I remember exactly where I was: Sydney International
Airport, waiting to board a ten-hour flight to Tokyo, followed by a twelve-hour flight
to Boston, then a one-hour one to DC to arrive home the day before Thanksgiving, 2018. My agent, Dave, said he had an idea he wanted
to run past me, so we hopped on a call—he had just talked to Vimeo, the video streaming
platform. They were trying to persuade him to persuade
one of his other clients to build a paywalled streaming site for their videos using their
tech. This, and infinite minor variations of this,
was something we’d get pitched constantly, as creators, but everyone recognized that
it couldn’t really work. In fact, it had a long history of not working. Perhaps the most flashy failure was Vessel—it
launched in early 2015 with the big-name creators of the time: Good Mythical Morning, Epic Meal
Time, Shane Dawson, Linus Tech Tips. It was basically a YouTube replacement—same
content, same creators, same features—with the addition that users could pay $2.99 a
month to watch videos 72 hours early. Combine that with their supposedly unique
advertising ecosystem and the pitch to creators was that they could earn dramatically more
per view. This is always the core proposition with these
alternate streaming services—more revenue per view—but they almost always have the
same problem: the number of views is orders of magnitude lower. Platforms have to extract value from the audience
somehow—whether through a paywall or through more intrusive advertising—so why would
an viewer watch on your platform when they can watch the exact same content on YouTube
for free and with less intrusive advertising? So, creators sign on to platforms like Vessel,
get menial views compared to YouTube, and before these platforms can grow enough to
get to a point where it’s worth it for creators beyond an initial paid test group they run
out of money and shut down. But we had some ideas on how we could fix
that—we thought there was a chance that we had identified a magic formula that we
were in a uniquely good position to undertake that could make this simple concept work where
all others had failed. Four years later, well… not to brag, but
we were right. Nebula has over 650,000 paying users, a $50
million valuation, one-hundred staff members, and it did all of that with absolutely zero
dollars of venture capital funding. So what did we do different? Why we were able to make this simple concept
work when all others had failed?
Clearly, this video is going to be different. I’m not going to be talking about logistics
or geopolitics or infrastructure or another business. I’m taking about my business, so that’s
why, for the first time, I’m here. This was a tricky video to write. I’m trying to use my unique combination
of positions as an owner of a now sizable business and as a creator to tell an intimate,
inside story of how you grow an idea into an enterprise. There are a lot of things that can’t be
said for legal or practical reasons and there are countless different stakeholders involved,
so what follows is what I believe is the fullest story anyone can tell about the inside operations
of a business of this size and nature, but there are, unfortunately, some things I just
can’t talk about. It’s a long story, but it begins in a very
small way: On July 27th, 2016, I got this DM from Philipp Dettmer, of Kurzgesagt: “Hey
man, let’s get right to it: so me and another big YouTuber might be starting something but
I really can’t talk about it yet.” We went back and forth for a month trying
to schedule a call, then finally we talked: basically, Philipp was going to introduce
me to the freelance sponsorship agent he and CGP Grey had been working with for years,
and later on, that might turn into something bigger. That “freelance sponsorship agent” was
Dave Wiskus—that’s a name you’ll want to remember. It’s pretty relevant throughout. We talked, he promised better rates through
a data-driven approach with an upfront commission, I somehow believed him, but eventually it
turned out he was actually right. Some important context: the industry that
had arisen around YouTube creators in 2016 was chock full of liars, cheats, and thieves. It was only over the prior couple years that
people could start to make a living off of YouTube and seemingly the first people that
thought to insert themselves as middlemen were all glorified grifters. Getting sponsored is crucial to going full-time
on YouTube, adsense alone rarely cuts it, but at the time the only deals I could land
for my fledgling channel were ones that automatically locked me in to six months of exclusivity
with the agency I booked through without any guarantee they would actually fill video inventory,
and with undisclosed commissions. “Undisclosed commissions” in this context
means they just told you exactly what you’d get paid which sounds great in theory, but
in practice what it means is that they’re selling the slot to the sponsor for one price,
then paying you a completely different, lower price and never telling you what the difference
was—they’ll just decide what they think you’ll accept, but you have little leverage
to say no because, once again, you’re locked into exclusivity, you’re only legally allowed
to work with them. Oh and, also, contractually they represented
the sponsor, not the creator, so their incentives were to push the price as low as it could
go. If you didn’t like it and wanted to jump
ship, you had to go without sponsorship for six months which would kill your finances. I’ve seen hard evidence that this particular
agency was taking a 50% undisclosed commission on certain creator’s sponsorships so it’s
