Latest / What's Your Problem? / Turning Writers into Publishers

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Turning Writers into Publishers · What's Your Problem?

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. In two thousand and eight, the writer Kevin Kelly
0:22
Speaker 1: published this essay about a big, exciting, ultimately kind of
0:26
Speaker 1: simple idea. If you want to make a living doing
0:29
Speaker 1: something creative, you don't need millions of fans or even
0:33
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of fans. You just need a thousand
0:37
Speaker 1: true fans. The math works, Kelly argued, because of the Internet.
0:42
Speaker 1: The Internet gives everybody everywhere the ability to connect with
0:45
Speaker 1: everybody else, and it means that people like writers and
0:48
Speaker 1: musicians no longer have to go through intermediaries like publishers
0:52
Speaker 1: and music labels and retail stores that traditionally wound up
0:55
Speaker 1: capturing most of the revenue from the sales of creative work.
0:59
Speaker 1: If you can find your thousand true fans, Kelly argued,
1:02
Speaker 1: and if you can figure out a way to sell
1:04
Speaker 1: your work directly to those fans, you could make a
1:07
Speaker 1: living doing the creative thing you love to do. I'm
1:14
Speaker 1: Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, the show
1:17
Speaker 1: where entrepreneurs and engineers talk about how they're going to
1:19
Speaker 1: change the world once they solve a few problems. My
1:22
Speaker 1: guest today is Chris Best. Chris is the co founder
1:26
Speaker 1: and CEO of Substack. Substack is a company that helps
1:30
Speaker 1: writers send subscription based email newsletters, which, as Chris says,
1:34
Speaker 1: is a very simple idea built on top of some
1:37
Speaker 1: very grandiose beliefs, beliefs about culture and ideas and commerce.
1:42
Speaker 1: More to the point, substack is one of the best
1:45
Speaker 1: tests I've seen of the theory of a thousand true fans.
1:51
Speaker 1: The idea for substack came to Chris and his co
1:54
Speaker 1: founder Hamish back in twenty seventeen. At the time, Chris
1:57
Speaker 1: had just left Kick, the messaging platform that he'd co founded,
2:00
Speaker 1: and there were lots of things he thought had gone
2:03
Speaker 1: wrong with media and the Internet. He'd always been an
2:06
Speaker 1: avid reader and a believer in the power of writing,
2:09
Speaker 1: and he wanted to share his ideas with the world.
2:11
Speaker 1: And so naturally I was like, well, I should write.
2:14
Speaker 1: How hard could that be. It's just typing. I already
2:17
Speaker 1: know how to type. And I started writing what I
2:19
Speaker 1: thought was going to be an essay or a blog
2:22
Speaker 1: post that was kind of just detailing my frustrations with
2:27
Speaker 1: the state of media and the Internet. It was sort
2:32
Speaker 1: of this like a complaint or a screed of some
2:34
Speaker 1: sort that was just like the Internet came along made
2:37
Speaker 1: it global an incident free to distribute writing, which is great,
2:41
Speaker 1: but at the same time, these platforms killed a lot
2:44
Speaker 1: of the business models that used to support great writing.
2:46
Speaker 1: Craigslis killed the classifieds, Facebook, Google took over the advertising industry,
2:50
Speaker 1: and now we're all sort of stuck clawing for attention
2:53
Speaker 1: on these various feeds waw, waw, waw, complaining, complaine. And
2:57
Speaker 1: I sent this piece of writing to my friend Hamish,
2:59
Speaker 1: who's actually a writer, and he very gently told me
3:04
Speaker 1: you're not the original snowflake you think you are in
3:06
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen writing a thing it says, wow, be Facebook
3:09
Speaker 1: is bad for us, Like, you know this, this is
3:13
Speaker 1: not exactly fertile ground. You didn't get the scoop on
3:15
Speaker 1: that one. Yeah, I didn't get the scoop on that one.
3:18
Speaker 1: He's like, I'll tell you that all of my friends
3:19
Speaker 1: who are writers are not going to be shocked to
3:21
Speaker 1: hear that there's been some disruption to the business model
3:24
Speaker 1: that supports their work. And basically like, look, you maybe
3:28
Speaker 1: write about all of this, but so what And you
3:31
Speaker 1: sort of asked the question He said, the more interesting
3:35
Speaker 1: thing would be, like, what do you do about it?
3:37
Speaker 1: It's easy to complain, it's easy to poke holes. But
3:41
Speaker 1: let's assume that all of this is true. How could
3:44
Speaker 1: you even how could things be different? How could things
3:46
Speaker 1: be better? And we started sort of arguing about that
3:51
Speaker 1: and batting around a bunch of things, and we were
3:53
Speaker 1: both subscribers to Ben Thompson's Stratechery at the time, and
3:58
Speaker 1: we were like, you know that dude's making which is
4:00
Speaker 1: just to be clear, that's a paid newsletter that lots
4:02
Speaker 1: of people in the in the tech industry subscribe to.
4:05
Speaker 1: It's an email letter that he's exactly. It's a paid
4:07
Speaker 1: it's a paid email newsletter. We're seeing other people doing
4:10
Speaker 1: these things where they're like, you know, you can write something,
4:14
Speaker 1: you can charge for it. We were just fascinated by
4:15
Speaker 1: this thing, and we ended up sort of hitting on
4:19
Speaker 1: the idea of substack. Is this very simple thing that
4:22
Speaker 1: does kind of two things. On the one hand, it's
4:26
Speaker 1: this very grandiose idea that's aimed at this broad societal
4:31
Speaker 1: problem of like, hey, this the total domination of all
4:35
Speaker 1: of our attention by this business model of these engagement
4:38
Speaker 1: maximizing platforms is bad, and we need to like create
4:41
Speaker 1: a real alternative for that with a different business model,
4:44
Speaker 1: and you know, it's like an alternate universe with different
4:46
Speaker 1: laws of physics for how you spend your time and attention.
