The Laughable News

The Laughable News is a black and white newsletter printed on the front and back of one sheet of 11 X 17 inchIt is filled with quirky news, fun facts, puzzles, cartoons, and jokes. It is designed to be read in restaurants, while waiting for your food to arrive. Earlier this year, Angela did a short interview with the owner, Ryan Armishaw.

What is The Laughable News?

The Laughable News is a source for everything needed to start a Community Newsletter business. We have professionally designed Newsletter Templates, a Member Forum where you can interact with other publishers, a File Download Area full of great items for setting up and running your business, a Comprehensive Member FAQ/Tutorial area complete with Video Tutorials, and much more. Our goal is to make starting a community newsletter business easy, while saving people time and money.

What inspired you to start your business?

Originally, we started the business because we needed a way to advertise our Coffee Roasting business ‘Earthson Coffee Roasters’ – which we’ve since closed down. We sold ads to other businesses and quickly discovered that the newsletter was the business to follow. After running it ourselves for 1 year, we decided that others could benefit from our knowledge/assistance. So, we decided to offer the templates to people across North America.

Why should someone use your service to build their newsletter instead of going elsewhere?

They should come and use our website for a number of reasons: it’s free to become a member. Membership allows you to post within the forum, discuss business ideas with other publishers, share ad designs/sales techniques, and much more.

If people want to pay for our quality content, they can purchase our templates at any time. But, they could technically use our website to learn all the skills necessary to start their own newsletter, with no requirement to purchase anything. We are interested in building a community where the shared knowledge will help everyone – even people who aren’t our customers!

How has your website grown since it launched?

Our website has gone through a few major upgrades throughout the last 4 years. It started out as a simple ‘blocky’ HTML site – ghastly – and then was upgraded to a Joomla 1.0 site. This was a major upgrade, and allowed us a cleaner design, greater control to share/protect files, etc. Earlier this year I made the upgrade to Joomla 1.5. It has improved the look and ease of use. We’ve also added a member forum and video tutorials which have greatly improved people’s experience.

What goals would you like to reach over the next year or so?

We would like to expand our website membership, and increase the number of people who are actively using our templates in their community. We’d love to have our newsletter spread throughout North America like wild fire!

Approximately how many templates are available for use? Do you make custom templates as well?

We just have one template design each week, but it does come with the option of customization. You can swap puzzles/cartoons in and out, rearrange the layout, etc. Perhaps in the future, we will design different templates for different needs – ie. ‘Bar Crowd’, ‘Religious’. But, for now we are focusing 100% on improving our current template to make it the best it can be!

Custom templates are possible, but we have not had anyone ask specifically for them.

Here’s a video tour of The Laughable News templates:

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