What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.
And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and
the strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same.
All right, I'm here with Nathan Bechez and Dan Chipper, the founders of Every.
How's it going, guys?
Good. Thanks for having us.
It's going good. Yeah, happy to be here.
So Every is a very interesting business. I won't let you guys describe it. I don't want
to butcher it. But I don't see a lot of publications like Every on the internet every day.
So what is Every and why did you guys start it?
Yeah, Every is a bundle of business-focused newsletters. So the idea is we want to write
about every topic in business eventually. We want to write about every industry, every
job role, every broad subject area, every company in a bundle where readers can pay
one price and they get access to everything that we make.
And there's a couple of differences between what we do and what other kinds of media companies
do. One is we focus on analysis and commentary. So we're not doing news. We're not doing scoops.
We're really writing pieces that make you think about the world differently. Two is
we write from a practitioner's perspective. So we want to write about business and we
want to write for people who are in their business lives and it kind of helps make them
better.
Yeah, like utility is kind of like a key thing that we focus on.
The last thing is we're just structured a little bit differently. We're structured as
a writer collective. So what that means is we're somewhere between, for our writers,
writing for something like the New York Times and writing a sub-stack where on the kind
of media company side of things or writing for a media company side of things, we provide
writers with money upfront to help them concentrate on their business. We provide distribution.
So a big thing that we do is we have a platform where we're matching readers to writers and
we're driving readers to writers. So you're not just kind of on your own. We provide a
trusted brand. We have editors to help you make the best work possible. So we prod a
lot of the stuff that a media company would.
And then on the other side of things, we provide upside. So we measure for writers how many
readers, how many subscribers they have and we pay them a percentage of their subscription
revenue and then we also give them their list if they leave. So if for whatever reason it
doesn't work out, you get a list of your emails so you can kind of take your audience where
you want to go. We're not just trying to lock you in to keep writing for us even if the
deal isn't working anymore.
That's a lot. You guys are doing pretty much everything. I mean, even one of the things
you just talked about will be very hard to do. Like, oh, we're just connecting readers
to writers like that is a full business in and of itself. And yet that's like one of
10 things that you're doing. Are you guys transparent at all with like how it's going?
Like how many readers you have or subscribers you have or revenue? Like how can we get a
sense of how this grand experiment is working out?
No, we're totally opaque. Zero data here. No, it's interesting because like we feel
like it's going pretty well. It's definitely so I think Dan, what are the last like publicly
shared numbers that we have?
So we're at like 2,400 paying subscribers. We have about 35,000, 36,000 free subscribers.
And we have I think 13 newsletters now and we work with about 20 writers. Some of them
are leads so they're the people that run the newsletters and some of them are like just
help here and there with production or writing smaller or like guess for articles or stuff
like that.
Right.
Contractors. Yeah.
Cool. 2,400 paid subscribers. That's quite a lot. What is your business model? I think
you charge like a couple hundred bucks a year.
After a trial.
Yeah, it's $200 a year which is kind of like highly encouraged and then optionally it's
$20 a month if you like really want to.
That's awesome.
But if you get the yearly you get a two week free trial so you know.
Yeah, I went to your pricing page and it's like it's hard to find the monthly option.
Like you do a really good job driving people to like the yearly option which makes sense
because that's like way more revenue in your pocket up front. That's money you can use
to go hire writers or go you know grow your website or whatever it is you want to spend
your money on.
Yeah, and like actually the really key thing about it that we learned from our investor
Eric Stromberg from Bedrock is that it gives us a year to get better versus the monthly
because basically every time you get the credit card statement you're like is this worth it?
And so we can only improve so much month over month but in a year I mean hopefully we're
going to be dramatically different a year from now and so it just gives us more time
basically.
But also it's funny because like that design of that subscribe page was partially a product
of just really trying to get it out the door pretty quickly. And so we don't want to be
like too obnoxious about like hiding the monthly plan. It was more like you know we should
add that back in kind of because at first working on not having it and it was like what's
the fastest way to add it but yeah we should probably. We don't want to have any like you
know dark patterns.
I like how it is. I don't think it's a dark pattern. I mean it's up to you to decide how
you want to charge for your business and it's up to customers to decide whether or not they
want to pay that or not. And if what you want to do is emphasize the yearly plan like that's
completely your prerogative and probably it makes a lot of business sense too so why not.
So I want to talk about the flip side of your business model which is like where this money
is going. You know it's obviously coming in from readers who like your writing but your
structured as a writing collective I believe you said which means that it's not like you
know your sort of typical media company owned by you guys and the writers just get like
a salary. How does it work.
Yeah so basically what happens is when a reader signs up we ask them in a survey like on the
sign up flow. Hey like what publication did you primarily subscribe for. And then we basically
attribute that readers revenue that readers monthly subscription fee to that writer. And
at the end of the month what we do is we just basically calculate which publications have
which readers attributed to them. And then we have some revenue split with that publication
where usually it's about 50 percent that we try to standardize it. So it's always around
50 percent with it with writers. And for any reader that we have attributed to them for
that month we pay them their percentage of the revenue.
So with what some of the writers that we work with we have kind of like monthly minimums
where before you've built in a big enough audience to like get subscription revenue
we just pay you to essentially to like write your articles. And so if the subscription
revenue in any particular month is greater than your monthly minimum you make the subscription
revenue if it's lower than your monthly minimum you make the minimum. So you have something
coming in the door and you're not just like kind of writing into the void for many many
years without getting any any money for it.
This is a fascinating business model. I'm obsessed with this because I think media on
the internet has been changing quite a lot. We've seen like the rise of the creator economy
the last couple years and we've seen I don't know like all sorts of like ups and downs
with like traditional sort of news media as well like the death of newspapers and the
rise of like online news and the New York Times like figuring out a subscription model
and substat coming along and basically peeling off a bunch of journalists. And it's what's
interesting to me about it is like I have no idea where things are going. You know like
it doesn't seem like there's any obvious like path that we're headed down or like oh this
is the one right way to do things and this is going to win out. But I think your model
has that potential because it's extremely absurdly ridiculously writer friendly. And
I think ultimately if like you're going to be friendly to anyone you want to be friendly
to the people who are creating the content like that's kind of like the hard side of
the marketplace to get started. So how do you guys look at like yourself within this
broader ecosystem of people reading online? Like do you think your model is the future?
