Chill Subs Has a Drug Problem

(January Updates) - drug bots, cats, data, taxes, and lots of sick people.

Mariam Chagelishvili

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There are some things you can predict while running a business. Taxes will happen. Subscriber rates will plateau. That sort of thing. 500 people trying to sell drugs on our website wasn't one of them.

We got tipped off when google sent us the month’s top 3 growing queries for ‘Chill Subs’

makes me miss ‘cool subs’

And so we checked our most recently created profiles aaaand:

We felt like that teenager in the car who finds out someone has cocaine on them and simply starts FREAKING OUT because what if the cops come? How might we possibly explain, "Officer, no, no, we're just selling literary magazines!"

We must have passed some internet threshold where the drug dealers start to pay attention.

And honestly, I don't really blame them. Like, if you came to me and said, "So, I've got this group of people who deal with chronic rejection, imposter syndrome, and need to focus on a single task for long periods of time. How can I help them?"

My first thought would be, "...drugs?"

Thankfully, Karina caught it, deleted them all and wrote a script to deal with the situation:

We’ve discussed preemptively adding, “Kidneys for sale” and “Hand Jobs Near You,” but honestly, we’re out of our depth. So we’ve contacted our login service for help.

In the meantime, this all may have contributed to our Slack stats which Karina was kind enough to provide in our last team meeting:

Which reminds me of my ongoing argument with Nikita about how much I swear in our copy. And since I write most everything for our Sub Club Newsletter, Nikita pulled some trump card bullshit:

What else?

Well, business daddy went on to bigger and better things in the fall so we now have a Money Mamma. Her name is Joanne, she is our accountant. She is the best. She had a call with us, and after we all logged off and said, “I want her to be my mom.”

Nikita made a before and after we started learning about what taxes are…

before:

after:

*No, idk why we’re on a rock wall in a forest.

This was our chat after Joanne sorted all of our quickbooks out and calculated our tax liabilities for 2023

She answered every question we had about taxes and not going to accidental money prison (a lot of questions). Seriously, if we could give anyone starting a business any advice it would be to START with a good lawyer and good accountant. It cost us a lot of “Oh, Fuck” money to fix up a year of being like, “Uhhh, what to we do with this 300 page document the government wants?”

Turns out “Ask Reddit,” was the wrong answer. BUT! We have both now. Paul and Joanne. We actually changed from a c-corp to an LLC in the past month because it turned out being a c-corp was really only for those who want to sell pieces of their soul bit-by-bit to cardboard cutouts of Peter Thiel.

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In other news, our data analyst advisor has earned an achievement award for his 100th sigh of exasperation.

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and so on.

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Jacob, who is helping us out with optimizing the website is almost done. So the website will be much speedier soon. Gosh, on new years eve somebody sent a super mean email about our website being slow. Like, on the day with the most parades, you couldn’t find a single other one to rain on?

But that’s kind of our curse. Chill Subs has grown so much. I mean, we’re even attracting all of those cool drug dealer kids (that’s how you know you’ve made it). But we are still a super small team with no funding and one back end dev. Heck, can’t win ‘em all.

We’ve got loads and loads of scary plans for 2024. Learned a lot from 2023.

Hmm, what else?

Nikita & Karina were on vacay for two weeks

Nikita got sick

Marcin got sick

Shelby got a tooth infection

Marcin and Shelby had teeth removed.

Karina and her husband adopted a new cat.

Their name is Screamy:

Earl was so happy!

hm, looks like somebody has been using Chill Subs.