How to Make Your Business Model a Win-Win-Win - with Dan Shipper and Nathan Baschez of Every

Courtland Allen: 0s

What's up, everybody? This is Courtland from indiehackers.com and you're listening to the Indie Hackers Podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process. On this show, I sit down with these indie hackers 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 Baschez and Dan Shipper, the founders of Every. How's it going guys?

Dan Shipper: 34s

Good. Thanks for having us good. Yeah.

Nathan Baschez: 36s

It’s going good. Happy to be here.

Courtland Allen: 37s

Every is a very interesting business. I wanna let you guys describe it. I don't want to butcher it. I don't find, I don't see a lot of publications, like Every on the internet every day. What is Every, and why did you guys start it?

Dan Shipper: 49s

Yeah. Every is a bundle of business-focused newsletters. 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.

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. 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. 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.

Nathan Baschez: 1m 30s

Yeah. Utility is kind of a key thing that we focus on.

Dan Shipper: 1m 35s

The last thing is we're just structured a little bit differently. We're structured as a writer collective.

What that means is we're somewhere between, for our writers writing for something the New York Times and writing a Substack where on the kind of media company side of things, or writing for a media company side of things, we provide writers with money, like a front to help them concentrate on their business.

We provide distribution. 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. 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. We provide a lot of the stuff that a media company would.

Then on the other side of things, we provide upside. We measure for writers how many readers, how many subscribers they have, and we pay them a percentage of their subscription revenue. Then we also give them their list if they leave. 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 like lock you in to keep writing for us, even if the deal isn't working anymore.

Courtland Allen: 2m 41s

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 that. We're just connecting readers to writers. 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 how it's going? How many readers you have or subscribers you have or revenue? How can we get a sense of how this grand experiment is working out?

Nathan Baschez: 3m 1s

No, we're totally opaque. Zero data here. No, it's interesting. Cause we feel like it's going pretty well. It's definitely. I think, Dan, what are the last numbers publicly shared?

Dan Shipper: 3m 15s

We're at like 2,400 paying subscribers. We have about 35,000, 36,000 free subscribers. 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 just a help here and there with production or writing smaller or guest articles or stuff like that as contractors. Yeah.

Courtland Allen: 3m 36s

Cool. Yeah. 2,400 paid subscribers. That's quite a lot. What is your business model that you charge? I think you charge a couple hundred bucks a year?

Nathan Baschez: 3m 45s

Yeah, it’s $200 a year, which is kind of highly encouraged and then optionally it's $20 a month if you really want to. You get the yearly, you get a two week free trial, so, you know, yeah.

Courtland Allen: 3m 55s

I went to your pricing page and it's hard to find the monthly option. You do a really good job driving people to the yearly option, which makes sense, because that's way more revenue in your pocket upfront. That's money you can use to go hire writers, grow your website, or whatever it is you want to spend your money on.

Nathan Baschez: 4m 9s

Yeah. Actually, the really key thing about it that we learned from our, our investor, Eric Stromberg from Bedrock is that it gives us a year to get better versus the month because basically every time you get the credit card statement and you're like, is this worth it? 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.

It just gives us more time basically, but also it's funny cause that design of that subscribe page, it was partially a product of just really trying to get it out the door pretty quickly. We don't want to be too obnoxious about hiding the monthly a plan. It was more like, you know, we should add that back in kind of cause at first not having it, it was like, what's the fastest way to add it. But yeah, we should probably, we don't want to have any dark patterns.

Courtland Allen: 4m 53s

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. If what you want to do is emphasize the yearly plan, that's completely your prerogative and probably it makes a lot of business sense to you. So why not?

I want to talk about the flip side of your business model, which is where this money is going. It's obviously coming in from readers who like you're writing, but you're structured as a writing collective, I believe you said, which means that it's not your sort of typical media company owned by you guys and the writers just get like a salary. How does it work?

Dan Shipper: 5m 25s

Yeah. Basically, what happens is when a reader signs up, we ask them in a survey on the signup flow, what publications did you primarily subscribe for? Then we basically attribute that reader’s revenue, that reader’s monthly subscription fee to that writer. At the end of the month, what we do is we just basically calculate which publications have which readers attributed to them. Then we have some revenue split with that publication where usually it's about 50% that we try to standardize it, with writers. For any reader that we have attributed to them for that month, we pay them their percentage of the revenue.

With some of the writers that we work with, we have kind of monthly minimums where before you've built a big enough audience to get subscription revenue, we just pay you to essentially to write your articles. 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. You have something coming in the door and you're not just kind of writing into the void for many, many years without getting any money for it.

Courtland Allen: 6m 33s

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 the rise of the creator economy the last couple of years, and we've seen, I don't know, all sorts of like ups and downs with traditional sort of news media as well. Like the death of newspapers and the rise of online news and the New York Times figuring out a subscription model and Substack coming along and basically peeling off a bunch of journalists.

What's interesting to me about it is I have no idea where things are going. It doesn't seem like there's any obvious path that we're headed down or 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.

I think ultimately if you're going to be friendly to anyone you want to be friendly to the people who are creating the content. That's kind of the hard side of the marketplace to get started. How do you guys look at yourself within this broader ecosystem of people reading online? Do you think your model is the future?

