Creator Spotlight: Matt Kiser of WTF Just Happened Today
One of the OG independent newsletter creators on consistency, platform independence and stamina
This is the first in what will be an ongoing series of profiles of independent journalism creators because who better to learn from than the folks actually out there doing it? And stay tuned next week for a second post featuring two of Matt’s biggest tips for new creators.
Flash back to January 2017. In an eerie way we were at a similar national moment. Now, we stand on the precipice of a potential second term for former President Donald Trump. In January 2017, we were staring down the road at his first four years in office – shellshocked, fatigued and desperately needing something to help us make sense of a Bizarro World moment.
Enter Matt Kiser. At the time, Matt was working on the product side of the news biz, but he, too, was trying to figure out the right way to put things in perspective. To make sense of an unpredictable news cycle. And to put it all in the right context as something crazy-making but worth knowing about. That’s when Kiser, who hails from punk/DIY roots, launched What the Fuck Just Happened Today, a daily newsletter intended to chronicle the first 100 days of the “shock and awe of living in Trump’s America.”
Eight years later, Kiser has grown up, moved across country, become a parent and, as of this writing, produced 1,352 days of his now four-days-a-week newsletter. Recently, we talked about how he got started, the importance of platform independence and how creators need to constantly balance user needs with their own vision.
An edited version of our chat follows below:
Liz: How do you explain what you do to your best friend or your mom?
Matt Kiser: I tell people I write a newsletter about US politics for normal people who don't have time or interest in watching broadcast news or time to read the newspaper. That usually sparks a question of like, “Oh, like, what is that?” And then I have to say the newsletter’s called “What the Fuck Just Happened Today.” It's like the ultimate icebreaker.
Liz: Do you have a job title? And if so, what is it?
Matt Kiser: That's a good question. Sometimes “founder?” Or I'll be cheeky and be like “blogger-in-chief.” I think I'm really uncomfortable with a title. I’m just like a one-man band. “Founder” seems too big and heavy. “Editor-in-chief” sounds like way ridiculous for one person. So I'm just like “the guy.” You know? I like it.
Liz: So it's funny when you said blogger-in-chief. I noticed that you've used that word – blog – elsewhere. Are newsletters the new/old blog? Should we just be calling them that?
Matt Kiser: It's a good question. You know, when I started this, I wanted to build a blog infrastructure, but I had enough foresight to put up an email capture form. And that is actually the one thing that I did that made this a business, not just a viral flash in the pan. Because I captured audience. So I think like my perspective has always been like, this is a blog and ostensibly the way I operate is I write the blog post and I publish it and that sort of spits out the newsletter product. The blog is like the publishing engine, but the product that people consume is really the newsletter.
Liz: You started out on TinyLetter (🪦), right?
Matt Kiser: Yeah, but I blew through their cap in a couple weeks and then moved over to Mailchimp. It's by far the biggest cost center I have, but it also takes the issue of infrastructure off the table by and large. You know, I can segment the list, you have different groups for different kinds of members, and it's just like the one thing I don't have to worry about.
Liz: Have you ever considered moving to one of the newer platforms, like Substack or ghost?
Matt Kiser: I looked into that a little bit and my biggest hold up was I didn't want to build my business on someone else's platform. It's probably a toss up whether or not Substack would be a cheaper overall product for me, especially given that they also have a growth engine built in. But I really like the idea of building my platform on a tech stack I can control. And someday if I need to swap out the email part of that, I could easily move away from MailChimp to something way cheaper through Amazon SES or something.
But it's just more technical debt I have to take on. I think if you're a non-technical person. ghost and Beehiiv and Substack are probably really good starting points because you know they're just like a CMS that allows you to send content and charge credit cards.
“I think if you're a non-technical person. ghost and Beehiiv and Substack are probably really good starting points because you know they're just like a CMS that allows you to send content and charge credit cards.”
Liz: Why did you go solo and what did you do before?
