Year-End Review

Off to a good start, but here's to an even stronger 2022

When I started working on my first article six months ago, I really had no expectations or specific goals in mind other than creating a little library of good company write ups for myself. I never wrote anything in public before, in fact I never even tweeted anything before. If anyone read anything I wrote, I considered it a bonus. Six months later, safe to say the response has completely surpassed my expectations. This fledgling blog has somehow reached almost 1.1K subscribers.

Here's a quick summary of the first six months:

• 9 articles, including long-form deep dives on Etsy, Take-Two, and Sea (4 part series)

• Total page views: 32,000

• Total email subscribers: 1,080

• Most read deep dive: Sea - Garena (6,300 views)

• Least read deep dive: Etsy (800 views)

Some other observations and learnings:

• Nothing clarifies your thinking and accelerates your learning like writing in public. Until I sat down and started writing about these companies, I didn’t realise how many gaps I had in my understanding of them and just how unstructured my thoughts were.

• Twitter has been absolutely magic, not just for growing the audience, but accelerating the learning through continuous engagement and feedback. The likelihood of getting a big engaged audience for this sort of content outside of Twitter is basically very low (I tried a few top of funnel approaches).

• Writing takes the least amount of time, and is the most enjoyable part of the process (for me anyway). Most of the heavy lifting goes into the research, thinking about the thesis and arguments, and collecting data.

• Finally, the connections, networks and conversations that have come as a result of this project has really been the best reward.

Plans going forward

More of the same. Will continue to publish deep dives on great companies with a sprinkling of shorter articles on company updates and other general topics.  I am also thinking about experimenting with shorter format deep dives, less focused on company overviews and concept explanations, more focused on investment thesis and other critical points of the evaluation. All I know is that this blog will be constantly evolving over time.

I’ve got quite a few interesting companies in the pipeline for 2022, from enterprise SaaS to tech hardware to media. It should be a fun year where I increase my coverage significantly. I have also been getting a lot of questions and having a lot of interesting conversations on Sea, particularly with the recent sell off, so I’ll definitely be doing some follow up articles there as well.

I love getting feedback and chatting to fellow investors. Please feel free to hit me up via the comments below or on Twitter (@punchcardinvest) where I am very active.

I am genuinely thankful for every single one of you reading, subscribing, sharing, and commenting on this blog. Happy new year, and thank you all for your support!