Supporting the Site Through Mentorship

Following Sam Harris’s lead, I’ve decided to get a bit more serious about enabling others to help support my work. I’m spending enough time on content creation, and enough people seem to enjoy the output, that I think it’s worth trying to recoup costs (first) and maybe even make a dollar (later) through the generosity of readers/listeners.

So I’ve created the /support page as the main landing page for doing that, and I’ve set up three main options for helping out—a monthly subscription, a one-time donation, and purchase of my book on the Internet of Things.

For certain levels of support I’m now offering mentorship services that go along with them. I grew up in the Bay Area listening to PBS drives so this feels weird (but also right).

At the $50 level I’m offering email assistance with the supporter’s career. I’ll review your resume, make comments on it, recommend one or more career paths based on what you say you want to do, and tell you what you should do to achieve that goal through an ongoing email dialogue.
At the $100 level I do everything in the $50 level, but we also have a monthly call to discuss your progress and do additional planning. I also open you up to my larger network, and if you have the fire I’ll also use social media and my various connections to try to get you either your first job in infosec, or a much better one than you already have.

I was using Patreon for this type of thing, but I strongly believe that it’s best for content creators to own as much of their platform as they can. With this change I’m moving over to Stripe for my payment processor. Stripe is one of the most respected companies in the fintech world, and I personally know that they do a fantastic job with security.

So that’s the story.

It feels a little…um…commercial to be doing this, which is annoying to me. But at the same time I’d also like to not feel stupid as hell for spending 5 hours working on my newsletter, paying tons of money on infrastructure, writing content, or doing whatever, when I could simply ask people to help and see if they find it worth it to do so.

In an ideal world this is all I would do. I’d learn things, curate the best stuff, and travel around the world speaking about those things with people.

I might do that full-time when I grow up. But for now I’ll do a miniature version of it, as a security consultant who spends most of his spare time doing that curation and broadcast.

I’m going to try to keep the annoyance to a minimum, but if the requests ever cross into “icky face territory”, please let me know.

As always, thanks for reading. And if you are interested in subscribing you can do so at the new place for that.

[ danielmiessler.com/support ]

Notes


I am also working on doing sponsorships for vendors that I really love, which I display or mention as a simple text snippet in the sidebar of the site. No JavaScript, no tracking, just text. I’m currently looking for a set of vendors that I like enough to do this with. If you have any ideas let me know.

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I do a weekly show called Unsupervised Learning, where I curate the most interesting stories in infosec, technology, and humans, and talk about why they matter. You can subscribe here.

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