A few months ago I announced I was going to try to sell Emergent Mind, my AI news aggregator, so I could focus on Preceden, my SaaS timeline maker.

I wound up having a lot of discussions with potential buyers, but in the end the offers I received were either too low to be worth the effort ($1k-$5k), or the offers were solid ($10k, $11k) but fell through during due diligence because of Emergent Mind’s lackluster growth.

That left me with a tough decision: keep it and continue trying to sell it, keep it and stop trying to sell it, or shut it down.

Selling it is easier said than done

Startups without PMF going out to raise another round: pic.twitter.com/FiZfzYaRa4

— Alex Friedman 🤠 (@heyalexfriedman) September 13, 2023

There’s some chance that I could have kept up the sale page and eventually sold it for $10k, which is the minimum I was looking to sell it for. But, I’ve become increasingly skeptical that I could have found a buyer for $10k.

A big hurdle is that in order for a someone to take it over, they need to be a Ruby on Rails developer, or be willing to pay one to continue the development work. Ruby on Rails developers are in short supply, and most individual developers are not in a position where they can justify forking over $10k for a product with mediocre metrics (more on that below) that would likely require a lot of marketing work to grow (and most Ruby on Rails developers, myself included, would rather be coding than marketing). I did chat with one agency that had Ruby on Rails developers (who would have used it in part to promote their business), but that presented other challenges: multiple people in the organization had to be convinced it was worth $10k and worth reprioritizing their limited resources to work on it. Easier said than done.

And why not do the deal for like $5k? It probably would have taken 30 hours of work to complete the deal once I factored in the paperwork, account transfers, training, Zoom calls, emails, inevitable issues, etc, and I felt my time was much better spent focusing on Preceden vs going through all that for $5k, even less once you factored in the ~25% taxes I’d have to pay on that amount. And that’s assuming I skipped hiring a lawyer (which can easily cost a few thousand dollars) and just used some boilerplate legal templates I found online, which comes with its own risks.

So, I probably wouldn’t be able to sell it for $10k, and didn’t want to bother for less than that.

Reasons to just shut it down

There are plenty:

Visitors and subscribers have mostly trended down and to the right

Here’s weekly unique visitors to the site since launching last December:

But wait, you say, look at those spikes recently! Problem is that they’re entirely due to a single ChatGPT hallucination example going viral. The real trend is that gradual decline between April and early August where each week fewer and fewer people visit the site.

And it makes sense too. I haven’t done any marketing for the site in months, and AI hype has dissipated somewhat since its peak earlier this year in the months after ChatGPT launched.

New newsletters subscribers is a better representation:

You can understand why when buyers started diving into things, they were understandably hesitant to fork over $10k+ for the site.

Questionable product/market fit

Don’t get me wrong, some people really liked it.

There are about 700 people who opt to receive the email daily, and another 200 or so that opt to read it weekly, for a total of about 900 active subscribers. The emails have about a 75% open rate and a 30% click-through rate, which I’m told are stellar.

Here’s what the email looks like:

And when I announced I was selling it and potentially shutting it down, I got a number of emails like this:

Thank you very much for your work on Emergent Mind. As an AI hobbyist with a IT background, I am looking forward to reading your email every morning.

But, my impression is that it is a nice to have for most people. There was a bug a few months ago that took the newsletter down for a few days and no one wrote in about the email not going out. Almost no one sent in suggestions for how to improve it. Very few people shared it with others. Very few people have mentioned it on social media during its time running.

Competition is fierce

And there are no shortages of AI news resources, many of which are run by highly competent individuals or teams. Matt Wolfe and Ben Tossell come to mind, but there are countless others. Their work is incredibly well done, and Emergent Mind with its short news summaries pales in comparison (though of course there are many ways to consume news, and Emergent Mind may be a better fit for some types of people).

Poor founder/product fit

I like building tools. Preceden, my other product, is a tool, and pretty much everything else I’ve built and stuck with is a tool of some kind.

Emergent Mind is a… news site. I really enjoyed automating the news aggregation and summaries, as well as building the daily newsletter. Pretty sure it was the first automated newsletter entirely written by GPT.

But I don’t try to stay on top of the news much. Not national news, not AI news. I check the Emergent Mind newsletter periodically, but am just not that passionate about reading or being a source of AI news.

