I'm Isaac Saul, and this is Press Pass: Our once-a-month, members-only newsletter that pulls back the curtain on the inner workings of Tangle.
A coach of mine once said that “the meaning of life is accomplishing really hard things with people you love.” That always resonated with me — and I’m remembering why this month.
I love my team. And running a successful media business in 2026 is hard. If you need a reminder, we just got a fresh one from the nation’s capital, where The Washington Post carried out a round of layoffs, decimating their international coverage, shuttering their sports section, and resetting the entire newsroom in big, traumatic fashion.
When papers with as rich a tradition as the Post’s — not to mention resources and a track record of success — are shaving jobs and downsizing, it provides a reminder of just how difficult it is to operate in today’s media landscape.
Here at Tangle, we’re facing our own set of challenges. Over the last 90 days, our monthly recurring revenue growth has been roughly flat. This is the first sustained period of stagnancy that we’ve experienced in the six years I’ve been writing the newsletter, and I think that’s due to a few factors:
First, our paid list is contracting after our massive growth spurt in 2024 and 2025. Put simply: 1% of our paid subscribers cancel every month, but because we have so many more paid subscribers than we used to, that 1% is just a lot more people in raw numbers than it ever was before. So we have to grow faster to keep ahead of the churn.
