Tangle - A year ago, I went all in.

Episode Date: April 13, 2022

A departure from form today, as Tangle reaches an important milestone. Thanks for listening.You can read today's podcast here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, the place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host, Isaac Saul, and today's episode is a little special edition, a little something different. I'm just going to jump right in and get to it and explain. I'm just gonna jump right in and get to it and explain. So the month of April is a special one for me and for Tangle. Not only does it mark two years since we launched paid subscriptions, it is also the month that I quit my job one year ago to work full-time on this project. That means for

me it is a month of reflection. So before we jump in, I want to let you know that we are going to be taking off tomorrow, Thursday, Friday, and Monday. We'll be back on Tuesday, April 19th. With Passover and Easter weekend approaching, this felt like a great time for our own little version of spring break and an opportunity for me to reconnect away from the news. As I have written and talked about on this podcast before, taking regular breaks is a pretty important part of my own stress management and part of a larger goal of mine to make sure that I don't burn out from doing this newsletter and this podcast as many other writers, solo independent writers have. I want to do this work for decades, not years. And as always, I encourage you to take a few days off from political

news when we do. It's good for you. It's good for your mental health. And this is a great weekend to do it. I also wanted to take this opportunity to pause and talk a little bit about where Tangle is and what you're part of and how special some of what is happening here at Tangle really is. I'm about to reveal some of the results of our survey on Monday, but I will get to that in one second. It has been an exhilarating year since I quit my full-time job. Working on one project that I truly love has helped me improve my output of Tangle, both in quality and quantity, and it's also improved the business. In the last year, we went from 22,000 daily readers to over 35,000. We now have readers in all 50 states and over 50 countries. We went from 3,300 paid subscribers to over 5,500. Our podcast, which you're listening to right now and was just in its infancy a year ago, is fully operational with unique original content every day,

pending sponsors, and close to 2,000 listeners on every single episode. We broke a couple hundred thousand plays, I think, a month or two ago now. We have moved off of Substack and built our own website on the independent platform Ghosts, which makes our newsletter 100% independent in every sense of the word. As well as expanding our reach, we've also expanded our team, necessarily. When I started Tangle, it was really just me every morning waking up, scouring the news, preparing a newsletter, running off to my day job as an editor, and then finishing it up before lunch to send it out, and then starting over the whole process when I got home from work. Now there are seven other part-time

employees working on Tangle. A social media manager other part-time employees working on Tangled, a social media manager, three editors for the newsletter, two interns, and Trevor, who is our podcast producer and editor. I've moved into a shared office space where I have my own desk and even a dedicated room to record this podcast

where I'm recording right now, meaning I'm no longer working from home or recording podcasts in my bedroom closet, which my wife is very grateful for. She says thank you. With the help of our growing team, our content has taken leaps and bounds forward. Our newsletters are longer, more accurate, contain fewer mistakes than they did a year ago, which all is a reflection of our more in-depth research and the editing team. The interns and additional editorial staff have improved our research capabilities and also allowed us to feature the occasional writing from other authors.

That means our pieces are more informative, more well-rounded, coming from a more diverse set of sources. With our podcast and growing social channels, all of our content is reaching more people every day on more platforms. Obviously, the last year has also been monumental in world events. The Afghanistan withdrawal, inflation, the infrastructure bill, the Omicron variant, the war in Ukraine, the confirmation of Katonji Brown Jackson define the year. The trials of Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William Roddy Bryan, of Kyle Rittenhouse, of Derek Chauvin, captured everyone's attention.

Here at Tangle, we interviewed Andrew Yang, Josh Rogan, Grace Lavery, Alex Vitale, and even John Segoe, one of the top pro-life activists in the country, one of the men behind the anti-abortion bill in Texas. Despite being an off year for political news, one without an election, and one where other news organizations have seen a huge drop in engagement, we continue to see open rates on our newsletter of over 50%, dozens and sometimes hundreds of responses to every newsletter, and growth of a readership that, unlike nearly every other mainstream news source, is ideologically

diverse. Our paid members continue to stick with us at incredible rates, with about 99% of all subscribers staying subscribers every month. Proof that our paid offerings are worth the very reasonable price of admission, readtangled.com slash membership, go subscribe. If you want a product that 99% of people keep paying for every month, it's right there, so support us. And notably, relevantly, for all of you listeners out there, we have a podcast that is getting tremendous reviews, a full, clean five stars on Apple Podcasts, and our listenership is growing every single month.

