Extreme Launch

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, June 1, 2001 by Deborah J. Schwab

An innovative Web-based approach let this entrepreneur skip costly direct-mail efforts and launch a profitable niche magazine with almost no upfront money.

At the age of 35, Brent McNeely wanted more than his graphic arts business. After a decade in design, he was bored, restless and looking for his next venture when he decided he'd try combining business with pleasure. He'd launch a publishing company based on a hobby he was passionate about: building model rockets.

But there were a few problems to overcome before blastoff. He had only modest publishing experience, virtually no start-up capital--and there were a handful of well-established model rocket magazines already in the market.

Try shopping that business plan to investors and you'll soon discover that most will tell you to stick with graphic arts. Fortunately for the would-be publisher, though, he decided he didn't really need outside financial backing. He launched his startup--Extreme Rocketry, a bimonthly aimed at the tens of thousands of Americans who build and launch their own model rockets--for barely pocket change. What's more amazing is that the title was profitable from issue number one.

Dissatisfied to some extent with the existing hobby magazines for model-rocket builders, McNeely searched for an innovative, affordable way to launch something different. "I just wanted to have a good rocketry magazine that had interesting stuff in it," he says. But he also knew what would give his title an edge over the competition: better design. He wanted his book to have full color, cover to cover.

McNeely initially considered not launching a print magazine at all, instead distributing articles in PDF format through a Web site, possibly with a paid subscription model. But when research showed that only 30 to 40 percent of his potential audience had Web access, he decided ink on paper was the way to go. In addition, he doubted the willingness of potential advertisers to get behind a Webonly publication, and he worried that subscribers would freely pass along the PDFs to non-subscribers. McNeely also considered a mass mailing to rocketry clubs around the country, but quickly killed that idea when he realized what the bill would be.

Instead, he ran a survey over Christmas 1999 at the Rocketry Online site (www.rocketryonline.com) asking site users if they were interested in a new rocketry magazine; 94 percent said yes. Now, he just had to find a way to get the magazine off the ground.

It's a smart man who listens to his wife. The solution came while McNeely was brainstorming with his spouse, Michelle, and his brother-in-law. Michelle suggested using a Web site to post PDFs of partial, not full, articles. Her idea was to post "crippled" articles, in much the same way that demo software is often distributed in crippled form.

With a viable way forward, McNeely started rolling on Extreme Rocketry. He announced EXR to the rocketeering community via Rocketry Online in mid-January 2000, and had the sample issue posted on his own site (www.extremerocketry.com) later that month. In each article, the layout and the first several paragraphs were identical to the proposed premier print issue. The remainder of the copy, however, was greeked in using the Jabberwocky Xtension for QuarkXPress, which generates random text.

"These partial-text stories essentially stand in for a soft offer," says Abe Peck, chair of the magazine program at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. "For small publishers, this is a very interesting idea." He notes that with the rising costs of mailings, circulation is becoming a "choke point," for first-time magazine entrepreneurs.

Some complain; most are happy

The "crippled" articles idea was not flawless. Even with a cover note in the PDF file explaining what was going on, McNeely says, "It was surprising how many complaints there were." Some people hadn't been paying attention and wrote in to complain about McNeely's "incompetence," and others berated him for not just giving away complete articles for free.

Still, the concept worked well enough to get the traction McNeely needed. He counted 1,500 downloads from his site--and netted almost 500 paid subs (at $24.95 each) when the first issue, March/April 2000, came out in mid-March with a pressrun of 1,000.

He already had computers, fonts and software, along with several years' worth of his own photos from rocketry meets and competitions. Therefore, McNeely says, outside of manufacturing and distribution costs, EXR' s only real start-up expense was $35 for the domain name. (Contributors are paid on publication.) In fact, he reports that he was in the black on the first issue, to the tune of several thousand dollars.

Computer-to-plate technology also helped the bottom line. McNeely says that CTP saved him thousands of dollars an issue over what he would have paid just a few years ago.

The first four issues of EXR were a one-man show, says McNeely. He wore every hat--from publisher to editor to circulator. However, since he was still running his graphic design business, time pressures forced him to hire his first employee--a high-school student who did customer service, database work and some graphic design. Later, when the student went back to school, he hired a full-time graphic designer and part-time office manager to take over from the student.