Newsletters and The Culture Wars — With Substack CEO Chris Best

Chris Best is the CEO of Substack, an email newsletter platform that lets writers send newsletters and charge subscribers a monthly fee. The platform — which I use for my Big Technology newsletter — is squarely in the middle of the battle over online speech, looked at by some as an alternative that will displace professional media. Best joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss his company's position in these speech battles, how he personally feels about the professional media, his investor Andressen Horowitz, and whether paid subscriptions are a better model than advertising. You can subscribe to my Big Technology Newsletter here: https://bigtechnology.substack.com/ The OneZero story https://onezero.medium.com/the-moderation-war-is-coming-to-spotify-substack-and-clubhouse-9fe00672091b Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Our guest today is Chris Best. He is the CEO of Substack, an email newsletter platform that lets writers send newsletters and charge subscribers a monthly fee to get them. My big technology newsletter is on Substack, though I don't charge a fee yet, which I'm sure we'll discuss. Substack is also smack in the middle of the culture war, and so we'll have plenty to chat about there as well. Chris Best, welcome to the show.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  The last time we spoke, actually with voices, not emails, was in your apartment, I believe in the Mission in San Francisco. Was that, was that, that was your home?

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Yes, it was also Substack HQ at the time.

• 2:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, and it's one of these like real Silicon Valley stories. Like, we met there two years ago, in 2019.

• 2:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  You guys, you were three guys, basically around a couple of computers. And fast forward two years later, you're a $650 million company, raised a ton of cash. I've left the job that I was working at to report on you guys, when I was reporting on you guys, which was at BuzzFeed News, and have now built my career essentially on your platform and doing this podcast. And you're the biggest media story in the world, pretty much. It's just one of these wild things in Silicon Valley where like, you know, in a couple of years, everything changes. How does it feel on your end?

• 2:46Speaker 01

  It's been an interesting couple of years.

• 2:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  When we met that time, did you have, I mean, every entrepreneur has optimism. But again, you were three guys and there was like a handful of people using you, starting to make some decent money, which is what my story was about. But did you have any sense of the scale that this thing was going to get at? Like if I would have told you then, you'll be valued at $650 million a few years down the road. Would that have surprised you? Don't tell me you expected that completely.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  I don't know if we expected it, but this is kind of what we're, what we're aiming for, I think.

• 3:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Like, we sort of had it early on in Substack history, before I even moved to California. We kind of had a moment where Hamish and I were talking, like, hey.

• 3:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hamish is your co-founder.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Oh, hey, my co-founder, one of my, one of my co-founders.

• 3:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  I knew beforehand, yeah, and brought me into your office, yeah.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  And we sort of had this moment, like, are we going to apply to YC? Are we going to try and do this? Are we going to try and play the, YC is a startup accelerator? You know, are we going to kind of play this game? What is the, what is the scope of our ambition here? Are we building like a cool little thing? Or is it something that we think could actually be transformative? And to me, the, the reason to work on it, the reason it's exciting to me is because I do think it has at least the potential to be transformative, which is a far cry from saying that it's a, it's a sure thing and I expected it and all that stuff. But I think this is the, the reason why it's, it's worth working on to me is it does feel like it's something genuinely important for the world.

• 4:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Well, I think it's still settled, unsettled in terms of what Substack's impact on the world is going to be. And I think as you've grown in size, there's been a lot of scrutiny. Now you're competing with Twitter and Facebook, among others. So we'll get into all that as we go through this conversation. Let's start here. You on March 11th had this one tweet that went kind of viral and you've deleted it since.

• 4:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Four words. Do you remember them?

• 4:50Speaker 01

  I think so. Refresh my memory.

• 4:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Defund the thought police.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  I saw you tweet that and thought that that was a fairly striking and aggressive thing from someone who is operating what, you know, a company that likes to talk of itself as a neutral email platform. So I wanted to start there because it was so intriguing to me. It got retweeted over a thousand times. What did you mean by defund the thought police?

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was, that was an interesting, interesting experience for me. I, I set my tweets to be deleted automatically after some period of time. So I think all of my tweets are deleted at this point.

• 5:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. You have a few up there.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Do I?

• 5:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Still, yeah. You welcoming Antonio Garcia Martinez to the platform.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah. I think, I think they get, they get automatically deleted after a month or two or so. There's some fixed period of time.

• 5:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. All right. So you stand by the tweet.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I, and I, in the sense of kind of like, it was something I kind of like wrote in an offhand way as I was, as I was kind of like thinking about all of the ways that people seem to want to sort of flex censorship muscles on the internet and think that it's like this, this righteous crusade to try to kind of shut down other people's speech and other people's ideas. That's something that I've always kind of

• 6:17Speaker 01

  been kind of constitutionally against, I guess. It feels like the wrong approach to me.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  And I tweeted what I, is certainly a, a flippant formulation of that.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Just kind of off, offhand without really thinking deeply about it. And it got, you know, as you say, it kind of went viral and traveled the world and some people were delighted by it and some people hated it and I was a genius or I was this evil. Look at this villain. And I kind of had this realization. I was like, Oh my God, this is what it's like to like win on Twitter. Like this is what success on Twitter looks like is like

• 6:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's terrible.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Having the stupidest possible thing. I was like, man, if this is the game, if this is what winning this game is, I do not need to play this game. It's a sort of like a play stupid games, win stupid prizes kind of idea. I think the place that I've put, we've put down our thoughts on this in a actual, consistent, cool-headed way. We wrote a post on the Substack blog, kind of outlining our philosophy on content moderation, why we think freedom of the press is important, as important as ever, maybe more important in the, in the age of the internet and all these platforms. And I think that would be the thing that I would, I would point to and want to stand behind.

• 7:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think it struck a chord because, and I wrote a story for 1-0, basically predicting that this was going to happen, that you would be caught in the middle of the speech wars along with Clubhouse and Spotify. And I felt that it struck a nerve because there were journalists that were starting to beat the drum of, largely journalists, maybe there were other Twitter users, I'm curious what your take is, and started to beat the drum of Substack needs to have a coherent content moderation policy. Some people thought it needs to take certain newsletters down. Other people were upset at you for funding some

• 8:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  newsletters through your Substack Pro program where you give newsletter writers in advance and they have to earn that out and they'll make a percentage above it, but essentially it's you funding them for a year or so. And people liked that because it was some sort of repudiation to some of the reporters, I think, who were talking. And, and I will say, tech media has spoken a lot about the need to moderate content on tech platforms and there's a backlash to it. And I thought that the people that loved that tweet said, Chris is sticking it to those reporters. And the people that didn't like that tweet said, this guy is running more, one of the more important media tech platforms in the

• 8:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  world right now and is falling on one side of this and basically thumbing, putting a thumb in the eye of a lot of people who've put some thought into the way the internet should operate. What do you think about that?

