[on-hold music] This episode of the Rebooting show is brought to you by House of Kaizen.
In the spring, I participated in a workshop House of Kaizen hosted for a group of publishers looking to expand their subscription programs.
And what emerged was that connecting subscriber journey stages with specific aspects of the audience experience is a powerful toolkit for subscription teams to focus on what is the biggest impact long term.
As Eric Hellwig of Mozilla's Pocket said, "House of Kaizen's framework was an incredibly helpful tool to align the entire organization on where we were hitting our marks and what areas needed attention."
This workshop is now available on demand as a self-guided course, or supplemented with one-to-one consultation as you see fit. To learn more, go to houseofkaizen.com. That is houseofkaizen.com/rebooting.
That is Kaizen, K-A-I-Z-E-N. Thanks, House of Kaizen. [on-hold music] All right, Jasper Wang from Defector, thank you so much for joining me, hot off a move. Yeah.
It's been three years since I did your last podcast. I know. I think I was one of your last guests, so, uh- I think you were. So I hope that doesn't happen [chuckles] for this one. That'd be an omen.
But yeah, let's, uh... Because I think at the time it was totally different. This was in twenty-twenty. Defector started in twenty-twenty, and at the time with a very strange proposition.
And the proposition that was people who were gonna pay you for the content that you were creating. A bunch of people came over from the artist formerly known as Deadspin, now sort of Deadspin, but not really Deadspin.
Something else under G/O Media. All part of the drama over there post-Gawker, the post-Gawker unwinding. And it was unusual. And I think now we're at a different, like, point where there is...
It's almost like a consensus that if you're gonna do high quality content, you're probably, it's not exclusively, but you're going to probably have a direct revenue component that's a large part of the model.
So just to level set, explain to those who are not super familiar with Defector what Defector is and what the model is. Yeah. So Defector launched in summer of twenty-twenty.
We launched with nineteen employees, uh, myself and then eighteen writers and editors who had all previously worked at Deadspin together.
They had quit Deadspin in October of twenty-nineteen after disagreements with their new private equity ownership and the new installed leadership team.
It was like a big labor story in twenty-nineteen, just the folks saying F you to the boss. Yeah. Um- And that was also early, really, ahead of a lot of... I mean, Gawker was one of the first properties to unionize.
I remember when Gawker unionized, I was like, I was kinda shocked. I thought it w- I was like, "Unions? That's for, like, steel mills and stuff. That's from a different era." Yeah. Totally.
There are people on staff who, in the very old Gawker way, they all, like, wrote what they were gonna vote. And there are people- Yeah...
on staff here who wrote about how they voted against the union, and I think, whatever. Things live forever on the internet. They have many other bad takes out there.
[chuckles] But, you know, feel some level of regret on that. Yeah. Okay. So, but I mean, it was part of, to me, like, almost, like, worker empowerment in some ways.
I don't wanna make, like, over-dramatize it as people at laptops, but still- No, yeah. Yeah, I- Still, there is this feeling within... Now, I know this from even being part of it.
There's always this feeling within news organizations of, we talk a lot about inequality, but there's inequality within it, and a lot of the times you don't have a lot of control.
In this last era, a lot of the people who are producing the journalism and the content were really not even asked, and, like, a lot of the people who were in charge of these organizations drove them off a cliff. Yeah.
I mean, I, I think many people would agree with that characterization. For us, we launched in summer of twenty-twenty, and it was very much envisioned as a worker cooperative, which it still is.
We divided the equity of the company nineteen ways, so some five percent in change to the original nineteen founders.
We had a very airtight operating agreement where, as an example, uh, I could be fired with a two-third company vote. Okay. And so, yeah, that's always hanging over my head.
A- and- and an array of other, um- You just gotta peel off thirty-four percent, Jasper. It's fine. No, that's right. I always... I, I, I...
It's a funny idea of, like, if it went up for vote and I just barely survived, it's like, "All right, well, see you all tomorrow. Well, we'll get back at it." [chuckles] I'm trying to think of my last job.
There were probably a couple moments I might [chuckles], might have failed that vote, but I think most times I would've been okay. [chuckles] Just barely.
Yeah, and so we're still very much low hierarchy, very high information transparency across, um, the organization.
We've grown to twenty-five people so far, and yeah, it's, it's still very much in that ethos of worker ownership. On the revenue model side, that- that's all operating model stuff. Sure.
