One Year Anniversary of Kaoboy Musings / Resolution of the Paywall Dilemma.

Thank you all for your support! I've come up with what I think is a fair policy to solve the tension between not wanting to be a "Newsletter Peddler" and giving something of value to my Paid Subs.

It was almost exactly one year ago (2/4/23 to be exact) that Twitter, following Elon Musk’s then-recent takeover, capriciously banned me without any explanation and forced me to seek out alternatives. I thought that I had lost all of my past Threads over the last several years, which really pissed me off.

That’s when I decided to migrate all of my content (I had fortunately saved my most significant Threads in Word format) onto Substack and to further organize all of my content by subject matter. It was a painstaking process, but I’m happy with the result since Substack now houses my entire body of work since 2019.

For my long-form content, my goal is not to bombard you with “market rundown” types of posts (I save those for my Daily Chats) but rather to create more evergreen, educational content (like my Mental Models and Investing series). This is why I spent the time to index the content.

I recently put out this Guide to show you how I’ve organized my corpus of work:

Despite Twitter eventually restoring my account, because 11,000 of you supported me on this platform, my intention is to continue creating content on both platforms but reserving long-form content and my KAOS THEORY Podcast for Substack only.

But I’ve been struggling with a dilemma all year.

Within several months, several hundred of you were kind enough to upgrade to Paid Subs even though I announced that my Paywall was a Voluntary Paywall. I try very hard to be an objective and impactful writer, and for me that meant that I could not tie myself down to becoming a “Newsletter Peddler.” That is not to denigrate the many fine paid offerings out there, but for me, the decision to charge someone for content comes with huge psychological strings attached which I felt would compromise my objectivity and desire to write. I didn’t want to feel beholden to put out stuff on a regular cadence; sometimes I put a lot out, and sometimes I put out less — it all depends on what inspires me and what I think is relevant and interesting at the time.

I don’t do this for the money and only write because:

• I am passionate about the subject material.

• I like to educate others.

• I like to draw out two-way discourse from other smart people to sharpen my own thinking.

But I also want to offer something of value to my Paid Subs, so I’ve come up with the following decision around my Paywall:

• ALL POSTS AND PODCASTS WILL ALWAYS BE FREE TO EVERYONE FOR 1 MONTH.

• Only Paid Subs will have access to the Archive beyond the month.

• Only Paid Subs will have access to the Daily Chats, which are very similar to my Twitter Musings of the Day, but open to a smaller, more focused audience without the noise or bots of Twitter.

I hope that is a fair and equitable solution to my dilemma of not wanting to compromise my objectivity and still wanting to provide relevant content that is accessible to everyone while also offering something of value to those who have upgraded to Paid Subs.

Thank you ALL for your kind support!

UrbanKaoboy