Kike Mujica, and the creation of Waznews: "We are a Media Tech, a technology company and we are also audio experts"
"We're synthetic by nature, we're experts in communication and information, we're a Media Tech, a technology company, and we're also experts in audio. We like the audio. That's what WazNews comes out of as a definition, as a declaration of principle," says Kike Mujica
Kike Mujica is a renowned Chilean journalist with extensive experience in radio. With a taste for technology, I had been cherishing for a long time to be able to do something different. But, he knew that he had something on his hands when the late former president (Sebastián) "Piñera is going to Venezuela, to this thing they did in Cúcuta, to try to throw Maduro out and that didn’t work."
In those days, at the dawn of 2019, a journalist close to Mujica told him that a well-known Chilean businessman wanted more information about what was happening and that because it was Venezuela, there was little reputable input.
Thus, Kike responds that he has no problem in being able to make a brief report with a focus on what is relevant. His question was "So, how much text am I going to send him, how much have I asked you for?" and the answer left him thinking: "By audio, because he doesn’t read. He told me he didn’t read, he didn’t have time."
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The On-the-Ground Test
With that ascendant, he decided to test his hypothesis about what he was developing, with the content of the newsletter "The Constituent" - a weekly informative delivery, with a focus on the democratic citizen process of voting on the new constitutional proposal for Chile.
"I started to try audio," he recalls, "and the audios were super well received and consumed, and that’s when I said, there’s something here, for various reasons, personal, professional, I could never close the business," he adds.
That’s how he was, talking with different potential people interested in participating in the origin of this project, "until I approached a friend who has a business that I think is going to be the next Chilean unicorn, which is Cristóbal Undurraga de Ceibo," who listened to him carefully.
"He says, good idea, perfect. I’m willing to put "lucas" in it, but you don’t have to direct it, because you have to take care of journalism, because if you don’t we’re never going to leave." That’s where WazNews was born
To execute and develop the platform
At that moment, he connects with the co-founder of BabyTuto, Desiree Grinspun, "we made a match, we liked each other and that’s when the WazNews story really began because she came to execute the plan," he specifies.
There also came the definition of what Waznews is (for us at Entreprenerd, a media outlet whose backbone channel is the audios via Whatsapp channel) by Kike.
"Of course, I could define it in three lines, because as we are synthetic by nature, we are experts in communication and information, we are a Media Tech, a technology company, and we are also experts in audio. We like the audio. That’s what WazNews comes out of as a definition, as a declaration of principle," he says.
In those days WhatsApp didn’t have the dissemination channels, so Kike was looking for all kinds of means of communication from which he could get employment experience. "You have to work with a company that’s certified by Meta. We located a bicycle kick. And we started to put together this platform that we didn’t just call the robot, we named it Tulio, after Tulio Triviño from 31 Minutos", something they did always thinking about trial and error, trial and error.
It was always the audio
Now... audio... Some might think that it would not be a good channel, since it requires paying attention for several minutes or seconds to fully understand a piece of information. It was one of Mujica’s fears, "I had some doubts because at first when the audio came out, it bothered people a lot. There was a lot of resistance to audio, but today, everyone uses audio. Now almost no one talks on the phone."
So, with this evolution, plus the evidence of what he experienced in Cúcuta and the information from "El Constituyente", the journalist decided to move forward. "Yes, audio. Audio because I work in radio," in a medium that "is still a reliable medium, it has gone down but it is still reliable. That one, two because I’m close to audio and three because I see a lot, a lot, a lot of horizon in synthetic communication."
"There is a concept of Axios, this gringo news medium, which is called Smart Brevity, which is brief intelligence, which is an enterprise" recalls the voice of T13’s Mesa Central "So, I always thought about it in audio and WhatsApp, because WhatsApp is the most transversal, easy-to-use medium"
The development of WazNews as a business
Despite having the backing of two experienced people in the world of new business, the first phases of WazNews coincided with many other projects: "We made a round of family and friends, and we gathered the first treasure to function and start and prototype," explains Mujica.