4:49
Speaker 1: Very high faluting. But on the other hand, it's like
4:52
Speaker 1: what if you could send people email and charge the
4:54
Speaker 1: money for it? Right, right, And it's pretty low faluting.
4:59
Speaker 1: It's like, you know, it's a very specific thing that
5:02
Speaker 1: some people newsletter. It's an email newsletter. Yeah, people say,
5:06
Speaker 1: what a newsletter. It's like actively unsexy technology, yes, right, right,
5:12
Speaker 1: So I mean I'm curious. So you know, obviously substack
5:15
Speaker 1: is a thing. Now I have to say, like, I
5:18
Speaker 1: don't think of it as a substitute for you know, Twitter.
5:22
Speaker 1: Twitter is my social media of choice. Unfortunately, I think
5:28
Speaker 1: of it as more of a close substitute to something
5:30
Speaker 1: like The Atlantic or The New York Times, who in
5:33
Speaker 1: fact are now clearly building their own email newsletter businesses. Partly,
5:38
Speaker 1: I presume in response to your success at substack, right,
5:42
Speaker 1: have you found in whatever data you have that substack
5:44
Speaker 1: is a substitute for social media. I think it's at
5:50
Speaker 1: least a substit I mean it's at least a substitute
5:53
Speaker 1: in that as readers, as consumers, we end up having
5:57
Speaker 1: kind of like a finite amount of time. Yeah, so
6:00
Speaker 1: every minute somebody is reading substack is a minute they're
6:03
Speaker 1: not looking at social media but could make. And that
6:05
Speaker 1: sounds kind of ridiculous when you sort of produced its
6:07
Speaker 1: like everything is in competition with everything else. But I
6:10
Speaker 1: actually think that's sort of like the fundamental shift that
6:12
Speaker 1: we've undergone, Like the whole dawn of social media was
6:15
Speaker 1: because we used to live in an age where it
6:17
Speaker 1: was possible to get bored. Yeah, and you would have
6:20
Speaker 1: time in your life where you're like, gee, I'm bored.
6:23
Speaker 1: I wish I had something to spend my attention on
6:26
Speaker 1: and if somebody could come along and give me something
6:28
Speaker 1: for free to do, that would be a great deal.
6:31
Speaker 1: And we've just come to the end of that age there.
6:34
Speaker 1: There just isn't every chunk of your attention that you
6:37
Speaker 1: ever want to spend on anything has been taken up.
6:39
Speaker 1: And in fact, there's increasingly loud clamoring and your phone
6:44
Speaker 1: badly absorb every second of your brain life. Still though,
6:48
Speaker 1: I mean, it's possible that sub stack, that the attention
6:52
Speaker 1: sub stack has taken and I'm happy for it. I
6:55
Speaker 1: think it's great that writers can make money, and I'm
6:57
Speaker 1: excited to talk about that. But it's possible that that
6:59
Speaker 1: has come mostly from not from social media, but rather
7:04
Speaker 1: from unsocial media. I mean, you literally have people leaving
7:07
Speaker 1: traditional media places where they are writing columns and starting
7:11
Speaker 1: to write substacks, right, Like, that's the it's a very
7:14
Speaker 1: natural kind of adjacency. No, you know, to be honest,
7:17
Speaker 1: it's almost certainly both. You know, people that had people
7:20
Speaker 1: that were working as professional writers, right, a lot of
7:23
Speaker 1: them can go to substack and get a great deal.
7:25
Speaker 1: That's awesome, we love it. But there's an even bigger
7:28
Speaker 1: cohort of people who were not professional writers before and
7:32
Speaker 1: who but for substack, might not have been writing. Either.
7:37
Speaker 1: Young people who didn't see a path and sort of
7:39
Speaker 1: you know, might have gone to you know, had something
7:41
Speaker 1: to give the world as a writer, and without this
7:44
Speaker 1: model might have had to go to law school like
7:46
Speaker 1: their parents wanted them to. Or people that work in industry,
7:49
Speaker 1: or people that have some adjacent thing that you know,
7:53
Speaker 1: making building an audience and sometimes on substack and sometimes
7:57
Speaker 1: building a fortune, and who but for substack, would otherwise
8:00
Speaker 1: not be writing. It's not like they would, you know,
8:02
Speaker 1: have a job at the Atlantic or something and who
8:04
Speaker 1: who I have never heard of, who most people have
8:06
Speaker 1: never heard of, right, which is cool and interesting. I mean,
8:10
Speaker 1: it's kind of like a smaller YouTube in that way,
8:13
Speaker 1: right where there's just this vast array of niches that
8:17
Speaker 1: people can fill. And so I mean I am curious
8:21
Speaker 1: to that point to get a sense of basically the
8:25
Speaker 1: distribution of I don't mean the literal email distribution, but
8:30
Speaker 1: the sort of distribution curve of substacks of the newsletters
8:34
Speaker 1: people write like, how big a substack? How big a substack?
