2026 Hyperfixed Goals

We have plans

Hi, I am never planning to charge for this newsletter, so there’s no need to pay for a subscription. If you like/believe in the radio I make, truly the best thing you could do to help us continue doing it is to become a premium subscriber to Hyperfixed. Thank you so much for reading.

Over the past year of Hyperfixed’s existence, we have been trying to scale this thing up, both as far as audience and premium members are concerned, and I have posted a couple articles on here about how the show is going and what we’re looking for from the future, and I wanted to update you all on where we’re at.

So we’re now about 18 months into this project, and the good news is that we are currently debt free and making enough money to squeak by. I have paid back almost all of our initial loan and we’re making money through both membership and advertising. We’re all getting paid on a schedule that roughly shakes out to about $75,000 a year, but all of the people who work on the show are currently contractors (including myself, technically) as opposed to full time W-2 employees, so everyone is getting a day rate. I am still bearing the brunt of any financial shortfalls (for example, I have only paid myself through the end of July, 2025), but I am getting to a point where I can pay myself back over time.

The problem right now is twofold, and the first one is premium membership. We’re still getting new premium members, but since the show started just about a year ago, we had a rash of people sign up for the annual membership, and I suspect we’re getting some attrition from people who either can’t afford it or simply aren’t into it. So as new people sign up, old people jump ship, and we’ve been hovering at about 3200-3300 premium members since October.

The second problem is audience, and that is a nut I have found difficult to crack. When we started making Reply All in 2014, we were able to parlay guest spots on and collaborations with other big shows into huge audience growth, on the order of 25k-50k new subscribers per collab. We have been attempting some similar high profile collaborations as a way to get our name out there — we teamed up with Claire Saffitz on the episode “The Lord’s Work,” and we teamed up with Reveal to produce an hour-long version of our 3 episode “Cat Drug Black Market” series, and while both of them were very positively received, they haven’t moved the needle much on our listenership, which continues to shake out to around 80k listeners an episode.

My goals for the show have always remained the same - 200k listeners an episode and 10k premium subscribers. As of right now we’re about 40% of the way there with the former, and 32% of the way there with the latter. But in the interest of setting more manageable goals for myself, I am going to try and shoot for something that feels in the realm of the possible.

Right now we have reached a comfortable equilibrium where, for the most part, we’re covering our bills and everyone who works on the show is getting paid on time. But I have some modest dreams for this year. The first is that all my coworkers are currently contract employees. I would like to make them W-2 employees of the show, which comes with a little bit of added cost. Second, as I’ve mentioned in previous installments of this series, everyone is working on this show is working on it for under their market value, and I would like to be able to give everyone modest raises to bring us closer in line with the industry standard. But most importantly, I would like to be able to both offer and cover the cost of health insurance.

To do this, my goal is to pick up 1500 premium subscribers. This will bring in around $82,000 - $125,000 annually, based on the cost of monthly and annual subscriptions, minus the cost of payment processing and a couple other fees that get taken out of revenue for the show. That is more than enough to cover health insurance, pay myself back a little bit for money I’ve put into the show, and give everyone modest raises.

The question, unfortunately at this point is — how? Hyperfixed is not a show that lends itself to video content. The tried and true method of collaborating with existing podcasts isn’t quite making a dent. I tried doing a 24-hour pledge-a-thon a couple months ago, but that not only didn’t get us a ton of subscribers, my internet stopped working about 7 hours in. I suppose we could do tangentially related video content (we did just have a TikTok that got a whopping 18k views) but that requires a ton of extra time and money that I would rather spend writing and reporting.

Either way, we’re not going anywhere, we’ll continue to grow both our show’s audience and the show’s ambition, and I’m excited about the future (especially our next main feed episode). In the meantime if there is anyone out there with either a surefire way to pick up new subscribers/listeners, or some kind of modern day medici who would like to be a beneficent patron of the arts, my email address is alex@hyperfixedpod.com. Either way, thanks for reading/listening/and so on.