Justin
Gage

Most people who work in or around technology carry a quiet anxiety they rarely admit to. They nod in meetings when engineers talk about microservices and Kubernetes clusters. They pretend to understand what "the API is down" actually means. They assume the gap between their understanding and their colleagues' expertise is a permanent condition - something you're just born with or not.

Justin Gage has made a career out of that gap. Not exploiting it. Closing it.

Since January 2020, his newsletter Technically has been the most useful thing in the inboxes of product managers, consultants, salespeople, operations leads, and career changers who work alongside engineers but never quite spoke their language. With 72,000+ subscribers and a ranking of #51 in Technology on Substack, Gage has built something rare: a newsletter that people genuinely need rather than merely enjoy.

By day, he serves as VP of Developer Marketing at Amplify Partners, a venture capital firm that bills itself as the "first investor for technical founders." The job is a natural extension of his superpower - helping technical things reach the right people, in the right language, at the right time. But it's Technically that tells you who Justin Gage really is: someone who decided the best way to help the non-technical world understand software was to write, week after week, the newsletter he wished had existed five years before.

Making Software Make Sense

The pitch for Technically is deceptively simple: software and AI explained for people who don't write code. But the execution requires something harder than technical knowledge. It requires the ability to remember not knowing - to locate exactly the right level of abstraction for someone who has heard the word "cloud" a thousand times but still can't confidently explain what lives there.

Gage's background made him uniquely suited to this. A data scientist and growth professional who studied at NYU Stern School of Business, he was never a traditional software engineer. He spent time at companies like Algorithmia, DigitalOcean, and eventually Retool's growth team - close enough to engineering to understand it, far enough away to remember what it felt like not to. That experience is the whole product.

The newsletter runs a free tier (one issue per month) and a paid tier at $8/month or $80/year for two issues monthly. When the newsletter hit 30,000 subscribers, it was generating roughly $160,000 in annual recurring revenue - numbers that suggest a sustainable media business built on genuine utility rather than audience gaming.

The content itself covers software engineering fundamentals, infrastructure concepts, AI developments, and the mechanics of how technology actually works - all translated into language that treats readers as intelligent adults who simply didn't happen to study computer science. No condescension. No unnecessary jargon. No glossy optimism about what technology will someday do. Just honest, clear explanation of how things work now.

Zero Paid Ads. All Signal.

The conventional playbook for growing a newsletter involves paid acquisition, referral loops, guest podcasts, and social media saturation. Gage largely ignored it. Technically grew through word-of-mouth, cross-newsletter recommendations with complementary publications, and the kind of organic sharing that happens when something is genuinely more useful than anything else in a category.

He also built tools that turned the newsletter into a resource, not just a publication. A public glossary of technical terms made Technically a reference destination, not just a read-and-forget inbox item. These decisions compounded over time into the kind of loyal readership that refers colleagues, shares issues internally at companies, and keeps renewal rates high enough to sustain the business.

The growth trajectory tells the story: 10,000 subscribers after 18 months of consistent writing. Then momentum kicked in. 20,000 within six months of that. Then 30,000, partly on the strength of cross-promotions and that watershed IBM recommendation. Then 50,000. Then 72,000 and still climbing.

What Gage built is a masterclass in the difference between growth and traction. Growth is getting subscribers. Traction is getting subscribers who tell their entire sales team about you at IBM conferences.

When Amplify Called

In early 2022, Gage left Retool's growth team and joined Amplify Partners as Director of Developer Marketing - a role that has since grown to VP. Amplify describes itself as the "first investor for technical founders," backing early-stage companies building tools for software engineers, data teams, and the infrastructure that the modern software world runs on.

The fit is obvious when you think about it. Amplify's portfolio founders build things that need to be understood by developers. Gage's entire career is about making technical things understandable. He brings the same instincts that built Technically - authentic communication, respect for audience intelligence, and a refusal to let jargon substitute for explanation - to the portfolio companies that Amplify backs.

The combination of building a significant independent newsletter and working inside an early-stage VC firm gives Gage a perspective that most people in either role don't have. He understands the creator economy from the inside - not as a theorist or investor, but as someone who has done the unsexy, consistent work of writing the same type of thing, week after week, for years.

Write True or Don't Write

Gage's philosophy about newsletter writing has the ring of something earned, not theorized. Authenticity is the whole thing. Not authenticity as a brand value or a marketing angle, but authenticity as the only sustainable approach to producing content that requires you to care about it enough to keep doing it for years.

The instinct to write for what you think your audience, boss, or potential customer wants to see is almost universal in professional media - and, by his account, almost universally fatal to long-term quality. The newsletters that survive are the ones where the writer is genuinely interested in what they're covering, is solving a real problem they personally experienced, and maintains the discipline to stay on topic even when the shiny-object appeal of pivoting becomes overwhelming.

This is harder than it sounds. The creator economy has made it easy to start newsletters and nearly impossible to sustain them. Most die not from lack of quality but from lack of persistence - writers who get bored of their own subject before they've given the audience enough time to find them. Gage is, above all, a persistent writer in a world of episodic ones.

He has also been refreshingly honest about the platform dynamics of building on Substack - speaking publicly about their 10% take rate, what they earn for it, and how he evaluates the relationship as a business decision rather than loyalty. That kind of clear-eyed analysis of his own situation is exactly what you'd expect from someone who spent a decade living between the data world and the media world.

The Non-Engineer Who Explains Engineering

There's a certain irony at the center of Justin Gage's story: the most-read software explainer on the internet was never a software engineer. He was a data scientist. A growth marketer. A business school graduate with strong analytical instincts and a genuine curiosity about how systems work. And somehow, that's exactly the right biography for the job.

The engineers who write about software for general audiences often can't locate the confusion. They know too much. They've forgotten what it felt like to not know the difference between a database and a data warehouse, between an API and an SDK, between machine learning and statistics. Gage hasn't forgotten. He was there recently enough to still feel it.

The newsletters he writes aren't trying to teach people to code. They're trying to give people enough conceptual clarity to do their actual jobs better - to ask better questions in meetings, to understand tradeoffs when engineers present options, to not feel like a permanent outsider in a room full of people who speak a different language. That is a different and arguably harder problem than technical education. And he has built 72,000 people's worth of evidence that he's solving it well.

Beyond Technically, he has written for a16z Future, contributed to Lenny's Newsletter (on what PMs most need to understand about engineering), published technical tutorials on Kinsta, and maintained a consistent enough presence as a thinker that Bloomberg, Crunchbase, and Muck Rack all keep profiles on him. The newsletter is the engine. Everything else radiates from it.

What remains is a profile of someone who found a problem that was genuinely his to solve - the same confusion he felt, multiplied by millions of people across every industry that touches software - and then did the unglamorous work of solving it, issue by issue, week by week, without burning out, without pivoting, without chasing the trend of the moment. In a media landscape full of operators, Gage remains, at his core, a writer.