MBI turns five!
On this day five years ago, I decided to start an independent research service. I had a simple idea: just one Deep Dive on a publicly listed company every month.
It may seem there are a plethora of Substacks or independent research services today, but even five years ago, there was only a handful of decent analysts publishing their work at a regular frequency online. Even the ones who did, very few actually did long form write-ups on publicly listed companies.
Over time, I realized why there weren’t as many decent analysts publishing their work online. The reality is if you are any good, you would inevitably get picked up by the industry. Market is usually efficient enough that good analysts are spotted fairly quickly. So, the only way any decent analyst can remain “online” for a long time is through their sheer commitment to stay independent. I have no doubt that the likes of Ben Thompson or Scuttleblurb needed to make conscious, firm decision to stay the course.
Admittedly, I was, at times, in two minds. Every year since starting MBI Deep Dives, I did receive interest from my own subscribers every once in a while whether I would be interested in going back to buy-side. In some cases, I did engage in and entertained these conversations. But over time, I realized I have increasingly become, for better or worse, “unemployable”. I have simply fallen in love with the work I do at MBI Deep Dives, and it is perhaps going to be pretty much impossible to replicate this feeling anywhere else.
Of course, the joys of working for yourself also exposes one to the vagaries of capitalism itself much more directly. My initial bet with MBI Deep Dives was very few people actually have the focus, interest, and discipline to do a proper Deep Dives every month and only a handful will do so online. So, if I can accomplish that and do a good job at it, it is highly likely to have a market for that.
Indeed, that bet was correct!
However, once “Deep Research” came to the scene, my business model increasingly seemed anachronistic to me. Although the raw numbers didn’t quite show any noticeable sign of tension, I couldn’t quite be at ease while thinking about the future of MBI Deep Dives in three to five years!
I could see multiple tensions brewing over time. In a pre-AI world, you could read a Deep Dive and easily appreciate the effort that went behind producing such a piece. Deep Research completely abstracts away or/and cheapens these efforts in the eyes of readers. If I came across MBI Deep Dives and saw this guy meticulously published Deep Dive after Deep Dive every month in the last 60 months, frankly speaking I would be impressed at the persistence and discipline. AI, however, likely already has or is going to rewire these perceptions in a profound way for all written content.
Remember how I thought only a handful of people could be focused, disciplined, and interested enough to do these Deep Dives regularly? Well, after Deep Research, that number certainly, theoretically, shot up to tens of thousands (if not more). As someone whose job is to analyze businesses, it didn’t take me too long to infer “Houston, we have a problem!”
While AI was posing these uncomfortable questions, the actual process of analyzing businesses didn’t quite get a lot simpler overnight. To understand, absorb, digest a new company and write my own thoughts on a business, I still needed to do almost all the work that I was doing earlier.
Nonetheless, I decided to take a deeper look at my work and what I could do to tweak my business model a bit. One of the things I always try to focus on is to take a closer look at what I am already doing in my day-to-day life and whether any of it would be useful to other people.
One thing that jumped out to me was I am an infovore who prodigiously devours content and I suspect I have developed a pretty decent taste on content published online. Moreover, thanks to studying different businesses over the years, I myself have a lot of my own thoughts and inferences while consuming content everyday. So, I thought what if I write everyday?
Admittedly, it was a jarring thought. Publishing something everyday requires a level of self-discipline and productivity that I wasn’t sure I quite had it. After some self-introspection, I decided to lean into my fear and gave it a shot. Voila, MBI Deep Dives went from monthly to daily!
How do I work these days?
I wake up somewhere between 4 to 5 am. I basically get three uninterrupted hours to myself before my son wakes up. So, I intend to publish my daily post within three hours before my son wakes up. I usually have a pretty good idea what I intend to write the night before, and typically have a brief outline before going to bed. I do the actual writing after waking up.
After publishing my daily post, I spent about an hour or so with my son. Then I focus on the monthly Deep Dives for the rest of the morning and afternoon. I tend to have pretty early dinner these days and post-dinner, I spend some time creating an outline for the post next day. Actually, ~80% of the idea of daily posts comes during my daily walk. As I try to hit 10k steps every day, these are usually great fodder for gathering my thoughts circling in my head.
It’s been two months since I made these adjustments. I surprised myself how easily I adapted to this schedule. I don’t think I have ever been as cognitively active as I had been in the last couple of months. The rigid deadline of publishing something everyday turned out to be a great way to stay deeply intellectually engaged. And it doesn’t hurt that the “market” responded; MBI revenues last month reached new all-time highs with lowest ever monthly churn in the last five years!
I don’t quite think Deep Dives are any less important today than it was five years ago. I want to do this job because investing is my lens to understand the world. To understand the world, I still need to dive deep, ponder, and wrestle with my thoughts before writing down my understanding and assessment of a business. But I do feel I needed to wake up to the market reality. I believe this will happen to a broad swath of knowledge economy jobs; as you can see, I don’t quite think AI is quite the wholesale replacement for the work most of us do, but we may need to take a deeper look to tweak some things to keep our work economically relevant in the post-AI world.
As far as success or failure goes, I remind myself the following by Viktor Frankl:
“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue”
Indeed, it must ensue! One of my core beliefs is mere survival online over a very long period of time will be rewarded in many positive, unexpected ways.
Here’s to the next five (and hopefully many, many more)! Thank you so much for your support!
