Hipsters, swanksters and something for the rest of us

I had dinner last night with a new friend, Kevin Friedman, the Founder of Mister Archer.  To describe Mister Archer, I’ll use Kevin’s own words: “Mister Archer is the ultimate insider for the adventurous and urbane in San Francisco.  Mister Archer is your friend in-the-know revealing what’s cool and undiscovered across a diverse mix of local activities.”

Basically, when Mister Archer finds cool new places to go or things to do around town, he sends out an email newsletter to his subscribers.

I have to admit, I also subscribe to Urban Daddy and Thrillist, which are a couple other locally oriented newsletters/arbiters of urban cool.  At least I think I still subscribe to Thrillist, to be honest I haven’t read it in a while .

But the category, namely, a local email newsletter service for busy urban professionals, is definitely intriguing.  I think Daily Candy really spear headed or at least popularized the category by providing a newsletter focused on women.  Their success was capped by the Comcast acquisition for north of 100Million last year.  This success encouraged a lot of other folks to wonder whether something similar might work for a more male oriented audience as well.  Hence, Urban Daddy for the “male mid-life but convinced I’m still an urban swankster” audience and Thrillist for the “younger hard core urban hipster” audience.

Urban Daddy totally has that Mad Men thing going for it, and awesome graphics.  I love the photos.  But I’m not sure I represent their core target audience…I never feel rich enough.  As for Thrillist, I  definitely know I’m not their core target audience since I’m not really in to designer T-shirts and my only baseball cap is a Giants cap with a decidedly uncool curl to the bill.  What can I say, I’m just not that hip.

I think the thing that worked for Daily Candy is the same thing that’s lacking in Urban Daddy and Thrillist.  That is a more ambiguous approach to the target audience so as not the be offensive to various corners of that audience.  For example, I sometimes feel guilty looking at Urban Daddy and I sometimes get offended reading Thrillist.  I’m pretty sure if I was core for either of them, I wouldn’t feel guilty or get offended.

So, that brings me back to dinner last night with Kevin.  His approach seems to be a little less hard edged than Urban Daddy and Thrillist, and while this may not hit the epicenter of a core audience dead center, I think it will lend itself to being appreciated by a broader set of subscribers.  That’s a good thing…to paraphrase another arbiter of cool, probably the “grandmother” of the category.

In any case, I’m now rootin’ for Kevin, so here’s a link to sign up for the newsletter.  It’s bound to be cool.

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