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that might be a fair, that might be a fair assessment. And I do think that in general, the way that tweets become successful is they kind of, if they maximally piss off both sides, if it's kind of like the worst, the worst possible thing is always the thing that that is most successful. Mm hmm. You mentioned something, you, you, you mentioned something earlier, you said Substack sees itself as a neutral platform. And one of the things that I wrote in that, in, that we wrote in that, in that our philosophy of content moderation essay is that we don't actually see ourselves as a neutral platform. Hmm. We have a, a point of view and our point of view is, is basically that freedom of the press is important, that giving people a place to express themselves, letting, you

• 9:50Speaker 01

  know, readers and writers, writers and readers be in charge of what they're seeing is, is actually a really important principle. But we don't, we don't think that that is a neutral position. It's not, certainly not a universal position. There are lots of people in the world who think that it's really important that every platform take a, you know, a, what's a, a, a fair way to put this, a, a strong approach to moderating and kicking off people that, that have the wrong ideas or that express things the wrong way. And we just fundamentally don't believe that. You want to defund the stop police? Yeah, I mean, there, there, I mean, there's, there's a real impulse in the culture. And I think it, it comes from a, it, it, it doesn't come from no reason. It's not people that are, there, there, there is a real problem there.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  My diagnosis of this is the first generation of these internet media companies, the social media companies created a like, a crazy machine. They created a machine that rewards engagement and therefore rewards like rage and hate and, and awful things. And so they kind of created a machine that inexorably pulls in an awful direction. And then the, the answer is like, well, once things get, inevitably, once the awful things start to crop up, we have to like, swat them down. And if not, this thing's gonna, this thing's gonna fall, fall over. And I just think that's like, that's not a solution. Like, we had one problem and now we're introducing heavy-handed censorship, which is really impossible to do well. And now you just have two problems.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  And the real solution is, is to play a different game entirely. I think the, there's a real problem. The incident comes from a reasonable place, but I do think that my position and the, and Substack's position is that freedom of the press is important and that heavy-handed censorship is not the, not the right solution.

• 11:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, Chris, but look, some people are gonna look at Substack as this tool that's gonna replace the professional media, which they say is, you know, obscuring the truth with news judgment on one hand and content moderation advocacy on the other. And you know, there are legitimate complaints about what the professional media wants to cover or doesn't want to cover. But I think what many of the people, the powerful people that are advancing these arguments want is less accountability. You know, don't look into the stuff we want hidden. And to get that, you just discredit the professional press as an institution. So when they see you say, "defend the thought police," they're thrilled because here's Substack as an alternative. And, you know, to the professional media, they can be less accountable that way. So Chris, I want to know, how do you balance your platform's role as like a calmer alternative

• 12:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  to social media-fueled writing and news while also not playing into the hands of these people who want to crush the press because they only want to see positive headlines and live accountability-free?

• 12:32Speaker 01

  No, I think that's a great question. I mean, the way that I think of this, I think ultimately the thing that we're setting up, that we are setting up to disrupt and to change with Substack is not the professional media, is not legacy journalism, anything like that. I really do think it is the attention economy writ large. Like, the thing that Substack is at the core to me is, as a writer, it's a place where I can go independent, I can, you know, have this model where I try to earn and keep the trust of my readership, which means that not only, you know, it's not just a different way to make money, but it's, you can do a different and better kind of work. This is why you should charge instead of having ads, by the way.

• 13:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, we're gonna talk about that second half, for sure.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  And for for readers, it's a I think of it as a place to take back your mind. Right? People have this growing sense of like, oh, my God, the the media diet I have is driving me slowly insane. And it's some of that comes from the professional media, but it's really the root cause of it is is the feeds is the social media algorithms. They're calling the shots. That's determining what wins. And people just it's compelling. I'm choosing it, but I'm sort of I have this uneasy sense of like. My mind is is is going to rot and it's breaking the brain. And so I think that that is ultimately what. What Substack exists to do. There are certainly people out there who kind of look at the. The manifold problems of the professional media and kind of take this approach of like. Institutions are awful. They shouldn't exist. Burn it to the ground and and do something new.

• 13:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's a very popular ideology right now, and they look to Substack as one of the ways to do that. So.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, for what it's worth, I'm not one of those people. I don't think that that I don't think that the answer, you know, to the extent that you have institutions that have problems. The answer is not burn them to the ground and and start over. I think that's a false a fault like a mirage of a solution. It kind of feels emotionally satisfying. But it's the kind of thing that when you try to do it in practice is is catastrophic. I do think that as as you as you mentioned, these having these institutions is really important. Right? Society can't function unless we have a a working professional press. Whether it exists in the legacy format or whether it's on Substack, whether it's in something totally different. That that matters deeply. And so I kind of think that. You know, the the.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  The thing that's that's worthwhile doing is. Trying to make institutions better. And I think the two ways that you can do that are you can sort of provide. Actual. A vehicle for actual real critique. Right? So if if if institutions get to a place where there's a.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Mode of group think where no one's really kind of like asking the hard questions and and. Making the strong case. It can kind of like. Lead things off the rails where even an institution that starts very good can kind of like. Descend into into madness. So having having.

• 15:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  In the in the case, the press asking some hard questions and not others.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And there's exactly like there's some things that you're you're supposed to like, you're allowed to be super critical of and other things that are that are sacred. And we can't kind of question the thinking on on this or that. I think providing a space where all of it can be questioned is is valuable in itself because it provides, you know, even when the questioning is wrong, it provides kind of like a corrective pressure to sharpen thinking and to have to actually like be accountable to doing the right thing. And the other thing that you can do is

• 15:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  That would not before you go to the second, not to mention hedge or orthodox thinking is courted your business's success, because if I'm out here saying the same thing that every other tech publication is saying, I'm not making a business on that. No one's going to subscribe. And I'm not, I wouldn't classify myself as like a traditional hedge or orthodox thinker. I might have a little some different perspectives on the stuff. But like, it does seem like a platform like yours will lend itself to the hedge or orthodox, where people will subscribe to stuff they can't get anywhere else.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I think where people will subscribe to stuff they can't get anywhere else is absolutely right. And some of that could mean people who disagree with the things that you get everywhere else. And some could be things that are just there's

• 16:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Undercover.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Not covered. Like they don't exist, right?

