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.

Image via Indy Maven

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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.”

One night Bailey was out with a couple friends at a bar when she was introduced to an editor at Metromix, which at the time was a local alt-weekly (it’s since closed). During their conversation she happened to mention her blog, and he responded with genuine interest. Not long afterward, she received an email from him asking if she was interested in writing freelance pieces for him. 

Bailey wrote some nightlife columns for Metromix, and this eventually led to her first role at the Indianapolis Star, which was owned by the same parent company. “I was officially the ‘things to do’ reporter, and my column was called The Adventuress,” she recalled. “So I started off writing about restaurants, nightlife, and just things to do around the city.” But then she began to branch out into more adventurous fare. “I went and did a two-seater ride with Mario Andretti around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and then wrote a column about that. I went on the back of a Moto GP bike. I swam with dolphins at the zoo. I flew three different types of airplanes. I did a hot air balloon ride. I went Christmas caroling as a caroler at the mall.”

During Bailey’s time at the Star she became an admirer of theSkimm — the daily newsletter written for a female audience that’s now sent to millions of subscribers — and she wondered if they could build something like that locally. “We met with the advertising team, and they seemed really excited and put together one-pagers,” she said. “But then ultimately they said, you know, right now for this next quarter we're going to focus on high school basketball awards and maybe we'll revisit this later.” For Bailey, it was further confirmation that the decision makers at the outlet weren’t prioritizing a key demographic.

Bailey’s mother had been fighting cancer for years, and so when it took a bad turn she quit her job to care for her. She continued to freelance occasionally over the next few years, but it wasn’t until the late 2010s — after her mom passed away and she had her first child — that she felt ready to dive into another full-time position. “I met with my former editor at The Indianapolis Star, Amanda Kingsbury,” she said. “She had been laid off and was working at a museum, and I said, ‘you know, I've been thinking a lot about all the stuff that we had wanted to accomplish during our time at The Indianapolis Star and just couldn’t, and maybe we should try doing that.’ So we got together and brainstormed what this could look like.” 

By April 2019, they were ready to launch Indy Maven. “We had a 200-person launch party and we told everyone who attended to sign up for the newsletter,” said Bailey. “So right from the beginning we had this base built in that we were talking to, and they were excited about it.” At the last minute, Bailey and Kingsbury had decided that Indy Maven would have some sort of paid membership, and so everyone who attended the event was given a free trial. This ensured that, from its very first issue, the newsletter had a community on which to build. 

Growing an audience and revenue mix

From the very beginning, the Indy Maven newsletter stuck to a consistent format, which involves several recurring sections:

• Features: These are usually longer, meatier pieces that are promoted at the top of the newsletter. Each item includes a small snippet and then links to the full article on the Indy Maven website. (Example: 5 INDY-BASED LATINX MIXED MEDIA ARTISTS)

• Spotlights: These are shorter items that often highlight events around town.

• Maven to Know: This is an interview that typically features an accomplished woman within the Indianapolis area. The most recent interview, for instance, is with a full-service doula who consults with expecting mothers.

• A link roundup that includes non-local articles that are nonetheless relevant to a female audience.

Beyond the launch party, Bailey couldn’t point to any specific strategies that helped Indy Maven build its audience; instead it mainly relied on slow, organic growth. But before it had even a single reader she was extremely successful in building out its revenue. “We just went around to businesses and friends that owned businesses and said, ‘we're launching this. We think that it would be cool if you got in early on.’” To sweeten the deal, she promised any business that purchased a 12-month sponsorship that it would get exclusivity within their industry; this meant that if, say, a plumber bought a sponsorship package, no other plumbers would be permitted to purchase ads for the entire year.

Indy Maven also began organizing local events that were hosted in various spaces around town. This not only provided additional sponsorship opportunities — especially since a sponsor could sometimes offer to host the event at their own facilities — but it also became a key driver of the company’s paid membership program.

To start out, paid members received one-on-one “office hours” calls with Bailey, but she realized pretty quickly that this approach doesn’t scale very effectively, so she eventually transitioned into organizing monthly in-person meetups. At first, you could only attend these meetups if you were a paying member. “But we kept hearing from our members that they wanted to bring a friend, so we modified it so that any member could bring a friend if they want to,” she said. “And then we realized that even that was too limiting, since one of our missions was to not create financial barriers, and we didn’t want to turn away someone who couldn’t afford a membership. So we opened it up so that members could attend for free but anyone else could purchase a ticket for $20.” Members who wanted to bring a friend could generate a discount code that gave the person a 50% discount. 

Pretty soon, the events were not only generating revenue through memberships and sponsorships, but they also drove greater awareness of the Indy Maven brand. To give you a sense of the event offerings, let’s take a look at a few scheduled for the month of October:

• Building Wealth Through Real Estate: A Workshop with Colleen Hungerford: This is a live workshop with a local agent on how to invest in real estate.

