We have a company cult.

It’s called “CLG” and stands for Conscious Leadership Group. It’s all about becoming more conscious in life and work by paying attention to your feelings (b/c they’re there either way, and they’re gonna cause trouble if you ignore them), keeping your commitments, acting with integrity, and so on. Very reasonable, non-culty stuff, packaged in a slightly culty way.

We work with a coach we love and she helps us learn and practice this stuff. We won’t make you do it, but you’ll probably want to.

When Ryan first started at Sudowrite we actually butted heads a lot. I am a designer, he is a designer, and somehow we got in this weird space where I felt like he was always shooting down my ideas and he felt (I think) that I wasn’t giving him enough control.

I’m sure there was more to it, because it definitely seemed like it at the time, but years later the whole thing seems so ridiculous that I can’t even remember what we were so upset about anymore.

Anyway, CLG helped us work through it. We worked through some “stories” we had told ourselves about each other. We did a clearing. (I realize this is a bit woo woo.) It took practice, but I got better at giving up control, Ryan started asking for my feedback, and working together got really good.

CLG has helped many of us communicate more clearly, grow closer, and ultimately know ourselves and each other better.

We’re kinda normal, kinda not

In a lot of ways I think Sudowrite is a pretty normal startup. We make software. People pay for it using subscriptions (I know, ew). We are smart and motivated to make good things. We invent new things and take pride in our work. All pretty normal.

And in some ways it’s not a normal startup. James and I have started companies before and sold them, and we weren’t looking to start a company. Unlike most startups today, we didn’t do this to take part in an AI gold rush. In fact, we started a couple years before ChatGPT existed.

James and I were happily writing fiction and made Sudowrite for ourselves. Then it kinda blew up. Since we’d been through this before, we decided to do things a bit differently.

We raised some money, but not from random VCs. Instead, we carefully brought in founders, writers, directors, and operators. We decided from the start that we wouldn’t chase ever larger and riskier funding rounds, giving up control along the way. It turns out this matters a lot.

This is our third year of profitability, and the third year we’ll do a profit share. We’ve been featured in The New Yorker and everywhere we care about. We have infinite runway. Our growth has come predominately from word-of-mouth. So far, so good.

We want to grow, but not just so we can raise more money and say we’re killing it. We want to grow because it gives us the resources to do cooler and more ambitious things. For example, this year we launched Muse, the first AI model made just for fiction. We’re working on more AI models for writers, and prototyping completely new ways to write.

We have over 20,000 paying authors. At our current revenue, a typical go-for-broke money-losing VC-backed startup might have forty full-time employees. We’re at a fraction of that.

That means we run things tight and stay focused on the important stuff. It also means everyone has actual impact. Not pretend impact, like share an idea at all-hands and maybe we’ll prioritize it if a VP claims it as their own idea it next quarter.

Anyone can come up with an idea on Monday, prototype it the same day, and ship it a couple days later.