Writing is building, but software is now content
The other day I was listening to a podcast in which Dan Shipper said something in passing that stopped me dead in my tracks: “writing is building, but software is now content”.
It is one of those pithy quotes that whacks you on the head and makes a bunch of random pieces fall into place and make sense.
Writing is building but software is now content… one of the really cool things is when we we just launched this app called Cora and that has 10,000 people on the wait list. Those are all now Every subscribers.
You can’t write an article that’s going to get you 10,000 new subscribers but you can write software that does it, and that’s incredible.
Let me try to break that down so I can understand it.
“writing is building”
This is speaking to the primacy of the motivation, idea, definition and spec for a product. Perhaps in the case of Every, this also includes the main writing on the site. Most importantly, writing is not content any more.
What is content then? Content used to be a derogatory term. People would churn out lots of it. It would be low-effort. It was used at the top of the funnel. This was the world of content marketing and SEO writ large.
But at the end of the day, this content alone was not executable or actionable. You could not get the content to actually do something for you.
This is where software comes in. Software is utilitarian. You can run it to do things for you, unlike writing. It used to be expensive and hence, scarce. But that is becoming less true by the day in the age of coding LLMs.
In the old world, there would be lots of content at the top of the funnel. This funnel would get fed by social media and SEO. At the bottom of the funnel you’d have some kind of software or service being sold.
In this old world, writing was cheap and software was expensive.
“…but software is now content”
But now that AI makes software cheap, one can quickly build useful software and use software at the top of the funnel. This could not have been done before AI. I think this is what Shipper is talking about when he says that putting out a software product got him way more paying subscribers than churning out articles.
In the new world, the setup looks something like this: you do a limited amount of high-value writing. It may not even be published. But it serves as fodder for what’s next. And what’s next is building lots of exploratory prototypes in software. This software can tackle small niches and long-tail use-cases.
You can do this now because creating software is getting cheaper. When software was expensive you could only build software for the 20% fat head, leaving the 80% long tail to fend for themselves. This software now becomes the top of the funnel. At the bottom, you sell subscriptions or services. This is the strategy Shipper and co are following with Every Studio.
[BTW, AI&I is a shockingly under-rated podcast. If Dwarkesh et al are the “architecture astronauts” of AI, Dan Shipper et al are the miners with dusty faces.]