Chris Best

And so the way that it would work is people would share the web version, but they would, once they subscribed, they would stick around and have the direct connection in email.

And so pretty quickly, you know, we built the ability for anybody to sign up.

We built the ability to do free ones as well as paid ones.

And then I think probably within a year or two, we got to podcasting features and we started to build other pieces.

this maybe gets to the business model question, because the thing that in our minds differentiates Substack is that it is a different fundamental business model, both for the people on the platform and for us, right?

So the way that Substack works is you can choose to charge a subscription.

Once you charge a subscription, you can still publish stuff for free, or you can publish only to your paid audience.

And the only way we make money is by taking a percentage.

And so we literally can't make money without the people on the platform succeeding.

And we felt like that and still feel like that is sort of like the core, the fact that the way you make money is this better way.

Yeah.

Nine times more money than we do.

That's just how it works.

Yeah.

And that means that we just have a different set of incentives as a platform.

We want to encourage people to not just doom scroll and spend their time on it, but to connect with things they actually love enough they might want to pay for.

But very early on, we took that with too much of a religious fervor, and we said, we're actually only going to allow paid stuff.

If you want to start on Substack, you have to charge, and we're not even going to let you send an email to someone for free, because that would violate the sanctity of our beautiful idea that we've created.

And immediately we realized that was never going to work because the first customer said, okay, well, where am I going to send the free ones?

And we said, well, it can't be in us.