no wonder why Dave was able to immediately beat their rates and get sponsors to come
back—they might have actually been paying less, but I, the creator, was getting more
of it. By chance, Grey and Philipp had also introduced
Dave to Brian from Real Engineering—we had collaborated on a set of videos that turned
out to be big viral hits that launched both of our channels into relevancy so he was also
one of my first creator friends. The next one was Joseph, from Real Life Lore. I had never met him in person but we had talked
plenty so I convinced him to fly out to the inaugural VidCon Europe in Amsterdam in April
2017. Part of the reason was because I had been
nagging Dave for months to work with Joseph, who’s channel was exploding, and Dave would
be there too—the perfect opportunity for them to meet. Joseph ended up having a nightmare weekend
of travel delays—some snowstorm or something—so he didn’t end up getting there until the
afternoon of the last day, but I introduced everyone and we headed to a bar. We stayed there for hours, everyone hit it
off, and it capped off an exhilarating weekend—the first time any of us had seen a physical manifestation
of the industry we had inserted ourselves into. After working in isolation, it was eye-opening
to see and talk to so many others doing the same thing as us and, according to Dave, in
retrospect, this was the moment when he fully realized that this informal system of freelance
sponsorship booking could grow into something more. It’d be called Standard—a purposefully
forgettable name for a company designed to exist in the background, making life easier
for the creators on center stage. And it worked—creators were simply just
having a better experience working with Standard. The rates were strong, the experience was
personal, the ethos ethical—in a landscape filled with grifters and cheats, the concept
of a sponsorship agency simply doing its job fairly was enough to drive natural, word of
mouth growth. We added dozens of creators to the roster
and started to be viewed as the go-to agency for educational YouTube. We hired staff, got an office, started throwing
VidCon parties, it was all happening. Unbelievably, this part—the part that at
the time felt like hard earned yet incredible success—needs to get glossed over to get
to the good part: November, 27, 2018. After a couple of days of back and forth with
myself and a few other creators, that’s when Dave emailed his full roster of creators
the white paper—the initial concept laying out our vision for Nebula. This is that exact email. In some ways, it was close: “How would this
work? Standard creators post ad-and-sponsor-free
versions of their videos, and occasionally the service premiers exclusive content. Let’s say we charge users $5 per month for
this service.” All of this is still true to this day—even
the price. In other ways, we were way off, “How do
we attract viewers? First, we can simply buy AdSense ads on Standard
channels. Sponsoring our own creators feels wrong, at
least for now. We can revisit this later if we think we can
do it without looking dumb.” This is about as wrong as it could be: we
have never figured out how to make Adsense marketing for Nebula profitable, while sponsoring
YouTube creators has been the driving growth force—we’ll get to how we made that work. But the real key that we understood from day
one was that opportunity cost, to Standard but especially to creators, had to be as small
as it could possibly be. Equivalents before us always raised a huge
amount of venture capital funding, made a big splash at launch, then ran out of money
before profitability leaving creators embarrassed when they folded. We knew that creators were wary of aligning
themselves to something so risky so we needed to make a small splash. We needed to design Nebula to fail gracefully. We needed to make this so that if it did fail,
it would have the smallest possible impact on reputation and finances. Essentially, we followed the most dramatic
form of the minimum viable product model of innovation. We needed to get a super scrappy version of
the product out to the public so rather than us having to guess, they, the customers, would
tell us what they wanted through how they acted. You watch consumer behavior in order to fulfill
their wants. Luckily, a lot of the bones were already in
place: Dave’s prior life was in the iOS app development world so he had a lot of experience
in software, and we actually already had a few engineers on staff to work on the backend
tool we used for sponsor billing and inventory management. The trickiest bit would be the actual streaming. The big platforms like YouTube and Netflix
make it look easy, but it’s quite a technical challenge to distribute high quality video
on low quality internet all across the globe—and we didn’t possibly have the money to build
our own streaming tech. Of course Vimeo originally approached us but
the problem with partnering with them was that they’d have owned the billing relationship—basically,
when someone signed up, Vimeo would keep their credit card details and info and, while we’d
get the money, if we ever decided to split with them there was no guarantee we’d keep
all those subscribers. So we rather decided to partner with another
streaming provider called Zype. Therefore, all we had to build was a front-end—a
slick, flashy user-interface to make it all look professional—and an iOS app. We barely even had a back-end. We had a guy named Eric, who doubled as our
podcast editor, who would take the videos creators added to a shared Dropbox folder,
