In 2021 Elena Marsh was editing a food newsletter from her kitchen table. It had 312 readers, a loyal handful of whom wanted to pay. The tools she tried took a tenth of every subscription and made her publication look like everyone else’s.
Jun Takeda, a friend who had spent a decade building email systems, offered to help for a weekend. The weekend became a year. By the end of it, forty writers were sending their letters on what would become Issue, and nobody had paid a share of their revenue to anyone.
We wanted a printing press, not a landlord.
Today Issue is home to more than twelve thousand publications, from village news to science letters read in ninety countries. We are still fourteen people, still independent, and still answering every email ourselves.
Issue is a MONOFRAME company. We are funded by our customers and by a small group of writers who invested early. There are no plans to sell, and no plans to start taking a cut.