[on-hold music] So, like, I do identify as South Asian. I identify as South Asian, I identify as Bengali, I identify as Indian, I identify as American.
I identify as all those things, and I also feel some weird connection to Burma. Like, I have read all the fiction I can- Okay... on Burma. I visited Burma. I try to ask my dad, like, "Where did you guys live in Yangon?"
And try to, like, walk around. Like, it's weird. And so I think why we picked that focal area is two reasons.
[on-hold music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I'm Brian Morrissey.
This week, I'm joined by Snigdha Sur, the founder of The Juggernaut, an independent publication dedicated to the South Asian community.
The Juggernaut is backed by a subscription model, and Snigdha and I discuss the niche she saw for seeing the news and culture through a South Asian lens, and the advantages of building a office subscription model.
And also what it's like to be operating an independent publishing company at a time of a lot of doom and gloom. Although I'm actually pretty optimistic about independent publications. Hope you enjoy the conversation.
[on-hold music] Snigdha, thank you so much for doing the podcast. This is a long time coming. We've been talking about doing this for, like, a year. I know, Brian. I'm so excited to be here.
We have been talking about this, I think, for over a year, but our schedules just do not align, but here we are on a Friday evening. Here it is. What else could be better?
What better way, what better way to have happy hour via Snigdha talking about [laughs] publishing. All right, we're gonna keep it upbeat. You're, like, almost, like, four years into this, aren't you? Three and a half?
I think it's gonna reach five years. Is it five years? Five years. I think we're gonna be f- we're gonna be almost at five years, which is incredible to say, on February 14th.
It's an easy date to remember because- Yeah... February 14th, it's Valentine's Day. Yes, correct. So yeah, almost five years. It's just weird to say. It's amazing.
So let's go back to, like, the opportunity you saw was that there was not a publication that was devoted to South Asian diaspora, right? I always say the opportunity is a little bit bigger than that. Yeah.
So I kind of zoomed out, and I use this phrase a lot, which makes me sound like a nerd, but I am a nerd, so I'm going to embrace it. Okay. Which is called, you know, first principles thinking.
Which is- Oh, that's very Silicon Valley of you. Yeah. Well, actually, no, Silicon Valley has lost first principles thinking. [laughs] Really?
'Cause I listen to, like, All In, and it's just like first principle thinking. [laughs] No, but they say these things, but many of these people actually don't do them. Oh, yeah.
Because you'll see these random tweets like, "Consumer is dead," or, "Media is dead," or, like, "There's no such thing as, like, a good AI company that's not OpenAI." Like, these are not first principle thinking tweet.
Like, Silicon Valley is the last place you'll find first principles thinking. Okay. If they had it, Silicon Valley would be doing better as a city- [laughs]... as an infrastructure, as a society, but they're not.
So the way I describe first principles thinking is actually to go back to, like, the super basic building block of something, and then trying to build it up and see- Yeah... where the inconsistencies lie, right?
So here's a building block, right? So I love using the jobs to be done framework. I love this because it's a very good first building block, which is what is the pain point we're trying to solve?
Like, what are customer, what do customers really need?
And what I was noticing about myself as I was getting older, as somebody who identifies as Indian, South Asian, Bengali, a woman, all these things, was that the cultural element that I'd been hiding it for so long, that there came a moment where it just became too exhausting.
So the job to be done I was seeing was that I think there must be more p- that the hypothesis is I think there must be more people like me who wanna read great stuff about ourselves, who wanna connect with each other, who wanna get informed, who wanna feel smarter, who wanna feel connected.
And so that was kind of, like, the job to be done I started with. Those three jobs to be done. Let's connect, let's inform, let's entertain.
And that's kind of how The Juggernaut started, which is I started with content because it's the cheapest thing to test, which people keep on forgetting, right? Yeah.
Instead of building, like, a whole rigmarole, like, I don't know, vitamin product or, like, a skincare brand or, like, anything that involves widgets for manufacturing, that's already- Difficult... yeah.
But if you have something that's just on the digital age, I mean, hello, digiday. Like, a lot of it is testing on literally, like, atoms and bits, right?
Which is, like, finding people who can write really great stuff, putting it onto a website or a newsletter or whatever form you want, or a tweet, seeing if people are engaging with it, if something's resonating there, and then kind of moving from that.
So started with that newsletter and was surprised that I got a lot of strangers to sign up. That's always a sign of success, and then that's kind of how The Juggernaut, like, kind of snowballed from there. Yeah.
But that was mostly the thing I was trying to solve.
I don't necessarily, I didn't know it would be in the form of a publication, and maybe it's hurt me in some ways because people don't love media for, again, not for first principle sticking to reasons which we can get to.
[laughs] But here we are. So wait, why, so why did you decide on media? Yeah. I think I kind of fell into it because I, I kind of joke about this, and you know I joke about this.
Like, I wasn't born to hedge fund parents. Like, I didn't grow up with- Mm-hmm... a silver spoon in my mouth.
Like, I didn't have a lot of resources growing up, but what I did always have was access to the Queens Public Library and the Bronx Public Library, and reading a ton of books for free, and watching a lot of movies that I rented.
And I think I fell into media because when I was thinking, "How do I solve this job to be done?" Media was what I knew. Like, great writing and great reading is what I knew.
And so I started reading a bunch of articles about South Asians, kind of aggregating them and writing my own analysis and sending it out on a Mailchimp newsletter for free.
So when that started kind of sort of working, I think the people I was around, I was also lucky, they had been to Silicon Valley, and they're like, "Why don't you apply to Y Combinator?"
I applied to Y Combinator, and Y Combinator if, you know, people aren't very familiar, but at the intrinsic end of the day, it's basically a 13-week program where people are just yelling at you every week.
They're yelling at you every week to try to get customers and revenue, every single week. In a good way. Like, it's literally like group peer pressure. It's like, uh, you know, it's like you're sitting in a group.
