How to Grow a Subscription Business?

Today’s interview is with Nathan Baschez. There aren’t too many people more familiar with the creator economy than Nathan. He started his own company with Hardbound and was the first employee and VP of Product at Substack in the early days.

Now Nathan runs a company called Every, which is a bundle of premium newsletters. In this episode we dive into how Nathan creates tons of high-quality content every week, and how to facilitate your ideas with a newsletter “mastermind” group.

We also get into a great discussion about pricing and churn for premium newsletters, and what it means for creators to have Twitter, Facebook, and other big media companies getting into the newsletter game.

Links & Resources

• Gimlet
• The Nathan Barry Show 023: Tiago Forte – Building a Second Brain & Lessons From a $1M/yr Newsletter
• scuttleblurb – A Value Investing Blog
• Clubhouse: Drop-in audio chat
• Andreessen Horowitz - Software Is Eating the World
• Slow Boring
• Substack
• Teachable: Create and sell online courses and coaching
• Gumroad

Nathan Baschez’s Links

• Every
• Twitter: @nbashaw

Episode Transcript

N Baschez: [00:00:00]
At the end of the day, writing is an act of communication. It’s a good form of communication. When you have thought deeply about what you want to say, and you’ve really crafted it, but in order to get to that point, you want to start with the more informal, casual, everyday way of talking. I think the feeling that this is a fascinating conversation is the key thing we want to get to because that’s the spark that you’re trying to like recreate for readers down the road. 

Nathan: [00:00:29]
Today’s interview is with Nathan Baschez. There aren’t too many people more familiar with the creator economy than Nathan. And so it’s really fun to talk to him. He’s got a great background. He started his own company with Hardbound and he was the first employee and VP of product at Substack in the early days.

And he was at Gimlet Media for awhile. And now he’s running a company called Every, which is a bundle of premium newsletters. They’re really focused on incredibly high quality content. And this episode we dive into how to write great content, facilitating your ideas with sort of a mastermind group.

There’s a fun discussion around that. We talked about Twitter and Facebook and others getting into the newsletter game and what that means. Otherwise monetize your newsletter pricing churn. There’s actually, it’s a great discussion on insurance. You’re gonna want to stay tuned for that. Anyway. There’s a lot of good stuff,

So let’s dive in and I’d love for you to meet Nathan.

Nathan. Welcome to the show.

N Baschez: [00:01:20]
Thank you for having me.

Nathan: [00:01:22]
Yeah, well, we can have the Nathan and Nathan talk newsletters show.

N Baschez: [00:01:27]
Two white guys named Nathan talk in the newsletter business.

Nathan: [00:01:31]
Exactly. We have all the diversity of newsletters represented right here. I just want to call it out right away. So I love, first at a high level for you to tell listeners whatever he is and, you know, kind of where it’s at right now and, and what you and Dan have done with it.

N Baschez: [00:01:50]
Yeah, totally. So Every is a bundle of business-focused newsletters. And basically we cover right now, mostly strategy productivity, and then we’re kind of getting into some industry specific stuff, but that’s pretty nascent. So we have a newsletter that covers the passion economy called Means of Creation.

We also have some podcasts that we do that are kind of, they’re very related to the newsletters, but basically it’s just this cluster of people that work together to create cool stuff. But there’s kind of, a lot of, we don’t really publish anything under the Every name. We publish it all under one of our individual publications.

And each of those are incredibly kind of like specific is the goal. and, the interesting thing about our bundle is we’re structured as this. Thing that we’re calling a writer collective where it’s somewhere between getting a job at the New York times and running your own paid newsletter, like, you know, on, on your own sort of like whatever convert kit or sub stack or whatever other platform.

And it, it gives you some of the upsides of, you know, having an editor, having some financing, having some distribution, all that kind of stuff, that you’d get by working at a traditional media company. But. Unlike working at a traditional media company, you’re building your own creative vision. Like you’ve got the final say on edits and stuff.

And you know, you have the most important thing is obviously the shared upside. So you get like a huge chunk of the profits. We typically split them 50–50, but it’s a little bit case by case, depending on like what kind of team we’re assembling around a specific newsletter. And sometimes there’s more than one, you know what more than one person working on one.

But roughly it’s like a 50–50 split. And, we’re also trying to kind of come up with creative ways to split the IP. But anyway, long-winded way of saying it’s like this interesting kind of new experiment, at least interesting to me, a new experiment in how to structure a media company.

Nathan: [00:03:31]
Yeah, I love it. So, as an example, let’s say I have a newsletter that I’ve started, I’m running separately, and I want to come to you guys and say like, Hey, let’s do a paid thing together. You know, I don’t know. I’ve got 10,000 subscribers and I’m looking to join every, what does that look like as far as what are you looking for?

And, and, you know, some of the more mechanics of that.

N Baschez: [00:03:55]
Totally key thing that it all starts with for us is we’re really focused now on. W things that wouldn’t exist otherwise. So if you’re starting, if you’ve got your own newsletter and you’ve got 10,000, you know, free subscribers on your email list and they love what you do and you know exactly what you want to do to, to, you know, create a paid subscription around what you offer, where you’re going to maybe write one thing a week, and now you’re going to write three things a week.

And two of them are going to be for people who are paying or whatever. Like ma maybe it’ll make sense to work with us. I think that it really depends on kind of like, your goals, but we’re more focused on things where like, maybe we’re really helping you like really deeply edit thing. Cause there’s like a thing you’re trying to do that, that you really value this sort of like editorial feedback.

And you’re kind of figuring out what you’re writing about as you’re going. or, maybe you already have a newsletter and you want to create a new sort of like. Version of it. That’s like, maybe it’s...