We are crowdfunding the sustainable future of Singletrack and you can own a share of our business today.
Don’t invest unless you’re prepared to lose all the money you invest. This is a high-risk investment and you are unlikely to be protected if something goes wrong
Back in July we announced our plan to open up ownership of Singletrack to new shareholders via the Crowdcube investment platform. Almost 500 of you signed up to be kept in the loop and yesterday we emailed all of you to let you know that our investment campaign is now live on the Crowdcube platform. We are very happy to report that there was an almost instant flurry of investors pledging amounts from £10 to a great deal more. We are definitely off to a good start but we need more of you involved, even if just to share the opportunity to anyone you think would like to help us thrive for another quarter of a century.
Next year Singletrack turns 25. That’s a quarter of a century of independence in the bike media world. A lot has happened in that time and we’ve left a lot of history in our wake over the years.
Latest Singletrack Merch
Buying and wearing our sustainable merch is another great way to support Singletrack
We’re continually doing what we need to do to remain a key player in both the mountain bike and publishing world, and we’ve proven time and time again that when the going gets tough, doing the right thing by our subscribers pays off, even if that means asking for their help.
Following the amazing support we received from our readers last year we’ve been looking at how we remain sustainable and not just survive but thrive as a media brand. We’ve looked at every part of the business and we’ve made changes where they were needed – We are adaptable, but now we feel it’s time to adapt again and once more we see our future involving you, our readers, subscribers and website users.
Singletrack has always been about the community. Our independence has allowed us to remain a mountain bike media brand for mountain bikers and by mountain bikers since the very beginning back in 2001. That won’t change and indeed we want to build upon the experience, contacts and knowhow that a quarter of a century has given us in the specialty publishing world
And that’s why we are offering a chance for you to not just be a reader of Singletrack but to own part of it.
Our investor campaign has just launched via the CrowdCube platform offering you the chance to become a shareholder of Singletrack. A real shareholder, part owner and with the chance to benefit from our future growth and success. You can invest any amount you like from just £10 to a lot more. The more you invest the greater your shareholding will be.
The investment process is overseen at every stage by Crowdcube. If you don’t have a Crowdcube account then you will need to set that up. To make absolutely sure, you won’t be able to invest for 24 hours after your account is created. They will also walk you through all the risks involved. Only then will you get the option to invest in us and even then, your investment will only be taken at the end of the campaign and again, only if you still want to invest. In the meantime there will be lots of opportunities for you to ask us questions and find out more about what our plans are for the future.
Follow us at Crowdcube.We will be using our Owners Club mailing list to keep our investors updated on how the campaign is going and after the campaign is closed, to keep all our new owners updated on the plans and more that we are already working on for the short to long term future of Singletrack. If you want to be a part of that then check out the campaign over at Crowdcube right now and sign up to our Owners mailing list below.
Donations
For financial reasons our investment campaign is open to UK residents only. We’ve been contacted by many of you from outside the UK about this but unfortunately there’s nothing we can do about that at this stage. If you are not a UK resident but you still want to support us then you can make a donation below. We will consider any donation as if it were an investment and offer up the same perks as the Crowdcube campaign investors can get.
Well yes, but that’s my content, not theirs… My point was that STW don’t seem to make the content, not that users don’t make it… Users here make lots of superb content.
They give you the platform. Be a shame if they saw your sentiment and thought, you know what, we’ll put a stop to that, no?
You’ve said yourself you had 2 sponsors from here, where would you have got them from if not here? A small motorbike forum?
But STW might be able to create video content that appealed more to you (and their grumpy middle-aged audience generally).
Or they might just do more of the clickbait-y dramatic thumbnail-but-generic content stuff that’s already all over YouTube.
It’d be nice to see them have a go, but my opinion is moot as I’m not in a position to put my hand in my pocket for this.
I think you’ve missed my point… my point was that i don’t see content from STW being created as regularly as it used to. We used to have context from Benji all the time, Hannah all the time and others, every day or two you’d have articles coming up with various things, now a lot of them i don’t think interested my hugely, but some did. There were kit reviews all the time, new bike reviews, ride reviews, adventures, but they’ve all gone away.
