Every Studio: Transforming Content Creation into Product Innovation
Either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.
Preface
Dan Shipper is one of my favorite technology creators, he’s not only a writer, but also a builder. In 2019, he and Nathan Baschez founded the newsletter Every, now has more than 75,000 subscribers. Based on the subscription community, they also launched three successful products and six months ago, Every expanded into a product studio.
As Benjamin Franklin said, "Either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing." It’s a media company with under 10 employees that's mostly bootstrapped. It’s also the best example of what happens with seamless integration of media, software, and AI.
In this article, I'll dive deep into Every - the newsletter and its product studio, how they incubate and launch new AI-powered products, and how the media and product sides work in accelerator.
What's Every?
Every is a bootstrapped media company initially co-founded by Nathan Baschez and Dan Shipper around Thanksgiving 2019. The two of them co-founded Every and grew it together. In 2023, Nathan Baschez spun out Lex from Every, establishing it as an independent company with himself as the CEO. Lex raised a $2.75 million seed round led by True Ventures. Dan Shipper continues to lead Every, and they will keep publishing great articles daily via email, including occasional contributions from Nathan.
Nathan Baschez: co-founder and former CEO of Every. He is a serial entrepreneur. In addition to co-founding Every, he also co-founded the AI-powered writing assistant Lex. He was also the first employee at Substack, a co-founder of Product Hunt and co-created Product Hunt.
Dan Shipper: current CEO of Every. He studied philosophy for his undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania, and during his time in school, he founded a SaaS company called Firefly and sold it to Pegasystems (NASDAQ ticker: PEGA). Now he writes "Chain of Thought" column and hosts the "AI & I" podcast at Every.
What’s Every Studio?
Although Every is a media company, they started incubating AI products as early as the fall of 2022. Lex was the first product incubated by Every. After incubating Lex, Every continued to explore new product incubation opportunities, and ultimately established Every Studio.
Every Studio was founded in October of this year. It is a dedicated product incubation division of Every, with the mission of developing a suite of AI applications - creative tools to expand minds and help you do your best work, all included in an Every subscription. The studio's goal is to build more efficient tools for thinkers.
They have already incubated products including Spiral, Sparkle, and Lex. There’s also a incubated product called Cora, which has not yet been officially launched.
Lex: an AI writing app to help users write better(Where I wrote this article!). In the fall of 2022, Nathan incubated Lex and then spun out as an independent company last year. Lex has raised almost $3 million from True Ventures and others.
Spiral: an AI writing app that automates repetitive writing tasks. Danny Aziz is the general manager of Spiral, he’s also one of the EIRs at the studio.
Sparkle: an AI file organization app to help users tidy their desktops.
The way Every Studio works is by partnering with Entrepreneurs-in-Residence (EIRs) to ship as many experiments as possible in a 3-month timeframe, until they find product-market fit. They have 3 team meetings per week for accountability and collaboration, and every Friday they do a show-and-tell of what they shipped that week. When they find a promising idea, they publish it internally to the rest of the Every team. If the team likes it, they'll then release it to subscribers.
Tinkerers, readers, writer-artists, curious novelty enthusiasts, multi-disciplinary autodidacts, polymaths, and well-rounded citizens - they are the typical EIRs at Every Studio.
Brandon Gell: Head of Every Studio. Brandon joined Every in May 2024 as their very first Entrepreneur-in-Residence. Prior to this, he was the co-founder and CEO of the insurtech startup Clyde, where he raised $50 million and built a team of over 100 people, before selling the company to CoverGenius in March 2023.
Dan Shipper believes that Brandon Gell is a very smart and ambitious founder, as well as a kind and empathetic person who understands that building a company is a team sport. Therefore, when Every decided to do more product incubation, Dan Shipper invited Brandon Gell to join.
Danny Aziz: one of the EIRs at Every Studio, and is now the general manager of Spiral, one of Every Studio's latest incubation projects. He previously led engineering teams at startups in the US and Europe, and was the founding engineer of the workplace app General Collaboration.
The products Every Studio is building are ones the EIRs want to use themselves, solving problems they see in their own future lives. “Businesses and individuals haven’t fully leveraging existing AI tools into their work flows.” They hope Spiral and the other product they built will be used by more people and become more powerful and shareable within a year.
The way Every Studio works is by partnering with Entrepreneurs-in-Residence (EIRs) to ship as many experiments as possible in a 3-month timeframe, until they find product-market fit. They have 3 team meetings per week for accountability and collaboration, and every Friday they do a show-and-tell of what they shipped that week. When they find a promising idea, they publish it internally to the rest of the Every team. If the team likes it, they'll then release it to subscribers.
Tinkerers, readers, writer-artists, curious novelty enthusiasts, multi-disciplinary autodidacts, polymaths, and well-rounded citizens - they are the typical EIRs at Every Studio.
Brandon Gell: Head of Every Studio. Brandon joined Every in May 2024 as their very first Entrepreneur-in-Residence. Prior to this, he was the co-founder and CEO of the insurtech startup Clyde, where he raised $50 million and built a team of over 100 people, before selling the company to CoverGenius in March 2023.
