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I'm the person who started a company with Doc Parsons 5 years ago, and who decided to make Vito over 12 months ago when Covid hit.

Doc and I made a point of never emailing our customers. It just wasn't something we do. Maybe we were lazy. Maybe we didn't want to bother anyone. Maybe we wanted to prove that we could build a $1m business without sending a single mass-marketing-email (answer: you can, but there's a risk it will be destroyed if a pandemic wipes out your business).

When you signed up to express your interest in Vito, you checked a box "join the Vito mailing list", but surprise! There was no Vito mailing list to join.

I was throwing around ideas, and I thought of vlogbrothers, a YouTube channel that's been around forever. It’s two brothers and they make videos addressed to each other. I thought to myself: wouldn't it be cool if I wrote a letter to Doc and then he wrote back to me, and that could be our Vito mailing list?

And so, this is that experiment. We chose Email Octopus (with tracking disabled), because our friend Kai uses them. And without further ado, I will address Doc.

(of course, this email isn't just for Doc, it's for you, so just hit reply if you want to discuss anything!)

How long has it been, now, since we started working together? More than 10 years, but who's counting?

I posted "Some Investment News" today on the Tito blog. It's good to get that post out. We don't really talk about investment that much, but did you know that we've sold €2.6m worth of shares in the company since we started? In that time, the business has earned €3.2m. I really like the ratio of those figures.

In actual news, I've been signing up to a whole bunch of online events lately. Does anyone actually enjoy online events? Are there any examples of really good ones? Have you "been" to any? I really cringe using the same language for online events that we use for in-person. Like, if I'm watching the news on TV, I don't "attend" the broadcast. It's shows! It's TV! In a way, the best platform for this kind of thing is actually Netflix.

I think that Covid exposed a really big opportunity, but I don't see it as having been solved. I guess there are folks out there making a lot of money selling platforms to folks (not us, alas. Yet.), but it feels to me that in-person events can't come back soon enough.

What do you think? The fact that there is so much fragmentation, that the bar seems so low, makes me feel that we're on to something with Vito. My sense is that folks like what we've made, but they're on the hunt for features, and we chose not to implement some features.

On that: what a comfort it is to not have certain features. To confidently be able to say: there is no tracking in Vito. There's no DMs so you won't get spam. Participants are invisible by default, so they're in control. I'm really proud of it. I think we should talk about it more, and present it as a feature. Every time I see a cookie notice, I cringe, because I know that I'm being tracked.

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