Packy McCormick's Advice on Writing: How to Publish Your Best Ideas Online

Packy McCormick writes 10,000-word essays about business strategy and somehow makes them fun. His newsletter Not Boring has over 180,000 subscribers. He earns roughly $3.5 million a year, primarily from sponsored deep dives that companies compete to be featured in.

He started as a random person in a basement writing a newsletter. The gap between that and where he is now closes one essay at a time.

His process draws from his Write of Passage profile, a detailed Growth In Reverse breakdown, and a conversation with Reid Tandy.

The Bill Simmons Model for Business Writing

McCormick saw an opening. Ben Thompson had proven that one person could build a subscription media business writing about tech strategy. But Thompson wrote with the rigor of a business school professor. McCormick wanted the rigor with the energy of a sports columnist.

He was explicit about the counter-positioning: "Ben Thompson does the thing that I want to do, but he does it so well that there's no chance that I'm gonna do that. But what if I counterposition against him? He's never gonna be as silly as I am. He's certainly not gonna compare creative destruction to the Mickey Mouse Club."

His model was Bill Simmons, who mixed serious basketball analysis with pop culture references and personality. McCormick does the same with tech and business. He will explain aggregation theory while referencing anime. He will break down a company's unit economics while making you laugh.

The insight is simple. Business writing does not have to be boring. The name of his newsletter is the thesis.

The Monopoly of You

McCormick's foundational principle comes from David Perell's concept of a personal monopoly. Combine your distinctive passions, expertise, and personality quirks into a voice no one else can replicate.

For McCormick, that meant tech and business strategy fused with genuine enthusiasm and humor. Not forced humor. The kind that comes from actually finding cap tables interesting. "It's really hard to do this every single week if you're not being yourself."

The inauthenticity trap is real. If you build a persona that is not actually you, maintaining it while producing thousands of words per week becomes impossible. The persona cracks. The writing suffers. The readers notice.

The Introduction Is the Ski Run

McCormick's process begins with the introduction. He compares it to skiing fresh powder: figuring out your line ahead of time is everything. Once you find the line, you just go. The introduction sets the frame, and the rest of the essay falls into place.

He writes six or seven drafts of every essay. Each draft is a fresh start from scratch, not an edit of the previous one. He opens a new Google Doc, keeps the good sections, and rewrites the rest. "I get to a spot where I just hit a wall. So I need to go back to the top and start fresh again."

The final rewrite happens between 4:30 AM and 8:55 AM on publication day. He wakes up, throws out the previous version, rewrites the entire thing under deadline pressure, and sends it by 9. This is not procrastination. It is compression. Each draft improved his understanding of the topic, so the final sprint captures the best version of the argument.

Growth Through Quality, Not Hacks

McCormick tested 100 growth ideas early in Not Boring's life. He abandoned nearly all of them. His conclusion: "Any time that I would be spending on growth, I really want to spend on writing."

The numbers back this up. It took him over twelve months to reach 1,000 subscribers. Then he hit 50,000 in year two. Then 100,000 eight months after that. Growth was nonlinear. The early period felt like nothing was happening. Then compounding kicked in.

He did not use clever distribution tricks to reach 180,000 subscribers. He wrote essays good enough that readers forwarded them in group chats. That is the entire strategy. Write something worth sharing, and people share it.

Writing for the Group Chat

McCormick does not optimize for mass appeal. He targets "smart people in a particular category" who share his work because it shifts their thinking. He wants his essays forwarded in the group chats where founders, investors, and operators discuss ideas.

The comment he gets most often after a company deep dive: "Finally my mom understands what I do." That is a signal. He is not writing for the insiders who already know. He is writing for the person who needs the concept explained in a way that actually clicks. His self-description is deliberate: "My job is to be the kind of dumb guy. The person who really needs to actually figure this out alongside the audience and explain it in a way that a regular person can."

This is a deliberate choice. Depth over scale. A thousand readers who forward your work to five friends each beats ten thousand readers who skim and forget.