I guess the best visual representation is kind of like A, but I have not been through that program. And you're sitting in a group, and you're kind of admittingI did not get any new customers today, or I did- [laughs]...
get new customers today, and everyone is judging you, including your group partners. And so I was like, "Well, the fastest way I know how to make money from a free newsletter is to start doing published articles."
And so I knew they had invested in The Athletic, and so we launched a paywall and started putting some original articles behind a paywall. We made $10,000 our first month, and I'm like, "Hey, look, I got revenue.
I got customers." I felt so excited because nobody else had revenue or customers- Yeah... or that much revenue or customers. So wait, let me ask you- Little did I know that, like, that's not even that much money.
[laughs] Yeah. Why Y Combinator? Like, have there been media companies that have gone through Y Combinator before? I don't know. Maybe The Anchor did. Yeah.
But, like, 'cause I always think of Y Combinator as, you know, Sam Altman, and, like, the true Silicon Valley. Like, if you're not gonna serve a billion users, forget it.
Like, it's just all blitz scaling and the rest of that stuff, and media is very not that. Well, you know, what's interesting is that The Athletic has gone through Y Combinator.
I believe you're right, The Anchor has gone through Y Combinator. Okay. Substack has gone through Y Combinator. But the thing is, we are going after billions. We're going after trillions, in fact.
So South Asians in the US have over a trillion dollars of spending power, actually. Mm.
And our audience, our ultimate audience, is actually in the billions, but we started with the diaspora because they have the biggest pain point.
And recently, we've seen more of our customers come from India, even though we don't even change prices for India. So that's been really fascinating to observe because- Hm...
now there are all these reports about there's going to be 100 million affluent Indians by 2027, where they define affluent as earning about $10,000 USD a year.
Now, you have to remember, purchasing power at parity, so that's more equivalent to anywhere from- Mm-hmm... 30 to $40,000 in the US a year.
So these are the kinds of people who can, you know, p- perhaps afford a subscription to the Juggernaut. So 100 million of them are in India right now, like, in a couple, three years.
So I think our sights were always global. But back to your question, why Y Combinator? I think that is what really differentiates us from probably...
I really just get this weird allergic reaction when people just say, "You're just a media company." Really? I don't know. It just bothers me because we're so much more than that. I call us a brand.
I call us a media tech company. I try to, like, put in all these word salad words just so people understand we're not just a media company.
Because I think that historically, the way people view a media company is the analog version, right? Yeah. Which is you have a print product, a magazine- Yeah... or a newspaper. There's ads on the product.
People pay a nickel or a penny or a dollar to get the paper from the newsstand, but then it's mostly running ads and that kind of physical analog.
But media today, as you know, 'cause you ran so many amazing things and you're doing the rebooting today, is a much more interesting beast.
It's, like, much more like an octopus with, like, multiple kind of tentacles- Mm...
and multiple kind of revenue streams, and it's not just ever limited to that analog version of ads or even the analog version of just a transactional purchasing something off of the newsstand, right?
That's not even what media is today. I find media to be...
I think the people who are doing the most exciting things in content today, I call it content sometimes, think about it in a more e-com or e-commerce kind of way, right?
And so the reason we chose Silicon Valley, or I applied to Y Combinator, is I was always been very data-driven and tech-forward, right? I built part of the site that we launched with a friend.
He did, like, 80% of the lift. I did 20%. I cleaned up some bugs. I did some coding. Mm-hmm.
But I knew how to code, too, and I was very data-oriented 'cause I come from a consulting background, which people also love to hit on, especially on the All In podcast, even though I just found out that David Sachs is a ex-McKinsey alum.
Oh, is he? [laughs] Yes. And so I think what these institutions train you to do is to be extremely first principles oriented, extremely data oriented, extremely strategic. I didn't think we would last for five years.
We didn't raise, like, $50 million- Yeah... and blow through $50 million. We did not do that. You did raise a couple million though, right?
Yeah, we did raise a couple million, but, like, the Axios raised 10 million out the gate.
The Athletic raised about $55 million lifetime before it sold to The New York Times, and The Atlantic got an infusion of millions of dollars from David Bradley when they were doing the pivot into profitability.
So a lot of these companies have a lot more capital behind them. Semafor raised, I believe, at least 10 million and then 19 million. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Probably getting some of the numbers wrong.
But now that I've learned my lesson, I do think I would've done better if I had a little bit more money from the very start. That kind of allows you to have escape velocity. Oh, interesting.
But we are aiming for once, right? Because we're aiming to be large. We're aiming to be not large for a large estate. I mean, obviously more money would be better. Yeah. Yeah. So e- explain to me why...
what do you think, looking back, like, why do you think more money would've been helpful? What would you have done different?
So more resources allow you to test faster, so we've never been able to hire all in one go, like, six writers and six verticals and five editors. Like, that was never possible with the pot of money in front of us.
I think for the average listener who's never built a company from scratch, two million sounds like a lot of money, and for someone who grew up the way I grew up, two million sounds like a lot of money.
But in a business context, that goes by really fast because you're paying people salaries and benefits. You're paying for, like, software subscriptions that cost in the thousands of dollars a month. It's insane.
Some of that stuff is insane. It's insane. I wanna have one of those document signing app... I, I'm like, "I'm sorry, like, this is not a cloud document solution. I am signing a PDF [laughs] on my phone."
[laughs] I really appreciate being able to do that. At the same time, the amount of money that I'm spending just to be able to sign a PDF on my phone kind of pisses me off, so yeah. Um- Exactly.
And I think the second thing is a cohort analysis, which is people sometimes put us in the same bucket as a Semafor or a Messenger, but we've never raised that amount of money.
So they're kind of tracking you, or even The Athletic. They'll compare me to The Athletic, but I'm like, "I did not raise that same amount of money at each period."