I hope so. It's really too it's too early to tell but I do think it's really I think
it's really appealing because like I was the first employee at substat and I think substat
is amazing for people who are either you know have a huge audience already or you know maybe
they're just really determined and they're they're willing to really take a big risk
on themselves and just really focus or maybe you've just got a lot of money and time and
you know and so you've got a long runway or something. There are some cases but it's generally
it's a very unforgiving kind of like experience curve where it's very steep in the early part
of the curve. And traditionally the way that if you look at most great writing in history
and analysis or content or whatever you want to say it's like that's not the way it's been
produced is not you start out as a you know 20 something maybe you graduated from college
and then you're just writing stuff on the internet like you probably had like mentors
you had like you know a community that you came up in you were able to learn your craft
and then maybe redefine the craft you know if you like really become a master and it's
really hard for that to happen just like on sort of like cold hard and personal internet
platforms and so we wanted to carve out a zone where there's just a lot more support
and so I mean the number one most obvious thing is just in terms of like money and but
also in terms of driving audience but I think there's this other thing that it's really
easy to underestimate but I think is really important I can testify for me personally
has been critically important which is having a group of people and like specifically really
like an editor that's just going to be your first best group of readers and that you're
writing sort of not sort of for like just the numbers because it's really easy to very
quickly get demoralized a lot of writers that we've worked with has said hey like you know
this is like one of my best pieces and I honestly would have probably killed it but you encourage
me to like keep writing it and that kind of thing is I think not to be underestimated
but it's it's you know as like my MBA brain is like how do you quantify that or whatever
you know it's very appealing to just be like all the sovereign creator totally standalone
totally independent but it's like not I mean you're dependent upon stripe you're dependent
upon Twitter you're dependent upon like whatever sub stack or ghost to review like there's
always dependencies and the question is what dependencies do you want to choose and like
do they care about you like are they invested in you like literally and so we want to be
a little bit more of a traditional thing while still offering it's like yes writers should
get a better deal writers should get wealthy much faster than than they do if you're like
on the you know whatever you live in Brooklyn and you make 50k and you write really amazing
stuff but it's you know all the upside goes to the company you work for because maybe
the business model is really hard and they can't pay a lot of upside out so anyway there's
a lot there's a lot to it but that to me is what's exciting about it like just personally
is that realistic though because I think you know with any sort of platform full of creators
whether it's something like Spotify where you've got a lot of artists or it's something
like your publication every we've got a lot of writers they're usually people who are
just the heavy hitters you know like 80 90 percent of the traffic and the readers are
going to like a very small number of people who just for whatever reason they just have
more reach they write better stuff to make better music and it's hard for everybody else
to sort of I think make a living that's comfortable and reasonable when things are so inequitable
yeah so to speak so how does how do you think about that you know is that something you
want to solve or is that something you look at is totally okay that's a that's a great
question I think we certainly see a distribution in terms of the writers who work with in terms
of like people who are making money and not making money but our theory of that is maybe
specifically in our case the the distribution might be a little bit less skewed than you
might think or at least the bottom end of the curve or the middle end is like the the
standard is like a little bit higher or what you could actually end up making is a little
bit higher because we're building niche subscription newsletters for business topics so even if
you have like you know a thousand a thousand subscribers or 500 subscribers like paying
subscribers in a particular niche like usually for any kind of business topic that's fairly
achievable and that is a good living and that's profitable for us and so we we probably expect
that you know some of our writers will be really like a lot bigger than others but that the the
ones that are doing even averagely well are going to make enough to make a living and it won't it
won't be this like you're you have like 300 million listens versus like 10 it's more like
I don't know Ben Thompson has like 3 million subscribers so maybe at the top end of people
that we work with like that that's the achievable outcome or I don't even know if that's really the
right number but like let's assume it's around there but for in the bottom end or even the
average end like having a thousand or five thousand subscribers which if you're a good writer
writing about business topics over a significant period of time you can get there it's achievable
we don't we don't think it'll at all the dynamics are essentially the same for this kind of a
subscription business yeah I also think there there is a little bit of a false dichotomy between
being really nurturing and investing in new talent and being a head-driven business if you
think about like HBO HBO is famous for having people come to them that are new and create
amazing stuff that that like never could have existed before both in terms of the acting
talent it's not like it like if you compare like you know sort of like a Warner Brothers film
average you know top-grossing film in the air to like the top thing on HBO HBO actors they're
gonna have some famous people but there's a lot of people that are new to you and that that is
part of what makes it so compelling is ever everybody likes discovering fresh talent you
know and and you know both in terms of writers and directors there's a healthy balance I think
there that's really important to keep striking also like I mean totally different world but
that one I've gotten very into lately Formula One so like the top two teams are Red Bull and
Mercedes and those also happen to be the top two teams in terms of their investment in new drivers
so they have this incredible pipeline and young talent and like right now the top Formula One
racer Max Verstappen is like also one of the youngest ever and there's this sort of like
direct thing of investing in new talent and achieving the sort of like top-level results
so yeah we want to be both nurturing and have really huge hits and also have it not be this
huge pressure if you want to serve like a pretty niche audience and keep it tight and like you
know you don't have everything doesn't have to be like you know the the biggest thing ever as
long as it's an awesome thing you know yeah I have somebody questions I want to ask you guys
about all this stuff because like finding writers and of itself is very difficult I think in your
particular niche like business most of the people who have the expertise are also like operators who
are running businesses and maybe they don't necessarily want to start careers as writers
right so how do you get business writers like seems like the hardest needs to get branding
like how do you structure your website and your brand and like how did you make those decisions
Nathan I know you worked at sub stack you're like you said the first employee at sub stack
yeah and Dan I'm not sure what your background is how did you come to meet Nathan I guess I
met Nathan probably like six or seven years ago maybe something like that I just moved to New York
he was in New York we were kind of we were both in texting I just sold my previous company before
this I worked on an enterprise software company called Firefly that I sold to Pega which is a big
public software company and had ran the businesses inside of Pega for a little while and we met after
that and I think Nathan was working I think you're working at General Assembly at the time yeah and I
remember I recently when we were like launching the company officially were writing this whole
letter and I was going back through my notes to like try to find the first meeting that I had with
Nathan and we went to drinks together and I just remember being so inspired by Nathan feeling like
the kind of person that builds products that come out of his soul and I was like I want to do that
that was like my first impression of Nathan Wow and yeah he has this like he has that thing and
that that felt very inspiring to me because I was coming out of an enterprise software business
where I really liked what I was doing and I was super into it but it wasn't enterprise software
is usually not your soul and if it is your soul like I mean good for you that's awesome and so
