informed.now CEO Kira Shishkin on Up Next with Gabriella Mirabelli

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Highlights

Why would informed.now care more about its phone number than its name? Gabriella Mirabelli puts that to Kira, who explains the toll-free number that spells INFO, the lowercase brand, briefings with no periods kept under 1,500 characters, and the SMS blacklist that forced an asterisk into Coinbase's name. They also cover referrals that reached Uber and DoorDash drivers and a possible higher tier for human replies.

Top Quotes

"We have a whole system internally that just screens our language for impartiality, because sometimes you can imbue bias in a statement just by using a certain adjective." (Kira Shishkin)

"When raising kids, you often get parenting advice that says not to yell to get the kid's attention, but to lower your voice instead. What informed.now is doing is the news equivalent of that." (Gabriella Mirabelli)

"We live in the world that normalized attention terrorism, our language just lags behind in describing it." (Kira Shishkin)

Transcript

Announcer: New ideas and new technology are causing seismic shifts in the media industry. Where are we headed? What does it mean? Keep listening. Media strategist Gabriella Mirabelli talks with the brightest minds in entertainment and business. Meet the innovators, the risk takers, and the disruptors on the front lines of change. From Hollywood, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and beyond. The future is coming to a screen near you. Are you ready? This is the Up Next podcast with Gabriella Mirabelli.

Gabriella Mirabelli: Welcome to Up Next. I'm your host, Gabriella Mirabelli. My guest today is Kira Shishkin. Kira is the CEO of informed.now, the news concierge service for the age of information overload. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Kira Shishkin: Thank you for having me.

Gabriella Mirabelli: In your own words, what is informed.now, and what makes it meaningfully different from all of the other things in the news space today?

Kira Shishkin: informed.now is a news concierge for leaders in the age of information overload. informed.now tries to be different from every news media company out there that seeks to overwhelm and advertise and clickbait. We try to do everything different. We give you the insight, give you the point, while minimizing our attention footprint in your life.

Gabriella Mirabelli: What would you say your core value is going into the product?

Kira Shishkin: I think the core value, and we also hear this directly from our users, which gives us a lot of confidence that we're hitting the right mark, is getting news without noise.

Gabriella Mirabelli: Oh, that's great.

Kira Shishkin: You get what's happening, whether that's an issue with tariffs or something international, maybe elections in Poland, or it's the US economy, or it's something about climate or cultural. Things that matter every day, completely devoid of any solicitations. There are no ads, there's no clickbait, there are no prompts for you to read more, subscribe, to do all these things that we take for granted as news companies have us do, which is answer to a prompt, a pop-up, then there's a paywall, there are advertisements left and right, then there's a video player in the background. The whole thing is just written with bias and tons of verbosity.

We take all that away, and we do so through a very minimalist channel. We use SMS as a way of communicating in the most minimalist sense possible, and it's also very direct. We text a minimalist, text-only news briefing to our readers with just the things that matter the most. We stop short of providing any sort of analysis or opinion, where we just touch on the common fact base across any given issue and say the what, where, and when. So for folks that are busy, can't spare the time to read all this news or see through all that noise, we give it to them right away.

Gabriella Mirabelli: And it really is no video. If everyone's zagging, you're zigging, right? Everybody's leaning into video, and your SMS, it's text, it's simple. You don't have informed.now on Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok. When I asked in our pre-interview if you were sitting on names to hold the IP, you shared that you weren't concerned and that the service wasn't about the name. It was about the phone number. So, a two-part question here: Why is the phone number at the center of the product experience but not the name?

Kira Shishkin: It's been a fascinating space to play in, in the SMS world, because it has its advantages. It's ubiquitous. Everybody has a phone number. Even if you don't have an account on Facebook or an account on TikTok or whatever it may be, everybody has a phone number. So it's extremely ubiquitous. You don't need to have an account. You don't need much to have it. So we're really excited about that part of the reality of that channel.

On the other hand, it's so minimalist that we can't send you all the things that classic email newsletters or traditional news organizations send you, which is a long list of links, tons of images, tons of multimedia content. There are GIFs, there are videos, there is incredible length. With SMS, we are attached to the brevity and the minimalism that comes with the channel. That's very much part of our minimalist commitment. We want to take up the least amount of space with the least amount of upkeep. You never have to remember a password. You never have to remember how to log in. You never have to get an app on your phone. That level of minimalism.

Gabriella Mirabelli: Thank God.