• 16:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Emily Atkins newsletter is is a perfect example of that. She writes heated, which is a climate change focused newsletter for listeners. Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, you should you should subscribe to I think it's heated world. It's a good one. And there's lots of examples like this. There's people that are covering industries are like, there's just nobody covers this my industry. Well, everybody I know wants to have something. And so I'm going to go and do it myself. Like, I know the industry. Well, I'm going to be able to do a good job of it. And then all of a sudden, there's this thing that people find valuable. So I think that is absolutely true. The other back to the institution question.

• 17:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  So provide, you know, sharp critique that that sharpens the thinking makes things better. The other is provide a place where new institutions can begin. So institutions are long lived, but they don't live, they don't always live forever. And sometimes you need some renewal. And so I think providing a place where if there is a new way needed, people can try it and find it and and create something. And I think there are a bunch of publications on Substack that are making a real stab at creating something new and lasting.

• 17:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I just want to go back to what we were talking about earlier. When it comes to where, what role this platform is playing, because I understand that you want it to be this like sort of counterpoint to social media. But you must be aware that it's become this very important place in the culture war. Uh, especially, you know, the culture war that's being fought over the future of the media, which is a big part of the broader culture war. So. So you're not going to deny that part, right? Like even though you like to, you know, go to this point about social media. Obviously, you know, I don't know, it does seem like it's playing a role in this culture war and it is being looked at by people as a way to burn down institutions.

• 18:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, I read the tweets, man. That's what, that's what people are saying.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  That's your first, that's your first mistake. If you would just stop reading the tweets, you'd be so much happier.

• 18:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's true.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  No, to me, this is all of a piece.

• 18:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Stop sending the tweets. Might be even better, but sorry, go ahead.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Both, both ideal.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  To me, this is all of a piece and it's not, I don't think of this as kind of like we, we. You know, set out naively and wanting to just do some cool thing and accidentally ended up in, in the heat of the culture wars like we. Knew when we started Substack, like this is what we're doing. And to me, the, you know, this. My thesis here is this crazy brain caused by social media is the thing that is making the culture wars be the way they are. And manifest the way they do and is causing some of the shifts in, in, in how that stuff works. And so we were. Running towards the fire when we started Substack, like we knew that was going to happen.

• 19:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  So I can't very well complain now that that's the case. And I would just rather. Be doing something that I think is positive, um, rather than just. Avoiding it and thinking, oh gosh, I hope this gets better on its own.

• 19:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, look, I happen to think it's positive overall. I like the fact that this exists. I think it's allowed me to explore new areas. Of my journalism that I don't think I would have gotten elsewhere. And so I appreciate that, even though I'm not, you know, running. Straight in line with your, your business model, but I think it is, it is overall good. I just do wonder, um, again, like we're, we're in a moment where trust in institutions is at an all time low. And is part of that the institution's fault? Yes. But is part of that also a campaign to discredit institutions by the powerful? Heck, yes. And I also wonder about your investor. You're invested in heavily by Andreessen Horowitz. They're your lead investor.

• 20:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, it's not a stretch to say that they have a real disdain for the tech press. And Mark Andreessen's blocked about every journalist I know. He's blocked me. I don't mind, but again, like, it's kind of hilarious to me that like, you know, I hear the corporate media is the problem. But now I'm hearing independent media might be the problem. And is it really the media is the problem? Or again, is it accountability? Because I do know that Andreessen Horowitz has had a number of investments that have, let's take the benefits. For example, the HR benefits company that was doing a number of things that were extremely sketchy. We're exposed by one of my colleagues, Will Alden at BuzzFeed News.

• 21:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  It was a black eye for Andreessen, which were pushing them to grow faster than they should have, which is a core component to a lot of VC business models. And so of course they're going to, you know, despise the media, even though the professional media, even though like, of course, they're going to get something. They're going to get things wrong, but it's also like, well, you know, maybe accountability is part of it too. So again, like, and this is kind of a funny thing for me to ask because I'm a journalist for sure. And I'm on your platform that again, is funded by these folks who don't have a high opinion of journalists, at least from what I can tell. So how do you think about that? And how has their thinking about the practice of journalism influenced you in terms of the way that you run your platform?

• 21:46Speaker 01

  I certainly can't speak for them other than to say that they've been pretty great partners for us. And, you know, in terms of building a business and all that stuff, it's been, it's been actually very valuable for us.

• 21:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, they did give you a lot of money.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  The money helps too. Can't complain.

• 22:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  I don't know. I guess a lot of this depends on, you know, okay, so we all agree that there's the media is not perfect. There's some degree of problem with it. People are dissatisfied with it to some extent. How much of that is, should they be looking inwards? And how much of it is, is, you know, a campaign to discredit?

• 22:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  A little of both, I would say.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  I think you could, yeah, you can, you can sort of like argue it until the cows come home. I think the question is, given that you're in that state, what's the way forward? Right? If we need trusted press and trusted institutions to have a cogent society, and we don't have that, what's the best thing that, what's, what's the, what's, how do we get from here to there? To me, that's the more interesting question. And I don't think, I, I, and this is a straw man. I'm not saying this is what you're saying, but the answer of like, well, people should just trust the media more. And we shouldn't talk badly about them, even if they're bad.

• 23:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Not what I'm saying.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  It's not gonna work.

• 23:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think there should be competition. I also wonder about the motivations of the people that are funding this thing. And I wonder if you do as well.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  I can speak to my motivations and my motivation with this is to build something new and better.

• 23:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  That provides a real alternative for, for writers and for readers. And I think that there are a bunch of people on Substack who, you know, have the opportunity to do the work now that they think they've always wanted to do and weren't able to in the old system. And to me, that's, that's just a big win.

