Ben Thompson
Founder and writer of Stratechery, the original paid tech newsletter
Where to hear and read about Ben Thompson1 episode or test
Ben Thompson is the founder and writer of Stratechery, the original paid tech newsletter, which he built into a business that earns millions by publishing every day. The thing most worth learning from him is to feed each day's news into one evolving model of how the world works and publish against a daily deadline, so that volume and stories do the work.
the most important article you write is the second article someone reads
How He Started the Paid Newsletter Trend — Ben Thompson
Ben Thompson: the story and the lessons
1How Ben Thompson came to start Stratechery
Thompson went from teaching English in Taiwan to an MBA at 27. His wife had told him to work in tech. The first-day case list at business school had no technology companies.
His professor said the principles apply to all industries. Thompson disagreed: zero marginal cost and zero transaction cost mean Google can serve 7 billion people without a person involved. He later worked at Microsoft.
His first Stratechery article challenged Clayton Christensen's history of Apple. He argues Apple broke the rules of the disruption theory, and that the popular Mac versus Windows story is wrong. DOS and the PC market existed before the Mac shipped, and the iPhone came before Android.
He calls Christensen the biggest influence on him, and says a mistaken core fact can ruin a whole analysis. The piece opens by saying Christensen got something wrong and closes by saying what.
He launched in 2013 with about 380 Twitter followers and no favors. Easy credit card subscriptions had just become possible. Stripe started in 2009 and launched its product in 2011.
Social media then rewarded sharing interesting links, which is much harder now. Well-known VCs told him the paid version wouldn't work. He says it is not obviously good career advice, and that writing your own site takes some narcissism.
As a student editor he wrote only where his paper had authority. At the Daily Herald he refused national issues because nobody cares what a student paper says about them. The paper wrote daily editorials on campus issues instead.
The paper judged that it met four of its five objectives. The last-minute rhythm of those editorials is the one he still works to. He avoids partisan picks today because he wants influence on technology, where he is credible.
2How Thompson runs a one-person daily media business
Thompson built a deadline into every single day. He calls himself a procrastinator, sets alarms for everything and writes in the late afternoon once panic sets in. A day with a weak piece costs him sleep.
His college thesis was a single 36-hour run. The result is roughly 170 to 200 public pieces a year, which he puts at the equivalent of 50 or 60 books in a decade. He fears open-ended time and has never written a book.
He treats volume as a strategy, not a side effect. Readers say they want good work, but they reward the steady flow. He charges $15 a month for updates and an interview.
Free articles find customers and paid updates serve those who stay. A once-a-week writer can't do both. He accepts that some pieces could use another round of editing. "I do think that volume or quantity is underrated."
For four or five years he was the whole company. He did his own taxes, accounting and email. His only costs were credit card fees.
Media is scalable on the back end and not on the front end. Writing every day is the real cost, which makes media a poor investment and an opening for people who can keep producing.
Most of his subscribers are now annual, which frees him. One bad update can be made up over a year. The best cohort subscribed monthly, turned off auto renew, then switched to annual in the first month.
Churn is very low, and lapsed readers still get the free articles. He doesn't want to understand his business too much: as long as the number isn't going down, things are good.
CEOs read him because he has no reason to flatter them. Everyone around a CEO has some incentive to say what they want to hear. Thompson only reads their reports and listens to their earnings calls.
Pushback has come from marketing staff and senior VPs, never from a CEO. A payment processor once told him one of three double-charged subscribers was the CEO of a top-five Fortune 500 company, and he tries not to know who subscribes.
He says a small audience that pays well is a good outcome. At $100 a year, a thousand subscribers bring in $100,000. He has subscribers in over 100 countries.
The internet favors a few huge platforms and many niches, and the middle gets squeezed. The addressable market is billions of people, so a small share is enough.
He keeps his schedule problems away from his readers. Readers signed up for an email every day, so his own busyness is his problem. In summer he wakes at 3 a.m. in Taiwan to write.
He skips interviews in July and early August and publishes three days a week. He says many writers are too hesitant to tell customers they must pay to read.
