After starting Blogads in 2002, I’ve had the privilege of talking with Rafat Ali periodically since the mid 2000s when he was working for Jason Calacanis.
I have cheered (and been cheered by) Rafat’s progress from solopreneur focused on travel news to a major player in the media ecosystem around the travel industry. Today Skift, Rafat’s company, supports nearly 100 people across 16 countries.
As 2025 ends, Rafat’s stepped back to reflect on Skift’s trajectory and reached a startling conclusion, a conclusion that’s about as big picture as it gets.
Every media company claims to provide insight. Most provide information wrapped in the language of insight. Skift’s actual contribution is epistemological: We’re teaching the travel industry new ways of knowing itself.
His post offers a synopsis of the many times Skift stepped back from the day-to-day news to do the hard work of defining and describing new axes that participants can use to graph and frame and position their businesses. Examples include concepts like “overtourism” (over-saturated tourist destinations) and “live tourism” (travel organized around live events.)
Framing his own business, Rafat sums up, “the company is an extended argument about what matters.”
I’m reminded a chapter in Sir Harold Evans’ autobiography, in which he chronicled how the Sunday Times wrote repeatedly about thalidomide over the course of weeks and months before any other UK publication covered the devastation the drug had wrought on children and families.
As one journalist who worked for Evans recalled, “He taught me how to campaign. He said, ‘You don’t just write it once. You don’t just write it twice. You go on writing until people are almost bored.’”
I’m also reminded of The Challenger Sale, a book about a strategic approach to selling “hard” products. The argument: don’t sell your product based on “cheaper” or “better,” since anyone can make those arguments. Position your product as solving a big problem (or opportunity) the customer (and your competition) isn’t even focusing on yet. Challenge them to see the world and their business in a new way.
In the same vein, Quizlab isn’t just powering quizzes, it’s embarked on a small epistemological mission: helping Substack publishers understand that a) quizzes can help readers notice new information or angles and b) after meeting the challenge of creating content that’s sufficiently interesting to attract readers, a publisher’s biggest enemy is churn.
I guess in a similar way, I see great Substackers (and newsletter writers and bloggers and, ok sure, all authors in general) as doing far more than providing information… they’re trying to change how their readers understand themselves, their peers, and the world.
And our quizzes help with that mission because each quiz creates a snapshot not only of an individual reader’s knowledge, but of how that knowledge compares to what the community knows or believes.
I’ll close with Rafat’s great framing of Skift: “the company is an extended argument about what matters.” All great ventures should have, in ways tiny or grand, the same mission in their DNA.