Transparent over hero
data-section="navigation-transparent"
sections/navigation/transparent.njk
Forty-two blocks, on one page.
Every block below is a standalone partial that reads one variable, s. Copy the include line to build a page in the source layer, or find the block by its data-section id in any built HTML file and copy the markup straight out.
Index
42 blocks · 14 groups
- Navigation 3
- Announcement 2
- Hero 7
- Logo strip 2
- Feature / benefit 4
- Stats 2
- Content 3
- Media / product 3
- Testimonials 3
- Pricing 3
- FAQ 2
- Call to action 3
- Forms 3
- Footer 3
Each block is a partial under src/_includes/sections/ that reads a single variable,
s. In the source layer, set s and include the file. In the built HTML,
search for the data-section id and copy the <section> element —
it carries every class it needs.
Announcement
2 blocks
Sits above the navigation and scrolls away with the page.
Static
data-section="announcement-static"
sections/announcement/static.njk
Autumn bundle — three products, one price, until 30 September.
See the bundleCountdown
data-section="announcement-countdown"
sections/announcement/countdown.njk
Enrollment closes when the countdown hits zero.
--d
--h
--m
--s
Enrollment is closed
See the curriculum
Hero
7 blocks
Seven openings. The press slider and the first four splits are the home variants; the last two carry the inner pages.
Press slider
data-section="hero-press"
sections/hero/press.njk
Byline — a cohort, a newsletter, a community and a shop for people who make things
A six-week cohort
Write the courseonly youcould teach.
Six weeks, twelve people, one finished course. You arrive with the thing you know and leave with a curriculum, a launch page, and your first paying cohort.
Every Thursday, 7am
A letter worthopeningon a Thursday.
Forty-one thousand readers, no sponsorships, and about twelve hundred words a week. The masthead, the archive, the single issue and the subscribe flow are already set.
Eighteen hundred members
The room wherethe workgets shown.
Eighteen hundred people in one quiet room. Critique nights, a members directory, an events calendar and a tiered join flow — the furniture a membership page cannot fake.
Twenty-six products, one shelf
Sell the thingyou alreadymade.
Twenty-six products on one shelf. A shop grid, a product page, a checkout and a thank-you, all on the same paper, because digital goods deserve a catalog and not a dashboard.
- Creators taught
- 2,140
- Seats left in Cohort 07
- 23
- Average rating, 380 reviews
- 4.9
Course split
data-section="hero-course"
sections/hero/course.njk
A six-week cohort
Write the course only you could teach.
Six weeks, twelve people, one finished course. You arrive with the thing you know and leave with a curriculum, a launch page, and your first paying cohort.
- Creators taught
- 2,140
- Seats left in Cohort 07
- 23
- Average rating, 380 reviews
- 4.9
Newsletter masthead
data-section="hero-newsletter"
sections/hero/newsletter.njk
The Quarter Sheet
Issue No. 148
One essay every Thursday about pricing your work, keeping an audience, and the unglamorous operations underneath a creative business. Read by 41,208 people who make things for a living.
41,208 readers
- No sponsorships, ever
- Roughly 1,200 words
- Thursdays, 7am ET
Community avatars
data-section="hero-community"
sections/hero/community.njk
A membership for working creators
Nobody good does this alone.
The Bindery is 1,840 people who make things for a living, in one quiet room. Weekly critique, a monthly numbers night, and a library of everything we have figured out since 2021.
1,840 members · 212 online now
Shop split
data-section="hero-shop"
sections/hero/shop.njk
Digital goods for working studios
Tools you can open today and use tonight.
Templates, presets and workbooks made for people who bill by the project. Everything is a single download, everything is versioned, and everything gets free updates for life.
Centered editorial
data-section="hero-centered"
sections/hero/centered.njk
Every number we charge, on one page.
No sales call, no custom quote, no enterprise tier that hides its price. Choose the monthly or annual view and the whole business is below.
Full-bleed image
data-section="hero-fullbleed"
sections/hero/fullbleed.njk
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.
Logo strip
2 blocks
Logos are drawn as a geometric mark plus a wordmark in the page typeface — no image files, no license rows.
Static hairline grid
data-section="logos-grid"
sections/logos/grid.njk
Students now teaching at
- Northline
- Paperwave
- Studio Kestrel
- Fieldnote
- Quarterlight
- Verso Labs
- Halcyon Press
- Meridian
Marquee
data-section="logos-marquee"
sections/logos/marquee.njk
@daniel.makes
@femi.writes
@tomas.field
@seamus.studio
@henrik.cuts
@lars.binds
@obi.builds
@kenji.prints
@ray.records
@marcus.types
Feature / benefit
4 blocks
Hierarchy comes from numerals, rules and type size. There is no icon-in-a-circle card in this template.