we kind of stayed in touch over the years we did a podcast together and I think always kind of
looked at each other as people that we would eventually maybe want to work with we did actually
for like a month or two it's like three or four years ago try to work together a little bit but
basically you know I sold that company I spent a couple years just like thinking about what I
wanted to do with my life I spent a year or more writing a novel so like really like went far and
wide in terms of like what I thought I might want to do and eventually probably two years ago at
this point I decided I wanted to start a productivity software company something like a notion or like
a Rome or something like that like I've always been very into productivity very into notes and
note-taking and so the way that I decided to start it was I decided I wanted to start a newsletter
first so I figured I would do a newsletter where I would interview people about their all their
productivity like systems and processes and I'd use that as like a way to get customer interviews
for the thing I wanted to build because I'd be able to understand what is the productivity stack
of all these people and I'll know how the product I want to build fits into their life and then
over time I'll probably like build an audience doing that and I'll be able to launch this app
that I'm building to those people so I started writing the newsletter it's called super organizers
it's still around and just got very like psyched about it because people loved it like it was
growing really quickly and I was like wow this whole newsletter thing is like really kind of
interesting it seems like it's taking off I love writing maybe like I should do a newsletter
business instead of like a build an app for it and eventually I kind of kept thinking about it I was
like maybe we should maybe we should do like business newsletters and because there seems
like there's a lot of opportunity in business newsletters and I was thinking about like who
to work on it with and obviously Nathan's name came up like he's been doing this kind of thing
for a while and he's was the first employee at sub stack so I called him and he was immediately
like yes this sounds awesome and we started we started working together so that was the original
kind of impetus of it yeah Nathan how did you decide to leave sub stack well it's very easy
they told me that I should leave basically this is a very interesting I it has been a huge journey
for me like I don't know in terms of like personal growth or like self-awareness or something like
that in the past couple years because I've always really struggled with the fact that I'm extremely
passionate about ideas and I get really excited about them and when I get excited about something
I have like unlimited energy and focus to work on it but I tend to like gravitate towards doing my
own thing because I don't want to like you know yuck anyone else's yum kind of I'm like very I like
these feelings come up in me of like I like I don't like that you know and like I don't know what
to do with that and it's been a huge thing that Dan and I have like worked on together to like in
order to become really like a really high functioning partnership which I think we are today we weren't
when we first started working anyway so yeah when I was at sub stack basically you know I was the
first employee it was a very general kind of like a job role it was like cool you're I guess we'll
call you the VP of product you're just generally can write code and host a podcast and design
interfaces and go to meetings with writers like I was just like kind of doing everything I was like
you know another joke title for me it was like head boy from Harry Potter or whatever as in like
from the house or whatever so anyway there it was like it was really fun I love the founders of sub
side I loved working with them on everything but also I was a pain in the ass for them I was a
really big pain in the ass because I had a lot of feelings and opinions about everything that we
were doing you know and it those are hard to work tell me tell me about that because I think a lot
of founders are in this position we're like yeah you're opinionated you want things done the way
you want them to be done and that's not a bad thing if you've got good ideas it makes it hard
to work for other people but you know you have a co-founder you have to collaborate at some point
how do you how do you resolve those two things therapy I mean honestly but also just like how
you resolve those two things is for me definitely still work in progress to some extent I think the
most important thing is to have a partner that is just committed to you and wants to work with you
on it and can hold your feelings about things and for me to learn okay I can take a step back okay
I feel really strong about this and Dan can like sense it and I'm like alright but like alright
let's figure out what we can actually do like it's like we can calm down now that I've had my like
emotion about it or something I don't know there's like a lot and and I know it's really still hard
for Dan in addition to you know and like everybody has their things I don't want to overstate like
I'm some like unique basket case or whatever I think there are a lot of people that anyone any team
I've ever been a part of I've seen people argue about what should be done you know yeah cuz people
care there's a lot at stake and people have different experiences which lead them to be
sensitive to different risks right and that's kind of what it comes down to is like what ideas can you
perceive what risks can you perceive I think with Dan really just the key thing has honestly been
willingness to work on it together with me and then keep me aside feelings use the word feelings I
think two or three times use the word emotions a couple times so really does sound like therapy
it does sound like you're very self-aware and I don't know if a lot of people in the tech space
you were starting companies use any of those words so I'm not surprised you guys been able to work
through things well it's funny because this is really like I mean this is hugely dense influence
on me I had never really I had I think technically been the therapy a little bit in like high school
when I was I was like diagnosed with ADHD or whatever and at the time I was kind of like I
don't know like nice to have some Adderall I guess because it helped out with homework and stuff like
that but like I didn't really like buy into it or really understand it at all and so I'd never been
there before I never really thought about like how my brain worked or anything else like that and yeah
Dan was just a little bit more like experienced with with therapy and just more attuned to it and so
you know we wouldn't basically like I started therapy Dan Dan and I started doing couples therapy
and it's honestly been the best like investment in our business ever because I think the number
one reason why most companies fail is either because the co-founders have some conflict that
causes them to just like lose trust lose respect you know something like that happens or it's like
this Cold War simmering thing where they're just not really kind of rowing in harmony together
because they just choose to let some things go uncommunicated and we kind of share this theory
that like the business world is like just bursting to discover therapy basically and coaching it's
kind of like a very early signal of like tip of the spear but so much of work is about emotions
and communication and you know turns out like that therapists are that's what they're there for so
yeah it's really good they're super useful and you know to your point a lot of companies
implode because co-founders don't get along and it's one of those things where I think when you're
looking at companies from the outside in like you don't see co-founder disputes like if I'm
looking at sub-stack like I have no idea what's going on with the co-founders and so I think when
people try to start companies it's easy to underestimate like how important that relationship
is and how important to your success like keeping that relationship healthy is and I'm sure there's
like a bunch of people listening to this right now who are working on companies with co-founders and
things aren't going well and they haven't even thought about you know getting a therapist or
trying to resolve things because that seems like a distraction from the real work of writing code
or hiring journalists or whatever it is they need to do yeah yeah I think everyone has this idea
that everyone else has their shit together more than they do and when you like when you
pull back the curtain on it it's like everyone has these like conflicts at work and everyone
is internally feeling all these things that they don't really express they're anxious they're
depressed or whatever and I'm always surprised like when I talk to someone who's really successful
that they feel that way and I've been thinking about this for a long time so I think like for
us one of the things we do is we have a we have a podcast called talk therapy where we just like
we talk about our own inner experiences and then we also like interview people about their experiences
