Technically is dead; long live Technically Some bittersweet news for you all today: after 5 years writing Technically and more than 100 posts about everything from APIs to data warehouses to Facebook DNS hacks, today I am (for the most part) shutting the Technically Substack down… …and replacing it with Technically 2.0, an amazing software product I’ve been working with @dkrevitt on for the past 6 months. But first… For a newsletter that started with an innocent tweet while I was bored in Haneda airport, this thing has come pretty far. 70K+ subscribers, yada yada. But you’re here for the story so here it is. It was December 2019, I was traveling before moving to SF to start at @retool, and like I said, I was bored. Late 2019 – what an amazing time to start a newsletter! There weren’t that many of them out there. And then came 2020. Everyone was stuck at home with nothing to do but sign up for more and more Substacks, and talk about them on the internet. Every day, another one of your friends was announcing a newsletter on Twitter. It was the golden era, no doubt, and many people like me combined hard work, a good idea, and the old fashioned “right place right time” streak of luck to build a really nice Substack business. I’ll never forget the day @benthompson referenced Technically in Stratechery. I must have gotten 50 texts from friends. Everyone was reading Stratechery at the time…it was like becoming a made man. There was this almost communal vibe in the air with these newsletters. Everyone was reading the same stuff, talking about the same stuff. It was a scene is what it was. But by 2022 things were changing. People were outside again, and had less free time to read newsletters. Interest rates were going up, and people were working more (even in offices). In the paid Substack group chats, most of us were reporting stalling or negative growth, even though we hadn’t changed anything on our end. And with 50% churn rates on these subscriptions, if you weren’t growing you were dying. I’m listening to Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush” as I write this and it couldn’t be more fitting. Although I imagine Mr. Young himself would disapprove of the whole paid newsletter endeavor. What happened to newsletters? David and I call what’s going on “Substack Fatigue” – people are just tired of reading yet another newsletter, let alone paying for one. Newsletters are just not the thing anymore. There are some fast growing news ones focused on AI, but the same story is going to play out in a few years when everything cools down. Political newsletters are fully investing in video and podcasts. Newsletters are not the thing anymore. We rode a cultural wave and the wave is over. You don’t have to die, but you have to adjust. The wrench in this whole story is that Technically was only (very) part time for me. I’m pretty sure at one point I was generating the most revenue on Substack for someone who wasn’t focusing on their newsletter full time. Which is a sick flex no doubt, but was also a huge problem, because I just didn’t have the time or mental capacity to make the big moves required to reverse the trend. Technically started to slowly lose paid subscribers every month, but I was at peace with that. I was entering a new phase in my life, settling down a bit, enjoying spending time on cooking, cocktails, and music. Approaching 30 and feeling really good about everything. It’s OK for some things to be temporary, and I was content with Technically to continue to be useful to people…just not make as much money. But in the back of my head, I always knew that Technically had a lot more potential, and deserved more than I could give it. That there’s no reason this thing couldn’t be a $1M+/year business. I continue to believe that technical literacy is going to be one of the defining social problems of our era, and the progress in AI only makes this even more critical. It should be way more than a newsletter, it should be how everyone learns what the fuck is going on in this digital world. I needed some help. But I had a bad track record of getting people to work on Technically with me. It’s hard to share custody of your child. And I am extremely particular. I’m not always the easiest to work with. Worked with some contractors here and there, but never found a more long term partner. I’m extremely grateful that @dkrevitt reached out to me when he did or this paragraph would end here. Instead, after regaling you with my boring tale for many paragraphs now, I can finally share what we’ve been working on since last year. It’s called Technically 2.0. It’s all of the content you know and love, but built as a piece of software specifically aimed at helping people get more technical. No more newsletter – it’s a learning platform now, complete with reading lists, bookmarks, a dictionary, and guided learning tracks. Our goal was to make a Wikipedia kind of experience: click around to follow your curiosity on whatever software you’re learning about. You can sign up on the Technically site (technically.dev). You’re going to have to pay for it, but if your experience is anything like that of the other thousands of people who already have, you won’t regret it. Enjoy the soothing sounds of David's voice as he walks you through it in the video below. It’s hard to say goodbye completely to something you’ve been doing every week for 5 years. Any readers with their own long running newsletters will understand the odd, para-social relationship you develop with your audience. So I’m going to keep publishing on Substack a little – monthly roundups of the new stuff we’re publishing on Technically 2.0, plus some good sponsored posts. So while the newsletter might be dead, it is also only just beginning (or something). Hope to see you on the other side, ~ ❤️ Justin