• 23:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's such a funny position for me to be in also, like, it's actually really good and cathartic to have this conversation with you. Because I understand that it's a complicated platform to be on. But also I think it's great, you know? It's like, I really like getting this opportunity to go one to one with an audience. You know, me emailing them once a week and getting replies and understanding that there's going to be a built in audience. So I like by default, do not need to sensationalize anything to get readers. It's amazing and liberating. And I think it's the way that it should be. So I like it and maybe you will, you know, I think one of the interesting things we've seen

• 24:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  and since you guys had your rise is that. Every publication seems to be, you know, going all in on newsletters now. You have Bloomberg, it seems Bloomberg has every reporter doing a newsletter now. The information just launched a new vertical, it's a newsletter. Everyone's asking, what's your newsletter strategy? Puck is another, is another one that's sort of launching in stealth now. Oh God, I'm probably gonna get in trouble for saying that, but their newsletters are out there. But it's basically like a new publication where they're gonna try to get people to pay for newsletters. So I agree that it's much healthier than trying to write for the social feeds. So we have common ground there for sure.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there's, there's two parts to that, right? There's the, there's the built in audience. Well, this is where, this is where we're gonna differ, actually. There's the built in audience where it's, you know, people have, have earned their trust enough. They've invited me to their inbox. And so if I want to write something that's not super clicky, but I think is important, I can send it, they'll get it. And the other part of it is actually having a way to get paid directly. The independence is the key and the, and having the audience is half of that. And then having the, the direct subscription, I think is the other half.

• 25:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I don't think we really disagree, honestly, because, so there's two types of currency that you can get from writing a newsletter. One is somebody agreeing to open it every week and not unsubscribe. And the other is someone willing to pay. And it's just, it's the same thing. It's just, you know, one step of loyalty higher. But I know, like, when I write for someone, I am not writing for them, you know, to share it on Twitter and blow up and outrage people. I'm writing to say, thank you for giving me a spot in your inbox. I'm gonna try to provide value and hopefully if I do that, you'll be back next week. And then eventually, you know, the idea is maybe, maybe turn on subscriptions, but not yet. Okay, so we have Twitter and Facebook.

• 26:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Are getting in this game too, which is interesting because all the incentives of social media are opposite of that. They are essentially outraged, write things that are shared like crazy. Let's talk about that after the break. We'll be back here in the Big Technology Podcast right after this with Substack CEO Chris Best. This episode is brought to you by App Point. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what App Point does. For 25 years,

• 26:55Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 27:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on the Big Technology Podcast with Chris Best. Yes, I met him in an apartment right around the corner from my old apartment, actually, in San Francisco, and had no idea that Substack would get this big. But I did find that reporters were, from our conversation, making real money. And maybe that sparked the initial desire for me to go and do it on my own. And my has it grown. So before the break, we were talking a little bit about the incentive for writing that comes to your inbox for a writer, the incentive for a writer that writes to a paid subscriber or even a free subscriber going to their inbox versus social media.

• 28:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Now, Facebook and Twitter are getting in this game. Twitter with review. Facebook just launched its own newsletter copycat called Bulletin. And Bulletin has like some very big name writers, including Malcolm Gladwell. And who's the guy that wrote Tuesdays with Maury? Mitch Albom. He's on there too. Some others. Oh, and yeah, anyway, we can go forever. So, but it's also a little bit weird because those of us who've been doing this for a while, newsletter writers, we did this because we wanted to get away from the social media algorithms, not run towards them. And Facebook's pitch and Twitter's pitch, I'm sure is, hey, we have the distribution for you. And so, do the same thing you've been doing forever. Just,

• 28:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  you know, use our platform and everything will work out. How strange is it to see them get in the game for you? And what do you think your competitive advantage is going to be? Because at the end of the day, you know, you have, your software is good. I'll say it's the best newsletter platform I've used. I have some complaints, but overall, very good. And, but you're still going against a, you know, 200 million daily active user platform, and then a 2.5 or close to 3 billion user platform in Facebook. So, yeah, what's your reaction? And then how do you win?

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and these are, these are massive companies. They have all of the resources, all the people. My reaction, you know, we talked about,

• 29:39Speaker 01

  did I expect this? I expect Substack to be where it is. I think I'd always hoped that Substack would be where it is. I'd always thought that we were on to something that this new model could really work and could really create a new path for, you know, writers and readers of the internet. And I think we're in the place in Substack's history where it is working. It's clearly working. It's clearly growing. There's hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. There's people that are making all this money. And I think that you just, you don't get to be one of the great companies and change the world without Facebook and Twitter copying you along the way. And so while it's scary to have a giant company, you know, clone your products, which is both flattering, but also scary. I do think

• 30:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Like clone, clone. Like on mobile viewer, you can't tell the difference. It was very brazen.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  It's pretty, it's, it was very flattering.

• 30:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  I could think of some other words to use, but okay.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  It's brazen. And I mean, this is, this is, this is what happens.

• 30:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's how it goes. Yeah.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  And I, I think it just, again, I just see this as evidence of like the, the, this model is working and this is the future and there's, they, they are seeing people, as you say, leave the ecosystem and choose something better and it's freaking them out. And, you know, I do think that they're, you know, they're building a credible effort at it because they've chosen to be inspired by some good sources. Um, I think the thing that I would point to for Twitter and Facebook is really just the core of what, the core of what Substack is, is this new model. It is a departure away from the, the, uh, incentive game. It is true independence for writers where you own your list, you own your relationships.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  You know, you can always reach your people and you, you sort of have this direct relationship. And for readers, it's this idea that like, you want to take back your mind. You want to stop spending all of your time getting sucked into these engagement machines. And I just don't think that, that Twitter and Facebook can ever fully offer that. It's kind of like oil companies building like a solar thing. It's laudable. It's nice, but they're not going to like shut the pumps down.

• 31:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  You've said, take back your mind a couple of times. Uh, do you think that using, I mean, reading email, newsletters and using social media are mutually exclusive? Because I'll be honest, I get a lot of links from Twitter. I get a lot of links when they come into my inbox from Substack. So what is this, uh, that you're talking about?