and it's really it's really interesting to see that and yeah I do think like when I was younger I
was very much on the like you just got to like write code and make the right decisions and you
know everything will be everything will be great but I think what that misses is that business the
cliches businesses about people but it is true and if it is about people then the way that people
behave and the way that people think and when people feel is like incredibly important and
being able to like figure out how to work in harmony with with people even when people have
different opinions is is a really and different ways of processing the world is I think we both
feel is kind of a little bit of a superpower if you can if you can do it and therapy is a really
good tool to understand like what you're bringing to situations and how your own brain works and
then also how others brains works and it's been really great for us couldn't agree more so what
did your partnership look like at the beginning in terms of you know the non-relationship part
of it like the actual decisions you were making like the down to the brass tacks stuff like how
do you get a company like every off the ground well one of the things we did first is we had
this idea for this media company like I think from the very beginning we want to do a bunch
of different business newsletters we wanted to do it in this certain kind of style which
is for practitioners we thought we might want to do it as like as a bundle where people could
pay one price and get access to all this stuff because Nathan had seen some of that stuff like
signs that's something like that might work from his time and sub stack and what we did first is
we were kind of wanted to do it pretty step-by-step we wanted to do it pretty organically so we it's
not we didn't like announce hey we're doing this thing called every we're not we didn't say like
it's it's gonna be a bundle or a media company or whatever what we did was I was running my
newsletter super organizers which was pre-existing and then Nathan started a newsletter called
divinations and we kind of just like ran them as separate newsletters for a little while because
we thought it would be a good idea to just at base what we're doing is we're making content
or writing and the best way to test that is to just write and see if people will pay for it and
see if it could grow and we figured if that worked then we'd take the next step and so we
did that for a couple months it was working people were people were paying for super organizers
they were paying for divinations they were reading it and really liking it and then we're
like okay let's take the next step the next step was testing a testing the idea of a bundle will
anybody want to pay for two publications at once and will that work and so what we did was we just
started a third sub stack we started a third sub stack we mirrored all of our content onto it and
then we launched it to the audience and we said hey like we're doing we're doing this bundle of
these two publications again we didn't announce it as a company we hadn't we hadn't even incorporated
like all any of that stuff we just tried it and like immediately the business like I don't know I
don't know what happened but it was like doubled overnight it was like it was like a big thing
you could not miss in the graph like wow that worked really well why do you think people care
so much about the bundle I mean they could just get your two newsletter separately was there some
message that said okay hey these are greater than the sum of their parts so there's like some sort
of like higher level purpose we're gonna provide for you to get both these things together yeah I
think the big thing is if you already kind of want both of them then bundling them you just
offered a discount so it was basically $15 a month each for our newsletters and then it was $20 a
month to get both of them so if you like really like one and you kind of like the other you're
interested in it but like you know if you would pay $15 a month for it the bundle is like a pretty
good deal and that's great because you know this is sort of like the magic of bundling is it's
basically a form of price discrimination where you can say like okay I'm gonna average out your
demand for like three different products almost and say okay like person A is like really into
like this publication and not so into that publication and then this other publication
they kind of like a little bit but they have some demand but it's not enough to charge like the
market clearing price take that across a whole bunch of different consumers and everyone's got
their own unique kind of like preference curve and then you can kind of just average it all together
to like just some the like willingness to pay across each publication and it equals some number
that's like less than they would all cost if you added them up as individual prices but more than
what people would pay if each one was charging their own individual price so it's like win-win
for consumers because consumers get access to more stuff more options for like less money and it's a
win for creators because consumers are spending a little bit extra than they normally would spend
because they normally just be missing out on a whole bunch of things that now they get access
to because they're paying a little bit more but they don't have to pay the full price more so
anyway I've tried to it's a very it ends up being very mathy and I wrote like a whole post about it
kind of like digging into math with like an excel model and graphs and all this kind of stuff I got
really fascinated by just sort of like though almost like the economics of that and it was just
insanely cool to see when we launched like our own bundle like it's like wow that actually works
like that's that's pretty wild yeah yeah it's cool and I think it's a I think this whole idea of
bundling things together is like criminally underused it's just like people don't think about it that
much in publications and writing like it happens you know but like for example even with like SaaS
companies I talked to so many different indie hackers who were working on like little different
tools etc and trying to get attention and like very rarely do they come together you know one
company to another and maybe several other companies and say let's bundle our products
together you know let's offer like some value to customers like we have a you know a business suite
or whatever which could add a lot of value and it could like get them a lot more comfort customers
a lot more attention than they got otherwise so I wonder if people will follow your example and do
more of this bundling stuff in the future because it's so lucrative and like just makes a lot of
sense yeah it's interesting I think people have this association with bundles that it's like the
cable bundle and everyone hates the cable bundle so I want to be bad you know that's what I thought
like I wouldn't have thought of this if Nathan hadn't been like look at the economics of bundling
it's so cool you know and it's true like it works it works really well if you if you do it right and
and obviously it's a core part of our business that has driven a lot of a lot of growth for us
yeah yeah what do you think about the opposite process of unbundling because you could say
something like sub stack has been unbundling bigger publications right like individual
journalists are leaving the New York Times and leaving other huge publications to go right on
their own and that seems to be a big draw for them it seems to like for the writers seem to
be like a better deal totally yeah the two things I'll say about that and then also the cable bundle
thing is there's definitely a lot of places when unbundling makes a lot of sense or just never
starting with a bundle in the first place so like one key thing is like your enjoyment or
experience of one thing like should not be inhibited by other things in the bundle that
you don't like so in Spotify or Netflix there's a lot of movies that I don't like but I'm not
really annoyed by their presence there like it doesn't get in my way so like that's a really
that's a really important thing and maybe if there's like just really one columnist at the New
York Times that you just want to read their stuff and but the New York Times doesn't make it easy
to just subscribe to that one person you have to sign up for some whole opinion newsletter or app
or you visit their website and it's like several clicks or whatever there's value to just being
able to access it and that's that's just purely a product function almost like it doesn't it's not
inherent to like oh you have to buy the bundle to be a part of it but also if there's other stuff
in the bundle that really has zero value like let's say the only way in the world to buy like
french fries was to also buy a hamburger and a soda right that would be really annoying cuz like
some people just want fries sometimes you know and so you don't have to offer everything only as a
bundle you could also separate out where it's like there's like a la carte or whatever and we do try
that honor that in the same way that you can sort of get you know a monthly subscription to ever you
can also technically get a standalone subscription to just one of the newsletters but it's also kind