3How Thompson writes each piece
He feeds each day's news into one evolving model of the world. He thinks of his framework as a machine: news goes in and a conclusion comes out. Surprising news signals a missing piece, and the machine failing is where his bigger articles come from.
Writing is mostly writing down conclusions he already holds, which is how he can write thousands of pieces. "when a piece of news happens I feed it in the machine and out pops sort of like a conclusion"
He quotes his own older pieces instead of rewriting them. Stratechery is a journal of his understanding. When he found he had already made a point about Facebook's network constraints years earlier, he reused it because he could not say it better.
People on Twitter make fun of him for it. He is evolving one understanding, not writing a thousand new short stories a day.
He waits for a real-world trigger before publishing a theory. Pure theoretical articulations usually don't resonate with readers. He keeps an outline, such as the relative risks of the hyperscalers, until news makes it worth writing.
This is also why he finds a book or anthology hard: his insights are anchored in time and place.
Thompson opens analysis with a story and spends his hours on the opening. His best pieces have a beginning, a path and a resolution. The Disney Charter standoff piece opened with the first commercial satellite launch before moving into carriage disputes.
Once the first few paragraphs work, the rest follows. Weak openings mark his less interesting articles, and some ship anyway because they had to be published. Many imitators had equally good insights and flamed out.
When stuck, he starts writing to find out what he thinks. He often lacks an opening because he does not yet know his own position. Writing forces the thought into final form, like filling in the gaps between bullets on a slide.
He says it also makes him a better podcaster, since every claim must be correct and structured.
He ties each piece back with a thread that pays off. Strong updates plant something in part one and resolve it in parts two and three. In one earnings piece he opened with Microsoft and returned to a Google capex point he had held back.
For conclusions he pastes the introduction at the bottom of the draft to keep it in view. If the two don't connect, he adds guideposts earlier or scraps the intro.
He reads every piece aloud before publishing. He began because each article is also a podcast. Stumbling over a sentence shows where it reads badly.
His typo rate fell to about one a month, from many more.
He made the second visit the one that counts. He called the second article a reader sees the most important, since that is when they decide to expect quality. A custom font, hand-drawn sketches and an orange color let a returning visitor recognize the site.
The aim was that when something happened and he did not write about it, readers would feel disappointed.
He protected his flow state by working away from the kids. He holds the whole structure of a piece in his head while he types, so interruptions break it. While the kids were young he rented another place to work.
His wife's verdict, after he arrived at dinner catatonic, was that he needed an office. He works at home again now that the kids are older.
4Thompson's rules for credible analysis
He states his view directly and refuses to hedge. His style is A happened because of B, because of C. An analyst is not a stenographer, so hedging every claim makes writing dull.
He rates himself 0% agreeable and says successful people online are probably highly disagreeable. "you got to go for it"
He corrects mistakes fast and shows which step went wrong. He follows John Gruber's rule that the best way to always be right is to correct yourself immediately. He walks readers through the link in his chain that was mistaken.
Getting things wrong is inevitable when writing every day. His media analysis is wrong more often than his tech analysis, because Hollywood is a city of big personalities.
He adds the analysis that fills the space between the slides. Companies supply the PowerPoints, and his value is what sits in the middle. He watches the first five minutes of a keynote because the frame a company picks says more than its products.
Repeating the slides or listing every possibility adds nothing. He says what he thinks is in the middle and owns it if he is wrong.
He guards against confirmation bias in his own model. Because he plugs news into a worldview he already holds, he checks that the actual numbers and specifications match the narrative.
He accepts overcorrecting, and sometimes being wrong from looking too hard for a surprise, as the price of staying honest.
He reads a whole book on the morning he needs it. He reads on purpose, not for leisure, and leans heavily on the book in that day's article. Many of his best pieces are historical, since a company's culture traces back to its founding.
One day of intense research on how GPUs work paid off years later when AI and Nvidia took over.
He writes what interests him, and nearly burned out when he didn't. In 2019 and 2020 he wrote about antitrust and Congressional hearings and found it soul sucking. The work was not the problem, the topic was.
He says writing to cater to customers is a recipe for burnout. Writing what he cares about is what sustains a daily schedule for years.
He tells writers to make their own pond. Writing about the big five tech companies puts you against him and millions of free opinions on Twitter. Neil Cybart owns Apple, and Casey Newton covers social networks.
