Emily Sundberg Built a Media Empire by Trusting Her Instincts

Smart consumers now recognize marketing tactics so well that they analyze campaigns like “marketing team needs a raise,” forcing brands to hire digital natives who actually understand the people they’re trying to reach.

Summary of Feed Me’s Emily Sundberg on How Fashion Underestimates Its Customers. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:00:11 — Most missed calls represent potential business leads, which is why building systems to capture them matters.
• 00:04:40 — Growing up near but not in Manhattan created a persistent sense of aspiration that influences how she approaches journalism and storytelling.
• 00:07:41 — Choosing FIT for its flexible night classes and strong business program, rather than pure fashion focus, set the foundation for her career versatility.
• 00:10:28 — Landing her first media job through a recommendation from someone at Instagram to the editor of The Cut demonstrated the importance of being visible in professional communities.
• 00:14:22 — Working at Great Jones, a direct-to-consumer cookware startup, gave her firsthand exposure to venture capital, influencer marketing, and how young women founders were being positioned in 2018-2019.
• 00:19:21 — Feed Me started as a simple Substack pivot from horror fiction to a daily curated link roundup with commentary, put behind a paywall from day one.
• 00:28:46 — She discovers breaking news by trolling job boards to detect what companies are hiring for, allowing her to scoop industry moves before official announcements.
• 00:36:45 — Fashion brands often push single items so aggressively through influencer coordination that consumers actively avoid them, understanding the artificial group-think being engineered.
• 00:59:18 — Modern consumers are sophisticated enough to recognize marketing mechanics and discuss campaigns with industry jargon, making authenticity and smart hiring of digital natives essential for brands.

In depth

The bridge-and-tunnel instinct that shaped a media voice

Sundberg traces her sensibility back to a specific childhood geography: Huntington, Long Island, close enough to see the Manhattan skyline from the water but never quite inside it 00:04:40. She frames this as a formative tension shared by other prolific New York writers and founders who grew up adjacent to the city rather than in it, describing the sense-memory of her mother returning from a Manhattan job smelling like pretzels and cigarettes, evidence of a world her family orbited without fully inhabiting 00:05:15. That positioning matters to her account of Feed Me because it explains why her instinct is to write for insiders and outsiders simultaneously, translating Manhattan’s status games for people who watch from just outside them.

She also insists her upbringing was not a hothouse of ambition. She describes a middle-class neighborhood with fishermen and Wall Street workers living side by side, a healthy, unstrict household with a teacher father, and a high school experience where creativity was encouraged rather than narrowly academic 00:04:16. The internet, not fashion or journalism, was her actual training ground: she describes spending adolescence on Facebook and Tumblr finding strangers who shared her taste in music and magazines, and frames that early online life as a playground rather than the anxiety-inducing minefield social media has become for later generations 00:06:53. That contrast is offered as a partial explanation for why she isn’t precious or fearful about the internet’s mechanics now: she came of age treating it as a place to build community, not a place to be ambushed.

The choice of FIT, the only state school in New York City, was practical rather than passionate: her parents would fund college only at a state school, and FIT’s business program let her work day jobs while taking night classes 00:07:41. She’s explicit that she wasn’t drawn to fashion or design as disciplines; she gravitated toward digital marketing, PR, and journalism classes, and valued that many professors held real industry jobs alongside teaching. This is presented as the single most consequential decision of her career, not because it taught her about fashion, but because it gave her paid internships at Yahoo, NBC, and Food Network during a period when tech and media companies were racing to build editorial and social operations, and because she graduated with minimal debt, which she says gave her the runway to take career risks later 00:21:06.

How a fired employee’s LinkedIn post and a cookware startup built her worldview

The origin story runs through several jobs that each contributed a distinct skill rather than a single breakthrough. A recommendation from someone at Instagram led directly to Stella Bugbee hiring her at The Cut days after graduation, illustrating how thin the membrane was between working inside these platforms and being noticed by the media companies courting them for traffic and relationships 00:10:28. Sundberg says this period, 2016, was an unusually good moment to enter social media journalism because Apple, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram were all actively cultivating media partnerships, and many of the contacts she made then still work at those companies.

The more formative experience, though, was her stint as an early hire at Great Jones, the direct-to-consumer cookware brand founded by former New York Magazine colleagues and marketed, in her words, as “the Glossier of cookware” 00:12:56. She describes watching venture investors cycle through the office, observing how young women founders were being packaged and written about, and absorbing how Instagram-native marketing actually functioned from inside a team too small to have formal departments 00:13:46. She frames this not as disillusionment but as data collection: she says she consciously filed the experience away, sensing she’d return to it later, while noting soberly that of the wave of DTC brands launched in that era, few survived or are still discussed today 00:16:03.

The pivot to Feed Me itself came out of a layoff, not a plan. When Condé Nast cut staff during COVID, she posted candidly on LinkedIn about being let go rather than concealing it, and the resulting inbound interest led to freelance work at Meta 00:16:31. It was inside Meta’s office culture, she says, surrounded by colleagues with eclectic side interests in bands, zines, and politics, that the appetite for a newsletter took shape: workplace gossip and culture that felt too small for the Wall Street Journal but too interesting to ignore 00:18:59. Feed Me began as horror fiction about capitalism and founder culture before she deliberately converted it into a paywalled daily link roundup, and she set herself a explicit threshold, to go full-time only once Substack income exceeded her consulting income, which happened after roughly a year of writing 00:20:27.