Kira Shishkin: So our brand from the outset became our toll-free number, which is 844-406-INFO. We kept the info in there because that is the one key phrase that is always going to be core to what we do. Even if the informed.now brand might evolve or change or multiply in different iterations, info is always going to be core to what we do. Our mission is to be the information concierge for the age of information overload, and so that's always going to be relevant.

The name might change. It might evolve. We also might launch multiple brands, which is part of our non-attachment to the branding. But the phone number is something that we're very excited about, because those are hard to get. And the info keyword is one of the most expensive keywords in the world of domains and vanity phone numbers.

Gabriella Mirabelli: I'm curious because in the press pre-interview materials, there was a lot of bold, underlined, color highlighting. Our name is always lowercase. Why? Why is it always lowercase?

Kira Shishkin: It just grabs people's attention. And there's something about it that's a nod to the minimalism, where we are almost Unicode. It's just very minimal. In a short answer, it speaks to our minimalism. You don't even waste energy on a capital letter.

Gabriella Mirabelli: Is that kind of where we're at? Okay. Well, interesting. So let's shift over to attention. You mentioned attention, and goodness knows, millions of articles on the attention economy. You're launching in an attention economy. You are launching a product that is intentionally designed to be quiet, calm, non-sensational, and minimal. So what did your launch strategy take us back to? You haven't launched yet. You're about to launch. What does your strategy look like?

Kira Shishkin: We thought of ourselves, and we still do, and we've only doubled down on this philosophy, as a rebellion against the world that is, as you would describe it, the attention economy. I feel like attention economy has been a good term to describe it, maybe a few years ago. We now live in the world of information overload, which is a post-attention economy environment, where folks are so bought into this attention economy concept that all that matters, the primary commodity, is people's eyeballs. And clickbait is rampant. And clickbait is rampant and is in everything that we do.

At this point, we live in the world of attention terrorism. And our language, I think, lags behind a little bit in describing it. But our attention is hijacked every step of the way, everywhere we walk, digitally and in person, physically, offline as well. Our attention is being hijacked with all kinds of varieties of clickbait, some less acceptable than others. And then it's being held hostage for as long as humanly possible so that ads can be fed to us, so that content that is sponsored, that is promoted, that is just additional extraneous content, can be fed to us. And we can be kept in this attention jail.

Gabriella Mirabelli: You're using a lot of really strong language, violent imagery. You've got terrorism, hijacking, held hostage. You didn't say force feed, and I'm surprised that you didn't work that in there. But you really do see it as against this aggressive landscape. Is that right?

Kira Shishkin: It keeps exacerbating. We've seen 3 main influences that got us here. The first is the adoption of advertisement revenue across the news industry, which is so dominant now that I don't know any brands who are reader supported. The vast majority of the revenue comes from advertisement, which means their incentives and the way they structure their content, their UX, their business is completely beholden to the advertiser incentives, which is engagement at all costs, which is grabbing people's attention at all costs.

Gabriella Mirabelli: Well, it's almost like you're the opposite, but similar to Tortoise. I think Tortoise is subscription only, but it's in-depth slow, whereas you are quick. You're timely. It's interesting.

Kira Shishkin: I like the aesthetic around this slow news. And I think the other difference, maybe jumping to a similar topic, and lead me where you want me to go: Part of the issue we're also seeing is this huge resignation from the news consumption world. A lot of young people, Gen Z, now Gen Alpha, and Gen Beta obviously are going to have the same experience of people resigning from consuming news information.

We see this in the most gentle way as a welcoming back, to say, hey, actually, reading the news doesn't have to take hours out of your life. And you don't have to see through all this filtering. Is this content or is this ads? Is this a sponsorship or is this facts? Is this a bias or is this actually what happened and where? We're introducing this way of welcoming people back from this great resignation from news consumption. And we see this short-form content as a way that's been resonant with our users, and people are attracted to it.

Selling people on Tortoise, or The Observer, which acquired Tortoise, is definitely going to be a little difficult, because it requires hours of consumption. And most people just don't have that attention anymore.

Gabriella Mirabelli: Right. Well, it's interesting. At the very beginning, you mentioned a news concierge intended for leaders. So it sounded like the intended audience was busy executives, a bit of the cream of the crop. But then, shifting into everyone has a phone number, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, which is very much the masses. So has your intended audience shifted, or was your intended audience always everyone but with an executive mindset?

Kira Shishkin: I love that you mentioned the executive mindset. I think we evolved in our understanding of what that is. We initially launched with this idea that, okay, we're going to be this concierge service. And in a way, we've always branded it for the busiest executives, for the board members, for the real leaders and decision makers of the economy. And we've definitely had resonance with those people.

