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Niche publishing brands are most powerful at intersections. For Cherie Hu, the founder of Water & Music, the intersection is music x technology x business x web3.

Water & Music was an accidental brand in many ways. Cherie was a freelance journalist in 2016, relying on writing assignments from established publications like Billboard, Forbes and industry trade publications. Freelancers were the original creator class of journalism, well practiced in juggling the actual writing with figuring out taxes, chasing down invoices and, yes, tending to their personal brands in order to get the next assignment. Cherie created an email newsletter in 2016 to distribute her latest stories and added pieces she wanted to write anyway without waiting for a publication to run them. The newsletter became a creative outlet.

It grew enough that Cherie moved it to Patreon, and by early 2019 it had attracted 5,000 free subscribers. Water & Music is now off Patreon and boasts over 2,000 members. It is also pioneering experimentation in web3 models with its own research-oriented decentralized autonomous organization and a $STREAM token.

My takeaways from our conversation:

Look for signals beyond analytics. Understanding whether you have the publishing equivalent of product-market fit requires looking for signals. Some are simple math: email subscribers, open rates, paying members, ad demand. But some are intangible, like people reaching out to you, asking how they can support your work and seeing people at conferences who are obsessed with the subject matter and want to connect to each other. “I realized that there are a lot of these readers who would have such amazing discussions with each other, but they just did not know each other.”

Autonomy is more than money. Water & Music really took shape as a brand when Cherie started treating it as a creative outlet rather than a promotional vehicle. The individual-led brand allowed her the freedom to “have the kind of career that would allow for the kind of work that I wanted to do.”

Build a team. One of the false dichotomies is this idea in the unbundling of publishing that you’re either all on your own or buried in a legacy news organization. At some point, everyone needs to build a team, even if the relationships are more flexible than a typical company. “I absolutely cannot do everything that is happening at Water & Music just by myself, especially in terms of how I want the community and the brand to grow.”

Embed in a community. Just reporting the news is a commodity product. The way out is to provide extra value in the form of analysis and insights, while positioning yourself at the center of a community that wants to connect with each other. “If you're trying to build some kind of media business, there has to be some deeper layer around it, whether it's building a community or even just providing context or analysis.”

Check out the full episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Let me know what you think:

Water & Music's Cherie Hu on going solo

The Rebooting Show