How the Tangle newsletter reached 77,000 readers and $624,000 in annual revenue
Isaac Saul wanted to create an antidote to the hyper partisan media ecosystem that dominates the web.
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If you ask Isaac Saul about the origin story of Tangle, the politics newsletter he publishes five days a week, he almost always cites his childhood in Bucks County, a suburb north of Philadelphia. “It’s a bellwether county in Pennsylvania,” he told me. “It's a place that everybody watches in national politics because it usually dictates where Pennsylvania goes, which is where the presidential election typically goes.”
Growing up in such a politically diverse area meant that Saul had friends and family across the entire political spectrum, and he believes this experience guides the ethos of a newsletter that goes to great lengths to consider all partisan angles before rendering a verdict.
Saul launched Tangle in 2019 when he was still a politics editor at A Plus — the viral news outlet founded by Ashton Kutcher — and the dual role meant he had to wake up at 5 a.m. every day so he could get the latest edition out. What started as an email list of 13 friends quickly grew to thousands of readers, and after about eight months or so he debuted a paid subscription. “I was making probably like $70,000 a year or something at the time,” he said, “and overnight I almost matched my yearly salary on this newsletter I'd been working on for eight months. And so I quit my job a few weeks later, since this was a real pathway for me.”
From there, Tangle’s audience grew rapidly, and today it boasts over 77,000 readers, $624,000 in annual revenue, and a small staff. Saul has also begun to branch out into other mediums like podcasts and video.
In a recent interview, Saul discussed how he came up with the newsletter’s signature format, how he converted his free readership into paid, and why he made the recent decision to accept advertising.
Let’s jump into my findings…
Rejecting viral partisanship
In many ways, Tangle is a rejection of the social media-fueled news environment that shaped Saul’s early career.
In 2013, he was hired by Huffington Post to serve as an associate editor. “I was working on what was essentially HuffPost’s viral team,” he said. “I was doing quick 200-word write ups and trying to drive traffic to the website, and it felt like I was in this factory with a bunch of other young writers doing that.” This caught the attention of the team at A Plus, which had coded a program that scraped the internet for the most popular content. “And when they did that, I was one of the top 15 bylines that popped up in terms of page views based on publicly available data, and so that was pretty much why they reached out to me. They wanted to get somebody who could drive traffic to this website and knew how to construct click bait headlines and viral images.”