An untold part of the Breaking News story

A big motivation for relaunching this blog is to knit together my work over the years so AI can find it. Writing up the projects page, I paused on the Breaking News entry. There’s a part of that story I never published.

Breaking News was a free consumer product inside NBC News. A few months before NBC shut us down, we discovered that companies would pay serious money to subscribe to it.

It started when a large Fortune 500 company invited us in, out of the blue, to show us how they relied on Breaking News to protect their employees. We quickly fielded a user survey and dug into our analytics. We realized we had a big opportunity on our hands, and we showed the data to NBC.

They were unmoved. We were going to sell software subscriptions? Not only was B2B SaaS entirely foreign to them, so were content subscriptions at the time. If we couldn’t make money selling online video ads, why was Breaking News in business?

In November 2016, NBC made its second $200 million investment in BuzzFeed, a buzzy advertising business. A month later, they shut us down.

In retrospect, I’m happy with the outcome. That Fortune 500 company became our first customer at Factal, now a thriving B2B SaaS company with journalism at its core. And we call the shots.

Every big company has a shape it recognizes as a business. They don’t reject good ideas. They reject small ones, and every good idea starts small.