On the revenue model side, as you alluded to, we are primarily subscription revenue driven. That is still the case. We're up to... We're at, like, forty thousand net active subscribers right now.
We just came over our third annual renewal hurdle, so we were up by, like, forty-two, forty-two and a half, and then had twenty thousand people come up for renewal, so, so lost a handful there.
So we're at about forty thousand paid subscribers. In year one and year two, that represented, like, ninety-five percent of total company revenue.
In year three, it's more like eighty-five percent, largely because we grew a hit podcast and so diversified our revenue a little bit. But by and large, we're still a subscription-driven business. Yeah.
And talk to me about the advantages and disadvantages of starting with subscription as the core driver, right?
Because I think the advantages...Not to-- Uh, just tell me 'cause I, I don't wanna answer the question for you. Yeah.
I mean, it's less the, the advantages than it is just, like, the moment that we started in twenty-twenty, what was the least risky and most immediate way to drive revenue? And you could imagine a world...
A-and so Deadspin was a very successful property in the sort of old media version of the world, with tens of millions o-of uniques a month.
And so the bet there is, like, all of these writers and editors are bringing their audience. Many of them are, are hardcore readers. I mean, like myself.
If, if I had not been involved with the company, I would've absolutely paid money to, to, um, subscribe to a, a new company.
And the technology was out there to run a relatively quick to, to set up paywall plus subscription management plus CMS, and that all seemed a lot easier than going down the ad model, where we'd have to have the skill set of sales, we'd have to invest in the ad tech, we'd have to sort of drive towards scaled growth on page views and, and unique visitors.
And, I mean, frankly, it was also just, like, I was gonna be the person in the business seat, and- [laughs] You're like- In a world in which- "Let's get subs." Yeah. [laughs] "I'm not doing lunch and learns nonstop."
Yeah. I'm, I am personal- I mean, I'm, I'm bad at sales. I was bad at sales. I'm still bad at sales. And so it's just like the subscription revenue side- Yeah... just seemed like the no-brainer to go down that path.
And we were basically proven immediately correct.
We announced on July 28th, twenty-twenty, and put up basically just a landing page for, like, pre-purchased subscriptions, and we sold ten thousand subscriptions in twenty-four hours.
So it's like, all right, there you go. That money's already in the bank. People paid annual subscriptions. Mm-hmm. Now we are b-basically immediately a fu- a functioning small business. Yeah.
But I think the, the trade-off, right? 'Cause I talk about trade-offs all the time 'cause there's trade-offs in everything, right? And you talked about launching with... What, it was nineteen of you or twenty of you?
Yeah, nineteen of us, yeah. Nineteen. And so you've added all of five people. So I mean, in three years, I think the trade-off is that's slow growth, right?
I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but, like, it really depends on what you wanna build. Yeah. I mean, I think we're, like, pretty internally coherent as a business, right?
So I think being worker-owned, not taking any outside money, some people would describe it disparagingly as a lifestyle business. Well, I never understand why that's bad. That sounds, like, amazing.
People sometimes- Yeah... are like, "Do you wanna build a lifestyle business?" I'm like, "Please." Like, I love it. Like, so what I have a great lifestyle and I also have a business?
Like, that sounds actually pretty good. Yeah, right. And so for us, a-and, and that's not implying that, like, people don't work hard. I don't want anyone- No...
on staff to listen to this and say, "Oh, I'm not working hard." By myself, whatever, I work many fewer hours than when I was in professional services as a management consultant, but, like, I work a full day every day.
But it's more about sort of, like, orientation towards growth and, like, benchmarks, I guess. For us, it's like we grow the way we wanna grow. Yeah. We wanna be subscription-forward.
We want, like, if you ask everybody, "Would you like ten percent more salary next year?" Everybody would say yes. And but, like, if you said, "Would you like a hundred percent more salary?"
People would probably say, "What's the catch?" Right? [laughs] What have we had to do in order to make that work for ourselves? Yeah.
And so I think just without that sort of framework, the venture-backed outside money framework of hitting your marks quarter after quarter, like, we just take into consideration, like, what do we want this site to be?
I don't wanna be moralistic about it, but, like, there's sort of an aesthetic interest in, oh, like, we run a site that doesn't have ads on it.
