Product lessons from building our subscription service Extra Crunch –
Summary
We’ve seen companies from infrastructure plays like Substack and Pico to brand verticals like Holloway and The Athletic receive venture funding, all with the goal of changing the economics of news, information and entertainment. Every day, I get the fortune of talking with founders about their startups and writing about them on TechCrunch, but I’ve also been something of an intrapreneur myself, building out product in the form of TechCrunch’s membership service Extra Crunch as EC’s executive editor over the past two years. One of the biggest concerns I heard from TechCrunch writers early on was that they would have to leave their beats for weeks at a time in order to produce “in-depth” subscription content — code for really, really longform pieces. Extra Crunch is available in a handful of countries, but launching elsewhere can require dozens of people to work together to handle tax, accounting, legal, policy, and security reviews across multiple corporate entities and regions. I code, and I have been able to cobble together some Python scripts to pipeline some of our data into an Airtable so that we have at least decent visibility on what our readers like and what they don’t (in some cases involving manually scraping our own sites since some of our tools don’t have API access).