The Healdsburg Map Project
Posted on | October 9, 2009 | No Comments
In 2008, I started an online community magazine in an effort to answer questions I was getting from guests at my vacation rentals. I named my project Healdsburg Magazine: A local perspective. I called on a few fellow bloggers about repurposing their content to while I tried to figure out a revenue stream for the website.
One day, I emailed Tod Brilliant to ask if I could use any of his blog content on the magazine. He is a local character and had interesting things to say and an interesting way to say it. I thought it was worth asking.
Tod emailed me back that day and said he had an even better idea. He needed to talk to his client–so give him a few days and he’d get back to me. He said his client was looking for somebody to work on a project and he thought we would work well together.
It turns out, his client is Circe Sher of Hotel Healdsburg. She was wanting to develop a strolling guide, a map of Healdsburg. To get people out and about and milling around and discovering different things about our town. She’d also heard about my magazine website and was wondering if I would be the right person. So we met one day at Cafe Newsstand and it’s now history–quite literally.
We named the project one day when we were driving to meet our printer (Andrew at ChromaGraphics) in Santa Rosa. Justice, Tod’s son was in the back seat, humming. Fiddling. Doing whatever five-year-olds do in the back seats of cars. Since I always value the opinions of five-year-olds (they just have great perspective–that simplified view of things), I twisted around from the front seat and just asked him: “What do you think we should name this map, Justice?”
He looked at me blankly, and stated the obvious: “Just call it The Map.” He said. “The Healdsburg Map.”
And he went back to humming.
I published the first edition of the Healdsburg Map in December 2008 with 54 advertisers. I distributed 10,000 copies in and around Healdsburg, California.
I started the second edition in June 2009 and gained 44 repeat advertisers. In September 2009, I’d established the map and magazine as a profitable business and sold the project to another local businessman to take it to another level. Kenny Lowe recently published 20,000 copies of the 2nd edition (with 64 sponsors), is about to release an iPhone application based on the original concept, and publishes a local newsletter using the Facebook group.
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