run them through the encoder, and post them in the right spot with the right metadata. All in all, it cost around $100,000 to get
Nebula ready for launch, an incredibly low sum for both a website and app, but there
was still one key thing we were missing. You see, creators don’t talk unless their
paid to. This is because creators are paid to talk. It’s just pragmatic: you basically get one
call to action per video. You’re lucky to successfully get someone
to listen to one call to action so what the data shows is that if a creator, for example,
runs a sponsor read then promotes their Patreon, what they’ll see, on average, is that they’ll
earn less overall than if they had just promoted the sponsor as the Patreon push cuts into
performance more than it drives additional revenue. It’s not always intuitive, but it’s a
quirk of audience behavior that we’d understood for years running sponsorships at Standard. Therefore, we knew we couldn’t just simply
ask creators to promote Nebula out of the goodness of their hearts. Not only would this hurt their revenue, which
would mean they would stop working with Nebula in the long-run, this would hurt Standard’s
revenue too since it came from commission on sponsorships. At the time, Standard and Nebula were literally
the same company with zero legal separation so weirdly, free promotion for Nebula would
cut off the revenue source that we were using to build Nebula. We didn’t immediately have a solution to
this. In all honesty, this was the biggest flaw
with the business model at launch. But again, the launch was designed to be an
experiment: designed to be that minimum viable product. We didn’t necessarily need a big marketing
method at launch because the launch was designed to help us find that, so the last piece that
we needed was for the creators to be emotionally invested. Everyone was excited by the concept, but to
assure people would stay excited through the inevitably difficult early days, well, we
figured they might as well be financially invested. So, though complex financial and legal wizardly,
we developed a system where 50% of Nebula profits were distributed to creators including,
crucially, if the platform were ever to be sold. That means if one day the platform were to
sell for, let’s say, a billion dollars, the creators would get half of that. We split that pool based on watch-time meaning
the more creators bring in and engage an audience, the bigger a share they’re entitled to. In the short-term, this would be a concept
that would keep creators building for the future. In the medium-term, this would allocate profit
to creators based on how much they contributed to growing that profit. And in the long-term, if Nebula were ever
to sell, this would make that a scenario where everyone wins, rather than one where the platform
wins off the hard work of the creators. Not only would this directly tie platform
success to creator success and vice versa, it would also keep everyone in that collaborative
mindset—one where Nebula and its creators were business partners, rather than clients
and servicers. We’d win together and we’d lose together. Next, launch. We didn’t have some massive plan. The website had been up and running for a
bit as we squashed bugs so what really marked the formal “launch,” if anything did,
was the first public promotion of the platform. That came from Isaac Arthur. On the morning of Thursday, May 23rd, 2019,
he released a video called “Colonizing Black Holes,” which ended with a push to his Nebula
Original—one of the first three, called the Paperclip Maximizer. We also had Originals at launch from Real
Life Lore, Second Thought, and Polyphonic, so each released videos mentioning Nebula
funded by a small and finite pool of money dedicated to launch promotion. This first weekend went better than we possibly
could’ve hoped for. By Monday, we had over 4,500 signups—they
were trial signups, plenty would cancel—but that gave us plenty enough data to work with
to figure out how to make this all work. Better yet, we were getting buzz: a lot of
it was negative, almost everyone thought we’d get added to the long list of failed alternate
streaming sites, but at the least, this told us that the idea was exciting enough that
people cared to care about us. Over the following weeks and months we used
some of our cash on hand to run some very small additional marketing tests—basically
seeing if we could pay creators a similar rate to their other sponsors and bring in
enough subscribers to justify paying them that much. The answers we got were… promising. On one test we did on my podcast, Extremities,
Nebula paid us $800 and got 200 sign-ups—each of whom would pay $5 per month. The only problem: we didn’t have cash. While we’d eventually generate cash with
the monthly revenue these subscribers brought in, that’d be a very slow process meaning
it’d be quite a while until we could start sponsoring the larger YouTube channels and
developing bigger Nebula Originals. But we found a solution. Standard had long run sponsorships for CuriosityStream—another
streaming service focusing on documentary and non-fiction content founded by John Hendricks,
of the Discovery Channel. To their credit, they didn’t get scared
thinking creators were trying to replace them, but rather understood that we were appealing
to a different, complementary market. So, Dave went down to the offices just outside
of DC and came out the other end with a win-win. We’d bundle. While I can’t discuss the exact behind the
scenes mechanics, we found a way to make it worthwhile for both companies so that, when
customers signed up for CuriosityStream through each creator’s sponsorship links, they’d
get access to Nebula for free.