8:38
Speaker 1: What have we shared? I think we've shared that we're
8:39
Speaker 1: over a million paying subscribers, hundreds of thousand of people
8:43
Speaker 1: who started a substack. I forget what our latest So sorry,
8:47
Speaker 1: a million paying subscribers and the what is the well,
8:51
Speaker 1: I guess for that when the average subscription is like
8:54
Speaker 1: sixty bucks a year ish, yeah, eighty somewhere in there. Okay,
8:58
Speaker 1: So is that something like eighty million dollars a year
9:03
Speaker 1: that people are paying not to you, obviously, but to
9:05
Speaker 1: the writers, of which you get ten percent? Is that
9:07
Speaker 1: the ballpark way to think about it? Yeah, I mean,
9:10
Speaker 1: it's it's more than that, but it's that's you know,
9:12
Speaker 1: that's the right, if I if I ballparked it at
9:15
Speaker 1: one hundred million for the writers, ten of which goes
9:17
Speaker 1: to you, would I be not wildly wrong. You're in
9:20
Speaker 1: the right order, mind, dude. Okay. Um. And then so
9:23
Speaker 1: within that, like again to your point of like, well,
9:27
Speaker 1: there's a few famous people, and you know, I'm curious
9:30
Speaker 1: to know how how the how the distribution works there,
9:34
Speaker 1: you know, how much are the top people making? And
9:36
Speaker 1: then like what's the median? Yeah, so the distribution is
9:42
Speaker 1: super sort of power laws you might expect. So I
9:45
Speaker 1: think the top ten people make something like twenty or
9:49
Speaker 1: twenty five million bucks a year between them. Wow, good
9:52
Speaker 1: for them, they should only live them be Well, yeah,
9:55
Speaker 1: people were making millions of dollars a year. Individuals are
9:58
Speaker 1: making millions of dollars a year. Individuals are making millions
10:00
Speaker 1: of dollars a year, but a very small number. It's
10:03
Speaker 1: like the Taylor Swift of substack and there's you know,
10:06
Speaker 1: there's they're actually quite a healthy number people who are
10:09
Speaker 1: making you know, real money. If you think of real
10:13
Speaker 1: money is like multiple times which you'd make as a
10:15
Speaker 1: writer at a publication. I definitely think of that as
10:18
Speaker 1: real money. But Okay, so your question is like what's
10:22
Speaker 1: the distribution and the like, tell me about the median person, Like, yes,
10:26
Speaker 1: there are some superstars, and I am happy for those superstars,
10:30
Speaker 1: but what's like a normal Like how many people are
10:33
Speaker 1: making fifty thousand dollars year? Like fifty thousand dollars years?
10:37
Speaker 1: Like up perfectly, you know that's a that's a living.
10:39
Speaker 1: And if you can write your own email newsletter and
10:41
Speaker 1: make fifty thousand dollars a year, that's cool. But how
10:43
Speaker 1: many of those people are there? I mean it's like hundreds,
10:46
Speaker 1: I think? Okay, okay, I mean if you're charging five
10:51
Speaker 1: bucks a month and you can get a thousand, a
10:54
Speaker 1: couple thousand people to pay you five bucks a month, like,
10:57
Speaker 1: that's a living, and like a couple thousand people isn't
11:00
Speaker 1: that many? Right? So? Like, how does that work? Are
11:02
Speaker 1: there examples of that? Are there? Sort of things you've
11:05
Speaker 1: found that people have made that work? Are there particularly
11:08
Speaker 1: interesting niches will have filled? That math is very important
11:13
Speaker 1: to why substack works. The fact that a relatively small
11:17
Speaker 1: number of people can chip in five bucks a month
11:20
Speaker 1: and start to be meaningful. And it's interesting because if
11:22
Speaker 1: you can get to a thousand, there's usually not a
11:24
Speaker 1: reason you couldn't get to two thousand or five thousand
11:27
Speaker 1: or ten thousand over time, and then that's why you
11:29
Speaker 1: get this sort of power law thing where you have
11:31
Speaker 1: this upside. But there's lots of things about what it
11:36
Speaker 1: takes to get there. The thing I think is most
11:38
Speaker 1: interesting about it, though, is how different the kinds of
11:41
Speaker 1: things you want to do to get there are from
11:44
Speaker 1: the things that would that you would do if you
11:46
Speaker 1: wanted to kind of like maximize your audience to get
11:50
Speaker 1: ad impressions right all of a sudden, Your incentives if
11:53
Speaker 1: you want to if you're trying to get your thousand
11:55
Speaker 1: true fans, your incentive is to create something that a
12:00
Speaker 1: thousand people deeply value and fall in love with and
12:04
Speaker 1: want to pay you for and want to keep paying
12:06
Speaker 1: you for. Right you want to earn and keep the
12:09
Speaker 1: trust of a thousand people making something they deeply value.
12:13
Speaker 1: And what that means is that there's if there's something
12:15
Speaker 1: out there that's like that that a thousand people would
12:18
Speaker 1: deeply value, but you couldn't necessarily get a million people
12:22
Speaker 1: to click on it's very very valuable on substack, and
12:25
Speaker 1: so there's a whole class of very valuable stuff that
12:28
Speaker 1: otherwise might not get created that can now get created.
12:31
Speaker 1: And so, I mean the obvious ones that come to
12:33
Speaker 1: mind are sort of business related, and there have been
12:36
Speaker 1: you know, industry newsletters have existed for a long time
12:39
Speaker 1: for this reason, right, There are lots of industry newsletters
12:41
Speaker 1: that are a thousand dollars per subscription because you know
12:44
Speaker 1: your work is paying for it. I mean that's one.
