- For Starters
- Posts
- The barista who built a media empire
For Starters is a weekly briefing for the next-generation of small biz owners. It’s curated by Danny Giacopelli, formerly of Monocle and Courier magazines.
Hey starter! Read on for…
Inspiration ➠ Analog everything
Advice ➠ Broadsheet’s founder
Ideas ➠ What’s ramen weather?
Tools ➠ Free Japanese clip art
Community ➠ An event to watch
➠ Get inspired
Look at this cafe | Photo: @Vlad Patru
1. Just perfect. Sometimes you see a shop, a design, a space that literally stops you in your tracks. This cafe in Bucharest, designed by Romanian architecture studio Vinklu for local coffee chain Boiler Coffee, is one of them. Is it a Norwegian chapel? A Japanese shrine? A Californian A-Frame house for small children? It’s perfect. ✨
2. Revenge of the analog. Just over a year ago, Zoë Lazerson and Brandon Minton put a vintage photo booth on the street in NYC (instead of in a bar or restaurant) and they called it Old Friend. The masses came to get their instant portraits and the New York Times came knocking. Now they’re expanding – the two have just opened a second location in Williamsburg. → As AI slop grows exponentially, there’s been a natural return to analog. Long may this continue.
3. Cook on-the-go. Introducing Larder, a portable kitchen you can put on a bike. It was dreamed up in London by architect and lecturer Ivan Chan, and writer and entrepreneur Damayanthi Ponnuthurai. → Read about it here. 🚴♀️
—
➠ Starter wisdom
Nick Shelton | Photo: Kate Shanasy
Want to start your own media brand? Back in 2009, after a stint as a barista in London, Nick Shelton returned to Melbourne and realized no one was covering cities & culture with the authenticity he craved. So, like a good starter, the 24-year-old did it himself.
Nick launched Broadsheet, a media outlet built on good taste and vibes, full of stories about food, drink, design and travel in Australia and NZ. With 80+ employees, millions of monthly readers, and a big influence on Australian culture (plus cookbooks & print issues), Nick’s now returned to where it all started to launch Broadsheet London.
For Starters met Nick at Toklas, around the corner from their new London digs, to talk about starting, bootstrapping, and why the future of media might actually be a return to the good old days.
Nick, great to see you here in London! Give us a snapshot of where Broadsheet stands right now.
After 15 years we’re now Australia’s largest culture media brand. We’re still independent. And we’ve never raised money.
That’s awesome.
It takes time. We could have maybe built the company faster, but it’s really worked out. We’re growing steadily. We’ve now got 80 people in Australia. It’s a good business over there.
So why rock the boat and come to London?
We were like, where’s the next exciting chapter for us? I’ve always wanted to do London. I’ve been thinking about it for nearly a decade. So here we are. We think London is the most exciting cultural city in the world right now. It’s always been culturally rich, but we think it’s at the beginning of a really interesting cultural growth journey. The amount of new bakeries, great coffee shops, interesting restaurants, theater, dance and music – despite the rising costs and cost of living, there’s still this cultural growth.
You’re also arriving at an interesting time for London’s media scene. The Evening Standard ended its daily print edition. Time Out’s not what it used to be. Eater London shut down. There’s been a rise of local food Substacks and TikTokers.
From a growing media perspective, there’s quite a lot of small under-resourced evergreen-style content operations out there – think “London’s top five bakeries.” Then on the other side, you’ve got the likes of the FT, How to Spend It, newspaper supplements, etc. That’s a very particular audience. We’ve always played a role that runs between those two sides. We take what we do very seriously. We have journalism at our core. We have high editorial standards. But we exist for everyday reading. We’re very bullish on that position.
I read an interview where you said other European cities – “Paris, Berlin, Milan, Amsterdam, Copenhagen” – might be next. True?
We’ll see how London goes! If we can demonstrate to ourselves that we can move to London and make it work. Coming from Australia, I was like, if we went to Paris, we’d have to do all this over again, but actually no, we can hub a lot of it out of London. We had to recreate a whole new infrastructure here in London. So once we set up the foundations in London, we can set up a Paris or Berlin office rather than a whole new infrastructure there.
And print?
We’re working on print now. First issue’s out in October. We’ve always seen print as the best way to build a media brand.
Print makes it real!
Exactly, it makes it real. When you’re online, you're coming via a Google search or something’s been served to you by an algorithm on Instagram. And newsletters are more a high frequency, high velocity thing. But with print, it’s like this is what we want to say about ourselves. It’s a really powerful brand tool.
Print! | Photo: Jeremy Orr
Courier was a monthly mag, but we also briefly ran a print paper called Courier London about local food and retail. Covid stopped that project in its tracks. How’d you make it through Covid?
We were in a pretty good place. Obviously it was really challenging. We managed to do it with minimal cost cutting. The Australian government was quite supportive and they underwrote a certain amount of payroll. Our clients were supportive and we supported our clients. While a lot of our competitors went underground, we said, ‘Let’s do as much as we can’. When we came to the end of the pandemic, that actually ended up being a catalyst for a lot of things for us.
Innovative biz models were popping up everywhere back then. Good fodder for content!
I’ll always remember a call I had with our editorial director the day everything got shut down. We were like, what the hell are we going to do? We write about cities and cities are closed. It took us about 30 seconds to realize that we don’t actually write about cities, we write about culture. And culture never stops.
So we built a brand around the idea that culture never stops. Meaning, if you’re at home, you’re still cooking, you’re still exercising, you’re still watching movies, you’re still listening to music. And the amount of innovation was unbelievable: people delivering cocktails to your front door, restaurants creating grocery stores, a chef from a high-end restaurant making sandwiches out of his apartment. There was so much cool stuff.
