In the second blog in our Destination Local series, the founders of online hyperlocal magazine Kentishtowner explain how they've evolved the business through optimising for mobile, moving into print and launching a second title focused on south London.

We are Stephen Emms and Tom Kihl and we run Kentishtowner, a "good news" daily hyperlocal magazine site based in London NW5.

Back in January last year, when we chatted casually in a pub to discuss turning Stephen's local blog into a fully-fledged daily online magazine, who'd have thought what the next 12 months would have in store?

Firstly, we decided to avoid hard news – plenty of established local papers were doing a good job of that – and publish daily instead on the arts, food, history, community and people. We aspired to be a "travel guide for locals" - to help people see their neighbourhood with fresh eyes. 

As professional journalists (Stephen a broadsheet contributor, Tom a former deputy magazine editor), we laid emphasis on good quality writing that wouldn't patronise our readership. This means not swerving away from 800-1,200 word features, although we also focus on the best ways to engage our rapidly growing audience: bitesize nuggets, interactive think-pieces, forums, video.

Our readership was growing nicely when a reader brought the Nesta Destination Local programme to our attention. We applied and were delighted to be one of the 10 winners, and set about relaunching the site for mobile.

Rather than pour our Nesta funding into mobile app development, we were always of the opinion that HTML5 could provide all we needed at a fraction of the cost. Therefore we were able to launch our mobile-optimised presence very quickly, essentially by installing a responsive Wordpress theme, then gradually customising it to our hyperlocal requirements.

Our first challenge was that many of our posts required more than one geo tag. We overcame this by creating map point landing pages for each and every business in our area. We called this section 'Nearby' and it quickly developed into a unique editorially-led business directory when we realised how well these pages performed in search. We didn't want to take on the likes of Google + local pages, but know that our mixture of carefully crafted editorial and detailed local knowledge provides by far the more superior landing page for all the shops, cafés, bars, venues, restaurants and amenities in the area.

Now our mobile readership is growing at more than twice the rate of our non-mobile audience. We continue to develop content and functionality specifically for handsets and tablets, with audio history tours the next extension to our mobile offering.

In Feb this year we were shortlisted for a Best Digital Service award at the forthcoming 2013 Newspaper Awards (alongside the Guardian and Sunday Times), and our new monthly print edition was even reported by BBC1 on their primetime news. We now enjoy 75,000 monthly readers and 300,000 page views a month, with a very active 10k social media community too.

We've broken stories locally and globally, gone from online to print - and the wider press has followed our every move, with features everywhere from the Sunday Times to a slot on primetime BBC1. In March this year we launched our second title, Below The River, focused on South London. This is already picking up about 5,000 visits a week.

Let it not be said, however, that it's all been a breeze. This project has taken over our lives and monetisation continues to be the big challenge: with that in mind we offer local advertisers multiple platforms - online, mobile and also our monthly 16-page print edition.

What are our plans now as we approach the mid-point of 2013?

Well, to continue building our audience, develop our Nearby functions and also really put the Young Kentishtowner Foundation, our charitable organisation mentoring disadvantaged local kids in online publishing, on the map. We would like to continue to push a symbiotic approach to supporting local business.

And, finally, we want to be a blueprint for a modern, sustainable hyperlocal publishing house.

Kentishtowner is one of 10 projects funded through our Destination Local programme, where we're working to support the next generation of hyperlocal media services.