You have to remember, by the end of year five or six, The Athletic has already sold to The New York Times for $550 million. Yeah. So, like, why didn't that happen for us?
Because we didn't raise that $55 million along the way, and I think some investors just don't understand that because they look at time as a universal thing, when beneath the time they have to double-click and see what's the resources- Yeah...
against that time. And there's different times and there's different ways that you build, right? And, like, I think what... I don't wanna talkFor Adam and everyone at the, The Athletic.
But, you know, they had to go hard really quickly. They spent a ton of that money on acquisition.
I mean, I don't know how many $1, one cent, one whatever offers I got from The Athletic, 'cause they were going and hiring like nobody's business.
They were like, "We're gonna open in London, so we're gonna go sit in a hotel for like a week and run through like 80 candidates to like hire like 20 writers." Like, that was also a different era, right?
I mean, you were at the end of the Zurp era, but like, you know, money was free then. And so I don't think you could build The Athletic today that way at all. No, you can't. It's very different.
And also, they also face a challenge... And I have to disclose, Adam is one of my investors. Yeah.
They also face the challenge of, though they had plenty of sports investors, they had to tell people, "Well, why in a crowded market will we still succeed?"
Sometimes competition is good because at least their investors could see, oh, there's space for another sports outlet.
For us, our challenge has always been initially to explain to them why our demographic or focus area even matters.
And I think what we're seeing is that reality play out more and more closer to truth every day that we survive. Mm. So my goal is just to survive, right?
Like, you know, what we're seeing with geopolitics today, like India, South Asia is increasingly part of, you know, global culture, and that's basically the- Yeah... thesis that we've always had.
So you gotta believe in that. It's a binary, yes or no. Is it gonna happen or is it not gonna happen?
If, if, if you don't believe it, which a lot of people have been sleeping on, you're gonna miss out on exposure to that growth and- Yeah. Sucks for you. So how do you define the area?
'Cause, I mean, you consciously made it South Asian, right, and not Indian and e- even within India, Americans like to paint every- what we call Africa a country, [laughs] right? So how do you end up defining it?
Because, like, it can get really broad. And I think one of the challenges of any sort of media company these days is really figuring out what your niche is and what your area is and to make it big enough.
'Cause I do see a lot of people when they think about niche, they slice it too thin, and it's just too small, or you become everything to everyone. So, like, how do you define it?
And is it like a group of people that, like, see themselves, like, similarly? [laughs] Yeah. Well, actually, that's such a great question. I get asked that a lot.
Like, how do you decide, like, the lens at which you stop or, like, the focal area- Yeah... at which you stop? And the reason I chose South Asia, and partly it's because I'm influenced by myself as the power user.
So, you know, I come from a family that our ancestral home is somewhere in present-day Bangladesh. We're a partition family, so we lost it. Yeah. So after 1947, we got pushed to India.
But if someone were to ask me, like, "What's home?" I'd be like, "Ah, I gotta answer you in five ways." My dad's family, they grew up in Burma.
My dad was the only one of his siblings that wasn't born in Burma because my grandpa was a doctor in the Pacific Theater during World War II. And then my mom's side of the family, same story.
And then apparently, according to some of my DNA test results, like I might have had a long lost ancestor somewhere from Southeast Asia. So, like, I do identify as South Asia. I identify as South Asian.
I identify as Bengali. I identify as Indian. I identify as American. I identify as all those things, and I also feel some weird connection to Burma. Like, I have read all the fiction I can- Yeah... on Burma.
I visited Burma. I try to ask my dad, like, "Where did you guys live in Yangon?" And try to, like, walk around. Like, it's weird. And so I think why we picked that focal area is two reasons.
One is that I do believe borders are very much a colonial concept, right? Like the British- Mm... set some borders that didn't really exist. Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India today were all part of one area.
The second thing I look at is historical connectivity. So all of those regions that we consider part of South Asia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, they all traded with each other.
[gentle music] They were interconnected. They have shared history. Mm-hmm.
But how does that manifest in the content or the editorial strategy? So we always say you always wanna be as specific as possible. There are certain things that are universal across the subcontinent.
Like we did an article recently on piercings. Piercings is a tradition that is true for South Asians, whether you are in Pakistan or in India or in Bangladesh. Doesn't matter where you're from. Mm-hmm.
You kind of view piercings with the same lens. You usually pierce your children as babies, which Americans find horrifying.
But then there are articles where you gotta be really specific, and that's where the beauty lies. Can we do circumcised? It's hard to stand on circumcision and be against piercings. [laughs] Yeah. Yeah.
So you wanna be very specific, right? So one specific story that I love is we did a story on how one of the world's first PC viruses was invented by two Pakistani brothers.
It's really important to talk about the fact that they were Pakistani because they have completely different resources and completely different history and completely different access to hardware and software than their fellow brethren in, in India or, you know, sisters in India.
So I think that's the beauty of what we do is we really go really specific when we need to, and we go broader when historically it makes more sense.
And I get people angry on both sides of it, and I'm like, "That's when you know you're doing something right," because people are always angry.
I have this guy tweeting at me right now about South Asian and how I'm using a CIA term. We actually wrote an article about the term South Asia already, and I asked him to read it, which he clearly hasn't. Okay.
So there are South Asians who do not identify as South Asians. They're like, "What are you talking about?" Oh, 100%. Okay. Yeah.
These are the people who have lived in the physical borders of present-day India their entire lives, and these people exist.
But as we know, true history involves far more immigration and migration and trade and connectivity than we can ever imagine. Yeah. So how do you decide your lens, though, within that?
We're talking about billions of people. We're talking about like probably, I don't know, like a fifth of the global economy. [laughs] Like, I, I don't know if we're talking about a niche at this point.
It's a large slice of humanity, right? How do you decide what's the lens? 'Cause I noticed, like, you're not as political. I mean, you could do the entire thing about geopolitics, right?
