When the five of us launched Aftermath back in November 2023 we all had a ton of experience working at websites like Kotaku, The Washington Post and Vice. Writing, reporting, editing, video, we'd done it all. Owning a website, though, has been a whole other thing.
It has been, in short, one hell of a learning experience! Working at a larger site, even at a senior level as some of us had, is nothing like working at Aftermath. At other sites we'd been part of big companies, all of which had their own accounts department, their own human resources, a travel team, social media experts and lawyers.
At Aftermath we have...us. We're everything and everyone. Got a technical issue with your account and need to send an email? That's us. Got a complaint? That's us. Filing taxes, building a merch store, doing accounts, bank stuff, social media work, Instagram page curation, legal paperwork and God so much more, it's all us.
It's been confronting, to say the least, and it hasn't always been smooth sailing, but we've somehow made it through all the bumbling, confusion and spreadsheets to celebrate our first birthday! So in the interests of transparency--and as a helpful guide for anyone else looking to start up a worker-owned business--we thought we'd look back on some of the lessons we've learned trying to own, run and write for a website at the same time:
Luke
I will never underestimate how much work it takes to keep a small business running ever again, because I would rather walk into the ocean than start another small business. I never appreciated at my last job how I was just able to write, but now enormous parts of my day are spent on social media, in emails, in spreadsheets and Word docs, all on stuff that doesn't even make it onto the page, it just keeps the business running.
And it makes me feel bad! People are paying money to read what the five us of are writing! So I hope folks can understand that if we have a slow day, or a slow week, it's not because we're taking it easy; that just might be a week where we all need to sign off on a new Operating Agreement, or someone is sick and someone else is away but those left have to fix a broken social media aggregator or meet with an accountant.
If you've been reading us for the year and have ever felt that way, then we're sorry, we're grateful for your support and are really trying! We've got big plans for Year Two, and that includes most of us being able to go full-time (some of us have been part-time for much of 2024), so hopefully there'll be more blogs on the website in 2025.
Riley
I've already written about my personal revelations during our Inside Baseball week, but from a broader perspective, a joke I make a lot now is that I finally understand why businesses employ so many people. There are simply so many tasks in so many areas that used to be someone else's problem; even when I was top of the masthead at other sites, there was always something that was handled by a different department, or there was at least someone I could reach out to for help.
Here, it's just us. Sometimes, that feels like it's just me--I handle the bulk of what I'd call the "business" stuff, and even when it's not a lot of tasks, it's a lot of cognitive load. A very minor example: I have been haunted for nearly a year by a new kind of form I have to file, one that comes with steep penalties for not filing, and one that's a little confusing for our business. That's not a lot of work, but it's the kind of stuff I spent my life blissfully unaware of until this year, and now it stresses me out. I used to be a punk who lived on a boat, man! And now I'm reading government websites about weird forms!
On the flip side, I feel like I've gotten more insight into how bloated businesses can become. We've all had the experience of it taking forever to get a freelance payment, and I've been the guy who has had to chase down such payments through a labyrinthine corporate structure. Something I'm proud of at Aftermath--and I hope our freelancers would agree--is that we pay promptly. This is easy to do because... it's just me, pressing the buttons. I can just publish the story and then press the "pay someone" buttons! On one hand that's a question of scale, and probably evidence of how janky some of our systems are, but on the other, I think it's a small example of how we're able to do certain things better than big companies, and how we're able to live our values through the business itself because it's ours. It's important to me to pay freelancers promptly, so I do it. It's really empowering to have control over the systems like that.
If I were going to give advice, one thing I regret is that I feel like we didn't talk enough about the growth phase when we were first dreaming Aftermath up. We sort of thought we would either succeed or fail right away, and I'm not sure we really reflected enough on the situation we've found ourselves in this year, where the business is growing, but not quite fast enough to be a full-time job for most people. (I work here full-time because I've been lucky to have some savings that have enabled me to do that, but that's also its own source of stress.) That situation can make it hard to know if the business is going well, especially when there are so many different pieces with their different measures of success, and so many different ways to measure success generally. (When people ask me "Is the company making money?" or "How many subscribers do you have?" they are fascinated when I'm like "Well see, it depends how you measure 'money' or 'subscribers,'" which are nouns I had always thought were fairly cut and dried until this year.) If you're thinking of launching something on your own, one thing I would advise is talking honestly with each other about your personal financial situations and how much runway you each have, so you can separate the business' situation from your own personal situation and needs, and so you can set goals for where you need to get to by when and plan for contingencies if that doesn't work out.
