Before Substack, There Was Ben
He started a blog in Taiwan in 2013. His employer was Automattic - the WordPress people - who gave him a $5,000 home office stipend. He used it to build a desk. He sat down at that desk and typed. Eleven years later, 40,000 people pay him $120 a year to keep typing.
Substack's founders described their entire business in a pitch deck as "Stratechery in a box." Ben Thompson was not in the room. He didn't need to be. He had already proved the concept.
Thompson grew up in a Wisconsin town of about 2,000 people. His parents were ministers. The local pastor was typically the most educated person in the community. He considered Bible college. He didn't apply to any Ivy League schools despite having the grades. Going to the University of Wisconsin-Madison was, in his words, "a big act of rebellion."
Before grad school, he moved to Taiwan to teach English for one year. He stayed for twenty-two. While there, he built classroom management software that got deployed chain-wide across a network of English schools. That was before he'd held a single professional tech job. He had not yet worked at Apple. He had not yet worked at Microsoft. He had not yet founded anything.
Northwestern gave him a dual degree - MBA from Kellogg and a Master of Engineering Management from McCormick. He interned at Apple University, the internal school Apple runs to teach executives how to think. He then joined Microsoft on the Windows Apps team. He started writing Stratechery while still employed. He left in April 2014 with about 1,000 subscribers. By November of that year he had the next thousand.
The math became simple and replicable. 40,000 subscribers at $120/year is $4.8 million before podcast revenue, speaking fees, or bundle pricing. He has no investors. He has no staff. He has a desk in a home office - upgraded from that original $5,000 setup - and he writes.