Nathan Baschez: 7m 31s

I hope so. It's really too early to tell, but I do think it's really, I think it's really appealing because I was the first employee at Substack and I think Substack is amazing for people who are either have a huge audience already, or maybe they're just really determined and 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 so you've got a long runway or something. There are some cases, but it's generally, it's a very unforgiving kind of experience curve where it's a very steep in the early part of the curve.

Traditionally, the way that if you look at most great writing in history in analysis or content or whatever you want to say, 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. You probably had mentors, you had a community that you came up in, you were able to learn your craft and then maybe redefine the craft, if you really become a master. It's really hard for that to happen, just on sort of cold, hard impersonal internet platforms.

We wanted to carve out a zone where there's just a lot more support. The number one most obvious thing is just in terms of 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 specifically, really an editor that's just going to be your first best group of readers.

[Another thing] that you're writing sort of, not sort of for just the numbers, because it's really easy to very quickly get demoralized. A lot of writers that we've worked with has said, this is like one of my best pieces and I honestly would have probably killed it but you encouraged me to keep writing it.

That kind of thing is I think not to be underestimated, my MBA brain is like, how do you quantify that? It's very appealing to just be the sovereign creator, totally standalone, totally independent. I mean, you're dependent upon Stripe. You're dependent upon Twitter or you're dependent upon like whatever Substack or Ghost to review.

There's always dependencies. The question is, what dependencies do you want to choose? Do they care about you? Are they invested in you? Like literally? We want to be a little bit more of a traditional thing while still offer it's like, yes, writers should get a better deal. Writers should get wealthy much faster than, than they do if you live in Brooklyn and you make $50K and you write really amazing stuff, but it's, you know, all of the upside goes to the company you work for cause maybe the business model is really hard and they can't pay a lot of that upside out. So anyway, there's a lot, there's a lot to it, but that to me is what's exciting about it just personally.

Courtland Allen: 10m 18s

Is that realistic though, because I think with any sort of platform full of creators, whether it's something like Spotify or we've got a lot of artists or 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% of the traffic and the readers are going to a very small number of people who just for whatever reason, they just have more reach. They write better stuff, they 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, so to speak.

How do you think about that? Is that something you want to solve or is that something you look at is totally okay?

Dan Shipper: 10m 51s

That's a great question. I think we certainly see a distribution in terms of the writers we work with in terms of like people who are making money or not making money.

But our theory of that is maybe specifically in our case, the distribution might be a little bit less skewed than you might think, or at least the bottom end of the curve of the middle end is like 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.

Even if you have a thousand subscribers or 500 subscribers, paying subscribers, in a particular niche, usually for any kind of business topic, that's fairly achievable and that is a good living and that's profitable for us. We probably expect that some of our writers will be really a lot bigger than others, but that the ones that are doing even average really well are going to make enough to make a living. It won't be this you have 300 million listens versus 10.

It's more like, I dunno, Ben Thompson has like 3 million subscribers. So maybe at the top end of people that we work with, that that's the achievable outcome. I don't even know if that's really the right number, but let's assume it's around there. But for in the bottom end, or even the average end, having a thousand or 5,000 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. The dynamics are essentially the same for this kind of subscription business, writing up as a topic.

Nathan Baschez: 12m 29s

I also think there is a little bit of a false dichotomy between being really nurturing and investing in new talent and being a hits driven business. If you think about HBO, HBO is famous for having people come to them that are new and create amazing stuff that never could have existed before both in terms of the acting talent.

It's not like if you compare sort of a Warner Brothers film average top grossing film in the air to the top thing on HBO, HBO actors, they're going to have some famous people, but there's a lot of people that are new to you. That is part of what makes it so compelling is everybody likes discovering fresh talent, both in terms of writers and directors. There's a healthy balance I think there that's really important to keep striking.

Also, there’s a totally different world, but that one I've gotten very into lately, Formula One. 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. They have this incredible pipeline of young talent and right now, the top Formula One racer Max Verstappen is also one of the youngest ever. There's this sort of direct thing of investing in new talent and achieving the sort of top level results.

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 a pretty niche audience and keep it tight. Everything doesn't have to be the biggest thing ever as long as it's an awesome thing.

Courtland Allen: 13m 54s

Yeah. I have so many questions I'm gonna ask you guys about all this stuff, because finding writers in and of itself is very tough. I think in your particular niche, like business, most of the people who have the expertise are also operators who are running businesses and maybe they don't necessarily want to start careers as writers. How do you get business writers? It seems like the hardest niche to get.

Branding. How do you structure your website and your brand and how did you make those decisions? Nathan, I know you worked at Substack and you were the first employee at Substack. Dan, I'm not sure what your background is. How did you come to meet Nathan?

Dan Shipper: 14m 27s

I guess I met Nathan probably six or seven years ago, maybe something like that. I had just moved to New York. He was in New York. We were both in the tech scene and 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 run the businesses inside of Pega for a little while.

We met after that. I think Nathan was working, I think you're working at General Assembly at the time. I remember, I recently, when we were launching the company officially, we're writing this whole letter and I was going back through my notes to try to find the first meeting that I had with Nathan.

We went to drinks together. I just remember being so inspired by Nathan feeling like the kind of person that builds products that come out of his soul. I was like, I want to do that. That was my first impression of Nathan. He has that thing 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.

