From simple newsletter to $4.5M/yr media company

Isaac Saul couldn't find an independent, nonpartisan news source, so he got on Substack and built his own. Seven years later, Tangle has close to a million readers and listeners — and it's bringing in $4.5M/yr.

Here's Isaac on how he did it. 👇

From reporter to $4.5M/yr media company

I’m a politics reporter who grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania — one of the most politically divided counties in the country. Early on in my career, I helped build A Plus, a solutions journalism media outlet, alongside actor and entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher. I worked as an editor and politics reporter for A Plus while I freelanced all over the media space.

Now, I run Tangle — an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported media company. We cover the biggest U.S. political stories by summarizing the strongest arguments from the right, left, and center, and then offering “our take.”

Our flagship newsletter reaches more than 500,000 readers in 60+ countries, and our podcast reaches hundreds of thousands of listeners each month. Our audience is made up of conservatives, liberals, independents, and those who don't identify with any political tribe.

Last year, Tangle hit $4M in ARR, and it does over half a million dollars a year in advertising revenue. 

The classic entrepreneurial story

I have a classic entrepreneurial story: I went looking for a product I wanted, I couldn't find it, so I tried to build it.

The idea for Tangle came from spending hours and hours scouring news sources, podcasts, YouTube channels, and social media to understand the best arguments from the left, right, and center on big debates of the day, and realizing there should be one place where you can get that info in just a few minutes. That’s why I started Tangle. 

All of this is born out of recognition that the news industry is broken. My work was getting published in a lot of different places, and I realized people trusted it not based on what I was saying, but based on where I was saying it. Readers on the left would trust nothing I wrote if it showed up in a conservative-leaning news outlet, and vice versa. 

In this era when media trust is at an all-time low, polarization is increasingly extreme, and so few people seem capable of talking to each other across the partisan divide, I wanted to create a genuine big-tent media organization — a place where no matter who you were, you would encounter political opinions that you did not agree with.

The first year

I started Tangle on Substack, but eventually left Substack for Ghost when I could no longer justify the 10% revenue cut I was giving the platform. The first issue of my newsletter went to about 13 people — most of whom were friends and family.

For the first year, I was working full time at A-Plus while writing Tangle every day. People started sharing the newsletter around, and I quit my full-time job when I launched a paid subscription option that 20% of my readers took.

All throughout that first year — and even today — I incorporated feedback from readers to shape the product and make it better. One piece of consistent feedback I kept hearing was, “I see what the right and left are saying, but you’re a politics reporter, so what’s your opinion?” That prompted me to launch the “My take” section, which is now one of the most popular parts of the newsletter. These days, it’s not always me writing it, but every day, someone on our team still shares their analysis of the day’s topic.

The mission, and most of the core parts of the newsletter, remain pretty much identical to Tangle’s earliest days, even as we’ve grown the business and team.

A media company's tech stack

As far as our tech stack, we use:

• Ghost as our content management system

• Slack for team communications

• Google Drive for storing and sharing files and editing the newsletter

• Acast as our podcast provider

• Outpost for a host of other things, like optimizing our pages and automated subscription flows

Subscriptions and advertising

We’re a subscription-first business, with over 80% of our revenue coming from recurring subscriptions — over 90% of our subscribers are on annual subscriptions.

We have three subscription tiers ranging up to our $199/year “Thank you” tier — but most subscribers are on our annual plan, which gets them access to all of Tangle’s paywalled content for $59/year. Aside from subscriptions, the rest of our revenue comes from advertising in our newsletter and podcast, hosting a few events each year, and landing speaking gigs at universities and other orgs.

We think of the free daily newsletter as our top-of-funnel product, and focus our ads to send people to the newsletter sign-up page. Then, once they’re signed up, we try to convert readers to paid members using quarterly upsell emails, discounted membership options, and high-interest, paywalled Friday editions.

