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.
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.
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.Â
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.Â
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.Â
Each of those examples (there are more) require time, skill and money. There is a detailed plan behind each.Â
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.Â
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..Â
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.
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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?! 🤮 😉Â
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.Â
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)?
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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?Â
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.Â
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.Â
In my time it’s never really been like that though. Also not sure what you mean by ‘core mountain biking’?
@Mark the pitch deck is very high level. From my naive reading of the financial numbers revenue is down and loss is up year on year – is there a plan to address this? Can you share?
What’s the relationship between gofar and singletrack media ltd? It’s mentioned in the accounts for this year with transactions between the companies and a shared director. Does gofar or singletrack media ltd own the core IP assets (i.e the brand, the web address, user data, etc)?
I’m fairly inclined to invest as I’ve got so much value from this place over the years, but it would be good to see more of a plan…
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Two years of losses up to Feb 2024. The latest accounts will be better – they are being prepped for filing at the end of November. Turnover is up for the last financial year by around £20k and costs have been considerably reduced in that period. I can’t comment on the actual profit as that’s not currently finalised.Â
Singletrack media is a legacy company that we mothballed 18 months ago. It came about from a time around 18 years ago when we considered a company name change from Gofar to Singletrack Media. We didn’t bother in the end. It has no assets and owns no IP. We used it to manage a studio we rented for a time as it was there and we could. But it is in the process of being wound up.Â
Can I be rude and ask what Chipps involvement is on a day to day basis?
To the casual observer it seems he’s semi-retired from STW contributing the editorial for each magazine, the email newsletter and a few articles now and again. Especially as he’s no longer a director of GoFar Enterprises. And why did he resign as director if still actively involved in day to day running of the company.
If you are basically running the show should the dilution of shares come from Chipps holding and not your own (not sure how this is doable!).
Re Singletrack Media Limited – it’s been charging a management fee of around £50k per year to Gofar Enterprises – what was that for if it was essentially a dormant company?
Singletrack Media did do a job for Gofar Enterprises ltd for a time. It managed a studio, equipment and dealt with rents but it was just a pain to run and for net zero benefit, which is why we decided to simplify and wind it down.
Chipps is very much active in Singletrack. He checks in daily with the rest of us from France and he’s currently neck deep in proofing and editing all the content for Issue 164. His shares are his shares (currently 50% like me). I suppose he could offer them up for sale somehow but then what is raised would be his and not be available to invest in the company. By creating more shares for investors we dilute our own shareholding BUT the investment raised through the sale of the new shares all goes to the company, where it’s needed.
I’m sure there are lots of different ways to do this but going through a service company like Crowdcube means we don’t have to get buried in the legal stuff – they are the experts at this kind of thing and we are not – they will be handling all the legal and financial jobs for us and we can focus on making the investment work.
I don’t think it’s drifted. When it was launched it occupied a space between MBUK (shredding the gnarr) and MBI (preoccupied with racing, although the bike reviews were good). It seems to me that that is still the space it occupies – some special events, big days out in the hills (in the UK and abroad), natural stuff, no bike parks. Question is whether that is still a viable position.
Is this the thing that was talked about a year ago (or that’s how it feels)
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I genuinely hope it works out for STW and those that invest
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However I don’t see the core demographic changing , or an attempt to try and change the core demographic.Â
If it’s going to change from what mtb to what zimmer frame then fair enough, but STW doesn’t appear to be attracting a younger user. Also the forum appears at every step to try and discourage new users and be happy with a strategy of we don’t care and it’s better if you pay.
what makes you think every website visitor is a forum user? Compared to here, pinkbike’s forum is a ghost town, maybe 10 long running threads that get updated every other day, next to no non bike threads, yet they seem to manage.
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Everything that @nbt said above re video. I was trying to find a way to write exactly that but he nailed it.Â
I think the risk with video is that if it’s very good, it gets lost in amongst the dross and if it’s very poor, it just is the dross…
It’s important to not focus on one aspect. I’m certainly not. It’s a holistic change. Video is one piece, the forum is one piece, albeit the most visible piece. The magazine is another, our demographic with its strengths and weaknesses is another. Travel content, content aimed at 30 somethings, marketing of what we offer, website ads, print ads, sponsorships… I could go on. It’s all of the above and more that fit together to make Singletrack. The core business is very diverse. To succeed we need to address all of it. We can’t while we are spread too thin but we can with your support.Â
The landscape is changing and while the print mag is not what matters to many people it is certainly a solid part of the whole. What I’m seeing across all specialist media (not just bikes) is that the strongest brands still have print in the mix of what they do. Print is a strength if done well and for us it certainly is. Having a physical product is really important. I know that for many reading this it is far from important, but as a business asset it is still key. Print is NOT a money pit for us, despite what is commonly thought. Being in a position to offer a marketing spread across ALL media gives us an advantage that pure digital do not have. Not just in terms of a physical medium but also in credibility. Publishing digitally is pretty easy – we all do it to one level or another on all the social platforms. But print is really hard to do. We do it well and in marketing conversations with advertisers it’s definitely a strength.Â
But print is still just one part of the business. The key to success is bringing them all together to work as a brand that you guys can get behind and also the wider bike industry (and other markets).
The point of this investment campaign is to put us in a position to do that.Â
That’s like being a new musician and saying you will not be releasing any music because it’s 1887, poetry books are still popular and a few people who bought your poetry books previously have said they don’t like gramophones.Â
OTOH every other advert I get at the moment is for AI enabled browsers that will watch a youtube video and summarize it for me. So don’t drop the written content!
The problem I’d question with that as a business decision though is that GCN/GMBN have already saturated the market with “how to fix a puncture" videos which are likely the ones that get the regular clicks and drip feed income for years to come. ST magazine has always generally been more about ride/routes/stories/interviews/travel and that sort of video content is going to be significantly more expensive to do well than studio content, how to videos or yet another variation on the question whether aero or weight saving actually matters. ST feels more like the longer format documentaries following endurance athletes on the TCR/HT550/GBDuro and that comes from established media companies like Red Bull with added brand sponsorship.  I’d be curious to know what something like “I just want to ride" cost to produce. That got ~2million watches, most similar similar documentaries get ~200k. Unfortunately cycling is niche media*, there are narrowboat blogs with higher figures!
*mass participation though, we just don’t watch youtube it seems.
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Oh don’t expect us to be copying GmBN et al. You won’t be seeing g puncture fixing videos from us 🙂Â
Fancy having a biking website where the forum is dominated by threads about biking. Whatever next
And yet MBUK manage to keep the lights on with hardly any meaningful online presence, an old tech website and a YouTube channel that brings in views but nothing with mega viewing figures – just the one that’s nearing 200k. 🤷♂️
Looks like they’ve knocked out a lot of content in the last ten months since their channel started – not sure what their ROI is – perhaps Mark has some insider info!?
I’ll be honest looking the the CrowdCube figures I take my hat off to Mark and the team – you are doing a cracking job on what looks like a shoestring budget! 👍
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Thanks @Mark much appreciated.
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Yes, but… part of the appeal of the STW forum is the off topic stuff.