I mean, Pakistan and Afghanistan are skirmishing now, and Pakistan and Iran. There's tons of stuff, but it seems like you go more towards a cultural lens.
It doesn't mean that there's not, like, politics in there, but I think politics can be very fraught.
You get into Modi and, like, who knows?Yeah, I think one of the principles we'd had from the very beginning, 'cause we had so few resources, that when people zig, we have to zag. Yeah.
So if The Economist and Foreign Policy and The New York Times are churning out really rapid, because they have the resources, political analysis articles, that's harder for us to compete. Mm-hmm.
So we will only write a politics piece if we feel like we have the resources to say something nobody else is saying, and that can happen. That does happen.
So for example, when mainstream media was talking a lot about, in twenty twenty, about how Kamala Harris, amazing South Asian VP, all these South Asians are excited, that's like painting us with a broad brush.
'Cause if you dug a little bit deeper, Brown people too are on a spectrum. So there were people across the board who had very various different feelings about her, and that's okay.
I, I love talking about this article that we did with Five Thirty Eight where we just followed the money and saw how South Asians were donating to congressional campaigns, because that actually revealed something about us, as opposed to just kind of waxing philosophical.
The reason we do bet on the cultural lens is because that's the part where- Mm-hmm... most mainstream media often fails already. Today I just reviewed this play in part Bengali and part English.
I'm not trying to call out this one person. I'm just calling out the phenomenon.
[laughs] I read The New York Times Review of the play after I wrote my review, and it just lacked the soul of the play because this person clearly didn't understand. This person was not Bengali.
This person did not know the language. Yeah. This person didn't know the history that we have, and that's what often happens in mainstream media, right? You're just doing the easiest take, the mainstream take.
You have to make it the vanilla take. Yeah, yeah, no. I mean, that's just part of it, and that's, I think, the differentiated lens that you can bring to the market.
So talk to me about matching up the business model with this. I mean, obviously this must have been a big consideration in, uh, Y Combinator. Explain why to go with a subscription model.
I think when you were doing it too, like, things don't happen in a vacuum, right?
And between The Athletic and the information, there's certainly a lot more interest in subscription models than if you were doing this, say, ten years ago. Yeah.
See, I may sound crazy here, but I really wanna build a hundred-year-old, two hundred-year-old, three hundred-year-old company. I'm not here to create a flash in the pan.
I think it forces you to do some things very differently than if you were trying to create more of a quick flash in the pan.
Before I even started The Juggernaut, I was researching things for like three or four years about other successful companies that had actually done it and what they'd done. Mm-hmm.
And across the board, especially for targeted plays, it was mostly subscription. And this is something that I think that, you know, people kinda yell at me about. They're like, "Okay, how can you really believe this?
You haven't tried anything else." But, like, look at Black Entertainment Television. It started off as a cable subscription company. If you look at Telemundo or Univision, again, cable subscription.
If you look at The Athletic, it was subscription. If you look at Politico, their big money maker was a B2B subscription called Politico+ that allowed them to exit for over a billion dollars.
If you look at Crunchyroll for anime, again, subscription. They grew to over seven hundred thousand subscribers, sold for one point three billion dollars to Sony. So when I was looking at all these businesses...
And even The New York Times, I have said this on a podcast before, but I love reading the 10-K of The New York Times. Go, everyone who is obsessed with media, please read the 10-K of The New York Times.
And you can see how they're slowly but surely shedding physical assets like paper mills, shedding a lot of their typical models from advertising and really going hard on digital subscribers.
All of their increase in the market cap during Zerk- Yeah... they went from something to, like, eight billion was due to increase in digital subscribers. It was not due to increase in advertising.
It was not due to any other move except for an increase in digital subscribers.
And even The New York Times, if you think about it, and one of my investors was telling me, is actually a collection of targeted plays, right? 'Cause there's a cooking app in there. So there's a cooking subscription.
Mm-hmm. There's a game subscription in there. So, like, these people might be very different from the people who are reading the news. Yeah.
And even their news has become a certain type of person, which was not true before. You know, I grew up in New York City. Yeah. I remember getting the paper at my home when I was three years old.
It was a very different paper than it is today. Some of the articles it writes, like, my dad would just be like, "What is it saying?" Like, "What?"
Like, you know, who would think that The Wall Street Journal is now the center paper? Yeah. Never in a million years. So I do think that that's one of the reasons I went with subscription.
The second reason is just necessity. I could never hit the eyeballs- Yeah... any advertiser needed just because I was so tiny when I'd started.
So I had to go for subscription 'cause at least I could get my customers to pay. Yeah. And I think we're seeing with the messenger that it takes a lot to pull that off from an ad-supported element.
Crunchyroll is an interesting one 'cause it is, like, cultural. Look, subscriptions is amazing. Politico Pro w- is for lobbyists and stuff like this.
The New York Times is an exception, but The Wall Street Journal goes on corporate credit cards, et cetera. Why did you think it fit for this area in particular?
Because there's contiguous areas where there isn't a lot of examples of success for subscription. Doesn't mean you can't succeed, but... Yeah. I think The Athletic is probably the best example- Yeah...
where it's just identity, kind of like I am an obsessed person with sports. I'm just gonna purchase the subscription. And if they could get to a million subscribers, I was like, wait, I have like, you know...
If you were to really slice it, I have about five hundred million people I think could be potential Juggernaut subscribers.
I'm taking that one point eight billion, and I'm taking, like, the top richest and then all the diaspora. And I thought, like, if they have, like...
They have a much smaller denominator than me, and they still got to one million. Like, I can definitely get to a million subscribers, right?
So in terms of why I had that confidence or maybe the naivete, part of it was this feeling that there must be more people like me, that, like, we have extra disposable income a little bit.
We feel completely underserved by mainstream media. They're not even listening to us. They sometimes just write absurd things. I think I told you...
