Substack CEO Chris Best on crossing 5 million paid subscriptions and building a network that doesn't depend on other platforms

knockout dragout fight in the rental home market and we recommend Wander. Anyway, let's bring in Chris Best from Substack. How you doing? Good to see you. Doing good. That jingle is unstoppable. Unstoppable. We got to get a jingle for Substack. Substack. What's the Substack jingle? What do you have a tagline?

What What's your What's your landing page hero hero text? The app for independent voices. There we go. Same same melody. I go with take take back your minds. Take back your minds. Okay. Put that in a jingle. How is the process of taking back minds going? It's going pretty well. Okay. Can't complain.

Cross 5 million paid subscriptions. Wow, that's a lot. Awesome. Apps blown ahead of I think all of the like legacy media apps combined. Amazing. Uh Chris and I were in the same YC batch uh winter 18. Another one. I always So, so my biggest thing with John is is actually probably good.

If John had just invested in in in his batch, he would have been too post economic to start a podcast and we wouldn't be here. It's like Coinbase, Instacart, Zapier, Substack, uh even uh what was the other one? The the the crypto exchange that absolutely ripped the NFT marketplace. OpenC was in our batch, you know.

Banta Repid. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Remarkable companies. It was good times. Um, so yeah, I mean take me through the the the history and evolution of Substack and where you're going next. Yeah, I mean we started we were in winter winter 2018 together. Um, the basic theory is we're building a new economic engine for culture.

Um, you know, we want to harness the power of technology, the power of world, you know, internet scale networks combined with a business model that actually powers independence. The version of that, the simple version of that that we started with is basically make it dead simple to do a paid email newsletter.

Um, but as the years have gone by, we've grown that into multiformat. You can do you can write, you can do a podcast, you can do live video. Uh, we've got this network and this app.

You can get the Substack app from the app store and discover this whole universe of the smartest, best independent media and culture on the internet. Uh, and that's what we're building next basically. I mean, I'm we're building a bunch of uh video tools.

We've got this live, you know, live tool that lets you do something that feels like a FaceTime call and then AI magically turns it into like a produced podcast and series of clips.

So, if not everybody is the brilliant, you know, YouTube sensations that you guys are if you're just someone that has something to say, uh, we make it dead easy. That's very cool. Super powerful. Was Ben Thompson really an inspiration? He kind of tells that story.

I don't know if that's true that Sir Tekker and he kind of pioneered this like independent newsletter creator really scaled the business but I mean had you been reading him at the time had you taken lessons away from cert when you built Substack? Yeah, I do. There was a few people doing it, right?

There was like, you know, because we had this this cockami scheme. We're like, "Hey, I bet you people would subscribe to, you know, things they deeply value if if if you had something great. " And there was a handful of people that were doing it.

You know, Andrew Sullivan did this with kind of like the Daily Dish back in the day. Ben Thompson had strategy. And here was this guy, you know, writing an email newsletter from his bedroom in Taiwan making, by our calculations millions of dollars a year. We're like, you know, that that sounds pretty sweet.

like why does why do more people not do that basically? Yeah. And you know the answer turned out to be turned out to be it's way too hard. So what if we made it way easier? Yeah.

I mean he's he's he's invested immensely in technology to build up Passport and what he's done and now there's a few other companies that run um but u um where does this go? I mean I guess the big question is like ads product you know is is tied to the written media. Uh Wall Street Journal has subscriptions and ads.

Um New York Times has subscriptions and even after you subscribe, you still get ads. We are an ad powered show.

Ads feel very uh they get a lot of negative attention, a lot of negative stated preferences, but the revealed preference is almost always people don't mind ads and scroll right past them on Instagram and sometimes even get value from them.

uh we've been very pro ads, but what has your uh take been on ads generally in uh in the Substack world? The thing that's actually different about Substack is kind of creator ownership and a model that rewards quality and value.

So the fact on Substack that you, you know, people don't subscribe to Substack, they subscribe to you.

um you know you can make you if you make something truly great and it a bunch of people value what they come all those things are what actually sets Substack apart you know the formats are similar to what you see elsewhere you get you can you can write a long form article you can write make a podcast you can do a video like those are those are not novel things the thing that's novel is this business model that powers independence the fact that you own the you know it's your business you are getting the upside you want to invest in the quality and I think there are methods methods of doing sponsorships and advertising that are that that that work with that, right?

The fact that people, you know, people are paying premium for you guys to advertise on this program, not because you're getting like the most clicks ever that gets sold at a market like at some market rate for the demographic, but because you're making something special and you have tremendous, you know, jingle skills, but the the audience is like is is magical.

Anyway, there are a bunch of people today. We're doing all subscription. we're powering that thing that actually works really well, shockingly well, much better than people thought it was going to work. People are consistently surprised by how well that business model can work for them.

But there are also people on Substack who are doing sponsorships and doing tremendously well. And so I do think that model can and should coexist with highquality media endeavors. Do you believe uh the medium is the message?

Uh we we we've kind of felt this where we decided to go live for somewhat of like a technical reason. Uh just with the way YouTube's organized, it kind of made things easier. But then once we were live, we realized, well, we're faster. We're not there's no delay between us recording and uploading.

And so we can react to the news. We could we could open up X right now and and read a headline that just dropped with you and get your reaction. And it's kind of changed the nature of the show. What's been your uh processing of like the McLuhan ideology? I'm a huge believer in live for that exact reason.

