The 1440 Daily Digest newsletter started with just 78 friends and family members as its readers. Five years later, the free, impartial news roundup goes out to 1.3 million subscribers, according to 1440 COO and Providence resident Pierre Lipton.
The newsletter was born out of the frustration Lipton and his co-founders felt about visiting multiple sites for news and their concern about the growing polarization in the media. The co-founders set out to create a newsletter that prioritized bias-free reporting.
According to Lipton, the 1440’s four-person team, including CEO Tim Huelskamp, editor-in-chief Andrew Steigerwald and chief content officer Sony Kassam, scour more than 100 news sites a day to identify the top stories. After identifying the biggest news stories, the team distills the facts in bite-sized pieces and links to the “least biased article.”
"I think what most people don’t understand is how truly time-consuming and arduous it is to be able to find the facts of a story," Lipton said.
More often than not, Lipton said, the distilled news bites come from several different sources, leaving 1440 to parse out the most pertinent information. The goal, he said, is to give readers the information they need without getting bogged down with the rest of the media landscape.
"In five minutes, you can get a full overview of what is going on in the world, presented with the most unbiased, fact-based news articles we’re able to source,” he said. “There are other excellent newsletters out there if you want to dive deep in politics, sports, finance, etc., but 1440 is a great place to turn for the general consumer of news.”
The name for 1440 was inspired by two numerical facts, according to Lipton. The printing press was created in the year 1440 by Johannes Gutenberg and there are 1,440 minutes in a day.
"That’s why we scour hundreds of sources every day to provide a concise, comprehensive and objective view of what's happening in the world," he said.
With steady growth in readership, 1440 has also seen investments totaling $2.5 million. The company's largest investor is Massachusetts-based Cannon Capital, a fund whose leadership team, Lipton said, has been supportive of the company from the very beginning.
"These days, our investors are also our readers because they engage with us at such an incredible rate and constantly help us improve,” Lipton said. “Our business model has become profitable and allows us to grow at an ever-accelerating rate. We've been fortunate enough to have rapid growth without large amounts of invested capital. This fact speaks to the gap in the market we're filling and the appetite for a more impartial way of reporting.”
That reporting hasn't been met without feedback. Lipton said early-adopter feedback they collected — and continue to receive — has centered around the structure of the newsletter, the content they were producing, the formatting of advertisements and the certain words and phrases they were using in the stories.
"Our reader base has always been very evenly distributed across gender, age, socioeconomic status, political affiliation, etc., so this feedback was priceless in allowing us to deliver for our readers," he said. "To this day we receive upwards of 100 emails every day from our readers, and we make it a point to respond personally to every single one."
Lipton said he sees a number of options for the growing company. In January, the company launched a Saturday digest after responding to reader requests. They’re open to reader suggestions, whether it’s a podcast or expanded social media presence.
"We also have some loftier ambitions, focusing on how people learn in general, with on-site educational materials on complex topics like cryptocurrencies, the federal reserve and outer space,” Lipton said. “Above all, however, we don’t want to lose focus. We have a product that people love, so you can rest assured we’ll grow to 2 million, then 5 million, then 10 million subscribers to the 1440 Daily Digest."
