Every’s Master Plan

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You may have noticed that things have accelerated at Every recently. 

We’re exploring the frontier of what a creator-run business can be and can look like. It’s something new: a business that has writing and creative work at its core, and builds software and other kinds of products as an outgrowth of that. It doesn’t look like a traditional venture-backed startup, nor does it look like a typical small media business. It’s ambitious, and fun, and off the beaten path of business. 

It’s also working. 

We’ve been putting out writing that I'm insanely proud of. We’ve also released two new software products: Spiral, which just passed 3,000 users this week, and Sparkle, which is in closed beta. We’re growing revenue rapidly—our monthly recurring revenue is up almost 8 percent over the last 45 days, and our overall cash flow is up significantly as well.

Personally, I feel like I’m doing the best writing of my life. I get to wake up every day, play with AI, think about the future, and craft what I find into words. I’ve been writing on the internet for more than 10 years, but I feel like I just reached an unexpectedly high level: Last week I was in Rome hosting a panel on AI and creativity at the Aspen Institute Italia, two months ago I went to Seattle to interview Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, and next week I’m flying to Brazil to keynote the largest AI conference in Latin America. I’ve never buzzed with so many ideas before.

There are many reasons for this success that have nothing to do with me. The biggest reason, obviously, is you: our readers. Nothing we do could happen without your support and attention.

Another reason is AI. The creative output—writing, code, design—that we can generate as a small organization is stunning. It feels like we’re sprinting in the sun when previously, we’d been running under water.

A third reason is the people who have chosen to work at Every. Our editor in chief Kate, our entrepreneur in residence Brandon, our lead writer Evan, our creative lead Lucas, our engineers Avishek and Andrey—and a whole host of others—are the key factors. It is the ultimate privilege to get to work with so many talented, kind, and hard-working people every day. 

But to the extent that companies reflect their founders—and that creative work reflects the state of mind of the creator—some of the acceleration has to do with me: I’m different, and that’s made Every different, and my writing different as well. 

I want to reflect a bit on why—and how—because I think we’re defining a new path for what a business can look like in 2024 in the age of AI. And hopefully, sharing our story will help you find and follow your own path, too. 

Headwinds

Every has been around for four years, and it’s been through lots of ups and downs. But about a year ago things started to get difficult in a way that felt uniquely hard to me.

Traffic started to decrease, primarily because Elon Musk’s takeover of X changed the algorithm and the platform stopped being as large a source of page views for our articles. In addition, almost a year after the release of ChatGPT, the immediate sugar rush of AI hype had started to wear off, so the bar became higher for us to create writing that went viral. We needed to go deeper with our writing. 

As if that wasn’t enough, my Every cofounder Nathan, who was also one of our top writers, left to run Lex, the Every-incubated AI writing app. We had a big set of shoes to fill in our editorial mix.

Our monthly revenue started to shrink. We had raised a little bit of money in 2020, but we mostly run the business at a break-even level. Declining revenue had the possibility to compound in a negative feedback loop: We would have less revenue to invest back into the business, so the shrinking would accelerate until, well...💀

Behind the scenes, I had to figure out how I wanted to run Every as a newly solo founder. I had to decide what I wanted my role, and Every, to be—and why. In retrospect, it was a new founding moment for the company. We had to replant the flag of what we stood for and why we were even doing this in the first place.

There are a series of key decisions that led from where we were a year ago to where we are today. They’ve contributed tremendously to our success. I want to talk about them, in chronological order.

Decision points

Focusing my writing on AI (fall 2022)

In October 2022, we launched Lex. It immediately took off and began to grow virally. I started to pay serious attention to the then-nascent AI boom. ChatGPT hadn’t been launched yet, but there was something brewing that I knew was important.

The AI boom had the flavor of a few others I’d participated in before. In high school, I started building mobile apps shortly before the iPhone came out. In college, while everyone was obsessed with building social apps, I built a B2B SaaS company just before that category started to take off as the paradigmatic path to startup success. After college, I became obsessed with note-taking apps as Notion was getting started, an obsession that lasted through the tools-for-thought gold rush that made Roam popular in 2020. 

Though I’d been right early in previous booms, I felt like I’d always been too cautious. I was half-in and half-out. I’m usually a on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand guy. 

I keep a short document of principles I try to live by, and in 2020 I’d written this:

So when AI started to excite me, I decided to go all in and write exclusively about it for Every. This focus has paid major dividends both for me and the company.

Being honest about who I am (summer 2023)

Given the above, you might be surprised to learn that until about a year ago I didn’t primarily think of myself as a writer. I thought of myself as a founder who liked to write. About a year ago, I decided to flip that: I started to think of myself as a writer who also builds things.

This was hard for me to admit. For a long time, my identity as a founder had crowded out that as a writer. Writing felt too luxurious, maybe a little shameful, and definitely not as respectable or remunerative as founding a company. 

Once I admitted that I wanted to be a writer to myself—and then to others around me—something interesting happened. The world started to bend around the decision in a way that was incredibly positive.

I used ChatGPT to find role models who had tread this path before me. While I had feared that no one else had successfully combined being a writer with building a valuable business, I learned that I was wrong. Sam Harris, Bill Simmons, Kevin Espiritu, and several other creators had done exactly this—and well.

I hired Kate Lee as our editor in chief from Stripe Press, and our professionalism, quality, consistency, and attention to detail immediately shot up. We signed our lead writer Evan Armstrong to a new contract, ensuring we’d have his voice and ideas in our editorial mix multiple times a week. I stopped treating writing as a luxury that I only got to do when everything else in the business was going well, and instead started to view it as the core process by which everything else in the business worked. My writing started to gain a bigger readership than it ever had before.

