🔴 “Everything that dies someday comes back”

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.

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:

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:

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:

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.

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