About
We make things for people who make things.
Byline started in 2021 as one course taught to eleven people in a borrowed room. Six years on it is a course, a newsletter, a membership and a small shop — all pointed at the same problem: creative people are good at the work and unsupported in the business around it.
- 2,140
- Creators taught since 2021
- 41,208
- Newsletter readers
- 1,840
- Members in The Bindery
- 26
- Products in the shop
How we got here
Six years, in the order they happened.
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2021
Eleven people in a borrowed room
The first cohort ran for four weeks with no landing page, no recording and a price picked out of the air. Nine of the eleven launched something within a year.
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2022
The Quarter Sheet begins
A weekly letter, written because the same advice kept getting given over coffee. It has not missed a Thursday since.
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2023
The shop opens
The Studio Operating Kit was a set of templates we kept emailing to students. Packaging it properly turned it into the thing that pays for the free issues.
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2024
The Bindery opens
1,840 members later, the membership is the part of the business that changed the most lives per dollar — mostly because of numbers night.
-
2026
Everything under one roof
Four products, one editorial system, one operating principle: never sell a thing that needs another thing to work.
What we hold to
Four rules we have not broken.
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Say the price
Every price is on the page, including the ones people find uncomfortable. If a number needs a sales call to justify it, the number is wrong.
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No manufactured urgency
Cohorts have real dates because rooms have real sizes. There is never a fake countdown, a fake seat count, or a discount that reappears next month.
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Show the numbers
We publish our own figures twice a year, in the same format we ask members to use on numbers night. It would be strange to ask for something we would not do.
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One thing, complete
No product requires another product to be useful. Buying the workbook does not put you on a ladder toward a $4,000 mastermind, because there is not one.
The studio
Four people, no growth plan.
Everyone here teaches, writes or builds. Nobody's job is growth.
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Martin Ellison
Teaching & writing
Nine years editing at Halcyon Press before this. Writes The Quarter Sheet and teaches every cohort.
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Obi Nwosu
Product & engineering
Builds the shop, the member library, and everything that has to keep working at 3am.
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Daniel Whitlock
Community
Runs The Bindery day to day, which mostly means protecting the tone of the room.
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Seamus Byrne
Design & art direction
Responsible for the fact that none of this looks like a funnel.
Four doors, one room behind them.
The newsletter is free and the best place to see whether any of this is for you.