Earlier in July, Substack announced a $100M funding round, bringing its valuation to $1.1 billion.

Substack has built an entirely new media ecosystem by enabling reporters and influencers to monetize their audience longing for long-term writing. People share links and discuss pieces from Eric Newcomer’s Newcomer, Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, Richard Rushfield’s The Ankler, Gergely Orosz’s The Pragmatic Engineer, Lenny Rachitsky’s Lenny’s Newsletter, Matthew Yglesias’s Slow Boring and thousands of other blogs. Many of these projects have grown into mini-media companies with staff, essentially rebuilding the publications their founders once left.

Substack now has more than 50 creators who are making millions of dollars per year on the platforms. In total, they boast 500,000 creators, more than 5 million paid subscribers, and have about $45 million in annual recurring revenue. Their domain got more traffic than than The Wall Street Journal and CBS News in June 2025.

Few things get people so worked up as Spotify’s payouts to artists. Every time this topic comes up on Twitter or Threads, you can be sure there will be hundreds of angry replies from people you can’t argue with.

So I wrote this post.

On Spotify, a single stream generates on average between $0.003 and $0.005 in royalties that get paid to the rights holders. Is that small?

The Network State is a concept popularized by the entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan. These network states begin as highly-aligned online communities and graduate to diplomatic recognition by existing countries, rather than seizing territory by force.

You can read in his own words:

A key concept is to go cloud first, land last — but not land never — by starting with an online community and then materializing it into the physical world.

I was a heavy user of Arc and abandoned it only after it was “sunset”. The app still works, of course, but I used to experience a few glitches and understood they would never be solved anymore. Still, I get their decision — Arc just wasn’t mainstream enough.

I understand it even better after using Dia. It has become my primary browser and I’d be extremely dissapointed if it went away, which is a very good PMF score.

The early reviews weren’t great. Arc has become popular because of its unique and polished UI, and then the Browser Company threw it all away and started from scratch. I get the frustration. But a niche browser never had the chance, while Dia might.

I have finished Apple in China by Patrick McGee, a fantastic book dissecting the history of manufacturing and breaking up some common myths around it.

There’s an uncanny quality about adversarial books and media stories like this. Patrick has talked to dozens of people who worked at Apple or their partners. But there’s always a bias in terms of who is willing to talk — mostly the people who didn’t leave the company on good terms. Jeff Williams, Apple’s former COO, isn’t joining that meeting invite. But the people who had issues with the management, disagreed with their “ignorant” strategies or believed they were wronged would. They might also use this as an opportunity to remake their story, so we have to trust the writer to build a complete picture from multiple sources. Throughout the book I was getting just a touch of that feeling, but I believe Patrick McGee did a very good job overall.

We know our devices are made in China. We saw the label on the back and maybe have heard about companies like Foxconn and workers operating these human “conveyor belts”. And while, admittedly, it is a part of the picture, Patrick argues that we’re missing the forest for the trees.

How many companies building cinema projectors do you know?

I bet you know at least one, and it’s called IMAX. You’ve heard the name when you watched “Dune“, “Avatar“, or something from Christopher Nolan. If you paid more to get an IMAX experience, they weren’t too shy to add a dedicated intro promoting themselves — quite obnoxious if you ask me.

Do you get how weird it is? I mean, do you know any other projectors? Yet IMAX has become entangled with the film industry and a sign of prestige. There are 1,772 IMAX theaters across 90 countries. A huge scandal played out when Tom Cruise couldn’t secure extended IMAX viewings for his previous Mission Impossible film.

Josh Miller, CEO of The Browser Company in his latest post on finally sunsetting Arc:

So when people ask how venture capital influenced us — or why we didn’t just charge for Arc and run a profitable business — I get it. They’re fair questions. But to me, they miss the forest for the trees. If the goal was to build a small, profitable company with a great team and loyal customers, we wouldn’t have chosen to try and build the successor to the web browser – the most ubiquitous piece of software there is.

I used Arc since the beta and I loved it. Arc was the first credible and ambitious attempt to reinvent web browsing that was actually able to get some traction. Unfortunately, it didn’t get enough.

Get into the car, take out the phone, put in into a flimsy piece of plastic that is somehow attached to the vents, connect the charger. Navigate to your destination.

That was the life before CarPlay. Now 79% of buyers aren’t even going to look at a car that doesn’t have it.

