We Have Been Brewing
Something new.
Hey there,
TL: DR – We are releasing a paid subscription to the newsletter. However, nothing will change; you will continue receiving the newsletters as always. Those signing up for the paid version will receive two additional newsletters in their inboxes.
The last article (on narratives) was our most-read piece to date. We added hundreds of subscribers to the mailing list since it went live. I had not planned for this announcement to go right after it, but here we are.
I promised we would only email you stories worth your time. Since this email might read like an advertisement, I’ve included eight newsletters from the past month to stay true to my promise. These stories are from the beta versions of the paid newsletter we have been developing over the past month.
With that said, here’s what we’ve been cooking.
When I started this newsletter, I wanted to tell the stories of undiscovered founders who still needed a platform. These stories were worth telling, even if they did not involve a tradable token. We’ve stayed true to that mission over the past few years. Close to 6,000 subscribers will receive this email; a thousand will read it within the first hour, and 40% will read it within two days. Writing for and learning from many of you has been an honour.
Stories offer an escape when reality does not paint a pretty picture. I turned to writing last November to escape the after-effects of the FTX fiasco. Soon enough, two friends, Sid and Saurabh, joined in. (You can read more about the crew on our about us page.)
We wrote about everything we found interesting – stories about the emergence of a new internet, the battle for royalties in NFT markets, and the struggles with value capture among protocols. We even understood the psyche of one of the most prolific airdrop hunters and the motives behind his behaviour.
To continue discovering and writing stories, you need a monetisation model. One of the pitfalls we could go into is building a lifestyle instead of a business. While we have built distribution with the newsletter, the risk of relying on ad dollars alone is always present.
And that is a treacherous place to be when you consider exchanges can collapse, platforms can conduct a rug-pull, and protocols often have a single agenda with the stories they try to push: the value of their token. I don’t want to be in the business of peddling tokens when there are better stories to be written.
One way to reduce our reliance on external capital is to have a paid version of the newsletter. Revenue solves most things in life, as they say.
Over the past month, we have been running a beta test for the paid product. A hundred of our most engaged readers were given free lifetime access to help with the test version of the paid newsletter. A handful of readers noticed the paywalls on our blog and paid. We will extend their subscriptions for a month for free to thank them for their trust. Active members of our Telegram community and LobsterDAO have also been given free access to the paid newsletter.
Here’s what you need to know:
Nothing changes for you as a free subscriber. You will continue receiving in-depth articles with the same frequency as always. The core product will not change. Our long forms are still our best distribution channel. We do not plan on diluting it.
The paid version adds two more newsletters (Mondays and Fridays) for the founders and investors who do not want to spend all their time keeping up with the industry. Do not sign up for it unless compressed stories with deep insights save you time and effort.
We will not include market commentary or weekly round-ups in the paid versions. These are going to be stories on specific themes that are relevant for the week. We do not have ‘alpha’ content.
The two pieces we will release weekly under the paid subscription are aimed at senior executives, VCs and founders. So the articles will be optimised for density and use more jargon to give as much context, in the least amount of time. The eight pieces linked above should give you an idea of what we are shooting for with the paid newsletter.
We have priced the newsletter at $25/month for eight articles. That comes to $3 per article, but you can access the paid version of the newsletter in numerous ways.
You can use our referral programme. Inviting three friends to Decentralised.co puts you on the paid version for a month.
If you are a bootstrapped founder, e-mail sid@decentralised.co for access.
E-mail me (joel@decentralised.co) if all you want to do is read a single article. We do not want you to steal our content. We are genuinely glad that you take the time to read our stuff.
If you run a community and a specific story interests you, we will generate custom links you can share with everyone.
The paid version of the newsletter will be led by Saurabh, who joined us from The Block. Over the next year, the broad vision is to build a sustainable business combining capital, distribution, and a founders network to scale from 0 to 1 with the least friction.
Our launch of VCData.site in May of this year was carried out with the same mission in mind. We anticipate the paid version of the newsletter to be ±20% of our revenue for the year.
I’ll keep you posted about how the experiment pans out by the end of the year.
Thanks again for reading, commenting, and sharing insights that make us all slightly better. You can use the button below to subscribe and join in on the next chapter.
You use the one below to gift a subscription to someone who may enjoy reading our content or buy for a group.
Anxiously excited about this new launch,
Joel John