Lastly, while I can sometimes feel a bit lonely working at a site that's so small (I am a nerd who, at my last jobs, absolutely loved getting to talk to people across my companies), the fact that so many of our worker-owned peers have given us advice never ceases to move me. We've even dispensed advice of our own this year! That so many people are rooting for us, and are so willing to answer an email or hop on a call, feels like something really special about this movement we're part of.
Nathan
Lessons I’ve learned this year, ranked:
1. Ask for help! Aftermath would probably be a pile of “What if we started a website together? JK… unless” DMs if not for countless rounds of emails exchanged with folks from Defector, Hell Gate, 404, and other worker-owned sites. We came into this clueless, but we were immediately embraced by a bunch of smart people who just wanted to help, no strings attached. (Also, we are now happy to offer whatever meager advice we can to others who are in the same position we were a year ago! We cannot, however, promise that it will be good advice.)
2. Live without regrets. Well OK, have some regrets, but don’t let them define your experience of starting an independent video game blog (or an affordable hotel for dogs, or whatever it is you’re aspiring to do). We made A LOT of mistakes this year on the business side of things. We could have spent and negotiated far more intelligently, and we could have begun doing so much sooner. But we didn’t have the benefit of hindsight at the time. When we realized we fucked up, it hit like a truck, because this thing is so fragile and precious to us. It’s hard not to worry that the slightest bump in the road will cause it to shatter into a million pieces. For now, though, we’re still kicking. Next year, we’ll apply the lessons we learned this year, and in five years, we’ll barely even remember the time we poured all of our subscriber money into a second season of Scavengers Reign, just now (note: this is a joke).
3. Community good. When you work in more traditional journalism, your main interactions with your supposed community occur in caustic comment sections or via Twitter, a collective nightmare from which we all finally seem to be waking. Turns out, rare exceptions aside, these are not effective means of forming a real, lasting community! They’re just haphazardly-paved streets for drive-by arguments. By curating our spaces – honestly, the small fee does quite a bit of heavy lifting, but our Discord moderators also deserve a ton of credit – we’ve managed to build something that feels authentically cohesive, conscientious, and supportive. Aftermath is a chill place to talk about video games on the internet. Can you believe that one of those exists? Me neither! Our readers show up, too, whether that means reading, commenting, watching streams, listening to podcasts, telling other people they should subscribe, or any number of other small kindnesses. When you work in independent media, community is everything, and while building and maintaining it is another part of the job – not just something you can engage with every time you press publish and then immediately tune out – it actually rules.
4. Nothing is too dumb. Working for The Washington Post slowly robbed me off the blogger’s greatest instinct: to see something or have an idea and just Toss It Up. Aftermath has both allowed and required me to get reacquainted with the side of myself that would, for example, interview a dog, count Gokus, interview the same dog again, be a menace to Geoff Keighley, egg, and Alarmo. I feel immensely privileged to have an audience that’s willing to go along with so many bits that may, in some cases, seem elaborate, but which I promise you sprang to mind fully formed, literally every time. For me, however, it’s also a necessary skill at a place like this. We’re a team of five, for whom this is not our sole source of income. Some days we have to keep the site moving, and we’re not always gonna have bombshell reporting in our back pocket. That said, we also don’t want to skimp on quality. Aftermath subscribers are paying for a premium service, not a firehose of blogs about weekly Fortnite challenges or whatever. I feel like if I’m not engaging my creativity even on the small stuff, I’m slacking or letting our audience down – and they’ll notice, because they’re smart and intensely clued-in. So it’s a balancing act: How do you keep the site feeling alive without putting yourself at death’s door? We’re still working on getting it right! But I feel that we’re much better at it now than we were one year ago, or even just a few months ago.
5. Good things take time. On the other hand, I am somebody who likes to work on big reported projects, and because of the many responsibilities I – like everybody else at Aftermath – have, those things aren’t as easy to dedicate multiple days per week to as they were at, say, The Washington Post. But it’s not like those stories are just gonna go away. Yes, I might get scooped, but even then, there’s often an opportunity to tell a bigger, more in-depth version of that story, or a similar story, or an adjacent story. Unfortunately, games journalism is a small and shrinking field, and even in the best of times it struggled to follow stories beyond games’ launch dates or singular explosive moments. The upside of this is that our audience – unlike the fickle whims of traffic, ad markets, and all that nonsense – actually lets us cook, so there’s more room to tell stories of, well, the aftermath of news events. We can afford to take our time. We don’t have to rush or pull the plug on a project because the moment’s passed. That said, deprogramming myself of the instinct to do those things has been a little trickier.