Numbered list
data-section="feature-numbered"
sections/feature/numbered.njk
What you leave with
Three things exist at the end that did not exist at the start.
Not notes. Not inspiration. Three finished artifacts you can sell on the Monday after the cohort ends.
-
A curriculum that holds together
Eight to twelve lessons, sequenced so each one earns the next. You will have cut half of what you thought you needed, and the half that remains will teach better.
-
A launch page that converts
Positioning, price, proof and the page itself. We write the promise first and let the design follow it, which is the opposite of how most creators do it.
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A first cohort that paid
You run a pilot inside the six weeks with real students at a real price. By week six you are not planning a launch — you have already had one.
Alternating 7/5
data-section="feature-alternating"
sections/feature/alternating.njk
What membership is
Four things happen here every week.
Every Wednesday
Critique that is actually useful
Post work in progress before Tuesday night and four members respond by Thursday. Structured, signed, and never anonymous — which is why it stays kind and stays honest.
- Four responses guaranteed
- Structured critique format
- No anonymous feedback, ever
First Monday, monthly
Numbers night
Three members share a real profit and loss statement and answer questions for twenty minutes each. It is the least glamorous hour of the month and the one people say changed the most.
- Real figures, not ranges
- Recorded for members only
- Sixty-one sessions since 2021
Always open
The library
Four hundred and twelve documents: contract templates, pricing teardowns, launch retrospectives, and the recording of every numbers night since the first one.
- 412 documents and counting
- Contracts you can actually use
- Every session recorded
Twice a year
Two days in one room
A spring and an autumn meet-up, thirty people, one long table. Members pay for their own travel; the room, the food and the schedule are covered by the membership.
- Thirty places, twice a year
- Room and food included
- Held in a different city each time
Hairline 3-up
data-section="feature-hairline"
sections/feature/hairline.njk
From the archive
The last three Thursdays.
Free issues stay open for two weeks. After that they move behind the paid archive.
No. 148
The price you are afraid to say out loud is usually the right one
Four questions that tell you whether you are underpricing out of strategy or out of nerves — and a script for the conversation where you raise it.
27 August 2026 · 9 min Free
No. 147
Your audience is not a number, it is a list of Thursdays
Retention is the only growth metric that compounds. What happens when you stop counting subscribers and start counting consecutive weeks read.
20 August 2026 · 11 min Free
No. 146
How to run a business that survives a bad quarter
Three creators walk through the month their revenue halved, what they cut, and what they refused to cut. Numbers included.
13 August 2026 · 14 min Paid
Tabbed panel
data-section="feature-tabs"
sections/feature/tabs.njk
Look inside
Three rooms, and what is in them right now.
Membership is not a Discord with a paywall. Here is the actual structure.
Nine channels, and none of them is #general
Every channel has a stated purpose and a person responsible for it. Threads close after fourteen days so nothing rots at the top of the list.
-
#critique
212 open threads
Work in progress, four responses guaranteed within 48 hours.
-
#pricing
88 open threads
Quotes, rates and the conversations where you raise them.
-
#launches
41 open threads
Pre-launch reviews and post-launch numbers, in public.
-
#contracts
26 open threads
Clause-by-clause help. Not legal advice, but close enough to be useful.
-
#tools
63 open threads
What people actually use, with the receipts.
-
#quiet
no replies
Post and move on. Nobody responds. It is the most used channel.
Four live sessions a month, all recorded
Attendance is never expected. Everything is posted with a transcript within a day, and the archive goes back to session one.
-
Wednesday critique
Weekly · 60 min
Live version of the critique channel, four pieces per session.
-
Numbers night
Monthly · 90 min
Three members, three profit and loss statements, no slides.
-
Office hours
Fortnightly · 45 min
Open room. Bring one question, leave with an answer.
-
Co-working
Twice weekly · 3 hrs
Cameras optional, microphones off, timer running.
Four hundred and twelve documents
Indexed, searchable, and maintained. Anything that goes stale gets flagged and either updated or removed.
-
Contract templates
34 documents
Retainer, project, licensing and kill-fee language.
-
Pricing teardowns
61 documents
Real quotes, what was charged, what was learned.
-
Launch retrospectives
78 documents
What shipped, what it made, what would change.
-
Session recordings
239 recordings
Every numbers night and office hour since 2021.