If it is your soul, I mean, good for you. That's awesome. 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 a month or two, three or four years ago, try to work together a little bit.

Basically, I sold that company. I spent a couple of years just thinking about what I wanted to do with my life. I spent a year or more writing a novel. Really went far and wide in terms of what I thought I might want to do.

Eventually, probably two years ago at this point I decided I wanted to start a productivity software company, something like a Notion or a Roam or something like that. I've always been very into productivity, very into notes and note taking. The way that I decided to start it, I decided I wanted to start a newsletter first.

I figured I would do a newsletter where I would interview people about all their productivity, systems and processes. I'd use that as a way to get customer interviews for the thing I wanted to build, cause 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. Then, over time I'll probably build an audience doing that and I'll be able to launch this app that I'm building to those people.

I started writing the newsletter. It's called Superorganizers. It's still around and just got very psyched about it because people loved it. It was growing really quickly. I was like, wow, this whole newsletter thing is really kind of interesting. It seems like it's taking off.

I love writing. Maybe I should do a newsletter business instead of build an app for it. Eventually, I kind of kept thinking about it. I was like, maybe we should, I mean, we should do business newsletters cause there seems like there's a lot of opportunity in business newsletters.

I was thinking about who to work on it with. Obviously Nathan's name came up, he’s been doing this kind of thing for a while and he was the first employee at Substack. I called him and he was immediately like, yes, this sounds awesome. We started working together. That was the original kind of impetus.

Courtland Allen: 17m 40s

Nathan, how did you decide to leave Substack?

Nathan Baschez: 17m 43s

Well, it was very easy. They told me that I should leave, basically.

This is a very interesting, it has been a huge journey for me in terms of personal growth or self-awareness or something like that in the past couple of years, because I've always really struggled with the fact that I’m extremely passionate about ideas and I get really excited about them.

When I get excited about something, I have unlimited energy and focus to work on it. But I tend to gravitate towards doing my own thing, because I don't want to yuck anyone else's yum kind of. I'm like very, I have these feelings for me of I don't like that. I don't know what to do with that.

It's been a huge thing that Dan and I have worked on together in order to become a really high functioning partnership, which I think we are today. We weren't when we first started working with that.

When I was at Substack, basically, I was the first employee, it was a very general kind of job role. It was like, cool, I guess we'll call you the VP of Product. You just generally can write code and host a podcast and design interfaces and go to meetings with writers. I was just kind of doing everything.

Another joke title for me, it was Head Boy from Harry Potter or whatever as in from the house or whatever. It was really fun. I love the founders of Substack. 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. Those are hard to work through.

Courtland Allen: 19m 21s

Tell me about that because I think a lot of founders are in this position where you're opinionated. You want things done the way you want them to be done. That’s not a bad thing if you've got good ideas. It makes it hard to work for other people. You now have a co-founder. You have to collaborate at some point. How do you resolve those two things?

Nathan Baschez: 19m 39s

Therapy. I mean, honestly, but how you resolve those two things is for me, definitely still a work in progress to some extent. I think the most important thing is to have a partner that is committed to you and wants to work with you on it and can hold your feelings about things.

For me to learn, okay, I can take a step back. Okay. I feel really strong about this. And Dan can sense it and I'm like, all right. All right, let's figure out what we can actually do. We can calm down now that I've had my emotion about it or something. I don't know. There’s a lot. I know it's really still hard for Dan in addition to, and everybody has their things. I don't want to overstate that I'm some 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. Because people care. There's a lot at stake. People have different experiences, which lead them to be sensitive to different risks. 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 get me to sign.

Courtland Allen: 20m 47s

That's the feeling. You use the word feelings, I think two or three times. You used the word emotions a couple of times. It 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 who were starting companies use any of those words. I'm not surprised that you guys have been able to work through things.

Nathan Baschez: 21m 1s

Well, it's funny, cause this is really, this is hugely Dan’s influence on me. I had never really, I had I think technically been to therapy a little bit in high school when I was diagnosed with ADHD.

At the time it was kinda nice to have some Adderall, I guess, cause it helped out with homework and stuff like that, but I didn't really buy into it or really understand it at all. I'd never been in therapy before. I'd never really thought about how my brain worked or anything else like that.

Dan was just a little bit more experienced with the therapy and just more attuned to it. We went basically, I started therapy, Dan, and I started doing couples therapy and it's honestly been the best 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 lose trust, lose respect, you know, something like that happens.

Or it's 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. We kind of share this theory that the business world is just bursting to discover therapy basically. Coaching is kind of the very early signal of tip of the spear. So much of work is about emotions and communication and it turns out that therapists are, that's what they're there for. It's really good.

Courtland Allen: 22m 22s

They're super useful. To your point, a lot of companies implode because co-founders don't get along. It's one of those things where I think when you're looking at companies from the outside in, you don't see co-founder disputes. If I'm looking at Substack, I have no idea what's going on with the co-founders.

I think when people try to start companies, it's easy to underestimate how important that relationship is and how important to your success keeping that relationship healthy is. I'm sure there's a bunch of people listening to this right now who are working on companies with co-founders and things aren't going well. They haven't even thought about getting a therapist to try and 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.

Dan Shipper: 23m 0s

Yeah. Yeah. I think everyone has this idea that everyone else has their shit together more than they do. When you pull back the curtain on it, it's like everyone has these 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.