6. Everything is advertising. Keeping a subscription-based site afloat means constantly converting new people into subscribers, both by going outside your usual bubble and preaching to the choir that follows you on social media but won’t part with just $7 per month to make sure you can eat. A small percentage of subscribers regularly leaves, after all, whether due to financial concerns, changing tastes, subscription fatigue, or whatever else. You can’t avoid it, so you’ve just got to compensate for it. This means you’re constantly pitching, trying to find inventive new ways to convince people that your thing is worth the asking price of almost no money, but still some money. On the upside, it can actually be kinda fun, especially if you care about and believe in the thing you’re advertising – which we very much do. Did somebody tweet about the site? Retweet that. Did somebody post about wearing your merch? Repost that. Did somebody say something that could vaguely be construed as relevant to the site? Are they famous? Then you’re about to have a field day. The fact of the matter is, shilling in the modern age is just one big bit. If you remain committed to the bit, you will succeed. Or at least you’ll make a few people laugh, and that’s good too.
7. It’s OK to learn as you go. I think it’s fair to say that I got off to a shaky start as a podcast host. These days, I’m a little better! By this time next year, I will be the greatest podcast host on Earth.
8. Getting hit by a worker-owned truck.
9. I’m honestly pretty over ranked list jokes. Ah, well. Nevertheless.
Gita
For a long time, I was afraid that my major contribution to this site was talking about it at parties. It turns out that this is a real job, and it is called marketing and communications. As a longtime lover of gossip and cheeky little chats about who did what, it has been incredible to learn that none of this is superfluous--this is exactly how you find your allies and build your master plans. There won't be gossip if there isn't a community, and with community you can find your supporters, the people who wouldn't know how to help until you ask them for it.
This is a lesson you can take into your every day life as well. If you are social and need something done, it's actually very likely you know a guy who knows a guy. Connecting these people isn't something that just happens on its own. A lot of people are actually very shy and discount their own abilities. If you're an extrovert or a social butterfly, people do actually appreciate how outgoing you are--people love being listened to, and they love to be included. So put on a party dress and bring your big ideas to your next gathering of friends. Somebody can probably help, and they're just waiting to be asked.
Chris
I have learned a lot of things this year of Aftermath, much of which seems painfully obvious in retrospect. Being reader supported is a form of liberation I wish on every games and tech writer. It brings out the best in your writing, freeing you to build out your beat rapidly. You find your voice and interest in ways that would normally be complicated by pandering to SEO and perceptions of what the news cycle demands. You discover fast what you enjoy writing, what your audience enjoys reading, and what your audience enjoys about you as a writer.
I have also found out that, while still difficult and imperfect, a flat hierarchy softens many issues that come from a traditional workplace. There is a frankness to being of equal stake that encourages dialogue otherwise stifled. It is a logical extension of the solidarity I felt with doing union work, and as a result I have become an evangelist for it. What’s more, this feeling is not unique to me. I have learned that cooperatives love helping each other, trading notes about how best to survive. Perhaps this is because we are so rarified – like flowers growing through cracks in scorching cement.
I do not know if this new wave of New Cooperative Journalism or whatever we are calling it can serve as an adequate replacement for the crumbling institutions that came before us. There are issues of scale and mentorship that simply have yet to be solved. How do you build something cooperative that has the same relevance and scale as the New York Times, for example? Though small, what we do only works because everyone involved has spent a good deal of time honing our craft. How does passing on institutional knowledge to young writers work in this new context?
I don’t pretend to have anything approaching an answer to those questions, but I know the path to answering them, either by ourselves or one of our sister sites, is much shorter, straighter and more just in our arrangement than in traditional media. When your hands touch every part of the business directly, you quickly see what works and what doesn’t and diagnose what is immediately vital to the health of the project specifically and your colleagues generally. For as much as The Adults In The Room loved to lecture us at gunpoint about efficiency, we have found ourselves to be far leaner, faster, kinder, healthier and better without their dead weight.
Aftermath is a grand experiment, and every day I am shocked at how much of it just works.