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think they're, they're mutually exclusive at all, but I do think like, to me, the zoomed out version of this is people used to get bored. People used to have this time where it's like, I have, I have nothing to do and I don't know, I need something to entertain me. Uh, and then the internet came along and then smartphones came along and social media came along. And now we've kind of like, built these engagement machines that are designed to kind of like suck up every moment of your life that it can possibly get their hands on to serve you advertising. And then as a person who's a user of one of these things, you're

• 32:39Speaker 01

  All of your life is getting sucked up by it. And your finite resource is not your money, it's your attention. You only have so long to live, you only so much, you know, energy to spend reading things. And if you give all of your attention to this feed that's kind of working against you, it is kind of taking over your mind. And I think people are increasingly realizing this and feeling this, you know, the fact that we've invented terminology like hate reading and doom scrolling is a pretty good tell that that people feel that something is wrong. And to me, the answer is not going to be like, well, stop reading things on your phone or like, don't just whatever, give up on this and eat your vegetables instead. I think the right answer is give people a real alternative, a different way to connect

• 33:21Speaker 01

  with the writers they trust, with the culture at large, with the ideas they care about. That's just not governed by the same underlying rules. It's not trying to maximize their engagement, but is instead trying to like burn and keep their trust to the point where they'll spend the money. And so to me, it's like, if people just at least some of the time, instead of clicking on Twitter, go to their, go read their, their Substack stuff, they're kind of using that reading time more intentionally in a way that is better for their life.

• 33:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Here's my perspective, I, you know, having done this for a while. I think that, you know, it's really interesting to hear you frame this from the perspective of the reader or the consumer. I honestly think that it's more compelling to frame it from the perspective of the creator, where the incentives that, that your platform creates, write to the email, again, built in audience, you don't have to worry about getting retweets to have people read your stuff. Therefore, you're going to be less predisposed to write for the incentives that these platforms have. And the way to get retweets and the way to get shares on Facebook is to write for outrage and is to write to confirmation bias.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 34:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  And if you have these people, and that's why, you know, you said earlier in the second half, the last half of the first segment, that, you know, we're going to disagree. We agree, I think a hundred percent on this. When you, when you move that relationship from I need to stoke outrage, or I need to say something dramatic or radical in order to get readers to, hey, I'm going to write the best thing I can and it's going to land in people's inboxes.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 34:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I don't need to worry about ramping it up because they trust me to tell them the truth and they're going to share it when they see me doing that. You know, versus the other way around. That changes the game. And then the second order effect is it changes the consumer experience.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right. It's not just a different way to make money doing the same thing. It's when you're doing it this way, the kind of work you do is qualitatively different and better. And that readers appreciate that. And actually, I, I think that's, that's exactly right as well. I see the, that writer framing and the reader framing of take your back your mind as two halves of the same coin.

• 35:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Right. One only works because the other works. Right? If we gave you this great way to, to go independent and a tool to send emails and, and nobody cared and nobody was hungry for a different experience. Wouldn't work. You wouldn't have readers that were clamoring for this thing. But what, what happens is, yeah, you, you get the better incentives. You can do the work that actually matters. And readers recognize it and it turns out are hungry for it because they want to take back their mind and because they want something better.

• 35:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Is it weird for you that, uh, sorry to keep going back to Andreessen Horowitz, but there's such an interesting player in this drama. Is it weird for you that they're, you know, your funder, I imagine on your board and also on Facebook's board. And then the same thing happens with Clubhouse, right? Like Mark Andreessen works hard to build a clubhouse up. Mark Zuckerberg comes and participates. Next thing you know, Clubhouse has cloned one to one on Facebook. Is that strange for you at all?

• 36:23Speaker 01

  It's not that strange, I guess.

• 36:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, you're being very kind to them. I understand why.

• 36:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, do you want me to, do you want me to, to trash them? Is that the?

• 36:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, I want you to be honest.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  I think it's going to sound, it's going to sound sort of puffy and ridiculous. Like we've had a really fantastic experience with them. I mean, the fact that they're, this is the firm that's helped build some of the world's great companies. Gives the, the perspective they bring extra value. Uh, I think there's a, there's a lot of this, I think there is a lot of like general skepticism towards them that, that's unfair and unwarranted in my estimation.

• 37:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, that's, that's, I think that's where we disagree. So, um, but, but, uh, you know, I, again, VC is complicated. I get it. Without VC, we wouldn't have some of our, uh, great companies and their engine of growth. But.

• 37:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  There's other incentives there. So anyway, you've you've taken enough incoming on Andreessen Horowitz. I'll leave you alone at this point. All right, let's take another break. I want to talk to you a little bit more about the technology of Substack, what this evolves into, and then maybe you can convince me to move from advertising to subscription. How does that sound?

• 37:39Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 37:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Finally.

• 37:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, we'll be back here on the Big Technology Podcast for one final segment with Chris Best. He's the CEO of Substack.

• 37:49Speaker 02

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• 38:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here for one final segment on the Big Technology Podcast with Chris Best, CEO of Substack. Well, we've really gotten into it in the first two segments. Chris, I appreciate you rolling with it. So I want to talk to you a little bit about the technology side of your platform. Let me just go with my first big question, which is that there's so many email newsletters now, and I wonder what this evolves into, because is it going to just end up to an email inbox being a thing you do to complete tasks, kinda, and then most of the time read stuff? Or do we just end up in the, you know, back in the days of the RSS reader, where you subscribe to certain feeds and they end up in your reader? And I know

• 39:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Substack has built a reader of its own, and I've used it. And I also know that like my Gmail, at this point, the Promotions tab is is strange. It's gone from, you know, 5% off coupons for the gap to just a stream of different newsletters coming in from Substack. And it does really feel like it

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Sounds like a major improvement to me.

• 39:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, it depends on the day.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  Unless you really like those gap coupons.

• 39:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  It depends who's writing. If Casey Newton's writing, no, I'm kidding. His newsletter's great. So what do you think?

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, and I should say that we do support RSS on Substack. So each Substack that is a newsletter is also an RSS feed. I think you mentioned this with podcasting. I think the magic of email is that it's the last, one of the last places where you can have a direct relationship with somebody specifically on a phone and mobile, right? Like when we switched from desktop to phones, the idea of browsing the web kind of mostly went away. People used to sit down and like type in their favorite websites and that was kind of you would surf the web. People do that in mobile a little bit, but not nearly as much. And so the real thing is you, you need to be on the home screen. You need to have a little blue dot in order to really have a relationship with somebody in mobile on their phone where they're doing a lot of reading.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  And it turns out that you're not going to make an app per new thing. And one of the few apps where you can have a direct relationship that people already have and they don't have to get a new app is their email inbox, because you can send them an email, they'll get an notification, they'll click in and they'll read it. Another one of those, by the way, is their podcast player, right? And the podcast player works the two.

