Buzzy news startup Axios made 3 key hires to help lead the company's expansion to subscriptions
- Buzzy news startup Axios has made three key tech hires to help expand the company to paid and other products.
- The new hires fill gaps left after Axios's heads of tech, product, and design left in short order in 2018.
- New CTO Mike Berkley hinted that the company would have product news in the coming months.
- But questions have swirled around who a paid product would be aimed at and how it would set itself apart from competitors like Politico.
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Scoopy news startup Axios is bulking up with key tech hires to help it expand to new offerings, including subscriptions.
Christos Apartoglou was hired as the first VP of product marketing at Axios. He'll join other recent hires Mike Berkley, who is Axios' first chief product officer; and Jess Szmajda, its chief technology officer. Apartoglou is slated to start in September and report to Berkley.
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The hires mark a shift to product from the venture-backed company's early days, when there was a bigger emphasis on design. Apartoglou spent almost 12 years at Google in marketing leadership roles, where he worked on Chrome, Google Assistant, and Accelerated Mobile Pages. Berkley has had product leadership roles at Spotify, MoviePass, Viacom, and Comcast.
The new hires fill gaps left after Axios's heads of tech, product, and design all left one after another in 2018.
Berkley said the company sees product marketing as critical to its future, and to that end, he's doubled the size of the product team, to 10 people. Axios has 175 employees in total.
Axios was launched in 2017 by Jim VandeHei, Roy Schwartz, and Mike Allen, who sought to take the rapid-fire reporting model they built at Politico for Beltway professionals and apply it to serve busy professionals with succinct newsletters, designed for mobile devices. They started it with $10 million in funding led by Lerer Hippeau Ventures, along with NBC News, Emerson Collective, Greycroft Partners, and the Atlantic Media owners David and Katherine Bradley.
While other digital media startups shrink or consolidate, Axios said it's on track to be profitable this year as it's expanded to events, podcasts, and a documentary-style news show on HBO that was renewed this year for a second season.
Axios has wavered in its subscription plans, though. Early on, VandeHei said Axios would launch a subscription costing as much as $10,000 a year. The company put those plans on hold while ad sales were going strong. It's been beta-testing a paid product for the past year.
Axios says it has a bigger role to play with readers
Questions have swirled around who a paid product would be aimed at and how it would carve out a point of difference among established subscriptions for professionals from the likes of Politico (which Axios' cofounders started before going off to launch Axios), Atlantic Media's National Journal, and The Wall Street Journal.
Berkley demurred on plans for the subscription product, but said Axios would start to talk about new products "in the coming months," and that there was a case for Axios to do more.
"I wouldn't get fixated on the fact that we may or may not have a subscription product," he said. "What is important is establishing a strong bond of trust. That gives us an opportunity to provide more value to them. We've done a lot of research into our audience to understand what role we play in our lives. We know our audience is loyal to us and highly engaged. They trust our brand and journalists. We see that as an invitation to provide even more value and help them with their lives."
Axios had 8.2 million visitors to its web site in June, according to Comscore.
"The whole concept of smart brevity is something a lot of people could benefit from," Apartoglou said. "We could reach millions of people."