Like, again, it's not moralizing, but it is like, oh, if you ask most writers out there, they'd probably be like, "Oh, it's pretty to run a site like that," right? Yeah. Or we don't have to, like, onboard new ad people.
We don't have to onboard new sponsors. Like, we... It's just, like, not a part of the bus- It's a lucrative business if you can do it well, but, like, it's just not what we wanna do. Yeah.
And again, it goes to trade-offs, and I, I know this from my own experience, even my current experience, sometimes operating a publishing business is...
It's always hard, but it also gets really complicated, and sometimes you're like, you're talking about everything other than what is technically your product, right?
Like, I mean, I remember at my last, like, company, our-- I remember taking aside the CEO. I'm like, "Our company meetings have nothing to do with what technically our product is."
[laughs] Like, it has everything to do with everything around what we claim that the core purpose of the company is, and it, it sends a weird message because if you're focusing on...
And mostly it's because it's really difficult to run an advertising business. It's really difficult to run an events business. It's really difficult to do, run a commerce.
All these things, I feel like in the, particularly in the last generation, added up to really stretch a lot of these organizations in so many different directions, and in some ways, not all the time, but in some ways take their eye off why do we exist?
And I think this is a good time for every single publisher, brand, not people deserve to exist, but, like, is to question why you have a right to exist as a brand.
Yeah, and I think part of it for us is also because we're a small team, because even at twenty-five people now, it's just me and one other full-time business person, because we are worker-owned, all of our decisions, like, I don't make any decisions unilaterally that are big moves without a lot of people whose day jobs are the editorial side.
And so th-that ends up, the, to your point of sort of losing sight of what we're actually doing here, like, we just never lose sight of that, and part of it, the trade-off is, like, my time as a business person, am I taking my eyes off of the subscription business in order to focus on advertising?
It's also them taking their eyes off the ball.
Like, we have an engagement editor who does all of the newsletters and does all of the social media posts, as well as being a blogger and an editor, and we've talked about doing more newsletter ads.
We've been approached by adBundlers, wholesalers, however you wanna describe them, and said, "Do you want a more regular stream of advertising there?"
And that discussion is like, it would be nice to grow those muscles and feel like we are dabbling more in ads and generating that revenue.
On the other hand, it's like that's just like a whole another process that has to be in place of like managing creative assets coming in, managing additional relationships with the, the vendors and the brands, and just like is it the time for...
Like, i- i- if we had the bandwidth across the team, it's like, yeah, of course you tackle that, but like th- no, we're operating with a limited team very much on purpose, and i- i- it's not quite the right time.
Okay, so you're basically talking about under 10% growth. And I think that's like normal. You, you have hyper-growth early on, every brand does, and then it becomes a bit of a slog. And talk to me about that.
Is, is that sort of where you've seen you hit a inflection point and then it's hard yards time? Yeah. I, I mean, it's definitely a case where each incremental subscription is harder to convert than the last one.
I think for us, we really saw weakness in the business for the first time earlier in 2023. We saw about 10% higher churn on our annual subscribers for the first half of the year.
That was a little bit mysterious, sort of unexplained. And I asked around to other people running subscription businesses, and they had s- were seeing similar things.
In fact, some of them had seen it in maybe a full year earlier. And we never got to a good answer on what that necessarily was.
Like some combination of subscription fatigue, macroeconomic climate making people feel more insecure in how they were spending their discretionary budgets, layoffs hitting industries where we know we have a lot of subscribers.
All of that could add up. And similarly, we pulled a lot of the levers. We, like, tried stuff to bring people back, and we've sort of stabilized the business a- at this point again.
We just went through our September renewal period when 20,000 annual subscribers roughly come up for renewal, and we came out of that at about 90% retention, which is the high end of, of what we were hoping for.
And then October similarly, it's sort of come back to the, the level of churn and retention that we had been seeing historically. But we, like, we pulled a bunch of levers. Mm-hmm.
We im- im- improved our engagement drip for early subscribers. We ran our second sale ever, so $1 for your first month. Mm-hmm. And then you convert to, to full price, and that was very successful.
We timed that against NFL season coming back, so it was just a good place in the calendar for people to be thinking about sports and spending money against it.
So we're in a good spot going forward, but if you sort of ask me to say what percentage of that difficulty this year was due to X or Y factor and how do we resolve it, I don't really know.
And it feels like a very hard-fought, single-digit growth in subscribers.
