Hybrid Hacker is growing! ☀️
A brief summer update about how things are going, and what's coming next!
Hey, Luca and Nicola here!
It’s been two months now since we announced that we were joining forces, so we wanted to give you an update about how things are going, and what’s coming next!
A full team committed to quality 🏆
During these last months, Hybrid Hacker and Refactoring have been growing faster than ever, and together now count more than 120,000 subscribers!
This is also possible because, as opposed to other publications, we have a full team behind them:
Luca is full-time on this and deals with everything from writing to business & admin stuff. This way he can take things off Nicola’s plate, who is able to focus on his incredible writing, while still working a full-time leadership job.
In total, we are a group of five, with Matteo, Paco, and Joel running partnerships, producing the podcast, and running great events in the community.
So, the two publications are staying separate, each with its own voice, but playing nicely with each other in many departments:
💬 Community — is a shared effort, and exclusive to our paid subscribers.
🎁 Deals — we run shared deals for the best software tools.
🤝 Bundling — if you want to join both Refactoring and Hybrid Hacker, you get a 30% discount (reply to this email if you want it! We are still figuring out how to do it automatically on Substack!)
Articles are becoming half-paid 🔒
To better support our effort in writing Hybrid Hacker, we are going to make parts of our signature long-form articles exclusive to paid subscribers.
As you may have noticed, we have been experimenting with this and the reception so far has been amazing 🙏
Our recent piece about How to Read Books drove tons of new subscriptions, making it one of our most popular articles ever.
Thank you so much for becoming paid subscribers and supporting our work ❤️
So, we are going to make weekly articles about 40% free (the first part of each article) and 60% paid. We believe this is fair: it provides value to free subscribers, while giving more meat to those who are willing to invest in their personal growth.
Paid plan is $10/mo 💳
We are also updating the paid plan price to $10/mo or $100/year, up from $7/mo or $70/year.
This was always going to be the final price of Hybrid Hacker, but we kept the 30% founding discount for the first year of the newsletter.
We believe this is a healthy price that allows us to invest more in content quality, while still being affordable for most engineers and managers who read the newsletter and want to invest in their own personal growth.
We are going to keep the discount active for one more week, so if you like what you read and want to support our work, you still have a few days to subscribe at the old price 🙇
We want to hear from you 🗳️
Finally, we are open to any ideas and suggestions to make Hybrid Hacker better for you:
What is something you particularly like?
What is something we can do better?
Feel free to write in the comments or reply to this email!
And that’s it for today! See you next week 👋
Sincerely
Luca & Nicola