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Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: We both really, really like writing and are good at it, and care a lot about the written quality of the product, and we both also have this product DNA where we’ve built software products before, and we know how that works, and we’re trying to figure out if you put those two things together, what can you make? 00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. Joined by our guest, Dan Shipper of every. 00:00:40 - Speaker 1: Thank you. Thanks for having me. 00:00:41 - Speaker 2: And Dan, I know you like me are quite a reader, reading anything good these days? 00:00:47 - Speaker 1: I am. I’ve been actually reading a lot. I also just have to say, like, the way that you do that intro, it feels so calming. I feel like I’m in good hands. I wanna like slow down and just bask in it a little bit. Perfect. Yeah, but what am I reading? I just finished this book by John Green, who I love called The Anthropocene Reviewed, and John Green, he typically writes novels. I know him for his novels. He’s written a couple books called like A Fault in Our Stars, another book called Turtles All the Way Down, which have been really impactful for me, and this is the first series of his essays that I’ve read. It’s basically a collection of essays. And the conceit is that in the Anthropocene, which is the era that we’re in right now, which is the era in which humans are affecting the environment. One of the central things that we do is we give reviews to everything. If you go on Google Maps or Yelp or whatever, everything in our world has like a review that boils everything down to between 1 and 5 stars. 00:01:43 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I always find it funny when you look up something like, I don’t know, the Atlantic Ocean or like an abandoned power plant or something like that, and there’ll be reviews in there, which are often hilarious to read, but yeah. 00:01:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s really funny. He opens it up by saying that he noticed that someone had given a park bench, like a 5 star review, and it’s like, what is that? What is that about? Why do we do that? And so the conceit of it is every essay in it is a review that boils everything down to between 1 and 5 stars of lots of things like sunsets or sycamore trees or bacteria or every single topic at the end of it, he’s like, I give sunsets 5 stars, and then every time he does it, it’s hilarious, but it says something I think really interesting and I just tore through it in like 2 days. It was really good. 00:02:30 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. I feel like he’s got quite a personality as a podcaster. I think YouTube was even maybe where he got started, kind of classic blogger, but yeah, great observations on the world, but also, yeah, very poignant observations, but also just really funny, really entertaining, and so that makes it, yeah, easy to read. I am at the point in my life actually, where there are many great books that have had a big impact on my life that are kind of a slog. But with being a busy parent and business owner and whatever else, I really appreciate something that’s just easy to read. It’s fun, it’s written in a way that it just flows smoothly and you can both get those great insights and widening of perspective, that is the reason why we consume media, especially things like long form books, but in a way that maybe it’s a little less costly in terms of your own personal activation energy. 00:03:22 - Speaker 1: I totally, totally agree. Like, there’s all those books where you’re like, I should really read this and I should really like it, but I’m just feel like I’m kind of out of gas, like, I don’t have the mental energy to do it, and then there are other books where you just kind of tear through it. I just went through this whole series of books. I basically went through the ouvre of this guy Irv Yum, who’s like a psychiatrist, and he writes, basically what I would term therapy fan fiction. And it’s so good. I read like 5 books in like 3 days and I just could not stop reading it, and I just like finding those things sometimes as a refresher to all the heavy stuff that we end up thinking about and reading day to day. 00:04:00 - Speaker 2: Absolutely. Well, tell me a little bit about your background. You kind of come from maybe a more classic Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur background, but then you had this journey of being early as a kind of substack paid newsletter, and now you’ve got your business every, which is very interesting, kind of modern internet media business, writers collective has some elements of some of the small giants, the business stuff we talk about here, but yeah, tell us the journey that brought you here. 00:04:28 - Speaker 1: The journey that brought me here, so my background basically started in software, really in technology and software. I started programming when I was in middle school. I read a Bill Gates biography and decided I wanted to start a Microsoft competitor, so I learned Basic, and I was going to build a Microsoft competitor called Megasoft, and Didn’t actually end up ever writing an operating system, although I really wanted to, but just fell really in love with that whole thing because I was super interested in business, and the only way to really start a business when you’re in middle school, is to be able to program cause that’s the only way that you can start a business where the only cost is your time. So, built a lot of apps, started with apps for BlackBerry in high school. And then the iPhone came out and I started building iPhone apps. That’s kind of how I paid for gas and food in high school, and then in college, finally met people that were also programmers and were also into like starting companies and stuff like that, and started my first company, it’s called Firefly. And there was an enterprise software company we built co-browsing, which is kind of like screen sharing, but all of that happens in a web browser, and we applied it to customer service, so built that for several years, primarily bootstrapped, so you’ll notice like a thread in my life is kind of this whole bootstrapping type mentality, and then sold it to Pega, which is this big public enterprise software company, right as I was coming out of school, and that was really, really good experience. I learned a lot about building a business. I ran the firefly business inside of Pega for a little while, and then I spent the next couple of years just like trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. 00:06:06 - Speaker 2: And I think this may have been the point where we met and I think what you described to me at the time and you had just started the super organizers newsletter and you were starting to interview people. Correct me if I’m wrong on this, but what I remember is you’d reached out to me and said, you know, hey, can we chat? I’m working on this kind of interview newsletter and the way you described it was, well, you didn’t exactly know what was next, but you figured talking to lots of really Interesting, accomplished, productive people might lead you to that somehow, and it really resonated with me because I was working on ink and Switch at the time, which in some ways had a similar origin after my sort of big career success in the form of Furoku and that ending and me trying to figure out what was next. Starting a research lab was a way. To kind of maximize my optionality, stay in divergent mode, not pick a thing to work on, basically, and eventually that did turn into something that was pretty focused around some specific goals, but at least in the beginning, the point was to do a thing that was incredibly exploratory and didn’t like tie me down to one very specific path. 00:07:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. And I definitely did that and the newsletter