of buried because we just wanted to see like do people want this like so it's the same offer as
before of like 15 a month 150 dollars a year versus the 20 or 200 for the whole bundle but
yeah basically if you're paying for a lot of stuff that you really truly don't want like if
you just want one like all you care about in the cable bundle is ESPN or something then that can
be a bad deal but there's this other part of bundling where sometimes people perceive it to
be a bad deal and it's really not which is the price of the bundle should never be just the sum
of all the individual prices right that's like defeats the whole purpose of bundling it should
be at some discount because you've got to assume not everyone wants everything equally so people
often think though oh like I'm paying 70 dollars a month for cable and all I want is ESPN and I'm
getting 70 channels so shouldn't I just pay one dollar a month for ESPN it's like man it was on
its own and probably charging 40 you know like yeah they like and so that is that is a thing
that is a little bit difficult is just the consumer perception of value can get warped
especially if it's a really long lasting bundle that's been around for a while I think what paid
newsletters it feels kind of fresh like oh $20 a month for like three newsletters I want and a
couple other ones that's also seem kind of cool feels like a good deal because we're so you were
in the unbundling moment where it's with salient for people like ah one of these individually is
probably 10 15 20 bucks a month yeah and I think for you in particular like the bundle you've
created it's not sort of arbitrary like if I go to the New York Times like I'm getting news but
it's like it's news about everything you know like there's it's really hard to like focus in
and be like well what do I really want for the New York Times with every it's like very specific
you're focused on business I mean I'm reading your scripts right now it says every is a bundle
of business focused newsletters and we see business as an endeavor that's intentionally
interesting and we hope to build a better world by helping people tell basically become better
business operators and at the end of the day like that's a very succinct value proposition and it
makes a lot of sense if I like want to learn about business that I could just go subscribe to every
rather than subscribing to like you know a million different newsletters or whatever like
the fact that you bundled things together makes it easier for me as a consumer to make fewer
decisions yeah and it's also why we kind of our wedge is like this sort of really specific like
strategy and productivity focus and specifically like tech ish focus and like kind of we've got
particular areas we're especially strong on like creator economy type issues we've got a lot of good
stuff on that like I've written we have a publication means of creation that I do with
Legion so we've got our kind of like niche that we carve out within that and then hopefully in the
same way that you know whatever like Facebook started at Harvard or uber started in San Francisco
we can get to other industries like you know wealth management or waste management those are
like the two go-tos that we have everything from wealth management to waste management yeah
hopefully we can get to those but we got to figure out a lot of core kind of like mechanics
first and and and learn and get it really working in our kind of like white hot center of you know
active where everything's super liquid and we're driving a lot of cross discovery and the value is
really working up for the bundle for people and I don't think we're there yet we've got a lot of
work to do to even sort of make San Francisco quote-unquote if we're uber like make that work for us
well you started off like very humble beginnings you guys combined your two newsletters into one
sub second newsletter you saw that that was a definite spike in your business where did you
go from there because you've come a long way since then the next thing that we did was we
want to do is start to experiment with adding more people into the bundle so we knew it could work
with Nathan and I who just kind of effectively pooled our resources and we're kind of like we
both collectively own the company even though it wasn't even incorporated as a company but like
theoretically we would we would own it we wanted to know like what would it take to to get a writer
who wasn't part of the company but maybe like just had a newsletter or could start a newsletter with
us as a writer more or less and so the first the first thing that we did was just starting to go
find another writer and we ended up partnering with this guy Tiago Forte who is a really well
known productivity expert he has a he's a course called building a second brain which is which is
amazing and he has this newsletter called this paid newsletter called praxis and we wanted to
just basically figure out like if we if we launch with someone like that what happens like if we if
we can incorporate his paid newsletter praxis like what is the deal that we could give to someone
like that that would make it appealing and then what happens if if we do get someone like that to
join the bundle do we still see a lot of growth and so that moment was another moment where we
tried it and it worked like we found a deal that worked for him and we grew a lot when we did it
he converted a lot of his audience into paying subscribers for every and it seemed like a good
thing for both sides can you explain with that product that pitch was like to get Tiago Forte
to join you because that's a hard pitch to make right like he's doing just well just fine on his
own yeah I think basically the the pitch at the time was hey like we know you here's this here's
this way that you can reach with your newsletter more people who might want to pay for it right
now but probably won't because it doesn't offer enough value but if you pitch they get your
newsletter plus a couple other ones that they've heard of like super organizers or divinations
for a little bit of a higher price you'll be able to get people who wouldn't have ordinarily signed
up his name is called praxis who wouldn't have ordinarily signed up for praxis but because it
now is offered with some other stuff like it pushes them over the edge and so you're gonna
make more money and you're gonna have a bigger audience for this newsletter than you would
ordinarily and that was the that was the idea and and and it was kind of trying to respond to the
objection of like well what about my my own newsletter that I'm currently running like am
I cannibalizing it and the answer was well what we hope is the way that these bundle economics
works is that people who really just want praxis are gonna sign up for praxis on its
own through you but people who want it a little bit but really want some other stuff that might
come with it are gonna sign up through us and currently you're not monetizing them but we will
help you right and praxis you know it's still available as a standalone subscription that is
a lot cheaper so if you want to just get praxis you can pay less for it so there's it the
cannibalization thing is a little bit if they were the same price or something like there's
some people who have newsletters that are like you know very financing and they charge $40 a month
that's tough for us to make that so where it's like get this newsletter and a bunch of other
stuff that you might also like for cheaper yeah we have to raise our overall price for that to
work right yeah cool so he just continued publishing his newsletter on his own it's kind
of like a risk-free deal for him like why not also co-publish it to your bundle get some extra
subscribers and there's really no downside yeah exactly and we structured it so it was like it's
a six-month commitment so it doesn't work it's fine yeah it was just like it was just a test
and for him also it's his side thing like his big thing is the courses so he can be a little bit
more experimental with it so we tried it it worked again and we're like wow we're really like
everything we're doing is working this is crazy it's really like now we're making money maybe we
should incorporate so we incorporated which was which is kind of funny yeah I think we're at like
10k MRR when we finally yeah like created an entity which is kind of fun because all my other
businesses have created an entity like very far in advance of revenue and the revenue never really
came right right right right I think we take a lot of pride in kind of like putting first things
first it's like let's make a product that people want and we'll pay for and then we can figure out
all the other stuff after like the trappings of whatever like we took us like a year to make swag
which which the swag is awesome but also I think we were we were both pretty proud of and so at
that point we were like okay this is working it's in it's a business we honestly we hadn't even
announced it as a business it was just still just look like a couple sub stacks to the outside world
and then we decided to raise money for it which was that was another big conversation about like
what should we do how much should we raise like all that kind of stuff because my my previous
