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It’s been a rollercoaster of a year, and far too long since I’ve provided any sort of public update on the publication itself.
So as we celebrate three years of writing about the regional startup and VC ecosystem, please indulge me (or don’t) as I share a little about how we got here, what’s changed, what we’re still figuring out, and where we’d like to take FWDstart next.
Straight off the bat, there’s the small matter of me having taken the plunge and gone full-time on FWDstart in January.
Probably should have mentioned that before now, but hopefully, even if you didn’t know, you’ve noticed it reflected in the quality, regularity and scope of what we’ve been publishing.
The decision wasn’t taken lightly, but ultimately trying to do justice to a separate full-time job in publishing while committing to a thrice-weekly newsletter had become increasingly difficult to sustain. So, in an act of ethnographic solidarity and to better understand my topic of focus, I became a full-time founder too.
I should hasten to add, of course, that commercially, things were looking up. Between sponsorships, partnerships, white-label report work and consulting, the prospect of doing this full-time had started to feel, if not entirely sensible, at least financially palatable and considerably less terrifying.
Going full-time was also supposed to leave me with something resembling a social life, but anyone who’s visited our apartment in the evening and found me horizontal on the sofa, laptop balanced skilfully on my chest, typing away in a posture that would make a chiropractor grimace, can attest to how that’s worked out.
But it has given me the opportunity to do much more of the work that made me want to start FWDstart in the first place.
We launched in earnest back in October 2023 out of frustration with the existing coverage of startups and venture capital in the region, and a steadfast, albeit slightly naive, belief that there was room for something more scrupulous, thoughtful and useful to the people actually building and investing here.
I wish I could say that we arrived with a fully formed editorial identity and immediately set about bringing it to life, but in reality, we didn’t know any better in a lot of respects, and some of what we initially produced looked quite a lot like the coverage I now find frustrating, featuring every founder under the sun, formulaically recounting their journey and celebrating what they’re doing, without necessarily interrogating it very much.
Look, there’s nothing inherently wrong with celebrating people building worthwhile businesses. But when every story follows essentially the same well-trodden trajectory, and every founder is inspirational, you do eventually have to ask who any of it is for and what they’re getting out of it. That becomes even more difficult to reconcile when you know the company and how the business is actually faring, and the coverage bears very little resemblance to either.
But the proliferation of AI slop sites and the indifference of legacy platforms have helped crystallise what I want FWDstart to do, which is to close the gap between what founders and investors know and discuss privately, and what’s publicly reported and accessible.
The distance between the two is often, how do I put this charitably, considerable. People inside the ecosystem have a much more nuanced understanding of how a business is performing, why a deal happened or where things have gone wrong than you’d ever gather from reading sanitised coverage. Simply put, I want us to do the work of getting closer to that understanding, validating it, putting it in context and making it available to our readership.
One of the difficulties of being a one-man Swiss Army knife is that you’re invariably stretched thin between functions, from writing and research to graphic design, bookkeeping, business development and everything in between.
And before the conflict broke out, commercial conversations and external engagement were taking up an increasing amount of my attention. When your words need to put food on the table, you suddenly become a lot more aware of the necessity of them carrying weight.
I enjoyed that side of the business, and still do. I obviously understand the publication better than anyone else, where we’ve come from and where I want us to go, and I take pride in being its biggest advocate.
But the prolonged bout of geopolitical instability meant longer-term partnership conversations shrivelled up, and continuing to bang the drum over sponsorships felt fairly tone-deaf given what was happening around us. It’s a good thing January and February had been strong months, or this whole adventure might have been measured in low multiples of Scaramuccis.
Now, while I hesitate to call anything that came out of that a silver lining, in the narrow context of this business it meant that I could dedicate virtually all my bandwidth to writing and reporting, speaking to people, developing sources, getting different perspectives and pursuing stories that needed time, during a fraught period when people seemed to have an increased appetite for just that.
I’m proud of our coverage of the early days of the conflict and how startups scrambled to deal with the AWS debacle, our doggedness in pursuing answers on Careem’s withdrawal from Saudi Arabia and Jordan, its job cuts and financial performance through e&’s disclosures, and our coverage of the Delivery Hero and Uber soap opera and its implications for the food delivery and quick commerce sectors here.
The same goes for our relentlessness in combing through the financial statements of BNPL giants like Tabby and Tamara, trying to approximate Impact46’s venture returns, and getting to grips with the mechanics of how companies like Abhi and Rasan, or entire sectors like B2B e-commerce, actually work.
It’s often thankless work that requires going far beyond what’s being announced publicly, scouting out and talking to people who know what’s happening, and then actually putting in the hard work of making sense of what you find and packaging it in a way that, fingers crossed, resonates and lands.
Fortunately, this past year, or more specifically the last six months, we’ve reached something of an inflection point in how willing founders and investors are to be open and transparent with me. More people have started trusting me with stories, pointing me towards things worth investigating and connecting me with people in the know. I want people to feel able to say what they actually think, including when doing so requires protecting their identity.
To that end, I think building FWDstart from inside the ecosystem has helped a tonne. People have been able to see what we’re trying to do over time, how the publication has improved, and that proximity has given us access and context that isn’t afforded to everyone. Developing those relationships has been a slow burn, but it’s one of the parts of going full-time that’s been most fruitful.