I might have told you this before, but The New York Times had this pandemic-era article about the yoga queen of the pandemic, and it was a white woman, which is fascinating for South Asian people because they're like, "How is the yoga queen of the pandemic a white woman?"
Like, let's think about that. Like, what does that mean? What are we saying? Or the L.A. Times saying, "Meet-"Shah Rukh Khan, the biggest Bollywood star, and we're like, "Wait, meet Shah Rukh Khan?"
We've known about Shah Rukh Khan for over 30 years. [laughs] So there's just this deep anger because you have to realize, like, Asian Americans were selected for in America.
We were selected for to be educated after 1950. Yeah. We had a quota and literally a ban against Asian migration, so everybody who came after 1965 were extremely educated, extremely skilled.
They come to this country and they're like, "You guys aren't even writing about us or care about us. The only time you write about us-" [laughs] "... are during the spelling bees and one of us becomes a CEO."
Like, you know what I mean? [laughs] Like, that's the only time. There's a lot of CEOs. Let's, let's be real. [laughs] And now there's a lot. Now- There's a lot of CEOs... there's a lot, but you, you have, you have to...
I have to bring you back to, like- Okay, got it... 2019, which was, like, a little bit different. Yeah.
And so I think that's where it came from, was, like, a sense of anger and complete disdain and being like, "You're not treating me like a customer with a pain point."
Okay, so you think that gives you leverage in getting people to convert? Sure.
Yeah, I think it's an important point because my theory about individual publications too is that there's a leverage that allows a higher conversion percentage w- when a brand is tied to an individual or when a brand is tied to something that gets them off the spreadsheet.
In life, you basically wanna get off the spreadsheet. That's basically your goal.
Because once you get on a spreadsheet, there's always gonna be someone that's gonna grind you down for less money, and it's gonna be more efficient, et cetera.
But if you can develop some kind of piece of leverage, and for some people it's personality or a personal connection. For some people, it's being part of, like, a larger cause, et cetera. It does provide leverage.
I also think, to your point about going from B2C to B2C to B- Yeah... we've seen this happen with Calm and Headspace, where now a bulk of their subscriptions is coming from corporations or institutions.
I actually think that's not too far off for The Juggernaut.
We have had corporations, I won't name all of them, and universities sign up for group subscriptions because increasingly there are Asian American employee resource groups- Yeah...
at a lot of companies, and increasingly there are South Asian studies departments being funded by South Asians at a lot of elite universities.
So I think that's where, like, life is going, so maybe in five years we'll be talking and I'll be like, "Yep, we're, like, 80% corporate subscriptions or institutional subscriptions," but we're- Yeah... not there yet.
We're so early. Yeah. So you decided to go... I mean, you have a very... It's, like, an Information/The Athletic-type paywall. This is not, like, a porous paywall.
This is not, like, a paywall in theory or, like, every fifth article or, like, the meter kicks in after a while or I could, like, open an incognito window, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I was inspired by...
Yeah, I was certainly inspired by The Information. I was inspired by the one- Like the Daily Beast, like, I'm sorry, like, I, I've, I've given my email to unlock that article at least 50 times, like...
See, this is what people fear, right? So we've been testing stuff. So in June of last year, that's why I wanted to wait to get to- onto your podcast, so I could- Okay... share some of these findings. Good.
In June, we ended our free trial. It was the scariest thing I did. I was like, "Why are we doing this?" Like, we'd had free trial forever, a seven-day free trial. We ended it. We saw conversions go up.
And one of the people who really pushed me to do this was Eric Newcomer. Shout out to Eric Newcomer of Newcover. He just hired a new person. [laughs] He's been doing exceptionally well.
Million- And he was like, "Stigma-" Mr. Million-Dollar Eric Newcomer. [laughs] Mr. Million-Dollar Eric Newcomer. And Eric, who I caught up with, and he was like, "Da, you are losing..." He was, like, shaking me.
[laughs] Like, he was literally shaking me. Okay. [laughs] Like, his wor- words were shaking me to, like, perk up. He's like, "Stigma, you are..." He was aghast.
He's like, "Stigma, you are losing all of your upside for your hit articles." And he was 100% right. I went back, looked at the data. Any time we had a hit article, we get a ton of free trials. Yeah.
A lot of them just churned after reading that one article. We are not creating the habit of them going- Mm-hmm...
and trying to find more because they have a free trial, so they're gonna just create another email address, create another credit card, and do that. So we ended the free trial. Scariest thing I did ever.
Worked like a charm. The second thing w- thing we did in December, which was also really tough for us, but we have to do it to be a sustainable company. I don't wanna shut down. I don't wanna be the messenger.
I wanna be a- Right... sustainable company. We increased prices in December. Again, scariest thing we did. So we went from $72 a year to $99 a year. We increased lifetime from 399- Right... to 499.
We increased monthly from 9.99 to 13.99. It was so scary to do. But I kind of just was honest to our readers. I was like, "I can't keep going like this, where we're just reliant on venture capital money."
Like, yes, I wanna raise when I raise so that we can raise on our own terms and turbocharge growth. I don't wanna be reliant, right? There's a difference. There's, like, a fine line. Yeah.
I wanna feel like I'm at my best. And I basically said, "If you want us to continue succeeding and not shut down, can we just raise prices here, and you can trust us that we're gonna keep on investing in our writing?"
And, you know, I've, like, underpaid myself for five years. Like, I already know that. Like, I- Right... this money is not going towards me. Like, this is going towards investing in our company. And you know what?
Like, we saw more growth after that, and one of the things that I think happened is that price is associated with quality.
So like, okay, like, this is the only thing I'm paying for that is associated with my culture, and the only publication I'm paying for associated with my culture. Can I afford $8.25 a month, or $1.90 a week? Okay, sure.
Here it is. So I'm gonna ask, how many subscribers do you have?
[gentle music] Come on, Stigma.
