The News
One of the most talked-about writers in business and culture journalism last year wasn’t employed by The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg.
She’s the writer of a daily newsletter that launched during Covid as a short-fiction blog and has morphed into a must-read for the young, affluent (or soon-to-be affluent) set in New York.
Emily Sundberg’s business and culture newsletter, Feed Me, publishes every weekday with a mix of aggregated tech and finance news, lifestyle content, media gossip, and NYC restaurant intel, among other topics. Over the last several years it has developed a cult following and over 50,000 subscribers, propelling it to the sixth spot on Substack’s paid leaderboard. The 30-year-old journalist wasn’t included on the New York Magazine power list, but those who were on the list told New York they couldn’t stop reading her newsletter.
Sundberg is saving a lot of the good stuff for a glossy magazine feature to come, but Semafor caught up with her to chat about the newsletter’s two-year anniversary, the announcement of a new podcast, the formal addition of some new contributors and a redesign with slicker, more ad-friendly visual branding and an ouroboros logo to match.
“I’ve been using a bootleg logo of Citibank for the past year, and I was really hoping to get a cease-and-desist from them,” she said. “That would have been really funny to post a letterhead saying that my newsletter was using their iconic logo, but I never got it. I realized I need to have an iconic logo. I can’t take a bank’s logo.”
She added: “It was half-joke, half not. But I am open to all banks advertising with Feed Me, not just Citi.”
Q&A
Max Tani: Why did you start the newsletter?
Emily Sundberg: I started the newsletter originally over COVID. It was the summer of 2020, and I was writing short fiction, I was writing little horror stories. I didn’t think much about it as a product at all. It was just like a fun little tool that I was using to send out emails to whoever wanted to be there. And I barely even promoted it. It was very, like, if you’ve seen it, cool. I was working at Meta. And then in 2021, a friend of mine who worked at Bloomberg was like, “Your story is on my Terminal right now,” because Matt Levine included one of the horror stories that I wrote in his newsletter. He linked to one of them. It was a horror story about a girlboss who kept all of her employees in her basement at her brownstone. And that was the first time I realized that maybe my writing is good.
I realized some people are thinking about newsletters in a way that’s different from how I am, and they can be a premium product. So then later on, I was working at Meta in the fall of 2022. They announced layoffs. By that time, I had seen people build real businesses on Substack, and before they even said that my team was going to be affected by the layoffs, I was like, I’m not living off of severance, I need to do something every day. I’m going to start a daily newsletter with workplace gossip in it.
At that point in time, there was a lot of excitement in the investment world, people were starting to return to the office, but they were also uncertain about layoffs. And in my group chats, I had billionaires, and I had people that worked at landscaping companies, and I had friends who were working on Wall Street, and I had friends who were working at retail stores downtown, and they all cared about the same stories. They were treating these niche stories about people they didn’t know with the same excitement as they were treating celebrity gossip. And I was like, fuck it. I’m going to see how this goes. And it took off really, really fast.
Am I surprised by the success of it? No, because I’m a really hard worker, and I wanted it to work, I wanted to create something. I spend a lot of time outside in the world. I have a good knack for what people like. I’m a very good listener, and I’m obsessed with the media industry and especially women’s attention spans. At first I was trying to just get a lot of women to read this thing, and then it ended up being a really cool, diverse audience, which I’m grateful for.
I’m curious about that too. Can you talk a little bit about the gendered element to it? And how has it changed over time?
First of all, all of my demographics I’ve had to do manually because Substack doesn’t have the best breakdown. So I do a lot of my own surveys. I’ve had parties that have skewed more women. I threw a party in the Hamptons this summer, and it was all guys in Rolexes.
How has it changed? If you close your eyes and you think of a woman Substack writer, you might think about one thing. And I’m not necessarily that. I spend a lot of time learning from men in the media industry, and I like learning from people who are really different than me. That’s why I listen to Barstool, it’s why I’m obsessed with local news. That’s why I’ve become friends with guys who own lacrosse teams. I could write all day about Glossier and about New York City restaurants. But there’s a lot of other people writing about that at the same speed as me. So I tried to figure out, how do I go in and be a really refreshing voice in the world of, for example, credit restructuring at Rent the Runway? I don’t know if anybody else is writing that in a sexy way that’s not just like a newswire.
