Sponsoring How I Write
Interested in sponsoring the show? Email hello@perell.com.
Quick hits:
239K+ YouTube subscribers, 475K+ followers on X, 46K+ Substack subscribers
104K avg. views/listens per episode since 2024
Past 365 days: 8.1M views/listens, 1.1M hours of watch time (+255% YoY)
Sponsored content produced by the same team that created this mega-viral short film, which got 5M views, 360K likes, and 23K comments in five months
Audience: 57% make purchasing decisions for their company, and 34% are current, former, or aspiring startup founders
Sponsoring How I Write is vastly different from a typical media buy. Most podcast sponsorships follow the same generic formula: you pay for an obligatory standard ad read that is either a talking head or has no video component at all, and hope the audience size and demographics line up well enough that you’ll get the visibility and conversions to justify the spend.
How I Write is different in three crucial ways: quality (our team has the skillset of a world-class creative agency), distribution (How I Write has a large, highly valuable audience), and credibility (David’s brand is extremely high-trust).
Quality
We don’t do standard ad reads. The team that produces sponsored content for How I Write created this mega-viral short film that has 5M views, 360K likes, and 23K comments in under five months. Our sponsored content has the production quality of a beautiful film, storytelling informed by years of interviewing the world’s best writers, and creativity that showcases the sponsor in uniquely memorable ways. And most importantly: it converts.
Distribution
How I Write’s audience is both sizable and valuable, and it’s growing like crazy. We’ve got over 239K YouTube subscribers, 475K Twitter followers, and 46K Substack subscribers. The show’s watch time has grown 255% YoY as of April 2026. A 2026 audience survey confirmed the value of the audience: 57% make purchasing decisions for their company, and 34% are current, former, or aspiring founders.
Credibility
David taught thousands of people to write through what Mercury called the “Y Combinator for writers” and built a Twitter audience of ~500,000 followers. Now he interviews the best writers on the planet every week. He’s become an authority on writing, culture, and aesthetics, and his audience has a uniquely high degree of trust, which extends to sponsors of How I Write.
“Trust is the hardest thing to earn on the internet. People who find Sublime through How I Write arrive with that trust already built. They convert at a much higher rate and are especially likely to choose our lifetime plan, which speaks volumes about the quality of David’s audience.”
- Sari Azout, Sublime Founder & CEO, How I Write sponsor
Ultimately, sponsors of How I Write are partnering with a creative agency with built-in distribution and credibility, which allows us to deliver serious value.
Our partnerships also often go well beyond the standard transactional media buy. We like to think differently and highlight our sponsors in creative ways that are tailored to the brand and match our insane quality bar. Some examples include content consulting, joint events, and live interviews at the sponsor’s HQ.
About the Show
Each week, we interview the world’s great writers — authors, musicians, screenwriters, comedians, journalists, CEOs, and more — about their creative process at a level of depth and quality that can’t be found anywhere else.
A prime example is the Richard Powers episode. Richard’s interviews typically average about 10,000 views on YouTube; his How I Write interview has over 800,000 and has become the definitive reference for his work.
Other past guests include Lee Child, Ocean Vuong, Elif Shafak, Jonathan Franzen, Steven Pinker, Sam Altman, Rosanne Cash, Eric Roth, Tim Ferriss, Ezra Klein, and Mitch Albom.
“David elevates the interview into an art form that often enlightens his interviewee as much as it does his viewers.”
- Dean Koontz, #3 Bestselling living author in the world
Sponsorship Packages
Presenting Sponsorship (10-episode minimum): 60-90 second custom segment embedded into the beginning of the episode, organic mentions on both X and Substack for each episode, sponsor’s logo included on all clips and shorts posted for the duration of the partnership (which includes the 3+ clips posted from our dedicated clips channel daily)
Filled through Spring 2027
Mid-roll (10-episode minimum): 60-90 second custom segment that is embedded into the episode
Custom package: Some combination of the above and/or tailored offerings like joint events, speaking engagements, creative consulting, etc.
Back catalog (12-week minimum): 60-90 second custom segment inserted across all previous How I Write episodes older than 1 month (audio only)
If interested, reach out at hello@perell.com.