How Every merges journalism and AI product development
The New York-based media company offers tech essays worth reading via newsletter, useful AI tools in its software license store and lucrative management consulting services
Every is a hybrid B2B and B2C media company steeped in AI. The journalistic offerings range from newsletters with essays, analyses and reverse engineering reports (“I Created a Hacker-News Simulator to Reverse-Engineer Virality”) to tangible instructions for tools and prompts. In terms of style and content, it is somewhere between Wired and The Atlantic, but much more narrowly focused on the topic of artificial intelligence.
What is exciting about Every is not only the excellent journalism, but also what happens with it additionally. Every originally started in 2020 as a pure media company. The New York start-up now also has an integrated Software as a Service (SaaS) division, offers AI courses and provides AI consulting for companies. Everything interlocks and builds on each other. The company has twelve full-time employees and around 30 freelancers.
The total reach of the free content is naturally the largest at several million per year. The newsletters behind the paywall reach around 100,000 paying subscribers. Around five percent of all users convert to paying subscribers, as Kate Lee revealed at the Newsletter Conference in New York in early May.
Every's target group includes the general public interested in technology, but also a lucrative business target group of founders, investors and managers in tech and media companies. The pyramid tapers upwards with training courses for around $1000 to $2000 and consulting contracts, e.g. for the development and company-wide introduction of special tools in companies.
At the very top of the pyramid, the air is very thin but also very lucrative with lectures and strategic consulting for five- to seven-figure sums. However, this only happens a few times a year. The revenue generated is reinvested in journalism, which leads to a virtuous circle. So far, growth has been almost exclusively organic, without investment rounds from venture capitalists.
The Every master plan with stacked business branches Source: Every website
How has Every managed to strategically integrate the company so efficiently? Or to put it another way: why doesn't every media company also exploit content as a product, over and above traditional subscription and advertising revenue models? In practice, this is easier said than done. At Every, several factors come together to enable verticals (deepening expertise and offerings on a topic) and the licensing of new products.
Product thinking: The two founders Dan Shipper and Nathan Baschez are journalists and programmers (Nathan is no longer with Every, but runs the Lex tool in a spin-off company). The numerous questions about AI tools and tech support for the community gave rise to the AI consulting agency and software product licensing. “We're moving into an area where the task of writing about something and the task of building something are increasingly merging,” Dan Shipper told the German Chefrunde Study Tour two months ago in New York.
Entrepreneurs in residence: some of the freelancers are “entrepreneurs in residence” with varying degrees of expertise in journalism, business, software development or consulting. They pursue their own ideas, from which they themselves benefit, but also Every. The newsletter authors receive a fee, but also share in Every's success. Their bonus increases with the number of subscribers.
Tool suite for the workflow: The Every editorial team is an author collective and also a test lab for new tools. If a tool proves itself in internal use and has market potential, it becomes a SaaS product. So far, these are the following tools:
Lex: AI-supported collaborative editing platform
Cora: email management tool that filters important emails, archives others and provides summaries of non-urgent messages. There is currently a waiting list for Cora
Spiral: Prompt-based tool that converts content between formats (for example, podcasts to social media posts or long text posts to shorter ones for LinkedIn etc.)
Sparkle: Tool for organizing documents and folders on the desktop, sorting by “Recents” and “Archives” (currently only for MacOS)
Attractive subscription package: For $20 per month or $200 per year, you have access to all essays, analyses and tips on the website, the newsletter, all tools and the community on the Discord platform.
Expansion of the subscription model: Only around 30-40 percent of paying subscribers have used the included tools to date, with Lex being the most popular. With Sparkle as the first individual subscription tool (5 dollars/month, 50 dollars/year, 199 dollars permanently), Every is now testing a model to reach people interested in tools outside the Every cosmos.
Experiment-focused virtuous cycle: essays, analysis and practical tips on AI attract audiences, software licensing and consulting ensure high profit margins and the whole cycle generates new authors.
“Our authors experiment with the tools, we build them and write about them, then we share them with the community and bundle them into subscriptions,” emphasized Kate Lee.
Conclusion: At Every, it's not just the founders sitting in an incubator and the developers sitting in the lab, but the entire team is imbued with the will to experiment. It helps that the authors also have a financial stake in the company's success. And last but not least, the foundation for this model is very simple and classic: first-class journalism that is worth the money.