The @taalumot Business Model
I’m approaching the second year of offering an annual membership, and now seems like a good time to share some info and context about the business model of this website and its surrounding activities.
There are many ethical and spiritual pitfalls in trying to make a living doing things other than entrenching the status quo, especially once divination and energy work and religion and stuff like that get involved. I have been confronted numerous times by misconceptions, assumptions, and suspicions that were, frankly, rightfully placed. The online spirituality biz is full of charlatans, and while I have written a decent bit about why and how I do what I do, it must seem kind of weird to also still see me occasionally hawking various sales and whatnot on social media. It certainly feels weird to me!
So here is the overview of how and why @taalumot Enterprises functions as a business.
Public Content and Astrology
As you may or may not have noticed, the vast majority of my creative and intellectual output is given away for free. My blog posts are not paywalled, my podcast doesn’t besmirch itself with anything business-related (except for a completely undiscovered Fireside Chat link at the bottom of the show notes), I provide the ability to pay me to download my music, but nobody does that anymore, anyway, and it’s all available on streaming, even my 100+-page guide to learning astrology is free with just a few unobtrusive ways to book a reading or donate. Making money has never been — and never will be — the reason I create stuff. I do that because there are cultural modalities to which I want to give life, and seeing them reach people gives me life.
I started selling things as a way for you to voluntarily support me if you like what I do. The music was the first creative thing I ever charged for, but frankly that was mostly to pay myself back for the enormous expenses of creating it. That wasn’t done under the @taalumot banner, though, either; the first @taalumot products for sale were the astrology readings. I decided to do that because it’s how many of my close friends and colleagues were supporting putting their own time and energy into making stuff online, and the market for it was clearly immense and could support new and unique entrants without creating a sense of scarcity for anyone. My income from astrology has now paid for all my astrology books and classes, it pays the bills here on my website, and it allows me to support some of my friends’ online activities in turn. There’s even a little left over for the family budget some months. It has been well worth doing.
I have never wanted to rely on astrology as a source of income, though, because that would not be good for my priorities. It’s very consuming of my time and energy, for one thing, which has compelled me to raise prices a few times until the work/life balance was in a sensible place. But it’s also just not the offering I want to put at the center of what I do as a practitioner because there are too many other lineages at play that operate in different ways.
Householders Membership and the Base Community
The sensible strategy was always to offer a sustainable membership, it just took some time to get the offerings into place to make it viable. Building Base, the private message board that would comprise the heart of Householders membership, took a fairly long time, and it also added significantly to my hosting bills, so I needed a clear vision of what I was offering — and for how much — first. I settled on a base (😏) price of $200/year with no monthly option because I wanted members who were willing to clear a high bar of commitment and wouldn’t churn out. My goal was not to maximize my income all at once but to find the people who were with me all the way. So far, it’s gone quite well; only five memberships have been terminated, for varying reasons. We’ll see what happens in December when the launch wave comes up for renewal.
There are two ways I have solved for equity with Householders. One has been to make bespoke arrangements with people who can’t afford to pay some or all of the cost. I set the base price to be able to support this for others. I have also, so far, offered month-long 50%-off-forever sales during the equinox months. These have successfully juiced membership by allowing a younger, leaner generation of householders to participate. At press time, there are 70 people paying for Householders membership (not counting the five cancelations), and there has been a steady rate of about 2X as many people at various discount levels as there are paying full freight. There are 105 people on Base, not counting myself (or our one bot, @owl), since there are people with whom I have made entirely non-financial arrangements.
Online communities, especially ones with spiritual content, can raise a lot of questions about power dynamics. My many initial forays into building community around all this were free, open or invitation-based spaces on various popular platforms. These all ended up going sideways because they were nominally free and open, but implicit social power dynamics made them weird, especially surrounding me as the person or one of the people who started them. When I realized the path forward for the community layer of my work was this membership, it was a primary principle that the bedrock of participation would be paying members, so that the members would hold explicit financial power — namely the power to withdraw their support — that would keep me accountable for providing something that meets their high expectations.
