🔴 “Everything that dies someday comes back”

How a shuttered publication led birthed a newsletter (ft. Kate Lindsay of Embedded)

Your guide to the newsletter world — new stories every Friday. Brought to you by beehiiv.

In the Spotlight today is Kate Lindsay, who I reached out to after realizing she’d already interviewed at least two of the same people we’ve featured this year … but one year and four years before us. I read those interviews, then a few more pieces, and here we are.

Kate is a freelance writer and newsletter editor, and her own newsletter, Embedded, is pushing 35k subscribers; I knew she’d have plenty to say about writing about the internet for the internet.

In today’s newsletter:

  • 🤝 Why more newsletters should be run by two people

  • ♻️ An indie newsletter born from a shuttered publication

  • 🏠️ Paying NYC rent with premium newsletter subscriptions

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. We have a podcast! Listen to Kate and I in conversation on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.

“I think if you're opening up Instagram and posting with an awareness of an audience, then that is posting as a creator.

Growing up, I always wanted to be a writer; when can I call myself a writer? And the thinking was always like, if you write, you're a writer. So, if you make a Reel, are you a creator? Maybe.”

Kate Lindsay

When a publication dies, what happens to the staff?

Everything dies. But, to quote Bruce Springsteen, “maybe everything that dies someday comes back.”1 Nick Catucci was hired by influence.co, a professional networking site for influencers, in March 2020. He was appointed Editor in Chief for a publication that didn’t exist — his task was to build it. Two months later, nofilter went live:

“We wanted to create something that doesn’t exist anywhere else: a publication about influencer and creator culture, and not just influencer marketing as a business or social media stars as celebrities.”2

Nick Catucci

Their first month was a success; Nick commissioned freelance writers whose personal Twitter followings helped generate solid traffic numbers. This earned him budget to hire one full-time writer, Kate Lindsay.

One year later, influencer.co pulled the plug.3 Says Kate, “It was just one of those things — the economic times were really bad. And, you know, when you're looking to cut something, it is often editorial that goes first.”

Having enjoyed the work and still feeling there was a significant market opportunity in covering the booming creator economy, Kate and Nick decided to keep at it. They were now independent, but they’d received generous enough severance packages to pay themselves to work on the project for the next three months.

No nofilter, no problem

Embedded was not monetized in the early days, but it had a clear editorial purpose with a proven audience, an editor, and a writer:

“I think I was writing five days a week, just something really short every day.

This is what I'll always say when people ask [for writing advice] — if you are in charge of your own publishing, if you don't have an idea, it's really tempting to be like, ‘well, I just won't write something.’ But it's helpful to get yourself in a routine of needing to come up with an idea.

If you're just waiting for inspiration to strike, maybe that's what the idyllic writer life is like, but it's not how it works for a writer that needs to make money.”

Kate Lindsay

At the time of the shutdown, the nofilter email list was around 250,000 addresses strong. Kate and Nick couldn’t just take the list with them, but they could send out an email explaining what happened, what they were doing next, and inviting people to come along. Around 500 people opted in; they weren’t starting from scratch.

And so Embedded, formed from the ashes of nofilter as a Substack newsletter, was born. This was April 2021.

Embedded has now been operating independently for three years. It “grows steadily at about 10k subscribers per year,” says Kate. This is largely word-of-mouth growth. Kate has built a reputation for writing clear-eyed essays on how the internet shapes culture; these essays are often widely shared, usually to the tune of 20k pageviews, sometimes 100k. People find their way to the subscribe button. It’s the kind of newsletter that other newsletter writers like to read and link to in their link roundups; this helps.

A paywall is a shifting, porous border

When Embedded introduced a paywall, they put interview pieces behind it and Kate’s essays in front of it. This proved to be a bad idea. “I was being precious about my precious little essays, and I wanted as many people to read them as possible,” says Kate.

Paywalling the interviews meant the interviewee was less likely to share the piece. They were also missing out on paid subscribers; people didn’t want to pay for interviews with guests they didn’t know. At the end of 2023, Kate tweaked the paywall structure. There’s one free essay per month; the rest are paywalled, and all the interviews are free. It’s worked much better:

“I was, for two years, making a bad business decision. Really, our paid subscribers were not growing because, at the time, I was employed full-time; what mattered to me more was the bigger number.

Now I'm way more interested in paid subscribers and making it sustainable rather than [attracting free subscribers].

Because once you hit a certain number, it's not possible that over 30,000 people are all exactly dedicated to Embedded. You're getting a lot more surface-level engagement.

Now I’d rather [serve] the people who are kind enough to pay or the people who are kind enough to be really engaged readers who don't pay. I want to write for them, and I'm glad to have other people there, but you have to focus your efforts.”