Those relationships also put us in a better position to cover companies shutting down, job losses, down rounds, disappointing investments and financial results, all of which I want us to approach with the same care we’d give to a promising new business.
Encouragingly, more of you seem to think this work is worth paying for.
Among our paying readers are people at BECO, Shorooq, RAED, Impact46 and STV, as well as the likes of Tabby, Tamara, Noon, Lean and Namshi, and diaspora founders building category-defining companies globally, including Clay.
The calibre of that readership means a great deal to me and is, I like to think, a reflection of how we carry ourselves. These are people whose judgement I respect, who understand the subjects we’re writing about, and who doubtless have plenty of other things they could be doing with their time.
Media is a difficult business, and our expectation has always been that FWDstart would need a blended revenue model. We’re an unapologetically pro-capitalist publication, and I remain firmly a disciple of Ben Thompson when it comes to the belief that advertising is amazing.
We’ve been fortunate to work with some stellar partners over the past year, including HubSpot, RemotePass, Sarwa and Geidea, among others. I’m grateful for their support, particularly in a difficult environment for a small publication serving a very specific business audience. There are already some very promising conversations underway for the coming months, and I’m tremendously excited about the partners we may be able to bring into the fold.
Reader revenue gives us more scope to keep reporting while those commercial conversations take their course, and ultimately more time to concentrate on the original stories that I think make the publication worth forking out for in the first place.
We’ve also recently introduced team subscriptions and have already onboarded our first client. If that sounds useful for your team, you can find the details here, or just get in touch. Put your knowledge budget to work.
On the editorial side, longform will, of course, remain a substantial part of what we do. I want us to keep producing deeply researched, narratively compelling pieces that combine original sourcing, detailed analysis and an actual point of view.
They do, however, take an inordinate amount of time, and producing one every week is increasingly difficult to reconcile with everything else. My instinct, along with certain conversion metrics I pay attention to, suggests there’s room alongside them for a well-reported, deeply sourced piece of 1,500 words that tells you something you didn’t know, explains why it matters and doesn’t require setting aside most of your lunch break. So you can expect much more of that work over the coming months.
The newly inaugurated Monday column gives us another outlet, particularly given my tendency to want to include everything interesting I’ve learned while researching a piece, whether or not it actually belongs in the story I’m trying to tell.
It gives us room to take a narrower question, offer an informed perspective and sometimes leave it unresolved, which is something I’m trying to get more comfortable with. An acquisition announcement, for instance, can become an opportunity to look at the underlying economics of a market, why the buyer might want the business and what would need to happen for the deal to make sense.
Friday will remain the more familiar news roundup, where the value is in the curation, choosing what deserves your attention, connecting developments elsewhere to what’s happening in our region, and including original information that hasn’t arrived in everyone’s inbox via the same announcement.
On the podcast, I’m excited to share that we’ll soon be ramping up to two episodes a week to work through a backlog of conversations I need to get out into the world ASAP.
We’ve also heard from readers that, with the volume of material we publish, things can very quickly begin to stack up in an inbox, and I’m keenly aware that the luxury of being able to set aside 15 or 20 minutes for a long piece is a considerable ask when we’re competing for a finite, and increasingly crowded, part of your daily media diet.
Given how much time many of you spend driving, there’s probably more scope for us to fit into your existing schedule if you can listen on the way to work, while exercising or whenever sitting down to read isn’t particularly practical.
To that end, we’re going to make audio versions of all our longer-form pieces available to paying subscribers, delivered through your podcast feed. Paid subscribers can expect a separate email with more detail on how to get set up very soon.
There are also a few people I should thank before I give the impression that all of this happens entirely on my own.
Zoë, my wonderful co-founder, remains very much part of FWDstart alongside her other commitments, and Umair, our podcast editor, does a fantastic job of making me look and sound considerably better than I deserve. I was also particularly proud to publish our first externally contributed longform piece, by Anmol Irfan, examining women’s mobility in Pakistan, ride-hailing and safety.
I’d love to do more of that. Having a regular contributor focused on reporting and sourcing is very much part of the ambition, and while I’m happy to carry much of the work myself for now, I don’t expect that to be the arrangement indefinitely. More reader support gives us the scope to commission that work and, over time, bring in people who can take responsibility for parts of the business that currently compete for the same hours in the day.
Events are firmly on the radar for 2027 too. The ambition is to host more intimate affairs, highly curated and invite-only, bringing together relevant founders and investors around very specific subjects. The emphasis will really be on getting a high concentration of the right people in the room, people who are building in a similar area, understand the questions being discussed and have something interesting and original to contribute.
If that sounds interesting, or if you’d like to explore partnering with us, please give us a shout. I’m always interested to hear what you’d find useful.
Going full-time in January was a decision about whether I could give FWDstart a proper chance to become the publication I wanted it to be. This year has made me more confident about the work, clearer about who it’s for, and considerably more encouraged that readers will help us fund it.
To everyone who already subscribes, recommends us, shares a story or takes the time to speak with me, thank you. And if you’ve been reading along and would like to see more of this work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
The anniversary offer gives you 50% off your first year of a paid subscription and is available until October 31.
Thanks as always for reading,
Jamie
