100,000 of you

Hello everyone, this is Krishna.

I type this as everyone on the team tries to finish up their pieces while running a dozen Claude Code project(s) on the side. Not that we’ve made anything remarkable, but we just feel fancy being koders too.

I write this because we just crossed 100,000 subscribers on Substack for The Daily Brief. That’s a very big deal for us. We write absurdly long pieces—20-minute reads, sometimes longer—on tiny minutiae about how businesses run. And yet, in a little over a year, 100,000 of you decided to come along for that.

A big, big thank you. For subscribing. For reading. For writing to us. For critiquing us. For sharing our stuff. For giving us your time every morning. Thank you so much!

The experiments

We wanted to take this moment to talk about all the experiments we’ve done, because everything you see come out of this team started as an experiment. Some of them have stayed alive — Who Said What, Aftermarket Report, The Chatter, Point & Figures by The Chatter, and Beyond the Charts. Oh, and how can we forget, The Daily Brief itself began as a throwaway experiment.

For every such initiative, though, many more simply failed. Often, because we’re a team of 5 and there’s only so much bandwidth. Sometimes, because we honestly didn’t think we were adding anything meaningful. Sometimes, because the format just didn’t click.

I vibe-coded a little site that shows all the experiments we’ve run and failed at. You can check it out here.

All in all, though, experimenting has been a net-net good. Even when they failed, these experiments forced us to think in new directions, and all of that feeds back into our main work. When you try to write a macro explainer series, you gain an eagle’s eye view of the economy. When you try to connect earnings calls into a narrative, you start seeing patterns you’d miss otherwise. Somehow, none of this effort was truly wasted. Some of our experiments might even see a second life at some point.

What’s next

Talking to actual experts. Not “social media influencers” but people doing the groundwork — the person inside a regulator’s office, the factory owner, the operations manager… people who actually do the work of running slices of the economy. We want to bring these conversations to you in every form — video, audio, text.

A regular reading list. We read a lot as a team. Most of it never makes it into our published work. We want to curate the best of it and share it with you.

A finance learning repository. We are constantly learning new things about finance ourselves, and if that’s true for us, it’s definitely true for someone just getting into this. We might try putting a clear, simple explanation of things nobody explains in one place — reviving “What Does That Mean,” but bigger and permanent.

We have more ideas than these. Probably a few too many for our team size, in fact. But we’d rather have this chaos than not try at all.

We want to hear from you

One: We want to build a thoughtful community around finance. Not a stock tip, not a Telegram group, but a close-knit group with high-quality conversations. We don’t know what this should look like. What would make you show up?

Two: How can The Daily Brief be better? What bugs you? What do you wish we did differently? Tell us. (Please don’t ask us for stock recommendations; we promise we’ll ruin your portfolio.)

To the 100,000 of you—this started as an experiment, and it still is. Every day we’re trying to be worth those 20 minutes of your morning. Thank you for being here. Thank you for all of it🙏🏻