Why these women entrepreneurs started a newsletter to help women make informed choices in life with Broadsheet Daily
Through the newsletter Broadsheet Daily, founders Shuba Visweswaran and Lakshmi Chaudhry are curating useful news so that women are armed with the right knowledge to make informed decisions.
You can either complain about a situation or decide to fix it. Shuba Visweswaran and Lakshmi Chaudhry decided to quit complaining and decided to fix things with Broadsheet Daily, a daily newsletter for women. With Broadsheet Daily that reaches subscribers’ inbox from Monday to Friday, the duo wants to arm women with good, useful so that they can make better decisions.
“It is named Broadsheet to reflect every woman’s broadest ambitions, broadening minds, and ever broader horizons. The broader our lives, the more we need to know, right?” say Shuba and Lakshmi.
Shuba Visweswaran and Lakshmi Chaudhry
Be the change you want to see
The duo, who met through a common friend, believes,
“Indian women are constantly striving for more in a half-changed society that is dead-set on making us settle for less. Also, we get near zero information on how to fulfil that most pressing task. Our biggest challenge on any given day, they say, is to find good information to make decisions, big or small - be it at work, in our relationships, or those regarding our health.”
Broadsheet brings its subscribers curated information, which covers not just art, politics and entertainment, but also recommendations and details on events happening in India and around the world. While it picks up a topic every day and provides a complete overview, it also suggests other curated items that subscribers can read to be better informed about a subject.
The founders thought of the idea in 2017 and launched Broadsheet Daily last year with an email distributed on Mailchimp. It took off with a bang and grew five times in the following months without any paid marketing.
While they have doubled their audience since then, they also launched their website along with an Ambassador Programme in April 2019, and have around 200 Ambassadors now.
Expert opinion
Both women bring decades of work experience to the table.
“I’ve grown up in the world of Madison Avenue advertising (literally, as Y&R is the only agency left there) cutting my teeth creating new brands and nurturing those that had lost their way. While at Y&R NY, I focused on women’s healthcare and helped build a few blockbuster drugs (Humira, Yaz) along the way. Learning the nuances of uncovering layers of consumer insight around very personal needs and wants was the biggest learning for me,” says Shubha.
In India she headed the strategy practice at FITCH design and later in Bengaluru, she was involved in branding for a few startups and hasn’t looked back since.
Lakshmi started her career as a journalist at Wired in San Francisco. “In the 20 years I lived there, I worked or wrote for pretty much every liberal publication in the United States - from Salon to the Nation to the New York Times. When I moved back to India, I became the co-founder and executive editor of Firstpost - back in 2011 when digital media was just a bunch of newspaper and TV channel websites. That was a huge learning for me - building and steering a hugely successful standalone news product with 20-plus million unique monthly users. I brought a lot of those learnings to my gig as Investment Adviser to the IPS Media Foundation.”
Now with Broadsheet, she is happy to be a founder once again. While Lakshmi and Shuba focus on the content, they have experts to handle tech, design and execution and are looking forward to grow their team in the coming months.
Connect with the users
Their overarching principle is to always maintain a direct relationship with our users - be it in terms of engagement, distribution or revenue. As for revenue, their product timeline is built around unlocking different premium packages for our audience who says Shuba, “will become members of our club rather than just readers.
These premium packages will offer a varying mix of content, events and online engagement - priced at different tiers. Our products will always be affordable and accessible, but always monetisable.”
They are closing on their first round of funding. An angel round, “We’re thrilled that it is made up of investors who strongly believe in our product and our mission, and also Broadsheet readers who have come forward to invest their own funds and connect us to other investors,” says Shuba.
Their close and direct relationship with the audience along with their vast experience has helped them understand the needs of the audience and deliver accordingly.
“We are that go-to source when they want to learn about something new. We are that trusted voice which helps them think through a complicated issue. Most importantly, we are their funny, smart friend who brightens up their day. Our subscribers write in all the time flagging bits in the daily email which made them laugh,” they say.
While their audience comprises mostly working women, working they also have a diverse subscriber base that includes Grade XII grade students, retired Supreme Court judges, successful male corporate executives who tend to be power news users. “In fact, one-third of our readers are men,” they reveal.
In the near future, they plan to roll out a series of pop up events related to marriage, online dating and friendships based on the response they received for their ‘election swayamvars’, an event that aimed to help women voters make informed choices in the recently held Lok Sabha elections.
The founders say, “There are far too many events which are all about putting a bunch of people on stage while the audience simply listens. We want to disrupt that model and innovate a highly engaging format where the audience is an active participant in creating the experience. It was amazing- 30-40 women in a room discussing politics and policy with respect and candour. They debated, disagreed, questioned and laughed!”
Building on the success of this event, they aim to organise more so that every woman who attends one leaves with at least two to three bits of useful information she can apply to her life.
(Edited by Rekha Balakrishnan)
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