Like, we're much more sophisticated than we were one year ago, but it was much less efficient versus the previous year where it was, like, relatively unsophisticated, but still growing with much more ease. Right.
And I think that's the normal...
Every subscription program, I feel like, goes through this period where you're really about converting the, I don't wanna say the low-hanging fruit, that's a terrible cliche, but you're converting the people who you think you can get, right?
I mean, e- every brand has that number. And you guys started off with a lot of people, 'cause they, the people who made up Defector had followings that they brought over with them. And then it becomes harder.
It just, it's just every brand goes through that. I think that's a normal evolution and maturation of these kind of program. Yeah.
In some ways, the change from the easy times to the harder times for us might be even more acute because we started with sort of like the previous website falling apart for largely non-economic reasons.
So the first year was very much about how do we get in front of the people who already know our deal and who already know the editorial voice and who have been sort of waiting around hoping that something like this would emerge versus at this point it's like, okay, we've converted those people.
The people who were previously Deadspin readers are, are probably aware of Defector, and if they're gonna pay, they're gonna pay.
And now we're like every other subscription business of you have to get that first touch point, and they learn about the brand, and they have to come back a second time and see, oh, they have...
It wasn't just a one-off, and then slowly but surely they give you their email address, and they read your promotional emails, and eventually they give you money.
And it's just like a much, it is that, like, th- that more traditional subscription story of, like, teaching the, the reader about exactly who you are.
Versus previously, there was a brand identity, there was an editorial voice, there was just, it was just like, oh, it's that thing. You could just point at this other thing and say, "That's what we are now."
I guess we don't really think about scale. Yeah, I know. Like, it's not a word that we really use. No, I know you don't use it.
I guess the way I would describe it- But I guess what I'm trying to get at, let's go beyond scale because that's like a pejorative. I actually think I have a- Okay...
a way to answer this, which is we got to, we went like 10,000 subscribers, 20,000 subscribers, 30,000 subscribers, like super easy.
Like months of running the business it's like just uptick and yeah, we hit the next round number. And then fighting from 30 to 40,000 was like years of work, right?
And so there was a moment back in the early days when people were like, "Oh man, in two years from now when we're like 100,000 subscribers, it's gonna be wild. We're gonna conquer the world," or whatever.
But I think everybody has, like, just understood. To your point, it's just, like, the easy days, we launched at an exact moment where in the business it was just easy to grow subscribers.
And so now it's like you just have to fight each extra 100 subscribers is harder than your previous- Yeah... 100 subscribers. And you just have to, like, plan around that. Like, it's building new muscles.
It's getting more sophisticated in your engagement, in your targeting. It's diversifying revenue a little bit more.
And it's certainly not taking on costs that-Are gonna look bad in a year, two years down the line if you can only grow at five, ten percent th-the next couple of years.
So for us, the conservatism to not get out ahead of it is already built into the, the- Yeah... operating model. And, like, so i-it's easy enough for us to just slow and steady. Again, lifestyle business. Yeah.
[gentle music] So let me ask you this, like, m-maybe not, I don't know if it's an uncomfortable question, but, like, what is it like being partners with, like, 18 journalists?
Because, like, at the end of the day, like, I always say, like, there's some great, like, quote, unquote, "Entrepreneur," I hate the word entrepreneur, but, like, entrepreneurial, like, journalists and stuff like this.
But the reality is, the thing that makes the best journalist really works against you [laughs] when it comes to building a business in some ways because you're trained, you constantly have people trying to massage you.
There's constant bullshit around. The core features is skepticism, and it can... Like, newsrooms can be, like, kinda cynical places, to be honest with you.
And when you're starting something new, there's a lot of unknowns, and it sounds like you guys -- I think the fact that you're cons- small C conservative is kind of indicative of the, the structure of the business to some degree.
'Cause I just don't think that journalists are naturally of the... I mean, we saw already that the entrepreneurialism can quickly move into, like, snake oil salesmen and even, like, fraudulent activity.
I mean, SBF is, like, next to me getting arraigned. I mean, by and large, it has been terrific. And, and part of that is, like, it, it's, it's not just any group of journalists would I say is terrific.
I think there's a couple things going for us here. For this group is, like, most of them basically took a blood oath when they quit on each other's behalf, right?
And so I think there's sort of like a, a bonded trust there that is a good place to grow from and have occasional tough, uh, discussions.