We've also seen, in the most mysterious ways, referrals spread to users in very blue-collar roles. People that were delivering DoorDash. People that were driving Uber. People that were first-generation immigrants coming to the US and just hustling, hustling, hustling. Even folks that have had to skip education so they can provide for their family and just build a life in this beautiful but cruel country.

And so we've seen this expansion, this explosion of our target audience, because we've started getting interest not just from the executives, but also the students, the academics, and the blue-collar workers I was mentioning, who were attracted to it for a different value. They were attracted to it because they were just as busy, if not sometimes busier, but they had fewer options. The executive can have their company purchase the Financial Times, which is, by the way, a $1,000 a year subscription, which is pretty prohibitive. And maybe you even have an analyst that does the news reading for you.

But if you are a third-generation Colombian American who just got to New York and you're driving Uber, you're trying to make ends meet, you have no time, but you also can't afford a $1,000 subscription to just one outlet. And so this gives you access to news without noise, the news without the taints, where you can form your own opinion. You have the toolbox to form your own opinion and feel enfranchised again without costing an arm and a leg.

Gabriella Mirabelli: What does it cost? Because you pinpointed the FT. I didn't realize it had gotten up to $1,000. Goodness gracious. I remember when it was $600 and that was pretty dear. So what is an annual subscription? Because your business model is a subscription model. What is the cost?

Kira Shishkin: It's only $99 a year, which, we've heard from our users, is absolutely nothing. And it's meant to be accessible. We're not necessarily planning to change it. We were considering that in the future we might raise it, but we want this to be accessible for people. And so our subscription is monthly. We don't lock you into any long-term contracts. You don't have to commit to a year.

As long as it's valuable to you, we want you to support our mission and make it possible for us to do the work that enables you. But as soon as you want to leave, we're sort of being a little bit non-business savvy on purpose and saying, just do monthly. Don't commit to a year-long thing, because as soon as you want out, we want that to be an easy exit.

Gabriella Mirabelli: That was Ted Sarandos' point of view about Netflix, that you should be able to quit. And if it's easy to quit, it's easy to come back. As I covered earlier, you've opted out of traditional social media. And we know from surveys that this is where discovery happens for people 13 to 39, and younger for Gen Alpha. Social media is the discovery platform. So what fills the role for discovery for your company when it comes to visibility and growth? How do people discover you?

Kira Shishkin: We have this additional burden that we have to overcome as we think of discoverability and growth, which is that the SMS channel, although ubiquitous, has serious trust issues with users. So we don't just have to convince new subscribers that, hey, we are this really valuable service, but also that it is safe to text a phone number, and that you're not going to get spammed by engaging with a phone number experience. So for us, the biggest lever that's been really powerful and a converting lever is testimony and referral. When somebody says, hey, I let this number text me every day, totally do it, and that comes from your friend, it is suddenly like all doubt is removed. It's a trusted referral from somebody else.

Gabriella Mirabelli: I'm curious if you thought of it in terms of almost an intentional opacity play in the marketing strategy, a benefit to being in the know, the way we saw with Clubhouse or early Substack, where it's a bit like if you know, you know, and it's kind of fun to be one of the people who know. Is that part of it?

Kira Shishkin: That's very much part of it. It's been our brand since the start because we've always been attracted to low-cost or even no-cost ways of spreading. We want the value to carry us, not an advertisement to carry us. And it's also consistent with how anti-advertisement we are, not just in our own product but in the whole industry. We kind of want that to stop. It would be ironic for us to run advertisements.

And so we've been leading from the very get-go with this being a membership. This is a community. This is a commitment to a worldview that you subscribe to. To answer your earlier question as well, the ways we've been bringing folks together are leading really hard into referrals, but also gathering people in person, offline experiences that show, oh, all of us here embody this lifestyle of wanting to be informed without being influenced. The power of community and community marketing is something that we've dipped our toes in substantially, but we're looking to scale and increase it nationwide. It's having in-person events that give a face to an otherwise very anonymous experience, where it's a one-on-one interaction.

Gabriella Mirabelli: Well, there's a lot of research around how Gen Z and young millennials really like experiences and creating third spaces, spaces where they can connect and build community, and that they are getting turned off by some of this violent maw of information, as you so eloquently drew the picture of. I'm curious. You've said you would never have advertising. It's anathema to everything you are, and that there's always a human. In our pre-interview, we talked about that there's always a human. You can text and get a human, which I didn't realize. I thought, sure, it says that, but it's a chatbot. So, a question for you: Would you ever have a chatbot? How do you keep the human touch as you scale if the answer is no?