• Mind of a Maven: How to Survive the Rest of 2023 with Leslie Bailey: This is an event where Bailey promises to share “her tips, tools, and advice on how to keep your business, brain, and body afloat during the busy last stretch of the year.”

• Hocus Pocus Potions Class with Mixo Indy: This is a collaboration with a local cocktail education business. “Get ready to brew, stir, and sip your way through a whimsical evening of potions.”

With each event, Bailey tries to strike a balance between offering up speaker-focused content and giving the audience an opportunity to interact with each other. “So it wasn't like, oh my God, I have to walk into this room and just network, because nobody likes to do that. [The featured speakers] gave them something to talk about after the presentation.” These monthly meetups are usually attended by a few dozen people, but Indy Maven also began organizing much larger quarterly events. For instance, its annual Indy Maven Style Swap — where attendees “purchase tickets to swap clothes with one another during a fun mavens' night out filled with food, drink, music, network building, and of course, fashion!” — is regularly attended by upwards of 200 women.

It didn’t take long for Indy Maven to build a thriving community of local women, which vindicated Bailey’s initial belief that her previous employers were underserving a relatively large demographic. In just its first year, the company generated over $100,000 in revenue.

Launching a coworking space

Bailey’s idea to launch a physical coworking and events space came, ironically, during the pandemic shutdown. “It came about as a result of talking to the Indy Maven audience and saying, ‘Hey, events were supposed to be a huge part of our business. We can't do events anymore. What else do you guys want to see?’ And the answer wasn't anything specific other than to just be around other women, support other women, find opportunities to connect with other women. And ultimately, to me, that just kept leading back to in-person gatherings, which I knew would eventually become available again.”

Bailey knew of other female-centric coworking spaces around the country, and so she began calling around to them to see if any were planning to launch a space in Indianapolis; none were. Meanwhile, she’d seen emerging statistics showing that a record number of women were launching their own businesses during the pandemic, and she figured that many of these budding entrepreneurs would want office space outside of their homes. 

Bailey found a real estate broker and provided an ambitious wishlist for the kind of building she wanted, and the broker pretty much hit the nail right on the head with her very first showing. Bailey signed a sublease with Salesforce, which owns a large building in the heart of the city. “This had been designed with a cafe and a gym and a big open, beautiful space with large windows,” she said. “It's right in downtown Indianapolis. It's got great parking.” The place came with furniture and gym equipment, so she only needed to do some light decorating. In May 2022, Maven Space opened to the public. 

With the launch of Maven Space, Indy Maven was able to immediately move over most of its live events to the venue. But it also built out an additional revenue model through its coworking memberships. For as little as $45 a month, a member can work out of the space two times a month. The prices go up from there, maxing out at around $295 for companies that want to bring in up to five team members. I asked Bailey to describe her typical customer. “It's a combination of small-team entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, as well as recent college grads who are working for a company that's not based here and they don't know how to meet people,” she said. “It's also moms that need to get out of their house and away from their kids.” That latter group tends to pick up in the summers when kids are home from school. 

The success of the Maven Space led to Bailey changing up the structure of how the Indy Maven outlet operates. “Indy Maven no longer has a membership program,” she explained. “All of the memberships are under Maven Space — so what was the Indy Maven membership is now a Maven Space Digital Membership.” Why? “I wanted to consolidate it as much as possible. So Indy Maven is operating as the editorial news outlet while Maven Space handles the memberships and live events. Before I made this change, I was duplicating work, and it just didn't make sense. So now we've moved everything that is not editorial over to Maven Space, and Indy Maven continues to create content.”

As Maven Space continues to grow, Bailey has considered opening up a second location in a different part of the city. “We would have those be more private offices while [the original location] continues as the larger event space for social gathering.” Meanwhile, Indy Maven still continues to serve as a vital entry point into the growing community. “I would not in a million years have started this space if I didn't have the newsletter, because the community was built in already,” she said. “I knew who I was marketing to.”

I asked Bailey what other media companies — especially struggling local outlets — could learn from her success. “Humans are multifaceted,” she replied. “Humans don't just operate in a digital space. They don't just operate in a physical space. And yet as media operators, we tend to just stay in our lane. I’m trying to reach people wherever they are. I want to be everywhere you look. I want to be where you're coming to events. I want to be in your inbox. I want to be your workplace.” When Indy Maven first launched, Bailey thought of the newsletter as the central product of the company, the hub, but she eventually realized this wasn’t the case. “Now I see the newsletter and the website as just a spoke, the coworking membership as a spoke, the event venue as a spoke, and it all comes back to the community at the center.”