We’ve also ramped up our advertising in the last year, and hired a dedicated ad sales staff member who has helped us fill our inventory, experiment with new placements, and reach a higher CPM. 

Ads, partnerships, and earned media

On the acquisition side, we’ve run paid advertising (especially on Meta) and partnered with other newsletters to cross-promote each other’s work.

But by far, the biggest growth accelerant has been earned media — last year, Tangle was featured on an episode of This American Life, and our subscribers nearly doubled in the following months. That’s the kind of breakthrough event that has always periodically accelerated our business. In my opinion, Tangle is ripe for opportunities like that because our elevator pitch is immediately compelling when told to just about anyone. “Don’t you want views from across the political spectrum?” is a question almost nobody says no to.

The other big, less quantitative driver of growth — and subscriber stickiness — has been attracting and retaining a loyal audience. People expect us in their inbox at noon every day, and our open rates have held steady even amid news fatigue. At a time when trust in news media is at an all-time low, I think we’ve been able to attain this kind of trust for a few reasons:

• We focus relentlessly on great content. There is no shortcut or hack or trick that can substitute for just filling a need and providing great content.

• We fulfill some simple promises, chief among them viewpoint diversity in our content. Most days, this is “What the left is saying” and “What the right is saying,” though sometimes we’ll offer pieces that counter each other.

• And, finally, we lean into transparency in how we work by featuring corrections prominently at the top of each newsletter and sharing (and explaining) our editorial policies.

The challenge of a never-ending beat

I think the most difficult thing about our job is that it just never stops. The drumbeat of news goes on, and running a daily is a lot of work.

There are mornings when I wake up and feel like I want nothing more than a break from the news, from writing, from business operations; but when you’re the top dog, you just find a way to push through. I joke all the time that if I had to start over, I probably would have done a weekly or twice-a-week newsletter, but of course, we probably wouldn’t have had the same success with that.

In all seriousness, if I had to go back and do some things differently, I would have:

• Started a YouTube page much sooner

• Gotten on TikTok in 2021 or 2022

• Hired an executive assistant much earlier

The YouTube and TikTok regrets are obvious: We just would have had a much better inside track on those platforms, which are growth accelerators, and now we’re trying to break through late in the game.

And the EA regret just comes from making that hire last year and realizing how much bandwidth it has freed up for me, and how much more I could have gotten done in the years prior if I had done it sooner. 

Ultimately, building out our team has been the thing that made all of this easier. With enough revenue to hire up, I can do this sustainably and launch on new platforms like YouTube. Now, we have a full-time team of 12 people, and so I can lean on them as much as they lean on me, which gives me opportunities to take breaks and focus on things aside from writing.

Focus on what doesn't exist

Build something that doesn’t exist. Don’t waste time trying to do something better than people who are doing it incredibly well already — we don’t need more business newsletters or dating apps or streaming platforms, I promise.

Choose something you love, and build it in a way that doesn’t require you, the person, to be at the center of it forever. If you build a brand that is built around you, then you are signing up to work forever on that brand, without a break. 

Hire people you genuinely love to be around. In terms of work culture, productivity, wanting to get out of bed and grind, nothing has mattered more to me than caring for and wanting to make this work for the people I surround myself with.

And just be consistent. Scale slow. If you’re in the content business, focus on that, not shortcuts or hacks. Spend only the money you have, and never more. Pay attention to your margins and “revenue per employee” as a metric, and the rest will fall into place.

What's next?

We have a lot going on, and are punching above our weight in terms of the level of content production for the size of our team — so, in the near-term, we’re laser-focused on producing high-quality content in our current outputs, and scaling up our audience with those outputs as much as possible. “Refine. Audit. Repeat.” is a goal I’m having our team keep in mind heading into 2026. 

You can sign up for our free daily newsletter here! If you prefer to listen, you can check out our podcast, and we also upload deep dives on news topics and video versions of the podcast on our YouTube channel. And you can follow me on X.