The Leverage Has Yet to Die

An update on 12 months of being an independent writer

Five people I’ve met this year are earning over a million dollars posting AI-generated tech slop to the so-called “elites” of our industry. Their subscribers don’t seem to care that nothing is actually being made. I could join them tomorrow and dramatically increase my income.

Instead, twelve months ago this week, I launched The Leverage.

The job isn’t finished. A lot has gone right, but there’s a yawning divide between what I want this publication to be and what it is today. Year two needs to beat year one.

My goal is to share with you the hardest lessons from the last twelve months, some financial results I haven’t shared publicly before, and then talk about what I envision year two looking like (Book release! Live events!).

Let’s get into it.

Slop works. Like really, really works.

These slop merchants I mentioned at the top are a visceral example of how AI-slop is a demand problem not just a supply one. People like AI generated content!

In my own work, I’ve been very, very selective about how I use AI. I use Claude as a research companion and copy editor, but it is never generating pieces wholesale. It allows my pieces to have more depth/quality while still being 100% my ideas.

Still, I feel like a dude at the candy store trying to sell broccoli chips. I want my customers to have cognitive security, and as such, I resist the temptation to just be overly negative about AI or the “do this or ur mom dies” type content. Ultimately, I am building this company because I want to make the world better, and I don’t think AI slop that appeals to our basest instincts is an ethical way to do it.

You should care much more about the quality of the writing/analysis in your life! Speaking of which…

The Leverage is a spooky accurate publication and it hasn’t made a difference

I used Claude to grade every post since my launch on a 1-5 scale, where 5 means vindicated and 1 means falsified. Weekend Leverage editions got broken out into individual claims since each one usually makes four or five distinct calls. Posts published less than 60 days ago got excluded — not enough time to evaluate. That left 131 graded claims across 86 essays plus 13 Weekend Leverage editions.

The pattern in my best calls is that I followed each thesis for months across multiple essays. Silicon Panopticon (June 2025) predicted Meta would ship facial recognition glasses despite my own skepticism that anyone would be shameless enough. They announced in February. Slack Declares War predicted every legacy SaaS company would lock down its data — every major incumbent has now followed. The Anthropic Switzerland thesis called the company’s $4 billion ARR run as the right bet eleven weeks before they went on their absolutely monster run. Context is King drove the SaaSacre interpretation other writers have since adopted. Double Bind Theory predicted ChatGPT erotica before OpenAI announced it.

Then there are the losses. Hire Misfits Not Missionaries was contradicted by who actually won the year. Anthropic and OpenAI, the labs that crushed, are mission-coded to the bone. Future Machine pitched prediction markets as a truth-seeking technology, and they collapsed into regulated sports betting. Profit is for Chumps argued negative AI margins were rational, and my own February essay Don’t Sell the Work walked that back. These are big ideas to get wrong, but their relative rarity makes me feel proud of the work I’ve done over the last year.

Being right doesn’t grow a newsletter. Instead, it is people organically sharing my work. The number one driver of success for this publication has been people forwarding or posting my work, and what gets spread is spiky opinions, jokes, and speed — not accuracy. “Interesting enough to share” and “this dude is right a lot” are almost entirely non-overlapping circles on the Venn diagram.

So I could have taken that lesson two ways. I could have chased the share graph and started cranking out hot takes. Instead, I doubled down on being right, because I think the small percentage of you who actually care about accuracy are the only readers worth having.

My 6 months in hell

This is my free subscriber chart over the last year. It was a meteoric rise followed by an incredibly painful shrinking of the list. The initial growth was driven by lots of people sharing me and a friend of the publication recommending me on Substack. Once that hubbub died down and my friend turned off the recommendations, everything went bad.

My email audience started to slowly shrink, and by December I was in a full on panic. I have a young kid, a wife finishing a PhD, bills coming, and a business that was visibly dying for six months. This was a “fix this or die” type problem. Thankfully, I fixed it! Over the last 90 days, The Leverage has started growing again.

Paid revenue has also skyrocketed, with gross annualized revenue having grown 40% since the free subscribers started ticking up.

A few things made this possible:

1. I committed to a more regular pattern of posting across social media, making content for X, LinkedIn, and YouTube. I rarely go viral, but the consistency of doing this has started to move the needle.

2. I locked in to an unbelievable degree. I have some large bills coming and I knew that if I didn’t make more money, my family was in trouble. Most days I’m awake at 4:30, in a cold sweat, with stress being the only alarm I need. After my daughter goes down for the night, I’m back at the desk until the moon is high in the sky, writing away.

3. Most importantly, all of you made this possible. More of you have been sharing my work the last 3 months and it has changed the business. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Telling people about my research is the single most helpful thing you can do for this publication. (Outside of paying of course).

The meta-thing connecting all of this has been my biggest takeaway from this new period of growth.

Quality is all that matters

In an interview with TBPN, Uber founder Travis Kalanick said that when building a product you should,

“Go all the way until it hurts. If you’re doing something and it’s easy, it’s not valuable…If anyone says a strategic thing was easy, I’m like, ‘You messed up. You could have gone way further. More competitive advantage. More differentiation. Get it together.’”

I have found this to be true in building The Leverage. I have started to grow over the last quarter because I am working harder than my competition is. Each day I am looking to make this company 1% better and working until my body collapses into bed, unable to muster another ounce of effort. In practice these changes look small: a custom chart style here, one more research call to validate a thesis there. But over time, these incremental improvements have added into a company that is actually working.

It was my family’s needs that allowed me to tap into that drive. And it was my wife’s unquestioning belief in me, her faith that I could pull this off, that gave me the courage to start The Leverage in the first place. It feels perverse that my overwhelming love for my wife and child has somehow translated into increasing shareholder value, but such is life.

So now that the company is (finally) growing again, what are we doing to take advantage of this momentum?

Year two

The bet for year two is simple. The analysis is getting better, and it needs more places to land. For the next few months, it’ll look like this:

1. Live events: We are doing The Leverage Live in Boston on May 26th and NYC on June 3rd. The event is called “How to Automate Everything” and is a panel discussion and happy hour where founders and senior tech operators will talk about how AI agents have changed how they are running their companies. My research has shown that a true AI native startup will have 2x the revenue per employee, grow faster, and require 40% less capital. These events will be pragmatic discussions on how to actually do that. I’ll send out a more formal announcement soon, but if you are in town, please come! The event is free. (If your company would like to get in front of this audience, please send me an email for info on sponsorship opportunities).

2. A new book: I’ve spent the last 9 months researching and writing a book about education and AI. It should be released in late May. Again, completely free. And again, more details to come soon, but I am excited for you all to read this. Writing it has changed how I am raising my kid.

3. Doubling down on video: While the YouTube channel is new (you should subscribe) I can feel in my bones that I am good at it. Viewers have expressed their excitement, and it looks like this could be a second growth engine for the business. Video will end up being a larger part of our product mix going forward, holding to a weekly release cadence. I should have a video up tomorrow on the Tim Cook retirement.

The core thing that makes The Leverage work is the original research and reporting that I do. You can expect that to continue. Multiple times a week you’ll get unbiased, analytically rigorous research that allows you to understand the forces reshaping our world. In the months to come, you can expect my product to be the highest leverage email you get every week if it isn’t already.

This has been the hardest, most wonderful year of my life, and I cannot wait to go even harder in year two. Thanks again for reading, subscribing, and sharing my work. What a gift this first year has been.

P.S. If you want to join us, I’m offering my only sale for the entire year. You can receive 20% off for your first annual subscription by clicking below.