About The Backstop.

I built The Backstop because I needed it, and the version I needed did not exist.

For the boring, autobiographical part: I'm Jacob. I'm a marketer by trade, a husband and father in Kentucky, and a builder by inclination — the kind of person who would rather design a system than buy another tool. My professional work is helping a large organization translate strategy into systems — campaigns, frameworks, operating models, the unglamorous infrastructure that turns intent into outcomes. I think in systems for a living, and I came to preparedness the same way most people do: by buying things and putting them in a closet, slowly, for years, and one day realizing the closet was not a plan.

What follows is the part most "about" pages skip: who is writing this, what they are using to write it, and what they will and will not do.

Who I am

A Kentucky household, a small one. We get a few weeks of ice storms a year and a long supply-chain memory of the spring of 2020. My wife and our daughter are the audience this site is written for first. They are who I think about when I decide whether to recommend something — whether the version of preparedness on the page is the kind a normal household can live with, or the kind that goes back in the closet next month.

I'm not a homesteader, a survivalist, or a former emergency manager. I'm a working professional who got tired of pretending a closet of supplies was the same thing as a plan, and built the thing I wanted instead.

Principles

How we pick what we recommend

Five rules. Every page on the site is built against them. The broader brand statement — what The Backstop stands for, who it is written for, and the lines we will not cross — lives on the Principles page.

1. Function first, brand second

   We start with the job to be done — light a room without blinding it, charge a phone four times, run a CPAP overnight — and work backward. The brand we recommend is whichever one does the job for the right price. Sometimes that's the famous one. Often it isn't.

2. Buy and use the budget tier ourselves

   Every gear breakdown is structured Budget / Mid / Premium. We buy the budget version with our own money and use it before we publish. The mid and premium tiers are tested where we can. Where we can't, we say so on the page rather than synthesizing a recommendation out of other people's reviews.

3. Test in the conditions we'd recommend it for

   A flashlight rated for cold gets tested in the cold. A water filter sized for two weeks gets run for two weeks. If a recommendation depends on a condition we can't replicate — a hurricane, a multi-day grid-down — we say what we did test and what we are extrapolating from.

4. Cite the source, not just the conclusion

   Numbers, doses, ratings, and survival windows all carry a citation. If a guide tells you "store one gallon of water per person per day," it links to the FEMA or Red Cross page that says so. The conclusions are ours. The underlying figures are not, and they should be checkable.

5. Update on a calendar, not by inspiration

   Every guide carries a "last updated" date. Gear pages get a full review every spring, before storm season. If something is recalled, deprecated, or replaced by a clearly-better version, the page is corrected within a week.

Sourcing

Where this information comes from

We pull from a hierarchy. The top of the hierarchy outranks the bottom every time.

Primary government and standards sources. FEMA, the CDC, NOAA, the National Weather Service, the US Army field manuals, the National Wildfire Coordinating Group, the EPA, and equivalent state agencies. Anything safety-critical — water, food storage, carbon monoxide, medication, evacuation — anchors to a primary source first.

Manufacturer documentation. Run-time charts, draw amps, fuel consumption, BTU ratings. We treat these as starting points, not endpoints. What a manufacturer publishes is typically the best-case rating, and we say what we measured ourselves when we can.

Named independent reviewers. Wirecutter, Project Farm, GearLab, and a small bench of category specialists we trust for specific domains. Their reviews are inputs, not endorsements. We re-evaluate the picks against our own framework before they show up here.

Lived experience. Mine, and the readers' when they write in. It is the strongest signal for things-you-actually-use-in-a-house and the weakest signal for rare emergencies. We label it as such and weight it accordingly.

Testing

How we test the gear we recommend

Every gear page has a "How we tested" section at the bottom. The short version, applied across the site:

We buy with our own money. No review units. No PR samples. No manufacturer-supplied loaners. The friction of paying for the thing is part of the recommendation.

We run the test against the use case. Budget headlamp for the closet kit — does it sit in a drawer for six months and still turn on? Mid-tier camp stove — does it boil two liters of water at thirty degrees? Premium battery — does it actually run the things you own?

We re-test on a cycle. Anything still on a recommended-gear page goes through a re-test in March, before storm season. Anything we no longer recommend gets a strikethrough and a one-line note explaining why.

