Chris Best

Originally, I didn't want to have anything be free.

I was like, we're going to be really pure and nothing can be free.

And then it turned out that the free thing was an important part of how this worked.

And we were sort of like that with the discovery piece, right?

We were like, hey, we're going to build an app, but it's going to be purely about long form.

It's going to be about only the things you're subscribed to because that is the core, which was true.

But it turned out that as we were building this platform for people to have this direct connection with their audience, one of the most important things they could do was to grow their audience and get in front of new people.

And so we were, for a long time, Substack existed in a world where we had these lofty ideas about creating a better incentive structure that would enable better things to flourish, but

In practice, if you were writing on Substack, you were still downstream of the existing social media apps.

If you were coming from legacy media and you had a massive audience, you could just bring your audience sometimes.

But if you wanted to grow, if you wanted to be a new person,

You couldn't grow on Substack.

You had to go to Twitter or you had to go to Facebook or you had to go to one of these other platforms.

And that was a problem both sort of at the science fiction vision level of we're trying to make something different, but we're actually, you know, still sort of wedded to this thing.

And it was a practical problem because those companies don't

have a particular interest in helping you take your audience and go and own it.

And you can have things like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg would decide, we don't want to be in politics for a bit because I was mistreated over the Cambridge Analytica thing.

And we're just not going to have politics as much on Facebook.

And if you're a political writer,

That's a big problem where, you know, we got in a spat with Elon around the Tote's launch.