12:46
Speaker 1: Are there kind of less obvious ones, you know, ones
12:49
Speaker 1: that are more oh less work related? Say, And that
12:53
Speaker 1: was one of our earliest questions, and we sort of
12:56
Speaker 1: we wondered this. We're like, well, okay, people if they
12:58
Speaker 1: can if they can say that it's for their job,
13:01
Speaker 1: or they can put it on a corporate credit card,
13:02
Speaker 1: they'll pay for it. But will they really pay for
13:05
Speaker 1: something else? But pretty quickly we had people doing kind
13:09
Speaker 1: of like literary comedy and culture writing and politics and
13:15
Speaker 1: the breadth of topics that it turns out that you
13:19
Speaker 1: can make on substack is kind of ridiculous. There's somebody
13:25
Speaker 1: writing reviews of canned fish. I don't know if he's
13:27
Speaker 1: making a ton of money, but it's like that's the
13:29
Speaker 1: sort of level of meeting to say, I mean, sure,
13:32
Speaker 1: it's the internet, Right, so every niche you can imagine,
13:34
Speaker 1: and then a ton more that you can't imagine are
13:36
Speaker 1: going to exist. The interesting question to me is what
13:40
Speaker 1: can you get a thousand people to pay five bucks
13:42
Speaker 1: a month for? And and maybe more to the point,
13:44
Speaker 1: like what have you learned about how to do that?
13:47
Speaker 1: Because I feel like that trick is actually generalizable beyond substack, Right,
13:51
Speaker 1: that's the basic, you know, minimum viable product. Find your
13:55
Speaker 1: core customers, make them love you, iterate like, I want
13:59
Speaker 1: to figure out how to do that better on the
14:00
Speaker 1: podcast that I make. Right, it's clearly a more mass model,
14:04
Speaker 1: but still the idea of like making a thing a
14:07
Speaker 1: few people really love, I think is is really compelling.
14:11
Speaker 1: And so what have you learned about how to do
14:13
Speaker 1: that specifically? Yeah, so topic can be almost anything. The
14:18
Speaker 1: things that really matter are you want to have a
14:21
Speaker 1: distinct perspective. Exactly what that means depends on what it is,
14:25
Speaker 1: but you want it to be either a distinct voice
14:28
Speaker 1: or distinct worldview, or some distinct expertise or distinct sensibility,
14:32
Speaker 1: something where the thing that the people are paying for
14:35
Speaker 1: is not the content. Nobody has a problem that nobody
14:38
Speaker 1: comes to substack and says I wish I could get
14:41
Speaker 1: more email. I wish I had more things to me.
14:43
Speaker 1: Nobody has that problem, right. The thing that you pay
14:46
Speaker 1: for is I need this person's take or this person's thought,
14:51
Speaker 1: or this person's recommendation, and I want them to curate
14:55
Speaker 1: a slice of my intellectual life or my attention for me.
14:59
Speaker 1: I want to delegate some of my worldview building to
15:03
Speaker 1: this person who I've built up this trust with over time.
15:07
Speaker 1: And in order to get that to worth paying money for,
15:10
Speaker 1: you want that to be distinct enough that you're not
15:15
Speaker 1: you know, you're not giving them something that they could
15:17
Speaker 1: get in a hundred different places. And you do have
15:20
Speaker 1: to kind of think about that integrity right being there
15:24
Speaker 1: if you're curating a slice of their attention, being judicious
15:27
Speaker 1: about what you're asking them to spend that attention. For
15:29
Speaker 1: somebody gives you permission to send them emails or gives
15:32
Speaker 1: you adds you to their podcast player, it's not only
15:35
Speaker 1: should you send them good stuff, but you kind of
15:37
Speaker 1: want to not send them things that are not worth
15:39
Speaker 1: their time or are not interesting. You mentioned you called
15:42
Speaker 1: it integrity, but the idea of respecting people's time their inbox,
15:47
Speaker 1: and it reminded me of the fact that not only
15:51
Speaker 1: is substack subscription based, people pay, you know, to get
15:56
Speaker 1: a lot of substecks. It's pretty anti AD, right, like,
16:00
Speaker 1: if you have a substeck, are you even allowed to
16:02
Speaker 1: put ads in your newsletter? We definitely frown on it.
16:06
Speaker 1: And this is an interesting point where we are very
16:09
Speaker 1: anti AD, but we're also very pro freedom. Basically, like,
16:13
Speaker 1: it's your editorial content. You're allowed to put what you want.
16:15
Speaker 1: So we've fallen short of saying we're going to police
16:18
Speaker 1: what you put in your newsletter, provided you're not literally
16:21
Speaker 1: spamming people, which we take a very dim view of.
16:24
Speaker 1: But we don't build any AD technology. We don't we're
16:26
Speaker 1: not sort of encouraging people to sort of have a
16:30
Speaker 1: hybrid model in general, even though that seems like it
16:32
Speaker 1: ought to be appealing. We think that focusing on the
16:35
Speaker 1: other thing actually maximizes the benefits of that thousand true
16:38
Speaker 1: fans logic, Tell me more, Tell me more about that?
16:41
Speaker 1: Is that you don't sound on the fence about it.
16:44
Speaker 1: Has the company been on the fence about it? Could
16:45
Speaker 1: you imagine becoming more proad. It's something we used to
16:49
Speaker 1: get a lot from writers and the kind of the
16:52
Speaker 1: logic is like, hey, subscriptions are money. Advertising is money.
16:56
Speaker 1: One money plus two money is better than just one money.