that I started Super Organizers was part of that. I think like, I went through this phase where I was writing a novel, which I wrote like 4 drafts of. I did tons and tons of other like little software projects and worked with a bunch of different people and had a bunch of different ideas that I was excited about. And eventually, I started this newsletter called Super organizers, cause I realized that I was just super interested in productivity and note taking. I’d had a bunch of ideas. In the, I would say like tools for thought space for a long time, kind of stemming from my first company where I just felt like I was this information processing machine, but my tools for processing information were like not great, and I was really interested in building software to like make that better. So when we talked to you, I basically started super organizers and the conceit for me, the reason for starting it was I wanted to build a productivity software company. But I didn’t exactly know 100% what I wanted to build, so I decided, hey, I’ll start a newsletter. I’ll interview like really smart, interesting people about how they think about their own productivity systems, and I’ll use that to inform the product I make. I’ll write the interviews up and get an audience, but like the real idea is it’s a way for me to do customer interviews with smart people. And so talk to you, published a bunch of interviews with a bunch of really, really smart people, and along the way, I just actually decided or found that people loved the newsletter, and loved the writing, and I could build a business with it, and that was very exciting to me and not something that I’d really considered before. So it kind of put me on this path of like, how would I do this as a business instead of like actually just going and building software cause I love writing, I love business, and this is a way to put them together. 00:08:56 - Speaker 2: Another interesting thing here, I feel like is the timing that sort of email newsletters were on the rise, maybe as kind of a replacement for blogs, RSS. I’m not sure exactly. Substacks obviously a big part of the story. You were early there and sort of the concept of paying a subscription for an email newsletter was something that I feel like kind of came out of nowhere, but then suddenly was getting a lot of traction and you were, I felt like very much in the right place at the right time to take advantage of that. 00:09:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it was a really, really interesting time. It was that wave about a year and a half ago where this started to really pick up that I was running super organizers and starting to think about this as like a business, and at the time I didn’t really understand that it was becoming this like trend, and it was kind of at that time that I started talking to my co-founder Nathan Behez. We’ve been friends for a long time, and we just both, at the time he was the first employee at Substack, so he was really feeling it and like, had been on this train for a long time and kind of knew that this was coming, I think in a lot of ways, and we started talking together at the time he was no longer at Substack. And we started talking about what could we build together, what we do together, and what that turned into is us kind of thinking about what would it look like to build a media company in this kind of environment where solo paid newsletters are becoming a thing, lots of writers are leaving their publications to do it on their own, and there’s a lot of benefits to that, but there’s also a lot of drawbacks, both for writers and for readers, that I think People maybe aren’t as sensitive to right now, but will become more and more important over time. And so we started thinking about how do we build a publication or a media company under this kind of environment, and we knew we wanted to build something that had a group of writers that was covering topics that we’re most interested in, which is basically topics in tech, topics that are about business, but that, you know, when you read them, you’re both entertained and you kind of feel like you’re getting something out of it. I would put this podcast in that kind of category too, where you feel like you’re getting something that is going to help you think better, make better decisions, be better at your job in some way. So we’re kind of like toying around with what is that kind of a media company look like? How do you build that? and how do you build the supply of writers and create incentives for them to all be in one place when there’s so much incentives to be on your own, especially if you’re someone that can write well enough to do that. And so, that’s where we started to come up with this idea for a writer collective, which I can explain, and start on this journey of like taking all these individual writers who could really write on their own in this environment and figure out how do we actually write together because in a lot of ways that’s better. 00:11:34 - Speaker 2: Well, that brings us really nicely to our topic today, which is, let’s say, building a media empire in the internet age, or just simply creating a media brand, an internet era media brand. And I think one of the things that was maybe eye-opening for me, watching your journey on this was thinking about what I would call classic media brands, I guess that’s the way to put it. Something like magazines and newspapers like The Economist is one that comes to mind, or The New York Times, maybe if you go more to entertainment, you have something like Disney, there’s one that I’ve read quite a bit about just because, yeah, Walt Disney is a really interesting entrepreneur and everything that’s been created there and how that company has evolved over time, is also really interesting. But I remember you telling me a bit about some of these what I would now call I guess like internet native media brands, and that’s something like Vox, for example, or Vice. So both of these to me are very evocative of like I know instantly what their voice is and what their kind of view on the world is, but they’re not one single media, right? Like you know, the Economist is a magazine. And so it’s writing, and that’s pretty much it. And then they have, I don’t know, data visualizations and things, but Vox, well, they have articles on their website, but they also have a bunch of podcasts, and then they have some YouTube videos, but they also have like a Netflix series and there’s definitely something that unites all of them, but at the same time they feel different to me in some ways from these more classic brands. And then you’re on this journey of bringing your perspective as a software entrepreneur, I don’t know, maybe it’s a software is eating the world kind of thing to, OK, how does the internet change media and especially if you’re doing it more at this indie level and yeah, as you said, like, how writers and publications and stuff even gets distributed to people, all of that is changing, which maybe creates confusion. It’s hurting some of these existing classic publications, and people have talked about the death of journalism and that sort of thing, but that it also creates new opportunities. 00:13:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. There’s a lot in there, there’s a lot to unpack. I think on the kind of like traditional media side, the way it has worked for a long time is, yeah, you have an editor at the top that is kind of assigning stories, is responsible for the voice and the vision of the publication, and writers kind of like slot into that more or less, and the publication is. Well, for, they pay you a salary, they give you an editor, they give you kind of like support, you kind of know what to expect. And a lot of cases, they don’t even give you a salary now because it’s too expensive, but like they give you some money and the publication’s job is to…
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