Anne-Laure Le Cunff — Ness Labs: Turning Neuroscience Study into Content and a Paid Learning Community

Ness Labs is a business that combines content covering ways of thinking, learning, creativity, and productivity with a paid learning community. Founder Anne-Laure Le Cunff gathered an audience by writing explanations of what she studied, then created a membership through which those readers could learn and interact together. The structure is one in which free content creates the first point of contact with readers, while education and community provide a reason to keep paying.

Leaving Google to Study Again

She worked in Google’s London and San Francisco offices before leaving in 2017. She then developed a chatbot to help people with type 2 diabetes with a co-founder and raised funding, but the co-founding relationship ended because their reasons for doing business and values differed. She also explored a similar idea with another co-founder and at an accelerator, but this too did not lead to a serious business.

Her next choice was to study neuroscience. After beginning graduate studies in 2018, she started unpacking the complex material she learned at King’s College London into writing that general readers could understand. It was a way to check whether she truly understood what she had learned and to remember it, and in a 2019 retrospective she said writing had indeed helped her organize her graduate coursework.

The direction of the content was also shaped by the burnout she experienced at Google and in startups. The “mindful productivity” she advocated was an approach that considered together the necessity of what needs to be done, the way one works, and one’s thoughts and emotional state. It targeted founders, creators, and knowledge workers who love their work and are ambitious but do not want to exhaust themselves in the process.

Building a Writing Habit and Gathering an Audience

In July 2019, she launched the newsletter Maker Mind. Its first roughly 300 readers were friends, former colleagues, and people who had followed her earlier founder activities. At the same time, she took on the challenge of “writing 100 articles over 100 weekdays,” sharing the process publicly as she built a habit of writing every weekday.

She published the articles on her website, shared them on Twitter and Hacker News, and linked readers to a newsletter signup. Through a newsletter sent every Thursday, she delivered the next article and turned one-off visits into ongoing relationships. By the end of 2019, she had built up 111 articles over about six months, and newsletter subscribers reached about 6,800.

On Twitter, she showed not only finished articles but also her writing process. She shared unfinished drafts and used questions and polls to gauge readers' interests. She explained that shifting from sharing other people's writing to revealing her own process was a major driver of follower growth.

Topic selection was not fixed to a single popular subject. Among the pieces with strong subscription conversion that she reviewed in late 2020 were an essay about the anxiety of wasting time and a guide to using the knowledge-management tool Roam Research. Because it was hard to predict which article would resonate strongly, she stuck to publishing consistently good work and watching reader response.

From Consulting and Sponsorships to Membership

The revenue stream that sustained the initial business was corporate consulting. In a 2019 retrospective, she disclosed that Ness Labs's annual revenue was about USD 77,000, with corporate consulting accounting for USD 64,976. Writing brought consulting inquiries and speaking opportunities, but she wanted to increase the share of revenue coming from products she created herself.

In the newsletter, she initially generated revenue through sponsorships. But coordinating with advertisers took time, and weeks when inquiries flooded in alternated with weeks when there were none at all. Her reason for considering membership was to provide value directly to readers while securing more predictable recurring revenue.

The immediate trigger was the March 2020 pandemic. When readers replying to the newsletter described loneliness and isolation, she created a space where people with similar interests could connect with one another. This time, she launched a paid community without a cofounder or outside investment, using her own funds and existing reader base.

The launch price was USD 5 per month or USD 50 per year. She had originally planned to offer only annual memberships, but given the economic uncertainty at the time, she added a monthly payment option. According to a record published on March 20, 2020, USD 1,105 in payments came in during the twelve hours after launch, combining monthly and annual membership sales.

Early member benefits included online events, a members-only newsletter, and discounts on related apps and courses. In Mind Match in particular, she personally connected members, arranged one-on-one online coffee chats, and provided prompts to help start the conversation. As the service added introductions to people with shared interests in the content, readers were buying an experience beyond simply reading articles.

For building the community, she used the existing service Circle, and it took about a week from idea to launch. She valued being able to create calmer asynchronous conversations than Slack or Discord. She aimed for a space where each person could organize their thoughts and participate at their own pace.

An Indie Bites interview published on September 18, 2020, described about 600 paid members and about USD 3,000 in monthly recurring revenue for the membership. At the time, the newsletter had about 19,000 subscribers, and separate revenue was also being generated from one-time product sales such as books.

Courses Create a Reason to Join, While the Community Sustains Relationships

At the end of 2020, the online course Collector to Creator became a new catalyst for growth. In a year-end retrospective, she explained that many members had joined to take the course and stayed in the community afterward. By connecting education and community, people who studied together through the course could continue interacting after the class ended.

On March 2, 2021, she disclosed 2,000 paid members and USD 8,000 in monthly recurring revenue. By this time, members were also holding their own events to share their knowledge or practice together. As members' participation was added to the founder's writing and courses, the learning experiences offered within the community expanded.

Sponsorship was also reintroduced in a new form. The offering announced in April 2021 was a USD 1,500 package featuring an in-depth interview with the founder of a tool for thinking and knowledge management, promoted through the newsletter and Twitter. At the time, the business's main revenue streams were divided among community membership fees, sponsor interviews, paid workshops, and consulting.

As revenue grew, she also hired people to share the operational work. In April 2021, she introduced a three-person setup consisting of herself, a sales and partnerships lead, and a social media and community lead, and explained that the initial help began as freelance contracts for a few hours per week. The team page checked in October 2026 also lists an operations lead and separate writing and research contributors, so Ness Labs can be seen as an education and content business that began solo and grew into a small team.

Expanding Through Publishing and Tiered Membership

On March 4, 2025, she published her first book, Tiny Experiments, in the United States. The book departs from fitting oneself to predetermined goals and explores an approach of discovering and adjusting the desired direction through small experiments. As it distills the experimental thinking and learning methods Ness Labs has explored into a trade book, the path to meeting readers expanded into publishing.

As of October 5, 2026, the official membership program consists of a basic Membership at USD 49 per year and Fellowship at USD 249 per year. The basic membership includes peer learning groups, self-directed learning courses, expert workshops, recorded materials, and co-working and writing sessions. The upper tier adds group coaching led by her, an experimental leadership course, small peer groups, and more, offering a more intensive form of participation; the official page also includes a waitlist sign-up notice.

In terms of business structure, an important shift for Ness Labs was the moment it expanded its scope from 'explaining what I learned' to 'helping readers learn together.' The accumulated writing brought in new readers, the courses provided concrete learning opportunities, and the community offered a space for ongoing exchange. The heart of this business is combining the ability to communicate expertise easily with instructional design and membership operations.