Kate Lindsay

Roles and revenue

Most indie newsletters do not have dedicated editors. Of course, this is one of the appeals of the format—anybody can start a newsletter with a few clicks. This is the promise of the internet: no gatekeepers. But that Embedded has a dedicated writer and a separate, dedicated editor gives it a qualitative edge.

At nofilter, Kate wrote multiple articles each day while Nick steered the ship. In the early days of Embedded, he handled all the administrative work — organizing meetings, creating the site directory.

I asked Kate what the demarcation of labor is now, three years into operating Embedded. Nick is less involved; he has a full-time role while Kate freelances. Today, he handles the “My Internet” interview series and reads over Kate’s essays to flag copy edits before publishing.

In the early days, Kate and Nick split subscription revenue equally. But Nick, being less involved these days and working full-time elsewhere, currently takes no income from the project. Kate takes in at least $1,500 per month—it covers her New York City rent. The record monthly take to date is $3,000.

Kate shared that they’re currently at around 570 paid subscribers; at the monthly subscription rate ($5), that would mean she generates $2,850 per month, of which Substack would take $285. (The actual revenue number is lower, given some subscribers pay the yearly $50 subscription rate.)

It’s (part of) a living

For Kate, then, Embedded is not enough to live on. But it’s a reliable and owned, if fluctuant, source of income — an anchor, a freelancer’s lifeline. It’s also a sandbox where Kate to plies her trade as a researcher and writer on her own terms. And it’s a calling card.

“The hardest part is the beginning, when you're not going to get the numbers you want.

You have to keep coming back and doing it because it's pretty rare that you're gonna start a newsletter and suddenly become a superstar. It's pretty rare that you're gonna start a newsletter and even over time become a superstar. Like, that can't be why you're getting into it.

I feel like we're in a pretty good place, but it's nowhere near my full-time income. But it has risen the profile of my work and gotten me a lot of opportunities.

And it also, I think, makes my work better because I'm forced to write every week. I can never get rusty.”

Kate Lindsay

Kate, besides putting out two to four issues of Embedded per week, has a freelance role editing a newsletter for Diem, a crowdsourced social search engine “inspired by the way women talk.” Her work appears regularly in outlets like GQ and Sherwood. As for Nick, he currently works at GQ as the U.S. Site Director.

Embedded is the second life of a software company’s media experiment that wasn’t able to justify its place on the balance sheet. The experiment died, the website fossilized, but the idea lives on.

Follow Kate on Twitter.
Read and subscribe to Embedded.

For the full story, listen to our podcast on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.

🎙️ In Kate’s episode of The Creator Spotlight Podcast:

  • 📰 Creators becoming journalists becoming creators

  • ✍️ Writing a newsletter vs. editing someone else’s newsletter

  • 🤖 Why the legal definition of “creator” is dangerously outdated

Listen on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.

The two-person newsletter operating model is underrated

Embedded is what it is because an editor had a vision, found a writer aligned with that vision, and the talented two worked together to execute on that vision week in, week out.

It is, quite simply, good to work with other people. Too many cooks may spoil the broth, but so can one cook without a second opinion. People make each other better; Nick’s critical feedback helped Kate become a better writer.

This is a two-sided coin of the creator economy. You can break through with little to no real-world experience and forge your own way, but in doing so, you may miss out on learning from more experienced people. Criticism is a gift!

The point is not simply to find a more experienced editor to partner with if you want to write a newsletter (or vice versa). If you’re writing a personal blog-type newsletter, sure, you do you. But more lofty goals are well-served by an extra mind.

The point is to collaborate. To find a partner who will take equal ownership in the project. If you’re a solid writer but don’t understand marketing, find a marketer. Or a designer, or a social media expert, etc. — find someone with a different skillset, arrive at a concept you’re equally invested in, and you can create something beyond the sum of its parts.

It’s tough work being a solo creator. Share the burden!

Thank you for reading. For more, check out Kate’s episode of our podcast on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.

Next week’s guest is Justin Gordon, a vlogger, podcaster, newsletter writer, entrepreneur, and community builder. He’s done it all — he once published an approximately hour-long interview podcast every day for over 100 days.

And if you missed last week’s issue, covering three lessons I’ve learned in six months of writing this newsletter, read it here.

Talk soon,
Francis Zierer, Editor
Twitter / LinkedIn

What did you think of this week's issue?

Be real. We love hearing from you!

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

1  ‘Atlantic City,’ Bruce Springsteen (Nebraska, 1982)

2  ‘Meet nofilter, a new publication for influencers’ (Katie Smith, Linktree, 2020)

3  If you navigate to nofilterpub.com today, it won’t even load (this was my experience on two browsers). You can, of course, read the old articles if you enter the URL into the Wayback Machine (everything dies; some of it gets stuck in purgatory), and some of them were republished on Embedded.

Reply

or to participate.