Creating a new tech and business website for emerging markets

We are a small team of experienced journalists and designers, that have worked on business and tech publications for a decade and more now. Fed up with corporate masters who don't know how to hack media (who does?) and an advertising market that is more interested in cat videos than real, valuable journalism, we are trying something new. Our core offering is a website that will offer both free and paid features to its audience across the Middle East and Africa, to begin with. Our coverage will be city based (look at [login to view URL]), but insightful and analytical (look at The Information), and our aim is to grow a small but loyal audience of readers across these city-hubs (Amman, Johannesburg, Dubai, Nairobi to start with). For the website, we are in the early stages. We have the domain, hosting, WP, and theme installed. We now need someone to help us bring our thoughts to life on how the website should look in Phase 1. In Phase 1, we want to have the basic, dynamic website set up where we will be offering features and news (text) only to our readers. In Phase 2, we will introduce podcasts and videos and also lock our deeply reported features behind subscription plans. In phase 3, we will build a data toolkit and also offer members-only apps that will integrate all our paid offerings. For now, we need someone to get us off the ground and let us start our journalism as we build the rest of the platform out.