For me, my background, I was a management consultant at Bain & Company for a decade. And being in consulting, you never actually get to make your own decision.
And so now even though, like, I lead the business, I still come to it with a very, like, let's try to get as many people bought in as possible.
Like, how do we think about influencing one another and not just, like, dictating what the next steps are and then bang your head against the wall?
There are definitely moments where I come out of a meeting and I'm like, "God, I really thought that decision was gonna take five minutes for everybody to sign off on, and we fricking talked about it in circles for, for two hours, and w-was that really necessary?"
But- Yeah... by and large, I think, I, I don't wanna pretend like everybody on staff is, like, super fluent in the mechanics of the business- Yeah...
and just, like, have all the right intuitions about where to grow and where to pull back.
I think there are some people on staff where I was like, "Had I, had you gone to business school as a 24-year-old, like, you would be an incredible business person. And so I lean on you for that sort of..."
There are other folks where it's like, by interest or by natural skill set, like, that's not you, but that's okay. Like, operating a business is not just, like, strategy of where to go.
A lot of it is, like, nitty-gritty, just keeping it running. And so everybody can, you know, find their place in, in providing. Yeah. So talk to me about keeping a very lean infrastructure.
'Cause I think one of the necessities of a lot of modern publishing businesses is the need to be very selective in how much infrastructure you take on, right?
I mean, you guys partnered with Lead, I think, for the, I don't know if you still are with the launch. But- Yeah...
talk to me how you think that through because, look, a lot of publishing companies added a lot of infrastructure costs.
Anyone who's been inside a lot of publishing businesses, the people who are creating the, the content are a minority of the people.
When I think about infrastructure, it is not just -- It's not factories, it's the, the reality of media businesses, it's people.
Because you're doing a ton of different things, and particularly when you're chasing incremental revenue everywhere it, it is, you can start to have pretty sprawling infrastructure. Yeah.
For us it is, we outsource as much as we possibly can. Again, we're 25 people, we're two businesspeople.
And a lot of that, me being the, one of the two businesspeople, is just managing outside vendors who we pay hourly or in some cases by retainer, in some cases a percentage of revenue.
So if I run down the list of vendors, yes, we're still with Lead by Ali. When we launched, they were using Pico as the plugin for- Mm... um, paywall and subscription management.
They have since cut Pico out of their platform. Pico now is called- Yeah. Well, they pivoted into, like, creator stuff, right? Yes. They, they work with influencers now. Yeah. It's not our deal.
Our tech is fully controlled by Lead. They're built on top of Stripe, so that's the technical part of it. Oh, it's a WordPress site fundamentally, so that's- Yeah... the CMS we work in.
And then everything else, like, I have outside HR partners, I have outside accountants and bookkeepers, I have an outside general counsel, I have an outside podcast lawyer, we have an outside trademark lawyer, we have an outside media, like, First Amendment rights lawyer.
We have agents at UTA who do some of our negotiating on the podcast side. I just signed a contract for Amuse Labs to run crosswords. It's a plugin to run crosswords on WordPress. A lot of this stuff- Yeah...
like, at some point, could you have argued for hiring in-house? Maybe. Some people make that choice.
But for us, it's just like, I'd rather -- A fun argument I, I end up in every year when we release an annual report about our business- Yeah... which some num- Which I love, by the way. I wish every company did that.
Anyone who's listening who tells me that they can't tell me something-I'm gonna point them to Defector. They tell you everything. I mean, there's no secret- [laughs] No... there's no secrets in LA.
I love when people are like, "We can't say that." I'm like, "Says who?" I was like, "You run the company, started the company. It's a private company. You can do whatever you want." [laughs] Yeah, right. Exactly.
For, for me, it's like everybody at the company already know. I- maybe that's it, is that, like, internally not everybody knows. For us it's like- Yeah, yeah...
internally everybody knows, so I'm just hitting publish one extra place, and so everybody, everybody knows. But one- Yeah...
one argument I end up getting in is people will email me and say, "You guys spend too much on tech." And we pay Lead a, a percentage of- Yeah, I think that... of revenue.
I think, you know, no offense to Austin and Ally and all that. They're obviously my partners at Digiday. They built our site. Yeah. I mean, and, and they're great.
And I think part of it is th- there, there is a part of this that is just, like, they took a chance on us, they made a bet, like, the bet is paying out.