Kira Shishkin: It's around pricing. We've talked about this and thought about this for a while, as to how we can support growing volumes with human touch. One of the things we've started noticing is that people appreciate a human on the other side, but our lead times as a result are going down. For our team of humans to get back to everybody in a human way, and it's not automated in any way, response times get longer and longer.

And so we've been thinking of limiting that to a higher tier of folks. We haven't rolled that out in any way. But if you want to have this concierge experience where you can not just get the one-way news, which is something that everybody gets, and that's our core value, but you want to have a conversation, in the future we'd probably roll out a tier that enables that and limits our bandwidth of covering that interaction. It's not going to be a lot more expensive. Maybe it's going to be 20 instead of 9, but maybe even 15. We've been toying with numbers, but that's how we would limit the quality and response time lags to the folks that really want it, so they're willing to pay for it.

Gabriella Mirabelli: Right. Well, as I said, I hadn't realized, even though it says when you first sign up to this mysterious text number, and it gets back to you, oh, there's always a human here. But yes, indeed, there is truly a human there, and yes, indeed, you can, at least for the moment, interact with it. Brands often talk about their voice. Duolingo, for example, has a distinctive voice. Is there a signature voice that you're trying to evoke? Now, obviously, when somebody reads informed.now, it's about being minimal. But in those human interactions, in your live in-person events or any marketing around live in-person events, what is the voice? Do you have a voice? Do you think about voice?

Kira Shishkin: We do, and it can come off as clinical sometimes, but we try to use very bare, minimalist language, obviously consistent and expected, and we try to use highly impartial language. We have a whole model internally that just screens our language for impartiality, because sometimes you can imbue bias in a statement just by using a certain adjective. Certain words are pejorative. They just have a pejorative tone to them, right?

Gabriella Mirabelli: Okay.

Kira Shishkin: If you can say "mounting debt" instead of saying "increasing" or "growing debt," you can put a stint on what we suggest this debt is. This is straight from this morning's digest. So thinking about what we use is a huge part of our philosophy, because our product is entirely a text experience. And so every word really matters.

Obviously, above all, the word count is probably the major distinctive element, as we are always under 1,500 characters. That's part of the SMS experience and limitations. We cannot go above that. And so we're super limited. We have to count every word, every character even. That's the biggest constraint. The brevity is paramount. But the other side is that we, again, do this extra screening for the language that we use to make sure it's impartial. It's almost clinical, where it's not in any way flavored with anything at all.

The other thing I'll mention is we have a strong opinion about punctuation. We don't use periods anywhere.

Gabriella Mirabelli: You're so young. It's so young.

Kira Shishkin: It helps appeal to that category, as well as the lowercase branding. I think we're building for Gen Z in ways we didn't even realize at the time, but it's been resonating. The lack of periods and the lack of punctuation sometimes has been very resonant with the Gen Z category. We have another commitment, which is that if something is longer than a sentence, it's hard to describe. We try to minimize thoughts into single sentences, where there isn't ever really a paragraph. There's only a sentence. And we try to break them up with spaces, where a paragraph is a sentence, but it doesn't need punctuation because it's the only sentence in that paragraph.

Gabriella Mirabelli: I see.

Kira Shishkin: And so we follow that, and we do the same thing in our other communications. If we're ever talking to somebody over email, which we do very rarely because we don't love to be there, it's not our world, we're always speaking in that way. I even think that in your communications with Lea or myself, we have the same writing standard of no periods.

Gabriella Mirabelli: I have a question. This is from our pre-interview. You said there are certain secret words that you can't use in SMS or else your message won't be able to go through. And it's a mystery what those words are. I'm curious. This interview is going to air after there's a gap of time between when I'm talking and when it goes live. But today, in the message that was sent today, there's a company name, and one of the letters in the company name is replaced by an asterisk. And I was curious as to why.

Kira Shishkin: That's exactly why. And it's unexpected. A particular company from the S&P.

Gabriella Mirabelli: It was like, really? It seems so strange to me.

Kira Shishkin: I mean, it's mind-boggling, because we would also have this assumption that this blacklist of words is old and outdated. But we've had experience with this list where there was a drug that was overprescribed. It was some sort of an opioid drug, and it literally was an acronym. I don't remember exactly the words of it. But there was an overdose epidemic of this medicine 20 years ago, and you still couldn't say it. We were reporting on it on a historical basis. We were just giving context to the news article. But we couldn't say it. And we were like, this is such a random thing to go on.

