'The Minimalist Publisher How to Do More with Less' at Mumbrella Publish 2022

1. The Minimalist Publisher:
How to publish better
with less
Ben May

2. Minimalist
min·​i·​mal·​ist
A style or technique that is
characterised by simplicity
Merriam Webster

3. Simplicity In Digital Products
• Building and maintenance costs
• Increased focus on ROI with
uncertain advertiser market
• Increase satisfaction with
teams who use products

4. If you want to survive the great resignation
and retain your best talent, you need to give
them the tools to succeed - and make their
life as easy as possible.

6. The Creator
Economy

7. The Editorial
Creator
Economy

9. Seven Typical
Product Ideas

10. 1. Google Tag Manager w/ a Data Layer
• Allow non technical users to add
analytics and tracking pixels
• Send more contextual data attributes
with every page load
Example:
Tell Google Analytics if a reader is a
paying subscriber or not. Then build a
report to see average time on site
grouped by users membership status.

11. 2. Automate Campaign Performance Reporting
• Manually building spreadsheets and copy-
and-pasting data is very cumbersome.
• Use no/low-code tools like Google Data
Studio, Super Metrics and Klipfolio as the
presentation layer.
• Once the API’s are all connected, you can
build reports and dashboards until your
hearts content.
• Spreadsheets can technically be
automated.

12. 3. Move Workflow Inside CMS
• Most newsrooms have a bunch of siloed
tools that all contribute to the lifecycle of an
article.
• The more systems and tools, the more risk
of human error or a breakdown in process.
• Leverage out of the box solutions in your
existing CMS or tailor to how your
newsroom works.

13. 4. Empower Editorial Teams with CMS Controls
• Most CMS’ are now using some form
of visual page or block-based
builder.
• Avoid shortcuts that require editors
to have to create janky workarounds.
• Page builders should make things
easier.
• Reduce reliance of devs to make
changes.

14. 5. The 15-Minute Newsletter
• Newsletters should be rapid and simple to
publish
• Eliminate the copy, paste, copy, crop, test
process.
• Send Newsletters straight from the CMS.
• Reduce human error and intensive testing.

15. 6. Subscriptions (and commerce)
• Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’re so
unique you need to build custom.
• Good at keeping developers busy but not
always at running a subscription business.
• Be smart about outsourcing scaling, security
and compatibility to someone else.
• Tools like Memberful, Recurrly, Chargebe,
Zuora and Piano do this exceptionally well.

16. “Our old membership site was was riddled with
errors and confusing navigation prompts, I'd
get emails almost every day from frustrated
readers.
Memberful is really robust with a seamless and
user-friendly interface. I no longer get daily
account queries, so that's just wonderful!”
Mike McPhate, The California Sun

17. 7. Commenting Systems
• If comments are for you, consider how
you’ll use them.
• Off the shelf SaaS plug-and-play
products like Disqus and OpenWeb.
• Avoid bespoke middleware or
dedicated services like Coral unless
there’s no way to do natively with
existing tech stack.

18. In Summary
• Technical teams should always be
challenged to deliver simple and
efficient products that aren’t
needlessly complex.
• Shiny object syndrome is real in the
engineering community.
• Generally speaking, publishing is a
pretty simple technology ecosystem.
• Building tools with your internal teams
in mind is becoming just as important
as your readers.
• Avoid trying to build Ferrari’s for the
milk run.

19. If You Are Technically Challenged
Are there any other ways we could build
this feature/project/product?
If we had 50% of the time or budget,
would we approach it differently?
Are we using industry standard / highly
used modules/plugins/libraries, or is this
feature being built with some bits of tech
that are experimental or run by a single
developer who may abandon something
critical.
Does this approach require additional
overheads (e.g. Additional AWS
resources, SaaS subscriptions etc)?
Do we need a different talent and skills
on the team to operate or develop in this?

20. Thank you

21. The Minimalist Publisher:
How to publish better
with less
Ben May