I'm always surprised when I talk to someone who's really successful that they feel that way. I've been thinking about this for a long time. For us, one of the things we do is we have a podcast called Talk Therapy where we just talk about our own inner experiences. Then we also interview people about their experiences and it's really interesting to see that.

I do think when I was younger, I was very much on the you just gotta write code and make the right decisions and everything will be great. But I think what that misses is that cliche that businesses about people, but it is true. If it is about people, then the way that people behave and the way that people think, and the way that people feel is incredibly important and being able to figure out how to work in harmony with people, even when people have different opinions is a really, and different ways of processing the world is I think we both feel as kind of a little bit of a superpower, if you can do it.

Therapy is a really good tool to understand what you're bringing to situations and how your own brain works, and then also how other's brains works. It's been really great for us.

Courtland Allen: 24m 25s

Couldn't agree more.

So, what does your partnership look like at the beginning in terms of the non-relationship part of it, the actual decisions you were making, the down to the brass tacks stuff? How do you get a company like Every off the ground?

Dan Shipper: 24m 37s

Well, one of the things we did first is we had this idea for this media company. I think from the very beginning, we wanted 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 a bundle where people could pay one price and get access to all this stuff cause Nathan had seen some of that stuff, signs that something like that might work from his time at Substack.

What we did first is we kinda wanted to do it pretty step-by-step. We wanted to do it pretty organically, so it's not, we didn't announce, we're doing this thing called Every. We didn't say it’s going to be a bundle or a media company or whatever. What we did was, I was running my newsletter Superorganizers, which was preexisting. Then Nathan started a newsletter called Divinations and we kind of just ran them as separate newsletters for a little while.

We thought it would be a good idea to just, at base, what we're doing is we're making content, we're 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. We figured if that works, then we take the next step. We did that for a couple months.

It was working, people were paying for Superorganizers. They were paying for Divinations, they were reading it and really liking it. Then we were like, okay, let's take the next step. The next step was testing the idea of a bundle, will anybody want to pay for two publications at once and will that work?

What we did was we just started a third Substack. We started a third Substack. We mirrored all of our content onto it. Then we launched it to the audience and we said, we're doing this bundle of these two publications. We didn't announce it as a company. We hadn't even incorporated, any of that stuff. We just tried it and immediately the business, I don't know what happened, but it was like doubled overnight. It was that thing that you could not miss in the graph, like, wow. That worked really well.

Courtland Allen: 26m 20s

Why do you think people cared so much about the bundle? I mean, they could just get your two newsletters separately. Was there some message that said, these are greater than the sum of their parts? There's some sort of higher level of purpose we're going to provide for you to get both of these things.

Nathan Baschez: 26m 32s

Yeah. I think the big thing is if you already kind of want both of them, then bundling them, you'd just offer it at a discount. It was basically $15 a month each for our newsletter. Then it was $20 a month to get both of them. If you really like one and you kind of liked the other, you're interested in it, but if you would pay $15 a month for it, the bundle is a pretty good deal.

That's great because this is sort of the magic of bundling is it's basically a form of price discrimination where you can say I'm going to average out your demand for three different products almost and say, okay, Person A is really into this publication and not so into that publication and then this other publication, they kind of like a little bit. They have some demand, but it's not enough to charge the market clearing price.

Take that across a whole bunch of different consumers and everyone's got their own unique kind of preference curve. Then you can kind of just average it all together to just sum the willingness to pay across each publication. It equals some number that's 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.

It's win-win for consumers because consumers get access to more stuff, more options for less money. It's a win for creators because consumers are spending a little bit extra than they normally would spend because they normally would 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 anymore.

I've tried to, it's a very, it ends up being very mathy and I wrote a whole post about it kind of digging into math with an Excel model and graphs and all this kind of stuff. I got really fascinated by just sort of the economics of that. It was just insanely cool to see when we launched our own bundle. It's like, wow, that actually works like that. That's pretty wild.

Courtland Allen: 28m 23s

Yeah. Yeah. It's cool. I think this whole idea of bundling things together is criminally underused. It's just people don't think about it that much. In publications and writing, it happens, but for example, even with SaaS companies, I talk to so many different indie hackers who are working on little different tools, et cetera, and trying to get attention and very rarely do they come together, one company to another and maybe several other companies and say, let's bundle our products together. Let's offer some value to customers. We have a business suite or whatever, which could add a lot of value and it could get them a lot more customers, a lot more attention than they got otherwise.

I wonder if people will follow your example and do more of this bundling stuff in the future because it’s so lucrative and just makes a lot of sense.

Dan Shipper: 29m 3s

Yeah, it's interesting. I think people have this association with bundles that it's the cable bundle and everyone hates the cable bundles so it must be bad. That's what I thought. I wouldn't have thought of this if Nathan hadn't been like, look at the economics and bundling. It's so cool!

It's true. It works really well if you do it right. Obviously, it's a core part of our business that has driven a lot of growth for us.

Courtland Allen: 29m 27s

Yeah. What do you think about the opposite process of unbundling, cause you could say something like Substack has been unbundling, bigger publications, right?

Individual journalists are leaving the New York Times and leaving other huge publications to go write on their own. That seems to be a big draw for them. It seems, for the writers, to be a better deal.

Nathan Baschez: 29m 45s

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.