This is particularly incredible given the environment that we're operating in. Tangle is a bootstrap business that ran for eight months without a single dollar of revenue, no investors, no advertisers. Now, as we continue to grow, we're projected to do more than $300,000 in revenue this year. Meanwhile, major news initiatives like CNN+, which had $300 million of funding, are flopping. Traffic across news outlets is cratering. The old sensational partisan model clearly isn't working. And it's no surprise. 74% of news consumers across the planet want outlets that quote reflect a range of different views and leave it up to people to decide. But very few news outlets actually do this. This new model is. Tangle is. We're still a little

guy in a big fight, our 35,000 daily readers and 2,000 daily listeners compared to tens of millions who watch partisan cable news every night. But we are chipping away. Perhaps best of all, though, is what we're doing. We're building trust. Earlier this week, I mentioned this YouGov poll that recently came out showing that there is not a single media outlet in America trusted by more than 50% of Democrats and Republicans. That includes the Weather Channel, okay? Nobody is at 50% trust from Democrats and Republicans. That includes the Weather Channel, okay? Nobody is at 50% trust from Democrats and Republicans. Intuitively, I knew that Tangle would stick out

in this way, but despite all the polling and questions and surveys I've done of my readers, I'd never actually tested this theory. So I decided to, and guess what we found? We truly are unique. I decided to, and guess what we found? We truly are unique. More than 2,200 people answered our poll, about the same or more than most statistically significant national political polls. 94.1% of self-identified Republicans, 96.9% of Democrats, and 96.2% of Independents said they found Tangle somewhat or very trustworthy. Again, not a single mainstream organization in the country has more than 50% trust from either Democrats or Republicans when that same question is posed, and we've got over 90% of both, including independents. Of course, we were polling our own readers, so the sample is biased, but we don't really

have a choice. I mean, we're not a household name yet. Still, even with that caveat, and it's a big one, this is proof of concept in the best way I could ever imagine. As I've said before, one of my critical goals with Tangle was to create the most trusted news brand in politics. I wanted to bring people from across the political spectrum under the same roof. Few things might prove that's what we're doing more than the results of this poll.

At the same time, there were also some things that surprised me and were cause for reflection. For instance, 38.5% of all respondents described our coverage as, quote, balanced but leaning left, while 3.7% said it was balanced but leaning right, and 56.4% said it was just balanced. Initially, I suspected this was being driven by our conservative readers. As I've said before, when people identify bias in others, it is often a reflection of their own biases. But it turns out that 34.7% of Democrats who read Tangle thought we were balanced but lean left, while 36% of Independents felt that way and 48% of Republicans felt that way. In other words, the numbers were being driven by Republicans, sure, which is to be expected, higher rates of Democrats said we leaned right too, but it was a consistent feeling across the

political spectrum that we were both balanced but also a little left of center. I thought this was particularly interesting because other news organizations like AdFonce Media that rate the bias of news outlets have pegged us as right of center on their media bias chart, while many international readers left notes saying that we may be quote balanced in America but we were right of center on the global stage. Perhaps even most interesting of all was this little tidbit. Despite Democrats rating us as slightly more trustworthy than Republicans, a slightly higher percentage of Democrats said Tangle was very untrustworthy, 2.74%, compared to Republicans, 2.61%. All told though, 96% of our readers rated us as very or somewhat

trustworthy, and 92.2% said they'd recommend Tangle to someone who shared their political views. I can't say how proud this makes me of our team and what we're doing. As fun as some of the recognition we've gotten from Forbes or the New York Times or Substack has been, nothing beats watching these results come in. Nothing beats knowing that we're building an ideologically diverse group of readers who actually trust us. So one year in, I'm feeling pretty good and pretty energized and pretty excited. Meanwhile, I'm learning a lot about what I love to do, like write and think and argue and engage with readers, and a lot about what I don't like to do, like self-promotion, asking for subscriptions, trying to growth hack, and paying taxes, which really sucks. But I also know it's still important to keep my pace, so I'm looking forward to a few

days off, coming back recharged. And of course, as much as I do hate that self-promotion, I'd also be remiss not to say we still need your support. Part of why we're trusted so much is our independence, but we don't make a lot of money off our advertisements in the podcast. We have no investors. Our newsletter is totally ad-free and independent, so we really do need your support. Please do consider becoming a paying subscriber. If you aren't yet, it helps us build and pay our staff. It's the only way we grow. You can do that at readtangle.com membership. There's also a link in our podcast description every day to subscribe. So it would be awesome if you took the time to do that.

As we head into the spring break, I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for reading or listening to our work. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for reading or listening to our work. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for making my dream project a reality. And most of all, thanks for trusting us. This really is something special and I can't wait to see how the next year unfolds. We will be back here at our usual time on Tuesday. I'm already looking forward to it. And I hope you all have a great weekend and a great break and a happy Easter and a fulfilling Passover if you're celebrating. And if you're observing Ramadan, I hope the fasting is easy. It sounds really difficult to me. And I'll see you guys in a bit. Peace.

Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who also helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. you you you you you you you you you Thank you. you you you you youご視聴ありがとうございました Bye. you Thank you. you you Thank you. Thank you.