Matt Kiser: I thought I wanted to work in music, but realized I wasn't going to be a musician. The next best thing I thought about was I'll just be like a music journalist and get free music and concert tickets. But I quickly realized I did not want to do the journalism thing, but I was technical and interested enough in journalism and Web 2.0 new technologies that I quickly found myself in the product manager space at media companies. I worked at Spin Magazine for a bunch of years and Business Insider.
When we moved to Seattle I needed to find a local job and I used that as an opportunity to do a career pivot. I went to a 12-week General Assembly full stack bootcamp because I just wanted to up my technical chops being in the city where we have Amazon and Microsoft and Google and Facebook. I went and joined an AI startup which was before we called it “AI” – it was just machine learning.
So I was like the one non-technical person at a very technical company and I really missed the media side. The one thing I experienced working for this company was it was a SaaS business model and I really love the idea of getting paid for a continual delivery of value. Like people will cancel their subscription to your SaaS business if it doesn't solve a business problem. I love that idea of just like always being put on the spot to deliver value to people. And then the other side of that was I got a lot of exposure to free and open source software-like movement. And the cool part about that is, open source software relies on transparency and relies on collaboration.
So the thesis I had was, what if you build a media company focused on this continuous delivery value that was paid for by the readers and that was also open source and collaborative? Like, what does that look like? So I started to build this infrastructure for this using free and open source tools and I built a site on HubPages initially.
I wanted to do this side project. Then like 20 seconds later the 2016 election hit and it was like, this is the right place and the right time. Which is why I have this ridiculous name for a company. Like if I was trying to be like a serious person it would have been, like, “Today's Political News for You,” or something, right? But it created a sense of urgency and camaraderie and It sort of just took off.
Probably three weeks into it I thought, man, this is gonna get expensive. So I asked my community, “Hey, like, this is gonna cost me like $4,000 to do this for the first 100 days.” That's what I was signing up to do. The idea was this project is gonna have an end date – 100 days from the start of the Trump administration. So I asked the community to throw some bucks in the tip jar to cover the costs and it was something like in the first 24 hours I raised $35,000 from a PayPal link.
“So I asked the community to throw some bucks in the tip jar to cover the costs and it was something like in the first 24 hours I raised $35,000 from a PayPal link.”
I was like, there's like something here that's beyond just like a little 100 day project.
Liz: When did you decide “I'm gonna quit my full-time job and this will be the thing that I do?”
Matt Kiser: My wife and I had a lot of conversations about it. The thing that she always told me was that I've always been very entrepreneurial but I had been kind of waiting for the right moment. I thought if I can make this a business and I can do this full time, and I believe in myself – and the privilege of my situation was my wife worked for a large tech company that had great benefits and we had the ability to do this in a way that was like a controlled experiment.
So I gave myself a runway and I saved money. I had a budget, had my little P&L and I was like, I think if I quit my job and do this full time I have about nine months to a year of runway. If it doesn't work out, it's a really cool story and I'll go find a regular job.
Liz: And eight years later?
Matt Kiser: It gets back to this idea of continuous value, which was, I'll do this as long as you [the audience] find it valuable and we'll measure that value by the amount of money that gets put in the tip jar. And when this no longer becomes valuable and people cancel their support, then I'll know it's time to pack it up.
Liz: So the tip jar. Is that your primary revenue model? Has the momentum kept up?
Matt Kiser: Yeah, so my work is 100 percent supported by these optional pay-whatever-you-want membership contributions, where you don't get anything other than feeling good about supporting continued production of the newsletter. In the early days I did stickers and t-shirts and what I found was I didn't want to be in the business of mailing merch.
Liz: But wait, I just read in your newsletter that I can click through to get the WTFJHT Election 2024 t-shirt.
Matt Kiser: Yeah, so this is the first time I'm doing it in four years. I don't personally make a lot of money on physical merch because I basically have handed it all off to a company to manage all the orders, fulfillment, delivery – that whole thing. It's more about fun and having something for like super fans.
Liz: Have you been approached by brands wanting to sponsor you?
