What Is the Biggest Loss of a Startup?

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When he finished grad school at Johns Hopkins, he was hired as the China guy. He moved to Beijing with a friend who had done an early online video game company in China sold it, made some money and started another one. And so I decided to go move to Beijing to work on that with him. But we did that through basically 2005, four or five until second quarter of 2008 before we had to shut the thing down because we ran out of money. We were idiots. It was a big market. We just didn't execute.

Bill Bishop likes to make clear he’s not a journalist. Instead, he’s a China analyst who brings his deep understanding of the country to an English-speaking language through his newsletter, Sinocism. In 2017, Bill became the “original Substacker” after teaming up with Substack’s co-founders to be the first newsletter on the platform.

On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, Bill and I discuss his independent path, and how a subscription model has created different dynamics as opposed to his experiences in the dot-com era as a co-founder of Marketwatch. What’s telling to me is that Bill is also now considering advertising. The Substack model of “only ads” doesn’t make much sense long term for most writers. Even if they convert 10% of their audience, they’re making no money from 90%. Most businesses don’t operate that way.