Nobody could really see a downside so
we negotiated details, signed a term sheet, and as of September, 2019, every Nebula creator
just started promoting the bundle in their already-booked CuriosityStream spots—in
retrospect it seems like a minor, ultimately easy change, but it yielded massive results. Personally, the bundle deal supercharged my
sponsorship performance. It was clear that the offering of CuriosityStream
and Nebula together was a more convincing sell to our audiences than any other sponsor
we ran on the channel. Even better, we started to understand the
marketing message that worked: pushing to behind the scenes videos or extended cuts
didn’t really work; pushing the idea of no ads or sponsorship on Nebula worked okay;
but the thing that clearly created these performance multiples was full-length, high-budget, exclusive
Originals. Seeing that, CuriosityStream started to coproduced
Nebula Originals with us. In October 2019, to film our highest-budget,
most ambitious one to date, I flew all the way to the remote Atlantic Island of St Helena
to make the World’s Most Useful Airport. While I was there we crossed 10,000 paying
subscribers, then it took less than a month more to hit 20,000. By the end of the year, we had crossed 35,000
and in six short months, Nebula had transformed from an idea into a fast-growth start-up. Now, through all this history, I was not actually
an owner of Standard—just a highly involved, long-term client. But it was clearly something I was interested
in: I was there from the start; I had helped it grow; and I believed in it, and specifically
Nebula’s, future. In 2020 an opportunity arose. Grey and Philipp were less keen on Nebula—it
seemed to make less sense to them—while the rest of the creator roster was so they
were looking for a way to end their involvement with the company. Therefore, Brian from Real Engineering, Alex
from LowSpecGamer, Devin from LegalEagle, Thomas Frank, and myself agreed to purchase
their ownership stakes and divide it up amongst ourselves, and we were all extremely bullish
on Nebula. By chance that sale occurred in March, 2020:
the same month as the world’s descent into lockdown. With everyone stuck at home, the streaming
industry exploded. It’s awkward to talk about in the context
of a tragedy, but the honest truth is that our bundle promotion was selling faster than
ever and creators were earning a lot. CuriosityStream capitalized on industry-momentum
by listing on NASDAQ through a SPAC merger in October which was initially a big success:
day one ended with an 11% gain, and they peaked in February 2021 at nearly double their first-day
price. Through and through, the Nebula bundle was
a win-win: it grew Nebula, it grew CuriosityStream, it grew creator’s sponsor payouts, and it
was a worthwhile proposition for all. So we decided to double-down on aligning the
success of the two companies by, for the first time ever, accepting investment. Now, investment had long been something we
were wary of. In our view, a big reason why similar business
models had failed in the past was because investors pressured the streaming platforms
to squeeze more and more value out of creators—basically, they did the thing that seemed right when
you look at it on a slide deck: take a bigger share of the revenue, make more money. But that fails to understand that the creators
drive almost all of the value of a platform like Nebula: if they’re making good money,
they’ll make more exclusive content for audiences, they’ll bring their creator friends
in, they’ll keep promoting the platform. So, it’s really that if you take a smaller
slice of the pie and give more to creators, the pie will grow so much in the long term
that the platform will make more overall. Every dollar a streaming platform like Nebula
makes is through the creators so it’s about creating that win-win scenario, rather than
trying to extract value from your business partners. We weren’t confident that most investors,
especially institutional investors, would understand that and the other nuanced dynamics
of the creator industry in the long-run… with one exception: CuriosityStream. Their people seemed to get it. They were also, by far, our biggest marketing
partner, bigger production partner, we had already aligned ourselves with them so deeply
that investment seemed like a minor additional level that would yield a lot of cash to revisit
in growing Nebula. So, after an unanimous vote by myself and
the other owners, Nebula no longer was entirely ours. While the exact numbers are not public, what
is is that they bought a significant minority stake that valued Nebula, the company that
did not exist just three years prior, at over $50 million. Incredible. Driven by this funding, 2022 was comprised
of some of our fastest growth to date especially as shows like Real Life Lore’s Modern Conflicts
and our Jet Lag: the Game proved massively successful at driving huge numbers of subscriptions. Staff headcount ballooned especially in the
engineering department as they staffed up to build apps for new platforms like Roku
and Samsung TV. We also, finally, had the money to build our
own streaming tech which freed us from some of the technical limitations of Zype’s white
label offering. And we geared up to produce our most ambitious
slate of Originals to date with the coproduction funding Curiosity Stream would provide. But this is a good chance to acknowledge failure. Now, failure is inevitable in business. It’s truly part of the process. You try new things, carefully, and success
