I was on my way to Tokyo when I stopped at one of the newsstands in the airport. Because I was getting ready for a 14 hour flight I bought a bunch of magazines. One of them was this magazine I had never seen before called "Good".
On the plane I got completely sucked into the content. I barely skipped any of the articles, which is very uncommon for me. But this what makes this magazine a great business ideas is not only the excellent targeted content, but also their subscription model.
First, this magazine is targeted as they call it at people who give a damm:
"We see a growing number of people tied together not by age, career, background, or circumstance, but by a shared interest. This revolves around a passion for potential mixed with fierce pragmatism and creative engagement. We sum all this up as the sensibility of giving a damn. But to shorten it, let's call it GOOD. We're here to push this movement and cover its realization."
Second, the subscription money goes to a charity that the subscriber choses. This is why they say they do this:
"We're doing this because
1) it's smart business and 2) we believe in this.
Let the secret be known—most magazines do not make money on subscriptions or newsstand sales. Traditionally, the best way to get a bunch of new subscribers is to send millions of pieces of unsolicited mail—junk mail—to people who might have some interest. We don't like junk mail, and we don't like the thought of spending millions of dollars on it. So we came up with the idea of giving away all subscription fees and allowing subscribers to choose which organization they would like to support.
This whole thing is an experiment. If it works, we'll actually spend less than half of what it traditionally costs to acquire subscribers. The success of this campaign will allow us to:
a) meet a self-selecting group of quality subscribers who find us through word of mouth, internet links, media coverage, our partner organizations, or the other crazy schemes we like to come up with; b) raise significant money for organizations that will do something important with it; and c) save resources and prove that you can do well by doing good.
Our goal for our launch year is to create 6 amazing issues of GOOD, sign up 50,000 subscribers and donate $1 million to their favorite organizations.
If you like what we're doing, please help us make it happen. Choose GOOD. Thank you".
The magazine didn't bridge the majority of my flight, but was a great read and got me to subscribe to it.
