Learning from Tangle's Success

Isaac Saul's Tangle was one of Outpost's first customers and it's grown into a media operation.

Isaac moved off Substack in Sept 2021 to Ghost and Outpost when he had 27,000 readers.

Almost 5 years later Tangle has 12 employees, 500,000 subscribers and $4M in annual revenue, almost all from subscriptions. That came from a ton of hard work, grinding and experimenting. And Tangle is still on Outpost + Ghost, with great tech that is a tiny percentage of site revenue.

Politics newsletter makes nearly $4m in subs despite giving most content away

Tangle Media, a US politics newsletter, converts 16% of free newsletter subscribers to paid and recieves $4m in recurring revenue each year.

Press GazetteAlice Brooker

There's a lot to be learned from what Isaac and his team are buildingm and I strongly suggest read more about that here in the case study/interview by Lex Roman.

How did Tangle get to 70k+ paid subscribers?

The paid subscription system that Tangle and Outpost built together is yours for the taking

OutpostLex Roman

But here's a bit from the Press Gazette profile.

Conversion through upsell emails
A key driver of Tangle’s 16% conversion rate is its upsell emails with an informal tone, said Saul.

“We’re really good at [converting] because we tell people a really personal story about what we’re going to do with the money and why we need it,” he added. “We are able to maintain that conversion rate by – [either] once a month, once a quarter – reaching out to our audience and asking them to support our work.”

These upsell emails lean into a more informal with subject lines such as “yes, I’m asking for your money”.