"No job I have ever had existed when I graduated from college."

The TPF Q&A with Gee Thanks’ Caroline Moss

When I grow up, I want to be like Caroline Moss. She’s one of the reporters who invented the internet culture beat, was one-half of the amazing Hey Ladies, and currently runs Gee Thanks, Just Bought It!, which started and continues as a podcast while also morphing into a 35,000 member-strong Facebook community, an Instagram account with 54,000 followers, a newsletter, a shop, and many other things. She also found time to produce an off-Broadway play that recently opened. 

On a rainy Tuesday morning, she talked with Three Point Four Media about the best day in New York City (Marathon Sunday), the state of internet culture writing (important and exhausting), not being on TikTok (hooray), and five-year business plans (dumb, but we didn’t go to B-school).

We are laughing.

Three Point Four Media: First question, how is marathon training going?

Caroline Moss: It's arduous at best. I am having a lot of fun. I have to have a race on the calendar at least every six weeks. If I'm not running towards something, I'm running towards nothing. I'm taking a couple week break right now because I have a big work thing going on, and I just have not been able to find the time. But I have a 10k on the calendar in October. My goal is to run the half in the spring, and the marathon in 2026. 

I've never been an athlete and I've never been a runner, so it's really hard at 37 to wake up and be like, “one of my big dreams is to, for some reason, run 26 miles in a row, and I'm going to do it.” 

Marathon Sunday is the best day in the city. Such good energy everywhere. If someone told you to walk 26.2 miles tomorrow, you could do it.

It is the best day. 

My goals are to finish and to have a good time doing it. I can figure out how to do that in the next year and a half. By the time you get to the actual marathon, you've already done all the work you can. That’s what I need to remember. 

Okay! Hard pivot: How intentional was Gee Thanks? What were your expectations when you launched? 

Professionally, and maybe in life in general, my personality is not to plan too much or be too intentional about getting somewhere specific. (Doing something like putting a marathon on a calendar is very unusual for me.) I do what is fun until I get distracted and do something else. I didn’t set out knowing what Gee Thanks would be. 

It started as a podcast where I wanted to talk to cool people and my friends about something interesting, fun, or exciting that they bought and why they bought it. I didn’t want the conversations to be about aspirational or expensive purchases. I wanted them to come on the show and talk about a drain plug they loved because it helped them fill the bathtub an extra three inches and make the bath perfect. We're all spending money constantly. What are we buying? How does it make us feel? What do we want to tell all of our friends about?

At the time, influencer culture was really oversaturated. The Wirecutter and Strategist are trustworthy, sure, but I've been burned so many times by both of those. I also don’t believe there is a “best” of something. There’s a “best for you,” and there are good options. That’s really how it started. I didn’t have any plans for making money. I just thought a podcast sounded fun.

That was like phase one, and then the rest of it snowballed from realizing that affiliate marketing where I share links to what we’re talking about buying is actually a solid business plan. Pragmatically, the podcast itself—and it took me a year and a half to figure this out—ends up being a loss leader. There's not a ton of money in podcasting anymore. The ad space dried up. How many direct-to-consumer brands could I talk about, especially in the ad space for a podcast about recommending things? I ended up becoming really picky about what I was going to read ads for because it flew in the face of what I was trying to do with the show. 

Gee Thanks will be six in November. If I had to think about where this company would go when I started in 2019, I wouldn't still be here. My approach to it has always been what's working, what's not working, and trying to pivot when I wanted to and how I wanted to based honestly on vibes. It turned into a very solid business, filling a niche space. 

There's no part of me that has ever set out to accomplish one specific thing. The pressure of that is too great. The success of Gee Thanks is found in the fun that I have with it. The fun of it has come from being able to expand what I do on a dime. I could not have imagined anything beyond maybe the first three months. I’m rolling down a hill and seeing where it goes.

We always get asked what our five-year plan is. We’ve never had one. Maybe that’s bad, but it’s worked for us so far. I don’t know how applicable past business plans are to what we’re trying to build. I don’t think they are at all applicable to something like Gee Thanks. It’s all so new.

The easiest way to fail is to come up with a five-year plan that you're unwilling to budge on because you are so blinded by the idea of what something could be, and not tuned in enough to the idea of what something is. It would be different if Gee Thanks was its own platform, if I owned the technology that would allow someone to shop a website that I created. But I am at the mercy of Instagram. I'm at the mercy of Substack. I'm at the mercy of Facebook. I'm very aware of that every day.

