Gratitude for All Y’all plus Year End Stats

The Year in Review, Gratitude, Polls & Charts!

What a year, am I right?

First, my second son was born. Which was to be expected. Secondly and unexpectedly, I was linked by Scott Alexander and then the New York Times. That’s like the Buddha holding fire and ice in each of his hands. Plus multiple links from Substack Reads, thanks to Nadia Bolz-Weber and then the staff of the Weekender!

“You hear about Some Guy? He’s going places.”

For all the brand new people, please click here for a nice introduction.

Now, here’s what that looks like on a graph.

The long, long ramp with low subscriber count is when I thought it would be a good idea to write fiction about group sense-making. This turned out to be a bad idea for traffic.

The jumps are the times I wrote stuff about my personal life. I started to do that consciously in June of this year. The highlighted data point is the day my paternity leave started. The big jump is about the same day that my second son was born and everyone linked to me at once. There’s no doubt about it. The strategy of “talk about my life because people like that stuff and then use that to promote the idea of the Trust Assembly” is working. For new readers, the Trust Assembly is this entirely orthogonal thing to my biographical stories about how we should improve the news ecosystem.

And then there’s that up and down see-saw part a little while ago that lasted for about a whole month. Let’s talk about that in a second. But first, gratitude.

Thanks, Guys! Also, Substack Has an Actually Really Good Business Model

How about another graph? I’ll put it over the same time span as the total subscribers graph. This is the paying subscribers graph.

First, my thanks not only to y’all but all of y’all. I’m an eccentric guy and you give up a bit of your life to read my words. I know that and I value it. I want to make sure I’m honoring that as much as I can. In the same way YouTubers have pet names for their viewers, I’m going to start calling you all “the guys.” It’s the highest honor I can give. So, thanks guys.

A special thanks to all who reached into their pocket to show support. We’re a little over halfway to a bestseller badge! This is enough money that my wife hasn’t minded me paying for things like GitHub licenses or hosting licenses to try to get the Trust Assembly off the ground. The biggest impact by far, though, has been that she’s okay with me dedicating more time to the project every week. With two small kids running around that’s no small ask. I still do the bulk of my writing/drafting early in the morning before my family is awake, but it’s been a huge productivity gain for me.

Thanks to Substack for making this all possible. It wouldn’t have been my intuition that you could make enough money from writing on the internet that your wife wouldn’t even be upset about you writing on the internet, but I was clearly wrong. The whole team that enables this is pretty amazing, and at this point I feel like I know half of the company via Notes. My internal projections, derived by holding up a ruler to the screen and drawing a trendline with a sharpie is that she might even ask me to do more if this keeps up.

The loudest of all possible gratitudes to the awesome people who are helping to build the Trust Assembly. I don’t have their permission to use their names but just know we have a Discord and a GitHub going and they are hard at work. These are people who read a post, liked an idea, and volunteered to make it real. The group is excited, as am I, and I am hoping to have some more specific announcements soon.

I also want to specifically thank Scott Alexander, who I mentioned above. Without him, none of those volunteers would know about the project. For those who don’t know who that is, I’ll go ahead and call him the Johnny the Pool Guy of the Effective Altruist movement. The dude literally donated to a kidney to a stranger because of math. When he linked to the project —and again, I want to stipulate that I don’t know him, and have never had any kind of private conversation with him— the Trust Assembly went from something that I write about at 2am to a very possibly real thing. If you want me to endorse any other publication, it’s that one.

Thanks again to Nadia Bolz-Weber, the staff of the Weekender, Ross Douthat, and Rod Dreher. I’m pretty sure none of them linked to me for the purposes that I now intend to use the eyeballs for, but I hope they would approve of it anyway.

Okay, fine. I get it. I need to have a Brand.

Let’s talk about that plateau. Imagine you went into an Italian restaurant and they offered you spaghetti and a pickled herring sundae. You would get up and leave. Duh.

A piece of advice that I give myself and that has never failed me is: “Okay, now pretend you’re at work and the other person is a customer. Would you still do all of that stupid stuff that amuses you?”

I have really, really weird hobby/interest clusters. I love woodworking, writing stories, reading fantasy novels, lifting weights, religious apologetics, product development, AI, futurism, and going to Costco with my family. Plus even more stuff it would take too long to write down and would just be obnoxious. If I went to talk to a pro about marketing a website around those themes, they would probably put out a cigarette on my forehead.

I asked in the Extelligence Substack Chat Thread if it was jarring that my content jumps around so much. The answer was overwhelmingly no. However, that was also from the group that was likely to respond and not the people who left. As a guy who “turns customer data into actionable business insights” for a living, you have to look at how people vote with their feet. There was a lot of churn for that month where we stayed flat. The curve is flat not because there was no movement, but because I had equal numbers of people leaving as signing up. If it had been all positive I’d be up another two hundred or so subscribers. There were a lot of email notifications during that period.

