We’re thrilled to announce that The Incline, a local media publication based in Pittsburgh, is joining WhereBy.Us. We’ll be working with the team that’s built The Incline into a beloved force for local news and engagement in a growing, innovative city. The Incline will be the fifth local media brand in our network, alongside The New Tropic in Miami, The Evergrey in Seattle, Pulptown in Orlando, and Bridgeliner in Portland.

WhereBy.Us has acquired The Incline from Spirited Media, which launched it in 2016 along with two other local news sites in Philadelphia and Denver. Spirited recently decided to find new homes for its properties.

Rossilynne Culgan, who’s been food and culture editor since June 2017, will take over as The Incline’s new director. Reporter and producer Colin Deppen and head of sales Lindsey Van der Veer are also staying on the team.

“Think of this as The Incline 2.0. WhereBy.Us helps curious locals make the most of their cities, and that mission aligns perfectly with our vision for The Incline,” Culgan said. “You can continue to expect incisive, meaningful, fun and engaging coverage — all with the extra signal boost from WhereBy’s team.”

We’re committed to continuing The Incline’s award-winning journalism, and to supporting its mission to help Pittsburghers explore and celebrate their city — like when they tried to find the best pizza or figured out why everyone adds an “s” to the ends of words or helped us learn how the city kept its “h”.

You can sign up to get The Incline delivered to your inbox every morning, and follow @theinclinepgh on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. See yinz on the Internet.

About WhereBy.Us

WhereBy.Us is a local media company that helps curious locals make the most of their cities. Our mission is to help people explore, connect, celebrate, and get engaged where they live — or as we say, “live like you live here.” Each brand on our platform publishes a daily email newsletter curating news and events, creates original journalism projects on everything from food to homelessness, and produces events to help people explore the city.

Today, we’re in five cities: Miami , Seattle, Portland, Orlando, and now Pittsburgh. We have more than 75,000 daily subscribers across our network and reach more than 3 million people each month across platforms. Since launching in 2015, we’ve raised more than $2.5M to support our growth, and we generate more than $1 million in annual revenue.

The Incline is joining WhereBy.Us was originally published in WhereByUs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Americans inside media and out are frustrated by what seems a failed approach to political journalism. That’s a good thing. We should talk about it as citizens and as an industry, and push our reporting institutions to serve us better.

But there’s another side of the business that remains essential to our democracy. Investigative journalism has never been more vital, and it’s never needed more support.

As newsroom resources are constrained and digital trends push publishers to iterate and adapt, it gets harder for media businesses to invest in the expensive, methodical work of diving into difficult stories, tracking elusive powerbrokers, and uncovering questionable things those in power would rather keep hidden. The structure of new digital media businesses (including the one I run), alongside the long decline of local newspapers, has made aggressive investigative reporting less and less common. With a new kind of politician in the White House and one party in control of the federal government, we’ve never needed it more.

The good news: dozens of organizations are producing investigative journalism, and you can help them do it with a donation or membership, even if you only have $25.

A definitely not comprehensive list of great organizations doing investigative journalism:

• NPR — local and national. Donate to your local member station.
• ProPublica—leading some of the best investigative projects in the country, and designing incredible data and tech tools to do it.
• Center for Public Integrity—Pulitzer-Prize winning reporting on everything from politics to juvenile justice.
• International Consortium for Investigative Journalists—the folks who brought you the Panama Papers investigation, coordinated by hundreds of journalists across a dozen countries.
• The Center for Investigative Reporting—they’ve got Emmys, Peabodys, and other awards, plus an excellent podcast, Reveal.
• The Texas Tribune—pioneering a new approach to state politics and policy reporting, which is desperately needed.
• Institute for Nonprofit News—a network of small and local nonprofit news publishers, who are usually paying attention to things the big players don’t or won’t.
• Or, buy a subscription to your local newspaper. It’s likely they’re still producing 90% of the original journalism where you live, and they need a little love.
• Mother Jones- hat tip Michael Cosentino
• MinnPost- hat tip @matthewtift

Who’d I leave out? Leave a comment; I’ll keep adding.