Don’t get me wrong, CarPlay is ifinitely better than what we had before. Car manufacturers operate in a very different paradigm than smartphone manufacturers. They source individual blocks and parts years in advance, so in the end your car problaby has a dozen of small computers running different areas, and multimedia was never their strong suit.

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re doing so through a web browser—one of the most critical pieces of software on your device. Browsers have morphed from just one of the apps into the backbone of modern computing. Web apps like Google Docs, Notion, Figma, and Slack have effectively turned them into operating systems in their own right, handling everything from work to creativity to communication. And yet, despite their importance, most browsers feel stuck in a time warp, unable to keep pace with this reality. A few years ago, I was optimistic about the future of browsing. Now? I’m not so sure.

Some of you might ask what I’m even talking about. 3 billion people use Chrome are are just fine with it. But in my view, browsers arestuck(I wrote that story 5 years ago). Most of them are still about browsing webpages, not apps, and Chrome, curiously, hasn’t evolved its “Chrome” (the part of the app around the content) much since its inception.

Back in the late 2010s and early 2020s, I had high hopes. New players like Mighty, Sidekick, and Arc emerged, promising to rethink what a browser could be. Mighty tried to offload rendering to the cloud for speed, Sidekick aimed to streamline workflows for busy executives, and Arc has become a beloved tool by many tech enthusiasts. Built by The Browser Company, Arc didn’t just tweak the edges of the browser experience; it tore up the blueprint and started over. It treated the web like a workspace, with a sidebar for pinned apps and persistent documents, Spaces that separated different contexts, and a UI that felt like it was designed for using the web apps, not just surfing the web. For me and many others, it was a breath of fresh air.

Meta recently fired 20 employees for leaking confidential information. The company has become notorious for employees spilling details from all-hands meetings—a problem Google also faces. Apple, by contrast, keeps a tighter lid on things, though it’s not immune: a year ago, a former iOS engineer was sued for leaking to The Wall Street Journal and The Information.

So why do people—especially those with cushy, high-paying tech jobs—risk it all to leak to the media? It comes down to three main motives: ego, disagreement with company decisions, and controlled leaks orchestrated by the company itself.

The first is about the feeing of empowerement. Working inside a company you know much more about its plans, performance and problems. Sometimes people simply want to leverage this position and feel that power. It’s almost gossip, except that they’re not just talking to their friends, but also to people whose job is reporting such things.

The second motive kicks in when someone’s unhappy with a company decision and wants to shine a spotlight on it. For obvious reasons, this specifically affects Big Tech companies with wide societal implications (so Meta and Google). What can you leak from Nvidia, how expensive their next GPU is going to be?

The iPad is in a weird place right now. On one hand, the iPad Pro M4 is an extremely powerful and futuristic piece of glass with enormous power inside. On the other, it can’t do many things supposedly professional users need and is very expensive.

There are cheaper models, but the good screen with 120Hz is reserved for the Pro, as are the best speakers (although there are reportst hese are worse than the 2018 model). This is a bit strange, considering that watching YouTube and streaming is the iPad’s specialty.

So you’re basically pushed to spend almost $1,300 for a basic iPad Pro with a keyboard. And iPads are a much better and more useful device with that keyboard—not even necessarily for work, but even replying to messages or writing down your address on Amazon becomes infinitely easier.

Jules Verne. Isaac Asimov. Greg Egan.

These are my favorite sci-fi writers of all time. Each one represents a separate age in human history and science fiction.

Jules Verne was the first sci-fi author I discovered by reading the Soviet translations of his books. He documented the age of wonders of the 19th century, where the Earth’s exploration is just about to be complete but a few remaining white spots are enough to excite the people. His stories are filled with an unshakable belief in progress a technology. “The Mysterious Island” is probably my favorite piece, a tale of a group of Americans stranded on uninhabited island with nothing but their watches and a dog collar and building a small civilization through their intelligence and perseverance. Jules’s style of lengthy vivid descriptions might feel dated, just like some of his views (too close to Kipling), and we no longer believe humans should eradicate all predator animals (although we did kill a lot of them already). But the way Verne’s stories embody the human spirit and ingenuity is truly timeless.

I hated running for most of my life. This year I ran 390 kilometers. I hope to do more next year.

