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.
Leave a Comment
Love this story and get enough motivation like this that i have left a long time ago. Appreciated highly your efforts that brings revenue to your efforts.
Such a great story and gives me much hope! I too went looking for something to do one specific simple task but couldn't find what I wanted. I could find similar but all tied into large expensive packages, but still couldn't do just want I wanted so yep I built my own, and have a few family & friends that have tested & use it and it works, it does the job. Now comes the scary part, trying to launch and grow it!
What an amazing story!
I like the part where he said "build something that doesn't exist", because it reminded me of what my tutor said about creativity: "you can build things that doesn't exist just blending things that already exist".
Wishing you lots of success!!!
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Hello everyone, I hope you're doing well.
I'm an AI automation and generative media specialist, focused on custom LoRA training, ComfyUI workflow engineering, and cinematic AI image & video pipelines.
I help brands, creators, and startups build hyper-realistic influencer models, UGC-style ad videos, and fully automated AI content systems using WAN 2.2, Stable Diffusion, Flux, and SDXL.
If you need reliable production grade AI systems or advanced creative workflows, I’d be glad to connect.
Best regards.
That's an incredible amount of founder conversations over a decade.
I'm curious — after interviewing hundreds of founders, did you notice any common patterns in the early stages of successful startups?
Especially around how they validated ideas before building the full product.
great story!! keep inspiring
Thanks a lot for sharing this story. It’s really inspiring to see how a simple newsletter could grow into a $4.5M/year media business. It reminds me that starting small, focusing on consistent value, and being patient can actually lead to something huge over time. This gives me a lot of motivation for my own projects.
This is a great example of finding a gap and committing to it long enough for it to compound. Starting with just 13 readers and growing to a million through consistent content is impressive. Also interesting how the free newsletter became the top-of-funnel for subscriptions — a really smart media business model.
Great story man. It inspired me to keep working and solve problems to grow my own startup. Well done.
Interesting story. I'm currently building small web tools as a solo developer and it's always inspiring to see projects grow step by step.
That's really a great insight
Great insight. It's interesting seeing how founders are moving from tools to full AI systems.
What stood out most to me here is that the growth story doesn’t really sound like a “hack.”
It sounds more like: clear problem, consistent execution, free newsletter as the funnel, then trust compounding over time. That part about earned media being the biggest accelerant was especially interesting too.
7 years of consistency really shows. Building a nonpartisan source in today's climate is tough, but clearly needed. Congrats on the $4.5M milestone!
Give me a like!
Inspiring story
Really inspiring story. The biggest takeaway for me is how Isaac focused on solving a real problem he personally had—wanting a place that summarizes arguments from the left, right, and center in one place. That clarity of purpose seems to have shaped everything from the product format to the business model.
I also like the emphasis on consistency and audience trust: showing up daily, focusing on great content, and being transparent about editorial policies. It’s a good reminder that in the creator/media space there are no shortcuts—distribution and monetization only work when the content is genuinely valuable.
The point about building something that doesn’t already exist also stood out. Too many founders try to do a slightly better version of something crowded instead of creating a unique perspective or format. This feels like a great example of niche positioning done right.
The EA hire regret hit different as someone who works as an executive assistant. Founders always realize too late how much bandwidth that role frees up. Also 'build something that doesn't exist' is the only startup advice that actually matters— everything else is noise.
Really interesting story. The part that stood out to me is the idea of building the thing you couldn’t find yourself. A lot of successful products seem to start exactly that way — solving a frustration the founder personally experienced. Also impressive how consistency (daily publishing) compounded into nearly a million readers over time.
Really inspiring story. Building something because you couldn’t find it yourself is such a powerful starting point. The focus on consistent content and trust with the audience is a great lesson for indie founders.
Really interesting story. The part about building something that doesn’t already exist really stood out to me.
I come from a blogging and SEO background, and recently started experimenting with building simple tools instead of just writing about them. One thing I realized is that even very small utilities can solve real problems for people.
For example, I built a simple font generator tool i.e., letras-diferente(.)net that converts normal text into stylish Unicode fonts people can use in social media bios, usernames, and messages. A lot of creators and gamers use it to make their profiles stand out.
Projects like this remind me that sometimes a simple, focused tool can be surprisingly useful when it solves a specific problem.
Curious how many other Indie Hackers here are transitioning from content/SEO into building small tools or micro-SaaS.
Really enjoyed this story.
What resonated with me most wasn’t the $4.5M number — it was the beginning. Starting with 13 readers and just committing to show up every day. That’s the part people often skip over when they talk about success.
I’m at a similar stage right now — early idea, very little built yet, and definitely starting with almost nothing. Reading stories like this is encouraging because it reminds me that most meaningful companies didn’t start with perfect conditions, funding, or a big audience. They started with someone deciding to build something they wished existed.
The line about focusing on what doesn’t exist really stuck with me. I’ve been sitting on an idea for years around creating a platform for unused or underutilized space — and only recently started exploring what it might take to actually bring it to life.
Stories like this make the early stage feel a lot less crazy.
Curious — looking back, what was the moment you first realized this might actually work?
This is a great example of building something because the product didn’t exist yet. The focus on trust and consistency over growth hacks is especially refreshing.
Seriously impressive! Posting consistently takes an incredible amount of discipline — especially in the early stages when there are still few visible results. 😵💫
GOOD!
The earned media point is underrated in most newsletter growth conversations.
Everyone talks about paid acquisition and cross-promotions but the This American Life moment is a different category entirely it's not a channel, it's a credibility transfer. One placement from a deeply trusted source does what 6 months of Meta ads can't buy.
What's interesting about Tangle specifically is that the pitch almost selects for that kind of coverage. "We show you what both sides are actually arguing" is a story journalists want to tell right now. The product IS the hook.
Most newsletters that grow fast are optimizing for clicks. You optimized for trust first and let the compounding do the work. Seven years is a long time to stay patient with that.
Hello Indie Hackers! 👋
I'm excited to share that my latest micro-SaaS, SachCheck AI, just got approved and featured on the SideProjectors homepage!
The Problem:
In India, fake news in regional languages like Hindi spreads like wildfire. Most tools are built for English, leaving 600M+ Hindi speakers vulnerable.
The Solution:
SachCheck AI is a lightweight tool that uses the Google Fact Check API to verify claims instantly in Hindi.
Tech Stack:
- Frontend: Vanilla JS, HTML, CSS
- Hosting: Vercel
- API: Google Fact Check Tools API
I am now looking for a new owner to take this forward and scale it. You can see the live listing here: https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/sach-check-
Would love your feedback on the tool!
wow
This is an inspiring journey! Love how Tangle focuses on viewpoint diversity and transparency while building a loyal subscriber base.
For anyone curious about the tech side — the team uses Ghost for content management, Slack for communication, Google Drive for file sharing, and Acast for podcasts. They also optimize subscription flows and pages with Outpost.
A practical tip: If you’re trying to analyze your content performance, consider using a Math Assistant or analytics tool to automatically calculate trends, averages, and growth rates — it’s like having a built-in helper to make sense of all the numbers behind subscriptions, open rates, and conversions. This can save time and guide smarter decisions when scaling content or ad strategies.
Great insights