Speaker 1: Friends, hello, and welcome to a Neverpost funding
update. I'm your Neverpost funding update host, Mike
Rugnetta. The long and short of the news I have for you is the
following. One, we're not going anywhere yet. Two, our runway is
shrinking, and we need your help.
We are at a pivotal and, honestly, a little bit spooky
moment in our trajectory towards becoming a self sustaining
program. And I'm gonna let you all know where we are, how far
your help has already taken us, spoiler alert, very, very far,
the whole way, and, how we are thinking about what happens
next. So here we go. Up until this point, Neverpost has had a
financial runway built by client work that we all do together.
The bulk of this has been covered by one client, in fact,
a single contract.
That contract just ended, which means that we'll need to
establish a sustainable financial situation in one way
or another by the end of the calendar year 2025. There are a
bunch of ways that we are approaching that challenge, and
we are hoping that the way we can do it is through listener
support, through memberships. This is both scary and exciting.
We've learned a lot working together over the last year on
both Neverpost and our client work. There's a lot that we
wanna do with the show, and every week, we learn more about
how to do it.
With the exit of our one big shared client, we all worked on
this client work together. We've encountered a kind of bargain.
We now have the time to try out more stuff with NeverPost, but
none of us currently has a job. So this is a big inflection
point. If you like us and you want us to keep doing what we're
doing with the show and maybe help make it the thing we do,
please consider becoming a member today.
Now is the time. If you've been waiting for some any additional
motivating factor, you can become a member for $4 a month
on our website at neverpoe.st. While you're there, you can also
tip us any amount of money one time. The links are in the show
notes. We're gonna be doing a few things over the next month
to help us towards our goal of making the show financially
sustainable absent our client work runway.
We're gonna be doing a member drive, roughly a week of mostly
live streamed programming to help get some new members,
introduce folks to the show, talk about how we think about
and do what we do, and so on and so forth. We're gonna say more
about this in the coming weeks in episodes and in the
newsletter, but this is gonna be happening in late August. I hope
you'll join us. We're gonna be selling our first run of T
shirts, and they look red as hell. We already have the
designs done.
They're so, so good, so get really hype about that. And then
we are also going to unarchive our old membership levels
starting when this upload goes out. The $4 tier isn't going
anywhere. It will still get you access to everything, but the $7
and $12 a month levels will return, and they will both also
have the same set of rewards. So there is no practical difference
between $4.07, and $12 other than the final two are for folks
who wanna help out a little more just because they can.
And if you choose to do that, my god, do we appreciate it?
Alright. That's the bulk of what I wanna say summarized. If
you're a freak for the details, the rest of this upload are
those. If you wanna bail now and go become a member straight
away, I'm not gonna stop you.
In fact, I'm gonna applaud you. Good work. Nice job. Just what a
show. What a show.
Okay. So if you missed the state of the pod episode at the
beginning of the year where we talked about how we fund the
show and how it's going, let me give you some backstory. We all
work together at a small production company called Charts
and Leisure doing client work. That means that companies hire
us to make media for them. Over the last year and change, client
work money has paid our bills, meaning we could do the work of
Neverpost without being paid to do it, which, none of us are.
The contract for our biggest client, the one providing
coverage for all of us to make the show together, has ended.
There was always a chance that this was gonna happen, but it
happened a little sooner and a little more, completely than we
expected. This effectively means we are all un or underemployed
at the moment. We have enough in membership and ad money to pay
for the show's direct expenses, including for occasional
contributing producer segments. So we're not losing money, but
the show doesn't make us any money in a meaningful way.
So there's now a money vacuum in the life of the staff that needs
to be filled. How it gets filled will have a big impact on the
show going forward. So that's what I'm about to explain. The
ideal scenario is that we become sustainable through membership,
and this means that we each get paid roughly what it costs us to
do the work required to make Never Post. We've made the show
for a year, as something that we do between professional
projects, and you've seen what we can do.
We were an Atlantic best podcast of the year. We won a Webby for
our live show. We did a live show at XOXO Fest, the last XOXO
Fest. We won an honorable mention for a best single
podcast Webby. We were able to join Radiotopia, an extremely
fancy storied network.
We were featured on Apple Podcasts multiple times. Imagine
what we could do if this show is all we did. To pinch a phrase,
we are nowhere near our true power level yet. This is where
you come in. If you join other people listening to become a
member, if you aren't already, we stand a good chance of being
able to focus more and more of our time on Never Post.
And who knows next year, what sort of shenanigans we can get
even more awards for. I bet I bet we can convince Georgia to
sing. Tonys, here we come. Okay. So now but seriously, what are
the other ways this can go?
It is possible that the show's audience grows such that ads
contribute significantly to sustainability, but this is
unlikely. Ad rates are pretty low. Audience growth is slow for
us and everyone else. I mean, don't get me wrong. Please tell
your pals about the show.
Share your favorite segments with them. It really, really
makes a difference, but the number one thing you can do to
help us in the near term is become a member. It's also
possible that we pick up more client work. And if it pays well
enough and doesn't demand sixty hours of work a week, we can
divide our time the way that we have been up until this point.
Finding new work and, you know, doing it takes time.
And finding one client which can account for so much of our
income as a whole team at once is really rare, but, hey, it can
happen. And if any of you out there are looking to hire an
amazingly talented content production team or work for an
organization who might be interested in the same, you know
where to find us. But the more we rely on client work and not
the work of the show to support us I mean, what's to say that
we're not back in this exact same situation in six months or
a year? It's exhausting. It And also means that we miss the
opportunity to see what we can do if the show is our focus.
It's also possible a percentage of the staff go get, like, jobs,
you know, like the normal kind where you're in an office at a
desk, and they sort of frown on you making an unrelated podcast.
It's also possible we each land our own separate client work,
which could make it tough to coordinate six people making a
show together. Or we land client work, but it's just it's so
demanding that making the show alongside it becomes too
difficult. The point being, the ideal here is we get paid to
make the show that we make more and better. This, of course, has
its own challenges.
We have to go into fundraising mode at exactly the same time.
So many other people and places and media outlets are doing
exactly the same thing because, I mean, you know, you live in
the world. You know what it's like out there. You know, I feel
this as a consumer just as much as I do a producer. And, to put
it succinctly, it sucks.
It it just it sucks all around. But we also know, that, you
know, you guys listen to the show, and you believe in it, and
you're one of the many really incredible listeners who's
engaged with us and the world around us and the Internet
situation that we all inhabit and the media and information
environment. And we just we hope that the things that we make are
meaningful enough that, you feel inspired to help out. So we're
gonna sell some t shirts. We're gonna reopen a few membership
levels, and we're gonna do a membership drive in August,
which we hope that you will join us for and tell your friends
about.
And if we're lucky, it'll all mean that we get to twenty
twenty six, and we get to make the best dang version of this
show that we know how to without, going bananas, been
playing a lot of Donkey Kong lately, or into debt. I'm I'm
crossing more fingers than I have. If you have any questions,
we would love to answer them. Send us an email, a voice mail,
a voice memo. Once we have updates for you on any of this,
it'll be in the newsletter, in the news sections of the
episodes proper.
I I mean, thank you. Thanks for listening this far, to this
detailed funding situation announcement. But really, like,
just thanks a million for your support, and especially for the
support of our members. We literally could not make this
show without you, and that is only about to become more true.
It's tough times, but we really believe in what we're doing.
We hope you do too. We hope that we can keep doing it together
the best way that we know how, and who knows, maybe even a
little better. Alright. I'll see you this Wednesday, in a couple
days with a full episode.