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The bundle question is interesting.

The model right now is really an unbundling. The direct relationship between writers and readers is what makes Substack work: as a writer, your incentive is to earn and keep the trust of the audience who deeply values your work. That's not just a good way to get paid for work you're already doing. It's a model that allows and rewards a fundamentally different and better kind of work that the work you would have to do if you were e.g. trying to please something like the Spotify algorithm.

That said, bundle economics are real. And so while we wouldn't and couldn't do some top down bundle, if there were a way to do bundling that maintained the direct connection, and put writers and readers in charge (e.g. writer self federation, or readers buying several subscriptions at once) that could be very interesting in the future.

Chris can we get a promise in writing from you that you will never implement bundles in such a way that writers couldn't leave your platform and take 100% of their paying subscribers with them?

I just thought about writers being able to share things they find interesting from other writers with their audience as an interesting lead.

Also an emergence of a "curator" class, people who could assemble "newspapers" out of the newsletters could be interesting, too.

This!

I just want to get this prediction down in writing in as many venues as possible: Substack will eventually offer (opt-in) bundling for authors, where the customer pays $x per month and Substack distributes that to the authors in the bundle.

This will offer some genuine benefits to readers (one monthly payment, maybe a discount) and to writers (lower transaction fees, since Stripe has a fixed cost that eats into small payments), but it will also sever the thing that currently makes it possible for authors to leave Substack and take 100% of their paid subscribers with them: every single reader has a unique subscription object in each individual publisher's Stripe account, which can then be ported to any other platform using Stripe. So when writers leave Substack they won't be able to take with them any subscribers who arrived through a bundle.

I think writers won't realise the danger here, and that Substack will therefore be able to lock in writers, against their original promise.

I would be delighted if this didn't happen, and happy to retract this if Chris could just promise that Substack will never do this kind of bundling, even if it's opt-in for publishers.

++ The Kaka https://thekaka.substack.com/

Also The Pragmatic Engineer: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/

+++ to Bernard/The Kaka, and go Kiwis.

Oh also Webworm by David Farrier is really good too https://www.webworm.co/

Better for international audiences, if you like Dax Shepard's podcast with him, you'll love his Webworm content.

> Or even a pay-per-article model - some of the free newsletters I'm on publish paywalled things I'm interested in, but I don't want to subscribe to the full deal. But I'd pre-load my account with $50 and pay a couple of dollars for a single article.

This is an excellent idea! Tracking individual articles for payment, rather than the whole publication/newsletter, would allow for bundling in a way that respects Substack's intentions of preserving/respecting the author and reader relationship.

I have seen tens of attempts to do this in a past decade, and it never seems to work.

People say they want this, but in reality almost no article seems to be worthy of eg. $5, even though you would be absolutely ok subscribing for $5 to a newsletter with 2 posts per month, one of which you won't read ...