Chris Best

And for a creative person, if you can do the work you actually believe in, if you can make something that you think is great and make money from it, that's the real underlying value.

And that story is true and important.

And the fact that, you know, the COVID sort of accelerated it and threw some gas on it for a while, it wasn't something that only started to work because of that.

And it wasn't something that stopped working once that ended.

We'll be right back.

I think it's fair to describe it that way.

I think of it as what should come after social media.

But I think that that, you know, we are making that thing.

And the, you know, Notes and the Substack app

The reason this matters is because we sort of realized at a certain point, hey, Substack is giving you as a writer or creator these tools to connect directly with your audience and to make money and to do the thing.

And that if you're somebody who already has a huge following, you can kind of pull that audience and bring it to your Substack and that's really good.

And now you're set up in this wonderful way.

But if you are somebody who aspires to do that, the most important thing is how do you grow?

How do you find an audience?

How do people get a chance to fall in love with you in the first place so that they realize they might want to pay?

This is why I'd like the paywall is like the last thing.

A lot of people who are very successful on Substack paywall very little.

It's really about, hey, am I making something that actually reaches people that they find deeply valuable?

And the way that it was working was that the way that writers and creators on Substack would grow is they had to go to all the other social media platforms.

And that's a problem for two reasons.