Chris Best

And in order to really have the connection to the place where people are consuming things, you have to be in one of those rectangles.

And most of the rectangles were not just powered by algorithms, but they were powered by algorithms that were actively hostile to the idea of having a direct connection, right?

Facebook does not want to give you a direct connection to your audience, neither does Twitter, neither does, you know, even YouTube doesn't, really.

Their business model is different than that.

And so if we wanted to give people the power of having a direct connection, in the long run, we could make our own app, which we've since done.

But at the time, it was basically, okay, which of these existing apps can you actually have a direct connection with people that people actually already use and do?

And I think the only two were email and the podcast app.

And email has this very nice property of being transferable.

So if you had an existing email list, you could bring it to Substack.

Also, part of the promise, and this was key right from the beginning, was you can leave.

And so we want to make this thing great.

We want to serve you really well.

We want to give you enough value that you want to stay here.

But part of the reason you can trust us is because there's exit rights.

You can go and you can bring your audience with you.

And email is sort of like a wonderful... There's a lot of fancy ideas of protocols that would let you do this, but email is the one that actually works in practice.

I think that actually helped at the time because you're obligated to check it, so you actually do check it.

But then when you're checking it, when there's 10 things that you have to deal with and one really great piece from a writer you love, you're like, well, I have time to read this.

We had the web stuff right from the start.

And so even from the beginning, it wasn't, you could think of it as a paid email newsletter, but a key part of it working was there was a web version.