is defined by your batting average: if you win more than you lose, you’re winning. Nebula Classes, however, probably pulled down
that batting average. It sounded like a great idea at the time:
through COVID, creators were earning massively by making online classes. We were constantly approached by various class
platforms who wanted to sponsor our creators and so, rather than promoting their services,
we thought it better to build it into Nebula so we could promote our own service and keep
all the customer revenue in the ecosystem. In all honesty, we were trying to capitalize
on a wave of popularity that was relatively aligned to what we already were doing. Unlike when we launched Nebula as a whole
we had a good amount of cash on hand to invest in this thanks to CuriosityStream’s investment
so we wanted to launch strong. We built out a section of the website and
apps for it, we built the backend tech to allow for multiple tiers of membership, and
we invested a lot in content. We launched with six classes—and each was
high-quality: shot in a studio in New York, well-edited, with motion-graphics and everything. That’s to say, they weren’t cheap. We then planned to release a new one each
week which meant organizing a dense production schedule. It was a massively complex, large-scale undertaking
but the engineering and production staff made it all happen without a hitch. The problem was that the concept just wasn’t
resonating with customers. We initially sold Nebula Classes as an additional
tier above normal Nebula—it was $100 a year by itself, or a $5 a month up-charge for existing
subscribers which might seem like a lot, but was actually lower than competitors with similar
production quality. We ran sponsorships for this and had some
minor wins but, on average, there was clearly audience confusion as we also ran bundle sponsorships
on the same channels at different times. We couldn’t promote classes in bundle sponsorships
as classes wasn’t part of the bundle, so in a way we were competing against ourselves,
and losing. Some people were upgrading, it wasn’t some
massive failure, but hardly enough to justify our rate of production—ultimately, creators
could improve sponsorship performance more by making Nebula Originals so that’s what
they would do. It was also clear that, by the time we launched,
we were on the downslope of the online classes wave. We were far from the only class platform struggling
to find product-market fit. So ultimately, we decided it best to just
have one Nebula—no up-charge for classes, we’d make it available to all subscribers
and simply slow down our production calendar. It was an important experiment and, while
not a direct overwhelming success, in a way, the marketing tests we did for it proved crucial
for what was to come: our biggest, most existential experiment to date. Come late 2022, as indicated in their quarterly
reports, CuriosityStream was looking to pull back their growth rate and orient more towards
profitability. COVID was dying down, screen-time was lowering,
the streaming industry overall was weakening, and so it made every sense in the world for
them to switch from a growth-orientation to a profit-orientation, as all growth-oriented
companies that survive eventually do. I assume for these reasons we got word that
they wanted to significantly pull back on marketing spend through Nebula bundle sponsorships. Clearly, this wasn’t something we wanted:
not only would it slow Nebula’s growth rate but, more crucially, it would reduce how much
we could pay creators to talk about Nebula on YouTube. This was, still, the primary way creators
were earning through Nebula—while watch-time payouts and Originals were significant, payouts
for YouTube sponsorships about Nebula were far more so. So, the natural next question to ask was:
could we just do sponsorships ourselves? You’ll notice that nearly everything advertised
in a sponsorship at the end of a YouTube video is an online subscription-based service. For some reason or another, these are just
what works best, but here’s how those advertising campaigns work in the background. Let’s say a service costs $10 a month. Every service has data on how long the average
subscriber sticks around—let’s say it’s 27 months. That means the average lifetime value of a
sign-up is $270. It might actually cost, say $5 a month to
run that service, meaning per month there’s $5 left. A good bit of that has to go to actually getting
the customers in the first place: to marketing. Knowing there’s $135 left in the average
lifetime value, the company will decide on an target average cost per-acquisition—let’s
say it’s $75, leaving $60 in lifetime value for profit that can be reinvested in platform
growth, or just taken as profit. Now that $75 target cost per acquisition acts
as the central success metric for marketing and when an agency designs a campaign with
creators pushing the service, their payment will be decided in the background by this
number. If, on average, they drive 100 sign-ups per
video, their pay will be roughly $7,500 per video and either the agency or the service
itself will evaluate spots as they run to make sure the long-term average cost ends
up at or below $75. This works… quite well. In fact, but the only issue is when that $75
needs to get paid: here—right when the customer signs up. But on the company’s side, after the $5
in monthly operating expenses, it’s going to take fifteen months for them to capture