Two things changed to make this happen. First, I now live right near the ocean’s embarkment, which is a great treadmill. Second, I absorbed the simple truth you can hear repeated time and time again: “Run slower”.

Paradoxically, that’s exactly what it takes.

I always thought that I just wasn’t made for running unlike some of my friends. I’d never experienced the “runner’s high”. But I still tried it, especially in my early university years. And this is where I made the crucial mistake. Probably because of Phys. Ed. I convinced myself that I need to run at 6 minutes per km. I could do this but after 2-3 km I was already tired and out of breath.

At the end of every year, news websites start publishing their gift guides (usually about two months in advance). It helps them gather extra traffic, and when you make a purchase, they earn money through affiliate links. So here’s my list of gift ideas with no affiliate links. These aren’t necessarily for someone else—you can treat yourself, too!

Sennheiser Momentum 4

AirPods have taken over the world, but good over-the-ear headphones provide a completely different experience. While most recommend the Sony XM5, I suggest you check out the Sennheiser Momentum 4, which, in my opinion, sound even better. With these, I’ve rediscovered entire genres and individual artists. I wrote a separate review here .

Added another year to my age last week.

For some reason, I wasn’t afraid of the infamous “30,” although turning 29 terrified me. After that happened, age truly just became a number.

It feels great to develop the capacity to observe yourself and think before you say or do anything. Not all old people are smart but you definitely do become a little bit smarter with time. However, at this age, many people either give up or start treating their bodies seriously and end up doing marathons or lift weight that look too heavy. You no longer have a warranty.

Omnivore was the best read-later app for most people. It was quite modern yet had a generous free tier. Yesterday the team informed the world that they got acquihired by ElevenLabs. The app will go offline and all the data will be deleted by November 15th.

It’s sad but almost should have been expected. Read-later apps are an extremely niche product, so you must be able to monetize a very small customer base successfully. I suppose the Omnivore team couldn’t, precisely because most people were drawn to the app because it was “free”.

Omnivore famously was open source. This should work as a cautionary tale for blindly trusting the “open source” label. All it means is that the code repo is out there. For this to become a viable service, someone needs to invest resources into developing it, paying server costs, and shipping mobile apps. And while subreddits are filled with people asking anyone to do this, I doubt that it will happen or be more successful than the Omnivore itself (why would it?).

I’m still using the 11-inch iPad Pro from 2018, and it’s great. Yes, it’s showing its age a little bit: the transitions aren’t as smooth, and the battery life is getting worse. Considering its age, it’s still a fantastic device.

But worst of all, Apple doesn’t have anything I can reasonably replace it with.

I was reading the review of the latest iPad mini on The Verge and it’s just sad. Yes, it’s half the price, but it’s built on outdated hardware and has a terrible screen. The new Pro with M4 is good, but if you want a keyboard, your only first-party option is a $300 Magic Keyboard. I vastly preferred the old Smart Keyboard. It was much lighter and cheaper. Basically, a cover that you can use to type if you have to. The new Magic Keyboard turns your iPad into a heavy laptop. And despite all of this, it’s still made out of this polyurethane that looks terrible in a couple of years.

In case you haven’t been following, there’s a huge drama in the WordPress community. Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress, launched a crusade against WP Engine, a company selling managed WordPress hosting and the competitor of his own entities. You can catch up on the story here .

But the funniest part of this WordPress drama is that WordPress is irrelevant.

Yes, it still powers around 40% of websites. But it’s not the future of the web. You *can* be both big and irrelevant. IBM created PCs as we know them and is currently worth $214Bn, yet nobody cares much about them. In fact, this scandal is probably the most attention WordPress received from the public in the last few years.

You see the same suspects whenever there’s a discussion of over-ear wireless headphones with noise canceling. People mention Sony WH-1000XM5 (orthodox want XM4), AirPods Max, and Bose QuietComfort (Ultra).

If you face the same dilemma, I recommend you try Sennheiser Momentum 4 Wireless. It’s an underrated pair of headphones that deserves to be on the same list. And it usually costs just $250, which is extremely competitive with other options.

What’s great about them? Sound, comfort and battery life, more or less in that order.

I have read dozens of excited reviews of Orion like these pieces from The Verge and Ben Thompson . I have also seen a comparable number of people surprised by this wave of affection, like John Siracusa in the most recent ATP episode.

