CoPress Co-Founder Explains Why Startup Shut Down
CoPress touted itself as a “safety net” for college publications, enabling news organizations to safely experiment with their Web sites. the startup moved college news sites off proprietary publishing systems like College Publisher, provided hosting and offered WordPress training and around-the-clock support in case anything went wrong.
But after working with about 40 student publications since February 2009, CoPress announced that it was shutting down for financial reasons.
CoPress, which was started by college journalists, encouraged students to innovate online, and innovate they did. That safety net, however, became more of a security blanket, inundating CoPress’ small tech support staff with unending requests.
Under CoPress’ hosting arrangements, student news organizations could receive unlimited, 24/7 support for a monthly fee. CoPress Co-Founder and Executive Director Daniel Bachhuber said the company couldn’t keep up, let alone make enough money to adequately pay its support staff.
“We were letting publications submit as many support tickets as they needed,” Bachhuber said in a phone interview last week. “We gave them full access to the server, and it was open-source so they could tweak and mess with the software all day long.”
Bachhuber said he spent hours a day trying to answer news organizations’ questions while interning at Publish2. He dropped out of school in fall 2008, partly to dedicate more time to CoPress, and said he doesn’t plan to go back. three other CoPress employees, who were full-time students, helped him handle tech support questions.
Because CoPress’ clients were using WordPress, which is free and open-source, they’ll continue to have full control of their sites. rather than pay CoPress, they’ll simply pay the third-party company that hosts their sites. Most of the sites are moving toward third-party hosting services, such as WebFaction and Slicehost, which offer 24/7 support. the main change is that clients can no longer rely on CoPress’ around-the-clock support to help them resolve technical issues related to WordPress.
Bachhuber said the lack of support could actually be good in that it may force student news organizations to do something that may have been easy to avoid when CoPress was just an e-mail or a phone call away: build in-house expertise and seek answers themselves.
“There’s so much you can learn on the Internet if a) you have the motivation and b) you know how to look and ask the right questions and participate responsibly,” Bachhuber said, noting that he’d like to see all student news organizations have developers on staff. “There’s a little bit of hand-holding that can be done, but what it requires most importantly is initiative.” Some of the colleges and universities that were using CoPress’ services, such as Fairfield University’s student newspaper, the Mirror, have created positions to help troubleshoot technical issues internally.
Joseph Cefoli, who was hired this school year as the Mirror’s online projects manager, worked with CoPress to help the paper transition from College Publisher to WordPress.
“As I finish up my senior year and we transition to the new staff, I’m creating documentation and training a new project manager who will be able to work with WordPress and the newspaper staff,” Cefoli said in an e-mail.
Moving forward, CoPress’ clients will be able to refer to a list of WordPress consultants who can help student news organizations with extended projects and technical support. Bachhuber has also created a Google group where students can solicit feedback from each other and share ideas about innovation in college media. Additionally, CoPress plans to release its database conversion script at the end of the month to make it easier for news organizations to get various archives into WordPress. Bachhuber said that having run a challenging business, he’s learned a lot about what it takes to make an operation viable.
“On the money side of things, you really need to know your market, have a good sense of what your business is going to be, and make sure you’re charging appropriately,” Bachhuber said. “We had to change our prices twice, which indicates that we didn’t really start out knowing what we were doing.”
Hoping to make its efforts more financially sound, CoPress began offering an hourly rate of $50 to $70 for tech support last September but found that student news organizations couldn’t afford it and therefore stopped asking questions. the company realized that the monthly fee was more attractive to customers and experimented with other ways of managing the high volume of support requests. Bachhuber, for instance, planned to create a distributed support tool, but didn’t make much progress on it due to limited time, money and staffing.
“Distributed support is an interesting and unexplored idea,” Bachhuber said. “Basically, we’d build a tool where, instead of all the support requests coming to us, some support requests would come to us and others would go to other Webmasters at student publications.”
Andrew Spittle, CoPress’ hosting director and a member of its tech support team, said that as much as he liked offering support to other student journalists, it wouldn’t have made sense financially to continue doing so after graduating from college this spring.
“When we projected out where we’d be in may, it was going to be nearly impossible to scale to a point where we could afford to pay three to four staff members,” Spittle said by phone. Working for a few dollars an hour is “not bad for a group of people who are in school and have the motivation and the time to commit 30 to 40 hours to it, but for people looking for a full-time job salary, it just doesn’t scale.”