• 40:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's why we're here.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  You have this direct connection. This podcast showed up in your thing. You went to the app, you thought, oh, that sounds nice. And there I go. And so I think the, the magic is not necessarily email per se, but it is that direct connection unmediated by kind of the attention algorithm where people opt into following you and you can push them something onto their home screen. Like that's the magic.

• 40:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Not fully unmediated, because we still go through, and I know we've talked the whole time about there are no algorithms. Yeah. Cause you wrote in your last post, um, for writers, this means being, and you're talking about email versus social media. Back to this again, for writers, this means being able to control their relationships with their audience instead of being mediated by fickle corporations whose, whose algorithms decide what gets the most attention. And I'm like, I like that in theory, but. Gmail, man.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, Gmail will.

• 41:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  You have the primary inbox, you have promotions and you have spam. And you know, this deliverability stuff is a real.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Make sure you drag the big technology newsletter into your primary inbox. It will help the whole world.

• 41:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm working on it. I'm working on it. So, but yeah, I think that, but, but it is the closest, as close as you can get to a pure experience, which is interesting. The, okay, tech question number two. The, the platforms you're competing against really good at helping publications get discovered. That's what their pitch is against you guys. Are you guys going to build in any discovery where like, you know, I'm interested in Substacks, like I can do a better job browsing. There have been even hacks of your website that people have built that tries to show folks, you know, what newsletters they might want to subscribe to. Or are you going to leave it largely on, on the newsletter writer?

• 42:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think the way that people in the industry talk about this is, are you going to be a Shopify for newsletter writers? Basically, you know, give them the tools and they go create and promote, et cetera, et cetera. You're just the, the bare bones technology. Are you going to be an Amazon where like, you're going to end up drawing the interest? And then be this crucial place for people to get discovered. What's your thought on that part?

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do think that discovery is one of the most important things we can bring to writers, right? The things that you, you know, you want lots of features, but the thing that you really care about is like, are people finding and falling in love, in love with my, my work? And for readers too, like if, you know, if I already know a specific writer I love, that's great. But then finding the next one is, is really important. So I think it's, it's both, we do some of this now, I think more than people expect where we're driving subscriptions for, for newsletters. And I do think it's a big area of opportunity for us. Yeah, there's the homepage. We have a few features that do this.

• 43:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  And there's and a lot of this happens, there's a lot of sort of cross discovery as well that happens organically. People link to each other, people put each other in their blog roles, they do cross posts and guest posts, things like this. So I think it is a major area that we can do a lot of good in. I think the trick is doing it in a way that doesn't, again, recreate the problems that we sought to avoid, right? You don't want to have a, you know, a discovery thing that ends up being gamable in some way that drives bad behavior, which is why I like revenue ranked leaderboards. It's kind of like, hey, if you want to game this, go ahead, like, try to get enough people to subscribe. Like, that's kind of the, that's the right game to be playing.

• 43:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Speaking of leaderboards, it's a great segue, Chris. You just handed it to me perfectly. Are you afraid your top earning writers are gonna leave? Because the chatter is, oh, this is a very expensive email platform. They pay 10% of all email subscriptions to you and then another 3%, I suppose, to Stripe. So, you know, once you get into a decent enough tier, you know, you're paying that to you guys. Then there's, you know, obviously the government and all that stuff. And what's a creator walking away with? And thank goodness, we're not paying Apple also. But there are, you know, there are alternatives. There's Twitter's gonna be 5%, Facebook's gonna be free. So how are you gonna target that? Maybe you give benefits, maybe you

• 44:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  lower that rate. Do you want to break some news here about how you're gonna lower the rate at some point? What's your thought?

• 44:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and you know, what's more, one of the key promises of Substack is that you can leave, right? We, we're not trying to lock you in, you know, that we think this is your thing, right? You have your email list, you have your payment relationships. We really, I think of this as us kind of burning the boats to say, like, we're not gonna force you to stay. And the only way that we're gonna get you to stay is by delivering enough value that it, it makes sense for you to stay. And the main ways that we can deliver value are by like, handling all of the things outside of the writing and just making it automatically great. And this is especially important early on, like our pitch, the very early pitch I made to some of the writers in Substack, maybe to you too, was we'll do everything for you except the hard

• 45:30Speaker 01

  part. Like, if you do the writing, the platform's kind of gonna take care of the rest. And that means having the software work, that means having support handled for you. That means, you know, a bunch of services that we're introducing along like help you find an editor, help you get your legal fees, like how do I do my design? Like, we sort of have like a whole suite of things that provide everything that you need.

• 45:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  And then the other, of course, is just growing faster because, you know, 10% is a fixed amount. But at the end of the day, if my, if you're bending my growth rate over time, that actually becomes much more meaningful than any like fixed point fee. And so the features that Substack builds that lets you grow both sort of organically, as people share, as people pass it around, as people link to each other, and through the platform where we're bringing you readers and we can say, hey, look over here, here's a bunch of people who only came because of the power of the Substack network. You know, if we can say, yeah, we're taking 10%, but here we brought you 20%, that just changes, changes the game entirely.

• 46:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, no, I, I think it's, I'll, I'll say from my perspective, platform rules, because I don't have to pay anything for it, whereas I would with others. But again, I'm ad-supported, so once I turn on subscriptions, I'm paying you guys 10%, which, look, I wouldn't mind, we're gonna, we're gonna, sorry, go ahead, Chris, yeah.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  I love the, I love that you know that you're gonna turn on subscriptions and we're just arguing over when you should.

• 46:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, well, let's, let's talk about it, because now we're into it. So I am gonna turn on subscriptions. My, so I, I, my idea has always been, this is not a one or two-year thing. So first of all, I want to say, you guys, let's talk about the services you offer. You, you've paid some writers advances, you've given some writers healthcare subsidies, done design and legal for them.

• 47:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  I haven't taken any of those, except I had one of your lawyers look over my first story to make sure I didn't get sued, which I appreciate.