Thompson thinks someone should cover Amazon daily, and someone Google. Online you compete with every writer in the world, so geography no longer protects you.
How He Started the Paid Newsletter Trend — Ben Thompson
Ben Thompson explains how a daily deadline, huge volume and stories with a beginning and an ending built a paid newsletter that earns millions. The technique worth hearing is his habit of feeding each day's news into a standing model of how the world works, so he can write every day without starting from scratch.
Thompson went from teaching English in Taiwan to an MBA at 27. His wife had told him to work in tech. The first-day case list at business school had no technology companies.
His professor said the principles apply to all industries. Thompson disagreed: zero marginal cost and zero transaction cost mean Google can serve 7 billion people without a person involved. He later worked at Microsoft.
His first Stratechery article challenged Clayton Christensen's history of Apple. He argues Apple broke the rules of the disruption theory, and that the popular Mac versus Windows story is wrong. DOS and the PC market existed before the Mac shipped, and the iPhone came before Android.
He calls Christensen the biggest influence on him, and says a mistaken core fact can ruin a whole analysis. The piece opens by saying Christensen got something wrong and closes by saying what.
He launched in 2013 with about 380 Twitter followers and no favors. Easy credit card subscriptions had just become possible. Stripe started in 2009 and launched its product in 2011.
Social media then rewarded sharing interesting links, which is much harder now. Well-known VCs told him the paid version wouldn't work. He says it is not obviously good career advice, and that writing your own site takes some narcissism.
As a student editor he wrote only where his paper had authority. At the Daily Herald he refused national issues because nobody cares what a student paper says about them. The paper wrote daily editorials on campus issues instead.
The paper judged that it met four of its five objectives. The last-minute rhythm of those editorials is the one he still works to. He avoids partisan picks today because he wants influence on technology, where he is credible.
Thompson built a deadline into every single day. He calls himself a procrastinator, sets alarms for everything and writes in the late afternoon once panic sets in. A day with a weak piece costs him sleep.
His college thesis was a single 36-hour run. The result is roughly 170 to 200 public pieces a year, which he puts at the equivalent of 50 or 60 books in a decade. He fears open-ended time and has never written a book.
He treats volume as a strategy, not a side effect. Readers say they want good work, but they reward the steady flow. He charges $15 a month for updates and an interview.
Free articles find customers and paid updates serve those who stay. A once-a-week writer can't do both. He accepts that some pieces could use another round of editing. "I do think that volume or quantity is underrated."
For four or five years he was the whole company. He did his own taxes, accounting and email. His only costs were credit card fees.
Media is scalable on the back end and not on the front end. Writing every day is the real cost, which makes media a poor investment and an opening for people who can keep producing.
Most of his subscribers are now annual, which frees him. One bad update can be made up over a year. The best cohort subscribed monthly, turned off auto renew, then switched to annual in the first month.
Churn is very low, and lapsed readers still get the free articles. He doesn't want to understand his business too much: as long as the number isn't going down, things are good.
CEOs read him because he has no reason to flatter them. Everyone around a CEO has some incentive to say what they want to hear. Thompson only reads their reports and listens to their earnings calls.
Pushback has come from marketing staff and senior VPs, never from a CEO. A payment processor once told him one of three double-charged subscribers was the CEO of a top-five Fortune 500 company, and he tries not to know who subscribes.
He says a small audience that pays well is a good outcome. At $100 a year, a thousand subscribers bring in $100,000. He has subscribers in over 100 countries.
The internet favors a few huge platforms and many niches, and the middle gets squeezed. The addressable market is billions of people, so a small share is enough.
He keeps his schedule problems away from his readers. Readers signed up for an email every day, so his own busyness is his problem. In summer he wakes at 3 a.m. in Taiwan to write.
He skips interviews in July and early August and publishes three days a week. He says many writers are too hesitant to tell customers they must pay to read.
He feeds each day's news into one evolving model of the world. He thinks of his framework as a machine: news goes in and a conclusion comes out. Surprising news signals a missing piece, and the machine failing is where his bigger articles come from.
