How a One-Man Blog Written From Taipei Turned Into a Multimillion-Dollar Subscription Business

In 2013, Ben Thompson started a blog on the side while living in the United States and working at Automattic. Within months, he moved back to Taiwan, where he would write most of Stratechery for the next decade. Plenty of sites covered the day-to-day of tech, but he saw room for historical and business angles in the same news. He made it his full-time job in 2014. More than a decade later, he still writes it alone, publishes most days, and runs a mid-sized media company. Stratechery never depended on a newsletter platform. Thompson built it on WordPress, ran payments through Stripe and later Memberful, and eventually replaced those with his own Passport system, owning the reader relationship from the first transaction.

He Gave the Best Work Away

His early model borrowed from Daring Fireball. Thompson treated free writing as the marketing and paid writing as the product. He published long free articles anyone could read and forward, then reserved a separate stream for subscribers. He posted no more than twice a week for free, so subscribing felt like an upgrade. The number he watched early was how many people visited the homepage on days he had not posted. Those were the readers who wanted more and would convert. Subscribers forwarded the free pieces and argued about them, turning readership into marketing. The writing carried a recognizable framework. In 2015, Thompson published Aggregation Theory, an explanation of how internet companies win by owning the customer relationship, and it became the lens a generation of operators used. He has since interviewed Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Jensen Huang, and Mark Zuckerberg, many of whom read him. The readership includes executives, venture capitalists, and investors across the industry.

The First Paid Product Had Three Tiers

The paid product launched in 2014 with three options. $50 a year bought a membership in the community, $100 added posts, and $300 added group calls. He later retired the calls. He simplified to a single $100 plan. Email entered by accident, when a buggy login meant early subscribers could not reach the posts, and Thompson emailed the first one to everyone who had paid. The early going was so thin that he stopped paying his credit card bills to preserve cash. He tried sponsored posts for about six months and dropped them, because subscriptions were always meant to be the core. By early 2015, he had passed 2,000 paying subscribers, clearing $200,000 a year.

One Free Article, Three Paid Updates

The product today is clean. A free weekly article does the marketing. Paid members get the Daily Update three times a week by email or podcast, plus interviews with CEOs and founders, for $15 a month or $150 a year. About half of subscribers listen to the audio version, a habit that began in 2014, when he co-hosted Exponent with James Allworth. In 2020, he turned podcasts into paid benefits: Dithering with John Gruber, Sharp Tech and Sharp China with Andrew Sharp, Greatest of All Talk, and later Asianometry. He built Passport to carry it, so one login delivers a personalized feed across every show. A single subscription now behaves like access to a small network, and the writing stayed with one person.

The Math of One Person

The figures are estimates, because Thompson does not publish subscriber or revenue numbers. Fortune cited an unofficial estimate of more than $3 million for 2020 and ranked Thompson third on its inaugural Creator 25 list. An outside writer later extrapolated annual revenue above $5 million from a subscriber base estimated at around 40,000, multiplied by the price. Whatever the real number, the per-person economics have no equivalent at a staffed publication. He has raised prices a few times, increasing the monthly rate from $10 to $12, then to $15. Speaking engagements run from $50,000 to $100,000 each. When Substack raised money to build its platform, its seed deck described the company as Stratechery in a box.

Where Stratechery Stands Now

Thompson wrote Stratechery mostly from Taiwan and moved back to the United States in 2025. The publication is now in its thirteenth year and once again U.S.-based. The cadence held, delivered through the Passport system he built. By 2022, Thompson said subscriber growth had leveled off, and that moving readers to audio reduced sharing while helping retention. He has framed flat subscription revenue as a fine outcome, and he has not published current figures. Stratechery also sells team subscriptions to companies, and the brand has grown past its founder, with at least one show on the network that Thompson does not appear on at all. He publishes about as much as a small newsroom, and he is the only person doing it.

Most people read Stratechery's numbers as a story about one unusually gifted writer. The more useful read is the structure beneath them. One person picked a subject narrow enough to own, gave the marketing away for free, charged a fair price for the volume, and kept the whole relationship in-house. The talent set the ceiling. The structure is why a single desk earns as much as a staffed newsroom.

You do not need 40,000 subscribers to run the same play. Own a niche, price the work as if it's worth paying for, and hold the relationship yourself. The ceiling for a solo operator with a strong niche and pricing power is higher than most expect. See you next week.

If you liked this edition of Growth Curve, forward it to a founder or marketer who needs to stop renting their audience — and start owning it.