Launching Sponsorship Packages

Vision and Goals

When I launched paid membership, I did it to make the newsletter sustainable.

I wrote here what sustainable means to me:

1. Pay for its current expenses (from domain name to tools, hardware/software used to create the newsletter)

2. Pay for expanding the newsletter and making it better. This means playing some collaborators to help me with watching/summarising more channels where content is shared, helping with creating images for the newsletter, and other small tasks. This will make the newsletter less dependent on me (now it is 100% dependent), thus increasing the chances of living longer.

There are also a couple of goals that I have in mind for the future of ShortRuby:

1. Making ShortRuby bigger than the newsletter → adding more projects to promote content creators. For example, there is a lot of space to grow and extend rubyandrails.info and make it so to drive more traffic to content creators while helping the community discover learning resources.

2. Building a team - I want to start paying for an editor and pay a junior Ruby developer to help open-source the projects and build more features.

Paid membership analysis

Currently, 43 readers have upgraded to one of the paid membership tiers (monthly, yearly, or founding members).

Here is a breakdown of all taxes that I need to pay on this income:

• Substack fee of 10%

• Stripe fees can range between 1.5% to 3.5%

• VAT of 19% - because I am registered as a VAT company in the EU, and this is required when doing B2C transactions thus, I decided to include it in the price for the membership

• My country’s mandatory social contributions (including health insurance) and income tax can reach around 35% or more. These are mandatory in every income stream.

About 66% of income goes to expenses, leaving less than $100 monthly for creating the newsletter. There's no budget for hiring an editor or additional help from newsletter income alone.

Launching sponsorship

I decided to launch Sponsorship packages along with the paid membership.

There were already some inquiries about this possibility so that it might work.

Paid Membership will still be available, and all paid members will not receive any promo or sponsored content I might include in the newsletter.

The promo content will be visible and marked as a promo only in three places inside the newsletter. You'll be able to read more about it here.

I will do this as transparently as possible, and I will remain the curator of everything that goes into the newsletter, having the same focus on quality and openness. I will focus on products that are fit and can be helpful for a developer. If they are created or are using Ruby, this will be a lovely outcome.

Paying subscribers

I still want the members to support the newsletter, but there is still a long way to go.

A mix of paid subscribers and sponsored content could be a great mix to allow me enough freedom to pick and choose what to promote in the newsletter while also offering subscribers the option to go ad-free.

I do hope that other projects I can create under the ShortRuby umbrella can become sustainable on their own and fuel the growth of this newsletter while keeping it accessible to everybody.

You will not receive any promo or ads as a paying subscriber. You will have an ad-free experience. 

Also, if you want to promote something via a sponsorship package at any time, I will discount the amount you have paid so far from the sponsorship price once each year.