That’s right, this week we hit 100,000 users, a HUGE milestone for us. And we know that they’re not porn bots, drug dealers or, for some reason, landscaping companies. Because, anyone remember that? That was fun. We do. We have a whole moderation system that got built because of it.
And there she is! The first user right there. Like Tom from myspace. Anyone remember Tom?1 Anyone remember Myspace?
So what else is new an exciting? Let’s make this one a check in. A completely purposeless update. No, not because I’m too exhausted to string together a cohesive piece on something useful that also conveniently gives me an excuse to tell people we hit 100,000 users without it coming off as self-aggrandizing. Because…family.
Let’s start with some of our recent fails. Big celebration merits some humbling. If you read our main updates newsletters, you might notice I often begin them with something silly. Usually, this is some mash up of chill and subs. Some examples...Chillonians, Chillsaxers, Chusitizens, and so on. It’s all so...so....silly.
Until last week, without thinking, I called 70,000 people Chubsters. Mhm. That...did not go over well. Especially because it was just a one-off email so I was being extra silly and in the subject line wrote something about content followed by: “NOM NOM NOM”
So someone who may not have been reading too closely, or was new to our style of greeting newsletter subscribers, would have seen NOM NOM NOM....Chubsters.
And someone did. And told me to “fuck off and do better.”2 Which is a fine reaction to someone who you think just insulted you. Though, and please give me a “though” here.
Though, I think, if you’re a reasonable person, you’d look at that and think...surely, this person made a mistake. Surely, they did not suddenly decide to burn their company to the ground to go on a body-shaming crusade around the internet, using this literary database they helped build as a platform to enact their ultimate bullying agenda.
When I called my brother for consolation he said, “Nah, I couldn’t believe you just called me fat in an email.”
...sigh. OK but the next week I went and directly made a joke about MFAs meaning “Mother Fuckin’ Artist” Degree and nobody batted an eye. So who’s the villain here?
In other news, we’ve got a lot of content updates. For those who don’t know, Shannan runs all of the Chill Subs’ extended universe. Ahem…
She works with Anna, our social media manager (yes, just one person for like a dozen channels), and Kennedy whose book “There Used to Be People Here” was just named one of Barnes & Noble’s Horror Books of the year. Shameless plug: go preorder it here. Yeah so there are only three people behind all that content from Sub Club, Write or Die, socials, and now with Novel Writers Network, we’ve dragged Kailey back into this nonsense for another First Draft November! And our content designer Tanue did an amazing job on the designs.
Speaking of books, Justine, our partnerships director has been back a month and a half and landed a bunch of new MFA partners before she went off on her book tour for Between Our Legs! Go buy that one too. Here.
We definitely need to stop hiring such talented writers because, as much fun as scrambling around to make internet-rent every month is, I think writing for a living will end up being a much more appealing option for all of them. And then you’ll all be stuck with me...body shaming you for no reason in promotional emails. Sorry, I’ll let it go.
Hmm, what else is new? We’ve brought on a new CTO. He’s amazing. He was Karina’s mentor! His name is Siarhei and does one-wheeling. He is more multi-dimensional than that but since he sent us down a rabbit hole of one-wheeler meet up videos, it’s all we can think about for right now.
It has been a while since we’ve done one of these monthly check ins. Years, even. Karina is doing rock-star things in Tbilisi. Yeah, this is her on the right:
I’d like to see Tom from myspace do that!3 You can see her rock out on her instagram here. Marcin is still in Poland. Nikita is in Berlin. They stopped sending me pictures of their lives for some reason. Though, Marcin (who used to be a concert pianist! Did you know that? He’s one of our product engineers now [he’s also the one you’re yelling at in our support]), since he knows classical music so well, he has recommended we all listen to Scriabin (I didn’t know who that is, do you?), He sent these two videos but he oversold it so much that some of us still haven’t listened to them because he said you can only experience the moment of your first listen once, and it should be perfect. Personally, I am waiting for that perfect moment—that moment with no stress or worries to tarnish it.4
Shel and I moved to Savannah, Georgia (the state) which is fun to explain to people who used to know us in Tbilisi, Georgia (the country). Oh! Speaking of, were you around in the fuckhead days? OK, if you were, Karina and her partner recently went back to that cabin and fuckhead is alive!
