Every Announces Plans to Incubate Software & Services Products as Core Part of Business

Every, the media company that prides itself on having the “best business writing on the internet,” announced today that it had hired Brandon Gell, formerly co-founder and CEO of Clyde, to be its entrepreneur in residence. He will focus on incubating new businesses internally that the publication can sell to its audience.

Dan Shipper, the co-founder and CEO of Every, told A Media Operator that:

We are going to incubate new products based on our interactions with our readers and what we write… then subscribers will get access to the products as part of their Every subscription. In some cases, we’ll run them internally and in some cases, we’ll spin them out and hire a CEO.

That’s exactly what happened with Lex (which I ironically used to write this piece). In October 2022, Every announced that “we’re building a word processor! It’s called Lex, and it uses AI to create a mind-blowing writing experience. We started building it to see if it could be useful for our writers, but over the past month, Lex has truly transformed our writing process, so we decided to share it with everyone.”

Fast-forward to August 2023, and Every decided to spin out Lex into its own company, with Every co-founder Nathan Baschez becoming CEO of the new entity. As part of that, Lex raised $2.75 million to start scaling the AI-powered word processor. “We figured out how to give investors their pro rata of Lex,” Shipper explained.

One key part of the equation is that all subscribers also get access to Lex for the same subscription price. Shipper explained, “Right now, it’s $20 a month, and ideally, it stays there… we’ll see, though, as we launch more products.”

This, ultimately, comes back to the general strategy that Shipper is executing with Every and why Gell decided to join as the entrepreneur in residence. “Brandon loves our articles,” he said. “The writing has changed how he thinks about business, and that’s why he wanted to hang out with us. Brandon wants to help run the incubation efforts.”

Trying to get into the software business is a horrible move for most media companies. Many have tried and failed. But Every may be different. Dan Shipper’s background is in product, and he was formally the co-founder and CEO of Firefly, a co-browsing tool that allowed for browser-based screen-sharing (for lack of a better phrase).

Gell is no different. He spent seven years as CEO of Clyde, a company that allowed brands to launch, manage, and scale their insurance and warranty programs. The business raised tens of millions and was sold to Cover Genius in 2023.

So, between loving the articles and understanding how to build technology, the Every team is in a position to deliver interesting products to its customers. As Shipper explained:

An essay can be quite a good MVP for a product. We see this already with how-to essays and a lot of times, people will pay for those and then they become courses. They can also then become software products. I’m excited to see the pipeline from the essay to product. It’ll be pretty strong.

And from a business strategy perspective, they’re looking at the content as a sort of top-of-funnel.

If we do our jobs with the media company, the media company is going to be doing the customer acquisition for these software products or services products we’re building… in an ideal world, that means those products have negative CACs. 

Evolution of Every

This sort of product incubation business wasn’t always the objective, though. Before Every, there were two newsletters: Superorganizers, which Shipper wrote, and Divinations from Baschez. They then merged those newsletters into the Everything Bundle on Substack in early 2020. Fast forward 12 months, and the Everything Bundle had turned into Every with eight different newsletters. As Shipper explained:

When we launched Every, it was a bundle of different newsletters and the theory was that we could bring a bunch of business writers together and find a way to build a publication where there were a bunch of different voices involved that allowed people to write together, but also respected the new economics. And the structure we came up with was that everyone had their own newsletter. We bundle under one price and split profits and everyone had their own list and could leave at any point.

However, they found that this individual newsletter bundle wasn’t a viable model. “We built a couple of newsletters that were really scaled,” Shipper explained, but many writers only wrote a few times a month. “The number of people who actually can do the thing, want to do the thing, and can do the thing every week, especially in business writing, is so small,” he said.

The team found that they were splitting resources across several newsletters, and it wasn’t like resources were flush, having raised a small pre-seed round. So, Shipper opted to pivot the brand to a single newsletter with multiple columnists. In October 2023, they hired Kate Lee, formerly the publisher of Stripe Press and head of content at Medium, as the editor-in-chief and general manager of the newsletter.

Another issue Every encountered was its continued top-of-funnel growth. “After the Twitter algorithm changes, we’re seeing less traffic,” he said, “which has slowed subscription rates.”

However, the business is still growing. Shipper explained that it generated low seven figures in revenue last year. “We aim to be breakeven because we are in a growth phase. We try to do as much as we can while also being pretty conservative with the kind of growth you can expect from a media company,” he said.

The bulk of the revenue is derived from subscriptions and course sales. It had a small ad business that fell off the cliff when the ad markets turned. However, Every has a new podcast called How Do You Use ChatGPT, which has gained quite a bit of sponsor interest.

Their ambitions are big for a small team—only five full-time members. Pulling off a software business is lofty, but focusing its development on products its current paying audience might want is a smart first step. However, whether those become nice revenue drivers or massive businesses remains to be seen.