Let’s go report the fuck out of America.

Nearly two years ago, with a few months of preparation and a huge tray of Knaus Berry cinnamon rolls that Rebekah Monson hauled to my apartment our office, Bruce Pinchbeck, Rebekah, and I launched The New Tropic.

Before we launched, We did our homework, designing a deep research process to understand our community and the opportunity we saw to serve it. (That process became a core foundation of our business and our community.) We vetted financial models, gathered advisors, and secured a bit of funding. But nothing tests your assumptions like a sudden impact with the real world.

Fortunately, somewhere between exploring Miami’s dive bars, diving into transit policy, and running Pitbull for Mayor, The New Tropic started to catch on. A hot minute later, we have a community of 30,000 amazing humans who spend time with us every day. Led by Ariel Zirulnick and Roshan Nebhrajani, The New Tropic is making unique local journalism on everything from ballot initiatives to the best bars in Hialeah.

We have a growing business model that eschews traditional advertising and the breathless hunt for pageviews in favor of creative storytelling, audience insights, and engagement with real people. Now, we’re headed to new places, starting in Seattle. (We wanted the longest domestic flight available. We’re really into AAdvantage miles.)

Anika Anand and Monica Guzman will lead The Evergrey (here’s their rundown on what they’re doing and how they got here). They are dedicated Seattleites, and two of the best leaders on community engagement, local journalism, and product thinking in the country. During the past few months, we’ve worked with them to research, design, and beta test The Evergrey with a small community of leading locals. Today, they go public with their first product, a daily newsletter. More is on the way.

On its face, The Evergrey looks and feels like a sibling to The New Tropic. That’s intentional. In Seattle, in Miami and around the world, cities are in a shared moment of growth and transformation that lays the foundation for building community and experimenting with new models for local media. Cities are unique. Each one is filled with passionate, curious locals with big ideas and the heart to make them happen. Through those communities, our cities innovate. Our cities solve problems. The stories of our cities become the stories of our world. At WhereBy.Us, we’re building tools, technology and a deep understanding of the next generation of local leaders to tell their stories in new ways.

WhereBy.Us started as a side hustle, with the three of us organizing small community design-thinking events packed with post-its and Play-Doh. As we built The New Tropic, we kept the WhereBy.Us name in the background. But it’s the foundation of everything we do — a bunch of nerds exploring, creating, and trying to make a difference where we live. We’ve grown from three full-time employees to 13, built a creative agency that helps brands big and small with local engagement, and developed technology to support new kinds of local engagement through media.

In the coming months, we’ll have plenty more to share about how we’re growing and where we’re going. But no announcement about our company’s future would be complete without acknowledging how much we’ve relied on the kind, smart people surrounding us. Our national reverence of entrepreneurship favors lone founders on magazine covers and stories of gruff geniuses who fight the odds alone. Entrepreneurship is a loosely organized series of mistakes. It’s about learning, listening, and trying new things. And it is impossible without people. It is impossible without the partners, friends, advisors, investors, colleagues, and taco delivery people who keep you running. It is impossible without a community — people who invest their valuable time and attention and who show us how to be useful every day. So, for all of The New Tropic fam and for our earliest adopters of The Evergrey, we appreciate you, we’re here for you, and we want to keep hearing from you.

-Chris, Bruce, Rebekah, and the whole WhereBy.Us team

You can check out The Evergrey and The New Tropic on their home turf, and read more on WhereBy.Us at our site.

If you’re interested in all this or just want to send over a funny GIF, you’re always welcome in our inboxes.

A new chapter for WhereBy.Us was originally published in WhereByUs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

(MDCDTPW, for short 😂) Working with our friends at Prism Music Group, we’re launching a campaign to redefine transportation, foster a new mobility conversation among Miamians, and build engagement and participation. This project is close to our hearts and our purpose as a company, so I wanted to share details on what we’re doing, how we’ll be doing it, and how it relates to The New Tropic.

How we get around defines how we see our cities.