One key thing is your enjoyment or experience of one thing 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. It doesn't get in my way. That's a really, that's a really important thing.

Maybe if there's just really one columnist at the New York Times that you just want to read their stuff, 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 several clicks or whatever, there's value to just being able to access it.

That's just purely a product function, almost. It's not inherent to be 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 french fries was to also buy a hamburger and a soda. That would be really annoying cause some people just want fries sometimes.

You don't have to offer everything only as a bundle. You could also separate out where it's a la carte. We do try that on our, in the same way that you can sort of get a monthly subscription to Every, you can also technically get a standalone subscription to just one of the newsletters, but it's also kind of buried cause we just wanted to see do people want this.

It's the same offer as before. It's $15 a month, $150 a year versus the $20 or $200 for the whole bundle. Basically, if you're paying for a lot of stuff that you really truly don't want, if you just want one channel, 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. That defeats the whole purpose of bundling. It should be at some discount because you've got to assume not everyone wants everything equally.

People often think, though, I'm paying $70 a month for cable and all I want is ESPN and I'm getting 70 channels. So shouldn't, I just pay $1 a month for ESPN. It's like, man, that's not how it works. If ESPN was on its own it would probably be charging $40.

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 with paid newsletters, it feels kind of fresh. Like, oh, $20 a month for three newsletters I want and a couple of other ones that's also seemed kind of cool. It feels like a good deal because we're in the unbundling moment where it's salient for people that ah, one of these individually is probably $10, $15, $20 bucks a month.

Courtland Allen: 32m 26s

Yeah. I think for you in particular, the bundle you've created, it's not sort of arbitrary. If I go to the New York times. I'm getting news, but it's news about everything. It's really hard to focus and be like, what do I really want from the New York Times?

With Every it's very specific. You're focused on business. I mean, I'm reading your description right now. It says Every's a bundle of business focused newsletters. We see business as an endeavor that's intellectually interesting. We hope to build a better world by helping people tell, basically become better business operators.

At the end of the day, that's a very succinct value proposition. It makes a lot of sense if I want to learn about business, that I can just go subscribe to Every rather than subscribing to a million different newsletters or whatever. The fact that you bundle things together, it makes it easier for me as a consumer to make fewer decisions.

Nathan Baschez: 33m 14s

Yeah. It's also why we kind of our wedge is this sort of really specific strategy and productivity focus and specifically tech-ish focus and 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.

I've written, we have a publication Means of Creation that I do with Li Jin. We've got our kind of niche that we carved out within that. Then hopefully in the same way that Facebook started at Harvard, Uber started in San Francisco, we can get to other industries like, you know, wealth management or waste management. Those are the two go-to is that we have everything from wealth management to waste management.

Hopefully, we can get to those, but we got to figure out a lot of core kind of mechanics first and learn and get it really working in our kind of white hot center of active, where everything's super liquid and we're driving a lot of cross discovery and the value is really working for the bundle for people.

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, make that work for us.

Courtland Allen: 34m 14s

Well, you started off with very humble beginnings, you guys combined your two newsletters into one Substack 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.

Dan Shipper: 34m 25s

The next thing that we did was we, what we want to do is start to experiment with adding more people into the bundle. We knew it could work with Nathan and I, who just had 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 theoretically we would own it.

We wanted to know what would it take to get a writer who wasn't part of the company, but maybe just had a newsletter or could start a newsletter with us as a writer, more or less. The first thing we did was just starting to go find another writer.

We ended up partnering with this guy, Tiago Forte, who is a really well-known productivity expert. He has a course called Building a Second Brain, which is amazing. He has this newsletter, this paid newsletter called Praxis. We wanted to just basically figure out if we launch with someone like that, what happens?

If we can incorporate his paid newsletter Praxis, what is the deal that we could give to someone that would make it appealing. Then what happens if we do get someone like that to join the bundle? Do we still see a lot of growth? That moment was another moment where we tried it and it worked.

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.

Courtland Allen: 35m 47s

Can you explain what that product pitch was like to get Tiago Forte to join you because that's a hard pitch to make, right? He's doing well, just fine on his own.

Dan Shipper: 35m 55s

Yeah. I, I think, basically the pitch at the time was, we know you, 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 Superorganizers 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 just called Praxis, who wouldn't have ordinarily signed up for Praxis, but because it now is offered with some other stuff, it pushes them over the edge. You're gonna make more money and you're gonna have a bigger audience for this newsletter than you would ordinarily.

That was the idea. It was kind of trying to respond to the objection of, well, what about my own newsletter that I'm currently running, am I cannibalizing it? The answer was, well, what we hope is the way that these bundle economics works is that people who really just want Praxis are going to 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 going to sign up through us and currently you're not monetizing them, but we will help you.

Nathan Baschez: 37m 9s

Praxis, it's still available as a standalone subscription that is a lot cheaper. If you want to just get Praxis, you can pay less for it. So, there's the cannibalization thing is a little bit. If they were the same price or something, there's some people who have newsletters that are very financy and they charge $40 a month. That's tough for us, to me, that's where it's like, get this newsletter and a bunch of other stuff that you might also like for cheaper. We'd have to raise our overall price for that to work.

Courtland Allen: 37m 36s

Yeah. So, he just continued publishing a newsletter on his own. It's kind of a risk-free deal for him. Why not also, co-publish it to your bundle, get some extra subscribers and there's really no downside.

