Chris Best

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.

And that gave us a lot of confidence that we were onto something, even though there was sort of like, you know, that was the biggest thing for a while.

Like it was – there weren't 20 more Bill Bishops we could go get at that time.

But we had this – it gave us kind of like the confidence we were onto something.

And then maybe the second one, yeah, I think, you know, COVID 2020, there was a combination of suddenly everybody has a bunch more time and a bunch more money.

And so there was sort of this great reshift in the economy where all of the online things or all of the virtual things got this huge stimulus and all of the real world things got this huge setback.

And Substack was a really good online thing.

It was something really valuable and meaningful that you could do on the internet.

And there was kind of a...

It was sort of a fever pitch moment for some of those tensions with media.

It was a time where a lot of the best and most interesting independent thinkers were getting summarily turfed, to be honest, from their perches at traditional media places.

You know, Barry Weiss was, you know, pushed to resign from the New York Times in that time.