Thank You for Sleeping in the Bed We Shit in
August updates
My mother's name is Karen. My step dad is Bill. That means their couple-name is either “Kill” or “Barren.” But names shouldn't matter, right? My uncle, for example, is named "Dick."
It might be this unfortunate trend that made my aunt panic-name her son “Ben,” which led to a confusing childhood of picking up Christmas presents addressed to me only to have someone shout, "Not that one!"
So you’d think I would have had the foresight to not call our membership “Sub Club” on a platform called “Substack” for our website called “Chill Subs.”
OK, but let me explain.
First, why Substack?
Building a membership onto a website takes a long time and we needed money, so we frankensteined two Substacks together to make up a membership.
Second, why Sub Club?
Uh, we hate to admit this… but we couldn’t resist the sandwich pun. That’s right. We prioritized puns over clarity. Nikita was not impressed.1
So for the past three months, anytime someone signed up via our website, I had to manually add them comped to both Substacks, and anytime someone signed up on Substack, I had to add them to a spreadsheet so Karina could comp them on the website.
We recently went through our members list and realized a full 80 people’s emails were not linked to any account on Chill Subs. So I emailed them all to try and solve this.
Some of my favorite responses:
“just call me Confused because I don’t actually understand the difference.”
“I have to say I find the subscription process to your organization very confusing indeed!”
“I have found it extremely difficult and confusing to track what’s what and who’s who (Sub Club? . Mag News? Ben & Karina? Chill Subs? — WTF is what?)”
“I'm not clear what you mean by Chill Subs”
My life has been mostly apologies & emails for the past month.
But because people are genuinely awesome, this wacky membership of ours has given us enough money to launch a legitimate premium membership with all sorts of tools on our website that we will release next week. So, thank you. And sorry.
And thank you. Moving on!
In other news, Shelby got us on this Social Listening Software to track any mentions of ‘Chill Subs’ on the internet. It finds any time someone used the words Chill Subs, collects the links into feed, offers details on reach, sentiment, and even provides a word cloud of associated terms:
Yeah…it started innocent enough…
then…
and then things got a bit out of hand
Our database person is leaving us to start a hiking business (I mean, who’d take mountains over sweet-sweet data collection? Weirdo) and the person we’ve found to replace him clearly fits right in:
Karina & her husband moved to Istanbul! 3 suitcases, 2 backpacks, 2 guitars…
And a cat.
OH! And somebody tried to Bot Attack our website. Idk what this means except that maybe someone was trying to steal all of our public data. When I asked Karina if we could track the person who did this she said, “If we had loads of money for a fancy hacker.”
Best part? Their bot attack software thingie broke down when it tried to pull data from [ugh] our weird little social media experiment.
But yeah, we might not have money to find the people but we’ve set up barriers to stop it happening again. (Basically someone didn’t want to spend a year gathering all of the information we’ve gathered manually) I wonder why! It’s so much fun 🫠.
In content news, Shelby informed me that the internet likes memes. So, now she sends weekly images along with an explanation of what these memes mean and I’ve had to…be funny?
And…I hate the internet sometimes.
We’ll announce a major release that took months to build:
Post a list that took hours to research and design.
Or wish one of our co-workers a happy birthday
And then post a meme:
When we asked our friend Chris for some help understanding this, he responded with:
And last week we gave Marcin so much shit for having no camera in our team meeting that he went out and bought one before the next one.
That we had to cancel.
If we ever accidentally hire someone without a sense of humor, we’ll be well and truly fucked.
Nikita is never impressed.
Whenever I think of Chill Subs, the very first thing that comes to my mind is "vicious sex life." I'm glad to finally know I am not alone.
Good luck with the move, Karina!
Please tell me the cat travelled in the cabin 😺😻.