16:59
Speaker 1: Like it's like, wouldn't I make more money? I think
17:02
Speaker 1: for in the writing world, people have seen enough success
17:06
Speaker 1: on substack that it's people are starting to get that
17:10
Speaker 1: the this model is working. And there's there's people who
17:13
Speaker 1: are in that category of people who are making millions
17:16
Speaker 1: of dollars a year on substack, who I personally at
17:18
Speaker 1: the start had to convince to turn on payments. And
17:20
Speaker 1: I'm like, no, I'm not gonna I'm gonna go do
17:22
Speaker 1: some sponsorship thing or I'm just gonna grow it and
17:24
Speaker 1: I'm gonna blow blow. I don't think I can really
17:25
Speaker 1: make any money, and then I'm gonna just try it.
17:28
Speaker 1: You know, you have whatever The New Yorker, the Washington
17:31
Speaker 1: Post very very excellent publications that I pay for with
17:35
Speaker 1: my own money, and I don't resent them running ads
17:38
Speaker 1: as well. Yeah, I can. I can see the argument
17:42
Speaker 1: for that, And I think people can make the argument
17:44
Speaker 1: for podcasts. You know, I personally, every time I listen
17:46
Speaker 1: to a podcast and there's a break, that's like, now
17:49
Speaker 1: let me tell you about something else. I'm like, okay,
17:51
Speaker 1: they're like coming right at me right now, you're coming
17:54
Speaker 1: right at I'm not gonna and listen, I don't begrudge it,
17:56
Speaker 1: but I'm not going to say that I love it. Now,
18:01
Speaker 1: let me tell you about something else. We'll be back
18:04
Speaker 1: in a minute to talk about bundling, unbundling and a
18:06
Speaker 1: problem substack has not yet solved. Now back to the show.
18:18
Speaker 1: So the first part of my conversation with Chris was
18:21
Speaker 1: largely about that thousand true fans idea. The next part
18:25
Speaker 1: of the conversation is about another famous tech saying, this
18:27
Speaker 1: one is like kind of half joke, half idea, and
18:30
Speaker 1: it comes from Jim Barksdale, who is a big tech
18:32
Speaker 1: guy back in the nineties. The key line is this,
18:36
Speaker 1: there are only two ways to make money in business.
18:38
Speaker 1: One is to bundle, the other is to unbundle. Like
18:42
Speaker 1: what do you make of that quote? What do I
18:43
Speaker 1: make of that quote? I buy it, I think, and
18:46
Speaker 1: I agree with you that so far subject has been
18:48
Speaker 1: this big unbundling energy. Right. The fact that as an
18:52
Speaker 1: individual writer you can go and start your own thing
18:56
Speaker 1: and make it on your own and get the upside
18:58
Speaker 1: of what you're doing and sometimes make you ten times
19:00
Speaker 1: as much money as you've ever made before, and have
19:02
Speaker 1: a business and all this stuff. That's wonderful. It's a
19:05
Speaker 1: good thing. I actually think that there's a lot more
19:08
Speaker 1: energy left in that thing. Um. I think people people
19:12
Speaker 1: sometimes they're like, well, what's going to happen when people
19:14
Speaker 1: are getting their eight substack subscription and they're really annoyed
19:16
Speaker 1: that they have to have so many different substack subscriptions.
19:19
Speaker 1: And I'm like, you know what, I like, bring on
19:21
Speaker 1: that problem. I would love to live in the world
19:23
Speaker 1: where that's your problem. I mean, obviously people that have
19:26
Speaker 1: in particular would love to live in the world where
19:28
Speaker 1: that's the problem. Of course, and there's you know, there
19:32
Speaker 1: are some people who who have that today, there's some
19:34
Speaker 1: people that are you know, subscribed to a whole bunch
19:35
Speaker 1: of things, but far and away, I think there's a
19:39
Speaker 1: ton of energy left in this sort of unbundling phase
19:43
Speaker 1: of like, I'm a writer, I have something to say,
19:45
Speaker 1: and I like, I want it to be my thing.
19:48
Speaker 1: I do think there's an interesting effect where bundle economics
19:53
Speaker 1: are real, and if we are successful at the grand
19:57
Speaker 1: unbundling that we are in the middle of doing, at
20:00
Speaker 1: some point there's this economic potential energy that for unlocking
20:05
Speaker 1: the surplus of bundle economics for writers and readers, And
20:09
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of ways you can imagine that happening.
20:11
Speaker 1: Like one thing that's happening already is that substacks are
20:13
Speaker 1: turning into companies and institutions, right, people are starting as
20:16
Speaker 1: one thing and then building a newsroom or building a company.
20:19
Speaker 1: And the other thing that would be, like the obvious
20:20
Speaker 1: thing would be like, well, what if you just had
20:22
Speaker 1: like a Netflix style thing, or like this is what
20:24
Speaker 1: medium did. It's like, why don't you just have one
20:27
Speaker 1: a substack subscription and then everything like you know, there's
20:30
Speaker 1: some magic algorithm that dolls out like who gets the
20:32
Speaker 1: money based on what? And the problem with that is
20:36
Speaker 1: that it although it unlocks the bundle economics, it kills
20:40
Speaker 1: the fundamental magic of what's good about substack, which is
20:44
Speaker 1: the direct intentional relationship between the reader and the writer. Right, Like,
20:49
Speaker 1: the whole deal is I'd choose what to spend. I
20:52
Speaker 1: don't know exactly what the right solution to this is yet,
20:56
Speaker 1: but my strong intuition is that the right answer is
20:59
Speaker 1: that you do, in fact want a bundle or bundles
21:03
Speaker 1: but that it needs to happen bottom up rather than
21:06
Speaker 1: top down. I think that, you know, as with anything,
21:09
Speaker 1: the hard part is making it simple. This is one
21:11
Speaker 1: of the fun things about building products, building good products,
21:15
Speaker 1: is you like sweat and curse and wring your hands
21:22
Speaker 1: and pull your hair out for a long time trying
21:23
Speaker 1: to wrangle a thing. And if you actually do a
21:26
Speaker 1: good job at the end of it all, you show
21:29
Speaker 1: somebody and they say, yeah, obviously, yeah, right, you idiot,
21:33
Speaker 1: Like you spent how long coming up with like an
21:36
Speaker 1: email newsletter with a website that takes money, you idiot? Like, yeah,
21:41
Speaker 1: but that's actually good, right, And you're not there yet
21:44
Speaker 1: for the bundle? Is that is that the upshot? Yeah?
