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WTF Just Happened Today? is a free, daily, political digest newsletter.
This week, Matt Kiser joins us to talk about how it works, what it costs him, and what nearly broke it.
In this episode:
📈 How a writing challenge became a $227k/year media business
💸 The pay-what-you-want model built on radical financial transparency
📬 The one-question email that gets more people to donate every drive
Listen wherever you get your podcasts; watch below; and scroll down to read our profile.
— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor
One sentence at a time
The dawn of a new presidency always means a spike in news items.
Feeling unable to keep up with everything happening in the early weeks of the first Trump presidency in 2017, Matt Kiser decided to start summarizing the day's political news as an education hack, just for himself: read something, write it back out in your own words, retain it better.
He had the idea to publish this practice as a newsletter — titled, since the beginning, WTF Just Happened Today? (WTFJT) — over martinis at a table at Buca di Beppo in DC, on January 21, 2017.
He and a close friend had flown in from Seattle for the Women’s March, and over dinner they’d bonded over a mutual frustration — they both had the money, the time, and the interest to follow the news, and yet neither of them actually felt informed. A summary newsletter felt like the solution.
On the night of February 15, 2017 — 27 days into what was supposed to be a personal 100-day challenge — Matt sent his subscribers a note.
His email list had grown fast; his newsletter had gone viral inside private Facebook groups related to the Women’s March almost immediately. Growth was quick enough that he'd already blown past TinyLetter's soft subscriber limit and was now running up real bills on MailChimp. He'd spent several thousand dollars of his own money on production, and now needed $4,000 to keep it going.
So he turned to his audience, sharing links to his Patreon and PayPal accounts in that day’s email, and went to bed.
"I wake up, and there's like $34,000 in that PayPal account."
Four days later, his Patreon subscriptions had accumulated $2,500 in monthly recurring revenue. A few days after that, $3,000 a month. On day 90 of this challenge, he quit his full-time job.
Become the media
"We have a scarcity of time available to consume news, but the media environment is optimized for an abundance of information,” as Matt writes on the WTFJHT? about page.
Even before 2017, algorithmic feeds were chopping stories into fragments, resurfacing old pieces as if they were new, and burying context. Matt had a loose thesis rattling around from years building product in digital media — a stint at Business Insider, then two years as the only non-engineer at Algorithmia, an early machine learning startup in Seattle. What would it look like to pair the transparency of open-source software with a subscription media model?
At first, he just didn't have the content to build a product that would test his thesis. In the back of a car on the way to JFK after the Women’s March, he started pulling news story links into an Evernote. By the time he landed back in Seattle, the shape of the project was clear.
"Don't hate the media, become the media" is an oft-quoted line in the journalism world, attributed to Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra. Matt always liked that idea. The internet, at its best, was the same; no permission required; you can just build things.
“You can just do it. But if you do it in a responsible, ethical, moral, value-based way, I think you have a better chance of finding lasting success — of finding your crowd or group and building community.”
Nearly a decade of publishing, by the numbers
Nine years in, WTFJHT? has:
200,000+ subscribers
A pay-what-you-want model that generates roughly $227,000 a year.
A public membership page disclosing Matt's operating costs and salary down to the cent
About 2% of readers support the project financially, contributing an average of $5.93/month. At that rate, each paying member underwrites 54 free readers.
The transparency comes from the open-source world and punk ethos Matt came up in — every edit visible, every change logged — but it also does real persuasive work during his quarterly membership drives. Framing a personal donation as a civic act lands differently than a generic support ask, and the responses bear it out.
"I can afford six bucks a month, and I wanna see this thing exist," one new member wrote him.
Another: "This is more valuable to me than the New York Times." He once received a handwritten letter from a woman who had read the newsletter aloud to her grandmother in a hospice garden every day until she died.
Matt has never run ads in the newsletter, had no plans to, and uses no paywall.
"I'm not the one producing this original journalism. It felt really shitty to try and cannibalize [the sources] with a curated, aggregated product.
I will keep doing this for as long as people will keep supporting me. The moment this equation doesn't work out, that tells me this product no longer serves a valuable part in enough people's lives. And we're just gonna stop."
Nine years in, the core product is nearly identical to what launched in January 2017: a one-sentence summary, six or so news stories with sources cited, every edit ever made visible on GitHub. The same ridiculous name.
"Without people, you're nothing," Matt told us, citing Joe Strummer, lead singer of The Clash. It's the closest thing he has to a mission statement — and it shows in how he runs the business: transparency as infrastructure, audience as relationship, and product as something sustained by and for a voluntarily paying public.
Subscribe to WTF Just Happened Today?
Connect with Matt on LinkedIn.
When your audience donates or pays for a subscription, find a way to ask why
When a reader signs up to donate to WTF Just Happened Today?, they receive two emails. The first is a simple confirmation receipt.
The second email, in a personal voice directly from Matt, asks, “What compelled you to give today?”
He says this second email is his best audience-listening tool. The responses are candid in ways surveys rarely produce — catching new members in a moment of generosity, aware of why they acted and willing to share.
He hears things like "I'm on a fixed income, but this is worth more to me than a Times subscription" and "I've been meaning to do this for two years." That qualitative signal shapes how he writes future funding drives: which framings work, which language resonates, which parts of the product people cite when they decide to pay.
It’s the same logic as including a signup survey for free subscriptions.
When a reader signs up for your newsletter, they are at their most engaged — and thus most willing to tell you a bit about themselves
This is the best time to collect demographic data to help package your newsletter and audience for pitching advertisers
If you don’t plan on selling ads in your newsletter, it’s still the best place to learn about who your audience is and what they want from your product
Whether free or paid, if you have a newsletter, and the ability to add surveys or personal-appeal emails designed to draw earnest replies to the subscription flow, it’s a must.
Creator Spotlight is owned by beehiiv and we use beehiiv, so here are guides on building signup flows and surveys using our platform.