I don’t want to get into the sponsorship debate massively as this thread isn’t really the place. But no, even without STW we’d still have both sponsors i believe. They do post/read/view here, but that wasn’t how we got them as such. But i’ve been told off a couple of times for posting even a picture of the boy or his ‘stuff’ and STW have actively told me off for it. Hence now i don’t post any pictures or mention his sponsors at all.
😆 “It’s bad news I’m afraid ladies and gentlemen. The major stumbling block in our plans for world domination, the one flaw that we hadn’t considered, is that our subscriber ride wasn’t flat enough" 😉
This is a generational gap thing. I’m a similar age to Mark and Chipps, I was born and raised in the 1970s. Screens weren’t a thing, books were. I read. I read a LOT and I read quickly. I don’t want to watch a video where they tell you what they’re going to tell you, advertise something, trail some other videos you might watch, ask you to HIT THAT SUBSCRIBE BUTTON, then slowly and painfully explain something. I can read the article in about a tenth of the time it takes to watch a video.
Younger people though seem to have an aversion to the written workd and need someone on screen showing and telling them what’s happening and how to do things.
I suppose then it depends on the target market and the usage profile of the site.
I’m considering investing, but not as a commercial thing – more to say thanks for being here and doing what you do, I’ve been knocking around since the start and have got a lot out of the site, even if we no longer read the magazine itself.
There’s no doubt that the loss of Hannah and Amanda have affected the content of STW but I’m amazed at the amount of content from such a small team, Ben must be out on the hills all day testing stuff!
Yes, the “glitches” are frustrating but it goes back to it being a small team. Hopefully this flotation will help, I can’t afford to lose any money but I have advertised (paid for) and will continue to do so along with continuing my subscription.
This seems an odd response to someone who highlighted that more details on the plans would be helpful so they can see what funds will be used for and decide if that is likely to result in a return on their investment.
I was also interested in investing but the lack of clear and upfront information on the what the raised finance will be used for is very disappointing. Surely it is up to the current owners to publish all the available information to encourage people to invest? At the moment it all seems quite secretive or suggests that you don’t have a full business plan – if so why haven’t you published that alongside forecast financials (P&L, Balance sheet and most importantly cashflow…cash is king!) as part of a pre investment pack?
I’m afraid at the moment this doesn’t seem like an investment but more an additional request for donations which fundamentally will just be used to keep the mag (or perhaps more pertinently the forum) going and pay the owners their wages.
Perhaps they don’t want to post all of the sensitive info on a public forum?
There is a discussion section on Crowdcube where you can post questions.
Understood but it could be sent direct to potential investors or maybe it is all available on the Crowdcube site and I havent seen it. Either way I think the onus is on those wanting investment to provide the information rather than expecting individual request/statements.
I get that. But there’s a few issues that I need to be very careful about. One is that the campaign is FCA governed, which means as director anything I put on the site here and in public has to be considered very carefully. I’m not allowed to make any claims publicly that are not already laid out in the pitch on Crowdcube. Everything I say is considered financial communication when I say it publicly.
That’s not an excuse – that’s legal advice I’ve been given from Crowdcube.
There is a pitch deck document that is available through the campaign but at the level we are operating at and have paid for this is available only to Crowdcube’s elite tier of investors.
Also, explaining in detail our business plan in public can be problematic. I’ve always been as open as possible when it comes to what we do at Singletrack and how the business is run and funded but publishing a complete business plan is probably a step too far and any business would be wise to consider what they make public for commercial reasons.
All that said – SOME broad strokes.
The plan breaks down into areas of the business that can be expanded in order to increase revenue and reduce operating costs. I’ve already alluded to video production as one area we have identified as a bottle neck. Video is lucrative – regardless of what your personal thoughts on it as a content medium. Personally I agree with some of the comments above regarding video. I prefer reading content to watching it. But I’m not here to run the business for me – it has to be run to be profitable.
