Wirecutter

“So we're the number one shower liner across like strategist or wire cutter.”

“I think you could even just take the form of like the wire cutter, but for, you know, these are products that are not going to kill you. And the thing is, it's such a nefarious problem that like it runs the gamut. It's like clothes that isn't made out of polye…”

“So we're the number one shower liner across, like, strategist or wire cutter.”

“Up until I would say this year, we were more of a news brand with a collection of adjacent lifestyle products, but with the acquisition of Wordle and The Athletic, along with just the continued growth of Cooking and Wirecutter and some of our other offerings, …”

“I feel like there's an opportunity for design oriented version of Wirecutter.”

“The information is out there. On the tip of the tongues of the editors covering those beats. But the formats that were common in the business models attached to them encourage you to click on, like, 40 different articles about, say, TVs, for example. And then …”

“I pitched it for Wired, I pitched it to a lot of places, and nobody wanted to do it. And like so many good ideas, you can't get people to take it for free.”

“Which is not advised, because then no one can make a decision. Someone should be a majority owner.”

“So I negotiated to give up all the launch sponsorship for 65% of the site, but I also had a clause in there saying that if I didn't feel like things were going well, I could basically leave and take the entire company with me.”

“Say instead of a front of the book, a couple hundred dollars for review, we were offering several thousand dollars to do the same work.”

“Now that you've got the top two or three, the next time you can introduce another 40, and you don't have to compare the new 50 to the previous 50, you just have to compare it to the current kings of the hill and see if they get dethroned. You now have tested a…”

“The affiliate program was, like, super cheap marketing for them, and it was designed to live on mom-and-pop Blogs. So they would have all these, like, cheesy widgets. If I'm, if like, some blogger wrote about something they like, and they could link on Amazon …”

“And as a CEO, I never checked anything, like traffic, or I knew the size of the checks coming, but I didn't pay attention to anything except the quality of the work.”

“By the fourth year, or the third year, it was making seven figures of profit.”

“When we sold about 60, and I think the sweet spot was under 30 in terms of everyone being on the same page culturally.”

“Is that number is actually wrong. It was a leak that was incorrect, but the times published it. It was more, but it wasn't an extraordinary amount.”

“The best podcast, the best books, the best everything is not capitalistic at scale. It still needs to be capitalistic. People need to afford their way of life and their tools, but that scale is something I'm really allergic to now.”

“The cadence of surfing too and like waves is really what informed Wirecutter's cadence, which is slow and clean and like impactful, as opposed to a bunch of like tiny little waves knocking all over the place in a messy way.”

“Wirecutter got classified now as like other revenue. So I've been trying to like decipher it and figure it out. And they do something like close to nine figures in sales from affiliate Affiliates.”

“So this was the origin of Wirecutter, and Wirecutter, of course, was organic, because originally it was somebody from a tech website who said, I'm fed up of reviewing everything in infinite detail and not just telling you which one to buy, so I'll make a site …”

“They never raised like a real VC full round.”

“And it is very hard to build a huge, huge, huge company doing that. But it certainly helps when people are doing communities or things around discovery. That's a pretty tried and true way to pay the bills.”