become sustainable, we needed to grow our audience.

Our weekly briefing was getting high engagement among our subscribers, but it was not widely shared, which limited our ability to reach new audience segments, so we explored new product ideas which could reach new readers.

In the first 18 months, the most requested feature by our subscribers was to create separate resources that highlight some of the best places, local businesses and activities in our city.

During the Accelerator we were introduced to tools that assisted us with prioritizing our activities, including an Impact Effort matrix – categorizing tasks into four quadrants (high impact/low effort; high impact/high effort; low impact/low effort; low impact/high effort). Following this exercise we decided that the fastest way to grow our audience in a short timeframe would be to develop a series of local guides as lead magnets for paid acquisition on social media. We offered the guides to readers for free in exchange for registration, and used social media ads to reach our target group.

It worked: in just four months, we almost doubled our free subscriber list from 2,800 at the end of February to over 5,300 at the end of June.

This validated our hypothesis that there is an under-served user need for thoughtfully curated content that helps locals discover and explore the best of what our city has to offer. Going forward, we plan to integrate local guides as a monthly format and look for other information gaps that we can cover from a distinct, local perspective.

The biggest takeaway for us is that while organic reach is effective for news products on social media, paid acquisition is still a very efficient mechanism for capturing leads and growing your subscriber base.

We are deeply grateful to the International Press Institute for supporting and guiding us in our effort of leveraging local guides through paid acquisition to build a sustainable local news startup.