substack on substack

an interview with substack co-founder/CEO Chris Best!

Jul 29, 2019

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Dear friends,

Buckle up. This one is gonna be meta!

When u write words and then send those words to others who at one point decided they wanted to read those words, that’s a newsletter.

Many many people have them and more are getting them! The question is... why? An urge to CREATE MORE CONTENT on more platforms to distract from our mortality? A vanity play for micro-influence? A chance for those without a platform -- especially those who have been historically denied a platform -- to say exactly what they want when they want, to a lot of people, free of gatekeepers? A fun thing to do w your long-distance friend?!

Whatever the reason for the boom, we think writing and reading newsletters is great. Turns out it is also Big Business! As evidenced by the fact that Substack, the platform on which we publish this newsletter, just got $15 million of VC funding from blue-chip VC firm Andreeson Horowitz last week.

We called up Chris Best, a co-founder and the CEO of Substack, to hear about the funding, how he hopes every writer (and writer-to-be) will get on Substack, and why being parodied on Twitter feels better than using Twitter. (The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)

MEATSPACE: We read your July 16 blog post about your big investment from Andreessen Horowitz. Congrats again! Can you tell us why you decided to go with VC funding instead of other funding streams for Substack?
CHRIS BEST: We started the company not quite sure if we were going to try and build it into a big business that had a big effect on the world, or whether it would be kind of a cool, niche thing. But relatively early on, we launched and had our first customer [Bill Bishop, who writes a newsletter called Sinocism] experience a huge amount of success. And we thought we saw an opportunity to build something really big and meaningful. And so we decided to go do Y Combinator, which is a startup accelerator.
We think that the model that Substack is promoting is good for the world: This idea that good writing has value, and that people's cultural output is worth a lot. By actually just charging people directly for it, it’s both more fair, because the people creating the value can get some of it, and it's also good for the world because we end up having more of that good, valuable stuff.
VC is sort of famous—or infamous—for requiring explosive growth. We’re curious if you could speak a little bit about what Substack’s plans are for growth in the next months and years?
Well, our plan is to keep growing. Our plan is to continue to make the product as good as we can possibly make it. And try to get every writer around the world to use Substack.
How many people use Substack? How many creators have newsletters, and how many readers are using the platform?
What I’ve been sharing is the number of paid subscribers on the platform, which is now over 50,000. We're not sharing the total other numbers -- for us that's the most important one, because that's the model actually working.
Our understanding is that your business model currently is ad-free, and you take 10% of paid newsletters’ revenue. Could you speak to whether that will change or if you have other revenue streams in the works, if you're at liberty to talk about that?
We think that this model is an alternative to an ad-funded model, and it's a little bit in opposition to it. Something that’s focused, that has really high value for what could be a small audience is great for subscriptions [and maybe less so for advertising.] So we’re not gonna do advertising, that's a big one.
The thing that we really would want to preserve over time is this idea that we're succeeding together with the writer. Our pitch to people is: we make money when you make money. The only reason you're paying us that money is because you made 10 times more money than that for yourself. Whatever the exact structure is and how that works, we really want to keep it so we're on the same team as the writers.
You wrote about the transition from running Kik, a messaging app, to launching and running Substack. Can you tell us more about the differences and similarities between running a social media platform and newslettering platform?
One thing that we think a lot about is incentive structures -- the rules within the system and who benefits. When you're designing something, whether it's social media platform or a media platform, the question of, “is this going to end up being a good thing for people?” really boils down to, are the rules set up in a way that good behavior will emerge and good patterns will emerge? Our goal from day one with Substack has always been just be thoughtful about that.
The idea that writers can have a direct relationship with their readers -- where they’re talking directly to them, they have this personal relationship, and their readers are paying and supporting the writer directly -- is this really simple and powerful thing. If you're a writer on Substack your incentive is to make great things for people: make things that respect people's intelligence, respect their time, that they want to keep coming back and reading so much that they'll pay for it. That’s just a better setup than just trying to be like the loudest voice on Twitter or whatever.
Obviously there aren’t barriers to entry on Substack -- anyone can start a newsletter. But many of the people that have had the most success in building these kinds of newsletter-reader relationships have gotten their start in traditional media, or brought a large Twitter following over to the platform. Are there things you can do to help people who don’t have this built-in clout?