Scoops without a newsroom: job boards, hotel receipts, and reading the room

Without an institutional newsroom behind her early on, Sundberg developed reporting workarounds that she still describes with some pride. Her signature technique was reading corporate job postings as a leading indicator: when Glossier posted openings for fragrance developers, she inferred and reported that the company was expanding into scent before any official announcement, treating public hiring data as a proxy for strategic direction 00:28:46. She generalizes this into a broader method of inference from publicly available scraps, including using geotagged or contextual clues, like the visible cost of a hotel room in a founder’s photo, to build small but genuinely newsworthy items.

The clearest example she gives is the Ronny Feig case: a construction blueprint he posted for a new Kith club in New York happened to show the word “Erewhon” in a corner, letting her report, ahead of anyone else, that the wellness grocer was coming to the city 00:29:43. The story was picked up by the New York Times and New York Magazine, and she treats it as proof that curiosity and pattern-recognition can outperform access, at least in the newsletter’s early phase before it had earned the kind of trust that generates unsolicited exclusives.

What’s notable is how she now reads the incentives behind incoming pitches rather than taking them at face value. She says that when traffic teams from other publications email her to place a story in Feed Me, she understands it’s partly because Feed Me sometimes drives more readers to a piece than the originating outlet’s own homepage, and partly because appearing in the newsletter functions as a signal of what deserves discussion that day 00:30:57. She extends the same skepticism to invitations, book talks, and screenings, inferring that repeated requests for introductions mean people see her less as a peer voice and more as a distribution channel, and she says recognizing this dynamic shapes how much deference she extends to any given publication or pitch 00:31:38. She’s candid that this whole method rests on instinct and pattern-matching rather than formal training or data models, and while she credits this instinct for the business’s success, she doesn’t claim it’s a reproducible formula for anyone else building a media company.

The new scarcity: when marketing a single product backfires

A recurring argument in the conversation concerns what happens when brands push one hero item too aggressively across influencer networks. Sundberg’s observation, developed from watching her own feed, is that consumers now recognize orchestrated influencer campaigns as engineered group-think, and that recognition curdles desire into aversion: she cites J.Crew’s heavily promoted shrunken sweater and a Free People coat pushed by roughly twenty influencers simultaneously as cases where she personally didn’t want the item precisely because its ubiquity signaled manufactured demand rather than organic appeal 00:36:03. Her claim is that visible coordination among influencers reads to a sophisticated audience not as social proof but as a tell, prompting people to actively opt out.

Imran Ahmed pushes back by introducing a distinction Sundberg hadn’t fully articulated: single-product marketing only backfires when the product is actually easy to obtain. He argues that if scarcity is real, whether through limited drops or high prices, product-focused campaigns can work extremely well, pointing to Loewe’s sandals and the phenomenon of people booking flights specifically to buy new Chanel collections as evidence that concentrated hype paired with genuine constraint reinforces desirability rather than undermining it 00:38:56. He extends this with the example of Human Made, the Japanese brand associated with Nigo and Pharrell, which has built weekly limited drops directly into its business model on the premise that universal availability kills desirability, a strategy he says he hasn’t seen formalized this explicitly elsewhere in fashion 00:40:09.

The two don’t fully resolve the tension between these framings, they layer them: Sundberg’s critique is about consumer perception of transparently coordinated influencer marketing specifically, while Ahmed’s addition is about supply-side scarcity as the variable that determines whether concentrated attention converts to desire or fatigue. Neither speaker claims to have a complete theory, and Sundberg explicitly says she lacks a trusted class of authoritative fashion critics comparable to the tech, book, and restaurant reviewers she relies on elsewhere, leaving her, by her own account, still assembling her framework for how fashion marketing succeeds or fails in real time 00:42:35.

Independence, advertisers, and the Zuckerberg interview controversy

Sundberg is candid that Feed Me’s business model rests on the fact that it has no outside investors, which she says lets her sleep at night without anyone questioning why growth in one month doesn’t match another 00:50:30. The subscription tier, roughly ten thousand paying readers at about eighty dollars a year, is supplemented by an advertising business with partners like Yahoo, Mercury, and American Express, and she stresses that the revenue supports a real staff, designers, and paid contributors like Patrick Radden Keefe and Alison Roman, rather than functioning as a solo operation 00:49:07. Her rule for choosing advertisers is authenticity of use: she partners with companies like Mercury, Resy, and Instacart because she and her readers already use them, and says historically ads have not degraded the reader experience since they typically remove the paywall rather than add friction 00:55:24.

That framework was tested by her interview with Mark Zuckerberg, conducted as a reader-driven “guest lecture” segment where paying subscribers submit questions. She acknowledges the interview drew criticism for being lighthearted given how consequential and controversial a figure Zuckerberg is, and that some readers interpreted her willingness to sit down with him as tacit endorsement of Meta’s record on surveillance and platform power 00:56:46. Her defense is twofold: she wasn’t paid for the conversation and hadn’t had a paid relationship with Meta in over a year, and she treats interviewing someone as distinct from endorsing them, noting she talks to subjects across the political spectrum without that implying agreement 00:57:11. She doesn’t dismiss the criticism outright, she frames it as an inevitable cost of visibility and repeats a distinction she returns to throughout the conversation, that her “smart readers” understand the difference between access journalism and advocacy, while acknowledging that not everyone extends her that same good faith 00:57:34.

What remains unresolved is how she scales this trust-based, instinct-driven model as scrutiny increases. She admits she has no personal assistant despite juggling writing, design, social moderation, ad sales, and event production single-handedly, and Ahmed volunteers his own experience of over-functioning at BOF’s founding, relaying advice from a colleague that hiring support is an investment rather than an indulgence 00:52:29. Sundberg doesn’t fully take up the advice on air; she leaves it as an open question, alongside her broader admission that she lacks trusted, edited fashion critics analogous to the tech and restaurant writers she relies on, suggesting Feed Me’s fashion coverage is still evolving rather than settled 00:43:05.

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.