Writing is mostly writing down conclusions he already holds, which is how he can write thousands of pieces. "when a piece of news happens I feed it in the machine and out pops sort of like a conclusion"
He quotes his own older pieces instead of rewriting them. Stratechery is a journal of his understanding. When he found he had already made a point about Facebook's network constraints years earlier, he reused it because he could not say it better.
People on Twitter make fun of him for it. He is evolving one understanding, not writing a thousand new short stories a day.
He waits for a real-world trigger before publishing a theory. Pure theoretical articulations usually don't resonate with readers. He keeps an outline, such as the relative risks of the hyperscalers, until news makes it worth writing.
This is also why he finds a book or anthology hard: his insights are anchored in time and place.
Thompson opens analysis with a story and spends his hours on the opening. His best pieces have a beginning, a path and a resolution. The Disney Charter standoff piece opened with the first commercial satellite launch before moving into carriage disputes.
Once the first few paragraphs work, the rest follows. Weak openings mark his less interesting articles, and some ship anyway because they had to be published. Many imitators had equally good insights and flamed out.
When stuck, he starts writing to find out what he thinks. He often lacks an opening because he does not yet know his own position. Writing forces the thought into final form, like filling in the gaps between bullets on a slide.
He says it also makes him a better podcaster, since every claim must be correct and structured.
He ties each piece back with a thread that pays off. Strong updates plant something in part one and resolve it in parts two and three. In one earnings piece he opened with Microsoft and returned to a Google capex point he had held back.
For conclusions he pastes the introduction at the bottom of the draft to keep it in view. If the two don't connect, he adds guideposts earlier or scraps the intro.
He reads every piece aloud before publishing. He began because each article is also a podcast. Stumbling over a sentence shows where it reads badly.
His typo rate fell to about one a month, from many more.
He made the second visit the one that counts. He called the second article a reader sees the most important, since that is when they decide to expect quality. A custom font, hand-drawn sketches and an orange color let a returning visitor recognize the site.
The aim was that when something happened and he did not write about it, readers would feel disappointed.
He protected his flow state by working away from the kids. He holds the whole structure of a piece in his head while he types, so interruptions break it. While the kids were young he rented another place to work.
His wife's verdict, after he arrived at dinner catatonic, was that he needed an office. He works at home again now that the kids are older.
He states his view directly and refuses to hedge. His style is A happened because of B, because of C. An analyst is not a stenographer, so hedging every claim makes writing dull.
He rates himself 0% agreeable and says successful people online are probably highly disagreeable. "you got to go for it"
He corrects mistakes fast and shows which step went wrong. He follows John Gruber's rule that the best way to always be right is to correct yourself immediately. He walks readers through the link in his chain that was mistaken.
Getting things wrong is inevitable when writing every day. His media analysis is wrong more often than his tech analysis, because Hollywood is a city of big personalities.
He adds the analysis that fills the space between the slides. Companies supply the PowerPoints, and his value is what sits in the middle. He watches the first five minutes of a keynote because the frame a company picks says more than its products.
Repeating the slides or listing every possibility adds nothing. He says what he thinks is in the middle and owns it if he is wrong.
He guards against confirmation bias in his own model. Because he plugs news into a worldview he already holds, he checks that the actual numbers and specifications match the narrative.
He accepts overcorrecting, and sometimes being wrong from looking too hard for a surprise, as the price of staying honest.
He reads a whole book on the morning he needs it. He reads on purpose, not for leisure, and leans heavily on the book in that day's article. Many of his best pieces are historical, since a company's culture traces back to its founding.
One day of intense research on how GPUs work paid off years later when AI and Nvidia took over.
He writes what interests him, and nearly burned out when he didn't. In 2019 and 2020 he wrote about antitrust and Congressional hearings and found it soul sucking. The work was not the problem, the topic was.
He says writing to cater to customers is a recipe for burnout. Writing what he cares about is what sustains a daily schedule for years.
He tells writers to make their own pond. Writing about the big five tech companies puts you against him and millions of free opinions on Twitter. Neil Cybart owns Apple, and Casey Newton covers social networks.
Thompson thinks someone should cover Amazon daily, and someone Google. Online you compete with every writer in the world, so geography no longer protects you.