I’m also aware of what I want to do and what I don’t want to do. I refuse to do Reels where I’m wearing this and I'm wearing that. That’s not fun for me. Could I grow my account 3x by the end of the year if I committed to doing that three times a week? Yes, I could. Would I be having fun? No. So what am I going to do that works within the confines of enjoying this? What is the point of starting your own company and getting to work for yourself if you hate what you're doing? I would rather have a smaller, more engaged following than try to pick up followers through all of these different ways that might change tomorrow.

No job I have ever had in the last 16 years existed when I graduated from college. Things that work now might not work tomorrow. Those of us who were in newsrooms 10 years ago remember pivot to video. That was going to be the big thing. Then Facebook changed its mind and everyone lost their jobs. The most important part of a five-year plan is knowing that whatever you're doing right now might not exist in five years.

You also have an innate and intrinsic sense of what's going on in the internet world. 

You have to stay in tune, but also you can't be all things to all people. The most important part of working for yourself, starting a company, or branching out creatively is you have to know who you are, what you like to do, what you're good at, and what your limits are. You can always be making more money. You can always be making more content. You can always be doing more things. That race will never stop. It's much more important to take stock of your place in the bigger picture and how you want to live in that place rather than jump jump jump. That's a way to burn out really, really quickly. 

Six months ago, all I was hearing about was influencers making hundreds of thousands of dollars doing stuff on TikTok and TikTok Shop. And hearing, “Caroline, you gotta be doing Tiktok. There’s so much opportunity.” But I don't want to do TikTok. Maybe I’m leaving a million dollars on the table by not doing TikTok Shop. But I don't want to burn out. I'm 37. I don't want to be on TikTok talking about how cute something is. It's just not me.

There is always another platform you can exploit. There is always a way to do premium, to charge people, to not charge people, to give something, to get something. That will be exhausting so quickly. The only thing that really cuts through in the overcrowded internet space is authenticity and really knowing who you are. People go too hard, too fast trying to be the internet person that they want other people to think they are. That's a recipe for disaster.

What is your sense of the state of internet culture writing today?

I think it's more important than ever, and we're in such a different climate than we were in five or 10 years ago. There was a real inherent belief that if you saw a video, you could believe the video. If you read a quote, you believe the quote. In the last 10 years something has fully shifted, and that makes the business of writing about the internet culture more important than ever. But it also makes it a lot more difficult. It makes it harrowing. It makes it exhausting. And maybe even sort of traumatizing. Whereas in 2013, “selfie" was the word of the year. Half of my stories were about kids going to funerals and taking funeral selfies. At the time, that seemed so egregious. Now it doesn't seem like anything. Those posts are a record of where we were. 

All of internet culture feels mundane as it’s happening, and you can't really notice the trends or see the trajectory of where you're headed until you're looking back on it. That documentation is super important, especially in regards to politics and as Gen Z takes over from the millennials. There is so much work that's been done over the last couple of years that's going to be so important for when we try to make sense of what we're living through. I don't think we have enough people doing it, but the people we do have doing it do it really well. Taylor Lorenz is a force in whatever way you want to take that word. She really is. 

The TPF Q&A: Casey Lewis, After School

To be honest, personally, I felt so fatigued by internet culture. When I stopped having to be so tapped in, I felt a certain personal peace. It’s hard for me to remember how much of my life I spent making sure I have seen every tweet, every BuzzFeed post, every this, every that, every Reddit thread. I’ve moved away from it because it was a little too much. The internet's worse than ever. I left the party when the party was still fun. 

I just looked up that Ellen DeGeneres selfie at the Oscars and it was in 2014. That feels like it was a million years ago. I think about the Deadspin Gamergate is culture now post a lot, too, which was also 2014, and how prescient that was in terms of everything that’s happened.

My directive at work for a long time was to get a certain number of page views and put up 10 blog posts a day. We never knew which ones were going to stick permanently on the wall as moments in the culture. The Ellen selfie is such a great example. We were talking about that for like 48 hours. Eleven years ago, a celebrity took a selfie and then tweeted it, and we could see it on Twitter knowing she was tweeting from the Oscars. In 2014, that was mind-blowing. Today: Who cares? That would not even register. 

When we look back 10 years from now, there's going to be stuff that we're going to have to remember, and the way we will remember it is by reading the earnestness in which it was presented in blog posts.

When you think about the context of "what's your five-year plan,” I'm assuming whatever I'm doing right now will not be relevant then. How are you going to pivot? How are you going to make sure you're still relevant even if the means by which you are creating and talking about what you're creating have changed? Internet culture is that documentation. It’s really important. It’s also incredibly fatiguing. I'm very grateful for the people who are still in the trenches. I will never be going back. It's too stressful.