I guess I'm an insurance salesman now

I am on a train to Frankfurt to meet Seamus, the insurance broker I work with. We are building a health insurance business from the ground up, and I have mixed feelings about it.

I could wax poetic about our goal of simplifying health insurance for immigrants and making insurance advice more accessible, but let’s be frank: this is about making money. This is what I’m doing instead of writing about German citizenship or tenant rights, things I actually care about.

I am going to Frankfurt because All About Berlin is facing an existential threat. ChatGPT and Google’s AI summaries almost halved my traffic, and many long-term partners shuttered their affiliate program in the last 6 months. I won’t tell you exactly by how much my income dropped this year, but it’s a concerning amount.

So I am on a mission to save All About Berlin as a business, so that it may survive as a resource.

But things are not so bad.

First, All About Berlin is not in danger. It’s is still profitable, just less so than before. If things stabilised now, I would sleep just fine. Your donations alone cover a chunk of my rent, and I have not even begun looking into other funding options. It’s a simple website with few moving parts; keeping the lights on requires virtually no effort. Hosting costs about a kebab per month, and it’s prepaid for the next decade. All About Berlin will ride out this storm and outlive the menace of AI, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.

Second, this is a distraction, not a pivot. The mission remains the same: to make life easier for immigrants. I have dedicated eight years of my life to building this useful resource that people trust, and I am not dismantling it for a quick buck. I’m also not setting this great project aside to become an insurance salesman. The way I see it - and I have made sure Seamus also sees it that way - this is just putting gas in the tank.

Third, I think that I’m onto something. This is not merely a cash grab. I am genuinely trying to fix the confusing, misleading process of getting health insurance. I believe that we have a good shot at getting it right. I am learning a lot about health insurance along the way, and that knowledge will find its way into the guides and the tools on All About Berlin.

Fourth, it’s working. It’s working so ridiculously well. We are not trying to figure out how to make this insurance thing work; we’re trying to figure out how to keep up with the demand. Seamus is working ten, twelve hours a day answering your questions. We’re trying to figure out how to give each of you the quality advice that we have promised.

I just want these things to be abundantly clear: I am fine, the website is not going anywhere, and I’ve just bought us a few more years together.