Let's Get Our Shit Together So We Don't Burn Out and Die

"Do we have....an agenda?" (February Chill Subs Updates).

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Welcome to the first of Chill Subs' in-depth updates! 

We'll do this here each month rather than over-stuff our regular newsletter. The logic is: if you like us enough to read ‘Things We Do While Waiting to Die’, you’re likely curious about what heck we do all the time. 

Or maybe not—maybe most of you trust us completely and you’re in it for the sexy screenshots. In that case, consider this our attempt to cling to our parents’ monthly donations because, after years of half-cleaned rooms & half-done homework, they've got reason to be wary.

If you can't tell, these will be super informal. If you're hoping for a critical analysis breakdown of our company, keep hoping. 

We're rooting for you.

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I bet you're wondering about the title of this post, huh? 

Well, let's give a little history. Chill Subs started with Karina alone—three months later, Ben (me) joined her. 

Since then, our method of working has mostly been like a game of drunk dodgeball:

…throw, catch, stumble, laugh, duck, get hit in the face, fall over, cry…

Somehow, things got done. Probably because we did it 10+ hours a day, 6-7 days a week, for eight freakin' months…

Then one of my best friends (Nikita) came on to redesign our website’s look and feel. In our first meeting, we kicked it off with some light chit-chat which rolled into our usual excitable disjointed barrage of weird ideas that ended abruptly when Nikita cut in with:

“do we have…an agenda?”

Nikita gives no fucks

And we realized:

“no. obv not. we're playing dodgeball...”

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Exhibit A:

Nikita:

Us:

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This all coincided with our friend who helps us with business/money things coming on more full-time as we develop our advertising offerings:

he looks super cool here but he’s a total nerd like the rest of us

AND my partner now manages our social media.

Here is us at a cafe in Barcelona (where we live) looking real busy, but actually we spent 80% of the time trying to get the wifi to work.

All that said, we realized we needed to get our shit together. 

It's one thing to only have one person to fling ideas back and forth with, but when others get involved, it turns out you really do need an agenda. And one thing we do pride ourselves on is our ability to adapt. So…

We upgraded from Trello:

yeah, that’s where the name of this newsletter came from

To Notion:

(OK, yeah, we still think we're funny).

AND we organized our Slack into some channels that make some freakin' sense!

Alright, well...they make sense to us anyway.

Sharing these has me thinking we should write something soon about our inclination to name things that make us laugh. Ok, I will. But just as a quick summation:

1. Karina & I come from a world of being cogs in little startup machines who all took themselves so serious. So serious, most serious-ed themselves to death. 

2. Our funny little names just remind us that, yeah we're a company. But we're also people. We are alive. We like fun.

Yeah, something like that.

MERCH!

Holy duck balls. I don't know how many of you out there have tried to get merch made, but it's a clusterfuck. (OK, maybe it's worse for us because we want it to be super good, but are also super broke...)

We've now partnered with a new agency who are rad as hell (and patient as hell) who've been sourcing different things for us. This month we ordered samples for bookmarks, mugs, totes, and shirts! Fuck yeah.

Interviews and the such & like

Karina and I have done two different interviews recently and—well, it’s really weird listening/reading them after. It’s like if you could read a transcript of yourself after a first date; the whole time thinking: “WHY DID I SAY THAT!”

Except, well, it’s only a couple thousand people who will witness your embarrassment. 

In the latest with Lilith Noah, she sent us the recording in advance. 30 seconds in, I guffawed (yes, it was a guffaw) and had to shut it off and start researching how to change my identity.

Karina was the smart one. 

But Lilith, as always, sounds amazing — and we’re sure she did an amazing job working tirelessly to make us sound as bearable as possible.

So long, farewell, (I’m not googling how to freaking spell ah-vee-da-say), goodnight!

In final news, I went looking for other companies doing start-up-like stuff in the writing world to connect with and was fed 1000 articles about how AI writers are going to replace us all!

So instead of making solid business connections to help us grow & flourish, I went and asked Chat GPT3 (or whatever) to write me a poem about Chill Subs:

Well, that settles it.

We’re all fucked.