I guess it would be hard not to mention that for most of the time that I was writing this letter, the lead photo was a selfie of me. I took that off, that’s not part of the letter anymore, because I started getting uncomfortable being recognized. But I do think that that probably drove a certain amount of traffic from men on LinkedIn.
How many readers do you have at this point? How many are free and how many are paid? It seems like things are going quite well.
I have over 50,000 readers. I would say over 10% of those readers are paid. And then on top of my subscription business, I sell ads on my newsletter. Somebody asked me the other day, is that just a nice cherry on top? And I said, that would be an awfully large cherry. My ads have been some of my top-performing posts, from engagement standpoint and traffic standpoint.
Do you have more demand than you can fulfill, or is it like a pretty, steady stream and it’s all kind of manageable?
I did 10 ads this year, and I think I said no to 10 ads this year, and I think all of the ads that I did were those businesses’ first, or almost all of them [were] their first. The first time they ever advertised on Substack was with Feed Me, which was really cool. There wasn’t that much hand-holding. There wasn’t a tight leash in terms of the types of content that they wanted. And they all crushed, which was really cool for me. And my readers didn’t mind. I think that it said something that the ads that I include on Feed Me don’t distract from the reader experience.
But I don’t think Substack [is] crazy about it. I think they’d rather me not do ads. They’re going to have figure that out eventually, just from a valuation standpoint, because competitors do all have ad networks.
How are people finding you? Is it just network effects on Substack? Is it a bunch of people forwarding your stuff along?
I had a very small social media following when I started my newsletter, but I think interesting people followed me just because of the jobs that I’ve had, whether they were at Meta or magazines or random consumer startups. So those are all tastemakers in their own world. So people would send it around to their friends. And then every time I wrote a story for New York Magazine or another place, people would find me through my byline.
And then there was definitely a little bit of a sweet spot where partners at hedge funds would send my letter to their portfolio companies if I mentioned their businesses in my newsletter. Like, Kirsten [Green] at Forerunner saw it, and they reached out to me, and they definitely sent it around to some of their funds. There were some guys at General Catalyst who saw my letter and sent it around. It’s often because I’ve mentioned a company that they’ve either invested in or were interested in. So that was definitely its own little wave.
And then Substack does have a lot of recommendation features. People would find me through that. I did have one really viral story over the summer. The title of the newsletter is called The Machine in the Garden. That went really viral, and I got a lot of new readers from that. But most of my traffic seems to be coming from emails, which makes me think that people are forwarding it to each other and finding it through there.
When you post gossip, do you ever get angry calls from the press people at those companies complaining? Do people bother you in that way?
People at companies call me or email me. I’ve had them ask if I can get on Zooms with founders. And I always say I’m happy to sit down in person. I don’t need to be on a Zoom with your founder. Like, if it’s that urgent, I’m sure you will tell me what the issue is, right? It’s often just a PR thing.
The other thing is, I’m nice. I love great work, [I] call out great work when it occurs. A big part of my letter, I think, is criticism and pointing out why something doesn’t work. Yeah, [if] that hurts your marketing team, then that probably means that they somewhat agree with me.
I am curious what the goal is. Where do you want to take it?
I think the daily newsletter will always exist. I think I will continue like my doors are open. If somebody wants to write for me, I’m happy to speak to them. I like the idea of handing over the mic to people who are really excellent writers.
That being said, I don’t think I will be a newsletter business. I have a real studio mindset in that. I want to make audio projects. I want to make another movie. I really enjoyed making merch. I kind of joked a few weeks ago that I wanted to make a really great boxcutter, because everybody orders so much stuff online. I was like, “Yeah, I could make a cool boxcutter.”
I really like making things. I’m in a cool position that I never took outside funding. I have nobody to pay back. It’s pure revenue, right? I enjoy the newsletter business a lot, and I think that I will continue to evolve Feed Me, the letter, but that will continue to feed other things that I do, whether that’s events, or talks, or screenings, or cool collaborations with brands that I love. I really see myself more as a studio than as [someone in] news. I hope that I can say that more confidently in a few months.