The hardest part of building products isn't actually building products. It’s everything else.

It’s proving the work matters, managing stakeholders, trying to plan ahead. Most teams spend more time reacting than learning—chasing updates, justifying roadmaps, and constantly unblocking work to keep things moving.

Jira Product Discovery puts you back in control.

• Capture insights and prioritise high-impact ideas with flexible frameworks

• Build roadmaps that stakeholders want to rally around

• Track ideas from strategy to delivery—all in one place.

👉 Get Jira Product Discovery free. Less chasing. More time to think, learn, and build the right thing.

Building with AI demands speed. Selling AI demands trust.

With deep integrations and automated workflows built for fast-moving AI teams, Vanta gets you audit-ready fast.

AI innovators like LangChain, Writer, and Cursor scaled faster and closed bigger deals by getting security right early with Vanta.

Start with Vanta’s AI Security Assessment, which outlines the most critical and common considerations across any AI program.

_{Thank you for supporting our sponsors, who keep this newsletter free.}

A few weeks ago, I made a promise in a tweet reply:

I couldn’t stop staring at those numbers.

Nearly $2 million in earnings.

In just 6 months.

For an indie software company.

For just 1 of their many books.

I’ll admit this wasn’t the first time I’d come across this strategy - I loved the Rework audiobook and it’s on my list of “gifts for other bootstrappers” (alongside Show Your Work by Austin Kleon and The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris).

But for whatever reason, this tweet triggered a 3-day bender of digging into what/how/why some tech companies produce physical books.

Here’s where that weekend ended up.

Enjoy.

— Tom

Digital goes analog

Chess Move

The what: A TLDR explanation of the strategy

Companies built on code, algorithms, and interfaces are turning to humanity's oldest publishing technology.

Creating something with mass.

Something that occupies space on a shelf.

Something that ages, yellows, creases, accumulates coffee stains.

You can't smell a website. You can't feel the weight of an app in your hands. You can't display software on your coffee table as a signal of your taste.

Physical + Digital = "Phygital"

(Side-note: I first found and fell in love with this portmanteau in the web3 era when NFT projects were attaching tokens to physical objects like stickers and clothes)

(Side-side-note: We should’ve saved the term “web3” for the AI web imo)

Software can be updated, deleted, forgotten. An app can disappear from the store.

Ephemeral. Subscriptions. A/B tests. Cancellable. Beta versions.

Printing something is almost recklessly permanent. You can't hotfix a typo in 10,000 printed copies. You can't patch a bug in the thesis after shipping.

The constraint is a feature - it signals confidence, deliberation, substance.

A book makes a claim on reality.

It says: these ideas matter enough to be fashioned into an object you can hold.

In turn, the book becomes a statement that fundamentally changes how we perceive the company.

It says: we're not just building esoteric products.

We're building institutions.

We’re claiming intellectual territory.

Digital content competes in an attention economy of infinite supply. Everyone can publish and access digital content instantly.

But books are scarce. They arrive unexpectedly. They get passed hand to hand. They create moments - the unboxing, the gifting, the spotting on someone's shelf.

In a world of endless scrolling, what people crave is something finite. Something complete. Something they can hold.

Breakdown

The how: The strategic playbook told through 5x interesting examples

1. 37signals - Getting Real (2006), Rework (2010), Remote (2013), It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work (2018), Shape Up (2019)

Co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (“DHH”) have published several books sharing the unconventional playbooks and learnings from building cult-favourite products like Basecamp and HEY.

Each title is part business book, part content marketing, part manifesto.

There’s a beautiful recursion in what the contrarian books represent.

37signals as a company proudly embodies a particular way of working: small teams, profitable bootstrapping, dogfooding, calm environments.

Their books teach and advocate for these ideas.

Their software also has the same principles subconsciously hard-coded - simplicity, bias for action, streamlined communication.

Reading their books is like receiving the source code for their company.

Jason Fried calls their strategy "Selling your by-products" – packaging your operational waste and turning it into a revenue stream.

The books are both a profit source (funding their famous independence from venture capital), as well as a marketing funnel.

Every reader becomes a pre-qualified customer. If you resonate with the philosophies documented in their books, you'll probably love their software.

They use books to profitably broadcast an authentic voice at global scale, introducing new cohorts to Basecamp every week.

Similarly, every reader becomes a potential employee - the books are a recruitment filter that attracts people who think like 37signals.

2.  Google - Google Chrome Comic (2008)

The browser is perhaps the most abstract product imaginable - it's literally a window into the digital world. A frame for virtual content.

