Tortoise Media

Tortoise was a startup publisher built on slow news and podcasts, with a small team and a smaller budget. It has since bought The Observer from The Guardian and publishes under that name now. I led growth, which meant everything from acquisition and pricing to community and retention, mostly through guerrilla tactics rather than big spend. Members went from 8,000 to 50,000 in eighteen months.

Growing the membership

The barrier to joining was too high and conversion was weak, so I opened things up. We introduced free trials, which A/B tested to twice the conversion and settled at 40% of triallists becoming paying members. I refreshed the pricing off the back of paywall data, which lifted ARPU by 25%, and added personalised landing pages where the journalist behind a story asked you to join. Small human touches, real numbers.

Betting on audio

The data was clear that audio drove far more engagement than text, so I pushed a pivot to an audio-first strategy that grew our reach fivefold. That meant taking podcasts seriously as a growth channel. I launched podcast marketing with Spotify and Apple, and when we spotted a breakout story in Sweet Bobby, I led the campaign that took it to number one in the UK, US and Australia. We sold the rights to Netflix, and it’s a hit series now.

Turning events into a channel

When Covid closed the room, I moved our daily live events online and they became our number one acquisition channel, with guests from Tony Blair to Greta Thunberg. I also modelled the company P&L alongside the founders to plan runway through the worst of it, which was growth work of a very different kind.