We are grateful that they took a chance on us, and therefore we do not begrudge them the revenue that is contractually theirs.
But I think the other part is people will email and be like, "Well, if you move to Ghost," and then you started just do- doing some of this setup. I'm like, "No, no, no, no. Y- when we say- Yeah...
we have no technical people in-house, you just... You're not listening to me. I'm saying we do not have anybody who keeps an eye on technical infrastructure, we don't have any design resources in-house.
Like, we, we don't have any product people. Y- my...
The other business guy is a data scientist, and he works with, uh, Lead in Austin on dashboarding and the, the sort of products on data that other Lead customers can use. But, like, that's it. Yeah.
And so for me to just be able to say, like, we don't do any of that, like- Yeah... I inhabit a premium for that. And by the way, it's also, like, competitive with, with, like, a Substack. Right.
But you also, you pay a premium, and really it depends on the model, like, right? So if you're gonna keep a, a super lean model, you're gonna pay a premium for that flexibility, right?
And the way I understand your deal, like, not to talk Lead's book, but, like, it's incentivized with...
And there's good and bad, but that's same with the Substack model in some ways, in that, like, it's incentivized with your growth of the, the core business, right? Of the subscriptions, right?
So I think that provides flexibility. Now, some people would look at it and they would say, "You're spending too much. You could just do flat. You could do Ghost, you could do whatever, and then you can..."
And you're just like, "I don't wanna do this because, like, that would require us adding more people." And, like, I would see this all the time. You would add a piece of technology, but guess what?
That takes people to operate the technology. They have to learn the entire system. Now it's like another FTE.
And so there's a lot of advantages to, particularly when you're trying to stay very lean on infrastructure, to outsourcing. And with outsourcing you might pay a premium- Yeah...
but you don't have to think about it, and you have experts. That's exactly right. And I think for us there's also the extra complexity of, like, everybody on staff is a co-owner in the business.
And so, but, you know, part of it, a part of us only adding a couple people a year is like, yes, we were very conservative with how our cash comes in and what financial commitments we're making in future years.
Part of it is also just, like, making sure this is a person who we want to bring on as a co-owner, and it, it's a lot easier when most people's jobs look roughly the same.
Like, you're a writer, you're an editor, everybody understands what you're doing. They can see how you pull your weight. They can see how you contribute. Yeah.
If we have just, the more people you tack on where it's like your job is a little bit opaque to most of the people on staff, and how do we make sure that you are being a good co-owner?
Like, it, it just adds extra complexity there- Yeah... in a way that maybe other companies don't see. So e- so everyone is a co-owner. This isn't like a law firm where you have partners and then you have others. Yes.
My first job was for a partnership, and I was not a partner, obviously.
[laughs] And the guy who was running it meant well with having us all in the partnership meetings, but it was, like, very awkward because they would discuss overhead costs and, like, I was- Right...
I'm like, I'm being discussed along with the furniture. Maybe I don't need to come to these meetings. Yes. For us, every single person, including new people who join, are owners, and we've, like, written it so...
I'm getting into a lot of the, the nitty-gritty here. Yeah, I love it. But when we talk about ownership of a, of a business, right, we're usually talking about three things.
We're talking about voting rights, we're talking about rights to profits, and then we're talking, and we're talking about, three, in a liquidation event, do you get to participate in the, the residual value?
So for us, voting rights, our operating agreement has basically enshrined that most of the voting rights go with employees, current employees.
So if you leave, you still have your equity for a liquidation event, but, like, you, you don't get to vote. So we have that. On profit share, s- same thing. We distribute profit share to employees.
It's on an employee level. It's not an owner level.
And then finally, we, we do give everybody some amount of equity so that in a far-fetched world in which we are, have some liquidation event, everybody does get to participate.
And so even if we, like, change that, even if we didn't give everybody equity voting rights, we've already said, like, you get profit share and you get voting rights. So it just is, like, it's very flat.
It's very transparent. It leads to similarly awkward conversations when everybody has to hear and understand how the business is operating.
But I think probably that is better than the version you're talking about where you're overhead, like furniture, as opposed to we're, like, we're all sort of on equal footing here- Yeah...
we're talking through it together. Look, there's no perfect model, and I think during the craziness of the, the, the very brief Web3 time, I was very drawn to the idea of, like, DAOs. And I... Not from- Mm-hmm...
like, a technical perspective or because I was all crypto red-pilled or whatever, but mostly because the corporation is very imperfect organization and the capital versus worker dynamic is fraught in, in capitalism.