The major misconception I have run into is that Base/my membership exists to create a captive audience for my astrology readings. On the contrary. The steep discounts on astrology readings for Householders members were the best incentive I could come up with to entice people who like my stuff but don’t know me very well to join the membership, which I expected them to like as well, and this has borne out beautifully.
The discounts have created a small group of customers who joined in order to get more readings, and a few close supporters have booked readings they might not otherwise have gotten. The discounts have not led to an overall increase in astrology bookings, and that wasn’t the point.
I do have other ideas listed as “future perks” for members, but I knew it would be a long time before there was enough money coming in from Householders membership for me to commit major logistical energy to making those happen, so the astrology discounts were the carrot with which I was able to launch the program.
Fireside Chat
The latest monetized offering I have added is the Fireside Chat. This was never intended to be a high-volume product, and indeed it has not been. It was something I decided to add in order to modify expectations around my time and availability. Doing this stuff online — more so in the Twitter era, but still to an extent — I receive a lot of incoming informal requests to be seen and heard and helped. I am mostly willing and able to work through these in the manner of normal human relations, but it has frequently been necessary for me to put up a boundary to say, “There is a limit to the amount of energy I am able to give to a perfect stranger, but you can hire me to expand that limit.” Launching the Fireside Chat gave me a sign I can point to in order to say that.
That said, offering it for half off for Householders has begun to be fruitful, as they get to know me pretty well on Base, and then they can book significant chunks of my time to talk about life and career stuff with which I can help them, and we have plenty of shared context for those to be highly and mutually valuable conversations.
Donations
The one other way I monetize all this activity is with a Donate page, but that really only serves as a place to point people who are moved in the moment to support me, and occasionally also as a way to pay me for some weird ad hoc service I have just performed. Over time, as my family’s main enterprises hopefully solidify, I expect to move more and more of my @taalumot offerings to a donation basis because it is the way it’s done in the Zen tradition, and I trust the incentives of it the most. For now, though, I continue to focus on the explicit annual membership because it is more generative in a building phase. It provides members’ expectations with power, and it motivates me to actively shape my offerings around what people want. Someday, it’ll just be what it is, and you can support me for it if it moves you to do so.
My Household’s Primary Businesses
If it’s not obvious, if @taalumot were the center of my professional life, none of this would be financially sensible for me as a householder responsible for three other humans, two cats, currently eight chickens, and who knows who else besides. The @taalumot endeavor provides my household about 15% of its income, and I expect — nay, hope — that this proportion will shrink over time.
My main, uh, post-career (if you will) pursuit is the Tiger Pajamas Web Site Company, a partnership with well-known @taalumot associates Ashley [website | TIGER TIME] and Phil [website | TIGER TIME]. I am gradually moving pieces of the @taalumot infrastructure over to the Tiger Pajamas stack, eventually including this entire website (God willing), and it will be through making websites for customers that the work I’ve put into this one really begins to provide for my family. That is to say, it is not the @taalumot work itself that will be aggressively monetized but rather the technical byproducts of and learnings from my experience doing that work, along with all the other work I’ve done in my career that taught me to do successful stuff online. As I said above, ideally this will only take financial pressure off @taalumot and allow me to support this work by even more voluntary means than has been the case so far.
And with all that said, my primary duty in this life is to provide household support for my wife, Rabbi Ariel Root Wolpe, who is the founder and director of Ma’alot, our startup Jewish congregation in Atlanta. There are many ways, implicit and explicit, that my work as @taalumot supports Ma’alot, but the important thing to know is that it is secondary. There are many more ways that I show up for Ma’alot not as @taalumot but as the rabbi’s husband, child-wrangler, drummer, tech crew, sound guy, and also sometimes relieving the rabbi’s pressure to teach about the Torah portion while also having to run literally everything else. I derive learnings and teachings for @taalumot from Ma’alot where I can, especially when it comes to holding a spiritual community together, but it is the in-person local work centered on my wife’s rabbinate that provides the primary support for our family, both in terms of money and in terms of all of the communal and cultural values I write about on this website.
We are a spiritual startup family now. We have many irons in the fire. We are doing our best to make them work for everyone with whom we are in relationship, and if you’re reading this, that includes you. Thank you for supporting @taalumot in whatever ways you do. You may not even be conscious of all of them, but I promise you I feel it.
