One of the questions I keep coming back to on this show is simple:
What are you unwilling to compromise as we grow?
Talk is cheap when it comes to mission or when the decisions are easy.
When conflict arises between monetization and staying the course with that mission, things start to get interesting.
My recent conversation with Kira Shishkin, Founder & CEO of informed.now, might be a prime example of that tension.
Kira is creating what he dubs a minimalist news concierge: one text per day containing a concise briefing of what actually changed in the world over the previous 24 hours.
No clickbait. No outrage loops. No endless feed.
And, most notably:
No advertising.
That last part isn’t a marketing feature. It’s a business constraint.
And that distinction is key.
Your business model shows me who you actually serve
Kira contends much of what’s wrong or broken with our current media landscape can be traced back to a fundamental shift in incentives.
As readers became accustomed to getting news for free, media companies needed another customer.
Advertisers filled that void. How else can you keep the lights on or better yet pay your employees?
Kira’s argument is straightforward: once advertisers become the customer, the economics of the product inevitably begin responding to what advertisers value: attention, clicks, time on page and engagement.
informed.now is trying to reverse that equation.
“We only accept revenue from a reader.”
Kira takes an existential stance: if readers don’t find informed.now valuable enough to support, then perhaps the company shouldn’t exist.
That’s an unusually uncompromising business philosophy.
It’s also unique to anyone running a for profit business.
Because informed.now isn’t merely promising to put readers first.
Its revenue structure forces it.
And that raises a question every founder should consider:
Does your business model reinforce your mission or will it eventually require you to compromise it?
The Non-Negotiable Test
I’ve discussed non-negotiables with several guests on Worthy for Thirty.
The industries change.
The tension stays.
With JW Wiseman and Curious Elixirs, the product has to pass a heuristic of requirements: taste, customer experience, how it makes someone feel and the functional ingredients, before it earns its way into the market.
With Bill Shufelt and Athletic Brewing, purpose wasn’t something engineered just for the corporate responsibility page. Building a new category and reinvigorating an existing one also meant thinking about employees, community and impact alongside the economics of selling beer.
With MJ Gottlieb and Loosid, the question becomes even more consequential: how do you grow a company serving people in sobriety without allowing growth, partnerships or monetization to degrade the dignity and trust of the community you’re trying to serve?
And most recently, in my upcoming conversation with NYT best selling author, Eric Ries about Incorruptible, we explored another version of the same question:
How do you design an organization so that keeping the promise doesn’t depend entirely on the people running it? It has staying power!
Different founders.
Different businesses.
Same underlying challenge:
How do you make the mission difficult to abandon?
That’s one of the commonalities between these conversations.
And I increasingly believe it’s one of the most important distinctions between a company that is mission-marketed vs. one that is actually mission-built.
A mission should constrain you
Founders are taught to fight for optionality.
More customers.
More channels.
More features.
More monetization.
More markets.
But purpose-driven companies occasionally need to do the opposite.
They need constraints or guardrails to keep their mission intact; it’s the organization’s north star that helps achieve double bottom line goals.
For Kira, one of those constraints is advertising.
Accepting advertising could theoretically create another source of revenue. But it would also introduce another group of people whose interests informed.now may run in opposition of those of the reader.
So Kira has removed that constituency completely.
That’s what makes this conversation particularly interesting from a business perspective.
The constraint is the strategy.
Look outside the show and there are fascinating examples of this.
Patagonia provides perhaps the most extreme case. The company didn’t simply publish a purpose statement. Its ownership was restructured so that the Patagonia Purpose Trust controls the voting stock and exists specifically to protect the company’s values and mission. Excess profits after reinvestment can flow to the Holdfast Collective to fight the environmental crisis.
Patagonia explicitly asked:
How can we make abandoning our mission structurally harder?
informed.now is asking a smaller but philosophically similar question:
How can we make exploiting the reader economically irrational to us?
That’s purpose moving from marketing into the business DNA.
But here’s where Kira’s experiment gets more challenging
The fascinating part of informed.now isn’t whether this philosophy is successful at its current size.
It’s whether it survives scale.
Kira told me informed.now is considering renewed B2B pilots, offering businesses customized information around areas like healthcare, finance or economic trends.
That’s where the next chapter becomes interesting.
Because success will create temptations that failure never does.
Imagine informed.now becomes 10X larger.
Then 100X.
A major corporation offers a lucrative enterprise contract.
A potential sponsor wants influence over which topics appear each morning.
A sponsor offers enough money to reduce subscription prices.
An investor offers capital that could accelerate growth but wants certain metrics to increase.
A product team discovers that sending three notifications instead of one materially improves retention.
Each decision might make perfect business sense on its own merits.
Collectively, they could create something that looks very different from the company Kira intends to build.
Kira already recognizes part of this tension. When we discussed product development, he told me the team is almost obsessed with not adding features.
The goal is the opposite of what many technology companies pursue:
take up the least amount of brain space possible.
Instead of maximizing time spent with informed.now, Kira wants to minimize it.
Think about how unusual that is.
Most digital products ask:
How do we make our solution ‘sticky’ so users spend more time with us?
informed.now asks:
How quickly can we give you what you need so you can leave?
