from Hacker News

Substack has spawned a new class of newsletter entrepreneurs

by jsm386 on 7/1/20, 9:23 PM with 52 comments

• by pembrook on 7/2/20, 7:45 AM

  Substack has been successful in creating buzz among the media crowd, and there's definitely a business there riding the trend toward subscriptions in the media biz, but unfortunately taking on $17M in VC money has set them up for a disappointing end.

  Here's how this plays out. The successful writers on Substack will eventually leave the platform for more control over their audience and lower fees (there's a reason Ben Thompson isn't on Substack).

  As this happens, and as the honeymoon PR period dies off, the journalists will turn on Substack, just as they do on every single thing Silicon Valley puts out (see Lambda School).

  Prior to taking on a16z riches, Substack was a cool indie brand. Now they're officially "big, evil tech." The fickle journalist twitterati just haven't realized it yet.

  Inevitably as more non-influencer writers head to Substack they'll start to see, like with Patreon, that only a small minority of creators will ever generate enough income to make a living.

  This, combined with competition from Patreon, Podia, Memberful, Ghost, Revue, the next indie platform darling, etc. will spell doom for a16z's growth goals for the platform.

  My guess is 3-7 years from now, after more funding rounds, they get acquired by Patreon for roughly the same amount of money investors put in. Employees will get nothing, founders might get Cush jobs and possibly a minor payout, VCs would have done better investing in the S&P.

  This is the type of business that works better bootstrapped IMO.

• by bawolff on 7/2/20, 5:31 AM

  Maybe this varries depending on interest niche, but for me personally, there is so much quality writing that is available for free, much more than i am reasonably able to consume, its hard to imagine paying a subscription for writing.

• by apatters on 7/2/20, 4:00 AM

  I think what Substack is doing is really exciting, but it remains to be seen how large this phenomenon will become. I heard on a CNBC interview that there are only about 30 writers who make a living income from Substack right now (don't know if it's true or not).

  "Pay money to support the creator" can work - Patreon is doing around $50M in revenue annually. Bundling can obviously also work with many big and established examples. But it strikes me that the two models attract a very different customer, so those who subscribe to a specific Substack newsletter may or may not be enthusiastic about buying a big bundle of them down the line.

• by trashburger on 7/2/20, 9:40 AM

  I was going to read the article, but if you think covering 1/3 of my screen with an uncloseable "you've read X articles" overlay is sensible, then I think not reading your article is sensible.

• by cjbest on 7/2/20, 3:41 AM

  One of the founders here. I’d love it if some of the HN crowd applied for our fellowship: https://on.substack.com/p/announcing-the-next-substack-fello...

• by seemslegit on 7/2/20, 6:48 AM

  In the same sense Uber has spawned a new class of driving entrepreneurs.

  The only asset a newsletter author has is his audience - with substack they won't even have that, in fact their publisher agreement explicitly prohibits the authors from asking any sort of contact information from their readers.

• by roadbeats on 7/2/20, 10:15 AM

  In bigger picture, this is a natural move from quantity to quality. The free content on internet feel like eating garbage. I follow a few really good newsletters (e.g Craig Mod's) and every episode feels like a chapter in a good book.

  What I don't enjoy about newsletters is the e-mail clients themselves. They're bulky, filled with features I never use. I wish there was a way to hook my newsletters subscriptions up with Kindle. I can customize the fonts, sizes, spacing for my best reading experience, and the writer can forget about styling and just can focus on the writing.

  Which makes me fantasize myself creating a subscription based reading platform with its own device :)

• by jackcosgrove on 7/2/20, 3:53 AM

  I am happy to pay for quality writing I can't find elsewhere, and in fact I subscribe to a Substack.

  I don't necessarily see the nascent bundling as a problem. Newspapers, which were the workhorses of writing, were bundled geographically which makes less sense now. Bundling by interest makes a lot more sense.

  Hopefully the writing supported by this paid model can be as creative as cable TV used to be, compared to network TV.