Dan Shipper believes that Brandon Gell is a very smart and ambitious founder, as well as a kind and empathetic person who understands that building a company is a team sport. Therefore, when Every decided to do more product incubation, Dan Shipper invited Brandon Gell to join.
Danny Aziz: one of the EIRs at Every Studio, and is now the general manager of Spiral, one of Every Studio's latest incubation projects. He previously led engineering teams at startups in the US and Europe, and was the founding engineer of the workplace app General Collaboration.
The products Every Studio is building are ones the EIRs want to use themselves, solving problems they see in their own future lives. “Businesses and individuals haven’t fully leveraging existing AI tools into their work flows.” They hope Spiral and the other product they built will be used by more people and become more powerful and shareable within a year.
Why media is the best place to incubate AI products?
“An essay is a great MVP for a product.” This low-cost experimentation - whether prototyping or reaching an audience - is a huge advantage in finding great new product ideas.
In the latest episode of Every, Dan Shipper, Danny Aziz and Brandon Gell talked about Every’s business model, what makes our flywheel turn, where each of us sees ourselves one year from now, and they thought media now is the best place to incubate AI products, with the following three reasons.
Low-cost Experimentation and Prototyping: Language models are fundamentally reducing the cost of producing product prototypes. What used to take months or years can now be done in just hours or days. As an example, they were able to build the first version of Spiral in just two days.
Convenient Access to an Audience: Over the years, Every has built up a base of readers who are interested in new technologies and businesses, and who are willing to try the products that Every creates. For most companies, the cost of validating whether people are willing to use an experimental product is high, but for Every, their readership serves as a natural pool of early adopters. Every's CEO Dan Shipper and Every Studio's head Brandon Gell both believe that the reason this model of combining media and product development works is that AI makes product creation cheaper and faster.
The Advantages of Writing: Every believes that writing is another key advantage in incubating AI products. Writing requires clear thinking, which helps the team better refine product ideas. Additionally, writing allows them to quickly validate ideas, as readers will let them know which ideas resonate.
As a lover of writing, I firmly believe writing is a good way of clearing your mind and that’s exactly the reason why I like writing. There’s also a reason why Jeff Bezos instituted strategy memos instead of slide decks at Amazon: Writing exposes bad ideas and elevates good ones.
When you’re writing, it’s also easy to tell when we’ve hit on an idea that resonates. Your audience will let you know. Now with the power of Cursor, Claude, vercel, and a bunch of AI development tools, we can build product within a weekend and if you have a community of AI pioneers, you can even test your MVP in a extreme fast way.
The low-cost experimentation and prototyping enabled by language models and development tools, coupled with convenient access to an engaged audience through their media platform, gives Every a distinct advantage in incubating new AI-powered products. And as a writer myself, I really believe that the process of clear, concise writing helps refine product ideas and validate which ones truly resonate. Every's approach of building a media business alongside a product studio is a powerful flywheel that leverages the strengths of both.
That's why Every's model resonates with me so much. The combination of AI development tools, a reader community of technology early adopters, and a small, fast-moving team is what makes their flywheel turn.
🎁Bonus: The Early Incubation of Lex
Lex is an AI-powered word processor developed by Nathan Baschez, the co-founder of Every. The incubation of Lex began within Every, starting as a side project.
After returning from paternity leave, Nathan Baschez began brainstorming new software projects. He found himself missing software development and sought to identify a suitable side project within Every.
During his three years at Every, Nathan had grown accustomed to using Google Docs daily to write and edit articles. Increasingly, he felt frustrated with the tools available to writers and editors, and harbored many ideas for improving them.
Moreover, Nathan was also excited about the emerging GPT-3 technology. He discussed with Every's other co-founder, Dan Shipper, how this AI could potentially be leveraged to assist writers and editors.
It was through the collision of these various strands of inspiration that the initial concept for Lex crystallized in Nathan's mind. He recalled the moment of insight striking him as he rocked his daughter to sleep one evening. Eager to capture the idea, Nathan considered jotting down some notes, but ultimately decided to commit it to memory.
With the steadfast support of his wife, Nathan then spent an entire Saturday sequestered in his office, coding furiously. A few weeks later, he had completed a prototype that satisfied his own expectations. Nathan promptly shared this early version with a handful of writer friends, eliciting a mix of lukewarm and enthusiastic responses.
The public launch of Lex attracted over 25,000 signups, prompting Nathan and Dan Shipper to seriously consider Lex's future direction.
They needed to weigh the relationship between Lex and Every's other businesses, and determine Lex's growth potential.
Ultimately, they made the difficult decision to spin Lex out from Every and establish it as an independent company.
The process of spinning out Lex was not easy. It took much longer than expected, as Nathan shouldered Lex's development work while also continuing to publish weekly articles for Every. Over time, the initial excitement around Lex began to wane, and Nathan faced the challenge of transforming Lex from a "nights and weekends" project into a robust product. Through ongoing user interactions, Nathan realized that users needed a tool to help them think and communicate better, not just a better word processor.
Just as Lex was about to complete the spin-out, Nathan connected with Natasha from True Ventures, ultimately securing a seed round of funding from them.
Refer
https://every.to/p/introducing-every-studio
https://makeitsparkle.co/
https://lex.page/
https://spiral.computer/