Ownership is more than just shares. There’s a quiet lesson hidden inside Sam Reich’s story of buying CollegeHumor for zero dollars and rebuilding it as Dropout: simplicity wins when integrity drives the system.
When Hank Green asked Reich about his business model, Reich called it “a comedy SaaS.”
Subscribers pay a small monthly fee, and in return, they get something meaningful and weird. No advertisers, no shareholders, no layers of compromise. Just the creator, the team, and the audience. Reich summed it up with a business rule disguised as a joke: “Never break trois.”
It means never add unnecessary complexity. In his case, never let a fourth party, investors, ad buyers, algorithms, enter the relationship between creators and their community. Because once you do, the creative energy shifts from serving the audience to serving the system.
Simplicity is a leadership discipline
Reich’s success isn’t about being disruptive; it’s about staying small enough to stay honest. He shrank CollegeHumor from 105 staff to seven, survived a pandemic, and built a million-subscriber platform by keeping control of the creative and commercial core.
The challenge, as he explains, is that success breeds complexity. Every new process, partner, or stakeholder introduces another voice telling you how to run your business. Reich resists this gravitational pull by refusing to grow faster than his ability to make good things. It’s a conscious rejection of the “scale at any cost” mentality that gutted media creativity over the past decade.
Integrity as a growth model
Dropout’s strength isn’t its budget; it’s its credibility. When Reich talks about profit sharing, fair contracts, and giving creative partners space to work elsewhere, he’s not positioning himself as a moral leader, he’s protecting his licence to operate.
His audience rewards that transparency. It’s a form of social license, the unspoken permission a company earns when people trust that it behaves fairly. Reich doesn’t claim perfection, just progress. “Perfect is impossible,” he says, “but we can set new standards for decency.”
In practice, that looks like a company where people stay because they feel ownership. Reich calls it “being everyone’s favourite second job.” That’s not marketing language; it’s a social contract.
Weird is good business
Reich and Green finish their conversation where it started; on the joy of weirdness. Reich’s ambition isn’t to dominate streaming. It’s to preserve a “walled garden of weird” on the internet. A place where creativity can thrive without permission or compromise.
That’s the deeper business case. Simplicity protects creativity. Integrity sustains community. And weirdness — the willingness to make something that doesn’t need to scale, keeps the work human.
“Never break trois” isn’t just a punchline. It’s a strategy for anyone who wants to grow without selling out: keep the circle small, the system simple, and the relationship with your audience sacred.
How Underpin replicates this
At Underpin, this is what we do. We work closely with clients and the people who use their services to make real, lasting change. We start with a short, clear brief that everyone understands, then test ideas in small, low-risk cycles. We prove what works before big commitments are made. The aim is always to build your ability to improve without us. When we leave, you have the tools, templates, and systems to keep making progress on your own.
We see social licence as a working asset. We make sure everyone affected by a project understands the benefits, the trade-offs, and their role in shaping the outcome. We keep decision-making transparent and give teams the permission and confidence to make improvements now, not later. It is practical, open, and grounded in results.
That is how we make change stick.