Million dollar blog posts
They were out there (and inside you) this entire time.
Writing is undervalued as a value-creation mechanism. When compared with other roles and skills, it is a lot less clear:
Engineers build an app, reduce infrastructure costs, and increase conversion. You can often see it in MRR bumps or AWS cost reductions.
Salespeople sell goods, find prospects, and close deals. Look at “on target earnings” for their impact.
Marketers measure traffic and conversion and attribute it to revenue.
Founders start companies, raise money, and sell products. Valuation, revenue, and exit value are all clear targets.
Although writing is a part of all of these roles, it’s rarely seen as core to value creation. This is because writing sucks at value capture. The most writing gets sold for is like $50 (book). Substack has helped, but only to raise this to ~$10-15 per month. These other roles have many examples of thousands to millions of dollars of value being created and captured.
The value capture in writing is a second-order consequence. Someone writes and the reader is the one who benefits and captures most of the value based on the action it inspires. It is then difficult to attribute action back to ideas from writing.
Million dollar blog posts are real
Even though many undervalue writing, I still believe in it. Take my favorite genre of writing: the humble blog post. Many blog posts have created millions of dollars worth of value. I’m not talking about side hustle, affiliate sites, but instead posts like:
Patrick McKenzie’s negotiation guide. It has helped hundreds of highly paid software engineers make tens of thousands of dollars across multiple jobs.
Mr. Money Moustache influenced a generation of people around savings, retiring early, and the FIRE movement with posts like The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement. The FIRE and fatFIRE subreddits are filled with people with millions in savings influenced by him.
Kevin Kelly’s 1000 true fans directly influenced and set the path entire creator business industry including Patreon which is valued at over $1.5B.
The effective altruism industrial complex like Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Sequences and 80,000 hours’ career guide encouraged many smart people to take making money and AI much more seriously. As the best example, take Sam Bankman-Fried. He was influenced by effective altruism to make a lot of money (fraudulently), lose it all, but still maybe come out near even because of his investment in Antropic? Many more also influenced by this writing went to work at (and make lots of money in) the companies driving the AI boom.
Susan Fowler’s strange year at Uber permanently changed the trajectory of Uber by being part of the ouster of Travis Kalanick. Depending on how you feel about that, this either saved Uber or stunted it (currently at a market cap of $146B). Either way, Kalanick went on to found a new company, CloudKitchens, which now has a valuation of $15B.
Paul Graham’s collected works including How to Start a Startup and Do Things That Don’t Scale are arguably the most influential pieces of “startup culture.” YC’s worth around $10B, how much of that can be attributed to these posts?
Sam Altman and Chris Dixon’s blogs like How To Be Successful and Climbing the wrong hill are in a similar category.
Ben Thompson’s commentary on big tech has had a major impact on their strategies (and stock prices). As a recent example, some think his analysis of Apple AI may have had a $150B impact on Apple’s market cap.
There are many short-selling funds that publish their research such as Hindenberg Research. For example, their post on Nikola led to a 40% drop in stock price and an ongoing fraud investigation.
Steve Yegge’s Google Platforms Rant condensed the Amazon way of building products and directly targeted change at Google. Since leaking, it has influenced many companies since then including Google). It shifted many people towards Amazon ways of building (seems to be working out for them). Jeff Bezos’ shareholder letters do the same, although not a blog post, they’re similar enough.
The million dollar blog post was inside you this whole time
More people than realize have a million dollar blog post inside of them. It has never been easier to share writing online that can reach and impact large numbers of people. There are no gatekeepers to sharing your ideas, and because of the leverage technology provides, a single idea can create more value than ever.
How do you write a post like this? The similarities in the above posts reveal some trends:
Reveal a valuable secret. Often the best secrets come from experiences. These are one-of-one, but the lessons from them can be extremely valuable to others. If something isn’t a secret, it’s probably already priced in.
Go deep. None of these posts are short or share information acquired simply. To manufacture one of these takes a lot of work, experience, research, writing, and editing. When you think about the potential payoff, it is worth it.
Stay close to the money. It’s easier to measure the value your post creates when people can see the monetary impact it has. Salaries, negotiations, stock prices, careers are all tied to money.
Aim at high-leverage people. The most impactful blog posts often aim to do so. Try to influence people in high-leverage positions: young people choosing their career, highly paid people negotiating, AI researchers, politicians, and stock traders.
Become an expert. Rarely does someone who does not have direct experience with the subject write a million dollar post. Many people above are provable experts in the things they are writing about.
Because of the nature of internet writing, you never know who is going to read your posts or what impact it will have on them. I’m not notable, but I know a small number of blog posts have dramatically impacted my life and some of my posts have impacted the lives of others. Although not as clear as other work, writing can prove to be massively valuable over time.
This idea inspired a recent PostHog blog I helped with: How software salespeople will try to screw you (and how to fight back). It turns out companies can save hundreds of thousands of dollars in software contracts by negotiating better. By sharing our experience doing that, we hope to save companies a lot of money.