It is infinitely easier to talk than act so this critique is in deference to the entrepreneurs in the arena. With that said, I think Substack should’ve done 2 things differently 

1 - Tailor the product to power users, specifically publications (file under things that don’t scale) 

2 - Embrace advertising

1 cont. Publishing has *always* been a power law industry and always will be

I think the mistake was thinking substack was long form Twitter, it’s not, it’s AWS for publishing

It’s not the former bc even w/ 100p liquidity of long form, discovery doesn’t really matter as ppl have a tiny limit on units of consumption for long form. Compared to tweets where one can consume hundreds in a session

If they inverted to grow big pubs fast it would be more subs $$ and likely better discovery

2 - Embrace Advertising

The Advertising market is gargantuan compared to subs. Even w expanding the addressable market 

This could have been a huge unlock for writers. Instead of a buggy double click with abysmal CPMs you have a native ads system that’s higher CPM and less invasive for readers

The crusade against advertising as a brand position prob negligible so a terrible trade off, this would have allowed them to offset rising commissions (went from 5–>10% and will continue to be raised) and keep writers locked in

This is the network they could have built instead of here’s a marginal long form writer

1 - Tailor to power users

When the first publications came online (Bulwark+) they made it so there could be multiple authors and created a news-ish looking home page…then stopped 

What publications have is *editorial leverage*. Meaning n+1 on staff is more than 1 and it scales

building [ØC] a storyworld accelerator + creator collectives protocol // fmr film finance guy // surf write produce think play // NZ<->NYC devonhdolan.com

I’m pretty sure they paid a bunch of name brand writers with sizable readership to use it

I like Substack a lot. I feel like their major mistake was getting a delusional valuation and being too big

I really like a couple of their features, like showing you suggested newsletters from the author you just subscribed to. Very smart

One thing their financials showed is that whatever strategy they pursue, they should’ve been more stringent with spending

At the going rate they will need to execute their pants off to steady the ship even with deep cuts to head count