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Lesson 4 of 6
Build news products
Start building your revenue model
Determine your revenue model (10:37)
Build your tech stack (9:21)
Build a fundraising strategy (9:10)
Select a CMS for your news organisation (4:56)
Evaluate your financial sustainability (7:05)
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Build news products

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Design, prototype, and test your news product

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Build a news product

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What is a news product?

A news product, such as an article, newsletter, podcast, news site, or app, provides information to an audience.

How to build a news product with a design sprint

A design sprint is a way to solve problems by designing, prototyping, and testing ideas with your audience, as cheaply and realistically as possible.

What are the steps in a design sprint?

  1. Understand
  2. Ideate
  3. Decide
  4. Prototype
  5. Validate
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Understand your audience and their needs

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Get started by identifying:

  • Your target audience
  • What problems you can solve for them
  • How you can uniquely address their needs

Learn more in our Learn more about your audience lesson.

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Ideate

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Once you clarify your audience’s needs, ideate solutions and create drafts of possible news products. A well-formed concept highlights the most important features and directly solves for the audience problem at hand.

If you have a team, encourage new ideas by working on your drafts independently.

A draft can be:

  • A sample version of a newsletter
  • A short video covering a topic, like a local event
  • A ten minute episode of a podcast

💡Best practice: Use the Google Design Sprint’s Crazy 8’s exercise, where you’re tasked with drafting eight ideas in eight minutes.

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Decide

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Next, decide which ideas should move forward by voting or evaluating against specific criteria.

You can go with a single idea (“best shot”) or with several ideas and test them against each other (“battle royale”), an approach developed by Google Ventures:

Best Shot:

  • Is best for commonly used products
  • Lets you develop an idea more fully
  • Gives you more time to ask questions about similar products

Battle Royale:

  • Is best for newer products with fewer expectations
  • Lets you compare your ideas with each other
  • Allows for more unique or unexpected ideas to emerge
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Prototype: Build a minimum viable product (MVP)

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Once you have selected an idea, create a minimum viable product (MVP).

Minimum viable products, or MVPs:

  • Have basic features to preview what your product will do
  • Test assumptions
  • Help you get feedback from your audience
  • Save time and money
  • Reduce risk of failure

What should I consider when building my MVP?

  • Frequency: How often would you need to publish (daily, monthly, weekly) to collect feedback?
  • Platform: What’s the cheapest and fastest way to test your idea? Can you send an email to your audience, or record a video on your phone?
  • Scope: What’s the most important problem to address? Which features are absolutely necessary?

💡Best practices

  • Limit your MVP to just the key features needed to provide value to your audience
  • State your objective from the outset.
  • Decide what you want to validate and how you will measure it.
  • Keep your test on track by setting a date to evaluate results.
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Validate: Test your MVP

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Test your MVP through:

  • Pilots, where you invite your audience to test your product
  • Ads, to measure if your product is relevant s
  • Promotions, to get feedback or to generate demand
  • Interviews, to understand what they value
  • Crowdfunding or pre-selling to gauge interest

💡Best practice: Test ads across several advertising platforms and track the number of clicks to see if your product resonates with your audience.

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Validate: Recruit participants

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Once you have built your MVP, validate your idea with audience feedback. You can recruit participants for interviews or focus groups by

  • Reaching out directly through email, social media, or talking to people at events
  • Using earned media, such as appearing as a guest on a podcast or writing a guest blog post
  • Placing ads, such as in local publications, community centers, or on social media

💡Best practices

  • Recruit at least 100 participants

Recruit participants by targeting specific audiences with Google Ads.

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Validate: Evaluate your test

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Evaluate if your MVP meets your audience’s need by reviewing their:

  • Behavior: Did participants engage with your MVP more than once?

  • Feedback: Did participants tell you they valued the MVP in surveys and interviews?

  • Reach: Did the MVP reach more, fewer, or the same types of audiences?

Based on your audience’s feedback, you can:

  • Keep going if your audience found the MVP valuable, and you know why they found it valuable.

  • Adjust the MVP to meet your audience’s needs better.

  • Reset if your MVP didn’t find early success or pivot to a different idea.

💡Best practice: Look for trends in audience feedback to identify issues or new features.

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