Ben Thompson: evaluation

Transcript context

…I've been thinking this whole time. I'm like, we have not talked about email once. My mentality has always been, Stratechery is a website first and foremost, but it's like, look, I'll deliver you this extra stuff via email. It will also be on the website on the sidebar. It'll be archived there, but you're going to get an email. It worked out in the long run. In the short run, though, I had a one day goal for new subscribers. I guess a two-day goal, because this site wasn't operable for the first day. I had a one day goal, a one week goal, a one month goal, and I failed to reach all of them. And failed pretty significantly, honestly, to reach all of them. I'm there, I've given up this six-figure job. I'm living in Taiwan, business school debt, and an idea that I thought could work but did not seem to be working very well. It was very, very stressful. I stopped paying all my credit cards because, especially back then, Taiwan was very cash-centric, so I needed to preserve cash. I was not sleeping. I also watched a podcast at the time, which was Exponent with James Allworth. I'm writing, as I mentioned before, seven times a week plus doing a podcast. I'm doing all the editing for the podcast, all the production, and all this stuff. I thought I'm going to have to go teach English again, to pay the bills at the same time. Then I think the first month, when I tore all that out, I screwed up the subscription, so I double charged a whole bunch of people to process all these refunds as well as customer support. It was pretty tough. I launched in April. This is April 2014, 2015?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.