I can't tell you. We, we have waited- I can't tell you... no, but you can. This is the thing, you can. I could tell you it's in the five- Now, you can, you can say, "I don't wanna tell you." You can say- [laughs]...
"I'm not gonna tell you." No, no, I said I can't tell you. But you can't say- Okay, I can't tell you... I don't let people tell me that they can't tell me. Who's telling you you can't tell me? Oh, okay, I have people.
But I will tell you, I can tell you these things. It's in the five figures. Okay.
It's in the five figures, and if all goes to plan, I'm not gonna jinx myself, we will hit some really big milestones this year.But it's in the five figures. Will you be profitable this year?
We actually reached profitability recently. Wait, like a day? Or like... I've done podcasts with Jonah Peretti, okay? So I'm not gonna fall for this stuff. Okay. We reached profitability after we raised our prices. Okay.
But I'm not going to talk about it further because I don't wanna jinx it too much, but like- All right...
we are on our way, and we just need to keep cracking certain product things that we're excited about, anything that's gonna persist. For example, I s- we talked about this. I have to figure out payment failures.
We have such great- Yeah... retention that on the fourth or fifth year we get automatic bank declines, and that can increase our profitability further. So like we're excited about some of...
Figuring out some of that stuff. So it's not all figured out. Yeah. Well, Stripe, if you pay them, they will find the new credit card and hit it. They will find it. Really? Oh, yeah. I pay separately because- Yeah.
Involuntary churn-... this seems, this seems a problem... is- Is the worst. It's the worst. It's one thing if someone- It's the worst... voluntarily decides to ditch you, but like... Yeah. But here's the thing.
I say we hit profitability, but guess what? I just turned around and hired a new editor. [laughs] So, so I'm about to increase my burn rate. Like, so we're at three people full-time- Nice...
and now with this new editor, four. Good. It's funny 'cause like the subscription model provides so much...
I mean, I don't have anyone full-time, but I have more people that I work with than that, like [laughs] in my little thing because like- Yeah... in order to do...
I'm gonna be doing memberships in a couple weeks actually when this comes out. But I'll put you down.
But one of the things with the indirect model when you're doing services and ads and stuff like this is it changes the composition. You need a lot of different people. Like I love all of my clients.
You know, there's like a 47 next to one of [laughs] my email threads. Like there's 47 of these messages, and that's just like on one thing.
So like it adds up, and I think that one of the things underappreciated a little bit with the subscription model, or maybe it is just doesn't get ca- talked about enough, is it really simplifies the organization.
Maybe look at the information. Like over half their people, well over half the people, overwhelming majority are really involved in making the, the product. In most publishing companies, that is absolutely not the case.
Most people are not involved in what's theoretically the product is. Actually, the Netflix 10-K talks about this. [laughs] Sorry- Yeah, girl... I'm like such a 10-K nerd. Yes. But this is why I went to business school.
Let's do a 10-K reading club. Yeah. Reed Hastings talks about this. He's like one of the reasons Netflix was such a incredibly successful company is that once you switch to subscription, it makes your company so focused.
You know, ex- everyone knows exactly the metrics that matter. There aren't two different metrics. There aren't two different dashboards. There's only one dashboard, and that's the only thing that matters. Yeah.
And in a way, I think that's why they had that whole Qwikster debacle 'cause he's like, "There's a whole crazy DVDs business that like people are also caring about.
Like I wanna separate that," 'cause he was like so fanatical about having this like clear- Yeah... you know, objective.
They had to bring it back, but like I think that's, that's one of the reasons Netflix has been so successful. That... By the way, that's like amazing. Like nobody remembers it.
Like that could've been like n- when I was a kid, I'm old enough to like... that I remember new Coke. But like that could've been like new Coke moment for them, and like Coke d- was like dumb.
Like they didn't give up on new Coke for [laughs] like a while. Like he was like, "Oh, I've seen enough." He's like, "Yeah." "Forget about this." I guess- "We'll pretend it doesn't happen." And guess what?
The DVD business was providing so much cash flow when they were- Yeah... burning money for acquiring subscribers. So it was the best decision he made was to combine it. That's how they survived. Yeah.
Now it's like the like chapter on the Wikipedia entry. Like nobody ever remembers the Qwikster stuff. I know. Nobody remembers this. But eventually- No. We're, we're aging ourselves. [laughs] Yeah. [laughs] Eventually...
Like we. Like I'm talking about new Coke. But eventually media businesses inevitably become multi-revenue stream businesses. I know you've done a little bit like w- with events.
Like how are you thinking about complementing the subscription revenue with other- Yeah... revenue lines? I 100% believe it. Honestly, it's the only way it works.
So [laughs] one of my investors asked like, "What if you couldn't raise any more money? What would you do?" I was like, "Honestly, I would only do things that make me money," 'cause I'm at the point where- Mm...
we're in a post-DERP world. And so two things, one, we did this amazing summit last year in September 2023.
We're thinking about doing a revisit, but this time we wanna get a hell of a lot more sponsors, so we're not in the red in it.
But I've also heard like your first year doing an event sometimes is not always the most profitable. So this time around- Yeah... we're like, "Okay. How can we make it a profitable venture?"
A lot of times you do have to like either, you know, break even or maybe even lose a little. I don't like losing money, but like [laughs] that's why I haven't done an event. I... Yeah, exactly.
I don't like losing money either, you know, Brian. That's why here I am. We're trying not to... Yeah. So I would say that one category of, uh, non-subscription revenue is events.
The second category that we've seen that I'm so excited about, that's why I'm so excited we're talking now, is like I just had like this thought during the holidays, is I just wanna work with great people this year.
So one of the things we're gonna try to do, and I haven't implemented it yet, but maybe it's gonna be in February, is we found this amazing merch partner where they only make the thing if they get the order.
So you don't have to pay for storage. You don't have to pay for like initial form of catalyst costs. You set the price together, so you can figure out your margin ahead of time.
