Stratechery

“Actually, my life is very, very optimized around. I write three pieces a week. I do an interview and I do three podcasts and all my focus and energy needs to be on that.”

“And at six months actually hit my one year goal, which was a thousand subscribers, thousand true fans, you know, it was a 100,000 dollar run rate.”

“What you're paying for when you pay for me is you're paying for my ongoing production. I'm making a promise to you. I'm going to write something every day. And you're paying for that promise. You're not paying for the actual content. The content is a byproduct…”

“There was also no there were no mentions of AI keywords. Like, if Skynet's really waking up, are they not thinking about Dario Amade? Yeah, so no mentions of Stratechery, no mentions of Dwarkesh, no mentions of TSMC, Abilene, Amadei, TPU.”

“So no mentions of Stratechery, no mentions of Dwarkesh, no mentions of TSMC, Abilene, Amade, TPU.”

“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 …”

“You had Ben Thompson from Stratechery really show that like, oh, there's maybe an alternate model but it was almost like, always like a curiosity and something that was like annoying to actually build.”

“That's why I generally, as a rule, don't have VCs on to do the introductory interviews. Because it's kind of hard to get, like, a real take, because that, that, that is, you know, such a motivation.”

“We figured out, you know, through napkin math and guessing, basically, that he was already making more than a million dollars a year from that.”

“If you really wanted to maximize the value of strategic rate, it would just be ads and a venture fund for sure.”

“There are three ways to win in news today. So in the news business, there's basically three formulas that work. The first is world-class analysis. So it's not about breaking the story. It's about having the best take And point of view on the story, that's some…”

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

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

“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 …”

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

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

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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…”

“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 love Ben Thompson, but he keeps saying there's no algorithm in email, like, Ben, have you looked at your open rates? Because I've looked at mine, and yeah, there is a fucking algorithm.”

“There were tons of sites writing about technology, but the vast majority, all of them basically were writing about technology from a product perspective, from sort of product lens.”

“I start from business models. I start from trying to gain an understanding of a company's culture, you know, which I think goes back to a company's founding and the lessons it learned early on. And from that, look at what they do, look at what they might do, l…”

“I'm going to deliver this product consistently for free. It's going to always be there for free. And then if you want more, you can pay to get more. So I wanted the feeling of pain to be a positive feeling where you're getting, this is such great stuff. I want…”

“The metric that I used when figuring out when I wanted to actually launch it was I was looking at the number of visitors to the homepage on days that I didn't post. Because those were people that were searching out new content. They were going to trajectory sa…”

“And the, you know, I've never done any marketing, you know, and this is, I think a thing where the internet is, is very, A huge benefit for publishers if you have this sort of model, because the friction for my subscribers to tell other people to try it out is…”

“Once someone has given you 10 dollars, like they're going to carve out the time because they feel like they already paid for it. They better do it. And what's great about that is it, it's a forcing function for habit building where people get in the habit of r…”

“The way to truly scale, the truly have impact is not to just influence the people who read you directly. It's to influence the influencers as it were.”

“And, you know, at this point, for a long time, they're actually fifty-fifty, but at this point, my annual membership is actually a fair bit larger than my monthly membership, and I think that's great.”

“I am well aware of how expensive credit cards are. It's my largest expense by a lot.”

“My goal when I started trajectory was that in five years, it could become my job. It actually became my job in a year, and I am now five years in, and, Far more successful than I would have ever imagined or made possible.”

“The social media is viewed as such a bad thing for publications, but that's because they don't have the right business model. For me, social media is absolutely incredible. I mean, it's the most amazing channel that, that could ever be invented. I get to use i…”

“I could write the exact same things, the exact same sort of person I was, and I've come along 10 years earlier, or five years earlier, and would not be successful. Yeah, absolutely. I'd be writing for like, you know, some like, magazine or whatever, make, you …”

“The only one I think that really qualifies is Stratechery. I find it quite insightful, quite consistently, and occasionally even provocatively, and I don't know anybody else who really writes about tech in any way that can deliver insights consistently.”