Changing how we get around is hard — and it’s harder still to get residents involved in those changes. How can we do better?

When Rebekah Monson, Bruce Pinchbeck Jr., and I started working on WhereBy.Us, we found the importance of mobility validated again and again in our research. Before we launched The New Tropic, we spent months interviewing locals about their experiences, following them on their commutes, waking up with them at obscene hours and standing up in their personal space to get a sense of what it’s like to live here.

One topic emerged stronger than any other: It’s frustrating to get around a growing city like Miami— particularly one born in the age of the automobile. That challenge shapes and influences every other part of how we imagine ourselves in our city.

Residents are rarely invited to engage in big decisions like transit. The last thing most of us want to do with our free time is study up on how metropolitan planning organizations relate to cities and counties and the dozen other indecipherable acronym agencies that call the shots. At the same time, many of those organizations are eager for more residents to join the conversation.

How we work

We publish The New Tropic to provide information and connection to our community of curious locals. We make newsletters, original stories, social media conversations, events, and other things that help connect Miamians. We have a team (led by Ariel Zirulnick) dedicated to that work. Our company keeps the lights on by creating similar work for companies and organizations that want to connect with the people who live here. We help them design engagement strategies, produce research and facilitate innovation, and design custom creative and storytelling that builds conversation with the right people.

We have a separate team that produces client work, so The New Tropic can remain independent and accountable to our community. We publish some of our client work through The New Tropic and our other channels, and branded content is always clearly marked as such.

What we’ll be doing with Miami-Dade County

Over the next few months, we’ll be creating four things, in collaboration with Prism Music Group:

1. A program of storytelling and creative content that explores what’s ahead for Miami’s transit system, takes locals behind the scenes, and unpacks the complexity of executing new ideas for making transit better. The goal of this work is driving conversation, feedback, and community.
2. A series of events on and around transit that encourage us all to use the system and get involved through fun and surprising interactions (like the Miami Soul Train).
3. A Kindness Campaign that will inspire us to be a bit more excellent to each other in public spaces, and explore how we can push for a more human and connected Miami.
4. WhereBy.Us is producing human-centered design research to help understand locals’ transit experiences and goals, and help us design the most effective engagements.

We’re excited about this project, because we can approach it with authenticity: transit is one of the biggest challenges in our city. Our conversation about its future has to be participatory, and has to include every part of our county, if it’s going to be successful. Alice Bravo and her team at the department are embracing this idea. They are choosing to work with us in part because they want this open conversation and two-way engagement.

Our journalism team at The New Tropic will continue to explore transit stories on their own, as they always have, pursuing stories the community suggests and looking for new ways to build connections.

Let us know your questions, concerns, and ideas as we embark on this new adventure.

How do you change a city’s conversation about transportation? was originally published in WhereByUs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re living in the era of unicorns and big dreams; of explosive growth, hockey-stick curves, and constant acceleration. Besides having a noticeably specific vocabulary, these ideas obscure the reality that most of the startup industry is making stuff no one wants, because we don’t take time to understand people.

“No market need”

Forty-two percent of failed startups failed because there was “no market need” for what they were making. That’s what CB Insights found when they began reviewing the post-mortems of unsuccessful startup companies in 2014 (the project continues, and it’s definitely worth a read: https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/startup-failure-post-mortem/). These aren’t month-old garage projects. Their review includes companies who raised tens of millions of dollars, operating for years with dozens or hundreds of employees.

How is this possible? How does a group of people go out into the world, create a name and a product and a ridiculously soft t-shirt, ask investors for their money, and launch a thing they’re not sure anyone wants? It’s because we’re usually designing for our idea of people, rather than people themselves.

Catching fire

Creativity without purpose is super important for society — for artists, explorers, inventors, even scientists, who need to push boundaries without being asked what the monetization strategy is. But startups are supposed to be different. Startups are the jewel of modern economics. They’re transforming cities and rescuing the middle class and disrupting horrible things everyone hates like going to the DMV and having pizza delivered by human beings who could see you in your underwear. Most of them will fail, but those that don’t will be worth $1,000,000,000,000,000 and capture five trillion users, and the charismatic founder will be on the cover of Fast Company by himself wearing a hoodie.

