Chris Best

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.

One is because now you're still downstream from the incentives on those platforms.

But if we're saying, hey, we want to create an alternative to the attention economy, but if you want to participate in it, you still have to be really, really good at Twitter, there's a contradiction there.

And the other thing is that, you know, those other platforms don't necessarily want you to be able to connect directly with your audience and take them with you, right?

If, you know, we got in a big spat with Elon around the launch of Notes and he briefly banned mentioning the word Substack and crushed the links.

But other, like even, you know, Mark Zuckerberg spent five years mad about the sort of fallout from the Cambridge Analytica thing and sort of, you know, turned, heavily turned down the dial of politics on Facebook, right?

And that's a fair thing to do.

But if you're a political journalist who wants to grow on Facebook, that's really tough for you.

And so there's all of these other networks that creators, writers depend on.

We want them to be able to use them to their maximum.