To market the launch of Chrome, Google hired Scott McCloud (a celebrated comic artist known for the Understanding Comics series) to create a printed comic.

It captured Chrome's inner workings and strategic decisions through 38 pages of hand-drawn art, explaining complex innovations like process isolation and JavaScript engines through visual narratives.

The printed copies were distributed to bloggers and journalists, who had to scan the physical pages to share them online.

The irony was the point - a turning point in internet history marked by 100s of tech nerds getting hyped about handling and scanning physical objects.

It made Chrome feel substantial, considered, worthy of attention.

A week later, people were selling them on eBay.

Today, they’re one of history’s most iconic pieces of tech memorabilia (and are being sold for a lot more…)

Apparently Google’s mailroom *accidentally* shipped some copies out before the scheduled launch.

The most ubiquitous digital product of the decade was analog-only for a few days!

3. Airbnb - Airbnbmag (est. 2016)

Airbnb's first attempt at print media, Pineapple, lasted exactly one issue. Budget constraints killed it in 2014.

They returned in 2016 with Airbnbmag, partnering with Hearst (publisher of Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Food Network Magazine etc) to create a coffee-table publication that blended travel research with leisure reading.

They featured popular places, host and guest stories, new experiences, and other editorial content aimed at making staying local feel luxurious.

For Airbnb, this was a strategic repositioning from competing with hotels to competing with culturally-beloved century-old travel institutions like National Geographic.

CEO Brian Chesky launched the project at Airbnb Open in Los Angeles, where he recreated Oprah's famous car giveaway moment with copies taped under every auditorium seat.

The message: Airbnb didn’t see itself as just a booking platform. It was a lifestyle brand with the gravitas to produce culturally-relevant physical media.

As consumer travel preferences shift toward authentic, tangible experiences, the magazine is another chapter in Airbnb’s quest to sit in a category of 1.

You don’t just use Airbnb. You live the Airbnb life, and live like a local.

4. Stripe - Stripe Press (est. 2018)

Stripe could have stuck to white-papers and developer conferences.

Instead, they became a publisher.

Payments, banking, compliance etc. are critical… but rather dry domains.

Stripe Press releases high-brow hardcover books on economics, technology history, and culture.

Titles like The Dream Machine and Working in Public aren't about payments infrastructure - they're about the ideas shaping the internet itself.

Content marketing for society’s intelligentsia.

To the everyday reader, these topics are too abstract to matter.

This is deliberate.

The topics matter intensely to the people who Stripe wants to matter to.

By publishing books that founders / execs / investors treat as required reading, Stripe inserts itself into the cultural discourse that shapes technology’s future growth.

The books create a halo effect. When founders recommend The Dream Machine, they invariably mention it's published by Stripe Press.

The payment processor has become synonymous with taste, thoughtfulness, and long-term thinking.

Reading the books implies membership in an intellectual tradition, by extension, alignment with Stripe's gravitas.

5. Midjourney - Midjourney magazine (est. 2022)

AI-generated art faces a fundamental intellectual problem: infinite reproducibility.

If anyone can instantly generate thousands of stunning images, where's the value?

Midjourney, the most popular genAI image creation tool, launched an initiative to offer an alternative narrative:

→ a physical magazine featuring a hand-picked curation of AI art

By compiling user-generated AI art into a beautifully printed publication, they repackage infinite digital possibilities into finite cultural objects.

Unlimited images available on the platform, but the curators need to select just a few hundred.

Suddenly, AI art has scarcity.

But the initiative isn’t driven by economics. The subscription costs just $4 per month.

The magazine symbolises provenance. When AI art appears in a physical magazine you might find in a museum gift shop, it gains artistic legitimacy.

The medium validates the company’s message.

A physical artefact that counters a central anxiety about AI art:

→ “Is this real art?”

The magazine says “Yes - you can hold it in your hands.”

A slight departure from our usual format, hopefully you found it interesting!

If this one hit with you, chances are a pal in your network would enjoy it to.

Forwarding is free, and only takes 8 seconds!

— Tom

Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways we can help you:

1. StrategyHub

Our flagship course on how to use free internet data to make better strategic decisions. Contains 5 years of strategy expertise, proven methods, and actionable tactics to accelerate your career with modern-day strategy skills.

2. Partnerships

We have a growing audience of 80,000+ strategists from top companies like Google, Meta, Atlassian, Stripe, and Netflix. Apply to feature your business in front of Strategy Breakdowns readers.

3. Tech stack

One of the most common questions we get asked is: “What tools do you use to run Strategy Breakdowns?” So, we’ve open-sourced our tech stack to give you an inside-look at exactly what tools we’re using to power each corner of this operation.