Aftermath’s move to Ghost had a lot to do with Outpost

In partnership with: Outpost for Ghost publishers

This edition of the newsletter is sponsored by Outpost. While this is paid content, Outpost had no editorial input into the story.

Journalists are trained to separate themselves from the business side of media. 

“How does this publication make money? I have no idea! I’m just here to report the news.”

That makes sense in a traditional newsroom context, but when you start your own media company, you have to learn how to run the business side. It’s a daunting learning curve and one that many journalists can’t stomach.

But the journalists who are winning at the indie media game right now? They figure out how to make the business side fun and interesting for themselves.

I’ve had my eye on the Aftermath team ever since they launched their first Inside Baseball subscriber drive. Aftermath is a worker-owned newsroom that covers video games and internet culture, founded by five journalists and zero business guys. They’ve turned their lack of business prowess into a strength by marketing however they hell they want to – from posting public subscriber milestones to creating a “Destroy AI” shirt, with artist Kim Hu, that fans marketed for them. 

What makes it possible for Aftermath to play around with the business side is part team culture, part software capabilities. And they just made a huge change in their software stack, trading Lede for Ghost last week.

Lede has been popular with worker-owned newsrooms because ye olde wise one (Defector) uses them. The Aftermath team liked Lede just fine, so why go through all the trouble of moving to a new system?

Aftermath co-founder Riley MacLeod told me a big motivator for the switch was Outpost, which gives them way better communication with their readers. 

Outpost is a marketing and monetization tool that supports Ghost publications. It does things like upsell new readers into subscriptions, catch failed payments and get website visitors to become newsletter subscribers. Gaining total control over the design of their new site with Ghost was important, but upgrading their revenue tools was also a big draw for this reader-backed team.

One of the first things Riley noticed post-launch was how much easier it was to read their analytics. Ghost shows current MRR (monthly recurring revenue) and total readership on log in, and Outpost sends daily and weekly reports that explains what exactly is working to grow the business.

“One of the hardest things about owning a news outlet is that I no longer have an analytics team. I am the analytics team.” —Riley MacLeod

This report was a conscious choice the Outpost team made over providing a bunch of dashboards because they know publishers are busy and just want the high level how’s the business doing metrics. It shows things like which email sequences converted paid subscribers and how many people have cancelled renewals. When the data is pushed to you, you can make faster decisions on it, like updating a flow that isn’t working.

As a 100% reader-funded venture, Riley knew they could be marketing more often but he didn’t want to just “spam the list” (his words, not mine. I think you should spam your list more!) Inside Outpost, he turned on several automations that send to individual readers, based on their own behavior or renewal dates: the free welcome flow, the paid welcome email, a retention flow and a win back flow. These can be much more effective than widely blasted messages because they come across as more personalized. 

This feature is called the Autoresponder in Outpost and Riley made it his top priority before the re-launch. He set aside a couple days to review the Outpost templates, tweak them for Aftermath’s voice and write some fresh copy for a few of them, with co-founder Gita Jackson’s help.

It’s been less than two weeks since the new site went live and this has already paid off.

Riley had a look at their first Outpost report while we talked and rattled off the numbers of people upgrading to a paid subscription, fixing failing credit cards, and renewing after cancelling – all because of the Autoresponder.

Aftermath also moved over their metered registration and paywall to Outpost, a strategy they were using already, but in the migration, they decided to increase the number of free articles casual readers get. Three free articles per month before you have to sign up with your email address and then, three more before you’re prompted to become a paid subscriber. They’ve also made all freelancer contributed stories free.

Like all good journalists, their paywall strategy keeps them up at night.

“I have humongous concerns about what it means when reliable news becomes basically a luxury good and the Post and Fox News are always going to be free,” Riley said, but we agreed the rent must be paid and when you’re 100% reader funded, that paywall has to deploy at some point. The metered paywall is a near perfect solution because it allows first timers to access that reliable news, but it starts to remind your true fans that maybe it’s time to cough up that cash and back your venture.

Aftermath can change the count of free articles anytime in Outpost with the click of a button.

Aftermath enlisted both the Outpost and Ghost teams to help with the re-launch – something that is available to most site owners — but Riley and his co-founders put many hours in, too. Luke Plunkett managed the web design and development while Riley focused on the Outpost setup and the Stripe migration. They made a Slack channel and created lists of everything they needed to do. It took them three to four months from start to finish.

“I cooked for the first time in three weeks. I was like, ‘Oh my God, I'm not gonna eat a sandwich standing over the sink while I write emails,’” Riley said about the week after the site went live.

Now that their tools are much improved, Aftermath’s going to work on converting more of the free readership into paying subscribers. They announced their new site on November 9, along with a $1 first month sale, which has been a successful strategy for them before. And thanks to Outpost’s handy reports, they’ll be able to see exactly how many new subscribers they win over every day.

Go check out Aftermath’s new site and start your free trial with Outpost so you can upsell and retain more paid subscribers, too.

PS: Outpost sponsored today’s story, but they didn’t touch a single sentence of it.