Stats
2 blocks
The band animates its counters; the inline row does not. Both ship the final value in the markup.
Counter band on accent
data-section="stats-band"
sections/stats/band.njk
The numbers we actually track.
- 2,140
- Creators taught since 2021
- 94%
- Finish the course they started
- 61%
- Sell a cohort within 90 days
- 4.9
- Average rating across 380 reviews
Inline hairline row
data-section="stats-inline"
sections/stats/inline.njk
- 2,140
- Creators taught since 2021
- 41,208
- Newsletter readers
- 1,840
- Members in The Bindery
- 26
- Products in the shop
Content
3 blocks
The curriculum accordion is a <details> group — open and keyboard-usable before any script runs.
Curriculum accordion
data-section="content-curriculum"
sections/content/curriculum.njk
The curriculum
Six weeks, in order.
Each week opens with a live session on Tuesday and closes with a critique on Friday. Everything in between is work you do on your own course, not exercises.
01 Find the thing you actually know 4 lessons · 3h 20m
Most first courses fail because they teach a topic instead of a transformation. We start by finding the one change you can reliably produce in someone.
- The transformation interview
- Why topics do not sell and outcomes do
- Sizing a promise you can keep
- Live: five positioning teardowns
02 Cut the curriculum in half 5 lessons · 4h 05m
You will draft twenty lessons and ship ten. This week is about sequencing — what has to be true before the next lesson can land.
- Dependency mapping a syllabus
- The one-outcome-per-lesson rule
- Designing the first ten minutes
- Live: curriculum critique in pairs
03 Price it without flinching 4 lessons · 2h 50m
Pricing is a positioning decision, not a spreadsheet decision. We set a number, write the justification, and stress-test it against three objections.
- Anchor, tier, and payment plan
- What a cohort is worth versus a recording
- Refund policy as a trust instrument
- Live: pricing office hours
04 Write the launch page 6 lessons · 4h 40m
One page, top to bottom, in one week. Promise, proof, curriculum, instructor, price, objection handling, close.
- The promise line and the five rewrites it needs
- Proof that survives a skeptic
- Editorial layout for people who are not designers
- Live: page teardown, every student
05 Run the pilot 4 lessons · 3h 10m
Twelve invitations, a real price, a real date. The pilot is the point — everything before this week was preparation for it.
- Recruiting a pilot cohort in six days
- Facilitating a live session that is not a lecture
- Collecting testimonials while the work is fresh
- Live: pilot debrief
06 Launch, then keep it alive 5 lessons · 3h 45m
The launch is a sequence, not a day. We build the calendar, the emails, and the operating rhythm for cohort two.
- A launch sequence that is not exhausting
- Waitlist mechanics that respect the reader
- What to change between cohort one and two
- Live: final critique and send-off
Events list
data-section="content-events"
sections/content/events.njk
On the calendar
What is happening next.
All times Eastern. Everything is recorded and posted within a day.
-
04 Sep
Numbers night: three studios, three P&Ls
Daniel Whitlock, Obi Nwosu and a third member to be announced walk through a full year of figures.
18:00 ET · 90 min · Live
Monthly
-
10 Sep
Wednesday critique — session 214
Four pieces, twelve minutes each. Submit by Tuesday 20:00 to be included.
12:00 ET · 60 min · Live
Weekly
-
17 Sep
Office hours with Martin Ellison
Open room. Pricing, positioning, and the paragraph you have rewritten nine times.
15:00 ET · 45 min · Live
Fortnightly
-
02 Oct
Autumn meet-up — Lisbon
One long table, one schedule, no lanyards. Travel is yours, everything else is covered.
Two days · 30 places · In person
Twice yearly
Timeline
data-section="content-timeline"
sections/content/timeline.njk
How we got here
Six years, in the order they happened.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
Media / product
3 blocks
The grid filters client-side by hiding items, so DOM order and tab order survive.
Filterable product grid
data-section="media-grid"
sections/media/grid.njk
The shop
Twenty-six products. Eight of them are these.
Filter by category. Every purchase includes free updates and a 30-day refund.
8 products shown
Nothing in that category yet.
Featured spotlight
data-section="media-spotlight"
sections/media/spotlight.njk
Featured
The Studio Operating Kit
Sixty-one pages covering everything between a first email and a final invoice: scoping questions, a rate card that explains itself, a kill fee that people actually agree to, and the retrospective template that makes the next project cheaper to run.
- Nine templates in Docs, Notion and plain Markdown
- A rate card structure that survives negotiation
- Free updates for life — currently on v4.2
- Used by 1,410 studios since 2023
$89
$129
Gallery mosaic
data-section="media-gallery"
sections/media/gallery.njk
The studio
Four people, no growth plan.
