Ben Thompson: commitment

Transcript context

…You've worked with an outside development agency to custom build software for which you are the only user to publish Stratechery now, right? At the beginning, it was all me. I built my own page. I did all that integration myself. I'm not really a developer, so it was very hacky. Actually, one of my nightmares was when I launched the paid product. In Stratechery, I messed around the format a little bit at the beginning. Actually, the real pioneer, who I should mention was Andrew Sullivan, had this manic posting schedule, like tens of posts a day. He didn't have a team to help him with the daily dish. He switched to a subscription when I think he left the Atlantic. It was successful. He quickly was doing a million dollars in revenue a year. He maintained that manic posting schedule that made sense in an advertising driven world where you want people always coming back and getting lots of impressions. The paywall was super loose. It was like 30 posts, and then you hit a paywall or something. The reality is what happened was he burned out. I think he had some health issues, and he ended up leaving. It was funny because when he left, everyone's like, blogging is dead, it's finished, it was a failure. I looked at him and I thought, I think this was actually a huge success. One of the problems was he had this posting schedule and system, and then he tried to drop a paywall on top of it. When I thought about Stratechery, I wanted to do the opposite, where I wanted a subscription to not feel like from a customer perspective that I was taking stuff away, but that I was giving them more just from a psychological perspective. Once I realized I definitely want to do the subscription model, I started becoming super disciplined about never writing more than twice a week. This was back in 2013 where I was doing Stratechery, because my plan was for subscribers, if they subscribe they'll get more. It would be like an exciting purchase as opposed to hitting a paywall, this sucks. And your audience that you are building up before putting the paywall in would still keep getting the same.…

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