Dan Shipper: 37m 48s

Yeah, exactly. We structured it, so it’s a six month commitment. So, if it doesn't work, it's fine. It was just a test. For him also, it's his side thing. His big thing is the courses, so he can be a little bit more experimental with it.

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 a real. Now we're making money, maybe we should incorporate. So, we incorporated, which is kind of funny.

Nathan Baschez: 38m 14s

I think we're at $10K MRR when we finally created an entity, which is kind of fun because all my other businesses I've created an entity very far in advance of revenue and the revenue never really came.

Dan Shipper: 38m 29s

I think we take a lot of pride in kind of putting first things first. It's like, let's make a product that people want and will pay for. Then we can figure out all the other stuff after the trappings of whatever. It took us like a year to make swag, which the swag is awesome, but also I think we were both pretty proud of.

At that point we were like, okay, this is working. It's a business. Honestly, we hadn't even announced it as a business. It still just looked like a couple of Substacks to the outside world. Then we decided to raise money for it, which was, that was another big conversation about what should we do? How much should we raise? All that kind of stuff.

Because my previous background is bootstrapping. I bootstrapped my business before I sold it. Nathan's background was venture and I was very skeptical of venture. Nathan was very skeptical of building a really big business through bootstrapping. We had to really kind of merge our perspectives and I think we came to something really good. It has been helpful for us.

Courtland Allen: 39m 22s

Yeah. It seems like a discussion that is rife for requiring you guys to go to founder therapy. Pretty big disagreement. How did you decide that the right decision was to raise venture capital?

Nathan Baschez: 39m 34s

Well, we did it in a very funky way. So, first of all, we're very clear this is anticipating to be potentially the only money we ever raise. There could be some time in the future when we want to raise more, but maybe not. We're not, we're just because we decided to raise now it doesn't mean we decide to get on the treadmill. Okay.

How do you avoid getting on the treadmill? One really important thing is to just stay pretty close to profitability. That's really important. That was the decision we made as a part of that fundraise that we communicated really clearly to of our investors.

Another thing is to not let the valuation cap on the SAFE sort of get away from us. A lot of companies, I mean, we probably could have raised at two X 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, 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 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 eminent 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?

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.

We also, one of our investors coined it Mirandizing. We read the Miranda rights to our investors, you have a right to not invest in this if you don't like that we're not doing the traditional venture thing. We're raising this money, but it might be the last money we raise. We might offer to buy you out in five years, if that's the path that it seems like it's going down, whatever.

Everyone was cool with that. Basically, everyone was like, yeah, like I wanna invest in you regardless because, oh, there's a couple people that said no, but most of the people, it was also, we were just focusing on angels, 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 like, yeah, y'all want to build a big business. I get if you don't want to get ahead of yourselves. I get if media is historically kind of tricky, but you have the vision for what you’re building. We believe in the vision for what you’re building. We think this will work out.

It was a little bit of a nontraditional race, but it's also, it's getting less crazy to do that. 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, MailChimp, there are really big businesses that have been built this way. I think a lot of the forces of operating a business this way make you a better business.

Courtland Allen: 42m 22s

Yeah, for sure. They force you to be disciplined. They force you to focus on what actually will keep a company to surviving rather than just getting on this 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, you're a media company. You're not really a tech company. Generally speaking, people who raise VC are 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.

What does your future vision look 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?

Dan Shipper: 42m 55s

Totally. When we did, I mean, we did have to say we have a big vision for this, and this is how we think it can be big. It may not be big on the timescale of like traditional venture. We want to reserve the idea that it won't and make that decision in a year or two and we know a little bit more about the business. 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 that it's not, we want to preserve the optionality to run the business that we want to run.

The vision that we pitched is kind of what we've talked about today, which is we want to cover every topic. 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. We have this new economic model for writers that we believe will help us acquire the best writers. We can kind of create this flywheel where we have a lot of readers that we can drive to writers, that helps us attract the best writers. We have the best deal for writers, which helps us attract more readers. We kind of create this machine that we think you can get big, really big over time.

That's the thing that we pitched. 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. I think our investors were pretty cool with that idea. 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. I think many of them looked at us and looked at what we were doing and said, okay, they have the right profile, so even if I don't fully believe in exactly what they're doing right now, they'll probably just pivot to software. They'll get tired of this and eventually 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.

Nathan Baschez: 44m 42s

Yeah. I think to me, there's this pretty clear, exciting thing about our model that's really different from a normal media company. Normal media companies, the way they work is they have a brand and it stands for one pretty specific thing. All the articles pretty much go out to all of their readers.

The problem with that is, and then the other thing they do is they mostly monetize via ads. 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, 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 our sub brands, which are individual newsletters, and those can be extremely tight and focused and unique to the author or the authors that are kind of like driving it. Overall, Every is just a collection or a pastiche of all these different cool things. I think that that sort of brand architecture almost can scale a little bit better than sort of a normal media company.

The key way that we make that work is by having really good cross-promotion of the newsletters to our readers. For a reader, if we have algorithms that are based on some combo of explicit signals, like following, or implicit signals, like times of reading or writing 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.

We're very early on this. It's very untested, but we're already building some stuff that's kind of getting to this. 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 going to be the best thing for you.