21:46
Speaker 1: And for the bundle, and we're still in the hard part.
21:50
Speaker 1: And honestly, there's so much value right now, Like there's
21:55
Speaker 1: there's so much value in these in the subscriptions as
21:58
Speaker 1: they exist. And we're already doing a bunch of things
22:01
Speaker 1: around cross promotion. We let writers recommend each other rather
22:04
Speaker 1: than having some algorithm that recommends it. So that's another choice,
22:07
Speaker 1: right In the same way that you're pretty clearly anti
22:10
Speaker 1: ad you seem pretty clearly anti recommendation. Algorithm, and that
22:14
Speaker 1: one is maybe more surprising to me because you know,
22:18
Speaker 1: discovery is hard, and I feel like you must know
22:21
Speaker 1: a lot about what people read, and if they read
22:23
Speaker 1: one thing, they like another thing, Like why not make
22:26
Speaker 1: that kind of you know, collaborative filtering recommendation? Yeah, and
22:31
Speaker 1: I would add some nuance there, like I don't think
22:33
Speaker 1: I'm against recommendation algorithms per se, but I think the
22:37
Speaker 1: specific thing that I'm suspicious of is the thing where
22:41
Speaker 1: you make an algorithmic surface that you as the reader,
22:46
Speaker 1: delegate as the control of how you spend your attention
22:50
Speaker 1: that has some objective that may not be your objective. Well,
22:53
Speaker 1: now you just turned substack into Twitter, right, That's that's
22:56
Speaker 1: the straw man version though, or YouTube? Right, Like you
22:58
Speaker 1: go to YouTube and it's like yea, yeah, you subscribe
23:00
Speaker 1: to that. But like, don't worry, here's what you really
23:02
Speaker 1: want to call. You don't have to do that. There's
23:04
Speaker 1: a way cooler version of it. That's just Hey, lots
23:08
Speaker 1: of people who read a glace Let's also read Josh Barrow.
23:11
Speaker 1: You might want to check it out. Like that doesn't
23:12
Speaker 1: seem like you're trying to steal my mind, like a
23:16
Speaker 1: social media platform. Yeah, and I think I would argue
23:20
Speaker 1: that we are doing the cool version of this right.
23:22
Speaker 1: And the two things that are important to me in
23:23
Speaker 1: this are, number one, we're not just optimizing for engagement.
23:27
Speaker 1: We're not saying like, here's what you're going to click on,
23:29
Speaker 1: and we're saying here's what you might like enough the
23:31
Speaker 1: one day you would pay for it. And the other
23:32
Speaker 1: thing is where possible, we'd love to have it be
23:36
Speaker 1: human powered. Right when you go to read a book,
23:39
Speaker 1: the fact that an algorithm said to you that it
23:42
Speaker 1: was the best possible book to you, even if you
23:44
Speaker 1: could know that was the truth, might be less compelling
23:47
Speaker 1: than somebody who you've trust and have gotten to know says, hey,
23:50
Speaker 1: I think you should check this out for these reasons.
23:52
Speaker 1: And so when you can have things that are that
23:54
Speaker 1: are you know, incentivized the right way, and when you
23:56
Speaker 1: can have human beings in the loop, we just think
23:59
Speaker 1: that that's like a makes for a better experience, and
24:01
Speaker 1: we've shown that you can make recommendations that people deeply
24:04
Speaker 1: value that way. What's something you haven't figured out yet, Like,
24:07
Speaker 1: what's something you're working on now, something maybe you've tried
24:10
Speaker 1: and it didn't work, like what's a's a what's a
24:13
Speaker 1: problem you're trying to solve? Now? Okay, I'll tell you
24:16
Speaker 1: one thing that I'm really fascinated with is when you
24:21
Speaker 1: get a bunch of people who deeply value this one
24:25
Speaker 1: writer or this one crazy niche and you find all
24:29
Speaker 1: the people who are willing to pay five or ten
24:31
Speaker 1: bucks a month for that thing. Not only have you
24:34
Speaker 1: given them a piece of media and a connection with
24:37
Speaker 1: the author they deeply value, You've created You've sort of
24:42
Speaker 1: crystallized this potential community. The writing and the writer and
24:46
Speaker 1: the thing you subscribe for is kind of like the
24:48
Speaker 1: bat signal that draws in the people. But over time
24:52
Speaker 1: the community ends up being a major piece of why
24:56
Speaker 1: of the value for people right being among all the
24:59
Speaker 1: other people who value this enough to pay for it,
25:01
Speaker 1: not having a bunch of trolls, because you can moderate profitably,
25:06
Speaker 1: and so I think there's a tremendous amount of fential
25:09
Speaker 1: energy there. It's something that writers and podcasters really want
25:14
Speaker 1: from us, And I don't think that we've totally cracked
25:18
Speaker 1: the answer to it yet, but we've been trying a
25:20
Speaker 1: bunch of things. Some new stuff is coming up pretty soon.
