What is Profit & Delight?
Poets wish either to profit or to delight; or to deliver at once both the pleasures and the necessaries of life.
Horace, Ars Poetica
I’ve always had a way with words.
My heart is in the theatre. I left home at 18 and travelled from New Zealand to London to intern at Shakespeare’s Globe. I watched Mark Rylance play Hamlet at least a dozen times. I went to drama school in New Zealand and worked primarily in theatre for more than a decade, as a playwright, actor and producer. My are performed in venues ranging from 50-450 seats. They’ve toured the world, and are even studied in schools (not much!). Theatrical success brought me opportunities in radio, TV and film. It took me to New York, as the Arts Foundation Harriet Friedlander New York Resident, and I stayed on for five or six years. I met the love of my life and married her.
The US is where I discovered a whole new type of theatre: Venture Theatre. I started working with founders of early-stage companies to help them pitch their ventures to investors. I recognise the same energy and drive in these founders as I do in the people I worked with in the arts, but the founders’ projects seem more significant. Each one of them is trying to change an important aspect of the world in a meaningful and lasting way. Even the ones who are pitching cannabis companies or blockchain-based platforms.
Over the course of five years I helped hundreds of founders raise billions of dollars in fresh capital. My job was pretty simple. All I had to do was help them get into great conversations with investors. It gave me a backstage pass to some of the more creative and significant early-stage companies of the last decade.
None of them are more interesting to me than Substack.
I know Hamish - one of Substack’s founders. He gave me my first job more than 20 years ago as a reporter for a student newspaper. I’ve followed the progress of the company since he and Chris would come and crash on my New York couch while trying to woo pioneer writers like Matt Taibbi. I worked for Substack for a few months in 2020 when Hamish had a baby and there was a huge surge of growth - particularly in the journalistic side of things, due to people getting cancelled and made redundant. I had just made the move from New York to Norwich, England. My wife’s career brought us here. Covid was rearing its ugly head. We were in the US as guest workers and it was a good idea for us to get out. Also, we wanted to have kids and raise them somewhere other than our beloved New York City.
Over the next few years I grew my Pitch Gym, and tinkered away on several projects in theatre and film. But I always kept my eye on Substack. I listened with pride as all my favourite podcasts based whole episodes on Substackers and their work. I saw Substack-published pieces drive news cycles. I saw the company grow and raise money and raise eyebrows among commentators who were both impressed and bemused by its growing significance.
I also tinkered away on my own Substack, and got more and more excited by the range of tools being developed for people who express themselves in written and spoken word. Substack is the printing press for the internet age. It’s a new stage for voices old and new. It’s a new and better economic engie for culture. It’s become a place for the podcasters and comedians and broadcasters and entertainers who weren’t a cosy fit for the platform in its newsletter-only stage. Now I work for Substack. It’s my job and my joy to evangelise to potential Substackers in the UK, and to help the ones who are already Substacking to do it more profitably and delightfully.
It’s also a stage for me. To experiment, and to strut my stuff for our mutual profit and delight.
I’ve always had a way with words. Today, Substack is my way.
You’ll find a great variety of things here. They’re all connected by my generative curiosity, and two short, clear and actionable ways of thinking.
Poets wish either to profit or to delight; or to deliver at once both the pleasures and the necessaries of life.
Horace, Ars Poetica
And one that I think comes from James Joyce, but I can’t find it, or anything like it attributed to him when I google.
A writer’s job is to experience epiphanies, and describe them.
What’s in it for you?
FREE SUBSCRIBERS
You get everything, the minute I’m ready to publish it - sometimes earlier. We’re doing each other a favour. I’m trying to work in a faster, freer, less fussy way. I’m trying to be open to inspiration, and surprise myself - and you. I have to unlearn some ways of writing I picked up for other formats. They caused me to slowly and methodically ‘edit’ over the course of a couple of years. ‘Edit’ basically means undo and redo. Better? Or just different? We’ll never know. Anyhow, not here. Not now. I’m playing with the possibilities of Substack. So that’s our deal. It’s free. It’s a bit more experimental. The publishing schedule is erratic. I have a couple of lists - you can get emails from one or both. Profit & Delight is my artistic one. Substackery is the technical, behind the scenes stuff I’m playing with to have a better reading and publishing experience on Substack. Both of them will be interesting and full of play. The keys words for what you can expect as a free subscriber are experimental, inconsistent and frequent.
PAID SUBSCRIBERS £5 A MONTH/£50 A YEAR
You get LESS. That’s right. It’s a counterintuitive idea, but hear me out. I want to provide you with a less busy experience of my work. Less frequent emails. I’ll say that again. You get LESS. You’ll get one post a week, or more precisely, one a weekend. It’ll be a simple omnibus that beautifully collates what I’ve published on Substack this week - alongside some of the more interesting ideas that I’ve encountered. It’s a more digestible, more considered way of experiencing my writing, and discovering other stuff you might like. I’ll leave out the things that I don’t think are worth your while. You won’t feel anxious to see tons of unopened stuff from me pile up in your inbox or in your app.
PEN PAL £500/year
I don’t expect many people to do this. But those of you who do this are in for a very cool experience. We’ll write to each other by hand. Or rather, I’ll write to you and I guess you can choose whether or not to respond. I’ll send postcards, and longer letters, maybe even a book or two, and play with a form of novella as letter. You can respond as you see fit. There’s nothing mass produced about this, and I have limited time, so we won’t let this group get too big. But it means I can introduce you to each other, too.
And if you’d like to Marie Kondo a friend’s inbox
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Finally this Substack is a more profitable & delightful experience in the Substack app. I say that as someone who is becoming increasingly inbox blind due to the torrent of emails sent these days. I don’t want to add to the problem.
If you read me in the app already then great! If you don’t you can try it out now by hitting the button below.
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