And I can understand this. Orion can be an impressive demo, but it’s still a demo. A prototype. A concept car. It’s reasonable to assume that Apple might have a similar pair of glasses in their labs somewhere and faced the same cost issues. “Apple doesn’t release prototypes” .

But I think we should stop giving Apple the benefit of the doubt. It’s their job to convince us. We’re excited about Orion precisely because Meta showed them, and Apple didn’t. I honestly do not care if they have something cooking. Yes, they have a good track record overall. But I don’t believe in a second we should buy in on their secrecy. They do it for their benefit, not ours. Otherwise, it becomes a cult with blogger shamans trying to interpret the divine signs.

Hyperlinks are the foundation of the internet. People say that Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet as we know it when he connected hypertext with TCP/IP. And yet, in 2024, hyperlinks are second-tier citizens at best, as the most popular social platforms don’t support them or penalize you for trying.

Facebook started deprioritizing links in 2017. Zuckerberg confirmed this later by announcing a broader effort to prioritize “meaningful social interactions” on users’ news feeds. The stated goal was to focus on posts from friends, family, and groups over content from businesses, media outlets, and publishers, particularly those containing outbound links. Twitter joined the party in late 2020, as they also wanted to reduce their reliance on external content.

This shift forever changed the internet.

When I got my first MacBook in 2014, the thing that impressed me the most was how many built-in apps MacOS had and how good a lot of them actually were.

Windows wasn’t like this and we were used to installing third-party apps for literally everything: a proper browser surfing the web, something to listen to music and watch videos, Nero Burning ROM (of course). When I used Windows XP, I had to use an app for dialing dial-up internet, because the native one was so much worse.

Apple showed me a different world, where default apps are good enough for most people. Safari was much better than Internet Explorer. Pages and Numbers are great for personal use (and I have used the former for many years without lawyers noticing). I’m still not a fan of Mail.app but many people use it just fine. Finally, you get Reminders and Notes.

If you spend too much time on Twitter (like I do), you might have heard about the idea of Going Direct. It started with a growing chasm between the tech and media industries and eventually turned into the idea that founders and companies should build their own audience instead of going to the media. This is what “Going Direct” is.

What’s the motivation here? They say that news websites aren’t your friends, so you should focus on content marketing through blogs, social media and friendly podcasts. This way, you grow your own audience you can leverage it for your goals.

There’s a lot of truth to this idea, and you can follow Lulu Cheng Meservey , who previously led PR for Substack and Activision/Blizzard and is one of the most active speakers on the topic.

Just listened to a podcast with Nikita Bier by Lenny Rachitsky that explained the power of communications very nicely.

Nikita is famous on Twitter for selling the same company twice (not really). He sold tbh to Facebook, left, built Gas to earn money, and ended up selling it to Discord. He is a master of growth hacking and building viral products.

With Gas, he and his team faced a grave danger. Somebody put out a hoax that the app was facilitating human trafficking. How an anonymous app where users can’t send arbitrary messages could have done, it is irrelevant because the hoax spread faster than the app. They rebranded the app and started with the other coast, and the same hoax resurfaced.

Telegram is a secretive social media platform with 900 million users. Their employees aren’t allowed to talk about their jobs. It only has one product manager in its founder. And they got to 900 million users without turning into Facebook but also aren’t earning as much.

Telegram is not really a secure messenger app. It’s one of the largest social media platforms. But certain product choices and the location of its audiences make it almost invisible to people based in the United States or Western Europe.

When you first open it, Telegram looks similar to WhatsApp. WhatsApp’s founders famously focused on keeping it simple and clean. For them this meant not adding anything else: “no ads, no games, no gimmicks”. So they added nothing to the app, even years after Meta bought it. About a year or two ago I noticed WhatsApp started adding very specific features that were obviously lifted from Telegram, like channels . But still much slower.

We’ve all seen these posts about how Twitter fired 80% of its employees, and then nothing happened. Seems it ultimately did affect their revenue:

Internal documents obtained by The New York Times show that, in the second quarter of this year, X earned $114 million in revenue in the United States, a 25 percent decline from the first quarter and a 53 percent decline from the previous year. The company aims to reach $190 million in U.S. revenue during the third quarter, bolstered by advertising associated with the Olympics, football and political campaigns, the documents said — but that target would still set the company’s quarterly earnings at 25 percent less than they were last year.