Everyone here teaches, writes or builds. Nobody's job is growth.
-
Martin Ellison
Teaching & writing
Nine years editing at Halcyon Press before this. Writes The Quarter Sheet and teaches every cohort.
-
Obi Nwosu
Product & engineering
Builds the shop, the member library, and everything that has to keep working at 3am.
-
Daniel Whitlock
Community
Runs The Bindery day to day, which mostly means protecting the tone of the room.
-
Seamus Byrne
Design & art direction
Responsible for the fact that none of this looks like a funnel.
Testimonials
3 blocks
The carousel is Embla; it reads direction off the document, so RTL needs no separate call.
Pull-quote carousel
data-section="testimonials-carousel"
sections/testimonials/carousel.njk
From the last three cohorts
What people say once the launch is behind them.
I came in with fourteen lessons and left with eight. The eight sold out. Cutting was the entire value of the six weeks.
Daniel Whitlock
Ceramics for Beginners · 4 cohorts
The launch page week alone paid for the course. I had been rewriting the same paragraph for four months and Martin fixed it in a nine-minute critique.
Femi Adeyemi
The Systems Letter · 12,400 readers
The pilot requirement is the thing that makes it work. You cannot hide in planning when there are twelve people expecting a session on Thursday.
Tomás Rivera
Field Recording Workshop
I doubled my price in week three and nobody blinked. I had been undercharging for two years because I had never written down why the work was worth anything.
Seamus Byrne
Studio Kestrel · Brand practice
Six weeks, twelve people, and a critique every Friday where somebody tells you the truth. I have paid five times this for less.
Henrik Vasquez
Motion for Editors
Two-up on accent
data-section="testimonials-duo"
sections/testimonials/duo.njk
Why people keep the subscription.
It is the only newsletter I have not unsubscribed from in four years. Partly the writing, mostly the fact that it never tries to sell me a cohort.
Femi Adeyemi
The Systems Letter
The quarterly numbers issue is worth the yearly price on its own. Nobody else publishes real figures from real creative businesses.
Tomás Rivera
Field Recording Workshop
Portrait cards
data-section="testimonials-portraits"
sections/testimonials/portraits.njk
Member spotlight
Three people, and what the room did for them.
I posted a rate card in #pricing that I was embarrassed by. Six people rewrote it with me over two days. I have charged the new number eleven times since.
Numbers night is the only place I have ever seen another creative business's real profit and loss. It reset what I thought was normal, in both directions.
The #quiet channel sounds like a gimmick until you have used it. Some weeks you need to say the thing and not be helped with it.
Pricing
3 blocks
Both prices are in the markup. The toggle switches which is visible — the table is correct before JS runs.
Two tiers with payment plan
data-section="pricing-two-tier"
sections/pricing/two-tier.njk
Enrollment
One cohort. Two ways to pay.
Same seat, same critique, same replays. The payment plan exists so the price is not the reason you do not do this.
Cohort seat
$1,450 $520
one payment per month, 3 months
Everything in the six weeks, plus two years of replay access.
- Six weeks of live sessions, Tuesdays
- Friday critique in groups of four
- Curriculum and launch page teardowns
- Two years of replay access
- Private cohort channel, no time limit
Seat + private review
$2,350 $830
one payment per month, 3 months
The cohort plus three one-to-one hours with Martin, used however you want.
- Everything in the cohort seat
- Three private 60-minute sessions
- Line edit of your full launch page
- Pricing review before you publish
- Priority answer in the cohort channel
6 of 12 places left
Three tiers, monthly / annual
data-section="pricing-three-tier"
sections/pricing/three-tier.njk
Membership
Three ways in.
Same room, same library, same critique. The difference is how much of Martin's time is in it.
2 months free
Reader
$0 $0
free, forever free, forever
The public rooms and the monthly recap. No critique, no library.
- Read-only access to #launches
- Monthly recap email
- Numbers night summaries
- Meet-up announcements
Member
$29 $290
per month per year
Everything the membership is. This is what 94% of people choose.
- All nine channels, posting enabled
- Wednesday critique, four responses guaranteed
- Numbers night, live and archived
- The full 412-document library
- Both meet-ups, room and food covered
Studio
$89 $890
per month per year
For teams of up to five, plus a quarterly hour with Martin.
- Everything in Member, for five seats
- A private team channel
- One 60-minute studio session each quarter
- Priority place at both meet-ups
- Annual invoice and PO support
Free versus paid comparison
data-section="pricing-comparison"
sections/pricing/comparison.njk
Free and paid
The honest version of the paywall.