My goal here is get a large enough voice that I can bring significant support to the Trust Assembly. The higher my profile the better able I will be to do that and/or bring leverage to any deal. I need to serve that end. So, I imagined myself in two different personas:

Pretend you’re a potential non-profit funder and Some Guy, sends you a link to a substack asking to support his weird meta news organization idea. It’s an interesting post but also the most liked post there is about a religious experience, then a story about his grandma, then another one about his cousin passing away… and what?

Now, pretend you’re you, just someone who is reading this right now. A reader. You probably found me from one of the pieces I just mentioned. You’re here because you specifically like that content. You like to read about my life, or religious apologetics, or what have you. And then you sign up thinking “Man, I feel less alone in the world because this is pretty open book of another person living a life and that’s comforting. I feel like I can undo the top button of my soul’s tight jeans and just know that I’m not alone in the world.” Then the next thing is a long spergy post about jury systems and some kind of computer architecture diagram?

This put me in a bit of a pickle. My biggest rule in life is “you gotta be you.” It’s the only thing that works over long periods of time. Whenever I have tried to not be myself, I always have almost immediately regretted it. I am that weird guy with all those interests. In real life, I sometimes try to say multiple things at once and what comes out is a weird alien sounding mess. So, then I asked myself, can I do all of this but optimize it for everyone? After all, it’s not like I go on long anecdotes in my professional life.

When I thought of it that way, there was one obvious solution. I created two child substacks.

Some Guy’s Junk Drawer

This will be the repository of all my long-form fiction, book reviews, and creative stuff that doesn’t fit what I think most people are here for. I do very weird book reviews. If it doesn’t belong here but I think it’s good, it will go to Some Guy’s Junk Drawer. You can check out a story about a grandma, a grandson, a werewolf, and a vampire here. You can check out another story about the life of a doctor told through a series of knocks he gets on his door here.

Don’t worry this will take away my focus. Part of the reason I did this is because I have something like 1,000 pages of fiction on my Google Drive that I have already written. It will need a bit of a polish before I bring it over, but I figured I shouldn’t let it go to waste and it actually would takes less time to bring it up to standard than drafting new. I’ve had mega viral pieces of fiction before, so I might as well use that to my advantage again. I will implement a paywall at some point in the future but I’m going to set it so that if you pay for one of my substacks you get access to all of them.

The Trust Assembly

This will be the repository for all Trust Assembly related content and will allow me to carve out a space specific for deep-dive content that I can direct interested parties toward without all the clutter about my life. As that project ramps up, this will take more and more of my focus as we do deep dives into particular cases. No paywall strategy for this.

Extelligence

Extelligence will be for stories about my life, essays that I think are of interest to this group, and then anytime I have big stuff regarding the Trust Assembly I will use this substack to drive traffic. That way I can economize the attention you give me and won’t annoy you too much with the details. When I do my voting poll posts and general updates, I will link to any content on the other two substacks that I think is of particular interest to help grow them both. That’s the best and smartest strategy I can think of to maximize the value of the attention you all have so kindly given to me.

Voting Polls

I usually write stuff about my life in a kind of trance. Sometimes, I didn’t even know I felt a particular way about something until that something has moved through my fingertips and onto a screen. Still, it’s usually not a painful experience. The story about my grandma was an exception to this. I need to write something that isn’t going to make me cry alone in my office for the next few updates.

So what you’re voting on here would be in effect after those pieces.

Oil Rig Summer — fun anecdotes about the hardest job I have ever had in my life, and why I will never ever complain about email job stuff.

Near Death Roofing Experiences — fun on roofs given my dad’s ideas about safety gear making people careless.

Sawmill Summers — fun anecdotes about the people who worked in the sawmill, like Nick at Night who was a genuinely schizophrenic guy who used to carve wooden guns out of scrap board ends.

Middle Middle Class — How I stopped living paycheck to paycheck.

On the Subject of Shantelle — How I went to therapy and started to set boundaries, but not before I ended up driving a homeless drug addict all over town.

Moosha Moosha — the story of how my little brother used to play with my earlobes.

Call for Volunteers

Seeking some additional volunteers for the Trust Assembly.

If you are a lawyer with interests in free speech and fair use, or non-profit org structure, I would love to have a very low commitment conversation with you.

If you are a designer who wants to build an entire wiki style site, boy would I like to impose on your generosity. There’s no funding for this, but as we approach an MVP I’m going to seek some so hopefully we can start paying at least some money to our volunteers.

Links to People for Karma

It’s the time of year where we should try to do good for others. So here are a few substacks I think are very well-written that could use some more readers. I’m only going to do a few of these to keep the signal high. I’ll try to do a few of these every update post.

True World by Keenan Weind — there’s a lot of good stuff here based on Greek mythology and while it’s a bit niche if you like that stuff, it’s worth a look. If you know where Rome geeks (men) hang out, it’s worth directing them here.

Field Notes by Katrina Gulliver — a fancy lady who lives in Europe and has appeared in many fancy places. It’s full of a lot of “oh, hey! I didn’t know that!” content.

Moon, Moonsplain, Murder Bear by Luke T. Harrington — A man with an interest range as broad as mine. God and horror. Go give it a tire kick.