Fuel HOUDINI Magazine’s Underground Rise
Donation protected
Right now, 10,000 people a week are reading HOUDINI—but our DIY engine is running on fumes.
HOUDINI Magazine isn’t just a magazine—the fastest-growing voice for the working-class under-30 crowd, built from the ground up by people who are done with corporate gatekeepers. Since kicking off on Neocities in June 2023, we’ve skyrocketed to 340,000 unique views, with over 10,000 visitors this week alone—five times what we had just three months ago. We’re on pace to hit 50,000 monthly readers by summer. But here’s the catch: this growth is outpacing our resources. Without $2,000 right now, we can’t keep feeding this fire, and the community we’ve built—130 members on Discord, influencers hyping us up, and a fiercely loyal under-25 crowd—will watch it flicker out. This isn’t a dream; it’s a freight train already rolling, built by real people for real people.
Where Your $2,000 Goes
Our audience is starving for more, and here’s how your support keeps them fed:
- Zine Printing: $2,000 gets us printers, card stock, and shipping to turn digital zines into physical keepsakes. We want to be able to send a monthly box of zines as well as offer publishing services for individual zines. It's a DIY operation, and we hope to keep it that way. Our “sneakernet” puts real zines on streets, at shows, in libraries—no corporate gatekeepers, just us.
- Freelance Talent: We're paying writers ($25-$50 per piece) to expand our coverage—gaming breakdowns, film essays, and cultural deep dives. Event coverage, tales from the basement beatdown show, reviews of A24's latest and greatest. Deep dives into artists, in depth album reviews. Fashion posting, art posting and political coverage from a working class youth angle.
- Paperback Runs: Printing 100-200 copies of reader-submitted weird tales and poetry ($2-$3 per book). Working class pulp fiction, weird tales, horror and in-between. If there's a modern Robert E Howard or Lovecraft out there, HOUDINI wants to be the one publishing them.
- Radio Gear: Hard drives, mics, and podcast equipment to get HOUDINI Radio going. We are looking to invest in a podcast microphone, pop filter, sound board as well. We'll also need to pay for the cost of launching our label on Bandcamp, as well as hosting costs for the server. We have several DJs and Podcasters already on board for this! This is your station—artist-driven, audience-voted.
- Research Depth: A financial cushion lets us craft long-form, hard-hitting pieces our audience craves but we can’t sustain without support. We are looking to work on long form, multi-part breakdowns and research intensive projects.
- Site Upgrades: A compliance audit to keep our hand-coded site accessible as we scale. We want to make so that people with screen readers and other accessibility tools can use our site, and that we are meeting all industry standards. Leveling up from hand-coded. We are also working on releasing our site's framework "Anti-Style" as paid software, if this Gofundme is fully funded, we will release it as free open source software.
- Gaming Boost: Extra cash to collaborate with indie devs, maybe even stepping into publishing down the line. We know several indie game developers and with our audience, limited release physical games, as well as publishing on Steam and other platforms is not out of the question. More of a stretch goal.
Be Part of It
Back us on this GoFundMe, and you’re not just donating—you’re joining HOUDINI. Your funding today fuels the future for 40,000 readers, Discord diehards, and influencers already in our corner. We’re anti-corporate, DIY, and built by a generation that’s over algorithms. Please share this with friends—text it to your band’s bassist, add it to a group chat, or pass it along to someone who’d get it.
New to HOUDINI? Welcome! This is your space for underground culture. Contribute, spread the word, and let’s keep building together. This isn’t a business pitch—it’s a call to water the rose of culture so it can bloom.
Organizer
Erik Houdini
Organizer
San Antonio, TX