These people might argue that these two items aren’t correlated but I doubt it. Twitter didn’t have a great advertising engine, so most of its revenue came from generic brand advertising, and companies have brand safety teams for a reason. Elon, a “libertarian capitalist”, still seems to have a problem with the free market when it’s against him.

The Digital Markets Act is a bad law. I can understand the idea that led to it. Digital tech companies have a lot of power, and existing regulations don’t adequately cover them. But instead of targeting specific examples of overreach, the EU tried to come up with a universal and far-reaching framework that freezes product development for the largest incumbents and prohibits vertical integration.

Ben Thompson explained this well:

The DMA, though, is much more far-reaching than that; the excerpt above rightly identifies the interoperability requirements as the more meaningful factor affecting Apple’s decision. Consider iPhone Mirroring: given that the iPhone is a designated gatekeeper platform, is Apple allowed to enable iPhone screen-sharing with a Mac but not with Windows or Linux? Or SharePlay Screen Sharing: can Apple allow you to jointly view apps via Facetime, but not other VoIP services? Or the big one, Apple Intelligence: can the semantic index be available to Siri, but not other voice assistants?

The internet is probably my favorite invention in the whole world.

It’s hard to compare it with penicillin or electricity, of course, but I still remember the awe I experienced when I realized I could talk to some strangers right on my computer or look up anything I wanted. Well, mostly texts since music and videos weren’t exactly available on my 45.2 kbps dial-up connection.

This was around 2005. The internet was paid by the hour. One month my parents got such a huge bill they realized I spent around 100 hours online, and believe me, it was expensive.

Arc is an alternative Chrome-based browser with a unique interface. It’s become so popular that The Verge reports on pretty minor updates. I switched to it quite early and haven’t looked back.

Browsers are the most important apps we have on our computers right now. Whether you like it or not, the application layer has shifted to the web. But as I wrote back in 2020, browsers haven’t caught up.

Look at Google Chrome right now. It’s essentially the same browser that launched in 2008. The only recent major update was Tab Groups, which happened in 2020 and they are still subpar. For one, groups aren’t persistent and I can’t understand the logic behind this. You create a “Work” group, open a bunch of tabs, close them… and the group disappears. Want to “work” again? Create it, name it, and choose the color. Every time.

People arguing about regulation tend to favor one side of the argument and believe that either the government or the market has the capabilities and the desire to standardize and solve consumer problems. Theoretically, both approaches are valid, even if they lead to different outcomes. I wanted to tell you about two particular examples I like the most. And yes, basically I will compare the United States and the European Union.

First is credit card cashback. But we need to take a few steps back first. When you buy something for $100 with a VISA or MasterCard, the seller doesn’t get $100. There are interchange fees charged by the card processing network that are shared between them, the bank operating the card terminal, and your own bank.

This creates a few challenges. The seller gets less money, but in theory, you’re more likely to spend more at their establishment if you can pay with a card. Still, they most likely keep their prices a tiny bit higher to account for this loss. The interchange fees also aren’t totally linear. The advertised Stripe US rate is a good example: 2.9% + 30¢ for each successful card charge. A brick-and-mortar business is more likely to use something like Square, which offers 2.6% + 10¢. But there’s always this fixed part, which makes fees on a small purchase much larger.

Most people tend to overvalue ideas and undervalue execution. In my experience, that holds even for many people in the tech industry. In general, this couldn’t have been further from the truth.

Now, there are some rare moments in history when getting the right idea at the right time could dramatically affect your outcome. Facebook would have issues coming up either 10 years earlier or later despite their famous ruthless execution. But it should still be true for most cases.

Thomas Edison didn’t develop an idea for an electric light bulb. On the contrary, he entered a race to invent one pretty late in the game. Many people thought of using electricity to produce light, yet nobody figured out how to do this reasonably. There were multiple attempts before him in the 1800s. Edison tried out hundreds and thousands of different combinations of construction and material until he could build a relatively affordable light bulb that could work for many hours.

Balaji started a discussion on Twitter that finally pushed me to put down my thoughts on the matter.

Some time ago, around the early 2010s, a tectonic shift happened in the media industry. Before this, it was a darling. Small and quirky companies improving our lives. Blogs like TechCrunch emerged to cover it exclusively and grew in tandem with tech. TechCrunch is now a prominent media outlet that is visited by 10 million unique people each month.

