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.
Mark mentioned above that there goals, with a plan attached to each of them – IIRC the first one is at £40k
I too struggle with too much coverage of far flung places. Not because I’m not interested in far off places, but because I feel that we should all be aiming to reduce (even eliminate) the number of flights we take.
I’d love to ride in Peru or Canada or the ‘Stans but i can’t bring myself to take a flight for a short holiday. It troubles me that people seem oblivious to this issue. I have the problem with the Bikepacking.com journal. It’s beautifully produced and if the writers are on long term trips with most of the travel done by bike then fine, but many of the trips are by people flying half way around the world to ride for a couple of weeks. We can’t all do that without worrying consequences… at least not on a regular basis.
Thanks. I knew I had seen 40k somewhere but just couldn’t find it again but that explains it.
As an example the current issue of the magazine. I enjoyed the article on Scottish riding. The gear reviews were ok. The morzine advert was fine on the mtb bit but then disappeared into gravel riding. The rest of the articles held no interest to me. I’m not interested in gravel bikes, silly tall bikes or whatever soul is meant to mean. For a magazine that’s about mountain biking there isn’t much mountain biking content in it
Just to balance things out, the international articles have always been one of the things which attracted me most to Singletrackworld. I may not get to ride many of them, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t like reading them, and dreaming about them.
And, although I find it unlikely that I will ever visit BC, it’s probably my favourite place in the world to read about, and to watch in YouTube.
I’ve decided an investment isn’t for me – at my age (late 50s) I need guaranteed returns on what little I have to spare.
So I’ll continue to support STW in the usual way, and bought another beanie hat on Friday! As I needed a new beanie and STW may as well have the business.
Thank you @the-muffin-man
Buying our merch is another great way to support us 🙂
Difficult to do that when the majority of trails we ride are officially out of bounds for a magazine to photograph or write about.
Any magazine for any outdoor sport/hobby is going to write about locations abroad. The important thing is balance. How do you get that right if all you can write about here are the usual boring bridleways in the Peak District and Yorkshire Dales?And I think the point Mark was making was that he’d rather not be galavanting round the world when his time would be better spent running the business. To do that though he needs to be able to pay other people who are much cheaper/more available than him to do that. 🙂
I guess some of this is down to how you view a magazine / life / the world / mountain biking. If your outlook is limited by the bounds of what you can personally access and do, then your world is going to be pretty small. The enduring joy of reading magazines, novels, taking in photography, art etc, is arguably seeing the universe, familiar and not, through someone else’s eyes.
A dull writer can make the most exciting experience seem mundane – an old climbing mate I used to call ‘Ticklist Dave’ was capable of making an epic struggle up the north face of the Eiger sound like a tedious stint in a supermarket check-out line – but a really good one can paint your familiar local trails in new, exciting colours. I’m not saying I don’t want to read about amazing foreign destinations and trails, though personally I’m not particularly interested in ‘resorts’ – change my mind! – but what I really want from a mag is the world painted in Technicolour.
Of course that’s both a very personal take and far easier said than done, but if you think back, the stuff that sticks with you is just that. Mike Ferrentino writing for Bike Magazine in his pomp, Steve Worland’s measured, understated genius for describing bikes, in motion terms, The Collective etc. Anyway, this is way off topic and, also arguably way on topic, but it goes back to the point I made somewhere further up the page, that everything else aside, brilliant content is what makes a magazine, channel or whatever work and there’s a lot more to that than the ‘what’ of what you cover.
I’ve thought about it a lot and decided a Crowdcube donation isn’t for me. But I do love the forum and I think I’ve had my moneys worth out of the lifetime sub I bought back in 2016 so I’ve taken out a digital bimonthly subscription. Now my alter ego can cancel and flounce if I feel the forum isn’t getting enough love ❤️
I was wondering what to do with my winter fuel payment – think I’ll direct it to this!
@Mark – did you change the branding or is that still the page we should use anyway?
I took the branding off it. Yes. That’s the place for donations.
What’s the beef with Guy Kesteven? He didn’t seem too complimentary about this idea. Weirdly, I’ve always thought he could be the missing piece of the jigsaw for STW content, he seems like a perfect fit for both written and video content for the STW demographic. I do agree with some of the comments above though, this has been structured wrong. Anyone who thinks they’re getting any of their investment back, let alone making a profit, is bonkers!As someone in the younger demographic around here (early 30s) but who’s been using the forum since getting into biking 11–12 years ago and admittedly grumpy beyond my years, I think the forum is the key to this place. I can’t say the website content has ever really engaged me much.
Fair enough; for me the appeal is the idea of owning a small part of this site I’ve spent so much time on.
Unfortunately Crowdcube issues mean I can’t, but I’ll still donate I guess
@ogden, no beef here, I just couldn’t help be typically childish. I do things my way with Patreon subs etc. Mark and Chipps do it their way with crowdfunding etc. Absolute kudos to them for keeping Singletrack going for so long in increasingly tough times and I’d much rather they survived than some of the slick schil set ups that populate this space.
GuyKes
Holy balls, I managed to summon @guykesteven 😂. Good job I was blowing your trumpet!
@ogden Yeah normally you have to say my name three times like Beteljuice but I got tipped off 🤣 Thanks for the comment anyway, I think Mark and the team have enough to cope with already without me being involved.
1 week to go before the campaign comes to an end. Big value investors are amazing but I’d just as much love hundreds of investors putting in small amounts. We have 60 investors currently. I’d love to see more, no matter the size of investment.
Branding still there but not matter, looks like the right place. Will get on with it