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Staying small in order to grow

I thought this was an interesting extract from Jill Abramson’s Merchants of Truth about the rise of Vice. Limiting their circulation was a deliberate strategy to facilitate its expansion in the longer term, enabling them to side step some of the pressures they would have been subject to if they had dived headfirst into growth. From pg 45-46

“We realized if we were going to try to go mass,” 10 Smith said, “and try to go for a million copies, we were going to have to dilute how we wrote and how we did everything.” Instead they doubled down on catering to the cool kids and consciously kept their circulation number lower than market demand. They printed 150,000 issues to distribute across the U.S. and similarly small batches overseas, in Japan, then the U.K., then Germany. “We got to a million copies that way,” Smith said. Each of those cool kids would pass their issue on to six or eight friends, expanding the magazine’s circulation by word of mouth.

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