• 47:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  So those are definitely enticing benefits, once those come in. Okay, but like I said, the, both this podcast and my newsletter, I don't look at these in a, in a time horizon of one or two years. This is what I want to be doing for the rest of my career. And so. Personally, my thought going free to start has been, let's, two things. One is, let's build an audience, right? Make sure that these are free and accessible to everyone. And I don't get, end up having some of the distribution hampered by a paywall. And then two is, I'm going to be honest here, and I've talked about this, I think, on the show before, but I'm concerned about potentially burning out at some point, which happens to lots of creators,

• 48:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  where they create, or writers, or whatever, people using these tools. Use, use your buzzword. They create so much that they lose themselves in some way. And at a certain point, they, they look up for air. They've promised paid subscribers that they would do three posts a week, and they find themselves physically unable to do one post a week because they've worked themselves so hard. So what I have always thought is, I can do this with advertising. I know they add industry and build it to a point where two things happen. One is, the audience is big enough where I feel okay putting some stuff behind a paywall. And, and then two, you know, being able to maintain my, my mental sanity.

• 48:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  And the thing about being on your own is you can just keep working and no one will tell you to stop.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, especially if you're in lockdown.

• 48:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Especially if you're in lockdown. So those are my perspective, but I, I do think that eventually the time will come to turn on these subscriptions. And I guess the timing, the timing question is what we'll talk about.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Let me give you the pitch that I would give you if you were, if we were just talking about, about this. As, as, what's, what's your thinking?

• 49:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  I think there's a, there's a misconception, and we thought this early on too. This idea that if I turn on paid, it's going to slow my growth.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  Where it's like, you know, I just need to like, get as many people as possible and then I'll turn on paid and then off I go. And we've just empirically seen over and over again that that doesn't happen. And in fact, a lot of the time when people turn on paid, their growth actually accelerates if they do it right. And the advice that we give people, by the way, in general on Substack is when you have a paid thing, take your best and most accessible stuff, the thing that you think is, you know, changing the world. You want the biggest reader, make that free. And the inside baseball stuff, you know, you can use the paid audience almost as like an audience of. People that have really opted in to get your, you know, that really care. And so if you've got something that's like, oh, man, only the people that really love me would ever want to read this.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  I don't know if I want to send an email to everybody. You have kind of like the perfect audience to hit with that stuff to do like discussion things to spend time with, to get ideas for stuff. I think that model works really well. The way the, the advice I give people now is don't turn on paid.

• 50:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. No. Oh, you go ahead. I'm actually kind of curious what your advice is now.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  My advice is, is, is don't turn on paid until you have kind of like, you know, when in a, in a startup, you would call product market fit, where you've kind of figured out your editorial strategy where people are like, people are continuing to open it week after week where it's kind of growing readership. If you're in a place where you're still kind of figuring out what the pitch of the thing is, then don't turn on paid because it just makes it, it locks you in, right? It keeps you, it keeps you, uh, it makes it hard to be like, oh, actually like, I kind of want to take a different angle on this.

• 50:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  If you've figured out the angle and it's working and you're just trying to grow it, I think you can turn on paid and I think it works really well.

• 50:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. I would say, so here's the, here's my counterpoint I was gonna give. I think people do grow when they turn on paid because they send more emails. And that's, you know, we've talked to, well, not you and I, but some people will talk about how the data always tells you to send more emails. And so again, that goes to the second part of the thing. I'll do it eventually, but I also think that advertising, so I actually started out in the ad industry, kind of disdainful of advertising. But I do think that advertising can play a really good role in supporting content. We've done two breaks in this conversation. No one was killed because of it and it will help support the podcast. Um, as far as I know, I don't know if, if we did programmatic ads, I don't take any responsibility for what showed up there.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  I would agree to disagree. I just hate, I hate podcast ads so much. I just.

• 51:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  But you like, but you like podcasts though.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  I like podcasts. I'd be happy to, I'm happy to pay for them.

• 51:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. Yeah. So that's another eventuality that could happen.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  And I think, I think the burnout thing is real. And I, the thing that I would, I suggest and that.

• 51:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm a year, by the way, I'm a year plus into this. I feel energized. I'm going to take August off, you know, post COVID, post book type of recharge. The podcast, by the way, listeners, podcasts will go on. I'm going to record four and then we'll keep rolling it. Um, but I, I, I will say. I've definitely spoken to people who've given up. You know, it's like podcasts, the most podcasts don't end up going to their third episode. I imagine you guys have, I'm kind of curious what your data is. Do most Substack newsletters go to their third newsletter?

• 52:21Speaker 01

  It's like the classic, I think of this as in like the heyday of blogging. It's like, this is my new blog. It's awesome. I'm going to post here every week. Second post, three months later. Oh man, I haven't, I haven't been doing it, but I'm really going to start now. No third posts.

• 52:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's it. Most newsletters also, I mean, not most, but a lot of newsletters I've seen spend almost every edition writing to subscribers about why they haven't written. And I'm just like, okay, I get it. Just, you know, let's go to the, let's go to the videotape here of people. So.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  I think the thing to do is to set the expectation upfront. Your readers don't want you to burn out. They're not, they're not sitting here being like, if I don't get a million emails, I'm going to be super disappointed. You know, you're paying, you're paying for the signal, not, not the like, you know, overall volume of content. And if you say, I'm going to take a healthy amount of breaks and that's part of how I'm going to serve you. And if you pay like, assume that I'm going to go on vacation, that's totally fair. People don't look, people don't look at that and be like, what do you mean? You took two weeks off in the summer to do something like you, monster. It's fine. It's a good thing to do and I encourage it. And I do think there are people who don't and it, it doesn't end up helping them in the long run. Because as you say, it, if you get burned out, you're not going to help anyone.

• 53:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  The keyboard becomes a very daunting thing to look at. Okay. You didn't really answer the question I asked about whether you were worried if some of your top earners will leave and do their own thing. Are you, I know that you said our value proposition is that we can help them grow, but talk about your emotions, Chris. Let's, let's get into this.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean.

• 53:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Are you worried?