That is a radically different North Star.
The five questions every founder should answer before growth mode
Kira’s experiment offers a fruitful exercise for almost any business leader.
Before your next funding round, major partnership, new revenue stream or growth effort, write down the answers to these five questions:
1. Who is our end customer?
Not who uses the product.
Who ultimately funds the business?
Those aren’t always the same person.
2. What behavior does our revenue model reward?
Clicks?
Transactions?
Subscriptions?
Attention?
Outcomes?
Retention?
Your mission statement may describe what you value.
Your revenue model reveals what the organization is financially rewarded for doing.
3. What money are we willing to turn down?
This might be the most difficult question.
If there is no customer, advertiser, investor, partner or revenue stream you would ever reject, how non-negotiable are your values really?
4. What metric are we deliberately NOT maximizing?
For informed.now, attention itself is something Kira doesn’t want to maximize.
Every mission-driven company should know which conventional metric it is willing to sacrifice to protect something more important - like mission.
5. What happens when the founder isn’t in the room?
This is where the Eric Ries conversation becomes particularly relevant.
A founder’s conviction is not infrastructure.
If the mission disappears when the founder leaves, then it was never fully embedded into the company.
The strongest mission-driven businesses eventually turn beliefs into systems, incentives, governance and economics.
A quick note from one of Worthy for Thirty’s newest sponsors, Gustus Vitae. Long before they became a sponsor, I had the opportunity to sit down with co-founder Frankie Scanlon to talk about how Gustus Vitae has grown from its farmers market roots into a brand built around quality, community and making cooking more accessible and fun. That conversation, and the way Frankie and his team think about building a business with purpose, made it a no-brainer to support the show. Gustus Vitae crafts small-batch, all-natural seasonings, sea salts and artisan cane sugars designed to make everyday food better. Click here to shop Gustus Vitae and get 15% off your order + free shipping—and support a brand that supports Worthy for Thirty.
The informed.now paradox
There is one tension I left my conversation with Kira thinking about.
informed.now wants factual news to remain accessible.
There’s a free-forever tier. The paid product was $55 per year when we recorded, with a $99 lifetime option being piloted. Kira specifically talked about wanting the product to remain accessible to students, immigrants, people beginning their careers and people without significant disposable income.
That’s admirable.
It’s also economically challenging.
Because Kira is simultaneously saying:
We won’t monetize your attention.
And:
We don’t want someone’s ability to pay to determine whether they can access the facts.
Those two promises create a very narrow lane through which the business must scale.
That’s not a flaw in the model.
That’s the experiment.
Can informed.now create enough value that a sufficient number of people voluntarily pay for something many consumers have been conditioned to expect for free?
Can B2B subsidize broader accessibility without becoming the constituency that begins dictating the product?
Can the company grow without optimizing engagement?
Can it remain minimalist while customers inevitably ask for more?
And perhaps most importantly:
Can Kira make his non-negotiables survive his success?
Doing good while doing well requires both halves of the sentence
This is why the informed.now story fits so naturally into what I’ve spent the last several years exploring on Worthy for Thirty.
I’ve interviewed founders building beverages, nonprofits, technology companies, healthcare platforms, marketplaces and movements.
The strongest mission-driven businesses I’ve encountered rarely treat impact as something that happens after the business succeeds.
They try to put it inside the mechanism that makes the business successful.
Mission Craft Cocktails commits a 1 meal donated to Feeding America for every 1 bottle sold.
Patagonia embeds purpose into ownership and governance.
informed.now makes the reader the source of revenue because Kira believes the reader should be the constituency the product serves.
Different mechanisms.
Same principle:
Mission becomes much harder to abandon when doing good and doing well depend on the same transaction.
That’s the sweet spot.
Because philanthropy can be reduced.
Marketing campaigns can change.
Founders eventually leave.
But when impact pervades the economics of the company, abandoning the mission can require changing the business itself.
The exercise I’d leave founders with
Take out a blank sheet of paper.
Draw two columns.
On the left write:
WE WILL ALWAYS ________.
On the right:
WE WILL NEVER ________.
Force yourself to put three things under each.
Then ask your leadership team one final question:
Would we still honor these if breaking one of them doubled revenue next year?
If the answer is yes, you’ve probably found a non-negotiable.
If the answer is “it depends,” you’ve probably found a preference.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with either.
But leaders should know the distinction.
Because inevitably every growing company meets a moment when its mission becomes inconvenient.
That’s when you realize whether purpose was something written on the wall or something built into the business.
And perhaps that’s the bigger takeaway from my conversation with Kira Shishkin.
Doing good while doing well isn’t about committing to a mission that sounds good alongside the business.
It’s about creating a business where maintaining the mission and building a successful company become increasingly difficult to separate.
🎙️ My full conversation with Kira Shishkin, Founder & CEO of informed.now, is live now on Worthy for Thirty on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and wherever you listen to podcasts.
Eric, these are wonderful reflections to a great conversation! Thank you again for having me
Hey Eric….I reached out to you prior but never heard anything back from you 🤷🏾♂️