There was a guy who was lowering pizzas from his bedroom window down to the ground floor on a string. What a wild time.
And because of all this, March 2020 ended up being our biggest traffic month.
Alright, why’d you never raise money for Broadsheet?
We’ve never had to. Our strategy has always been to live within our means. So if we make $1 million, we can only spend less than a million dollars. If we make $2 million, we can only spend less than $2 million. I also just like the flexibility of having no one else to work for other than our team. It’s grown very steadily and organically.
Like a real business.
Like a real business. And I think that now that we’ve gone through a full cycle and all these big digital media startups have collapsed off the back of huge valuations, I’m like... I don’t want to do that. Plus, Australia never really had that hyper investment culture. So it’s worked out. Now we get to do things like move into London and Paris.
It’s almost become more of a badge of honor to bootstrap than to raise!
Lots of people raise a shitload of money at really big valuations and think they’re winning, then all of a sudden their business might be worth half of what it was and they own 30% of a business that’s worth half. I'm not exactly excited by that...
Home Made (2021)
Let’s talk about changes in the media industry more broadly.
The media industry is in transition. It’s between eras right now. Less text, more video, and AI is going to do something, we just don't know what yet. Distribution through Google and Facebook and Instagram has totally changed. It’s much more about owned audiences, and about personalities.
Can you elaborate?
The economics of media is all about distribution. That’s why Google and Meta have made so much money – they manage the distribution. Google said we’re going to organize the world’s information. So you’d write an article, Google would index it, you would search for something relevant, and Google would serve it. For a long time, in the old days, 50% of our traffic was Google and maybe 30% was Facebook. They’d give us some of that distribution and we’d monetize it. There was a whole conversation about how the homepage is dead and that the front door of your publication was actually Facebook or Google.
But now they’re saying, we’re going to keep it and monetize it ourselves. That’s making media really difficult right now.
You’re talking about AI search?
Yeah, so we’d get tons of traffic on really generic terms like ‘Best restaurants in Melbourne’ but now they’re going to answer that for you. Google is in such a competitive race with OpenAI and the other AI companies that they have to be able to provide the answers right in the box. There’s all kinds of sidebars to that – stealing content, ignoring IP, etc. But the reality is, I’m not going to sue Google.
And if nobody’s going to a newspaper’s site because search is being done within the AI box, an advertiser-led model will be tougher which can really tank media companies.
It is going to tank lots of them. But we’ve managed to adapt. And so the silver lining in this really challenging moment is that a much, much, much greater proportion of Broadsheet’s traffic is now direct – via our newsletters or our app, etc. We were like, we have to build our own audience again. We have to have people who love our brand, who come to us every week. We have to market it properly. We have to monetize that relationship. And we have to sell advertising. It’s almost like the last 20 years in media was an aberration and now it's returning to the old ways of doing things.
What about video?
The language of media and the internet is of course now much more video, which happens on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. So we’re sort of saying two things at once, or talking from both sides of our mouth. But I see video as the marketing for your brand; they then come through to your website and that becomes the direct relationship where you monetize it. You can only monetize a video to a point. And audio’s the other one. We’re looking at doing a podcast in London, which will also have a video component.
When can we grab a paid subscription?
We don’t do that currently, but we might in future. I just think that if you’re not looking at it, then you’re crazy.
All very exciting…
Some people are like, you’re doing too much at once. But in my mind, this London platform is like starting a business from the beginning. It gives us the opportunity to really experiment, to try new things. We're able to move a lot faster here. We've already got a team of six here.
Our big challenge is to get famous fast. How can we put ourselves in front of a big audience? How can we partner with people? Every step of the way is about building into other communities.
—
➠ Good idea!
“Ramen weather” → On the climate-induced plight of noodle shops in New York and other cities in the northeast of the US, when diners steer clear of hot broth dishes in hot weather. Great piece in Brooklyn Mag:
“For this cuisine to truly break through into the pantheon of New York’s great, ubiquitous comfort food staples alongside pizza, burgers, and sushi, ramen needs a following as devout and mainstream as those other classics, which depends on a year-round, weatherproof business that can support all the creativity and diversity found in areas where ramen proliferates abroad.”
—
➠ Toolbox
🛠️ Resources
The free-to-use clip art service that's shaped Japan’s visual language — and you can use it, too.
📚️ Reads
Building a Watch From Scratch in a Brooklyn Basement. Kottke
The new economics of starting up. How 1,500 early-stage companies are raising, spending, and hiring in 2025. Mercury
Kurasu founder Yozo Otsuki on building a brand that lasts. FLTR
🧠 Findings
+1.3% → The percentage change in office visits in NYC from July 2019 to July 2025, i.e. NYC office visits have hit pre-pandemic levels for the first time. Other US cities.... uh, not so much. Denver, you must really, really hate the office. (I would too if I was surrounded by mountains.)
🙃 Fun
“Honey, I Have No Clue What You’re Talking About—I Did NOT Use AI to Write My Wedding Vows” 👰
—
➠ Our community
Event alert: For Starters subscriber Keir Whitaker runs an annual gathering called Craft+Work – and the next one’s on 26th September in London.
Keir explains more…
“Craft+Work brings together soloists, founders, and leaders in the Shopify Partner ecosystem (and just beyond) to share real stories, honest reflections, and fresh perspectives. It’s not your typical event – forget big crowds, endless panels, and bloated slide decks. Instead, it’s fifty curious, like-minded people in a room, having candid conversations about what it really takes to build and grow a digital or creative business. If you enjoy For Starters for the behind-the-scenes look at how others are building, Craft+Work is that – only live, over coffee, with others who are figuring it out too.”