Shit, meet wall. Now, stick.

November updates

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So we do a lot of random shit. I'd love to call it something other than "random shit" but I'd also like endless money, world peace, and a bathtub full of kittens. Sometimes, reality wins.

Since Chill Subs was founded, we've had a lot of successes. Substack, for example, has been a life saver. Submitter’s Club as well. Merging with Write or Die, our beautiful browse, all our funky little tools. But that’s not always how it goes.

We also…

• launched a line of merchandise including mugs, t-shirts, and tote-bags (that became way more work than we realized and had to be put on hold)

• developed, launched, and dropped multiple advertising programs (that were a total mess and made us feel confused and icky sometimes)

• wrote, edited, rewrote, and designed a business plan and pitch deck to pursue a UK startup Visa (as you can see, we are thriving in the UK right now…)

• cried

• planned, scheduled, filmed, and edited several videos for a never-to-be seen YouTube series (Nope. Oh god, nope. We’re too awkward)

• audited our data. (Got yelled at by a data analyst (audited our data again after changing the structure of our data (so we stop getting yelled at))).

• learned what interns were. (Felt really weird about what interns are. (Started paying interns.)))

• launched an internal social media network called 'ugh' (that got shut down by bots)

• set up our company as a c-corp (realized we shouldn't be a c-corp (hired some really terrible accountants (hired a lawyer (freaked out over how much a real lawyer costs (fired aforementioned accountants (hired better accountants (restructured as an LLC (cried again)))))))

...and so much more.

There is this theory that if you let a monkey hit random keys on a typewriter for eternity, they'll eventually write Shakespeare. Well, it's no Shakespeare, but Chill Subs ain't too shabby if you ask me. We've managed to scramble enough together to pay our core team what's known in the business world as "a pittance" and have 19,000 active users.

Oh, and we finally got a logo!

and we LOVED it…

and then…

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

Someday, when our celebrity-status paperwork has gone through, when Chill Subs is so wildly successful that we've just turned down an offer by Elon Musk to buy and rename it "LitX," reporters will find us in our respective kitten-baths and ask how we pulled it off. I promise, at that time, we will all pretend we knew what we were doing.

In the meantime.

We've got several things "in the air" you might say. Since we live in different time zones, our primary form of brainstorming is attacking each other on Slack.

For example:

or

By the end of the year we want to launch…

• the finalized version of all of our tools

• a brand new admin panel design for editors

• new browse and listing page designs

• a full submitter’s club portal and workflow

• optimize the data flow in our browse to make it faster

• launch our “smart-search” in full

• the schema for our submissions manager

• a self paced course for submitting to magazines

• a thorough ranking system for literary magazines

• a Tik-Tok

• And figure out this damn name for Kailey’s new Write or Die Substack…

What? You thought brilliant names like “Chill Subs” just fall out of the sky? This is real work, okay.

Back in the real world, life is doing it’s thing.

Karina is getting her bath going:

Nikita is trying to figure out how to get a visa to Germany. He is sick though.

Mariam had us over for one last dinner together before we flew out this week and her uncle makes cakes!

So we all did what we do best…

Then Shel and I just moved to Portugal. Nikita made us Chill Subs T-shirts to wear open our journey so for our 3 (yes, 3) flights out of Tbilisi, we looked like escaped camp counsellors

But hey, our new Airbnb has offices in it! Yay!

and since we couldn’t find a surgeon in Tbilisi, Shel needs to learn how to have her Wisdom teeth ripped out in Portugese. Because they look like this:

And since our company dental plan consists mostly of Marcin’s jokes, this should be no problem.

Kailey’s seasonal job is ending so she’ll be living off our sweet-sweet pittance for a while.

And Marcin has been living out of an IKEA Bag for six weeks so we’ll be trying to get him sponsored soon.