Free readers get a real newsletter, not a teaser. Paid readers get the archive and the numbers.
| What you get | $0 Free · forever | $8 Paid · per month, or $80 a year |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly essay, Thursday morning | First half | Full issue |
| Archive access | Issues over 2 weeks old | All 148 issues |
| Quarterly numbers teardown | Not included | Included |
| Six-part pricing series | Not included | Included |
| Replies read and answered | Not included | Included |
| Annual reader survey results | Summary | Full data |
| Sponsorships or ads | None | None |
| Subscribe free | Go paid |
FAQ
2 blocks
Pass an id on `s` when you use more than one accordion on a page.
Accordion
data-section="faq-accordion"
sections/faq/accordion.njk
Before you enroll
The questions we get every cohort.
What if I do not know what to teach yet?
Week one exists for exactly this. About a third of every cohort arrives without a topic and leaves with a promise they can defend. If you get to the end of week two and still have nothing, take the refund.
How much time does this take each week?
Two hours live, four to six hours of work on your own course. It is a working cohort — the deliverables are your material, not exercises, so the hours go into something you keep.
I already have a course that is not selling. Is this for me?
Yes, and it is often the fastest version of the six weeks. You skip the blank page and spend the time on sequencing, price and the launch page instead.
What happens if I miss a live session?
Every session is recorded and posted within four hours. Critique is the part you should protect — if you cannot make a Friday, swap into another group in the channel.
Do I need an audience already?
No. The pilot in week five is run at twelve people, and we cover how to find twelve people from a standing start. An existing list makes launch easier, not possible.
Is there a payment plan?
Three monthly payments, no interest, no fee. It is the same seat — choose it on the pricing table above.
Two column
data-section="faq-two-column"
sections/faq/two-column.njk
Practical questions
Subscription, billing, and what lands in your inbox.
- How often does it arrive?
- Every Thursday at 7am Eastern. 148 consecutive weeks so far. If a Thursday is ever going to be missed, the previous issue says so.
- Can I read before I pay?
- Yes. Free readers get the first half of every new issue and full access to anything older than two weeks. That is roughly forty complete essays available right now.
- What does paid actually unlock?
- The full weekly essay, the complete 148-issue archive, the quarterly numbers teardown, and the pricing series. The comparison table above is the whole list.
- Monthly or annual?
- Either. Annual is $80, which is ten months for twelve. There is no difference in what you receive.
- How do I cancel?
- One link at the bottom of every issue. No email required, no retention offer, and you keep access to the end of the period you paid for.
- Do you run sponsorships?
- No, and that is a permanent decision rather than a current state. The subscription is the business model.
Call to action
3 blocks
The accent band is the one place the accent hue covers the page.
Full-bleed accent band
data-section="cta-band"
sections/cta/band.njk
Twelve seats, six weeks, one finished course.
Enrollment closes the moment the countdown does. The next cohort after this one runs in April.
23 seats left · Full refund through week two
Inline newsletter
data-section="cta-newsletter"
sections/cta/newsletter.njk
New products, occasionally
Six or seven emails a year. That is the whole promise.
New releases, free updates worth knowing about, and the two sales we run.
Split with media
data-section="cta-split"
sections/cta/split.njk
1,840 members · 41 countries
The room is open.
Join today and your first critique thread goes up on Wednesday. If it is not for you, cancel from your account page in two clicks.
Forms
3 blocks
No backend ships. Every form validates client-side, shows loading, success and error, and takes a data-endpoint.
Inline email capture
data-section="forms-inline"
sections/forms/inline.njk
The smallest form in the library.
One field, one button, full validation and every state.
Contact
data-section="forms-contact"
sections/forms/contact.njk
Send a message
What do you need?
- General hello@byline.studio One working day
- Orders and refunds orders@byline.studio Same day, weekdays
- The Bindery Ask in #meta once you are in Members only
- Speaking and workshops martin@byline.studio Two to three days
We are a remote studio with a room in San Francisco that is open on Thursdays. Post reaches us at the address below.
1140 Folsom StreetSan Francisco, CA 94103
Application
data-section="forms-application"
sections/forms/application.njk
Apply
Apply for a seat.
Fieldsets, a radio group and a commitment checkbox — the long form, with the same validation contract as the short one.
Forty-two blocks, four home stacks, twenty-one pages.
Every home layout in this template is a different arrangement of the blocks above. Start from one of the four, or compose your own.