Warp News: Creating fact-based optimistic news

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This inspiring story is of a rising media startup called Warp News, started by Mathias Sundin, Eric Porper, Rich Spuller, Magnus Aschan from Sweden. Warp News helps balance the negative bias in other news media with their fact-based optimistic news in technology, science, and human progress. The purpose is to give people a more fact-based and optimistic view of the world and the future. Optimists have more ideas than pessimists, and they create more out of those ideas. In a world with more optimists, Warp News aims to warp the curve of humanity and make a better future come sooner. Here is the story of Warp News in Mathias’ own words.

Introduce us to the idea of Warp News

Warp News is a unique media company producing fact-based optimistic news. The news media today are highly negative, and that is turning people into pessimists about the future. Pessimists don’t push the human race forward; for that, we need optimists. We produce fact-based optimistic news to show people the world as it really is. There are, of course, problems in the real world, but most of them are getting smaller, and we know how to solve all of them.

What’s your strategy story? What led you to start Warp News?

When I ran for Parliament in 2014, I only accepted campaign donations in bitcoin because I wanted to have an intelligent discussion about the potential of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. But instead, people only wanted to talk about problems. As a Member of Parliament, I worked with many tech issues, and over and over again, people focused on the problems and very little on the opportunities. Out of that frustration grew Warp Institute, a non-profit foundation that is the parent of Warp News.

If we let the pessimists dominate, many huge opportunities will be lost, and progress to slow. With faster progress, we can save millions of humans lives every year, solve climate change, connect everyone on Earth, create an abundance of healthy food and super cheap and clean energy – to mention a few things.

What marketing, operation strategies are you adopting at Warp News?

We find most of our subscribers and readers through Facebook, and we find them all across the world in rich countries and developing countries. We use Facebook ads but also run a large Facebook group. It is the only place on Facebook where we only focus on the positive aspects of a news item and only discuss solutions.

We are now also stepping up our presence in other media, bring the debate about negative news directly to the newspapers.

What is your competitive advantage at Warp News?

We are unique in our focus on fact-based optimistic news. This means we can get unique access to companies and entrepreneurs. For example, we are going to follow electric airplane maker Heart Aerospace on their journey. That kind of content will both educate and inspire our community. When they read about Heart, they will get ideas themselves, and some of those ideas will lead to new companies that we can follow and report on. That creates a unique, positive flywheel.

That is why our strongest asset is our community. 40 000 optimistic forward-looking people is a very strong source of ideas for us and absolutely central to our long-term success.

Share a story when you have been customer-obsessed

When we recently wrote a Warp News Manifesto, we did that with a ton of input from our community, especially our volunteers. We do this also with our Premium Supporters, that is, our paying members. A couple of them contributed with ideas that turned into central parts of our manifesto. We are strong believers in the wisdom of crowds. Some feedback of happy customers:

I subscribed to this newsletter with the intent of growing my insight about the world through sharing with your community. I truly desire to put my effort into changing lives in various aspects especially in the fields of technology and human development.

Okedi Emmanuel,18 years old Ugandan

Thank you for the great initiative and newsletter, it helps me, and not least my children to believe a little more in humanity!

Christophe

Any strategy mistakes you have made and what did you learn?

It might be hard to believe, but I was too pessimistic back in November of last year. I was too negative about our funnel and wanted it to work better before spending more ad money. It turned out that it was working better than I thought, and we should have spent more. If we’ve done that, we would have had conversions in January and February itself. We still had nice growth, but it could have been better if I hadn’t been so pessimistic.

Finally what advice do you have for your fellow entrepreneur readers?

If it is possible in your business, create a community. Nothing beats getting ideas and advice from a group of people that like you, but aren’t working for you. The wisdom of crowds is the strongest force on Earth, use it.

Disclaimer: The information in the above story is provided by the startup and The Strategy Story takes no responsibility for the authenticity of the product and services offered by the startup. Reader’s discretion is advised.

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