The Genius of Ben Thompson - 10 years after he founded Stratechery

A media analyst out of Taiwan started a Newsletter revolution.

Ben Thompson started doing paid Newsletters around 5 years before Substack got going. It was in 2013, just five years after Kevin Kelly’s ‘1000 True Fans’ viral blog proclamation. Fast forward 10 years, in 2023, and even Wordpress is now doubling down on paid Newsletters.

Before Substack tried to prove to the world that paid subscriptions were scalable (over years), Ben Thompson had already done it. I found this video inspiration in terms of the “audacity of hope” argument with regards to paid subscriptions:

“To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.” - Kevin Kelly (2008)

Watch the video on YouTube

Today there are free and paid peer recommendation systems that enable Newsletter creators to find an audience organically outside of the limiting algorithms that favor sensationalistic short hits. On Substack, beehiiv, SparkLoop, ConvertKit, Refind and in more places.

Pioneers like Ben Thompson, who founded Stratechery, were early solo-entrepreneurs in the Newsletter economy that influenced the founding of Substack among other things. Ben has gone on dozens of Podcasts throughout the years, where you can learn more about the story.

Ben realized that there was a demand for content like he could produce, and grew his Newsletter paid subscriptions to thousands, before platforms even came to make it easier for the masses. It can take years to scale a Newsletter, even now with all of these recommendation channels where you can super-charge your list (which you own).

Read about Ben on Wikipedia. So why am I talking about Ben today? It’s been 10 years since he launched his Newsletter. Congrats to Ben. Before building a Newsletter he was a growth engineer and before that worked in product at Microsoft for a brief stint.

Ben realized also an important point, high frequency content is more immersive, so he was writing four times a week, three paid and one free. (according to the video interview above). Fast forward today and he has various podcast endeavors as well. He does not require a Substack, he does it all and built it all himself, he’s a real solo entrepreneur who had to figure it out before it became easy.

So where did Ben get all of his success or fans from? His LinkedIn appears relatively inactive. Meanwhile on Twitter he has 230,000 followers. Something had given Substack the early idea that Twitter was where “network effect” primarily occurred for writers and their target audience. Years before Substack took Twitter’s “Notes” name for their Twitter clone product and poked the bear that is Elon Musk.

So when Twitter started to punish links from Substack, Ben Thompson was not impacted at all. Why? Because he owns his own platform, revenue, growth - I mean it’s probably just a wordpress. Those early blogger entrepreneurs realized you need to be independent.

Stratechery stands for the intersection of “strategy” and “technology” together. So Ben also understood the Venn approach to writing at the intersection of things where there is an actual demand and relatively large total addressable market. You will find he often writes about big technology, companies like Microsoft, Google and so forth.

Let’s continue listening to how he explains it, listen on YouTube.

He often writes about how media has been impacted by Technology. Wikipedia even calls him a media analyst. So he’s really talking about technology at the intersection of business and media. So there’s a lot of potential audiences who might be interested in his work, his niche is surprisingly broad if you extend to all the people who work in technology at big companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple and so forth, which appears to this entire segment of engineers, managers and executives - who can easily afford a $12 a month subscription!

A lot of success in the Newsletter economy can be attributed for how long a Newsletter has been active. So on Substack Creators who have been around let’s say two years longer, will be making a lot more revenue than somebody who is relatively new. This is because it takes a lot of work, persistence, marketing and time to scale paid subscriptions. (there is no disclaimer about this, you sort of have to realize it for yourself).

HINT:

Did you know? You can embed graphs and infographics now directly in your Substack? Data visualization: Writers can now insert interactive charts, maps, and tables into posts with Datawrapper.

I think Ben Thompson is important in many ways for the ownership economy and his media analysis is somewhat interesting in the evolution of the internet. People like Ben understand unbundling, aggregation, network effect, curation and bundling of hybrid models for revenue generation.

Ben Thompson was making millions of dollars before Substack came into being. His early dialogues with Bill Bishop. Ben telling Bill that he was leaving money on the table offering too much free content is a reminder to us all.