What a tech reporter felt when he went out on his own

The Media Voices Podcast interviewed tech journalist Casey Newton, who recently left the Verge to publish his newsletter independently.

Just a couple of weeks into launching Platformer, Newton has grown the free list to 30,000 subscribers, and has almost 1,000 of those now paying him at least $10 a month. He’s aiming to convert around 10% of his newsletter list.

Here is an excerpt:

Casey Newton: I’ve been giving this thing away for three years for free. There’s no telling how valuable people find it until they actually fill out a form and contribute. And so it’s been so tremendously heartening.

The day that I announced that I was leaving The Verge, it should have felt like a really exciting day. But honestly, mostly, it just felt very scary. It sort of had that bad dream feel of like, ‘Oh, wait, did I really do this? Are they really actually cutting off my email address, like, can I go backward?!’

But then by the time that I’d woken up, the next day, so many people had subscribed that I knew I was going to be good into next year. Just using the revenue that readers had already contributed, I was going to be able to make it into 2021 just fine.

Read more here.