It was a stroke of luck that I sat next to Matt Kiser at a conference this summer.

We were surrounded by employed newsroom staffers, but here was Matt—an indie newsletter entrepreneur.

Not just any newsletter entrepreneur. A newsletter entrepreneur who is 100% funded by his readers and has been for 7 YEARS.

Matt calls himself an “inbox journalist” now though he’s got plenty of mainstream cred I won’t get in to because here we care more about MRR than mastheads.

I’ve been chasing Matt down for more details on how his revenue works since we left that conference and he was kind enough to break it down for us this week.

Here’s how Matt Kiser runs What the Fuck Just Happened Today full time entirely on reader support.

100% funded by pay-whatever-you-want

Let’s start with what it costs Matt to run his newsletter.

He wrote this up for his supporters, and take note of how he did it, because he believes the detail he shares with them has meant more contributions. Keep in mind that Matt’s email list is now 250k which means his tech tool cost is hefty, because the bigger your audience, the more you pay to stay online.

$16k/month is what it costs Matt to run WTFJHT, including his salary.

That’s an operating budget of around $200k/year.

Who pays him and how

Matt offers three recurring memberships plus one time contributions with some presets. 2% of his 250k+ readerbase are paying contributors at any amount.

Here’s what his upgrade page looks like. Those buttons take you to Memberful where he manages subscriptions and payments, though you can see he also accepts Venmo and PayPal for tips.

Take note that he prioritizes three options even though he makes others available.

The content is the perk, by the way. Meaning that as a contributor, you’re paying to continue the project. You don’t get any special access or rewards.

What’s brilliant about how Matt frames this on the upgrade page is that it’s not that you get more for being a contributor, it’s that this project could go away if you don’t contribute. Matt says “I try to talk about my membership model not as a transaction, but as an investment.”

(This is a powerful psychological principle called loss aversion and it’s also what State Farm uses to sell insurance and what Verizon uses to sell phone plans.)

How Matt went reader-funded in 90 days

What the Fuck Just Happened Today? started as a GitHub blog in 2017.

Matt said this about his newsletter’s origin story:

“I had long loved the ethos of open source software, namely transparency and collaboration. I also preferred the idea of recurring reader revenue as the metric of success for a media company rather than the number of pageviews.”

He committed to publishing one update per day on this blog for the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency.

He found content/market fit immediately.

In his words:

“Between the name, the political climate, the style and formatting of the project, and a lot of luck that I couldn't control (nor could I ever hope to replicate), the site went viral. It got shared into deep pools of private Facebook Groups back when those were very popular, which drove a huge amount of traffic to this poor little GitHub Pages blog.”

But his newfound virality came with a growing audience cost.

Matt had put up a newsletter capture because he was smart enough to know that blog visitors may never return but that meant he had $4k in MailChimp expenses to cover less than a month after Trump took office.

So he turned to his fans, told them how much he needed and why. They came through with over $30k in less than 24 hours via PayPal.

(I asked Matt how big the list was at that point and he couldn’t really remember but he guessed 45k.)

WTFJHT moved quickly from PayPal over to Patreon, building up $2500/month in recurring revenue which made it clear it was a business:

“On Day 90 of this project, I quit my job. That was nearly eight years ago and I'm still publishing my content and code on GitHub and funded entirely by the readers.”

What works best to drive contributions

If you run a publication, you know that launch inertia slows down…fast. So how does Matt keep the reader revenue growing?

His overall promotion plan is fairly light now:

• 2 “NPR-style membership drives” every year: 3-5 days with calls to action at the top of the newsletter (Matt’s newsletter is already daily)

• As needed membership pushes: Mostly to get one time contributors to give again but also to surface new paying members.

• A daily “tip your blogger” CTA: Every issue (or most of them) has a button that goes to the membership page.

Here’s some of what he’s uncovered that make that lighter promo possible:

• Adding PayPal and Venmo for one time donors: This allows Matt to get contributions from people who “hate recurring membership-style plans.”

• Focusing on expansion revenue: Encouraging members who have already donated to do it again (we heard this in RANGE’s story too)—Matt’s words of wisdom to tattoo on your arm “people who already support you with money are usually willing to pitch in even more when given the chance.”

• Free sticker giveaways: A few times a year he offers free stickers to everyone on the list but suggests a $3 contribution and says “free-to-paid conversion rate on a free sticker is high” and that most people end up giving $5 or $10.

Regarding the three above insights, Matt thinks of it as working together to make the revenue work even with just one reader:

“It's a lot easier to get someone who pitches in $5/mo ($60/year) to buy a couple $10 ‘free’ stickers and maybe a $30 t-shirt annually than it is to get them to upgrade to a $100/year membership.”

Matt’s paying readers are covering the operating costs so retention/expansion is more important than new revenue to him. New revenue still matters, still makes up for churn, but is less the focus now—a good sign of a healthy, sustainable business.

If you learn nothing else from this story…

Matt’s rapid virality is hard to replicate but his expansion approach is universal.

Testing additional asks to your biggest or longest supporters, trying out things like the free sticker giveway—those can work at any audience size. Split your monetization attention 50/50 with half on new subscribers and half on the current base and you’ll be golden for years to come.

Want more on Matt’s story? Liz Kelly Nelson did a deep dive with him and also shared two of his profit and loss tips as your audience (and tech bill) grows.

P.S. Want to know why 1 referral is worth 2 stickers? I did the math.