But lets say I wanted to stick with it. Now what? Is this website and newsletter what Emergent Mind is and now I have to market it and grow it into a real business? That sounds like a lot of (not enjoyable) work to me. I could partner with someone who enjoys that side of things, but even that would require a lot of work. Which brings me to the biggest reason to shut it down…

I should focus my time and attention on my other product

My other product, Preceden, is doing well. Not sail-into-the-sunset well, but well enough that I’m able to work on it full time and it can support my family financially with some buffer. And I’ve got a long, long list of projects that I’m really excited about to improve the product, market it better, and grow the business. Every minute I spent thinking about or working on Emergent Mind is one less minute I’m spending on my actual business.

Why split my time at all with another product, especially one I’m not that excited about taking to the next level?

I’ve told everyone I’m selling it/shutting it down

I’ve publicly gone back and forth on Emergent Mind’s future several times before, and the thought of writing this blog post where I justify doing it again was not very appealing to me.

But, avoiding a few eye-rolls should not be a factor in my decision-making process.

Why keep it

For most of the last few months, the “sell it or shut it down” route made the most sense to me. But, after a lot of reflection, I realized I was looking at it the wrong way.

The curse of inflated expectations

I made big mistake early on in the course of building Emergent Mind: I expected too much of it, and myself really. Rather than be some fun little side project (which I’ve had a ton of over the years), I saw it as an ambitious startup that had the potential to see meteoric growth and become the top AI news source. I told everyone I knew how big it would be, formed a Delaware LLC (to make converting it into a Delaware C Corp easier if I choose to raise money), spent $760 chatting with an IP lawyer for an hour to avoid getting myself in trouble with the direction I was going, and even thought about putting Preceden on the back-burner to focus 100% on Emergent Mind.

But then reality set in, and I realized how much work would be required to achieve those goals. There’s only so much time in the day, and faced with the prospect of trying to build/market/run two products by myself or focus on just one, I convinced myself to end Emergent Mind because I wouldn’t be able to achieve those initial ambitions.

It’s a false dichotomy though. It took me a long time to realize, but I don’t have to choose between shutting it down and devoting 50% of my time to growing it into an AI news juggernaut. I could work on it one day a month. Hell, I don’t actually have to work on it at all. I could make some tweaks to get the costs down and put it on the back-burner for 2 months or 2 years. It can be a small site with a small audience and that is completely okay.

And while it’s true that I’m super focused on Preceden right now and probably will be for the foreseeable future, my past indicates there’s a strong chance I may want to take a break and work on something else in the future. I will hopefully be in this full-time indie-hacker mode for years to come, and it’s unlikely Preceden will be the only thing I work on for the rest of my career.

I also have a ton of interesting ideas and potential directions for Emergent Mind that I may want to devote some time to in the future, not because I think they will change its growth (though maybe), but because they seem fun to work on. For example, how could I change the newsletter to make it appealing and informative to someone like myself who is only casually following the latest AI developments? How can I surface big picture trends, and not just list summaries of yesterday’s news items? I have some ideas.

And that’s what Emergent Mind should have been all along: a small side project that I can work on when I want to work on it, with no pressure to grow it into something larger.

And lets not forget: there are those 900 active subscribers with a 75% daily open rate. There are a lot of people getting value from the site, and while it may never be a top-3 AI news source with hundreds of thousands of readers, I should be (am am!) thrilled that it has as many readers as it does, and its a privilege to be serving them.

Also, I can likely get the costs down to something like $150/month, which is really not bad. If it was costing me $500/month, there would be a much stronger argument for pulling the plug, but for $150/month, it makes sense to keep it going and keep my options open.

What’s next

I’m going to put Emergent Mind on the back-burner for the foreseeable future. When I’m feeling inspired to work on it, I will, but am not going to put any pressure on myself to grow it by taking on large product and marketing initiatives that I’m not excited about.

Maybe it sits on that back-burner for months or years and continues its gradual decline. Maybe I get a meaningful offer one day and do sell it. Maybe in a year I announce I’m shutting it down and get a few more eye-rolls. Or maybe with some small product, marketing, and monetization projects I’m able to turn things around, and gradually want to spend more and more of my time on it.

We’ll see what happens.