Travel is another area for development that is profitable. It opens up new markets in the travel sector for us to earn revenue from. eg. Air Canada as a sponsor of our in production Canadian destination guides. Plus the associated tourist authorities that support this kind of content.
Marketing of our content is another area that needs development/investment. For 25 years we’ve relied on the fact that the website brings hundreds of thousands of visitors every month – that has meant we have not needed to spend on external marketing to gain subscribers/readers. That landscape has changed quite dramatically and there’s a number of markets that we need to target to increase subscriptions growth. 1 example being lapsed subscribers (there are several in the plan). That level of marketing needs budget and time/staff. We don’t have enough of either at the moment – hence the reason for investment.
Each of those examples (there are more) require time, skill and money. There is a detailed plan behind each.
One new idea that has come out of the Crowdcube campaign thanks to the chat I’ve had with a potential investor who wants to remain anon, is ringfencing editorial budget to be spent on paying for content from contributors under the age of 30. This very much fits with the long term objective of attracting new readers and new audiences. One problem I intend to tackle is the issue of the content creators creating content for their age group. If we keep cranking out content from our current demographic without considering younger audiences then the market we serve will shrink as, frankly, we all die off. I’m not looking to continue Singletrack as it is – that’s like holding on to your CD collection and vowing never to stream anything.
One more project we created and then stalled due to lack of resources was the moderation tools on the forum – a topic I’m sure we can all relate to. We had developed an AI/LLM tool that was designed to help moderators home in on potential ‘issues’. This was based on an early Google tool called sentiment analysis. In a nutshell it could detect if conversations were getting heated and then alert moderators that there may be something to keep an eye on. We built the tech behind it but we couldn’t spare the time and money to polish it into a final product. My thoughts on that were we could build a system that could be sold/licenced to other online forums – potential R&D fuding etc..
So, we are not without ideas and we certainly have a lot of experience in this area. We are small and can adapt to big changes in the market without having to run thing sup a corporate flagpole – But the limiting factor really is time and money. Singletrack needs to adapt and change with the current markets and tech and trends in MTB if it’s going to be around for another 25 years. That’s not possible without investment in time and money.
Additional: I posted that having just come out of a meeting with a company/agency called BidX. They help companies develop bids for grant funding in areas of R&D and tech innovation. This is another avenue I’m currently looking at – In general though, grant funding requires the company to have a percentage of the funds in place. Again, that’s predicated on a successful crowdcube campaign.
ewwwwww…. young people?! What do you want that for?! 🤮 😉
NBT has perfectly summed up my position, and I think illustrates a key divide, between the ‘fans’ who see investing as an extension of the other donations and subscription they may have, and the more serious/ sensible ‘investors’. The appeal is a bit different to the two groups.
Question: was the answer that this is UK only (you can register a non-UK CrowdCube account, but this offer is only available to UK investors)?
It does appear to be a UK resident only campaign. To go wider and into europe wold involve a lot more upfront costs and more admin and due dilligence by a separate EU registered Crowdcube company.
What else can I tell you?
I’ve just started a mini MBA at Lancaster University in Business Growth and Mangement. I’ve been doing this for 25 years but it’s never too late to learn more and I want to make sure that IF we succeed with this investment campaign that I give that investment the best possible chance of working.
Thanks for all the updates and question answering – appreciated.
Do you have a minimum figure in mind that you need to raise?
I have a number of investment total points at which I’ve adjusted the plan. £40k is where are target is currently with more in the plan if we exceed that.
This hits the nail on the head for me. Apart from the forum Im not sure what else is being bought / invested in. I subsrcibe to the magazine but am rarely interested in more than half the articles as they dont cover my interests in the sport and I have no interest in gravel. Since I started subscribing many years ago the mag / site seems to be drifting away from core mountainbiking. That might be a deliberate stragegy or an accident of chaging interests of the editorial team, I dont know. But gone are the days I used this site to find out whats new or happening in the sport.
Increasing our editorial output IS very much part of the plan. One reason for the reduction in output is the simple fact the team is much smaller and so we have to pick our jobs very carefully.
In my time it’s never really been like that though. Also not sure what you mean by ‘core mountain biking’?