Chris Best

there's a piece of received wisdom that, you know, among professional gamblers, they tend to have started out with a big winning streak at the start of their career.

Um, and of course, if you think about it for a second, that's not because, you know, the reason for that is because people who started their career as a professional gambler with a losing streak actually don't go on to become professional gamblers.

It's just a selection effect.

It's like, oh yes, that's, that's how, that's the origin story of these things.

And I feel a little bit like that because our first customer was this guy, Bill Bishop, who had been writing a new, an email newsletter about, you know,

for an international business and government audience for ages.

He was perfect.

There was probably like five people in the world that were the perfect first customer for Substack, and he was one of them.

And he had been thinking about charging for his work.

He'd been inspired by Ben Thompson, but he kind of couldn't be, you know, didn't want to futz around with all the technology.

So he was sort of this perfect first customer.

And we like hacked together the first version.

You know, I built this little website and plugged it into Stripe.

And I remember launching on his first day.

And, like, six figures rolled in, like, within hours.

And I was kind of sitting there on my computer being like, I can't, like, this seems really good.

I can't believe, like, I don't know what I expected, but this is way more than that.

And we sort of, you know, we had this really big first success at the gate.

You know, we got into YC.

We sort of had this, you know, the very first thing we tried was this massive success.