Matt Kiser: No! I think the name is just so toxic. And then there's this sort of funny audience mismatch where the brand name would make you think this is a bunch of like millennials and Gen Zers, but it's really primarily retired women and then a lot of their husbands. I launched around the same time as the Women's March and that Facebook group was like 20,000 people and I got shared into it.
Liz: Well, that's a great lesson. You don't always get the audience you think you're aiming for, right?
Matt Kiser: Totally. And it's been this funny thing of adapting my plans. Like I've wanted to do all this like product work, to build all experiences and things. But the audience just wants this narrow thing.
Liz: How do you feel about that? Does that narrow thing still align with what brings you joy in this project?
Matt Kiser: Yeah. I'm doing this job for fun. It's the most flexible job I've ever had. I get paid a competitive salary. It's all good on paper. My interest was more in product – making things and experimentation and trying stuff, and online communities. That's where I grew up. The mismatch with the audience has been this funny thing to resolve over the years where it's like, okay, I can spend some time building this tool or making this thing or trying this thing out, and I know no one's going to use it. But maybe this isn't for them necessarily. It's for me, and there are like three dozen people who actually want to use it. It's easy to get complacent with that and just be like, “no sense investing in these things.”
Liz: Is there in your mind an end date for WTFJHT?
Matt Kiser: For the last eight years, I've felt like I'm playing with house money. I am so lucky and fortunate and privileged to get to do this kind of work. I came of age in the dot-com bubble and 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then I graduated right into the 2008 recession. I was living in New York making $400 bucks a week before taxes. There was this hustle culture so deeply ingrained in me that when I hit on this idea and it was a business that was sustainable and I found that kind of equilibrium, my mentality was, I'm just going to keep pulling on this string for as long as I possibly can and try things and figure out how to exist and be sustainable.
I don't know where this is going because this wasn't a planned business. Had I sat down and written out a business plan before starting – one, I probably would never have launched and then, two, I would have over-analyzed it and the moment it didn't go the way it was on the plan would be the moment I said, “Oh this is like a failure.” Instead, this was such a rush.
Things have changed so much. Now I have a wife. I was a renter and then we bought a house. We lived and survived through a pandemic. And now we have a child. I had a gallbladder before. And now I don't have a gallbladder, like, right? It's like there's this before and after.
So how long do I continue doing this? I am mentally committed to doing it for another four years. I think of it as like a tour of duty. In four years that will be 12 years I’ve been doing this I’ll have done three different presidencies. And at the end of that, I can decide whether or not to keep doing this or do something else. At some point this just doesn't become a useful part of people's lives either because the political climate changes or the way we consume news and information changes or the classic publishers fully figure out how to solve the problems readers have today.
Liz: Also, you publish four days a week. That is a legit commitment.
Matt Kiser: I know. Like, how sustainable is that and how hard is that? Difficult. There's nothing like being on deadline every day. I started out doing seven days a week. But now I'll publish Monday through Thursday, and then I use Fridays as my business operations day. I try to push most meetings to Fridays, do all my technical debt stuff on Fridays, customer service, because it's the one time where I can do work without being on this deadline of producing this like blog post every day.
Liz: Right, right the stuff that isn't about being a creator; that's about being a business owner.
Matt Kiser: It’s important for people making this leap to think a lot about the cadence and what their publishing cycle looks like. And then being able to stick to that continual schedule because the consistency is the thing that keeps us from flaming out. You have to know what your truth is about why you’re doing this. It's not about publishing thet hing. It's like, like, “Why do I care about this?”
For me, I have an interest in all this. Like if you have a higher interest in civics and democracy, we shouldn't be surprised at the outcome of 2016 or at least, you know, the 53 percent of Americans who were surprised by the outcome of 2016.
Liz: Would you ever go back to working in a corporate or kind of more structured environment where you're working for someone else?
Matt Kiser: I think so. Who knows in four years if this is still sustainable? Like, I don't know if I can control that, right? I would need to figure out what it is that I would want to do for a paycheck because there's something very different between receiving a paycheck and being an operator. There's a trade-off between those things. And then it's a question of how do I zoom out and think about things like how to apply what I know and my expertise to a more traditional job?
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