If a publication that you follow a published a new thing, you just get that. Otherwise, you get something from our greatest hits. We have a lot of really evergreen stuff, something that's related to topics you seem to be interested in, et cetera. So, we're early on that, but it's exciting. Hopefully the results will be promising, but we don't really know yet because we literally it's less than a week old.

The other key thing besides that sort of 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, 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 write there for like forever, the New York Times kind of same deal. But it's been, it's really hard if you're one of the other companies, because people, they're always looking to kind of level up, go to the next thing.

And I think the reason they do that is because it's really hard to get a raised in most of media. I mean, this is why it's better to end up getting 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 best alternative to negotiated agreement with your publisher is, well, I could go on my own. I could do a Substack. There's this confidence with writers that has kind of changed, I think, the negotiations with publishers.

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 Substack. It probably does not look like what the model used to be able to get away with as a publisher. Hopefully we end up having a 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. Hopefully that'll help, too.

Courtland Allen: 48m 7s

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 have your strategies been? How do you get people to actually come and read Every and subscribe to Every?

Dan Shipper: 48m 30s

That's a great question. The answer that we have so far is, 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 have in their heads or answers questions that they have in their heads. Then we put it on Twitter and we put it on Hacker News and sometimes it goes viral and that's honestly the core.

Doing that consistently is kind of the core of how we've grown so far. There are a couple of more sophisticated, sophisticated I'll put that in air quotes, sophisticated things that we do, too. We're starting to change a little bit because at the place we are now, I think it's useful to start actually being a little bit more in the weeds on different growth tactics and stuff like that.

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 if you write something really good, it's going to spread.

Another thing that we've done over time is kind of the model that I started with Superorganizers, which is interviewing people. 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 successfully more and more followers, every time you publish you get exposed to their audience and you can kind of recruit their audience to be your audience. Then that means you can get someone even more famous next time.

It doesn't fully work exactly like that all the time. 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 have these bits that they just give you that they've given to a hundred people before so it doesn’t feel as raw.

Other things that we've done right now, something that we're experimenting with is just doing cross promos with other newsletters. We have someone who's doing growth with us and he's just setting up different cross promos with newsletters that we're a fan of. That has been actually fairly successful so far. But yeah, I think we're just at the very earliest stages of figuring out how to grow beyond just writing stuff that people really like.

Nathan Baschez: 50m 31s

Yeah. I think all the other stuff kind of depends on that first core layer of just the writing being really good. We focus way more time on editing pieces and figuring out what makes a good piece and that kind of stuff then we do like 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. If the pieces are good, you don't need cross promo that bad because people just share it on Twitter. It's really the higher order bit is just editorial focus, basically.

Courtland Allen: 51m 1s

Yeah. There's nothing more shareable than basically articles online. You get a URL. Every single social network is formatted to allow you to share links and blow it up into a cool little expanded version with a picture and stuff. If you write good content, people will share it. What have you learned about writing good content?

Nathan Baschez: 51m 15s

We're developing some 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.

The engine of the piece is the core idea of why am I here in the first place? If you're here, it's you're going to learn how to start a new media company, or at least how these people did it and you're going to learn a bunch of random other bits about this kind of world along the way, maybe co-founder relationships, whatever. That's the engine of this podcast interview that we're doing.

Drag is maybe you have a really strong engine, but just the way you wrote it, the sentences don't make sense. They're not kind of, they don't logically flow from each other. You start to feel lost, you know? 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.

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. Sometimes the engine is just weak or it only appeals to a really tiny subset of people. It's kind of like, this is very specific. Maybe you might want to make it a little bit more broad or something like that.

The engine is kind of the core reason why you're there. The drag is anything in the way that it's written that gets in the way of sort of accessing the power of that engine. Then lift is just funny little things like voice, or jokes, or tone that kind of 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 two minutes at least of reading cause something good may be around the corner. That little lift, those little nice, those kinds of help too. But yeah, I don't know that that's kind of our overall framework.

Dan, you've got a lot of other stuff on this too though.

Dan Shipper: 53m 7s

Yeah. I mean, I think that there's a lot of things within that what makes a good engine. Also, how do you get the best out of writers? One lesson that we keep learning over and over again is 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 not going to really work. A lot of the best pieces come from writers kind of digging into their own soul on what they're interested in. If they're interested in it, then it probably do well for people who are like them or interested in the same things as they are.

That's reflected in our model. Nathan and I don't go to writers and be like, hey, you should write about this this week. Each publication inside of, 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 the pulse of the audience and gets to say this is what I'm into. This is where I want to lead the audience, within certain bounds obviously.

Our job is to help them do that better, to bring that out and bring more of them out into their pieces rather than being the ones who assign stories and say here's what you got to cover. That's one of the reasons why we think this can be bigger than just productivity strategy, tech-focused articles the vision for each publication lives in the writer. It's a little bit more decentralized than a typical media company.

That's one thing. It's really hard to remember that because I think we typically are like, you should do this and get excited about it and it just almost never works.

Nathan Baschez: 54m 38s

Yeah. Yeah. It feels like, oh, we have a media company, we should be able to be excited about ideas and get people to do our ideas, but not if we want it done well. It's just our idea, you know, the visions in our head. You know? Yeah.

