Would You Pay $1.99 to Know the Most Important Thing in Social Entrepreneurship?

Man, I love the internet. I've just started a new business overnight that I actually think has promise. Would you pay $1.99 a month to keep track of fields that you care about, but just don't have the time to be heavily involved in?

The last year has seen a resurgence in the email newsletter as a social medium. High profile tech leaders like Jason Calacanis have abandoned blogging in favor of a direct email list. Companies like Thrillist and Groupon have built million (or billion) dollar businesses on the backs of email. And people are starting to notice.

Last year, I started "NList," a personal mailing list designed to make it easier for me to share things I thought were important, enlightening and interesting with friends and acquaintances -- many of whom I don't regularly see or speak with. I've averaged about one NList every 4-6 weeks. It's been an amazing experiment and I hear all the time from people who love the personality and immediacy of the medium.

When I saw letter.ly, a new startup from Sam Lessin, I had to try it. The idea is simple: paid newsletter subscriptions. You sign up for an account, set any price you want, and you're off to the races.

While most of the early users are charging for their personal newsletters, I'm in a slightly different position. My NList is about the social experience of staying in touch, and I'm not going to add a pay wall to that. When it comes to my specific industry knowledge, I already have this blog which I update ~30x/month. Not to mention a constant stream of Posterous, Twitter, and Facebook shares.

I started thinking, however, about all the people I talk with who are interested in social entrepreneurship, but only tangentially connected to the field. They don't necessarily have time to follow the day-to-day rhythm and pulse of the field. For them, the quantity of content on blogs like this actually become a barrier to entry because they don't know what to focus their limited time and attention on.

Then I began to think about all the topics for which that was the case for me. Pitbull advocacy. Middle East politics. These are things I care about and have spent time with in another life, but don't necessarily follow day to day. What I need is something that gives me the ability to know what people in the know think are the most important things happening in those fields.

So I've decided to try an experiment. I'm going to be publishing a once-monthly email magazine called "The Most Important Thing in Social Entrepreneurship." It will be exactly what it sounds like, a highly-focused, heavily curated snapshot of what I believe to be the most important thing(s) happening in Social Entrepreneurship in that month. It's perfect for readers who don't have the time to read every post I write on this blog, but want the no BS view of the events they really oughta know about.

This will not change anything about what I write on this blog. The cost that you're paying for the newsletter is not about getting "better" content, or things I can't write here. The cost is for the convenience of getting the highly refined snapshot.

And, because why the hell not, I decided to actually really try and see whether this idea has legs. Instead of just limiting the fun to The Most Important Thing in Social Entrepreneurship, I'm franchising "The Most Important Thing" as a platform. You can see the website here, and if there is a topic you care about, you can apply to create your own Most Important Thing newsletter. You keep 90% of the revenue, and the 10% cost of buy in gives you access to a whole network of people who will be learning this road together, sharing best practices, and building revenue around their passion.

I think that within our social change community, there are thousands and thousands of people who want to be connected with knowledge leaders in fields related to their own, but who don't have an opportunity to do so right now that fits their daily constraints. I think that providing a new way for those people to access that knowledge ultimately creates a meaningful social good with benefits beyond the produce and consumer of content.

This could be a catastrophic failure, but I actually think the economics of content are changing in a way that makes this the right time for this (which I'll write about later this week).

If you're interested, here are the relevant links:

The Most Important Thing (Mimpthing) Platform

Application to write your own Mimpthing

The Most Important Thing in Social Entrepreneurship

NList

Photo credit: theseanster93