background is bootstrapping I'd bootstrap my business before I sold it and Nathan's background
was venture and I was very skeptical of venture and Nathan was very skeptical of building a really
big business through bootstrapping and so we had to really kind of like merge our perspectives and
I think we we came to something really good yeah helpful for us yeah seems like a discussion that
is right for requiring you guys to go to founder therapy yeah pretty big disagreement how did you
decide that the right decision was to to raise venture capital well we did it in a very funky
way so first of all we're very clear like this is anticipating to be the like potentially the
only money we ever raised there could be some time in the future when we want to raise more
but maybe not like we're not we're just because we decided to raise now it doesn't mean we decide
to get on the treadmill okay so how do you avoid getting on the treadmill one really important
thing is to just stay pretty close to profitability that's that's really important so that was a
decision we made as a part of that fundraise that we communicated really clearly to all our investors
another thing is to not let the valuation cap on the on the safe sort of like get away from us a lot
of company I mean we probably could have raised that like 2x or maybe even more of the cap just
because caps are crazy these days for early-stage companies granted we're a media company and maybe
whatever some stuff is not as attractive as some tech companies but still you know we went with a
pretty low cap because we wanted to imagine okay let's say we don't raise any more money let's say
we just want to keep operating this for like a while we love running the business it's working
it's growing but we want to buy out these initial investors at some point if they want to be bought
out because there may not be some imminent liquidity event what's a cap and an amount we
raise on that cap that we could envision ourselves paying out some reasonable multiple for in the
future to buy that stock back so the higher your cap the more you raise the much more difficult
that becomes and becomes most startups just never do that they either get acquired or they return
zero money to their investors so we wanted to keep that reasonable and we also like one of our
investors coined it like Mirandizing like we read our Miranda rights to our investors where we're
like you know look like don't invest like you have a right to not invest in this if you don't like
we're not doing the traditional venture thing you know we're raising we're raising this money but
it might be the last money we raise we might offer to buy you out in like five years if that's the
path that it seems like it's going down whatever and everyone was cool with that basically everyone
was like yeah like I want to invest in you regardless because well there's like a couple
people that said no but most of the people it was also we were just focusing on angels you know
like people who it's not institutional capital for the most part that had a very specific profile
we did raise from bedrock they do have a very specific profile and bedrock was just basically
yeah like y'all want to build a big business I get if you don't want to get ahead of yourselves
I get if media you know like is historically kind of tricky but like you you have the vision for
your building we believe in the vision for your building we think this will work out so it was a
little bit of a non-traditional race but it's also it's getting less crazy like to do that like
notion didn't raise money for a long time until they raised a huge round github didn't raise money
for a long time until there is a huge round Shopify you know MailChimp there are really big
businesses that have been built this way and I think a lot of the forces of operating a business
this way make you a better business yeah for sure they force you to be disciplined they force you
to focus on what actually will keep your company to surviving rather than just getting on this
like treadmill of raising more and more and more money and we'll figure it out later I think one of
the things that makes you less traditional in addition to the fact that you didn't want to raise
additional rounds was as you said like you're a media company not really a tech company and
generally speaking people who raise if you see your tech companies who are raising money because
it's going to massively accelerate their growth and they'll become this huge phenomenon in the
future I guess what is your future vision look like like how do you convince investors that
you're going to build some huge massive thing when you're not a tech company or is that even
the pitch that you needed to make totally when we did I mean we did have this we did have to say
like look we have a big vision for this and this is how we think it can be big it may not be big on
the time scale of like traditional venture and so we want to reserve the idea that that it won't
and make that decision in a year or two and we know a little bit more about the business so you
should know that you're taking the option of it being really big and we're going to try our best
to make it really big but in the case there it's not we want to preserve the optionality to run
the business that we want to run and the vision that we pitched is kind of what we've talked
about today which is we want to cover every topic in business we want to be a place where
readers can come and we can provide them an experience where we match them with the kinds
of writers that we think are going to be good for them so every reader kind of gets that gets
their own experience and we have this new economic model for writers that we believe will help us
acquire the best writers and we can kind of create this flywheel where we have we have a lot of
readers that we can drive to writers that helps us attract the best writers and we have the best deal
for writers which helps us attract more readers and we kind of create this machine that we think
can get big really big over time so that's the thing that we pitched and we also kind of said
but also it might not exactly work like that and we want to take the time to figure that out and
I think our investors were pretty cool with that idea and I should also note that it was easier for
us because we both have software tech backgrounds and have deep relationships with venture capitalists
and angels and so I think many of them looked at us and looked at what we were doing and said like
well they have the right profile so even if I don't fully believe in exactly what they're doing
right now like they'll probably just pivot to software they'll get tired of this meeting eventually
and they'll probably just pivot to software I don't think that that's what our lead thinks our
lead believes in what we're doing and understands it really well and thinks it can be big but I
think a lot of our angels did yeah I think to me there's like this pretty clear exciting thing
about like our model that's really different from a normal media company which is normal media
companies the way they work is they have a brand and it stands for one pretty specific thing and
all the articles pretty much go out to all of their readers and so the problem with that and
then the other thing they do is they mostly monetize via ads and this is the model when people say
media doesn't do well with venture capital or whatever this is the model that people have in
mind we're not this model in two ways that I think are pretty important you know I think we
think are we think really important that may or may not work but it's at least like in theory it's
a good reason why we might be able to exceed the scale of some of those one is the every brand
doesn't publish any articles we only publish articles under sub brands which are individual
newsletters and those can be extremely tight and focused and and unique to the author or the
authors that are kind of like driving it but overall every is just a collection we're like a
pastiche of all these different cool things that's like I think that can that sort of brand
architecture almost can scale a little bit better than then sort of like a normal media company and
the key way that we make that work is by having really good cross-promotion of the newsletters to
our readers so for a reader if we have algorithms that are like you know based on some combo of
explicit signals like following or implicit signals like time spent reading or reading
articles and stuff like that we recommend really consistently good stuff to you then it's got a
little bit more platformy type of attributes basically we're very early on this it's very
untested but we're already building some stuff that's kind of like getting to this like for new
users we're running an A B test where half of our new users right now are receiving an email a day
and it's a personalized just whatever we think is gonna be the best thing for you if it's a
publication you if a publication that you follow published a new thing you just get that otherwise
you get like something from our greatest it's we have a lot of really evergreen stuff something
that's related to topics you seem to be interested in etc so we're early on that but it's like
exciting and hopefully the results will be promising but we don't really know yet because