But something changed. The tech industry was taking over everything, and its champions started becoming more and more prominent in our lives. With scale came scrutiny. Journalism is the fourth power, a system of checks and balances that is supposed to question everything by design. This is a handy property. Financial Times was the one that uncovered all the fraud behind Wirecard, Germany’s favorite unicorn. Coindesk published the materials that triggered the collapse of FTX so we could learn the other side of Sam Bankam-Fried.

The European Union and Apple are locked in a fight nobody wants to cede. First was the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which made Apple create an entirely new subset of rules for iOS and the AppStore. And yesterday, Apple was fined almost $2 billion for their anti-steering provision affecting companies like Spotify and Amazon’s Kindle.

All digital purchases on the iPhone must go through In-App Purchases, which involve a 30% commission to Apple (goes down to 15% for long-term subscriptions). While certain services like Netflix and Spotify (classified as “reader apps”) can ditch IAP, the resulting user experience gets weird. You cannot sign up if you download such an app as a new user. And the AppStore rules prohibit developers from even suggesting to their users that they should go to the website instead and start their subscription there.

This is probably one of the most egregious examples of how Apple’s strategy leads to suboptimal experiences on their devices. Apple feels entitled to this tax, which you can clearly see in their statement.

Most politicians are populists, which is the natural result of the basic rule of communications: the larger your audience is, the simpler your message should be. And with politicians specifically, there’s a straightforward line from the size of their following to their actual power.

Politicians are incentivized to find a slogan that resonates with people and run with it regardless of their personal opinion on the matter. As an off-topic, I doubt certain US Republicans have a significant issue with LGBT themselves, but they adopt the message that works for people who can vote them in (or out), however cynical this might sound.

The same is happening to AI. And it’s accelerated by AI becoming a major trend covered by practically every media publication. Not only most have dedicated AI writers, but there are entire outlets (e.g. VentureBeat) that have largely shifted their focus to AI.

I saw this post on Matt Birchler’s blog and thought it was an excellent format to share what apps and services I use daily.

• ✉️ Mail service: Gmail
• 📬 Mail client: Superhuman
• ✅ Tasks: Things 3
• 📰 RSS service: Feedly
• 📲 RSS client: Reeder
• 🗞️ News: Artifact – 📚 Books: Amazon Kindle
• ⌨️ Launcher: Raycast
• ☁️ Cloud storage: iCloud + OneDrive
• 🌅 Photo library: iCloud + Amazon Photos
• 🤳🏻 Photo editing: Capture One + Darkroom
• 🌐 Web browser: Arc on Mac, Safari on iPhone and iPad
• 📆 Calendar: Cron
• 📖 Reading: Readwise Reader
• 🌤️ Weather: Carrot Weather
• 🎙️ Podcasts: Castro
• 🎶 Music: Spotify
• 🛹 Clipboard manager: Raycast
• 🔐 Passwords: 1Password
• 💸 Budgeting: Numbers
• 💬 Transcriptions: MacWhisper
• 🐘 Mastodon: Mona
• 🍿 Movie discovery/tracking: Letterboxd
• 🌮 Recipes: Mela
• 🖼️ Screenshots: CleanShot X
• 📝 Notes: Craft + Apple Notes
• ✈️ Flight tracking: Flighty
• 📦 Package tracking: Parcel

You can read the original post here.

One of the strongest moves in communications is pushing slightly wrong numbers out so that many people start quoting them and associate with your business (or your competitors) forever.

Two of my favorite examples are Stripe and Apple Music. Let’s dig in.

Stripe famously charges $2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. Well, on average, they charge more. This pricing only applies at the base level and for bank cards issued in the United States. Any foreign card adds 1%. There are charges related to addon products you might use, from Stripe Subscription to something more specific.

But many people quote the advertised figure, which acts as an anchor. I know Stripe alternatives for some local markets that heavily promote the fact they’re a bit cheaper once you include all these charges.

Blogging became popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with the rise of platforms like Blogger and WordPress, which made it relatively easy for people to run their blogs.

Then came social media platforms and managed services like Medium that ultimately gathered hundreds of millions of people who’d never bothered to set up their own blogs. Traditional blogs have been almost abandoned during this time.

And even though we’ve seen the resurgence of email newsletters and Substacks, they operate a bit differently: newsletters are usually more professionalized, and authors stick to one or two areas and generally write to make money out of it.

