Chris Best

And then we as a platform are only going to make money when the writers and creators make money.

This is why we take a percentage fee because it's like for every dollar Substack makes, the creators make nine.

Right.

It's it's we can literally only succeed as a business if we are helping people make money, do the work they believe in.

And then those people can only make money if they're if they're making something that's really good enough that, you know, people are choosing to pay for it.

And so, you know, when we you know, we still have a short form content, we still have a feed with an algorithm.

But when we run an experiment and we're asking, like, how do we make this algorithm better?

Right.

If we run a test that says, hey, we got people to spend more time and scroll more and see more things such that if you were serving ads, they would have seen more of them, but they read less or they spent less time watching a long-form thing.

For us, that's a loser because we know that finding you something that you deeply value is –

the way to get you to fall in love with it that you might pay.

And so the kind of like the underlying economic incentive that we've created to pull this platform forward pulls us in the direction we want to go and makes us, kind of yokes us to having to serve the actual people who are using it.

Another thing we do that's like this is letting people export their audiences.

The fact that a subscription on Substack is an email subscription.

You get the email address.

You can bring your subscribers or somewhere else.

You can take your subscribers with you when you leave.

At the surface level, you might say, oh, that's bad because you're not locking in your customers and you're giving them the option to leave.

But what it actually does is it means that because you know you can leave, you can trust Substack.

You can come here and you know that the only reason you're going to stay is that we're giving you enough value and we're making something that's actually good.