we literally it's like less than a week old so but then the other the other key thing besides
that sort of like brand architecture or personalization stuff that I think could help us scale more is
the way that we pay out with writers feels more like well I think there's a lot of churn in media
at the very top there's not as much like at the New Yorker there are people that right there for
like forever the New York Times kind of like same deal but it's been it's really hard if you're one
of the other companies because people you know they're always looking to kind of like level up
go to the next thing and I think the reason they do that is because it's really hard to get a raise
in most of media I mean this is why it's better to end up getting like a book deal or something
like that because at least it's like you get a revenue share I think that the big thing that's
happening now because the internet finally is this sort of like best alternative to negotiated
agreement with your publisher is like well I could go on my own I could do a sub stack there's this
confidence with writers that has kind of changed I think the negotiations with publishers and we
think of ourselves as kind of like okay like what's the model you do in a world where it's really
easy for anyone to start their own sub stack it probably does not look like the what the model
used to be able to get away with as a publisher and so hopefully we end up having you know better
talent retention because there's just so much more ownership as a writer of your connection with
your audience your ownership of the upside financially and hopefully that'll help too
let's talk about marketing growth connecting readers to writers because this is something
that I think most people struggle with on the internet who are trying to start any sort of
company whether they're putting out media whether they're trying to start a SaaS business it's hard
to get people in the door and you guys have to be good at that otherwise it's really not a solid
reason for writers to join your collective what are your strategies been you know how do you get
people to actually come and read every and subscribe to every that's a that's a great question and the
answer that we have so far is like it's pretty boring honestly it's we write we try to write
really good stuff that we think will resonate with people that says something new and interesting
that hits on topics that people like have in their heads or answers questions that they have
in their heads and then we we put it on Twitter and we put it on Hacker News and sometimes it
goes viral and that's like that's honestly the core and doing that consistently is kind of the
core of how we've grown so far there are a couple of like more sophisticated I'll put that in air
quote sophisticated things that we do too and we're starting to change a little bit because at the
place we are now like I think it's useful to start actually being a little bit more in the weeds on
like different growth tactics and stuff like that and and we're really starting to get more
sophisticated about that but I think especially when you're starting out the thing to do is just
make good stuff especially in media because that's the idea is like if you write something really
good it's gonna spread so another thing that we've done over time is kind of the model that I started
with super organizers which is interviewing people so when you do an interview with someone and you
write it up and you do a good job and they like it they share it with their audience so if you can
write really good interviews and get people who have successively more and more followers every
time you publish you you get exposed to their audience and you can kind of recruit their audience
to be your audience and then that means you can get someone even more famous next time it doesn't
it doesn't like fully work exactly like that all the time like sometimes the famous people don't
share it honestly you have to mix in people who are not famous because sometimes famous people are
just aren't very good interviews they just like have these bits that they just like give you and
but they've given it to a hundred people before so it's really feel us like raw other things that
we've done right now something that we're experimenting with is just like doing cross
promos with other newsletters we have someone who's doing growth of us and he's just setting
up different cross promos with newsletters that that we're a fan of and that has been actually
fairly successful so far but yeah I think I think we're we're just at the very earliest stages of
figuring out like how to grow beyond yeah just just writing stuff that that people really like
yeah yeah and I think all the like other stuff kind of depends on that first core layer of just
the writing being really good so it's like we focus way more time on editing pieces and like
figuring out what makes a good piece on that kind of stuff then we do like you know doing cross
promo or whatever else we're just now starting to do some cross promo but it's like the cross promo
wouldn't work if the pieces weren't that good and if the pieces are good you don't need cross promo
that bad because people just share it on Twitter so it's like really the high order bit is just
editorial focus basically yeah there's nothing more shareable than basically articles online
we've got a URL every single social network is formatted to allow you to share links and like
blow it up into a cool little expanded version with a picture and stuff like if you write good
content people will share it what have you learned about writing good content we're developing some
like frameworks around this one is engine drag and lift so three interesting things lift is a new one
that Rachel Jepsen our executive editor came up with that I love but so the engine of the piece
is like the core idea of like why am I here in the first place you know it's just like oh like
you're gonna like if you're here it's like oh you're gonna learn how to start a new media company or
at least how these people did it and you know whatever like you're gonna learn a bunch of like
random other bits about this kind of world along the way like maybe co-founder relationships whatever
that's like the engine of this podcast interview that we're doing drag is like okay maybe you have
a really strong engine but just the way you wrote it like the sentences don't make sense they're not
kind of they don't logically fall from each other you start to feel lost you know and so I think
about it kind of like a car this is funny this is before I got into formula one now that I'm into
formula one I'm like way into this analogy but it's sort of like if you have a car that has really
terrible aerodynamics no matter how strong the engine is people are gonna fall off but it's really
hard as an editor to fix an engine that's just not there like sometimes the engine is just weak or
like oh it only appeals to like a really tiny subset of people and it's kind of like this is
very specific like me you might want to make it a little bit more broad or something like that but
you know the engine is kind of like the core reason why are there the drag is like anything in the
way that it's written that gets in the way of sort of accessing the power of that engine and then
lift is just funny little things like voice or jokes or tone that kind of like keep you sticking
around it's like when someone makes you chuckle in the middle of writing or someone just points
out something that's really insightful even if it's besides the point of the engine you're just
kind of re-upped for another like two minutes at least of reading you know cuz like something good
may be around the corner and so that little lift those little nice those those kind of help too
but yeah I don't know that that's kind of like our overall framework Dan you've got a lot of other
stuff on this too though yeah I mean I think that there's there's a lot of things within that like
what makes a good engine and and also like how do you get the best out of out of writers so like one
one lesson that we keep learning over and over again is like writers the best pieces are written
by writers who care about those pieces and want to write them and trying to make a writer do
something that they don't want to do is like not gonna not gonna really work so it's a like a lot
of the best pieces come from writers kind of digging into their own soul on like what they're
interested in if they're interested in it then it will probably do well for people who are like them
and so or are interested in the same things as they are and so like that's reflected in our model
like Nathan and I don't go to writers and be like hey you should write about this this week like
we're like each publication inside of every each newsletter is its own publication with its own
writer who has the voice and vision of the newsletter and is the one who has the finger on
on the pulse of the audience and it gets to say like this is this is what I'm into and this is
where I want to lead the audience you know within certain bounds obviously and our job is to help
them do that better to bring that out bring the more more of them out into their pieces rather