I've got some stuff that I write. Dan has some stuff that he writes. We have things that we're excited about, but the purpose of the company ultimately is to be a jet pack for writers to get what they want faster and a parachute.

Dan Shipper: 55m 5s

Yeah. It's yeah, that fallacy is the media equivalent of I just need a technical co-founder to make this idea work.

Courtland Allen: 55m 11s

Yeah, I just need to hire some nerds to build this app.

Dan Shipper: 55m 15s

We'll all get rich. Yeah. It's like, actually, no, you got, they have to want it too. 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?

That's one big thing that we've learned. I think in terms of different engines, pieces that put their finger on things that people have been thinking a lot, but don't have the words for usually do really, really well. Pieces that hit on timely topics but have something to say that is new and interesting do really well.

That's hard, actually. It's really hard to chase that. 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 what people are publishing so that you can do it, too. Once you start doing that, once you start looking at what everyone else is doing, you lose whatever that is that can get people interested in what you're doing, because you're no longer original. You're just kind of recycling ideas.

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.

Courtland Allen: 56m 22s

Yeah. It's a tricky line to walk because people really like to share and talk about things that they already sort of know about. If people are all talking about a particular thing, then it's just, like during the election season, for example, everybody wants to share articles about the election cause all their friends are reading about it and talking about it.

It is true 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. I like your strategy of sort of reading books and reading things that other people aren't necessarily reading, because then you can sort of react to that. You'll come with fresh ideas that people haven't heard before. You can, if you want to apply it to topics that people are excited to share and talk about.

Nathan Baschez: 56m 58s

I'm curious. I mean, Indie Hackers has an amazing audience and does like what we just said vibe with your experience. We have some podcasts, none of them are that big yet. I'm curious if it works differently in podcasts. Sorry, I want to turn the tables selfishly, really quickly if that’s okay.

Courtland Allen: 57m 17s

Yeah, totally. Podcasts are a very different medium than written content. It's easy to get sucked into the paradigms of one and try to transplant those to the other and it doesn't necessarily work.

For example, you talked about the engine, drag and lift. I think drag for a podcast is a lot about sort of the rapport between the guest and the host, right? How smoothly is the conversation flowing? If it's a sort of awkward, stilted conversation that doesn't sound like people know each other or friendly with each other, it's just hard to listen to.

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. I think it's because people generally listen to podcasts, even if they're educational for more entertainment, like pass the time sort of purposes, you know. They're just sort of going to walk the dog or going, I'm going to run or going to the store. They just want something that's just smooth flowing and that feels really good. That's an example of something specific that might be in a podcast, but not in written form.

Nathan Baschez: 58m 11s

Vibing.

Courtland Allen: 58m 11s

Yeah, exactly. Then for the web stuff, we don't hire, well, we do actually work with a few journalists and stuff, but generally speaking, random people all over the world write stuff for Indie Hackers. Our sort of process is very different from yours.

We're not like, 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 a community people who upvote and filter the best after the top. Then we'll just promote that and put that in our newsletter. That's sort of an incentive to get people to write better stuff. I don't at any point in time expect most of the stuff written on Indie Hackers to be particularly good. As long as the homepage is good, that's fine. It's a very different approach.

I mean I'm looking at your homepage right now for Every, and you kind of have just 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 it was kind of here's what Every is. You talked about your brand and your publication, so I'm curious why you decided to switch to the sort of I guess reverse chronological list of articles. I would guess it's because you want people to develop a habit of coming to your homepage and reading it.

Nathan Baschez: 59m 13s

Yeah. But that's just the logged in versus the logged out experience. You're logged in now, if you open it, you'll probably see the same thing that you're remembering.

Courtland Allen: 59m 23s

Okay. Yeah, so it's very different. So, it's not like, cause Indie Hackers we do just the logged in experience is the same as the logged out experience. We'll just give you a list of articles. The idea is very much 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 at a very regular clip. For us, volume is very important.

Nathan Baschez: 59m 43s

Yeah, totally. It's something that we talked about before we were building our own platform cause we used to be on Substack. All of a sudden it's like, we have a choice. What do we want our homepage to look like? There's two different directions you can go with it or you can try and find some different middle ground, but there's 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?

It's like just get people into reading as fast as possible. 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. Tt felt really useful to sort of say, overall, what do we do? What do we focus on? What are we all about? But then to get your email and get you in, and then you just have the list of articles basically.

That's basically the way it works now, but we're definitely going to keep experimenting with that as we grow and maybe the need for an explanatory homepage will lessen or something once, if it becomes really well-known or something like that, the dynamics could change.

Courtland Allen: 1h 0m 44s

Oh, cool. 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 two’s sake, 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 the perfect collection of newsletters that I would want to actually read in my inbox every day. I just subscribed to Every, and hopefully that'll save me a lot of time. I create random hodgepodge that is not at all always high quality. So, I love what you guys are up to.

Nathan Baschez: 1h 1m 15s

Thank you so much. That means a ton. Really. I love what you're up to, too. Thank you for, thank you for doing everything that you do. I have learned a ton from, from the podcast and from what people write in the community. It means a lot to be here.

Courtland Allen: 1h 1m 28s

Cool. Well, can you guys let people know where they can go to find Every and also whatever else it is the two of you guys are working on.

Dan Shipper: 1h 1m 36s

Yeah. They can find us at Every.to, on Twitter at @every.