Superhuman is a productivity-focused email app initially designed for founders and executives that has massively expanded its focus since then. Its “the fastest email experience ever made” tagline is well-deserved. It’s also known as an email app that charges $30 a month and amassed over 200,000 on its waitlist, which made many people believe it’s obnoxious.

I’ve been a user of Superhuman since its early days (in fact, we invested in the company). I think it’s indispensable for people who deal with email a lot. This is enabled by many different things, forming a unique software experience I haven’t seen anywhere else.

Superhuman is fast. It’s a web app, but it’s the fastest web app I have ever seen. I mostly use it as a pinned tab, and there’s an Electron wrapper if you need one. All interactions are rapid yet smooth. But it goes deeper. Superhuman breaks the age-old concept of GUI and consciously eliminates UI elements like menus and buttons unless they’re critical. Instead, it pushes you to learn keyboard shortcuts and operate like a power user. In case you forgot or if you need to access a rare, more convoluted function, there’s a powerful Cmd-K Command Bar that has become a standard for powerful productivity-focused apps. And Superhuman’s natural language processing is genuinely one of the best.

There’s a widespread notion that Uber is getting more and more expensive. You can find multiple series of articles produced on this topic each year and entire SEO-optimized webpages for this particular query.

Some people even believe that Uber is worse than conventional taxis right now. Uber’s only advantage to them was the price, and since those prices have soared, they see no value. In fact, these people believe Uber could only grow because of its initial low prices, artificially attracting customers and taking market share, only to leverage its semi-monopoly position later.

I think they completely misunderstand what Uber actually is and what makes it an excellent service.

Uber isn’t the only ride-sharing company even though it was the first. Depending on the country, you could switch its name with Lyft, Bolt, Grab or something else. I’d keep using “Uber” throughout this story.

Basecamp and DHH specifically know how to trigger people and use this all the time to drive awareness without spending a dime. They take stuff that’s happening anyway, like when they had issues with Apple because of Hey, and sometimes they write something edgy out of the blue.

They juggled the names of Basecamp and 37signals, with the latter being the current one, but most people know them as Basecamp, so this is what I’m using here.

Basecamp is known for building very opinionated and slightly old-fashioned products as a remote and bootstrapped company. There are many similar companies out there, but Basecamp is certainly the most recognizable. Why?

There’s a certain community in tech that’s very vocal about their preference toward native apps. I share that sentiment, yet sometimes people take this idea too religiously.

First, what is a native app? It’s an app built using the native frameworks of a platform. For MacOS it could be SwiftUI. Such apps leverage the native platform’s interface, including windows, buttons, text areas, and everything else. They look right and familiar, and they behave this way. And most of the time, they’re smooth and fast. Historically, this has been the way to build applications for any platform.

But the Web has advanced so much from the early pages with hyperlinks that it’s now a platform for applications. Modern JavaScript runtimes, reactive frameworks (e.g. React), and platform APIs allow developers to use web technologies to build apps running on desktop operating systems. And this has largely become the preferred way to create new apps by now. If you use Slack, Notion, Spotify, or Todoist, then you’ve seen it. Their desktop applications are effectively just wrappers, usually built with a technology called Electron (Spotify isn’t though). And people hate Electron.

It seems that we’re finally getting out of this weird period of collective gaslighting where people tried to convince everyone Zoom was the best conference app out there.

I prefer Google Meet. It’s just better. I understand it was terrible pre-COVID as if Googlers never used it themselves. But they’ve caught up in a major way since then. Now it’s a very competent web app that gets out of your way and lets you talk to people. You open the link, and you’re right in the call. Meet doesn’t ask you to update anything.

Look, I’ve been working remotely since 2014. We used to have calls with the US, and most of the time, people would suggest calling their cell (despite the terrible voice quality). Then I started noticing Uber Conference and GoToMeeting, which were a bit clunky but at least used VoIP to provide clear voices.

MacStories ↗

Finalist is a new iPhone and iPad task manager that combines elements of note-taking apps, Kanban boards, and calendar apps in a unique and interesting way. The result is a lightweight app that’s simple and quick to use but unlikely to replace a fully-featured task manager for most users. Finalist is organized into three primary tabs: ‘Today,’ ‘Monthly,’ and ‘Lists.’ From the Today tab, you can add tasks simply by tapping on the screen and starting to type. It’s a lot like creating a checklist in Apple Notes.

