Stratechery

“Substack's seed deck says Shackery in a box. That was their pitch.”

“Half my subscribers now listen instead of read, which is amazing.”

“In fact, if someone comes back and if they are just over the top rude or disrespectful or insinuating things about me, I will not just cancel their subscription. I will refund them their entire purchase and say, please just never come back.”

“In November, I put a little post out. First, I simplified my model. I said, no more of this 300 level, cheap level, one price and one product. That's all you're getting. And then number two, I'm like, hey, I got a thousand subscribers. Business model works. Yo…”

“Every link to myself in a strategy email is tokenized and that token goes one link deep. So even if that email is forwarded to you can go read old stuff.”

“What I was wrong about is that the vast majority of people thought I would fail and go out of business. They didn't want to lose their money. And so they didn't subscribe, but once it was clear, I would be an ongoing entity. Then like, oh, okay, I guess my mon…”

“If you produce super highly differentiated content, that is something that. Is not going to appeal to the whole world, but to the people who like it, they'll really like it, and if you have that sort of audience, you should maximize your revenue per user, and …”

“So if a CEO wants to talk to me, it has to be on the record and it's going to be the full transcript and the full interview is going to be available to my subscribers. And I want my subscribers to have all the same information I do.”

“The reality is interviews don't drive subscriptions. And so I do it because again, I want to push the tech product. I want people to use my podcast product.”

“I really try to not break news. That's actually an explicit choice on my side.”

“I think my audience at this point is like 70% annual subscriptions.”

“CEOs are surrounded by people telling them what they want to hear. That's their incentives, right? The reason why the VP is attacking me is because he's worried I'm going to make the VP look bad in front of the CEO, right? That's the concern. Whereas the CEO i…”

“For a long time, my percentage of subscribers actually followed was a fixed percentage of my Twitter followers.”

“Niches are way bigger than you think they are. So if you think you're writing about a niche topic, the internet being a global community of four-ish billion people means that any little niche, there might be six people in your geography that care about it in …”