Issue #62: How to be business partners with your best friend
Or best friends with your business partner?
Written by . Edited by .
It was a warm spring day. Aliza and I were sitting at a picnic table, beers in front of us, and she was telling me about the gate agent who’d made her feel guilty for boarding early to pump.
“That’s what you should write about!” I said. Several weeks earlier, Aliza had pitched our friends on a podcast recommendation newsletter. But I thought her experiences and emotions around motherhood would be more interesting.
“Oh my gosh, yes,” she said. “Would you want to do it together?”
My immediate response was no. I was used to saying “no” — in fact, I’d almost bailed on the brewery date. I didn’t know Aliza very well, and as I wrote about here, intense pre-hang anxiety meant I often flaked. But I’d pushed through the discomfort to show up. And, as you know because you’re reading this, I ultimately pushed through the discomfort to say “yes” to Aliza on the newsletter.
It’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Not only has Platonic Love been an incredibly rewarding creative and community-building project, it also brought me and Aliza very close, very quickly.
It turns out that’s not a unique experience. As our own relationship has deepened, Aliza and I have grown more curious about relationships that span both work/art and friendship.
To learn more, we talked to:
and , Webby-nominated podcasters, writers of top culture Substack , and co-hosts of Love to See It, a feminist podcast about reality dating shows, rom-coms, and what they say about us all.
Claire Parker and Ashley Hamilton, co-hosts of Celebrity Memoir Book Club, a top-charting podcast dissecting celebrity memoirs, and Memoir Practice, a series where they help the next generation of talent write memoirs that aren't bad. (Aliza: This podcast — speaking of podcast recommendations! — was one of the first Aja and I bonded over.)
Whether you’ve started a business or creative project — or thought about starting a business — with a friend, I think you’ll find this discussion fascinating…
On what came first, the friendship or the creative partnership:
Emma Gray ( / Love to See It): We were friendly, but not particularly close. We’d been working in the same newsroom at HuffPost for four years, and the reason we ended up working together was because we both really wanted to do a Bachelor podcast.
Ashley Hamilton (): We were acquaintances slash friends who became creative partners who became best friends who became business partners.
Aliza (Platonic Love): Most people assume we were best friends when we started the newsletter, but we actually didn’t know each other that well. Aja was my friend’s boyfriend’s best friend.
On the organic development of the friendship:
Emma Gray (Rich Text / Love to See It): It's a very intimate thing to be making a podcast. We got in a routine where we were talking a lot and having a lot of conversations for the podcast — which of course were professional — but our show is a chat show, we get into the personal. We connected easily. We had a lot of common interests. And we were making something that we were excited about.
Claire Parker (CMBC): We definitely started our podcast very early into knowing each other. And the experience of talking for an hour every week builds the friendship really quickly. Like we had an arranged marriage — via podcasting — for friendship.
Aja (Platonic Love): The newsletter accelerated our friendship timeline. Because we were working on basically a group project on steroids, we started talking throughout the day. And then we started noticing we were having the same thoughts and ideas at the same time.
On fighting with your business partner / friend:
Ashley Hamilton (CMBC): When we have conflict in our regular friendship, it seeps into the business — because we can't record a good episode when we're mad at each other. But when there's conflict in the business, it's hard to be like, anyway, should we take the train together to this birthday party? That being said, we actually don't argue that much about business.
Claire Parker (CMBC): I actually have a joke about me and Ashley that our friendship works because we only sweat the small stuff. Two years ago, I made her cry on her birthday in Bonnie’s restaurant because we couldn’t stop fighting over which kind of shelves we should install in our new studio. Meanwhile, we’ve both made some pretty huge mistakes — tens of thousands of dollar mistakes — and when the going got tough, Ashley stuck by me. At the end of the day, I always try to remember we’d pick each other over any listener; we would pick each other over the business.
Claire Fallon (Rich Text / Love to See It): I've been on a journey with accepting conflict in this partnership. Because I don't expect to have conflict with anyone but my romantic partner, and I've always found fighting with my friends to be really traumatic. But there's no way for Emma and me to have our lives bound together so closely without wanting different things at times or having to advocate for ourselves and work through and compromise — or just getting on each other's nerves! — you have to accept that’s gonna be part of it.
Emma Gray (Rich Text / Love to See It): Once you expect and understand that tension or temporary conflict is human and healthy rather than some indication of rot at the core of the friendship… It's actually good practice.
Ashley Hamilton (CMBC): Practice removing your ego from that communication. It took me and Claire like six years to do that — and we're still always working on it. When things are tense or times are busy, it's easy to feel stressed out or bossed around. You have to remind yourself, okay, this person that I've created a partnership with is not scolding me. We're working on a thing together.
Aja (Platonic Love): Aliza and I rarely have to chase each other down for stuff. When we have tension, it’s because one of us took something personally — for example, a few weeks ago my feelings got hurt over which photo we were going to run with an issue, which is funny in retrospect, because it really wasn’t a big deal. Or a few times, we’ve been in different places with how much time we can or want to spend on the newsletter. But we’ve tried to embrace that. When one person needs to back off a bit, the other can pick up their slack knowing the see-saw will reverse at some point. Navigating the tension has definitely made our relationship stronger, and, I think, better at working through conflict in other friendships, too.
On not leaving the big things up to “vibes”:
Claire Fallon (Rich Text / Love to See It): When we started our LLC, we made a partnership contract with a lawyer. We did that with the recognition that we care about each other and have each other’s best interests in mind, but it’s not a good idea to completely leave all of that up to vibes. There was stuff like, what if someone wants to take leave in the future — which I ended up wanting to do because I had another baby — or one of us wants to leave the partnership? What if one of us dies? There are all these eventualities that we sorted out in a more business-like, bloodless way than how we usually make decisions.
But once we got that in place, we proceeded as if [the contract] didn't exist.
Aliza (Platonic Love): From the beginning, we decided we’d stop doing Platonic Love once it stopped being fun. But we’ve always treated it like a business — even when we only had 100 subscribers.
On advice for starting a business or project with a partner:
Claire Parker (CMBC): Find somebody who you deeply respect and like over somebody you think has clout. We will come up together. Experience comes. But respect does not.
On why, at the end of the day, it’s all worth it:
Emma Gray (Rich Text / Love to See It): You get to pay your bills and have a best friend. It’s really ideal.
Claire Parker (CMBC): So much of this isn't as fun as you thought it would be unless you have a friend there. Like traveling on the road is a dream we both had our whole lives. And then by the third run you're like, oh, actually, spending 48 hours in a weird hotel off the highway that’s attached to nothing — okay, the fun here is that I'm getting paid to hang out with my friend.
Aliza (Platonic Love): Our conversations move pretty effortlessly from “life” to “Platonic Love” and back again. We can talk for hours and hours.
Thank you so much to today’s guests for taking the time to share! If you haven’t already, check out and to stay in-the-know on all things pop culture and celebrity memoirs.
And one last thing!
The most-popular link in Monday’s issue was the keychain ring-holder that Sam bought me a few years ago. We’ll see you on Monday with more links, plus a guest that Aliza and I’ve both admired for many years…
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Icons on icons!! Loved this one! - LM