I wrote about all the ways people build their own task managers ranging from a single entry in Apple Notes to over-complicated setups in Personal Knowledge Managements tools Roam Research and Obsidian.

Omnivore is an open-source read-later app. And that’s the first thing that differentiates it. Of course, consumers don’t really care when things are open source, but this potentially allows other developers to fork it if the original team abandons the app (which seems to be a running theme in this space).

Omnivore was launched in 2021, and despite this I’ve only seen maybe a few reviews of it, and almost zero mention on top tech blogs. Which is weird, because it’s a good app.

Its design is reminiscent of Pocket, but it’s much friendlier.

Too often, we see two distant sides of the spectrum and nothing in between.

Some people (often with blue checks on Twitter) believe he is the most successful businessman on Earth, and we’re literally months away from using Twitter (sorry, X.com) to run our financial lives. That he will finally build the WeChat of the West.

Others believe he’s a rich trust fund kid who stumbled into founding many successful companies changing their industries. These people tell you that he merely invested in Tesla and not found it (which is true, but Tesla didn’t really have much except a great brand and a complicated captable), that SpaceX engineers are the actual heroes lifting all the weight (which is a useless statement since it can be applied to any organization).

Bear is a Markdown-centered note-taking app for the Apple ecosystem. It was first released back in 2016 during a very different era. Apple Notes were barebones compared to what they’re right now. They still used IMAP to sync your docs, a protocol designer for email with no support for differential changes! That’s why many people jumped from Evernote to Bear. It was slick, fast and kept your content portable.

Just recently, they released the long-promised Bear 2.0. Unfortunately, I think they lost most of their users along the way. See, the question of when the Bear 2.0 would come out became a meme in r/bearapp. Because it took the development team a few years to make this new updated version, while the original one barely changed.

During this time, one of the clear leaders in the notes space has turned into an oddity, still loved by its core users, but unable to get too much attention. We’ve seen tremendous improvements in Apple Notes and then the rise of the networked-thought like Roam Research and Obsidian, to digital-native document apps like Notion and Craft. And maybe it was largely a fad. But it’s hard not to see how far these apps have progressed.

Building a service business isn’t easy. If we compare it to any software company, the worst part is that you aren’t really compounding. Every client requires dedicated work. You can’t just win and move on to capture new ones.

The good part is all your competitors struggle as well. And ultimately, whether сustomers like you depend on two things: results and execution.

Ideally, both parts should be perfect to extreme. There are areas where you don’t fully control the outcome. But you always have full control over your own execution. The way you talk, write, draft documents, make proposals and do everything else.

Sometimes I have to interact with people in other services businesses. This could be an accounting firm offering their services to us or a local PR agency we might need to support our client. 

Grifters have one specific thing in common. Not all of them, but as soon as I see this, I don’t expect them to be serious people. Instead of showing concrete facts and achievements, they list “tags” in their bio and profiles.

“Serial entrepreneur”. “Mentor”. “Web3/Blockchain/AI”. “Founder”(without the name of the company).

This isn’t helpful information. It’s just status signaling. Anything that can help them perceived more important in a certain social group.

Focus on the facts.

I’ve just watched a funny sketch about Threads from Ryan George (look him up!) and noticed one thing.

He was calling Threads an app by Meta.

When Zuckerberg renamed the company, people laughed at this as an attempt to avoid the negative publicity associated with Facebook, or a corporate reporting stunt similar to Google calling itself Alphabet.

There was one key difference.

The launch of Threads, Meta’s alternative to Twitter, has reinvigorated discussions about privacy and data ownership. A number of smaller Mastodon instances have preemptively defederated Threads, people have concerns about Meta launching yet another social app and getting even more data, etc.

Personally, I believe that we’re in the midst of a moral panic our grandkids will be laughing about.

A moral panic is a widespread fear, most often an irrational one, that someone or something is a threat to the values, safety, and interests of a community or society at large.

I often see people confusing different privacy-related things and using weaponized language to convince you something is bad. Just look at the terms thrown around. You need to protect your privacy and fight the surveillance as if these people are living under Stasi or trying to fight the statewide network of spies—the words we choose matter. By framing the problem in the right context, you can position yourself as the winner without even making a move.