And I think going back to, like, Butsim, there's always been efforts to try to remake how we organize as a group of humans to make it more fair and more equal than... In- inevitably capital is...
And I think that's probably why in some ways why everyone wanted to leave a private equity run publishing company because anyone who's been in one of those, you're like, "What do we do? For who? For what? Like, really?"
Like-Just because somebody who has no idea about this business has no stake in this product, it needs, I don't know, like, an extension of their Hamptons house. We, we, we've gotta do this? Like, why? [laughs] Right.
Yeah. I, I think- I would always find this, honestly, like, even with, like, my own, like, team at the other... I was like, "Well, we've gotta grow this."
And they're like, I'd sometimes get particularly younger employees who don't like... They're like, "Why? But why do we have to grow? Like, we're profitable.
We're grow- like, why do we have to, why do we have to grow more? What, explain that why." And I'm like, "Well, you know, we have to." [laughs] You'll get it when you're older. Can we change the subject?
[laughs] I'll give you a very concrete example. A concrete example of me as, as executive, as labor, and as shareholder on how you consider all of those factors in. Our refund policy at Defector is very generous.
Like, we send you the 30-day renewal notice when your annual subscription comes up, but if you, if we charge you in 30 days, and you write in, and you say, "I didn't want to be charged this," we'll just give you the money back.
And that consideration, right, like, at, at any number of publications, it's not that easy. You gotta j- jump through hoops. You gotta yell at a lot of people- Yeah... to get your money back.
Try to cancel the Wall Street Journal. The thing is, I am- Good luck. Right. [laughs] The thing is, I am one of those people who has to get yelled at, right? Like, there's only two business people.
[laughs] I am in the customer service inbox. If you send an angry email, I read that, and then I have to fight you on it. And so we talked about it.
We talked about as a company, like, how generous do we wanna be on this?
And part of that consideration, in addition to what does it look like to the customer and the financial impact, is like s- like somebody has to triage those emails and, like, make a decision, and so just take it out of our hands.
Just, like- Yeah... g- give the refund, and then we're sorta done with that. And so would, would I rather have an extra thousand dollars in my pocket and, but have to answer 100 angry emails? I probably wouldn't.
So [laughs] that's, that's the sort of trade-off you make there. It's also, it's, it's another trade-off, like, when...
'Cause I think a lot of times, particularly small organizations, they get into subscriptions or memberships, they don't recognize that, like, the trade-off of, like, having, like, many thousands of customers is you have many thousands of people who are gonna forget their password.
They're gonna forget how to spell their names sometimes, and they're gonna come to you because they can't spell their name. Yes. That's exactly right.
That, that is, like, the, one of the first things I say when we talk- [laughs]... to groups of journalists who are thinking about their, doing their own thing.
It's like, "Yeah, so let me talk to you about, like, paywalls and subscription strategies, but, like, do you have a customer service inbox set up?
Because one way or another, the complaints are gonna get to you, and you better have a good process for managing that and directing people in there." Yeah.
I mean, it's something that people don't like, I, I feel like don't think about enough, like, before they get into it 'cause, like, more customers, more problems. And it's, again, it's just a trade-off.
It's a good problem to have [laughs] that's better than nobody, no customers, no, no- nobody forgetting their name or how to spell their name. But, I mean, we had one guy from Amazon. He couldn't spell Amazon.
He couldn't spell his name, and we had to solve the problem every single time. So all right, cool. Let's leave it there. Really appreciate you taking the time, Jasper.
It's always good to catch up, and I love what, what Defector's doing, and hopefully more people will try these new models that are more worker-owned. And even if they don't, like, become, like, massive, that's okay.
Yeah. I think we're, we, we've been very blessed with a pretty successful, smooth journey so far.
But if all that happened was we did it for a year, and we paid ourselves a little bit of salary, and we tried a thing, like, that would've been very noble, too, and I think I, I, I think it's totally right.
Like, it, it's a healthier ecosystem if people are willing to go out there and try and, and potentially fail. Yeah. All right, cool. Thank you so much, Jasper. Thanks, Brian. Good talk.
[upbeat music] 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. [upbeat music]