At the same time, he faced a lot of resentment, the "classic Chileanism," he recalls. "You explain an idea to them and the first thing they see is the negative side. So they told me, no, first they are not going to send you the audio, they are going to replicate it and they are not going to make money because the subscriber is going to send it to 100 people," to the point of comparing an informative broadcast to a channel of school parents.
At that moment, along with Mónica Pérez, Mauro Valdés and Axel Christensen, Pablo Ardiles, "who is an expert in data and is the head of data at Kaufman, of the Kaufman group, who liked the idea, he said, and I am interested in this, and we began to develop. We also hired a company, he has a fintech, some of the people who worked on data with him went to work with us and we started putting this robot together to test it, test it, test it over and over again, and we keep testing it, and we keep testing it."
With all that, everything was ready in August 2023, in a dynamic process that had a series of pivots, but that had great support. "Channel 13, where I am a collaborator, the press director said, well, good idea, why don’t we put a link on the page of the 13th and announce it on the screen and put a QR? We said, let’s put a QR on the screen in Mesas Central."
And they put the QR code "We had 7,000 followers in 5 minutes". Nothing fell, and with that foundation they continued to build, first on a free platform. Now, they already have more than 12 thousand users using the Whatsapp information channel and added a paid model, where the premium version amounts to CLP 4,990 where every day I get a news summary of the day or I also get specific things that I can do. For organizations that want to create custom QR codes for check-in systems, it’s now easier than ever to generate QR codes using modern online tools
"There are 8 news items at 7:30 in the morning with a press summary that I do, that I read the newspapers early and I tell them, I do a curatorship in the background, that is, hey, the most important news in Chile are usually 3 or 4, there is no more news. So I tell you this, this, El Mercurio brings this, this, this, I read the international newspapers, the New York Times, El PaÃs, the Guardian and ClarÃn of Argentina."
Kike’s summary in this regard is "We have a lot of our own reporting, because we are not clipping, we are not clipping, we are generators of our own content" But, there is also a free option, "it has a service that is two news instead of eight, at the same times".
The Immediate Future: B2B
With all this, the idea is to be able to continue growing in followers and subscribers. The goal for 2024 is to achieve 2,000 paid users, regardless of total growth. All this, without leaving aside the B2B leg, which he says they arrived at "unintentionally", when they went to present the medium to different big brands.
"We went to about four companies and one company said, what a cool model, super innovative, disruptive and clear, because could we send an audio of the company?, I said, bah, then we have the B2B model, the B2B model is the same customized WazNews," Mujica explains.
"There are very uninformed executives who are problems for the company, that is, very poorly informed, that is, incredibly misinformed. I’m not making a damning judgment, but for various reasons, lack of time, lack of interest, he’s not interested in politics, but more and more executives need to be informed, because of Zalaquett’s audios and Hermosilla’s audios, all of that affects the company. So we said there, an entertaining model is to curate the topics that they have to know no matter what, which are the first four news items that reach those customized Waz News, and they asked us for four news items that they need to disseminate and that because of the problem they have, that the intranet is dead - because no one has kicked out the intranet and that emails are not read and that clipping is very large—then it’s very abundant."
In this way, they are already working with SQM and CMPC, who are charged per subscriber - who receive this personalized information - "which has turned out to be a very practical solution."
With all this, "we have received calls from Mexico and Colombia, from people who came for various reasons to get to know the medium and who were interested in the model," although they recognize that the first focus is to be able to raise more capital because "we ran out of money from the friends’ fund."
Yes, Kike assures that "the model is super scalable at the Latin American level, super scalable because we have already made the investment in technology, it is to introduce phones, to put phones with another code, it is different from the Chilean one. In fact, we have subscribers, some from outside."
The icing on the cake, "To go out, when we are well stabilized, to go out and look for a round hopefully this year", a roadmap that must be discussed with its partners, because "as it is a strange medium, what we want, and what those who invested want is that there is editorial independence, that it exists".