Sometimes products really do catch on and catch fire, and we’re all using them, and they’re generating the kind of real value we care about, like jobs and the financial ability to have a doughnut shop on the company campus. But businesses don’t usually grow like that. It’s a long and hard and educational thing, and it’s impossible to know everything when you begin. Fortunately, it is possible to know whether anyone wants the thing you’re doing, before you start doing it. Many people call this process design thinking or human-centered design (we do too, and it’s a core part of our business), but the naming makes it alien. At its core, it’s about validating ideas by learning from real live humans. It just takes a little bit of curiosity.

How we design things for humans

At our 18-month-old startup, we’ve failed at a lot of things, from business to process to failing to stop rats from eating our refrigerator insulation. We’ve also succeeded, building a profitable and growing local media company in a year, because we started with a deep understanding of the people we wanted to serve.

The core of everything we do is community. Will a story we’re covering help people accomplish something? Why is an event special or useful to locals? How can we make a creative project for a customer something engaging for our users? If we have an idea for a new product or a feature, we think about our community first: have we learned enough to know it’s valuable?

Finding the right people

The first step in human-centered design is finding the right people. To make better things, we have to learn from people with open eyes and minds. We have to find real, live humans and seek to understand their needs, goals, behaviors, and ideas.

In our work we often use the “extreme user” method, which looks for people at the edge of the bell curve around a problem or product, because their needs and behaviors are more pronounced. (Stanford’s d.school has a nice summary of the approach). We also make stakeholder maps, which help us visualize a system and the different people and organizations within. Then we consider what we want to learn, and assemble a set of interviews, observations, and other explorations with the right people on the map.

Many teams work from assumptions of what their users are like, particularly when they’re starting out with limited time and resources. They make “personas” informed by stereotypes (soccer moms like to drive minivans!) rather than actual insights collected by listening to people.

All of us are contradictions; layers of conflicting behaviors that don’t make any sense, which is confusing at first. But we’re irrational beings. We’ve never made any sense. That’s why there’s a selfie toaster.

Think about the people you know: Someone who’s healthy 23 hours a day, but eats two cups of ice cream before bed. Someone impeccably neat, except for the dirty pans they leave in the sink. Someone who takes pride in reading Foreign Policy and telling you about it, but secretly spends an hour every day on TMZ.

Part 2: Asking questions and building good ideas

Startups that fail because of “no market need” are largely failing, I’d venture, because they assume people and systems work in expected ways. What I’ve learned from building our own company, and a lot of research and consulting before that, is that few things work the way you expect before you dive in. And that’s a delightful discovery, when you’re open to it.

In part 2, I’ll share ideas for how to explore what your users really want.

In the meanwhile— what users are you trying to understand?

We write about this and other adventures in our publication and on our WhereBy.Us site. Let’s talk about stuff!

Startups are making stuff no one wants. Here’s how we can fix that. was originally published in WhereByUs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In part 1, we learned that somehow, 42% of startups fail because they’re making things for which there’s “no market need.” There are some easy practices that I think can help fix that.

Ask the right questions

When most of us ask for feedback or try to test an idea, we hand over the thing we made and say, “Hey, I made this. Do you like it?” We assume what we’ve made helps people with something they want or need. This is how focus groups work, and they are horrible. People want to be helpful, so they say yes. If they say no, they’ll invent answers that don’t reflect how they really feel. Problems often work differently than we first imagine, so we have to focus on people and what needs and goals they have.

Productive curiosity starts with a good design challenge: a guiding question that encourages us to listen and explore unexpected ideas, but that’s specific enough to give us focus.

If I’m making software for doctors, the right question isn’t “How can my software help doctors schedule appointments better?” It assumes doctors need help scheduling appointments, and that software is the solution, and it’s about me, not the doctor. A better question is, “What challenges are doctors facing in managing their offices?” Or “What are you writing in my chart?” It’s focused on the doctor, and it opens us to learning new things.

