Boredom led this ex-reporter to start Southeast Asia’s hottest hyperlocal news company

The Navratri Hindu festival in Bangkok. Photo: Alexander Hotz for Coconuts.

Before Byron Perry founded Coconuts, the rapidly growing Asian community news site with one million monthly unique visitors, he was a perpetually bored journalist.

After moving to Los Angeles in 2007 to work as a copy editor at Variety magazine, the American found that the entertainment business wasn’t his calling despite opportunities to attend film premieres and interview celebrities.

Then there was the matter of print publications struggling. Variety saw its print ad revenues drop, and had to lay off 30 percent of its staff – including Perry, who was one of the youngest employees there. He took his severance package and traveled around the world, landing in Southeast Asia and a gig as an English language reporter at the Phnom Penh Post in Cambodia. That didn’t last long.

The job wasn’t boring, but the town was. I rode around in a bicycle covering the latest news in Siem Reap, or a new coffeeshop, or a new construction in town.

He then moved on to cover real estate in Thailand, but again, property wasn’t something he liked. This led to the thought of starting his own news website, since he felt there wasn’t a good urban news website in Bangkok.

Starting in September 2011, Perry bootstrapped Coconuts out of his Bangkok apartment for about a year.

I had to write nearly all the articles myself, with some help from freelancers.

He got some reprieve after receiving funding from angel investors in Silicon Valley. The money gave him a welcomed cushion to focus on readership growth and the business aspects.

Cure for boredom

The closest analogue to Coconuts is perhaps Gothamist, the company best known for its city blogs in places like New York City, Los Angeles, and even Shanghai.

Essentially, Coconuts focuses on hyperlocal news in Southeast Asian cities. While this could, in theory, mean covering events like the opening of a local photocopy shop that have no relevance outside of its immediate vicinity, Perry wants to find unusual happenings that can go viral globally. It does both original articles and content aggregation by scouring for stuff on social networks.

Given its hyperlocal coverage and business model, the site needs to expand rapidly, especially in the early stages. Coconuts wants to be a pioneer of sponsored content in Asia, which differs from advertorials in that publications take full control over content which sponsors pay a sum to be associated with. It’s something that Buzzfeed and Vice magazine have run with and are succeeding.

Making new media profitable

Coconuts, Coconuts everywhere