February Updates — Back Up The Goddamn Mountain

Holy hell, is January already gone?

Mariam Chagelishvili 

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When my brother was a freshman in high school he decided to join ski club. On day one, he went up the mountain, came down, fell, and broke his wrist.

One year later, not deterred, my brother rejoined ski club. On day one, he went up the mountain, came down, fell, and broke both his wrists.

I'd like to end this story with something inspirational. Like, "And then he went up a third time and now he's in the Olympics!"

No, my mom had to help him pee for three months, and he never skied again.

This is the kind of energy we have at Chill Subs. We go up. We come down. We fall. Shit breaks. Up we get.

I don't think this is usually how a business is run. I think it's because so many businesses build behind closed doors. Heck, I don't even know who owns half the companies in indie lit, and I'm a snoop.

But this is changing. There is a new trend called, "Building in Public." I'm pretty sure it's the business world's version of shirtless mirror pics at the gym. Essentially, it's saying, "Here. This is everything we're doing. All the skeletons. All the broken wrists."

It means being transparent with operations, open with finances, clear about our goals.

So, what have we been building lately?

Well, we transitioned from a C-Corp to an LLC because C-Corp sounds evil. Also, it turns out C-Corps are mostly for when you want to dress your business up in skimpy clothes, walk it to a street corner and wave at fancy cars hoping for a ride. Investors seem awful and the more we looked into the types of shares you have to give them, the more awful it seemed.

So we chose to be poor for two years, rope two of our friends into the business, and get married. Like a normal business!

So, now we are a multi-person LLC — get this, we're officially called Write or Die Magazine now. Cause we're broke we tried to cut corners as much as possible (while still paying an absurdly expensive and professional lawyer because we're not doing this shit twice—uh, I mean, three times!) so since part of all this was Kailey legally merging with us, she already had an LLC.

The other part was those two we roped into our party, Shelby & Nikita. They are co-owners too now! Yay! So there are five of us total running things with skin in the game — Karina: Boss ass dev, Kailey: Write or Die (and like, a million other things), Shelby: Social Media & Marketing, and Nikita to make us look fly as hell. And I do this...uh, words. And I still shout at Karina all the time with whacked-out ideas because that's never going to end.

Now we have a really cool chat in slack called 'admin.' So, yeah. You know. Cool.

Speaking of Slack. Marcin wanted to try Slack premium so he clicked the popup and now we have Slack Premium for a month.

The main perk of this is that it gives you the full history of all your chats. So, of course, I decided to go and search the names for all of the folks on our core team to see who gets pestered the most (usually when we need them to do something). Let's see:

• Shelby - 319

• Ben - 391

• Marcin - 459

• Kailey - 564

• Karina - 1061

• Nikita - 1521

Poor Nikita. It's okay, those are mostly catcalls.

Ooo how about everyone's first public message ever?

Poor Nikita. If only he knew the consequences of that message.

What else?

Karina and Marcin are working on something called “refactoring” — I can’t be certain but I think that has something to do with extracting oil from the ground with chemicals.

Nikita has been making unbelievably cool artwork for our latest venture for Write or Die — write or die 101. If you haven’t checked that out, you can here:

I’m also teaching a full 12 lesson course on submitting to lit mags throughout the month of February. You can learn about it here:

Sorry For the Inconvenience — A Submitter's Guide To Lit Mags

I’ve been using loom to make some mini tutorials throughout and they have this auto-title thing that happens when it saves a video. It really can’t accept that our business is called Chill Subs:

Oh well, the course is going super well so far! Lots of great feedback. Also, hopefully it can pay for our lawyer. We looked at our contract and realized they charge $450 an hour. AN HOUR! He makes our monthly salary in 3 hours…oh god. Why didn’t we make a database for lawyers.

KARINA! I have an idea!