The promise
Help media and brand professionals make the right decisions to convert and retain
One sentence, agreed in the first workshop, written to be checkable against any future article.
Case study
Quentin Franque
A brand media still running on the decisions taken at its launch
The decision that came first
Six months after a first engagement, Poool's leadership team came back with a conviction: the product could address a new market, possibly with some changes to it. Rather than build towards that belief, we went and tested it.
- a light MVP, framed before anything was built
- a structured interview guide
- one hundred market interviews of thirty minutes, run in pairs with a Poool counterpart
- a report consolidating the signals, the objections and the go or no go logic
The recommendation was not to launch the product direction the team had come in with, and to take an alternative one instead. It was followed. The point was never that the leadership had been wrong: they already had the second idea. The research told them which one to put the resources behind, which is why execution got faster rather than slower.
The mandate
Seven weeks, from mid June to early August 2022, to give the media an identity it could still be run on once I was gone.
-
1
Framing
Key themes agreed with Poool's communications lead, then an interview guide written and validated with the CEO and the content lead.
-
2
Interviews
Thirty targets qualified before a single call: sixteen brands, eight media, four vendors, two consultants. Each one carried a full line of qualification, including the arguments for and against approaching them and how close they already were.
16
brands
8
media
4
vendors
2
consultants
-
3
Two documents, presented in person
Key learnings and personas, handed over and walked through with the founder, the communications lead and the content lead in the room.
-
4
Two workshops of three hours
The first on the brand platform: vision, mission, promise, values. The second on editorial identity: the name and the editorial line. Each followed by revision calls, then a thirty-seven slide hand-over.
What was decided in the room
Two readers, not an audience
A subscription lead inside a media company, ten to twenty places down the org chart, who has to fight for a budget line and becomes the decision maker once he has it. And a marketing director inside a brand, five to seven places down, who already holds a budget and picks his own suppliers.
Two more were mapped around them: the digital director who defends the first one's decisions upstairs, and the project manager who feeds them both.
A tone with four traits
- shareable
- precise
- decisional
- self-assured
Decisional was the hard one: every piece has to leave the reader knowing what to do with it. The workshop also wrote down what the tone is not, which is the part people skip: not bullshit, not overclaiming, not cold, not literary.
The name
Sixteen candidates came out of the workshop. The one that won did so on a single criterion: a name that evokes the community being addressed rather than the traffic it might bring.
The Audiencers
Three families, not a list of topics
- Decisions revenue, key indicators, why own a media at all
- Operations registration, subscription, retention, analytics
- Inspirations success stories, tools, behind the scenes, stolen ideas
What was ruled out
A launch plan is mostly a list of things you will not do. These were written down and signed off in the same session as the rest.
- No podcast
- No Twitter as a central channel
- Medium for teasers only, never full articles
- One existing partnership put back on the table
- Not media subjects only, brands too
Formats were not chosen on taste either. Each was scored on how much each participant wanted it and on how easy it was to produce, then ranked. Benchmarks won the long formats. Curation and translation won the short ones. Heavy studies lost on production cost, not on interest.
What is still standing, four years on
Three decisions taken in two three-hour workshops in 2022 are still legible on the site in 2026.
The promise
The sentence agreed in the workshop is, word for word, the meta-description of theaudiencers.com today, in English.
The architecture
Decisions, Operations and Inspirations are the three categories every article on the site is filed under.
The name
One of sixteen candidates on a whiteboard. It is the brand named in the acquisition announcement.
And what changed scale
A format of micro-events, dinners, to keep the media alive
The Audiencers' Festival. At least ten editions held across six cities: Paris, London, Madrid, New York, Toronto and Hamburg.
A public question board with ten volunteer experts
A community of more than 15,000 publishing professionals, running across six WhatsApp groups in two languages.
One year after launch, the site had gone from 3,000 to 14,000 monthly visitors and the work had generated 95 business meetings. Those are internal figures from the time, not public ones.
What grew around it since was not in the plan: a consultant directory, a library of case studies, a dozen standing benchmarks, an annual study of publishers' tech stacks, and a paid subscription.
Where it ended up
On 4 March 2026, Poool signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Darwin CX, a Toronto-based subscription management platform.
The announcement sets the deal out in three parts. Poool brings the front end: engagement, conversion, retention. Darwin CX brings the back end: billing, renewals, authentication, analytics. The third part is not software.
The Poool and Darwin CX teams met at an Audiencers festival.
I have rarely worked with individuals as talented as Quentin. He possesses two abilities that are typically not found in the same person: simplifying the most complex matters, and creating and executing an action plan with exceptional efficiency.
In 2022, Quentin helped us imagine, build and launch The Audiencers, a bilingual brand media that has since become the main community for media professionals in France and beyond. With Quentin, nothing is ever bullshit, nothing is ever gratuitous. One of those rare people who can change the trajectory of a journey, with the intelligence, humility and warmth of a true mentor.