So we wanna partner up with some of our favorite people and do limited merch drops with favorite designers and a charity we pick.
We'll know exactly what the margin is, and it'll be a great way to have people wearing Juggernaut merch everywhere, which really show off a little bit of our culture, and we're really excited about that.
So I think it's gonna be events. It's gonna be merch.
We have some sponsorship revenue coming on newsletters that's just ad hoc, and we should totally talk about that offline because I haven't really cracked newsletter ads yet, and that's something I'd love to add to my plate.
Yeah. But those are the three things that we're thinking about.
But also what's exciting is I also tell my investors like, "Don't hold your breath on any of these three revenue streams, like events, merch, or newsletters," because we have so much more opportunity in the core subscription business.
And until that's fricking tapped out- Yeah... I'm not gonna be happy. So, so 2024 is a big year for politics. Can we get more politics writing in? It's gonna be a big year for business and tech.
Can we get more business and tech writing in? We think that we can scale the team a little bit with a little bit... a few more writers, a few more editors.
So we think there's a huge opportunity there, and also with product. Like-Our iOS and Android apps are great, but they could be even better. And I think that there's gonna be a few product loops that we've heard.
I was just catching up with the person who was former Medium and Twitter, Michael Sippey, here's a shout-out. Oh, yeah. And he was like, "Seena, have you thought about productizing more community stuff?"
And I was like, "I love that idea." Like, how do we become like Duolingo? How is the Juggernaut a Duolingo dating app? Like, that would be great- Mm-hmm... if we could figure that out for 2024.
So I will say those are the other revenue streams, but I will also say, you know, don't hold your breath. I still think there's so much opportunity in the core business. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, you know, subscriptions are a great base to, to build off of. I think, you know, we've seen it. Like, I mean, if you can, it's just they, they take a while, at least I've found.
[chuckles] They take a while to build. Okay, so the first 10,000 are always really tough, is what Adam Hanselman told me, but after that, it kind of snowballs. Yeah. And so there's some form of network effect- Right...
weird thing going on where people are just telling each other. We just got a customer service request like, "Do you guys have family plans?" And I'm like, I'm officially becoming Netflix.
Like, I need to start doing family plans, and accounts, and, like, password sharing crackdown, but, we, we're not there yet. But, like, that's just a great sign to hear. Yeah.
Well, customer service is another thing people don't, like, think about with subscriptions a lot, 'cause more customers mean, like, more people who have forgotten their password, and they will all forget their password.
Just assume that they will forget their password. Yeah, we have sign in without password already built, but doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. They will still email us saying they forgot their password. Doesn't matter.
They're still gonna... Once you take someone's money, they're gonna email you. It doesn't matter if it's their fault or not, and you're gonna have to deal with it.
So everything comes with costs, and one of the costs of running a subscription business is, ideally, you've got five figures, which I believe would be over 10,000, uh, customers that are paying for your product, and so you're gonna have to service those 10,000 people.
A shout-out to Loop Support if any startup is looking. They help you find CX people. So they do the vetting, you interview them.
If you like them, you can train them up on your Zendesk, and that has saved us so much time because I used to do all CX, and now I don't. Yeah. And our customer rep is awesome. Danielle, you're awesome.
We're so glad we get to work with you. [laughs] So you're into, like, building the product too, like, it seems like. I mean, you guys are doing, like, a fair bit of your own, like, tech and stuff.
'Cause talk to me about that decision because, like, I personally, I'm just like, I...
Of all the things that I could be spending my time on, I wanna spend the least amount of time here because I don't think it provides me a ton of leverage.
Why do you think that's important to be hands-on and not just take off-the-shelf stuff? Yeah. That's a little bit of our, I guess, Silicon Valley YC DNA. Mm-hmm.
And that's why I bristle when people say we're just a media company, 'cause we operate more like, honestly, like a D2C SaaS company, if that makes sense.
So we've invested a lot in our data architecture, kinda like Netflix. Again, like, you have to think about which 10-K am I reading, right? I'm reading Netflix's 10-K.
[laughs] So, like, they were really strong at analytics.
That's what allowed them to quickly figure out what content was working and how to double down on what was working and figure out what price to even pay for acquiring titles and testing really quickly.
So we measure every single action on the Juggernaut website. We know which articles are working. We know which articles are not working. We know which articles are converting people the most.
We know which author is the most popular. We know which c- topic and category is the most popular. We know all of these things, right? And we're not, by the way, we're not selling any of this data to anybody.
It's all ours. The, you know, we're not ta- taking this to ChatGPT. It's all ours.
And we use that to reinvest in, you know, working with the writers we wanna work with, working on expanding on content areas we need to expand on. And again, shout out to our engineer, Suyash. He's the best.
One of the best hires I've ever made in my life. He has taken over the entire product stack from our website to our apps on Android and iOS.
He also helped us do a Juggernaut Wrapped for the first time in the end of December, so you can now review what articles you read, what categories you read, what authors you read.
And so the tech part is really critical because I think the biggest problem in media today for, if I were to look at the messenger, is you gotta know when to call it, right?
You just said read these things, you when to call it for Quickster. Yeah. You gotta look at your own data and be really honest with yourself and call it. Like, I remember our first six months, we were not growing at all.
This was in 2019. And I remember just looking at the data, and my partner also looked at the data with me. He's like, "Seena, this isn't working. Like, you gotta really change something. Like, this is just not working."
And so that means, like, we've tried Facebook ads, we tried changing our articles, we tried, we tried so many different things, and that's really important.
And I think that if you're not looking at data, if you're not looking at it on a daily basis, on, like, a weekly basis, you're doing something wrong. And by the way, there's so many levers you can pull.
You can pull the creatives you're putting on advertising. You can pull the lever of who you're working with when it comes to writing. You can pull on the format. I think that people have lost that hustle, right?
