If you want to survive as a media company – you better become a tech company too.

We have this idea that the internet is Google and Facebook, or that it’s Apple and Samsung – when in fact it’s Tim Berners-Lee. It’s free, it’s a gift – it’s what you make it.

Our team have recently made a very small piece of the internet.

Josh Fanning is CityMag’s owner and publisher. He and CityMag’s editor, Farrin Foster co-founded City Standard last year.

We’ve built a custom WordPress site with password protected user accounts and an integrated Stripe payments system. The site is connected to a private Trello board where our subscribers are kept up to date with developments on the site and developments in the stories we publish there.

With City Standard, we want to upend the author-audience dichotomy and halt the growth of mainstream media’s impotence by opening up the editorial floor so audiences can see stories come to life, so they can pitch and discuss story ideas with their peers, and have those ideas further developed by our editors and, ultimately, so our audience can feel good about funding a really bloody good story.

We’re still in the beta stage of this idea, but I’ve realised that since launching I have now become that most hyped thing – an entrepreneur with a start-up.

Despite my surprise, that’s what’s happened. And while I regret nothing of the process of getting to here, I’ve certainly learned some lessons along the way. Here are seven:

1. This is Not America (TINA).

Adelaide is not Silicon Valley. We’ve got copper phone lines in our building, not to mention the other, organic, elements that come with low-rent office space in the CBD. We’ve not attracted any enthusiastic angels to our cause, nor have we received millions to fund fibre optic access and bean bags.

But, we have attracted a strong group of small-scale investors in the form of our subscribers. One reader has personally contributed over $1,500 in one-off gifts through our site.

We could read all the “Lean Startup” books in the world but the culture in Australia is different to America and indeed, Adelaide is different to Melbourne or Sydney. While America has a “fuck yeah” attitude, we’re finding that Australians are mostly saying “fuck no – I don’t want to give you $2 a month to make your precious stories”. And so, we have to win readers over one at a time – the good thing about this is that our churn rate is extraordinarily low and we can invest in what matters to our first customers.

Takeaway: Australians are a cynical bunch. Market research is one thing but you really need to launch in order to learn what’s off about your assumptions. Launch and then hone your offer through the sales process. Only invest in what matters to your customers.

2. Don’t do web dev one day per week

We first launched City Standard with the help of our longtime collaborators and developers of the CityMag website, Lightbulb Digital. But, we felt that if we wanted to stay in media then we needed to be a tech company too. And so, with the gift of perfectly maintained and ordered databases from Lightbulb, we brought web developer David Burden into the fold as our “in-house” guy.

It turns out one-day-a-week is the worst idea possible. While having Dave in the office was brilliant and it did massively influence our approach and appreciation for the code driving our project, the days Dave wasn’t in the office left room for our creative department to continually expand the scope and scale of the product – something we just couldn’t afford.

Takeaway: Don’t spread your budget thin. Bring the creative and development process together and scope the project against a timeline and then do it. Time in-between leads to infinite possibilities and infinite possibilities are bad for budgets.

3. Find a designer who loves the screen

User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) designers are pivotal to digital projects. Screen design is so distinct from any other design form and it’s such an exciting realm to work in. Don’t settle for any designer who’s less than horrifically excited about the potential of digital design and its ability to affect people.

Takeaway: The internet is a visual economy. Alternate wording – you need to hire Tyrone Ormsby as your creative director. But you can’t, because we already did.

4. Start before you’re ready

Pretty sure this is a cliché start-up thing but it truly was our experience – albeit in hindsight. When we launched, we thought we were ready. We were wrong.

Takeaway: Make friends with early adopters and, as in any good relationship, listen to what they have to say and make obvious efforts at self-improvement.

5. Make time for each other

We were really lucky to have an entrepreneur in residence at the same time as we were launching citystandard.com.au. Sheshi gave us structure and systems and dashboards and helped hone propositions and many, many other things.

The main thing she gave us was an excellent communication culture. The daily meeting she instituted between myself and City Standard co-founder Farrin Foster immediately erased or aired any mis-communication and put the people driving the project on the same footing.

Takeaway: Many times this daily huddle turned into a coffee and chat about things other than work but these conversations created an important unity and trust that has had a positive trickle-down effect.

6. Getting Help

If you think you know it all then there’s no harm in asking for a second opinion. Sheshi went over many things we knew and understood about what we were undertaking, but she also showed us some whopping big things we’d missed.

Takeaway: Sheshi has moved to Berlin. Call Enterprise Adelaide instead.

7. Find truth

We read on Techcrunch recently that start-ups often fail because they don’t come up with satisfactory answers to essential questions. Similarly, Simon Sinek wants you to start by answering ‘why’ you’re doing what you’re doing.

For City Standard – we want our ‘why’ to be deep, meaningful, and philosophical – the founders are writers after all. We spent days pouring over words in sentences and jiggling commas to try and come up with the perfect way to describe why we launched this hybrid crowdfunding / social media platform for local journalism. We think it exists because Adelaide deserves its own world-class platform that tells our story without fear or favour. We want it to exist so that all our best talent in photography, writing, filmmaking and music doesn’t purely end up in advertising. But the ‘why’ we ended up with was even more simple. We’re pouring everything we’ve got into City Standard because we believe the internet is broken.

Takeaway: You can fix the internet. This may read like a sales pitch but it’s not – the internet isn’t set in stone, it’s a work of our combined imagination, ingenuity, and determination. You have as much right to make a part of the internet come true as anyone else.