• 53:53Speaker 01

  Of course I'm worried. And this is kind of the, I, I, we've, we've designed the business of Substack to put this pressure on ourselves, right? We, we make it explicit that people are allowed to leave anytime. It's one of our core promises. It's your audience, right? We've got a fee that makes the business sustainable. If you're writing on Substack, you never have to wonder like. Oh, what is the business model? Are they going to turn around sometime in the future and like, do something? Do they, are their interests uncoupled from mine? No, we have a fee that aligns our interests. We want you to make way more money because then we make way more money and that you know that we're, you know exactly how we're incentivized. You know, the same way that the reader gets aligned with the writer, the, we are aligned with, with, uh, you know, the writer gets aligned with Substack. We want you to win for all these reasons.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  And I think it just puts the right pressure on us, right? It puts the pressure on us that we have to show that value, that we have to show you, you know, here's all of the ways that we're helping you. And so I think it lights a fire under us as a company to make the platform that can keep the great writers, not because they're stuck, not because they're forced to use our weird payment infrastructure, but because it's the best place to be. And I think actually like counterintuitively in the long run, by like exposing ourselves in that, you know, being vulnerable in that way. It's actually like a jujitsu move that helps.

• 55:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's good. I agree. I think it's a good move. And, uh, and it seems like it's working. You've had most of the people stay. Seems like your revenue is growing pretty well. So you don't have to raise again, do you?

• 55:22Speaker 01

  No.

• 55:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  You're in good shape. Uh, I think I'm gonna, uh, this has been a very inspiring, uh, conversation. I think I'm gonna start a publication that's going to be all about the bad things that people are saying online and why they should be removed. And, uh, I'll call it the Thought Police and we'll do $5 a month and.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, we'll see, we'll see how many people, how many people get excited for that.

• 55:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  You can tweet, "Fund the Thought Police."

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Good luck with that.

• 55:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm kidding. I'm not gonna do that. Uh, uh, they wanted to ask, some people wanted me to ask you about content moderation. You guys have talked about that ad nauseam. Um, you're not tight. Do you, do you have a head of policy now? Are you taking any newsletters down? I know there's been one that's been removed for some weird, for like trying to point someone to a different payment service. Uh, but what's, what's your situation on that?

• 56:10Speaker 01

  We take like thousands of newsletters down, mostly because it's spam. Like the number one problem we have is people that are like, I know.

• 56:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. I want to follow, but that will be the last question. But yeah, sorry. Go ahead.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  There's, there's lots of problems. Um, it is a major area of the company. You know, I think the thing I would say, we took, covered this a little bit, but we wrote a, an in-depth blog post about our philosophy of

• 56:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  moderation, the highlight of which is basically, we believe strongly in the freedom of, of the press. We think that letting, putting writers and readers in charge of what they say is, is good, even though, even though there are trade-offs, we think it's, it's good, it's important, it's necessary for society. That's where we as a company come down. And, you know, we do, we do acknowledge that some moderation is necessary. I don't think that we can say, we're gonna like, cover our eyes and never look at anything. Um, I don't think that that works in practice. I don't think that's the way to actually further the ideals of a free press, but we do kind of, that is the position that we come from. We just care deeply about it.

• 57:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Great. So you're not gonna take me down for doing ads and not subscription?

• 57:11Speaker 01

  Not unless you do that thought police one. No, I'm just kidding. That would be fine, of course.

• 57:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, cool. Uh, all right. Last question for you. Your free email service essentially, if people are, um, you know, not doing ads, so you have lots of spam newsletters on there. And I imagine the email service providers are looking at Substack as a domain and saying, are these trustworthy newsletters? Are they not? And regardless of the fact that you have some high-quality folks and some spammers on, on your, uh, on the platform, they will treat some of the domains the same and then start sending some of the good Substack newsletters to spam. I know Casey Newton just tweeted that his dad couldn't find his newsletter and he said, check your spam folder. And his dad said, I want a refund in a text message. And I've had friends saying, hey, Alex, what happened? You took the last couple of weeks off and it turned

• 57:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  out it was in their spam folders. So, yeah, obviously, we talked about this a bunch already. And again, I'll conclude here, but, um, deliverability, getting emails into inboxes is the most important thing an email platform can do, at least in my opinion. So, uh,

• 58:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  So how do you address that issue?

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's a hugely important issue for us, you say, and I actually think this is one of the great strengths of Substack compared to some of the other more general email sending services that do a lot of email marketing. Like, so putting aside spammers for a second, if you just have normal Substack users that are sending emails to people, our support volume, by far, there are more people saying, hey, I wanted this newsletter and I was really excited to read it and I was missing it. That, that the number of people that have that problem dwarfs the number of people who have the problem of like, geez, I got this thing and it was spam and it was annoying. And virtually no email newsletter, email service provider has this problem where you're sending a large volume of email that people actually really want and care about and are happy to get

• 59:03Speaker 01

  and will drag into their inbox because it's something they want. And so kind of like structurally, when Substack is used correctly, we're actually one of the best, we're in the best position of all of the email people because we, people actually want these stupid emails. We're not, we're not powering the 5% off the gap that you didn't think you signed up for, whatever thing. It does mean that we have to be absolutely ruthless about protecting the service from people that try to send, like abuse it and, and use it for unwanted emails. It, there's a lot of like smart people at Substack that work extensively on that problem. And it's, you know, it's a key to the business for sure.

• 59:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Okay. Well, Chris, I have to say, when we first met in that apartment, I didn't think we would be talking in this situation where I would be basing my career on your platform and you would be on your way to unicorn status. But here we are. It's been really a wild ride. It's been great to speak with you about not only like the nuts and bolts of the technology and stuff like that, but really the impact that the platform is going to have on society and the fact that you're thinking about this thoughtfully is, is pretty cool. So, thank you for joining and speaking with me, you know, for quite some time about all these different issues. And I'm sure everybody that's listened to this point has gotten a lot out of it. And I'm sure anyone who's dropped off about a half hour and also got a lot out of it. So, I appreciate it, Chris. Thank you.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, thank you for having me. Thank you for being on Substack. Don't forget to turn on paid subscriptions.

• 1:00:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  I won't forget. I haven't forgotten. It will just, it will take some time. All right. But I'll do it. I'll do it. You have my word. Okay, everybody. Well, thank you again for listening. Thanks, Chris Best, for being here, taking some time out of his very busy day in startup life to chat with us here on the Big Technology Podcast. Pleasure coming at you as always. Thank you, Nick Watney, our editor, our fearless editor, who turns these things around extremely quickly. Red Circle for hosting and selling the ads. Kind of maybe think of them as the Substack of podcasts, but they like advertising. So maybe we get you guys in a cage match or something like that and figure it all out. And once again, thanks to you, the listener couldn't do without you. Appreciate you being here with us again, and we'll see you next Wednesday on the Big Technology Podcast.

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