cjbest

We'll definitely look for ways to make the product better for readers and writers.

You can already add pictures. We are testing comments for paid subscribers on a couple of publications (you heard it here first!) And that other stuff is definitely interesting.

What will not change is that the experience for the reader will stay really simple - Sign up, and everything you need shows up in your email. Also the model will stay focused on letting readers pay writers directly for high quality content, because that's the magic.

On Substack, readers pay writers directly. The writers are independent. We take a cut of the subscription revenue, which is the same in this case as for others.

We think this aligns our interest with the writers interest, the same way that the subscription model aligns the writer with the reader.

I can give the Substack take on this.

1. We think it's very scalable. The value of attention has flipped - you used to get bored and need to fill your time, now your time is the last scarce resource, so it makes sense to pay to use it more wisely. We see early adopters doing this happily now, but we think it will become the norm.

We also think it will be good for democracy. The incentives of ad supported social media encourage clickbait, cheap outrage, and hyper-partisanship. Subscriptions reward thoughtfulness and deep value.

The one thing I worry about is too much exclusivity. If we landed in a place with really high subscription prices and only the privileged few getting access to good information that wouldn't be ideal, but that is avoidable.

2. Mostly they will have to change. Some will be successful.

3. The new model is readers paying writers directly. The difference at internet scale is that you can reach everybody in the world, and therefore you can be more successful with a much more specific topic/audience. Also because of software, you can start doing it as an individual writer in an afternoon.

Re discovery: Yes!

We want the writers to succeed, and while it's ultimately up to them to write something good enough that people want to subscribe, getting discovered is something we can help with.

Having a place to feature them will help with this (though it's less important right now than e.g. helping free posts get shared.)

In fact, we have a super basic version of this that we wrote in 20 minutes here: https://www.substack.com/discover but we have a ton of plans on how to make it better - most importantly by focusing on the author & publication as the key element rather than the post.

Matt is a publisher on the Substack platform. We take a 10% cut of his subscription revenue.

Because he is an established author, and we're really excited about this new format of serialized fiction, we have also been putting extra product development and publicity effort behind his publication. We think of this as Doing a Thing that Doesn't scale, as in http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

We subscribe to the pg take on naming. We went through a couple of options we like, and Substack was the one we could get the .com for. It's a Stack for Subscription publishing. We didn't realize about the node developer with the Twitter handle; hopefully it's different enough that it's not a pain for either of us.

See http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html

We think Patreon is awesome. It's a great general purpose tool for supporting creators, and the fact that it is so successful shows that people are willing to pay for stuff they value.

Substack is focused on letting writers start their own publication - top to bottom - with subscriptions as an integral part.

This is definitely part of our motivation for making Substack. When readers pay writers directly, the writers are accountable to those readers, and not e.g. advertisers.

The new hot thing is to do a newsletter.

It's the minimal version of a blog, and it's easier to get people to come back and read when new posts show up in their inbox.

(I am one of the founders of Substack, that lets you do a newsletter + website for free, and even charge subscriptions for it. There are a couple interesting writers choosing it including Matt Taibbi who is doing an AMA right now at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17239602)

Thanks, love this. We think Ben Thompson is right about a lot of stuff, and he is definitely a big inspiration.

Ooh hockey!

Curation with commentary can be very valuable. That's a lot of what Bill Bishop does with Sinocism (https://nb.sinocism.com/)

If you can do a roundup that lets people stay up to date in a way they find valuable, it could definitely be a good idea. I'd encourage you to try it as a free newsletter on Substack and see if you can get people reading it regulary!

Thanks, that makes sense. Definitely once we get to a certain size.

Ahh that’s a really good point. You may be the first to disconnect Stripe. I will make sure this works.

Email me your account details if you’d like. Chris at Substack dot com

Thanks, that’s good feedback. And glad you’re signing up!

We’ll continue to make it better as quickly as we can.

I agree with you.

I just think it’s the right challenge for us to solve for: how do we continue to deliver that much value (or as much as possible) vs. being the lowest cost option for email + payments + website.

Oh that’s a great idea. I will put it on our roadmap.

Currently you would need to link to the main page which has a subscribe form, but doing and embedded form would be much better.

Oh we would love that!

Yes. This is our dns provider not bending the rules to work nicely with Heroku, which doesn’t play well with apex domains (but is handling our SSL.)

Would love a tip if anyone knows an easy way to fix this properly.

That’s a great idea. Could help existing readers find things similar to stuff they already like. Thanks!

All really good points. Thanks for the feedback.

We are a Stack for Subscription publishing.

Thanks! We’ve had (paying, highly engaged) users report that they like there is nothing to think about.

One thing in future that’s really exciting to us is the idea of building community, and using the paid barrier as a way to solve a whole bunch of the problems that normally come with that. Some writers have slacks, and people who follow a niche writer often delight to meet each other.

Need to find a way to keep it just as simple though.

Thanks, that’s a good idea.

The way we try to handle that now is by having an option for writers to write free posts - which are visible to anybody, and get emailed to non-paying subscribers. That way you can get a sense of the writing before committing (and regular readers are the ones who subscribe anyway...)

You’re right that that doesn’t let you “preview” the paid content though. We’ll think about that.

Ahh thanks. I hope you don’t mind if we boot that one.

How do you foresee sub domains being a problem otherwise?

One click. The way we see it, you have a direct trusted relationship with your subscribers.

We let you import them so it’s only fair :)

True, and we hope that if we do a good enough job we can provide more value for the 10% than you get by switching even as you grow.

We’ve seen writers doing this report that they spend up to 40% of their time messing around with the platform - if we can improve on that by a chunk and let them focus on writing it adds up!

Great, thank you.

This highlights one of my favorite things about the newsletter format: sometimes it can be worth more to you to get less content. If the goal is to stay informed, a writer that can do it in a shorter, less frequent email adds more value to your life :)

Oh awesome! I see

> Stay well-informed about the world each week with clear and concise summaries of important news ...

That sounds like an exactly perfect fit for Substack. We've seen that if you have a committed newsletter following (look at open rates and reader comments) that loves it, up to 10% of your list might pay pretty quickly if you just asked them. Depending how they think they could price it could be worth over $1000 month to start. Of course, this depends on the audience etc.

If they want to do it, it's a simple as signing up, connecting Stripe, and importing the existing list. They can send out a 'free' post saying that the newsletter is going paid, and it will go to that list, and come baked with calls to action to subscribe and stuff.

We've done a couple of these now and would be happy to help. Feel free to point them to 'chris' or 'hamish' at substack.com

Thanks! That's a great idea, especially now that people can create lots of these.

I wonder what would be the ideal format for that? It could give you a list of newsletters and their descriptions, with some popularity signals or something.. It might be better to surface the free content though. Maybe "here are some recent free issues by newsletters you might enjoy." Just thinking out loud...

Maybe part of what makes a good family offers is encouragement/tendency to work hard and make good choices?

Worth thinking about what a level playing field really looks like.