2023 Year-end Review: Highlights, Changes, and Business Thoughts
2023 Year-end Review: Highlights, Changes, and Business Thoughts
Thank you for a wonderful year!
Welcome to Speedwell Research’s Newsletter. We write about business and investing. Our paid research product can be found at SpeedwellResearch.com. You can learn more about us here.
2023 was Speedwell Research’s first full year in business and we would like to share some highlights, as well as how we are thinking about the service going forward.
Highlights:
We published our longest research report ever on Meta Platforms, which was 47,000 words and 166 pages.
We created a new category of short reports called Exploratory Research Reports and published our shortest research report at 5,100 words.
In total we published 178,100 words. A 250-page book is about 70k words. That’s 2.5 books.
We launched our own podcast, The Synopsis, and produced 11 hours and 9 minutes of content.
We were featured on four podcasts: Business Breakdowns, Equity Mates, Chit Chat Money, and Neckar’s Minds & Markets. We also had a written feature on Meta with MBI.
One of our reports was positively mentioned on a company’s earnings call (more on this, hopefully, soon)
We committed to writing a new memo on investing or business every Friday morning.
Our Most Popular Written Pieces of the Year were:
1) Accounting Insights: Alibaba, JD, and the $330bn Footnote
2) Priced to Outperform Perfection: The Home Depot Circa 1999
3) The Consumer's Hierarchy of Preferences: Assessing Retail Strategies with The Inventory Value Capture Index
4) The Consumer's Hierarchy of Preferences: Two Ends of the Strategy Spectrum
5) The Piton Network: Decisions that Simultaneously Support and Limit the Future Decision Space
Our Top Three Most Popular Podcast Episodes were:
1) Copart: Building a Deep Moat Business from Junkyards and Wrecked Cars
2) RH: From Near Bankruptcy to Multi-Billion Dollar Luxury Retailer
3) Floor & Decor: The Costco of Flooring
Thoughts on the Business.
Like many new businesses, we spent a good portion of 2023 reiterating our product offering. When we first started, we focused exclusively on long equity research reports, however, as we found people also wanted more company updates and, frankly, just more content in general, we continued to increase our publishing cadence.
We learned there is a limit to how many in-depth research reports we can do, but adding shorter-form content like our new weekly memos series and Exploratory Research Reports has been net additive. This goes back to something we said on the Neckar’s Podcast at the beginning of the year:
I believe it's not worth writing anything that I don't believe is worth reading. The things I think are most interesting to read are the ones where the writer’s really excited about it. I spend the better part of a month on each report and it just would not be a great experience for me if I wasn't enjoying it. I think it would show up in the quality of work. It's very hard to be good at something when you don't enjoy it.
The simple (unfortunate) reality is there is a limit to how many earnings transcripts or 10Qs we can read in a day without our attention waning, but writing about a different topic or learning about a different company tends to be more invigorating than tiring. It is sort of like how alternating the muscles you work out allows you to work out more often. In just the past few months we feel like we have started to close in on the right mix of different work that best optimizes our time and research output.
One of the toughest parts of this business is that what makes great research seldom translates to virality. The same way raising money for a fund can get in the way of investing, we often feared that focusing on growing the business could risk the research product deteriorating. We want to acknowledge this because as the Carl Jung quote goes:
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
We think we found a reasonable solution to this with our recent commitment to produce one written Memo every Friday, as the memos allow us to explore different business concepts and usually are ideas that we stumbled upon while researching and wanted to think through more anyway.
Additionally, we also learned that a Podcast is easier for us to produce than trying to come up with viral Tweets. We also felt that the conversational aspect of a Podcast allowed for our work to be presented in a different fashion and occasionally resulted in things we hadn’t thought before. As such we will increasingly rely on short written content and the Podcast for growth rather than writing content just for Twitter (which we were never great at anyway).
Improving Speedwell Membership Benefits.
Another thing we learned this year is that even though our Extensive Research Reports cover almost everything an investor could want to know about the business, investors still appreciate on-going commentary on the business. Thus, we decided to commit to providing members with at least 2 annual updates on each business we covered. We may though just end up providing commentary each quarter, even if the commentary is very short.
In the past, we may have been a little too stubborn in not wanting to publish anything that someone wouldn’t want to read a year after it had been published, and we always considered earnings updates to be the epitome of a short shelf-life writing. It is for this reasons we eschew most short-term factors in our reports. While we still absolutely stand by this sentiment—our Constellation Software report is over a year old, but you would be hard pressed to find a better single report to start learning about the company—but we will be a bit more flexible on our ideology here. In the future, Members can expect more short updates from us, even if the update essentially conveys there is nothing worth updating.
Looking Forward to The New Year.
Next year we have a lot planned for Speedwell between our research reports, company updates, newsletter, and podcast. We are pleased by how Speedwell has grown in the past year, but now that we have settled on the right mix of products, we are very excited to keep up the momentum and just be more regular with our output.
There are a couple exciting things in the works that could materially accelerate growth at Speedwell, but honestly even without them we will continue to plug away indefinitely, as we feel extremely fortunate to have such fun work at Speedwell.
Thank you all to everyone who has supported us, even in the smallest way whether that be giving us the privilege of sending you emails or liking one of our posts: we are immensely grateful. And to our paying Speedwell Members, thank you for allowing us to put our full efforts into investment research: you are the reason Speedwell can continue to exist, and we wish to express our deepest gratitude.
We hope everyone has a Healthy and Happy New Year!
All the Best,
Kevin and Drew
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