This allowed him to focus on his reporting and not waste time on sales calls. The experiment was so successful that over half of the restaurants have already renewed for a second year.
In a recent interview, Matthew explained how he came up with the idea, what services he provides for these 12 restaurants, and why he thinks his model can be replicated by other local news startups. You can watch the interview over here. Super excited to talk about this local newsletter you've run, but first I want to just talk about what led up to you launching it and what your career was before that.
You actually have a background in media and local journalism. In fact, you spent most of your career working for a single newspaper in Colorado Springs. Yeah, that was the Colorado Springs Independent. It was our local alt-weekly here. We are a sister city to Denver.
They have the westward and some bigger papers. But we are the smaller, we're the second city in Colorado. And you're correct, I did spend my whole career there before launching my own thing afterwards. I did. I did 10 years in the business. I started when I was in high school and carried a job through college. But basically with that background of like, hey, you've got an opening in the food writing team.
I've been doing food. Why don't you let me do that? So that was a nice little segue so that I had some more industry background experience that became really valuable when It came to making relationships here and interviewing the chefs and the baristas and the bartenders and having more credibility than just someone who doesn't know. Half of them were.