Because a lot of these people starting these companies are from the older- Mm-hmm... kind of more tenured generation of media where you didn't have those levers to pull. They're not even thinking about pulling them.
So anyway, that's why I think we do it at Hundred Five more as a tech company and a SaaS company, I would say. Yeah. We really care about retention, we care about cohort, we care about LTV.
We care about all of those things more so equally. Yeah, and I am 50% product, 50% editorial, which I guess makes me a little bit different than some other media founders.
Everyone has their own strengths and things they gravitate to. I mean, if you're running a business, you have to do everything. But, like, there's certain areas [laughs] like, you know, like QuickBooks.
Like, I'm like, "Oh God, uh, do I really need to go into QuickBooks?" It's not really a specialty of mine. So- I hate it.
But then, like, I didn't do sales, and all of a sudden because of the model I chose, I've gotta like, you know, be- become, you know, a salesperson. And- Yeah.
And you're probably way better at sales than you give yourself credit for. So... Uh, you know, I try to hold my own, Seena. You know, I just... Everyone, everyone good on drinks? Who needs a drink? Who needs a drink?
Everyone good? You know, it's, it's good. I, I know what to do. Honestly, I think sales is very... I've said it before on this podcast. It, I-- to me, a lot of the skills are very similar to journalism.
I'm a trained journalist, and, like, you need to be curious, you need to be able to listen, you need to be able to connect dots and understand through a bunch of contradictory information what the true story is, and it's very applicable.
True. [laughs] Okay, so where are you placing your bets, like, this year? Because, I mean, right now it seems like mostly text.
Are you looking into doing more multimedia, whether that's video or whether-It's more podcasting. What are you seeing in the data that tells you that drives conversions? Yeah.
So for me, for us, we haven't seen as much success in podcasts, and I know a lot of other people have, and I really respect them, but that's just been something that just seems too tough for us to crack right now, especially in a post-COVID world.
I think audio was really growing during the Clubhouse days, and I think we actually had a weekend Clubhouse there and two Clubhouse chats every week, and it did really well. So podcasts isn't where we're going.
I did say in my Nieman Lab prediction that this will be the year of video, and the reason I believe that is because twenty twenty-four is full of so many elections that I think people are just looking for voices that they trust and actual people who explain things to them.
I think, you know, recent political events have already shown that, and the way I think we're gonna im-implement this is I'm excited about a couple of hires coming up, and I can't reveal all my cards because they all haven't signed the dots and dotted and shown up in the office yet.
Mm-hmm. But one of the things we're excited about in Juggernaut team culture is we always say everyone does their own job, obviously, what you were hired to do.
But I love giving people that ten percent time to, like, if I push them, like, if you had ten, uh, percent extra time, what would be the extra thing you would do?
And a couple of people who might be joining, they said they wanna run our TikTok, and I was like, "You just run with that."
Like, it's not something I'm gonna go out of my way to do today 'cause I frankly feel pretty burned out and pretty full bandwidth. Yeah.
[laughs] But it's one of those things that I think a young person who has a lot of hustle and actually understands that platform even way better than I do can do really well, taking a lot of our existing analysis and transforming it to video.
So I think that's one bet I think could do really well, but am I rushing to do it yet? No. Right. I wanna tell founders, like anyone who listens to this and anyone who's a leader, I often say it's okay to say no.
Even if it's, like, the hot trend, I think people feel a lot of pressure, and I think it's okay to say no because, like, you can make whatever you're doing work. Yeah.
I think all, all my conversations with people who are building something, like, f- at a small level come down to this feeling of you have to keep moving, and you have to keep trying things.
But at the same time, your most precious asset is your focus.
And so [laughs] there's, th-those things are always gonna be contradictory in that you cannot stagnate, and you cannot wait until it's the right time or things are perfectly lined up.
But at the same time, if you're trying to do, like, twenty things, you, you're not gonna do them well at all. So it's a difficult... I haven't- You won't... figured it out. That's for sure. I know.
I haven't figured it out either. I also do think every company has its own super channel.
That's my super channel social media str-- like, theory of life, and our super channel right now is Instagram, which also has Reels, so we're like, "Well, will we actually do all these other things on there?" Oh, yeah.
You guys have a lot of followers on Instagram. I'm gonna check out your Instagram. We're nearing four hundred thousand. This is gonna be a great episode because- Yeah...
a lot of things will have happened by the time this comes out. But yeah, we're nearing four hundred thousand. We're hoping- Do you make any money off that? Like, does that convert?
Can you track, uh, how, the impact that that has? I haven't figured that out. So, like, if you know anybody who can figure this out- [laughs]... that is the one thing that I haven't been able to figure out.
But the ratio of subscribers to Instagram followers has been relatively interestingly not always constant, but, like, you can track. So something's happening there. Yeah.
I also think what's fascinating is that we now have started getting some inbounds for people who wanna do ads on our Instagram, and so we have to just think through how we wanna do that because it's very...
You know, we're very careful about our curated Instagram, so we're like, "Okay, how do we make sure it's very clear it's an ad? How do we make sure that we make it Juggernaut-y and informative?"
So that's another way it could make us money, but we'll see. Yeah. I say do the ads. Put hashtag ad on the bottom and run it. It's fine, Signe. Take the money. All right, Brian. We'll talk.
[laughs] We have to talk because I need to channel the Brian sales journalist- My answer is usually gonna be take the money. Don't do anything unethical- [laughs]... but otherwise take the money. Awesome.
Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time on Friday, late Friday afternoon, going into a Friday evening. It's already dark in New York City. It's time for your dinner.
It's time for Brian New York City dinner. All right. So. Thanks, Signe. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Brian. Take care. Thanks for listening. Thank you to Jay Sparks for producing the Rebooting show.
If you have a podcast that you're considering making, you should check out Podhelp us and what Jay can do for you. Go to podhelp.us.
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