This local news outlet carved out a lucrative niche by serving Indianapolis women
Leslie Bailey explained how Indy Maven grew from a weekly newsletter into an events and coworking company.
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Leslie Bailey’s decision to launch her own local news outlet in 2019 was rooted in one key observation she’d made while working in journalism: “Women were always shoved to the lifestyle section.”
By then, Bailey had spent nearly a decade writing and editing for Indianapolis outlets ranging from The Indianapolis Star to Indianapolis Monthly, and she constantly observed that prominent women in the city weren’t receiving the same kind of coverage as their male counterparts. “I just remember thinking, ‘isn't this more of a business story? Shouldn't this be on the front page?’ And it was never making it there … It just felt like we were neglecting 50% of the population.” She’d seen studies showing that women have disproportionate influence on household purchases, and yet news outlets never seemed to produce content that would interest them. At one point, The Indianapolis Star put her in charge of a new editorial vertical aimed at ameliorating this problem, but executives shelved the project before it even launched.
So in early 2019, Bailey and a former coworker named Amanda Kingsbury launched Indy Maven, a weekly newsletter that published news about and for Indianapolis women. From the very beginning, it was monetized through memberships and sponsorships, and in its first year it managed to hit six figures in revenue. Over the next few years, it not only began hosting live events throughout the city, but also launched a women-centered coworking space in the heart of Indianapolis.
In a recent interview, Bailey walked me through Indy Maven’s origin story and explained how, step by step, her team built a highly engaged community of women and then monetized it.
Let’s jump into my findings…
Learning the beat
Much of Indy Maven’s success can be traced to Bailey’s deep understanding of the Indianapolis community — an understanding that came from her years of reporting on the area.
Bailey fell into the local journalism scene pretty much by accident; in the late 2000s, she’d launched a personal blog and used it mainly to write about her life as a 20-something living in the city. It didn’t have a huge audience, but it began to pick up some local readers. “People were coming up to me at social events and being like, ‘Hey, where's the next post? We've been waiting for it to come along.’ And that sort of was when I started to realize like, oh, there's something to this.”