25:23
Speaker 1: That's pretty exciting. And I think if we can make
25:26
Speaker 1: the community aspect of it, right, that will end up
25:31
Speaker 1: being tremendously powerful. Well, it's interesting because it's like creeping
25:37
Speaker 1: back towards social media, right, I mean, maybe a better
25:41
Speaker 1: version of it, but fundamentally that's what you're talking about. Yeah,
25:45
Speaker 1: I mean it's people talking to each other, people engaging
25:49
Speaker 1: with ideas, people building relationships. And it's again it's sort
25:54
Speaker 1: of in this I think of it as an alternate
25:57
Speaker 1: universe with different laws of physics from the universe where
26:01
Speaker 1: all of these giant platforms have grown up of the
26:03
Speaker 1: kind of like massive engagement based AD supported thing, that's
26:07
Speaker 1: one way to build it. And we're building a kind
26:09
Speaker 1: of this alternate rails. So what's the thing you're about
26:13
Speaker 1: to roll out? Am I allowed to talk about this one? Yes?
26:19
Speaker 1: So we've been working on We've been working on chat.
26:24
Speaker 1: That's something that you can do on substack chat like
26:27
Speaker 1: real time, like like Slack style or g chat. Yeah,
26:31
Speaker 1: you could look at you could think of Slack, you
26:33
Speaker 1: could think of i RC back in the day. You
26:35
Speaker 1: can think of Discord is like an amazing thing. Discord
26:38
Speaker 1: seems like the closest model there is that, right, I
26:40
Speaker 1: don't know discord that well, but that's a very it's
26:42
Speaker 1: like a community oriented chat, right, I mean is that
26:45
Speaker 1: what I should think of for what you're working on? Yeah,
26:48
Speaker 1: I think closely related. Is it hard? Have you been
26:51
Speaker 1: trying it and like not quite figuring it out? It's
26:55
Speaker 1: been working fairly well. I would say we're being We're
26:57
Speaker 1: trying to be thoughtful about it. Right. The thing we
26:59
Speaker 1: never want to do again is kind of break the
27:02
Speaker 1: magic of substack. And in this case, one of the
27:05
Speaker 1: things that really matters is you want the writer to
27:07
Speaker 1: be in charge. Right. This is something where I'm if
27:09
Speaker 1: I have my community, like and this is my little island,
27:13
Speaker 1: my own private social network. Um, I want to be
27:17
Speaker 1: in charge of that. It's not I don't want it
27:18
Speaker 1: to be something that ends up being like and people.
27:20
Speaker 1: You know, there are substack writers who have tried having
27:22
Speaker 1: a slack or a discord or one of the telegram right,
27:25
Speaker 1: people just telling telegram, and it's often just like it
27:28
Speaker 1: becomes like this source of pain for them. They're like,
27:31
Speaker 1: oh my god, it's this whole thing and I'm like,
27:33
Speaker 1: it's not mine and I can't really it's got a
27:35
Speaker 1: life of its own. It's really get really spammy. You know. Yeah,
27:38
Speaker 1: it's it's it's hard to make it right. And we're
27:41
Speaker 1: not trying to make you know to the extent that
27:42
Speaker 1: we're building. We're not trying to make the best standalone
27:46
Speaker 1: communication product for any purpose. We're trying to make the
27:49
Speaker 1: best place to build community and hang out with your
27:54
Speaker 1: your substack audience and among your substack audience. Um. And
27:58
Speaker 1: so we've been trying to like make sure that we're
28:01
Speaker 1: building that with people who are actually doing that, because
28:05
Speaker 1: this is the fun part about building something like substack,
28:08
Speaker 1: which in my estimation is like a holy new thing,
28:10
Speaker 1: is all of the interesting features of it are emergent.
28:15
Speaker 1: You don't find out until you have the actual people
28:17
Speaker 1: trying to use them, and then you find out whether
28:20
Speaker 1: it's working or not. And so we're being pretty thoughtful
28:22
Speaker 1: and building it with real people and getting their feedback
28:26
Speaker 1: and making sure it's good. So such Stack is not
28:30
Speaker 1: that big as a company, right an order of ten
28:33
Speaker 1: million dollars a year in revenue is very small as
28:36
Speaker 1: companies go, And yet I've heard a ton about it.
28:40
Speaker 1: It's gotten a lot of coverage in the media. As
28:42
Speaker 1: a journalist, I know that journalists love writing about other
28:46
Speaker 1: journalists and writing about journalism, and I think that's part
28:48
Speaker 1: of it, right, So you've gotten a lot of coverage
28:51
Speaker 1: for that. Also, you know, your company has been criticized
28:55
Speaker 1: for paying certain kinds of writers to come to the platform,
28:58
Speaker 1: and you know, I'm not interested in relitigating the details
29:02
Speaker 1: of that, but I'm curious how the sort of two
29:05
Speaker 1: sides of that have played out. Right, How getting covered
29:09
Speaker 1: much more than a company your size would get covered
29:12
Speaker 1: if it weren't basically a media company or a sort
29:15
Speaker 1: of media adjacent company. How has that been for you?
29:17
Speaker 1: Have the pluses outweighed the minuses? How do you weigh that? Yeah,
29:21
Speaker 1: the way that I think of this is that we
29:23
Speaker 1: you know, substock has an outsize impact on the culture.
29:28
Speaker 1: People care about it for reasons that are valid and
29:32
Speaker 1: go beyond the money. We've taken a lot of heat.