that $75 back in revenue. You essentially need to spend $75 to eventually
earn that $60 in profit—put another way, you need to invest it. This is the role of investors in these start-ups:
companies can have an entirely viable business model but just need more cash in the bank
to pay for the marketing that leads to growth. But we didn’t want to take more investment,
we didn’t want to give up more ownership of the company, so the question was: could
we use the couple million we had in the bank to kickstart growth at a fast enough rate. We were sure we had a viable business model:
we had years of proof that we could get a customer through YouTube sponsorship for less
than their average lifetime value, the question was when that cost per acquisition was recaptured. If it was quick, in the first year or so,
we were in business: the math worked out so that we could maintain or even grow our monthly
marketing spend as we would recapture revenue fast enough to reinvest it in new marketing. If it was slower, if we didn’t recapture
target cost per acquisition until far in the future, the careful balance that had made
Nebula work where so many close-equivalents failed could all come crumbling down. Today, we’re five months on from the switch
to direct marketing and, I won’t bury the lede: it went off better than our wildest
expectations. Crucially, over 80% of sign-ups are opting
to pay for the annual subscription rather than the monthly one. Considering we pay creators for Nebula sponsorships
the day after they go out, that means we actually get a year’s worth of revenue before we
even pay for the promotion. In this case, that entirely eliminated the
cashflow constraint because we make more day one on an average sign-up than our average
cost to acquire a new customer. Of course that doesn’t mean we turn a day
one profit, we have operating costs beyond marketing, but it means we have a marketing
strategy that could theoretically expand basically infinitely—zero cashflow limitations. In just a few short months, we went from spending
zero dollars to more than half a million dollars on marketing per month, and we are earning
back more than that in the same month. I can’t stress enough how incredible this
is. We, the creators, are now entirely in control
of our own future. With this, we’re charting our most ambitious
slate of Originals to date, we’re bringing on new creators, we’re investing in our
tech, there is so, so much that this big risk has unlocked. Right now it feels like the last couple years
have been an overwhelming success but I truly believe that, looking back, we’ll consider
2023 much like we see 2019: the turning point that makes previous success the backstory
you just have to get through to get to the good part. We have learned so much so now, we understand
what people want and we have a company configured to offer that. I truly cannot wait to show you what we can
do. Now I need to do thank-you’s. When describing Nebula’s history like this
it feels like its success was defined by decisions and, while partially true, those decisions
could only lead to anything thanks to the sum of small, collective actions made by dozens,
hundreds, thousands of people. First, and foremost, the staff of Nebula and
Standard. Unlike us creators, they do not get the public
recognition for what they do: they pour their passion into servicing our passion, working
day in and day out to build a system that allows us to do more of what we love to do. Nebula truly could not exist without them,
us creators couldn’t exist without them, so I’m endlessly grateful for the work they
do. Second, the creators. The community that has arisen out of Nebula
and Standard is just incredible. Every day we talk, celebrating our wins, commiserating
our failures, searching for solutions to problems—we go to conferences together, we go on vacation
together, we go to each other’s weddings, and we’ll be at each other’s funerals. I truly don’t know if I could have navigated
the stresses of life as a creator without them, and I know Nebula would have failed
without our collective vision for a brighter future for the creator economy. Lastly, the subscribers. I could never have imagined that people would
look at Nebula as anything more than a company—something trying to separate them from their dollars—but
I was wrong. There is an unbelievable community of people
who not only use Nebula, but have latched onto the same vision we have. They celebrate our wins, and help show us
where we can grow stronger. I’m constantly in awe of how much forgiveness
they gave us for scrappiness in our bootstrapped early days and we could not have come to today
without that. Thank you for taking a risk on us: I hope
we have proved it worthwhile, and I promise you that we’ll only work harder to make
that even more so in the future. To close out: I had to pay for the production
costs on this video somehow and it kinda felt weird to make it feel even more like a big,
long Nebula ad by putting a Nebula sponsorship at the end, but it felt even more weird to
put another sponsor at the end, so I’m gonna go with the less weird weird option but keep
it simple: if you aren’t subscribed to Nebula but want to check it out, use our link, Nebula.tv/Wendover,
where you’ll get $20 off an annual subscription, bringing the cost down to just $2.50 a month. Thank you for caring enough to listen to this
story: it’s a wild one and I hope in a few years we have an even better one to tell you,
thanks to you.