The company is so much bigger now, and we’re doing bigger things. Dhruv, from our dev team is merging all of our code into one mono-repo. For those who know what that means, congratulations—you won the internet. Our data department is seven people! David, Karina, Maya, Nastya, Arina, Rhea, and Niyati. And in our last meeting, they all said they are…happy?! Which means either David & Karina are doing a great job or they’re threatening their co-workers before every all-hands meeting. As anyone who has previously worked in the data department will tell you: it’s probably the latter. Last I checked, we’ve gotten into jobs, pitch calls, residencies, everything we could think of (except agents, that’s a biggie and it’s coming).
We’ve got a bunch of columnists now. And Karan from Only Poems is managing our Inner Circle membership. And we’re about to launch services! As soon as our lawyer gets done untangling and then retangling our terms of service.
Yeah, Shel has been working with our lawyer on these terms of service for like two months because we need it to accommodate all of our random brands and he’s officially announced that this is the most complicated terms of service he’s ever had to make. Which in lawyer-talk means: the bill is coming due. FUN!
Hmm, about 25% of the company has been sick. Tis the season….what else?
Karina’s friend asked ChatGPT about the founders of Chill Subs
If you’re wondering what’s wrong here. That’s not Karina. Shel & Nikita are not one person and neither of them look like that. And I have a face, thank you.
And we’ve decided to move away from the “cofounder-led company” dynamic. It gets so hard once you have a lot of people and departments and you need a lot of folks with expertise (like Siarhei). It’s funny since we were all freelancers who came to work on something because we didn’t like the rigidity of hierarchical companies. But once you get big enough you realize that hierarchy, when done well and with the right people, is not about power. It’s about responsibility. Taking it and giving it. I think if our old bosses could see us now, they’d be making that face parents make when their kids become parents who have a child who is just. like. them.
Oh, yeah, so let’s round this out with some updates on recent articles
Follow up to Write or die or die or die or die or die - Everything is going great. People love Mort, the vulture. We just launched our first submission call. Jane, Erin, and Caitlin all launched their columns.
Lessons in branding from a not-sandwich, not-sex thing company - We have a new logo. Official, now. And we’re all happy with it. It’s a cute little seal that looks like a seal and we’re never going back. This is it.
Inside our search for a way to tell human writing from AI slop - Uh... yeah this whole ai thing is a damn mess. I think the detection / human-made labelling industry has a lot of potential. But things are moving too quickly to make any decisions right now. We’ve had many issues with finding “ai” all over with friends and editors and contributors. And people we are very close to and trust get flagged for ai sometimes and they swear they didn’t use it. And I think for a lot of folks, they aren’t publishing lots of writers all of the time, so they think it’s a black and white situation because they are not responsible for a lot of writers. It’s really not. So our policy has become: we believe writers. That’s it. Because that’s all you can do. And if you look at all of these AI detection companies, it is in their best interest for writers to be mistrustful and to push splashy stories about writers’ careers being ruined. And we don’t know where the line is for folks. Is grammar fixing okay? is shortening text okay? Is it okay for copy but not creative? These are not the questions for people with as little education, power, or insight as us. We will leave it to the professionals: anonymous crusaders on social media.
That’s where we’re at. OH and we’re about to add pieces to our tracker. It’s going to be amazing. I might start submitting again just so I can use it. Stay tuned.
That’s it. I think.
Bye
I couldn’t help looking him up after writing this. Apparently, he retired at 38 with a net-worth of $60 million. I’m 37…so if every single person who reads this could go ahead and buy 300 chill subs memberships, I’d appreciate it. I’m running out of time.
Side note: our support chat is a wild place. Someone told us recently to “live shamed and die empty.” Like, holy shit. We’re a database of magazines…in what world?
I’m sure he’ll get to it once he gets to the end of what he is currently doing…51,345,135…51,345,136…51,345,137…51,345,138…51,345,139….
Tom knows what I’m talking about