Why We've Turned Down Opportunities to Expand Our Business

By Amanda Freeman, Co-Founder of Vital Juice, New York City
Amanda Freeman and her business partner, Lisa Blau, started Vital Juice, a daily email newsletter based in New York City that since 2007 has delivered news about fitness, nutrition, beauty and wellness. Freeman says their smartest move was staying focused on developing their core business-the daily email-rather than getting distracted by developing their website or pursuing book and television deals.

My professional background is in market research, consulting and trend forecasting. Lisa worked in Silicon Valley and was also a producer on CNN, so she has a background in technology and writing. She is in charge of the content of our newsletter and I am in charge of the business side of things-marketing, ad sales, etc.

In my previous line of work, I discovered that there were a lot of intelligent urban and suburban women, who were interested in learning more about wellness-encompassing the improvement of your mind, body and soul. These women are what we call "well-conscious": interested in pursuing a healthy lifestyle in order to look and feel their best. Lisa and I decided that we would design our business around educating people about the latest information, tips and trends in health and wellness.

The content comes to you


From the consumer's point of view, it's much more convenient to have the content come to you, already filtered, in a daily email. I was never someone who had time to check TMZ or the Huffington Post every day. Probably the only site I checked with any regularity was weather.com. So to my mind, it made more sense to send the content directly to the consumer in order to be daily inspiration for healthy living. From the business point of view, consumers only have to come to our website once to subscribe, and then all the wellness information they need to know comes into their inbox everyday.

Right now, we cover Los Angeles and New York City. We localize our emails by hiring editors in the local market and establishing ourselves as the go-to wellness resource in the city-we want people in the selected location to recognize our name. We also have two national newsletters called Vital Juice Everywhere and Vital Juice Moms.

We expand our subscriber base virally via emails forwarded by subscribers (word of mouse), as well as through press coverage, Facebook advertising and ad-space barter deals. We've exchanged ads with media outlets such as Shecky's and Refinery 29, which are fashion sites; New York Magazine, and beauty blog The Fairest.

Ad revenue is scalable


Ads in a dedicated daily email are up to 100 times more expensive than banner ads on a website. That means you'd have to get 100 times more traffic on your website to justify spending the same amount of time and money on it.

Our guiding principle all along has been focusing on our daily email and not spending too much time and energy on developing our website or other extraneous aspects of our business. We have been approached by agents and industry people about doing books, TV shows, expanding our website and selling content on iTunes. As tempting as a $50,000 book advance might be, it makes more sense to put our time and energy into building our subscriber base.

The bottom line: Ad revenue is scalable and a book advance is not.

Expansion plans
Focusing on expanding our existing subscriber base means we are slower in expanding our email to new cities. The problem is that in the beginning you have limited resources. You can't do everything, so you have to stay focused on developing your existing business.
As of January 2009, there were three of us working at Vital Juice. Now there are eight, and we are looking to add two or three more employees this year. Although we are not yet profitable, our subscriber base has grown by more than 10% a month and we are up to nearly 150,000 subscribers.

We are going to add a weekly Recipes edition this summer, which will include healthy recipes vetted by Vital Juice experts. That move is based on both subscriber interest in recipes (they are insatiable!) and interest from food marketers to advertise near recipe-focused content. consistently rank among our most popular types of content, so this is a logical next step for us.

We are launching Chicago and San Francisco editions later this year and plan on reaching other cities in later. We've focused on building a good business model and sticking to it. --As told to Harper Willis

Before starting Vital Juice, Amanda Freeman and Lisa Blau teamed up on The Experience Club, a service for women in New York that offered alternative ideas to dining out as a social occasion. Vital Juice has been featured in publications including People, The New York Times, TMZ and C magazine.
Resources

• Check out Daily Candy, one of the daily emails that inspired the format of Vital Juice.
• Determine your business' core competencies.
• How to tell if your core business model needs to be overhauled.
• Read 9 tips on how to encourage and prepare for the growth of your small business.