Why a Paid Newsletter Won’t Be Enough Money for Most Writers (And That’s Fine): The Multi-SKU Creator

15 min readNov 24, 2020

A number of reporters and columnists these days are “going indie,” detaching from their previous employer and signing up with a site like Substack, Patreon or Medium to get paid for their writing by their readers. The motivations are usually blends of seeking freedom (to write at their own cadence and on whatever they want to cover) and the accelerating austerity at media companies from ad supported business models collapsing. Friends of mine like tech journalist Casey Newton have recently made this transition (he left Vox to launch Platformer) so I’ve gotten a bit of insider perspectives on the ambitions and economics of these launches.

Much of the discussion around the sustainability of this movement is focused on the math of converting readers (or followers) to paying subscribers. “If she can get just 10% of her 500,000 Twitter followers to pay $100/year…” is the type of simple analysis that accompanies both the glass half-full and glass half-empty outlooks, benchmarked against either their previous salary or some notion of what economic success looks like. And while this framing isn’t wrong, it’s very incomplete. It’s my belief that very few “Substack writers” will make 100% of their income from their newsletter and this won’t be a failure of the platforms but instead related to the nature of creation itself. Enter, the Multi-SKU Creator.

The biggest impact of someone like Casey unbundling himself from The Vox is that he is now an entrepreneur with a product called Casey. His beachhead may very well be a paid newsletter (it’s very good by the way) but the newsletter is just one SKU. Maybe the SKU he cares most about. Maybe even the SKU that makes him the most money. But it doesn’t have to be the only SKU. There could be a podcast SKU. A speaking fee SKU. A book deal SKU. A consulting SKU. A guest columnist SKU. And so on. And if he does several of these over the next few years, it won’t be about the success or failure of Substack (for him) but a mix of creative, economic and lifestyle goals. In fact, I’m such a believer in the Multi-SKU Creator that we backed a startup company called Stir.

Stir is kinda of like Square, if Square was built for digital creators instead of coffee shops. Their first products include a dashboard which allows you to combine your multiple sources of income into a single view, tools to support automatic revenue sharing among creative collaborators and an experiment to let you charge Twitter followers for access to a separate private feed. Even in their early days we’re seeing creators who span multiple platforms (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc) and multiple teams/brands/partners. The end result is that there’s no one platform, no one product that fulfills all their needs. And no matter where they are creating, Stir can help them keep their head above water. It’s an exciting future and one that I believe will lead to all sorts of new voices finding their audiences.

Oh and if this sounds cool, you can sign-up for early access to Stir and they’re also hiring.

Notes and More

💰to Fair Fight supporting voter rights ahead of Georgia Senate Runoff

📦 Things I’m Enjoying

It’s turning towards winter which means less sunlight/outdoors. Please make sure you’re getting enough Vitamin D, which in some studies has been show to also be effective in keeping your immune system tough against COVID.

🏗 Highlighted Homebrew Portfolio Jobs

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WRITTEN BY

Hunter Walk

You’ll find me @homebrew , Seed Stage Venture Fund w @satyap . Previously made products at YouTube, Google & SecondLife. Married to @cbarlerin .

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Working In Tech & Worrying About Getting “Too Old”

The above tweet seemed to resonate with folks, and sometimes when that happens, I like to expand in a post, since the tweet will disappear in 30 days.

Ok, let’s talk about working in tech and feeling like your best years are perpetually behind you. It screws with your head! This was part of the reason I spent almost two decades metaphorically being chased by a failure tiger. No bueno for one’s health and wellness. Why does this feeling exist and what can we do to help ourselves and others navigate?

It exists because it’s true and part our popular mythology! Ahh you didn’t think I was going to start there did you? Seriously, any discussion of this topic should acknowledge that there’s an incorrect (and sometimes illegal when it plays a role in hiring) age bias in our industry. “Pattern recognition” of a what a founder looks like still gravitates towards, as one VC said (and I’m paraphrasing) “pasty young white males.” This is changing as we see women take their companies public and people start multibillion dollar companies in their — gasp- 40s. But to write a post confronting the “I’m too old” anxiety and not recognize all of this would be dishonest. …

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9 Nov 11

Me! Talking Tech, Politics and TikTok with Alex Kantrowitz

Reporter Alex Kantrowitz had me on his Big Technology podcast and we covered a bunch of stuff about the social platforms, politics & tech and my days at YouTube. To subscribe to the podcast and hear the interview for yourself use Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Overcast.

I love when podcasts make transcripts available and you can rea

The Essential Nature of In-Person Work For Early-Stage Startups

tldr: instead of choosing between in-person or remote, your seed stage company (or team) should be more hybrid, tied to the type/phase of project going on. With in-person being used during periods of intense team ideation, collaboration or debate. While remote is best for execution sprints and concentrated individual problem solving.

Photo by Tommy Lisbin on Unsplash

2020 has turned out to be a really interesting test of what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real. The Real World. Uh, sorry, as a MTV generation kid, that reality show opening is hardwired into my brain. What I meant to say is 2020 has provided us a bunch of forced learnings around collaboration given that much of the tech world shifted from “mostly together in offices” to “mostly apart, at home, supported by software.” While we all agree that ‘apart’ is best right now for reasons of safety, the discussion around what a post-COVID world seems to be largely bifurcated into Office vs WFH/Distributed. More recently there’s some acknowledgment that maybe a hybrid will be the path back, where different people are in the office for 2–3 days/week to take into account social distancing and give people productive time away from the office sans commute. …

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3 Nov 5

Is It Fair To Tell Founders “Just Execute And You’ll Be Fine” When We Know It’s Not A Level Playing Field?

Photo by John Gibbons on Unsplash

So I recently re-shared a 2019 blog post where I’d basically advised founders who’ve raised seed capital to worry less about “how will I raise the next round” and more about “how will I execute my plan?” The post’s kicker said it was “rare for a company that’s executing well to fail to raise a Series A” based on my early experiences in venture.

Some of the responses highlighted that this wasn’t true of companies with founders who didn’t fit the traditional male, usually white, usually straight, founder stereotype. That those founders had personally experienced challenges in what the “executing well” bar meant for them in the eyes of future funders, not to mention that getting funded to start with, and then executing well, was usually already from a disadvantaged position due to the structural issues in tech. …

178 Nov 2

Never Become The Person Your Twitter Followers Want You To Be

Something happens on Twitter after you’ve gathered enough followers to become at least a “semi-public figure” and I don’t think it’s healthy. Expanding outside your immediate social circle of IRL friends and into URL friends tends to include what I’d call “tribe followers” — an increase in the number of people who are expecting a certain type and tone of content in-line with whatever the tweet was that caused them to follow you. …

Why a Paid Newsletter Won’t Be Enough Money for Most Writers (And That’s Fine): The Multi-SKU Creator

Notes and More

Hunter Walk

You’ll find me @homebrew , Seed Stage Venture Fund w @satyap . Previously made products at YouTube, Google & SecondLife. Married to @cbarlerin .

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You’ll find me @homebrew , Seed Stage Venture Fund w @satyap . Previously made products at YouTube, Google & SecondLife. Married to @cbarlerin .

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