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Quote/Unquote
Andrew Burmon is the founder of the newsletter Upper Middle, a highly original exploration of the psyches and lifestyles of a specific swath of American professionals, whom he refers to as Oat Milk Elites. I met Andrew at a dinner hosted by 1440 last fall, subscribed to his newsletter, and have been following his work since then.
The newsletter, which launched in September 2024, has around 140,000 subscribers and monetizes its readership, in part, by inviting them to participate in surveys, the results of which are shared in editorial projects and, of course, with the partnering brands. He built the email and website using Claude Code and this week unveiled a sweeping redesign of both products.
Before creating Upper Middle, Burmon helped launch a number of brands in the Bustle Digital Group portfolio, including Inverse and Fatherly. He now lives in rural Litchfield County with his wife and young son.
This interview has been edited.
Mark Stenberg: Where did the idea for Upper Middle come from?
Andrew Burmon: It came from two directions: First, the experience of working in media and the minor ego death that had been my career. The other: My wife is an ER doctor and epidemiologist, so she suffered through Covid in a real way. That prompted me to look around at my friends, many of whom are lawyers or similar professionals, whose careers were not going the way they had envisioned, largely because the economy has been restructured around financialization and the very rich. So I had the idea of: How do we talk to that experience?
Mark: You monetize it, in part, through surveys. How does that work?
Andrew: When you sign up for Upper Middle, you are prompted to sign up for Upper Middle Research. You can make money taking surveys there, which aims to create a culture of survey-taking and data-sharing that informs the whole project. A lot of what I’m trying to do is explain water to a fish, taking this group of urban, well-educated, W-2 employees to step back, think critically about their life experience, and try to understand why they feel the way that they do.
Mark: How much revenue does that generate?
Andrew: Six figures. March was my first month over $40,000. My goal for the year is to top $400,000 and put all of that back into the business.
Mark: You run this entirely on your own, but the design is highly stylized. How do you do that?
Andrew: I use Beehiiv to deliver my emails, but I built an AI wrapper on top of it that helps me move a lot faster. For that I used Claude Code. So instead of entering everything free-form into Beehiiv, I basically fill out a form and it generates the newsletter for me.
Mark: Every week the newsletter feels very original. Where do you get your ideas from, or do you take inspiration from any other newsletters?
Andrew: In a previous life I was the editor of Spy for Penske—this was not Graydon Carter’s Spy, but still. I think there used to be a lot of publications that were aimed at an effete audience that, frankly, were unapologetic about it; they were having fun with it. I think a lot of media people started to feel that that was unacceptable, and maybe over-indexed on afflicting the comfortable. I think it is important to empathize with people that entered into their personal and professional lives expecting one thing, got something different, and are squaring that with the huge internalized expectations they have for themselves.
