Why the Tech Crash could be good news for The Information

But this one was emailed directly to some Gopuff employees: Would they like to subscribe to the Information — so they could read other articles like the one it just published about their company?“Because you work at COMPANY, we thought that you might be interested in this exclusive feature on Gopuff,” read the automated marketing message, which presumably meant to replace “COMPANY” with “Gopuff.” The email included a link to the original piece and an offer for a 25 percent discount for a one-year subscription to the Information, which normally goes for $400.Welcome to the other part of the subscription boom, the part that’s rarely mentioned in the many stories about Substack and other subscription-based media startups: The difficult, grinding work that goes into finding people who might want to pay for your stuff, getting in front of them, and getting them to take out their credit card.And yes, in the case of the Information, that can sometimes lead to pitches sent to people working at companies you’ve just written difficult stories about, says Jessica Lessin, the company’s founder and CEO.“We intentionally reach out to people we think are interested in our articles,” using custom-built software to predict what kind of readers might be interested in a story, she told me. “It’s like Netflix recommendations,” she said.I do think Lessin and her team are going to have plenty of opportunities to repeat the Gopuff playbook in the coming months, assuming widely held predictions about a tech industry reversal pan out: Easy investor money turns scarce, companies that used to spend wildly become manic cost-cutters, and layoffs turn tech startup employees into ex-startup employees.At the Information, there are plenty of examples of high-flying tech companies quickly reassessing their plans, halting new hires, or even letting people go as the market convulses: Gorillas, a Gopuff competitor, is laying off 300 people — about half of its headquarters staff; Cameo, a once-buzzy company that lets you hire celebrities to create personalized videos, is cutting 25 percent of its staff; even Amazon is canceling plans to expand its empire of warehouses. She also tries to spread the gospel of the subscription media model, an effort that includes an “accelerator” program for people trying to launch their own subscription-based companies.The person who sent me the Information’s Gopuff marketing email also added a concern-troll commentary: What if Lessin spends her time chasing stories about wobbly startups so she can sell them subscriptions?