Sam Parr built The Hustle for maximum reach. McCormick built Not Boring for maximum impact per reader. Both models work. The difference is in what kind of reader action you are optimizing for.

The Sponsored Deep Dive

McCormick reinvented sponsored content. Before Not Boring, sponsored newsletter content typically meant branded listicles or banner ads. McCormick writes 15,000-word investigative essays about companies he finds genuinely fascinating. He covers the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Twenty companies request sponsorships for every one he accepts. That selectivity is the product. Readers trust his sponsored posts because they know he turned down nineteen other companies to write this one.

The pricing emerged organically. He did not hire a sales strategist. He did not read books about sponsorship models. Readers and companies started conversations, and supply-demand dynamics set the price.

Volume as Signal

McCormick publishes twice a week. Tuesday posts are long-form trend analysis and company deep dives. Thursday posts are sponsored analyses. The total weekly output regularly exceeds 10,000 words.

This volume is not a grind for the sake of grinding. It is a signal. When a reader sees that someone produces this much quality work this consistently, trust compounds. They subscribe because they believe the next essay will be as good as the last one.

Ben Thompson calls the second article someone reads the most important one. McCormick ensures there is always a next article worth reading.

Optimism as Strategy

"Optimism actually shapes reality. If you have to choose optimism or pessimism, you're more right if you're optimistic."

This is not naive cheerleading. McCormick covers risks and downsides in his essays. But his default orientation is that technology creates possibilities. That orientation attracts builders, founders, and investors as readers because they share it. Pessimistic analysis attracts a different audience entirely.

Your worldview is a filter. It determines who reads you, who shares your work, and what opportunities come your way. McCormick chose optimism deliberately and built a business around the audience it attracted.

The Research Obsession

McCormick's deep dives begin with obsessive research. For his Tencent piece, he spent two days digging through Chinese-language sites, cross-referencing investment data, and building what became the most comprehensive public spreadsheet of Tencent's investment portfolio. For a sci-fi project, he used multiple Anthropic accounts in rotation - hitting rate limits on one, switching to the other - to classify three thousand entries on whether sci-fi ideas had come true.

This is not research as preparation. It is research as the product. Readers share the spreadsheet, the database, the resource. The essay is the frame, but the uncovered gem is what people remember.

Do Not Fear Early Silence

McCormick took over twelve months to reach 1,000 subscribers. Twelve months of writing essays that almost no one read. Most people quit during this phase. They interpret silence as a verdict. McCormick interpreted it as a baseline.

Initial indifference does not predict future success. The quality was improving with every post. The audience was building, slowly, one forwarded email at a time. Growth in the early phase is invisible. It looks like nothing is happening. Then it looks like everything is happening at once.

Start Before You Have Permission

McCormick documented his journey from the beginning. "I doubt I'm ever going to get there, but just in case, let me just time stamp all of this stuff because if it works then I could show people that I'm a random idiot sitting in a basement somewhere writing a newsletter and you could also be a random idiot doing this thing."

He did not wait for credentials. He did not wait for an audience. He did not wait for anyone to tell him he was allowed to write about business strategy. He wrote, published, and improved in public.

Key Takeaways

• Business writing does not have to be boring. Personality and rigor coexist.
• Build a personal monopoly. Combine your real interests and voice into something no one else can replicate.
• Spend time on writing, not growth hacks. Quality compounds.
• Write for the group chat. Depth of impact beats breadth of reach.
• Reinvent existing formats. McCormick turned sponsored content into investigative journalism.
• Optimism attracts builders. Your worldview determines your audience.
• Start before you have permission. Document the journey.

McCormick proves that a single writer with a distinctive voice and genuine enthusiasm can build a multimillion-dollar media business. No journalism degree. No media company. Just someone who finds business strategy genuinely interesting and writes about it like it matters.

Sources: McCormick's Write of Passage profile, Growth In Reverse analysis, and conversation with Reid Tandy. Athens is an AI writing editor.