Please tell us a bit about yourself and your business
I created Tangle in 2019 as a fully independent, nonpartisan media outlet focused on U.S. politics. Our core product is our newsletter, but we also launched a podcast, YouTube channel, and live events in recent years.
I was entirely on my own at first, working a full-time job and writing Tangle before and after work. The first newsletter went out to 13 people, but the response was really positive right off the bat. About two years after that, I was making enough money from paid subscriptions to make Tangle my full-time job.
Our growth has really accelerated since then; I now have four full-time employees (plus a team of interns and volunteers), and our readership has grown to about 105,000. It’s a dream come true.
I spent a decade in mainstream newsrooms having to constantly ward off anxiety about losing my job or not making enough to get by, so I’m extremely grateful to have my own company with a sustainable business model and a mission I truly believe in.
What inspired the idea of your company?
At the start of my career, I worked at big outlets like Huffington Post and got to see the biases that pervade mainstream media up close. Story selection, slanted headlines, selective quotes, you name it — the examples of bias were everywhere. I’m glad I had those experiences, but I also knew that doing that kind of work wasn’t why I went into journalism.
I eventually made the jump to the startup world, helping Ashton Kutcher launch A-Plus, which was a positive news-oriented outlet. I was one of the founding editors there and found it to be a much more fulfilling experience, but as someone with a background in politics, I knew I eventually wanted to find my sweet spot.
I started Tangle toward the end of my time at A-Plus, building on an idea I had for a newsletter that would give readers an in-depth look at one big story each day and would leave them feeling informed about both the facts of the issue and what each side was saying about it.
Can you walk us through the process of developing your product?
I started Tangle following the same entrepreneurial model a lot of people do: I built the product I wanted! I spent hours trying to read and listen to a wide range of political news punditry to understand the best arguments from the right and left about divisive topics, and I wished it all existed in one place. It didn’t, and I figured I couldn’t be alone in wanting that, so I built it.
As Tangle started to grow, we’ve leaned into this founding ideal more and more. We’ve created new offerings and expanded the number of platforms we’re on — podcasts, YouTube, live events — but this idea of going deep on issues that aren’t getting the attention they deserve and giving people a full spectrum of arguments to contend with has remained core to what we do.
When you first started building your business, when did you notice traction? That OH S**T moment.
For me, it’s always been about our readership numbers. The first real “oh shit moment” was when we hit 5,000 readers.
That number just felt pretty “real” and proof that I was building something with legs. Soon after that, I polled that group of 5,000, and over 500 said they’d pay to support me (at the time, I was doing Tangle in addition to a full-time editor job, so my hope was that one day, I could make enough off Tangle to solely focus on that). When I did the math (at $50/year for a subscription) I realized that was $25,000, which wasn’t that far off from a salary.
Then everything became real. The next big moment probably was when we launched paid memberships, and then when enough people signed up that I was able to commit to Tangle full-time.
That was about three years ago, and now Tangle has become a full-fledged media company.
What strategies have been most effective in acquiring customers and reducing churn?
For acquiring customers, advertising in other newsletters has been a sustainable and effective strategy for us. We look for newsletters with a readership that seem like they’d be interested in what we have to offer (balanced, in-depth politics stories) and try to partner with them on ad campaigns.
It’s not designed to take away their readers, but rather expose them to an additional offering that we think they’d like.
For reducing churn, we’ve employed two strategies: getting people to subscribe on a yearly subscription and building brand loyalty. To the former, the yearly subscription gives us a lot more time to build trust and familiarity with readers; they can cancel at any time if they want, but most tend to view it as a commitment to give us a genuine shot and make a decision about renewing after they’ve engaged with the newsletter for a sustained amount of time.
We’re proud that a strong majority choose to stick around after that first year. To the latter, we emphasize reader engagement — answering reader questions in the newsletter every day, personal responses to every email that comes in, interactive social media, etc. — to show that Tangle is meant to be a place where people come together to talk and debate issues in good faith (ourselves included) rather than be told what to think.
We’ve found this approach really resonates.
How much revenue was your best year?
$800,000
What is your biggest overhead expense?
Employee payroll. Including myself, we have five full-time staff, and we also employ a rotation cohort of paid interns.
Having a strong team has allowed us to boost the quality of our content and expand into new areas, so it’s a cost that is easily justified and has been accompanied by huge revenue growth.
What was your childhood like? Were you slinging candy on the playground?
Not really, but I was super social. A talker. That is what my work is really about – talking to people.
And writing. I’ve always loved writing and have been journaling since I was a kid. Nothing in my work is more important than being able to chat with people and being able to write clearly about my ideas. So that is really what I’m about.
How many attempts at building something did you make before you found what you’re working on now? Did you always have an entrepreneurial drive?
This was the first time I ever tried to build a company. I got lucky, in a lot of ways, but also worked my ass off.
Lots of 16- and 18-hour days those first couple of years when I was doing Tangle in addition to a full-time job.
I outworked a lot of newsletter creators who quit before I did, but I also got flashing signals early on that I had something special that was connecting with people.
I wouldn’t say I have had an entrepreneurial drive, but I’ve always been a really hard worker, really competitive, and loved pouring myself into something. Tangle has let me channel all three of those traits into something productive.
What's a big problem you’ve faced as a business owner and what were the emotions behind it?
For me, it was the realization that the buck stops with you. In previous jobs, if I messed up or dropped the ball or wanted a day off, there were always a few people who could pick up the slack and cover for me. When you are a business owner, it’s on you entirely.
A cousin of mine who owns his own business once said this about employees: “They’ll never care as much as you do, and that’s the hardest part.”
I don’t know if that is true of my employees, who are passionate, hard-working, and aligned with Tangle’s mission, but there is some genuine truth to the idea that for them it’s a job, and for me, it’s kind of my life. That part is tough.
What do you spend the majority of your time doing, in a given week?
These days, it is pretty split between content creation and business operations. But no matter what, the thing I spend the most amount of time doing in any given week is reading. I read so much.
Political reporting, books, tweets, newsletters, everything. I’m always reading. Thankfully, it’s stuff I’m interested in, otherwise I could never last.
Your best advice for people that want to start their own business but feel stuck
Think of a product you want, figure out if you think other people would want it to, see if it exists, and if it doesn’t – build it.
Second to that, think of a product idea you like but think is being executed poorly, then go build it.
Again, I don’t think of myself as an entrepreneur who aspires to build a ton of different businesses across different verticals, but as a first-time business creator and owner, those two observations jump out to me as key to success.
Anything you'd like to share with the audience? (A shameless plug, new features, ect)
Get out of your bubble! Check us out at readtangle.com.
The newsletter is free Monday through Thursday, so you get most of our content without paying, and you can get a good feel for what we offer without a financial commitment upfront.
That said, if you like what you see (or you just love our mission), a paid subscription is just $60 a year and gets you access to our entire archive of over 1,000 issues, our exclusive Friday and Sunday editions, and front-of-the-line access when we launch new initiatives (like live events).
Check out Isaac at:
His Website: https://www.readtangle.com/
Podcast: https://shows.acast.com/tangle
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tangle.news/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@tanglenews
X/Twitter: https://x.com/Ike_Saul
X/Twitter: https://x.com/TangleNews
