I come to independent publishing through technology. I spent the bulk of my career working on growth projects for companies like Gusto, Prosper, Nissan, Joyable and Guardant Health. My interest has long been in how to build an audience for new products and how to entice that audience to become paying customers. I worked for Eric Ries’ consultancy in Silicon Valley teaching lean startup methods as we implemented them for companies like Toyota and Macy’s in their innovation labs. I also worked with many early stage startups and growth stage tech companies helping them develop, launch and grow subscription products. Through this experience, I popularized a methodology known as “growth design,” which blends business and design. I launched the Growth Designers community in 2016 which is still in operation and I’ve given talks internationally on the subject which has now been widely adopted as a core competency in tech.

In 2020, I launched my first paid newsletter project called L.A. Pays Attention which covered local politics and received statewide acclaim from news outlets like KCRW, CalMatters and the L.A. Times. I quickly got hooked on the dual path of writing while building a paid community around your passion. I sold L.A. Pays Attention to local newsroom L.A. Public Press in 2023 and have since launched two additional paid newsletters, one of which is now my full time job. The other project, Journalists Pay Themselves—which covered how journalists become entrepreneurs—was merged into Liz Kelly Nelson’s Project C in 2025.

These days, I practice what I preach, running a reader-backed publication with over 350 paid subscribers and long term paid partnerships while teaching other writers how to fund their work.

It would be ideal if great thinkers could contribute their ideas, research and writing to society without worrying about how to fund their work, but that’s not the world we are living in. All work needs funding and what gets funded is often what gets produced. That’s why I’ve made it my mission to help independent writers secure diverse sources of funding that honor their values.

My practice centers on paid subscriptions. I teach strategies for building an audience-backed business that supports a writer’s work while balancing the demands of the research, writing and community building itself. The paid subscription model is centuries old, fueling the work of successful authors, newspapers and magazines to continue publishing. In my work, we take lessons from these longstanding publishers and pair them with modern tools to grow sustainable, reader-funded projects.