Gabriella Mirabelli: You know, if it was something like Fen-Phen or something like that, I think probably because there was a lot of weird marketing through text messages. Or maybe spam. Spam users use that word a lot.

Kira Shishkin: That's totally why. But it sometimes comes as a surprise if you haven't been targeted with that spam. It's like, this is what people are doing?

Gabriella Mirabelli: So this morning, you mentioned Coinbase.

Kira Shishkin: I mean, I'm comfortable mentioning their names. Shouldn't be anything tricky. We were super surprised because it's very current.

Gabriella Mirabelli: So they are updating this blacklist of words all the time, apparently. And it must be that there are a lot of Coinbase scams.

Kira Shishkin: And what the company has suffered is a huge ransom.

Gabriella Mirabelli: Well, right. A hack. So I'm sure it's all interrelated in some respects. But how interesting. Before you did this venture, you had a background in venture capital. How has your background as a VC influenced how you're building informed.now, especially around brand and marketing? It sounds like it's a bit of backwards day, that it seems like everything you're doing is the opposite of what you would have done before. Or is that just me misreading it?

Kira Shishkin: No, I think that's right. It's easy to just show up and do the same best practices as everybody else. But then you also get treated the way everybody else does, which is that no one gives you attention. No one talks about you. And it's just a general sea of information and option overload. But when you're doing everything different, or you're doing some key things different, then suddenly you are in a category of your own.

And definitely from my venture building days, investing days, I have seen that the organic conversation that goes on around products is the most powerful referral, the most powerful marketing. You can't even help but talk about it because it's so unique. And so inadvertently, we are playing into that playbook of trying to be unique, not for the sake of it, but it's also playing well to our other elements of marketing, which is that we want to be part of people's conversation. We are literally in a category of our own based on what we do and how we do it. Nobody does it the way we do it.

And so whenever we talk about media minimalism, news minimalism, there really aren't alternatives competing with us. Anyone that would say they're competing with us is something like the Morning Brew newsletter, which couldn't be further from what we do. So it just helps us stand out. And if anything, the lesson from the VC days is to stand out at all costs to be part of those conversations that happen organically. When people are saying, hey, this cool thing that I heard of, this cool thing that I'm part of, that is so much more powerful than using these common best practices that will only let you stand out as much as all the others stand out.

Gabriella Mirabelli: So how do you get, I mean, obviously word of mouth is huge, and word of mouth from people is big. Do you do any partnerships with influencers?

Kira Shishkin: We are. So this is something I wanted to touch on earlier. This is also true from our pre-interview: I mentioned that social media is not an area we want to play in as hard. That was an idea early on. That was a commitment early on that we felt very strongly about, and more and more so. I think we've interacted with LinkedIn, and it's certainly been changing. Our commitment is that we don't want to be advertising, and we don't want to be advertising on social media either.

But content and organic content on social media platforms is something that we are slowly crawling back to. The growth we've seen from LinkedIn alone, if we can double that through Facebook, Instagram, the Meta world, and TikTok, is going to be a very powerful engine for us. Hey, it doesn't cost any real money. And it's still organic in the way that you have to discover us. You have to see us. We're not going to intrude on your attention, but we are going to show up there in the future. And yes, we'll look at influencers as well, because as you've hinted at earlier and in your other episodes, there really aren't other options for discovery.

So this was maybe coming to terms with the reality of the growth engines that are out there and realizing that we will be on social media. There is no doubt. It's just that we will not advertise on social media.

Gabriella Mirabelli: A lot of these platforms, Facebook, for instance, throttle corporate organic growth. LinkedIn, not so much, but still your personal posts on LinkedIn will travel far more swiftly than informed.now's posts on LinkedIn. They will be seen by more people. And so I could see looking for influencers who talk about minimalist lifestyles, people who talk about consuming, looking for the communities, the people who have already built these communities and partnering with them where they might talk about it. That might get you more bang than anything you do on your own.

Yeah, I would probably have just, because, like I said, aren't you going to just squat on it to have your name? Because of course you should. These things could change. But I think if we think about kids not posting on the grid very much on Instagram, you don't have to do very much, especially if you're working with other partners and you're staying true to your brand. And if it really is about being in the know, maybe it's not really huge influencers. I don't know. I think there are ways you can stay true to what you're saying and still thread that needle.

I think what you've done so far is really interesting. I think that there is a lot of noise. And with raising kids, they talk about not yelling to get attention, but lowering your voice to get attention. And I think that what you're doing or trying to do is the information equivalent of that.

Well, thank you so much for the time. I really appreciate it.

Kira Shishkin: Thank you very much for having me. This has been delightful.