Today we’d like to introduce you to Laura Lorek.
Hi Laura, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
Before launching Silicon Hills News, I worked as a senior writer with Interactive Week Magazine. I worked out of my house in Dripping Springs, covering the commercial development of the Internet. I often flew out of Austin to San Jose, Boston, Denver, Chicago, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and other cities to report on stories. When the dot com crash happened in 2001, Interactive Week closed down. I went to work at the San Antonio Express-News. For eight years, I covered technology, biotechnology, economic development and other stories in central Texas. For years, I kept commuting from Dripping Springs and I had a condo in downtown San Antonio. So, I lived the tale of two cities. During that time, I did a lot of stories on Austin with ties to San Antonio like the story on the founding of Tito’s. Bert “Tito” Beveridge is actually from San Antonio. He ran the first legal still in Texas and paved the way for distilled beverage makers to follow.
In 2009, I moved to Wimberley in the Hill Country. In 2011, I received a competitive New Media Women’s Entrepreneur grant from J-Lab at American University in Washington, D.C. The grant provided seed financing to launch Silicon Hills News. Since then, I’ve developed the news site into a global tech news source with more than 35,000 unique visitors and 30,000 social media followers. I’ve also raised more than $600,000 for the venture in sponsorships and advertising.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
No, it hasn’t been easy. Running a startup is a roller coaster ride. It’s filled with tremendous highs and lows. Silicon Hills News has ridden that coaster for 11 years. During that time, we dealt with all kinds of problems. We’ve also created incredible products and held fantastic events.
Early on, Silicon Hills News wanted to create a data-driven site that tracked all startup activity in San Antonio and Austin. We pitched our idea in Chicago at the Online News Association pitch event. We didn’t get any backing, but we did get a competitor out of the deal. Be careful to who you tell your stories. We also met with a local Austin entrepreneur who I thought would partner with us. He ended up launching Austin XL, another competitor. It’s out of business. And another time, a Boston-based organization wanted to buy us. They ended up getting all of our financial information and then went directly to our sponsors and got support from them. Another time, an intern from a competing news organization asked for our media kit. (I didn’t know he was an intern at the time). I sent it to him, and the news organization used it as a template to duplicate for their news site. That’s when I found out the guy was an intern with the news organization. To say the startup world is brutal is an understatement. I also pitched Silicon Hills News at a Central Texas Angel Network event and to angel investors. I didn’t get any takers. So, I decided to focus on revenue. I actually went to Revenue Camp at Poynter for startups and learned about ways to generate revenue from Geekwire, a successful Seattle-based startup.
We also had a TV show called Slice of Silicon Hills News. I hired a broadcast journalism graduate to run it. We stopped doing it after about a year. The segments were too long – 15 minutes and it wasn’t attracting a big enough audience to justify the expense.
Silicon Hills News also launched a Kickstarter for our 32-page print magazine. It was successful and we printed eight editions of the magazine before stopping production. Our biggest hurdle was distribution. It’s costly to produce and print a magazine and also costly to get it into the hands of people. I do still believe in print magazines but only on special occasions.
Silicon Hills News also had a staff of two reporters and a handful of freelancers. But as our site grew more successful, instead of getting more money from sponsors, we got less. Silicon Hills News was also battling major market forces. Google and Facebook were getting more than 80 percent of all the digital ad dollars and those sites were not producing any news content. My site and others had to face this brutal marketplace to compete for ad revenue and also produce compelling content. Eventually, I had to let my staff go, and that put even more work on my back. But I kept going. I worked through every vacation and rarely took time off. I worked weekends and late into the night. I showed up at just about every startup event in San Antonio and Austin in the first five years of our business. All of that work paid off in developing deep relationships with people within the technology and startup communities in Austin and San Antonio.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Silicon Hills News?
I’m the publisher of Silicon Hills News. It’s a bootstrapped Central Texas regional technology news startup. It’s also female-founded and 100 percent owned by me. We write stories about Austin and San Antonio entrepreneurs. We also write technology trends stories and cover breaking technology news. We have launched a magazine, a podcast, and a calendar project through three successful Kickstarter campaigns. Crowdfunding has been our go-to source of funding to launch a new product. Our podcast is four years old and has more than 100 episodes in four seasons. We have featured dozens of Austin’s most successful entrepreneurs on Ideas to Invoices, our podcast. Silicon Hills News has attracted more than 3 million unique visitors. We have thousands of followers on our social media channels and more than 10,000 signed up for our newsletter. Before the pandemic, we hosted monthly lunch and learn events at Galvanize, monthly speaker’s panels, and annual events such as BlogItSA, ContentATX, SpaceATX, and our annual calendar party. We are starting to get back into the event and just hosted our first indoor, in-person event, BigIdeasATX at Strangeworks on August 25th. Our next event is at OJO Labs on Sept. 29th. My background is as a technology reporter. I worked for five newspapers and one technology magazine before launching Silicon Hills News.
Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
Books: Made in America by Sam Walton, The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz, Good to Great by Jim Collins, The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries & Jack Trout, The Startup Owner’s Manual by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf, Think Again by Adam Grant, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel Pink.
Apps: Slack, Audible, PicCollage, Instagram, Videolicious, Clubhouse, TikTok, Venmo, PayPal.
Podcasts: How I Built This by Guy Raz, Ideas to Invoices by Laura Lorek, Masters of Scale by Reid Hoffman, TED Talks Daily, This American Life.
Other helpful organizations locally: U.S. Small Business Administration, SCORE.
Pricing:
- $100 a month to advertise a local business
- $500 for a 500-word sponsored content article
- $150 to advertise 15 seconds on our podcast
- $500 to sponsor one of our in-person events
- $50 to run an ad in our weekly newsletter
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.siliconhillsnews.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/siliconhillsnews/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SiliconHillsNews/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/SiliconHillsNew
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAthZWqYYRY
- Other: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ideas-to-invoices/id1213118533
Image Credits
Photos of entrepreneurs in the Silicon Hills News collage by Errich Petersen, Silicon Hills News photographer. Other photos are taken by my camera.
