Tomas Pueyo
Tomas Pueyo is a French-Spanish engineer turned writer behind Uncharted Territories, a Substack of big-picture explainers on geography, history, science, technology, and how the world works. He reached a global audience in March 2020 when his data-driven essay Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now drew tens of millions of reads within a week and was translated into dozens of languages, lifting him from about 450 to over 35,000 Twitter followers in a month. He turned that spike into the Uncharted Territories newsletter, now around 81,000 subscribers (alongside more than 300,000 Twitter followers), and left his job in 2021 to write it full time.
- Win by Assembling Experts, Not Being One — won authority on COVID by assembling scattered research into one clear place, not by being a credentialed expert
- The Edge of Reading the Papers Nobody Reads — builds a content edge by going to roughly a dozen primary papers per article
- Borrowing an Exponential Intuition From a Past Career — ported a virality instinct from building Facebook viral apps into reading the COVID curve
- Repackage Each Piece as a Viral Twitter Thread — his biggest distribution lever: turns each piece into a thread with a curiosity hook and a visual in every tweet that goes viral
- Catch the Viral Spike in an Owned List — captured the viral reach into an owned email list via a Google Form embedded in the article
- Build the Explainer Around a Two-Sided Conflict — structures dry topics as two-sided conflicts so readers follow them as stories
- Make Complexity Graspable With a Sticky Metaphor — coins reusable metaphors (geography as hardware, institutions as software) that listeners repeat
- Free Post Hooks, Paid Post Pays Off — pairs a shareable free post with a paid follow-up that answers its open loop
- A Visual on Every Unit You Publish — attaches a chart or map to every tweet and section so the work stops the scroll
- Keep a Hundred Drafts in Flight — maintains 100 to 150 drafts and themed series so he never starts from a blank page