Professional Pricing

Prices will be going up January 15, 2024.

My search for a sustainable business model for this newsletter continues. Since my last business update I have made progress. Revenue continues to grow. On the scale of sustainability, though, revenue is not growing fast enough to make a difference. I can’t afford 3 years to sustainability.

One simple way to try to increase revenue is to raise prices. The downside is if people stop paying altogether then you’ve lost revenue. This creates a tradeoff space, although it’s not as simple & linear as Microeconomics 101 described it.

When I turned on paying subscriptions I wasn’t trying to create a business, I just wanted incentive to finish Tidy First?. I used the default Substack pricing. I wasn’t trying to optimize anything.

Now that I have a fledgling business, good enough to be promising but not good enough to be self-sustaining, though, it’s time to think more like a business person. That or turn off paying subscriptions & going back to posting sporadically when I feel like it.

The $7/month pricing is common for Substacks for personal use. Substacks that will be paid for by employers are typically $15-25/month, noticeable money added up over a year but a tiny fraction of, say, a tech salary. At the high end are niche $50+/month stacks covering a specific commercial topic like semiconductors or investing. That seems too intense for me. I want to be at the high end of that middle range—clearly a good investment but not at the tippy-top.

What You Get

From a test-first perspective, at the end of a year of reading, paying subscribers can expect:

• Better software design skills

• Better communication skills for promulgating those improved designs

• Connection with a community of like-minded individuals

• Surprising, provocative ideas worth following up on

My overall mission is to help geeks feel safe in the world. This newsletter contributes to that mission by teaching technical & social skills to make sense of the world & navigate the world’s complexities artfully. The topics orbit around software design as an exercise in human relationships, but include:

• Incentive systems

• Business architecture

• Personal development for geeks

And, this being a newsletter for geeks, meta-reflection like this essay here.

Each week, paying subscribers get a Thinkie, a habit of creative thought. Paying subscribers are among the first seeing the results of this decade-long study of mine. People ask me, “How’d you think of that?” Thinkies are my answer.

Paying subscribers also get a raw, unfiltered stream of ideas, technical & business, that I generate. I’m currently experimenting with an LLM code named Rent-a-Kent to see how Kent-like I can make a model. I’ve also posted ideas for software development tools.

Recently, paying subscribers have been getting draft chapters of a short book I’m writing on thinking in terms of tradeoffs.

I will also be writing the sequel to Tidy First? in 2024. Paying subscribers will get chapters as they are drafted. The followup will cover software design in the context of a team. How do you maintain relationships with your fellow geeks in spite of change & conflicting incentives? The book will also go deeper into the theory of software design, especially the role of power law distributions & how they invalidate many of the conventional assumptions of software design to date.

New Prices

If you are a paying subscriber when the prices go up, your price will remain at the same level forever (well, as long as I’m writing). I’ll still provide the same content to all subscribers: one blog post a week on a geeky topic & one post from the archives.

The price of $25/month (or $250/year) will take effect January 15, 2024. Sign up before then to cement the current $7/month pricing for life. Please contact me for group subscription discounts.