One of the one of the main ways [to find success on Substack] is people who have an existing mailing list. It usually takes some time but that's the kind of thing that you can do, right? If you're writing something that is going out like an email newsletter, and people genuinely like it, and they share it with their friends and say, “Hey, this is the thing that I actually enjoy getting and it's worth reading,” there is a little bit of intrinsic growth there.
We want to make sure that we do as much as we can to foster that sort of natural growth: like making sure there's good subscribe buttons, good share buttons, making it easy so when you post something, it goes to the newsletter but it also goes to the web so people can find it and share it and discover that they like the thing and put down their email, yada yada yada. One big focus is just making sure that if you're already writing something that's great, that all of the friction of sharing it and having that thing grow on its own is kind of gone.
There are also things that we can do to help introduce people to things that they might like, as the platform grows. We started doing that very little bit with like, the Substack.com homepage, or how we highlight top posts and popular newsletters, stuff like that. But I think there's a lot more we can do on that front over time.
Speaking of discovering new newsletters, you mentioned earlier that your hope is to have more people writing newsletters and bring more people to platform. Who do you hope will start using Substack? And do you think that this new round of funding will impact those goals?
Our initial focus is writers. We use that term kind of broadly: we think of a writer as anybody who is creating some written content that people are going to like. So everything from like a journalist that wants to send a newsletter to maybe somebody who works in an industry who just has sort of a cool inside perspective and knows what people in that industry like, or somebody that has some good comedic take on something -- anybody who wants to connect with an audience through writing, and do that on a personal level, we want them on substack. Everybody. So it’s just a matter of, how do we get them?
Yeah, there was that Vanity Fair piece that was like, omg everyone has a newsletter now. You’re like, that’s good?
Yes! One of my favorite things I've seen lately is I've seen a couple of Substack parody tweets on Twitter, where somebody will tweet something and then say, subscribe to my substack for only $50 a month blah blah blah and basically make a joke about how the best way to do it is be on Substack, and that always makes me smile. Being parodied is the best.
Part of the zeitgeist. In terms of the newsletter bubble -- um, I mean --
[laughs] The newsletter bubble’s about to crash! We’re gonna go through a newsletter depression!
Haha. The newsletter boom.. I just think it's interesting that there are a lot of new products emerging around the newsletter space -- not just hosts like Substack and Tinyletter, but different apps for helping you manage your subscriptions to newsletters, etc. Where do you think they like newsletter industry is going next?
Newsletters are kind of a shorthand. The things that are good about a newsletter are that you have this sort of direct connection to this voice that you trust that's not mediated by an algorithm. And we're obviously very bullish on that trend of saying as a writer I want to directly connect; I want to have this relationship with my audience without a middleman in between. You can't do that on other platforms. People on both sides crave that, so we think it's going to continue to grow, and that the set of tools around it will get better.
You described newsletters as an alternative to yelling on Twitter. Do you feel like you reading my newsletters has brought you away from Twitter or other more trigger-happy news sources? And is that another goal of the platform?
Yes, definitely. For me personally, I kind of have a love-hate relationship with Twitter. I have this cycle where I realize I'm using Twitter too much, and then I delete it off my phone. and then I feel way better and I live my life for a bit, but then there's some reason why I have to go back on it. It always sucks me back in, and then I always start the cycle anew. Which is kind of embarrassing, actually.
But I do feel like having a bunch of Substack newsletters has given me this place where if I sit down and I want to read something, I'm being mindful about what I'm spending my attention on. It gives me this better alternative. It does make me feel better when I make that wise decision, which is not always.
Word, same! Finally, we’re wondering how, if at all, Substack’s upcoming growth will impact the user experience for newsletter creators like us?
I am hoping that we can just make it way better. It's gotten to the point where honestly, it's a little bit ridiculous that there’s three of us in the company. [Co-founders Hamish McKenzie, Jairaj Sethi, and I] are the people that are developing the core product, and we also do all the customer support. I'm sure there will be some growing pains. But if we're doing our jobs well, overall, we think the customer experience for everybody will just get a lot better.

Thanks so much, Chris, for creating Substack and for doing this interview about Substack, and godspeed on the growth. Personally if we had $15 million we’d start by buying more stickers! A moonshot.

OKAY ALSO:

More good background on Substack’s new VC funding (Fortune)

Why the pivot to newsletters reflects a broader shift in media diets (NYTimes)

Why more women are turning to newsletters to share stories -- way back in 2015! (The Cut)

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