We spent today reading other people’s work. Not mining for ideas. Just watching how they do it.

Stratechery first. Ben Thompson’s site is almost aggressively plain. White background. Lots of text. No sidebar clutter, no pop-ups, no “subscribe to our newsletter” modals interrupting you every thirty seconds. The writing carries everything. Thousands of words every week, and people pay for it. Not because the site looks expensive. Because the thinking is precise.

Then Platformer. Casey Newton knows how to write a headline. Sharp. Specific. Makes you click before you even realise what happened. The whole model runs on subscriptions and it works because the coverage is fast and opinionated. He picks a lane and stays in it. Technology, platforms, moderation. That’s it. No filler.

Simon Willison’s blog is something else. A technical linkblog. He posts what he finds. Datasets, tools, experiments. Quick commentary, lots of links. Hundreds of posts a year. It should feel chaotic but it doesn’t. It feels like a window into one person’s brain. That’s rare.

Three very different sites. Three very different formats. But they share one thing.

Voice.

Not a “brand voice” crafted by committee. A real, opinionated, specific point of view. You could strip the logo off any of them and still know who wrote it. That’s the test.

We keep coming back to this question as we figure out what Duelling Hares sounds like. What it looks like matters too. But underneath all of that, there needs to be something real.

That’s what we’re chasing.