Angelica Malin,
Founder of About Time

Who is About Time and what do you do?

My business is multi-faceted - we have About Time, the Academy, and She Started It. 

About Time, in a nutshell, is anything it’s ‘about time’ you tried in London and beyond. We cover anything that’s exciting, interesting and worth people’s time and energy in the capital, so we’re a content platform for that. Then we have the About Time Academy, which is our events arm. We put on reader events and festivals aimed to inspire and educate people, especially our She Started It LIVE, which is our flagship festival of female empowerment - a two-day event that is designed to inspire the next generation of female entrepreneurs. We highlight amazing women across different industries who have started their own businesses.

At VIDA, we define Next Generation Media Brands as having one or more of the following characteristics: Being disruptive, having diverse revenue streams, operating across multiple platforms and meeting the needs of an underserved audience/community. How does About Time fit our definition of what it means to be a Next Generation Media Brand? 

That kind of fits with everything we do! We definitely have multiple revenue streams, which is really important to me. It’s something I talk about a lot in podcasts and interviews. People say, ‘how have you survived as a magazine’, because so many magazines in my time have gone under, but I’ve always said that having multiple sources of income is so important to stay afloat. 

Digital media is changing so quickly and I think you if you rely on algorithms or one thing to fund your business then it can become quite problematic. For us, we try to have a diverse range. We have money that comes in from content partnerships and sponsored content from brands, as well as working with brands on social media campaigns. Then we have our own festivals and events which bring in money from ticket sales, as well as brand partnerships. And then, personally, I do quite a bit of speaking and writing, which is a whole other thing.

We’re also keen to help underserved audiences. What we try to do with our events is show a really diverse range of women from different backgrounds – ages, ethnicities, etc. We try to highlight women who haven’t been in the mainstream media yet. When we’re curating panels, we look to have a wide range, and not just of women who are far ahead with running their own businesses – which can sometimes be intimidating – people want to see women who are in year one or two of launching something as it feels more accessible. We try and help people who haven’t had access to information or networks or mentorships, so we offer free childcare at our events and we also make sure that tickets are accessible price-wise. If someone can’t afford it, we offer lots of complimentary tickets so that as many people as possible can come. 

What’s your ‘why’?

Our ‘why’ has changed along the way, and I think it’s ok for it to change. People can worry when they launch a business and don’t have a major sense of purpose yet, but I think that it can crystalize over time. I’ve done this for 6 years and I don’t think I really ‘got it’ in the first couple of years. When I first launched, the purpose was to create a content platform that was genuinely really useful to people. When I was researching where I wanted to go out for dinner or what I wanted to do at the weekend, I was confronted with these really long lists and I couldn’t get through all the content in them. What I really wanted was for someone to sit me down and say “it’s about time you did this”. So that was the idea – something that’s authoritative, bossy and personal – like your friend in-the-know telling you about a cool new restaurant. That’s what About Time was meant to be. So, that was my ‘why’ at the start, but as we’ve done reader events and festivals over the years, things have slightly shifted and we’re now more focused towards giving people amazing experiences and trying, with our events, to build a community. I don’t think the community element was there so much at the start. 

How did you build your brand?

It’s been a bit of an evolution for us, and I think this year we’ll actually start to scale back a bit. It’s always a challenge with a media brand how to scale without diluting who you are. 

We were being approached by brands who wanted white-label stuff, so we would make recipes to put on the website and brands would get in touch and want us to produce content for them. The agency side came naturally from that. When we were putting on events, brands would come to us and want to do reader super clubs, etc, and I think if you’re doing it enough, you might as well make it a ‘thing’ so that it has more of an official channel. 

We’re quite aware that we have About Time, the Academy and She Started It, and we’re now looking at the bigger brand piece: How do we bring it all together for the everyday consumer of our content? There’s always that sweet spot between trying to do too many things and wanting to make money. 

How did you develop your audience?

For the website itself we have 85,000 uniques, and I think that just comes from publishing really good quality, regular content. There’s no trick to it, it’s just consistently posting a lot and having a good tone-of-voice throughout. Twitter is really good for us – good for engagement and traffic. We see Instagram as its own platform because we don’t find it’s the biggest driver of traffic, and then Pinterest has been really good for SEO and stuff like that. But it is all dependent on what’s doing well on the website and replicating it.  

How did you increase your revenue?

Through different streams. It’s through doing reader events, doing bigger, better, chunkier brand partnerships, and it’s the sweet spot between hiring more people and not having the cash to do that… but knowing that hiring those people will bring you the cash. I now have a Head of Brand Partnerships and a Head of Events and it’s their job to put on events that make us money and be proactive (instead of reactive) with partnerships. It’s all about trying to strategically hire to grow the areas you want to. 

How have you raised funds?

I have taken no investment. I launched About Time straight out of university with £500 savings to build a very basic website and get a basic logo made, and just built it from there. I think we’ve been lucky because we’ve grown slowly but sustainably. I’ve seen a lot of companies that have taken a whack of investment and then burnt through a lot of capital really quickly without enough of a concept or audience. What we’ve done is take a lot of time over it, but create something that’s sustainable. I feel pleased that we haven’t taken investment, but in the future, we might do. We try to launch things that are relatively low-cost to get off the ground. Even our festivals - it’s mostly venue fees, but for the most part it’s our time. So, we haven’t needed lots of capital yet, but we will see!

What’s next?

Our next festival is in September and we’re doing a ‘wellbeing’ focus. It’s a two-day reader event, and then we’re also planning a website redesign this year to bring that up to scratch.  We have a couple of new projects in the pipeline, plus I’m also writing a book - I’m just trying to fit it all in!