Caffeine is moving to Substack!

This is an exciting move for us, for all kinds of reasons.

Firstly, it comes as we’ve hired an incredible team to grow Caffeine. Led by our irrepressible new CEO Lauren Vosper, the team now includes journalist Finn Hogan, and Head of Community and Events Pauli Sosa. You’ll be hearing a tonne from them from now on, and they’re on hand whether you have a story to tell, advice to share, or a partnership to talk about.

As we (along with all news media) grapple with the challenge of how to sustainably fund high-quality journalism, Substack has emerged as a kind of great hope. A community of people who value reading enough to pay a little for it, on a platform that makes it super easy for writers to publish and earn a little from it.

The startup that ‘made newsletters cool again’ has millions of paying subscribers, and a valuation in the hundreds of millions of United States dollars.

Substack was founded in 2017 in San Francisco.

By a New Zealander.

Wait, Substack was founded by a New Zealander?

Yes folks it was, and that’s why this was such an obvious choice for Caffeine.

Hamish McKenzie, Substack’s co-founder and Chief Writing Officer, graduated from Otago in 2004, moved to Canada to complete his masters, then to Hong Kong to write for magazines, then to the US as a tech reporter, then to Tesla as their lead writer, before writing ‘Insane Mode: How Elon Musk’s Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil’.

Hamish then founded Substack alongside Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi, and grew it into the publishing giant it is today.

We started Caffeine to ensure kiwi founders learn from other kiwi founders who are doing the hard thing of building an incredible company.

Hamish is one of those other founders, and he’s been super generous with his time and insights, some of which you’ll read about next week.

So part of the move is symbolic – the daily for New Zealand’s founders, published on the platform created by a mega successful kiwi founder.

The move is also about ensuring the financial wellbeing of Caffeine.

It’s no news that running a news media business is Hard.

With the support of Previously Unavailable and a handful of willing partners, we’ve funded our progress to date – developing the platform, hiring a great team, and producing daily content that we hope you find useful and inspiring.

But we need help.

Help that Substack makes it much easier to ask for.

We’ll continue to make most of our content free, and we hope that those of you who value what we do, and have the ability to make a small contribution, will choose to do so, by becoming a paying subscriber.

You’ll see options for how you can contribute on our new site from Monday. Please do consider supporting us, and in doing so, supporting the success of New Zealand’s startup community.

We’ll be creating subscriber packages for companies too, and our inboxes are very much open to those wanting to support us in bigger ways – as a patron or sponsorship partner.

As a reader, you don’t need to do anything – you’ll continue to get your daily shot in your inbox, and caffeinedaily.co will remain our URL.

You’ll notice some design changes. Substack is not yet as customizable as it will be in future – so we’re a little limited in how distinctive we can make the site look.

But the quality and regularity of the content will stay just the same.

And, you’ll be able to like and comment on our content, which will help us better understand you and what you’re getting the most out of.

So let us know in the comments on Monday what you think of the new Caffeine, on the mega-huge and kiwi-founded Substack.

Happy weekend!

Lauren, Finn, Pauli & James.