than being the ones who like assign stories and say like here's what you got to cover and that's
that's one of the reasons why we think this can be bigger than just like productivity strategy
tech focused articles is like the the vision for each publication lives in the writer and it's a
little bit more decentralized than like a typical media company so that's that's one thing and it's
really hard to remember that because I think we typically like are like you should do this and
get get excited about it and it just ideas yeah yeah it feels like oh like you know we have a
media company we should be able to be excited about ideas and get people right do our ideas
that's like ah yeah not if we want it done well yeah it's just our idea you know the visions in
our head and you know yeah so I've got some stuff that I write Dan has some stuff that he writes we
have things that we're excited about but help it's like the purpose of the company ultimately is to
be like a jetpack for writers to get what they want faster and a parachute yeah it's yeah that
fallacy is like the media equivalent of like I just need a technical co-founder to make this idea
right I just hired some nerds to build this app that I'll be perfect we'll all get rich yeah it's
like actually no you got they have to want it too you know yeah and so yeah for me it's like oh I
have this idea you should write it it's like actually no I should just write it because you
don't have that idea or whatever you know yeah so that that's that's one big thing that we've
learned I think like in terms of different engines like pieces that put their finger on
things that people have been thinking a lot but like haven't don't have the words for usually
do really really well pieces that hit on timely topics but have something to say that is like new
and interesting do really well and that's hard actually it's really hard to chase that we just
we just recorded a podcast yesterday where we were talking about this feeling that you almost need
to have your finger on the pulse of like what people are publishing so that you can do it too
and it's like actually but once you start doing that once you start like looking at whatever
analysis doing like you you lose whatever that is that can get people interested in what you're
doing because you're no longer original and you're just kind of like recycling ideas so I think both
of us probably read few newsletters honestly we probably just read a lot of books and do a lot
of thinking and talking to people that we think are smart and that's a really good way to generate
some of these ideas so yeah it's like a tricky a tricky line to walk because people really like
to share and talk about things that like they already sort of know about you know it's like
people are all talking about a particular thing then it's just like you know like during the
election season for example everybody wants to share articles about the election because like all
their friends are reading about it and talking about it but it is sure that if you follow what
everybody is doing what everybody else is doing too closely that you do lose what makes you unique
and what makes you special and so I like your strategy of sort of reading books and reading
things that other people aren't necessarily reading because you can sort of react to that you know
you'll come with fresh ideas that people haven't heard before and you can if you want to apply it
to topics that people are you know excited to share and talk about I'm curious I mean indie
hackers has an amazing audience and like oh dude does like what we just said vibe with your experience
like also we don't have real hard we have some podcasts none of them are that big yet like I'm
curious if it works differently in podcasts sorry I don't know yeah totally podcasts are a very
different medium than written content and it's easy to get sucked into like you know the paradigms
of one and try to like transplant those to the other and it doesn't necessarily work for example
you talked about like the engine drag and lift I think drag for a podcast is a lot about sort of
the rapport between like the guest and the host story how smoothly is the conversation flowing
and if it's like a sort of awkward stilted conversation that doesn't sound like people
know each other or are friendly with each other it's just hard to listen to you so some of my
best episodes for example have just been with people who I'm really close to where people can
tell that we're close and I think it's because people generally listen to podcast even if they're
educational for more entertainment like past the time sort of purposes you know they're just sort
of going to walk the dog or going on a run or going to the you know store and like they just
want something that's just like smooth flowing and that feels really good it's like that's an
example of something specific that might be in a podcast but not in written yeah vibing yeah
exactly and then for like the web stuff like we don't hire we do actually work with like a few
journalists and stuff but like generally speaking like random people all over the world write stuff
for any hackers and our sort of process is very different from yours so we're not like oh how do
we only get the best content possible we're much more like how do we get as many people as possible
writing and then create an algorithm and like a community of people who upvote and filter the
best stuff to the top and then we'll just promote that and put that in our newsletter and that's
sort of an incentive to get people to write better stuff but like I don't you know at any
point I'm expect most of the stuff written on any hackers to be particularly good so as long as the
homepage is good that's fine and so it's a very different approach I mean I'm looking at your
homepage right now for every and you kind of have just like a giant list of articles and it's
default sorted by newest it hasn't always been like that I remember going to your website in the past
and like it was kind of like here's what every is and you talked about your brand and your
publications so I'm curious like why you decided to switch to this sort of I guess reverse
chronological list of articles because I like I would guess it's because you want people to
develop a habit of coming to your home page and reading it yeah but that's just the logged in
versus the logged out experience so you're logged in now if you open a guy you'll probably see the
same thing that you're remembering okay I see yeah so it's very different so it's not like
because any hackers we do just like the logged in experience is the same as a logged out experience
just give you list articles the idea is very much like develop a regular daily habit of coming to
read the site and seeing what's new which I think only happens if things are changing it like a very
regular clip so for us like volume is very important yeah totally we it's something that
we talked about like before we were building our own platform because you know we used to be on
sub stack and you know all of a sudden it's like we have a choice like what do we want our home
page to look like you know and you know there's two different directions you can go with it or
you can try and find some different middle ground but there's like the you know do you want it to
be like a landing page that describes what the thing is or do you just want to have a bunch of
articles right like so it's like yeah just get people into reading as fast as possible and we
ended up going for the landing page that describes what the thing is because it felt like it's a new
thing we want to give people a chance to feel like they're oriented you know it felt like really
useful to sort of say overall what do we do like what do we focus on what are we all about but then
to get your email get you in and then you just have the list of articles basically and so that's
basically the way it works now but yeah we're definitely gonna keep experimenting with that as
we as we grow and maybe the need for like an explanatory homepage will lessen or something
like once if it's like becomes really well known or something like that like the dynamics could
change but yeah well cool I've I feel like I've mined you guys for information about how your
business works it's super cool I hope this model ends up being sort of a winner in the long run
not just for you to say but because I think it's better for writers it's better for readers
I am the guy who spent a lot of time combing the internet last year trying to put together you
know the perfect collection of newsletters that I would want to actually read in my inbox every day
and I just subscribe to every and hopefully that'll save me a lot of times I create a random hodgepodge
that is not at all always high quality so I love what you guys are up to thank you so much that
means a ton really I love what you're up to thank you for thank you for for doing everything that you
do I have learned a ton from from the podcast and from what people write in the community so I mean
means a lot to be here cool well can you guys let people know where they can go to find every and
also whatever else it is that see if you guys are working on yeah they can find us at every dot to
every dot to or on Twitter at at every and yeah subscribe all right thanks guys thank you thank you