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 learning games, influencer networks, storyworlds // 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