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Comment by cgb223 | Hacker News Reader

Hi Chris, Hamish, Jairaj, and Sachin!

I'm a huge fan of your platform, and love that its empowered some of my favorite journalists and other others to write freely while continuing to be able to provide for themselves.

One question I have is as a small time blogger, I currently use Medium as my platform. The reason I do so is because it has an audience baked in, so I'm easily(-ish) able to attract new readers to my blog and grow the list of people who follow what I write.

What does Substack have or is planning to have product feature-wise that might allow for smaller writers to get the word out and have a social network-like following to help grow their own readership?

I would love to switch to support your product, this is the one thing holding me back.

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Thanks for the kind words!

The nice thing about "network-first" products like Medium and Twitter is that there's a large audience baked in (as you mention) that you can tap into is a small time writer. But the trade-off is that you don't own your audience - you can build up followers, but you don't have a direct connection to them outside of that product. You typically don't get their email addresses, and you can't take your audience with you if you choose to leave.

You also don't necessarily own your work! I was a huge fan of Medium when it launched, and an early active writer. One day, my best performing post got added to someone else's collection, and now it "lives" in some random space that I have nothing to do with (https://medium.com/p/3eadcdc56ff2). This was a pretty frustrating experience.

We think there's a way to have your cake and eat it too: own your own audience, and be in full control. But also get access to a network of readers that grows over time. We're trying to take a deliberate and thoughtful approach to growing the destination for readers, and the app is a major step.

>The reason I do so is because it has an audience baked in

Does it? Do people browse medium looking for things to read? Where does the 'baked in' audience come from?

My personal opinion of medium is very different - I usually see it as blogspam.

To answer your question a bit more specifically, one thing that's starting to work as a nice discovery loop in the app is being able to tap on a commenter's profile and see what other Substacks that person is subscribed to. Reader profiles existed before the app, but since comments don't render in emails (but do in the app), this discovery loop was pretty constrained.

We have some other exciting ideas in the works for helping readers discover more writers through the lens of the writers they already trust, that the app will provide a nice canvas for.

Yes exactly. There's this red thread you can follow through the platform. My favorite kind of discovery!

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