Chapter 1: What inspired Chris Best to start writing and how did it lead to Substack?
Tetragrammaton.
I've always believed that The things you read and the media you consume in general is not just how you spend a big chunk of your life, it changes you. And so great writing and great culture in general is this deeply valuable thing. And so I was like, I should write. How hard could it be? I would love that. I have ideas. I know how to type. I'm a programmer. I love reading.
And I started writing what I thought was going to be an essay or a blog post or a screed of some sort, like detailing my frustrations with the media economy on the internet. kind of just complaining in broad strokes. Look, the internet came along, smashed a lot of the business models that used to sustain culture and hasn't really, I mean, it's created a lot of wonderful things.
There's been a lot of promise, but it hasn't yet replaced, especially like the economic engines that made those things go in a way that was satisfactory to me.
Chapter 2: How did the concept of Substack evolve from an initial idea?
And I was just kind of whining. I was going off and saying, wah, wah, you know, Sure, Craigslist killed the classifieds and maybe Facebook is not an unalloyed good. And I sent it to my friend Hamish, who's actually a writer. And he let me down very gently. He's like, these are all good points you make, but it's 2017 and you are not quite as original as you think you are.
Other people may have noticed that some of these trends are going on. But he's like, here's how you could make this essay you're writing better. You should add a section that just says, so what do you do about it? how could this be different? It's easy to complain. It's easy to say, here's everything that's wrong. It's much more interesting though.
It would be more interesting as a reader to have a theory of what could a new and better thing be. And we started arguing basically.
Chapter 3: What is the core philosophy behind Substack's business model?
And that argument turned into what became the core idea for Substack.
And what was the core idea?
The core idea is that the writers and the people who make the culture are the heroes. And they need independence in order to give the thing they have to give to the world. They need the freedom to make the things they want to make. And they need to be able to make money. And not just make money incidentally, but to be able to make money doing the work they believe in.
And that if you can create those conditions, not only will it appeal to the best writers, the best makers, the things that will get created will be different and better.
And then from writing that, what was the moment of, okay, I'm going to build this as opposed to just a theoretical solution to a problem?
Yeah, we were arguing about the thing. And I've always felt that if you sort of need two things to have a a really worthwhile idea in technology. You need to have sort of what I think of as the science fiction vision, sort of a grand, important idea for how the world could be different that actually matters.
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Chapter 4: How does Substack differentiate itself from other platforms like Medium and Patreon?
And you need to have sort of a humble beginning. You need to have like a first step that you can actually take soon to be able to make progress towards that thing. You don't have to know how it connects, I don't think. You can have this kind of foggy city on the hill and then you can have this next thing that you do.
You have to have some belief that you're going in the right direction, but you don't have to know where the rest of the path lives. And as we were arguing, we sort of realized, you know, we were developing this grand science fiction vision, this idea that you could make a new economic engine for culture. I mean, ultimately to me, it's like, I think you could power a renaissance.
Not as in we would be the ones to do it, but by giving kind of like the tools that the creative class need, you could actually create something that really meaningfully changed the world. And we had this very simple place to get started, which was this idea of a paid email newsletter. And there was already people that were doing this in the world.
There was this guy, Ben Thompson, who wrote a thing called Stratechery that was like a tech business newsletter. You know, he was writing this thing from his bedroom in Taiwan, making millions of dollars a year, sending out this email that people paid for. And we looked at that and we were like, hey, that's something new and better is getting made and is successful.
Successful in that it makes some money, but also successful in that it's making something that people really value.
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Chapter 5: What challenges has Substack faced in terms of free speech and censorship?
And it works today for this person. And there's no reason it shouldn't work for some more people. And it is actually a viable kernel of this much larger thing.
Tell me a little more about the much larger thing, like in the fantasy version of it, tell me the big version of the dream of what it could actually be.
Yeah, the thing that really appealed to me then, it was around independence. It was around the idea that, you know, in the early days it was really writers because that was sort of that initial, you know, Hamish was a writer, I'd been trying to write. It was this writer-focused thing.
I don't think the idea is actually not only for writers, but I felt that the people who were the most interesting to read had this kind of, like, outsider nerd thing. And if you could free them to pursue their obsession or pursue their vision to the utmost, It would allow the creation of new culture. And in order to free them, you had to give them a business model that actually worked for them.
You had to have a strong presumption of freedom of the press, but also you had to make it simple enough for a person to actually use. And one way to look at Substack early on was like, hey, come and type into this box. And if the things you type are actually great, which is really hard, by the way, almost nobody can do it.
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Chapter 6: How has the media landscape changed since Substack's launch?
But if you can do that one thing, if you can type something great, you know, to put it reductively, we will make the rest magically work for you.
Yeah.
You will get rich and famous if you can type this thing that's great, which is hard enough.
Did you think of it as a countercultural thing or no?
Yeah, I would say so. At least in the sense that really good new ideas are always countercultural or there was... It always starts as the counterculture. Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, the things that were not countercultural weren't as ill-served. Like there was lots of outlets for the main culture, I suppose.
So the first step, seeing a paid email that made sense, seemed like this could be a good way to start.
Yeah, and that part was not an exciting blog post to write, but it sort of triggered, I saw that as, oh, we could make this tomorrow. There's something we could do here that would work. And it would be the first step towards this bigger thing we feel we're seeing. How did the name come?
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Chapter 7: What future features are being considered for Substack?
We had it narrowed down to two names. We had lots of ideas. What was the other one? It was either going to be Substack or Monograph. Both respectable. Both respectable.
Yeah. And... How did you choose?
Somebody bought the domain monograph.com while we were arguing about it. And I said, screw it, I'm buying Substack.
Okay. Do you know what the first piece posted on Substack was?
The very first piece that was physically posted was sort of a manifesto that Hamish and I wrote. Once we decided to make the company, we kind of got to work. I started building the website that was going to hold the thing, and he started writing kind of an original vision for the thing.
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Chapter 8: How does Chris Best envision the role of Substack in independent media?
And I felt that we couldn't publish it somewhere else. We had to use our own software to publish the first piece. So that was the first thing that was ever published at all. And then the first Substack to launch was this guy, Bill Bishop. who had been writing an email newsletter about China for kind of a business and government audience.
And how did you get him to move to Substack?
Well, he read the manifesto. I think Hamish had known him for a while. Often this is the thing you want when you're making a new product. It's like, you don't want it to be kind of good for a lot of people. You want it to be really good for like one person. And he was that guy. He had been already writing an email newsletter.
He already had this audience of dedicated business and government people that loved it and had a ton of value in it. He'd been thinking about charging for it, but he couldn't. you know, didn't want to mess around with all of the technical details of doing it. So when we went to him and said, hey, can we just make that happen for you? He's like, that sounds great.
Is there any competition in this space or no?
I would say there's lots of people who have been, to my mind, copying the output who look and say, oh, it's email newsletter publishing, so send an email and charge money. We can copy that and for cheaper.
And then we've had a couple of iterations of the old Twitter bought a competitor that was like that and then tried to build the feature into, and then after Elon bought it, they tried to build the feature into X. Facebook spun up a clone for a while called Bulletin and sort of tried to like cargo cult it from my perspective.
I mean, I'm biased, but there's nobody to me that seems to be doing the exact same thing we're trying to do. The thing that I set my sights on in the world right now is just YouTube. Because YouTube of the major networks is the closest to being an economic engine for culture. It actually does pay people. It has an opinion about how that should work.
And it is just completely enormous and dominant and is in some ways so good. And then I think in other ways it falls short.
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