We surface what we couldn't test. If we couldn't run the test we'd want — hurricane, sub-zero, a multi-day power outage — that limitation goes on the page. The reader gets to decide whether our partial test is enough for their use case.

Updates

How and when pages change

Every page on the site carries a publication date and an "updated" date. The two are not the same. A page published two years ago can have a current date if it has been re-verified; a page published last month can have a stale date if it hasn't.

Three update windows:

Spring review. March and April. Every gear page and every event playbook with seasonal relevance is re-read end-to-end before the first storm season of the year.

Hot fixes. Within one week of a recall, a discontinued product, a meaningful change in expert guidance, or a reader-flagged error. Hot fixes ride on a short note at the top of the page and, when material, a one-line correction in the next newsletter.

Quiet revisions. Typo fixes, link rot, small clarifications. These move the "updated" date but do not get called out.

Limits

What we are not

We have opinions. We also have limits.

1. No fear marketing

   Preparedness as an industry has a corner that runs on fear, and that corner makes the rest of the category less trustworthy by association. We won't manufacture urgency to drive an open rate.

2. No pay-for-placement

   No brand pays The Backstop for a recommendation. Affiliate links on this site are labeled inline, and an affiliate relationship has not changed and will not change a pick. If a product earns its place on a page through the normal evaluation, an affiliate link on top of that is fine. If it has not earned the place, no commission gets it there.

3. No upsells inside the content

   The site is free. The newsletter is free. The checklists are free. If The Backstop ever sells a product — a printed guide, a physical kit — it will be obviously a product, separately marked, and the free content will not get worse because of it.

4. No anonymous voice

   Every page has a writer attached to it. Most of them, for now, are written by me. As the site grows, that may change. The byline will never go away.

Disclosures

Money, affiliates, and what we owe you

The Backstop is independently run and self-funded. There is no investor and no parent company.

The Backstop uses affiliate links — currently through Amazon Associates, with REI and category-specialist retailers added as their programs approve. Those links are labeled inline, and any commission earned has no effect on what we recommend or in what order. The most-recommended product on the site as of this writing pays the smallest commission. That is on purpose.

We do not run banner ads, sponsored posts, or paid newsletter inserts. If that ever changes, it will be announced in advance and surfaced here.

Analytics

How we measure the site

The Backstop uses Plausible Analytics — a cookieless, privacy-respecting tool hosted in the EU — to count pageviews, newsletter signups, gear-link clicks, and checklist completions. Plausible does not use cookies, does not fingerprint visitors, does not collect personal information, and does not share data with third parties. If your browser sends a Do Not Track signal, the tracker does not load at all.

The analytics script is served from thebackstop.co rather than from a third-party domain. The aggregate data still ends up at Plausible. The point is that there is one less external service touching your browser when you load a page on this site.

The reason we measure at all is to know which guides and checklists are useful enough to keep building on. It is not to know who you are. There is no Google Analytics on this site, and there will not be.

Corrections

When we get it wrong

Two things happen.

For material errors — anything that could affect a household's safety or a buying decision — the page is corrected within a week, a correction note is added at the bottom of the page, and the next newsletter carries a one-line errata note.

For non-material updates — clarifications, refinements, better phrasing — the "updated" date moves but no separate notice is published.

Reader-flagged corrections are credited on the page when the reader is comfortable being named, and silently when they aren't.

The edges

What this site is not built to replace

The Backstop is a generalist field guide for household readiness. It is not medical advice, legal advice, or structural engineering. For anything medical — medication, dosing, conditions, kits for specific diagnoses — the doctor outranks the website. For anything structural — your house, your generator interlock, your wood stove — the licensed pro outranks the website. For anything legal — firearms across state lines, controlled substances in a go-bag, evacuation rights — the attorney outranks the website.

The geographic baseline is Kentucky. The principles are portable. The specific gear and seasonal advice may not be, and we mark the places we know they aren't.

If something on the site reads as more authoritative than it should — overconfident, underqualified — write in and tell me. That kind of feedback is how the methodology stays honest.

How to reach me

If you've read something on the site and disagreed with it, found a mistake, or want to share a story from your own household — reply to any newsletter. Every email lands in my inbox, and I read every one. The address is also at hello@thebackstop.co if you'd rather skip the newsletter loop.

I do not respond fast. I try to respond honestly.

— Jacob