How Has Your Approach Adapted Over the Years?

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When he started the newsletter, it was for people who are pretty special. Once you turn into business, though, it's like, how do you keep it growing? And then one of the real tensions is how do I make it appeal to a broader audience but at the same time stay true to sort of a more specialized approach because there's a lot of general stuff out there about China and any topic that people aren't necessarily going to pay for.

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.