• by fxtentacle on 7/2/20, 7:25 AM

  Can those people actually make a living wage from it, or are they "entrepreneurs" like all those Instagram "influenzas"?

• by langitbiru on 7/2/20, 5:15 AM

  It's nice to see a different business model of writing. Medium uses subscription model for a whole while Substack uses subscription model for each author.

  Time will tell which one will work better.

  I already subscribed to writers on Substack (all of them write about blockchain/DeFi).

• by captn3m0 on 7/2/20, 7:27 AM

  Still no custom domains, so you don’t really own your audience or your content on Substack.

• by vaibhavthevedi on 7/2/20, 6:32 AM

  I believe that platform works the best if you have a niche based newsletter. And that's what makes it best.

• by CaptArmchair on 7/2/20, 8:03 AM

  I tend to think that Substack isn't that new or different from other platforms that tried to reinvent publishing. They basically took an existing mode of publishing - newsletters - and have build a centralized platform that allows individual writers to share their content with their audience.

  The difference is the offering towards the audience. What are readers willing to pay for? Content published on a blog or in a newsletter isn't inherently different: it's short pieces conveying thought, opinions, observations,... So, why would anyone be more willing pay for newsletter content rather then content posted on the Web?

  There's the simple convenience of having content you subscribed to delivered to your inbox, rather then having to invest time and effort scouring/curating it yourself from the Web (bookmarks, closed platforms where you need to register, etc.). Content just lands at regular intervals in your mailbox, end of story.

  There could be a perception that your Inbox is your own personal space as opposed to the Web as this foreign place with inherent dangers to which you have to expose yourself just to get to the good bits. Authors to newsletters become your guests, whereas you are their guest when you visit their websites. So, I think a sense of agency and being in control are big drivers here.

  The sense of exclusivity of being part of a fledgling tribe of readers to a small publisher who knows how to appeal to that sense. Receiving an e-mail in your Inbox is as different from visiting a website, as is receiving a personally addressed snail mail is from going out and reading newspapers in the library.

  I'm also curious as to how the e-mail / newsletter model impacts Substack's operations. Unlike 'traditional' social media, millions of visitors don't flock a central platform 24/7/356 which comes with hard infrastructure problems. I'm well aware that there will be different challenges that need to be met, but pushing content to individual mailboxes is, in essence, a hybrid form of decentralization and distributed publishing combined with a centralized platform for curation and subscription.

  Another assumption I'm going to make is that revenue isn't spread evenly across all publishers on the platform. I suppose it's more of a long tail with a typical Pareto kind of distribution. 20% of the writers account for 80% of the revenue and then there's a sharp drop off. Thing is, I suspect inactive publishers don't consume much if any resources: e-mails in an Inbox have a rather short half-life as opposed to the (perceived) need of keeping content available over HTTP which brings additional running costs with little to no added value.

  It's interesting to note that Substack isn't the only offering in this space. A direct competitor came to my mind: https://www.getrevue.co/

  Personally, given the pre-dominant promotional nature of newsletters, I'm pleasantly surprised how this mode of writing/authoring has been adopted, once again, by budding writers and publishers. After all, journalling via mail has a long historical pedigree. It's great to see how the analogue concept finds traction in the digital age as well.

• by mvellandi on 7/2/20, 6:37 AM

  Newsletters are the easiest way to retain readers since it just pops in their inbox -- if the writing is good and/or specialized. Good design also really helps. When I managed the newsletters for a New York urban planning nonprofit, we averaged 23% open rates. Another good hook is when issues don't have a public web archive, or it's paywalled.

  I saw the bundling mentioned in the Digiday article with the "Everything" brand, and I unsubscribed since I just wanted the business analysis and not other topics (like productivity advice) mixed in. Maybe bundling is okay for other readers.

  I have to check out what Substack offers in terms of analytics and email design templates. Personally, I'm interested in series-based newsletters for storytelling that's pubdate agnostic (everyone gets the same first issue). I'm going to look closer at ConvertKit and BareMetrics.