The media industry is not good at this. We ask, “How can I get more people to look at my content?” This question is about me, assumes I’ve made content worth looking at, and encourages the ridiculous free-for-all that passes for traffic strategy at many companies. A better question is, “What do my people want to know more about?” or “How can I help my users accomplish X task or Y goal?”

At WhereBy.Us, our research and design method focuses on what it’s like to be a local. What’s a day in the life of different Miamians? What are the highlights and challenges? What gets people excited about where they live? These aren’t questions about content, or media, or websites, or email. They’re questions about people, and we use the answers to help us design impactful engagements.

When we use this process, we see fast results — our most shared content, like our neighborhood guides, are products built with human centered design. Our work for clients is built with it, too — we help them understand local users like we do, and create experiences that respond directly to real people, so they deliver authentic interactions and value.

We use this practice to drive our engagement model, which lets us understand, segment, and serve locals more effectively.

Test ideas with people

When we listen to and observe enough people, we get ideas about how to help them. We understand the common among the uncommon — challenges and opportunities shared by people with different experiences and backgrounds, that might be worth solving. But before we implement them, we need to test them.

Testing is often learned in startupland as “lean” development, which is about iterative cycles of creation and testing. But I’ve found that in many companies, using this process without human-centered design leads to spending twenty development cycles on improving the way a pop-up window works, with no evidence from users that it truly matters to them. When resources are limited, it’s much more valuable to solve big problems first, even imperfectly.

Humans are an essential part of data-driven ideas like A/B testing, too. With enough users, anyone can track what works better — the short headline or the complex one, the light layout or the dark one. Even when the differences are incremental, at scale they can have substantial effect. But in a vacuum, A/B tests don’t help us understand much. Sure, our short headline worked. But why? Did it solve a user’s problem better? Was it funnier? Does it always work like that, or just on this subject? Should we pivot to only writing short headlines, with no content?

In testing what we do with The New Tropic, we always pair data (which headline performed better?) with human-centered inquiry (how does our community think about or act around this topic?). When we put the two together, we start to see not just what works, but why.

Fit first, grow second

In his excellent piece on why music streaming service Rdio failed, The Verge’s Casey Newton quotes Wilson Miner, who led the company’s design: “Rdio, I guess, made … that classic startup mistake of worrying about being profitable and having a business that makes any sense before you’ve reached this astronomical growth curve.”

To be fair, “the economics of streaming music are brutal,” Newton writes. “The only way to win is to achieve a massive scale.” But it’s accepted wisdom with startups in virtually any industry: grow first, then make money. In media, growth is everything: more content to drive more pageviews to drive more ad revenue to drive more content to drive more pageviews. We make size synonymous with success, when there’s little long-term evidence, in bank accounts or with the people we supposedly serve, that this is true. The curse of the media mogul repeats itself, online or on television or in print, when ego drives decisions.

We think better companies are built the opposite way: understanding, deeply and better than anyone else, the people you exist to serve, and solving real problems for them before gambling on growth or scale.

Practice empathy

I spend a good portion of my time facilitating workshops and running sessions on human-centered design and how it applies to media, local engagement, and millennials. Sometimes it’s with startups, but often it’s with big companies or industry associations. In either case, it always strikes me that we are all individually awesome at learning from people and designing with empathy. It’s a deeply human process. We’re hard-wired to seek out other people and connect with them.

Our culture, though, is not awesome at this. We encourage startups to tell their stories with a focus on how amazing they are, how completely they understand the problem, and how clearly their solution is solving it. We expect big companies to have earnings calls with clear strategies in changing markets; uncertainty is deadly. We ask government and political leaders for unwavering ideals and flawless plans; we give no margin of error.

I think we’d have better conversations, and more productive enterprises, if we celebrated honesty and curiosity. If we started with what we don’t know, and our plans for learning it.

How do you want to encourage curiosity and human-centered design in your work? Let’s chat about it.

How curiosity can make better startups was originally published in WhereByUs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.