Ness Labs did not start as a planned business. While a neuroscience student, Anne-Laure had learned about the 'generation effect' (explaining a concept in your own words helps you understand and remember it), and used that as her own justification for a personal writing habit: turning what she was studying into short articles. The writing habit built an audience over 2019, and only afterward, once sponsors and readers started asking to pay for more, did it turn into a company.

“a psychological phenomenon showing that when you create your own version of something, you both understand it and remember it better”

The newsletter's very first readers were friends and former colleagues she emailed directly when she made a landing page for it in the summer of 2019, before it had any public audience.

The first time anyone paid for anything connected to the newsletter was inbound: a reader asked, unprompted, if they could pay to have a sponsored link placed in an edition, for $100. This happened near the end of 2019, while the newsletter itself was still completely free and almost a year before the paid community existed.