[ The problem ]
Recruiters won't tell you what the job's like. Discords get you to the interview. Nothing gets you the offer.
Internship season runs on guesswork. The internal Discord servers, alumni Zoom calls, and sanitized recruiter pages don't answer the only question that matters: what is it actually like to work there?
Stringer pays current interns — kept anonymous to readers, vetted by us — to keep a weekly journal. Real workload, real culture, real trade-offs. Reader subscriptions ($69/yr founding rate) fund the writers, so the content stays raw. The marketplace incentive aligns the writer with the reader, not with the company.
[ Approach ]
Editorial-grade brand, built like a product.
Most newsletter brands feel like blogs in a wrapper. Stringer needed to feel like a publication you'd subscribe to before reading a word — because the marketplace runs on the writer's perceived authority, not the platform's. I leaned into editorial typography (Instrument Serif italic display + a custom S-mark in 5 colorways), a single primary green / sand palette pulled from old Esquire mastheads, and a hero "letter from the founder" pinned to the homepage with washi-tape framing.
Built on Astro for the marketing site (Lenis + GSAP for scroll-scrubbed parallax on the hero), Supabase for waitlist + writer applications, Resend for the 20-email lifecycle (waitlist → founding → renewal → writer onboarding → launch). Notion is the live source of truth for the 50-item launch checklist + payment ops; the marketing site syncs from it.
[ Stack ]
[ Where it stands ]
1,000
Founding spots @ $69/yr
20
Lifecycle emails designed
77d
To public launch