There’s a tremendous friction that arises when you don’t allow yourself to do what you really want to do with your life. You make a lot of halfway decisions to negotiate your competing priorities: what you want, and what you want to want.

I’m running full speed ahead at Every, faster than I ever have before. And that’s only been possible by becoming honest about what I want. 

Treating my OCD with Zoloft (summer 2023)

After many years of struggling, I finally figured out the right treatments for my obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

OCD is thought of as a sort of cute, neurotic form of being a neat freak, but it’s much different—and worse—than its caricature. The World Health Organization includes it on its list of the top 20 causes of illness-related disability worldwide. 

For me, it had been debilitating: My thoughts constantly swirled around fears that I knew were irrational but I couldn’t stop thinking about. It took me many years of therapy to even know I had OCD, and a few more years to get the right treatment. (Unfortunately, this is a surprisingly common story.)

About 12 months ago, I got into the right treatment (exposure and response prevention with an OCD specialist) and started taking the antidepressant drug Zoloft. It has completely transformed my life. I’m calmer, my mind no longer races as much, and I can more easily differentiate between fears that I need to take seriously and those that are irrelevant.

Not only has the medication significantly reduced my symptoms so that OCD doesn’t run my life anymore, it’s also changed my sense of self. I’m not fundamentally different; I still have the same personality, interests, tastes, loves, and fears. But it’s allowed me to evolve in ways that I hadn’t previously been able to: I’m more confident and less conflict-averse, and it’s easier for me to take risks and make mistakes.

I’m sad and angry that it took me so long to find the right treatment. But I’m also filled with hope that treatments like this exist and can work. 

(Obviously, Zoloft is not for everyone. Asking whether it works is kind of like asking whether paint works to make art. On average, paint makes random smears. For some people, it makes Starry Night.) 

Starting a podcast (November 2023)

The deprioritization of link-sharing in X came with a new algorithmic priority: the promotion of posts containing videos. Daddy Elon taketh away, Daddy Elon giveth. When Evan noted this, we began having serious discussions about creating video podcasts to take advantage of the shift. 

That’s how my show, AI & I (previously called How Do You Use ChatGPT?)—about how the smartest people in the world use AI in their work and lives—came to be. In its eight or so months of existence, it’s generated 740,000 video views on X, 223,000 YouTube views, and 90,000 plays on Spotify. It’s also been insanely fun: I love interviewing people, a habit I’d dropped since shelving my original Every column, Superorganizers.

While I can’t say this for sure, I think the podcast has made my writing more resonant—it’s certainly grown my audience tremendously, which has led to more traffic for Every. It helps people put a face to the byline—the writing supports the podcast, the podcast supports the writing, and they both support everything else in a virtuous cycle. It’s also been creatively rewarding to work on it with Every’s creative lead, Lucas Crespo, who acts as the producer. It would not be nearly as popular or interesting without his constant attention and care.

Building products again (May 2024)

A few months ago I got an email from my longtime friend Brandon Gell with the subject line, “Long time no talk—considering my next move.” He’d just sold his insurance tech startup Clyde and was toying around with starting a studio to incubate software products. He wanted to know if I was interested in doing that as part of Every.

I was. We’d incubated software products, like Lex, before, and because audience growth had gotten harder, I was thinking about ways to increase our revenue from the valuable subscribers we already had. Brandon joined as our first entrepreneur in residence shortly thereafter.

Within just a few months, we launched Spiral publicly, released a beta version of Sparkle, and spun up a few other initiatives that we’ll be able to announce soon. Brandon is a force of nature.

This week, when we were discussing what the last few months have been like as compared to our expectations, we realized it’s gone almost exactly like we planned—which almost never happens in startups.

It’s a fun time to be building on the internet.

Our master plan

A few weeks ago, I shared Every’s master plan with the team. It looks like this: 

(Hat tip for this pyramid model to Chad Cannon, who laid it out at a creator retreat hosted by Tiago Forte. It blew my mind.)

Our core activity, at the bottom of the pyramid, is to produce writing and other forms of content that reach millions of people. We monetize the audience with our Every subscription—a bundle of content, software, discounts on products, community events, and more for tens of thousands of people. At the top of the pyramid, we offer higher-ticket items like courses, consulting, and advising for small numbers of people in our audience who can afford to pay for our expertise. 

We then take the cash we generate and funnel it into producing more great writing. Hopefully, this will allow us to build Every into a creative playground for smart people to make the best work of their lives. 

I am confident that this is a viable way to build a business with writing and creativity as its core—one that also becomes large and valuable. 

Here I need to take a step back: I’ve been writing about my conviction that we’re building at the frontier of business. We’re doing something new, but I want to make clear why and how that happened. It’s not because we’re trying to do something new. I didn’t step back and come up with a perfectly rational vision of the future because I wanted to feel special. (I’ve tried, and it doesn’t work very well.)

Instead, I stopped trying to fit myself and Every into an old model of what a founder, software startup, or media company needs to look like. Those are all old ideas, from an older context. They can be useful when needed. But they’re dry and dead.

I’ve just tried to be honest about who I am, what I want, and what I believe to be true about the little piece of the world we’re trying to build in. Newness comes as an automatic outgrowth of that. It doesn’t require trying—only honesty.

Emerson wrote, “Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.” 

You sail into uncharted waters because you’re actually looking at reality instead of seeing what you’ve been told to see. You've lifted your eyes from old maps and started reading the stars and currents around you.

When you review your progress, you’ve ended up somewhere new—but at the time, all you were doing was solving problems as they appeared.

We’ll keep reading the currents as they come along. Thanks for joining us on this journey so far. We couldn’t have done it without you.

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Dan Shipper is the cofounder and CEO of Every, where he writes the Chain of Thought column and hosts the podcast AI & I. You can follow him on X at @danshipper and on LinkedIn, and Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.