29:35
Speaker 1: We've had people very thrilled at us and very mad
29:38
Speaker 1: at us, and I've always felt like we can't complain
29:42
Speaker 1: too much about that. You know, we kind of set
29:45
Speaker 1: out with these, you know, the two ambitions. But one
29:49
Speaker 1: of the ambitions is very grandiose, right, It's about making
29:52
Speaker 1: this new business model for writing and culture. On the
29:54
Speaker 1: Internet and having that dramatically shape the world and who
29:58
Speaker 1: people are. And there's just no way that you succeed
30:02
Speaker 1: at that without, you know, running towards the fire, running
30:06
Speaker 1: towards the heat of the culture war and the media
30:09
Speaker 1: and the spotlight and all of the things that people
30:12
Speaker 1: care about. And so as much as it can be
30:14
Speaker 1: both thrilling and uncomfortable, I don't feel like we get
30:17
Speaker 1: to complain. This is kind of what we signed up for,
30:19
Speaker 1: and all of our paths to success do lead through it.
30:25
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a minute with the Lightning Round. Okay,
30:35
Speaker 1: let's get back to the show. We're going to close
30:37
Speaker 1: with the Lightning Round. There are two names that come
30:40
Speaker 1: up in the Lightning Round here that I didn't explain
30:42
Speaker 1: during the interview, but I should have. One name is
30:45
Speaker 1: Jane Jacobs. She's the author of a book called The
30:47
Speaker 1: Death and Life of American Cities. The other name is
30:51
Speaker 1: Matt Levine. He's a finance writer who writes a newsletter
30:54
Speaker 1: for Bloomberg News. Now let's get to the Lightning Round.
30:58
Speaker 1: What's the most important lesson you learned from reading Jane Jacobs.
31:04
Speaker 1: I love the broad impact that's small, practical details of
31:11
Speaker 1: the spaces we inhabit can have on how we live
31:14
Speaker 1: our lives. And there's lots of stuff in Jane Jacobs.
31:17
Speaker 1: It's like that. I don't know if all of it
31:19
Speaker 1: is well empirically supportive, but there's this fascination with you know,
31:23
Speaker 1: if you have homes that have windows at street level
31:27
Speaker 1: and people are looking out, people walking down the street
31:29
Speaker 1: feel a different way, and it's this very brass tax
31:33
Speaker 1: like physical aspect of geometry that ends up broadly shaping
31:37
Speaker 1: people's lives. I think cities are like that, and I
31:40
Speaker 1: think that the digital places we create are like that too. Okay,
31:43
Speaker 1: if you could have one person in the world start
31:46
Speaker 1: writing a substack, who would it be? Might be Matt Levine.
31:53
Speaker 1: Oh sure, me too. Same You would make so much
31:57
Speaker 1: money it's absurd. I'm sure he's doing well, but yeah,
32:03
Speaker 1: it's a good choice. Really really got me with that one.
32:06
Speaker 1: If everything goes well, what problem will you be trying
32:08
Speaker 1: to solve in five years? One thing I think about
32:12
Speaker 1: if we're, you know, successful in all the things we
32:14
Speaker 1: want to succeed at, this becomes this bigger and bigger
32:17
Speaker 1: that the GDP of the sub stack of verse gets
32:20
Speaker 1: gets more and more. You know, we are built on
32:24
Speaker 1: this foundation of the ideals of a free press, the
32:28
Speaker 1: ideals that writers should get to like, have their space,
32:30
Speaker 1: and make what they want. One thing that I could
32:32
Speaker 1: see being very interesting is as that goes international, having
32:36
Speaker 1: that collide with various societies where unlike here in the US,
32:41
Speaker 1: there's not a strong legal and cultural protection for the
32:43
Speaker 1: idea that people should be allowed to write have ideas
32:46
Speaker 1: people should be allowed to sign up for it. I
32:49
Speaker 1: think that's not a free press, right, And it's not
32:51
Speaker 1: a free press. There's not a free press. Yeah, and
32:53
Speaker 1: yet on subject there is a free press. And what
32:55
Speaker 1: does that mean for us that that should be an
32:57
Speaker 1: interesting problem? Should we earn the right to confront it?
32:59
Speaker 1: How many subseects do you get? Oh man, hundreds? How
33:03
Speaker 1: many do you read? How many do you read? Many?
33:07
Speaker 1: I pay for tens and I read probably at least
33:10
Speaker 1: all of those ones. I read a lot of substack
33:12
Speaker 1: to the it's really it's great. I'm an avid user.
33:16
Speaker 1: I thought you were going to say it's a problem,
33:18
Speaker 1: but I guess you wouldn't say that. Oh, I love it.
33:20
Speaker 1: It's a great Everyone should should mimic me in this capacity.
33:25
Speaker 1: What's one piece of advice you'd give to somebody trying
33:27
Speaker 1: to solve a hard problem, have a grand science fiction
33:37
Speaker 1: vision of what you're trying to do, and take one
33:40
Speaker 1: step at a time. You think you're going to work
33:44
Speaker 1: on Substack forever could be Is there something that would
33:50
Speaker 1: like signal to you that it's time to do something else.
33:55
Speaker 1: If we go to business and they physically have me
33:57
Speaker 1: removed from the office, I would probably have to consider
34:00
Speaker 1: my options. Chris Best is the co founder and CEO
34:07
Speaker 1: of Substack. Today's show was produced by Edith Russolo, edited
34:12
Speaker 1: by Robert Smith, and engineered by Amanda kay Wong. I'm
34:16
Speaker 1: Jacob Goldstein, and we'll be back next week with another
34:18
Speaker 1: episode of What's Your Problem.