You know, we're building this video product that you that is live within Substack and I think it's almost like a hack that sets the social expectation. The fact that you're going to be able to sit down, make this thing, ship it off. It's not necessarily the case that the majority of the audience is going to watch live.

Totally. It's great that those of you here, but it's, you know, it's going to be there's going to be a VOD, there's going to be clips. Those might be the places that actually get the distribution.

But as a hack to make the thing, the fact that the, you know, the social expectation between us right now is we're sitting down having a live conversation makes it easier, makes it faster. It does feel different.

Like I don't know if you have this, but I feel, you know, the feeling of being live is a little bit more energizing than than otherwise. Definitely. And then also it just builds I mean we we we like it because it builds trust with you. Like yes, there will be clips, but we're not going to edit.

We can't edit out what you're saying. So if you want to make your case in some way, we can't be like, "Ah, we didn't want to put that in. You're not. " Yeah, I could I could go back to the tape and say, "Well, here's here's the full context. " Exactly. Exactly. It's always there. Uh can you talk about this?

So So one, I want your help kind of framing something because there there's in my mind there's this stages of of Substack, right?

like our audience at least the initial core audience is a sort of like terminally online ex you know tech enthusiast genius wealthy that that that's a core audience but average you could say terminally online bill you know 20 to you know goated definitely or like in the conversation definitely in the conversation no but but to me there's been these stages of substack where like I don't know if it was like a year ago at this point that I noticed that substack had not become a household name but it had been become outside of tech.

Outside of tech, Emily Auster, for example, but had just become something that that kids I went to college with that aren't in tech were Yep. subscribe to probably three Substacks and it was like part of that. It wasn't just all like it became it became like clearly part of popular culture online. Yeah. Yeah.

And did was there a no was there a moment is that like the wrong analysis and I just wasn't paying attention outside of our bubble or did you feel something like that too?

I get this question a lot and I think people because it kind of grows in pockets right like it'll be there'll be you know this bunch of crypto people that all join at the same time or a bunch of politics people or a bunch of finite like there's sort of like these you know next adjacent market pockets as it grows.

And so all along there's I've sort of had people ask me this be like it feels like Substack is suddenly blowing up like what does that feel like? Has your life changed? And internally like it's just been growing really consistently, really steadily. Like the curve just looks like a steady exponential curve.

And so it is kind of always true like this is this is the most exciting time. Um I have had I've you know I do feel it too like I I I get less blank looks when I tell people I'm working on Substack than I used to. Um but yeah, it's been a it's been a steady march.

How has uh kind of the war with with X maybe war is not the right word for it but obviously removing links platform changes. Yeah, platform changes obviously frustrated a lot of the core creators who had been building an audience in both places.

But for my view, it seems like they maybe, you know, created a monster like in the sense that like it maybe made you guys react and be like uh and and it maybe it was like a short-term win, but uh will maybe be a mistake long term and that maybe it's kind of pushed you guys to think even bigger about what Substack is.

I mean the funny thing here is that Ben Thompson credits his early growth with LinkedIn and sharing links on LinkedIn and then LinkedIn had an algorithm change and he had said that he it wouldn't be possible to build strategy the way he did in the modern LinkedIn era.

So there was kind of like a LinkedIn vibe too but yeah I'm interested to hear how you've been processing just all the platform changes really. So I mean this has always been my theory is if you want to build one of these businesses you need a model that supports independence.

You need people to be able to subscribe to you and then you also need like internet scale networks to grow on.

And in the old days of Substack, it would be, you know, at the very start like Trajectory, you'd have this newsletter, this website, but then you'd have to go on Twitter to promote it or go on LinkedIn or go on Instagram or what, wherever. We always want you to be able to do that. We want you to be able to publish.

It's not a walled garden, like put it everywhere. Put it on the RSS feeds, put it on YouTube, whatever.

But you're totally at the mercy then of these other platforms that don't necessarily you know sometimes they go to war with you like Elon got pissed off at us but a lot of the time they just they don't care right Zuck can turn around and say we're not doing politics for a little while because people got mad at us and if you're somebody that writes about politics that's really bad for you and so we always knew that we need to we needed to make our own network our own place [ __ ] Zoom reactions I got to turn that off is that the OS level.

I feel like I've turned this off a thousand times and it sometimes still comes back. If we could just shoot whoever built that feature, that would be perfect. Um, anyway, we had to build a network. We knew we had to build a network. You know, it doesn't make sense.

It's not like, you know, Facebook or LinkedIn or X or anybody's Tik Tok's job to help you like, you know, take your audience and own it and make something independent. Uh, it's never like been their main thing. So, we knew we had to do that.

That's why we built, you know, the Substack app in the first place, which is why Elon got so mad at us. he felt like we were, you know, competing, but ultimately we just knew these independent places need their own network that actually wants them to grow and thrive.

Um, it was a big painful thing for people that were on the platform. It sucked that you're like links didn't work. Super annoying. Um, but it was a it was a very small fraction of traffic. Like it didn't slow down the business or the numbers at all. There was a lot of sturman.

It was very like st you know for people that are like had a big Twitter presence and were trying to make a substack. It was very painful and stressful, but it didn't slow down the growth at all. That's cool. What's your your yours in the in the team's sort of decision-making process?

It feels like at a bunch of different points with Substack, you could make a product decision that might drive immediate m basically make the number go up, but maybe wasn't aligned with the kind of platform that you wanted to be and and maybe not even aligned with humanity.

And on that note, there's sort of this like interesting thing where every platform maybe other than Substack is sort of like converging on being the same app.

This sort of like short form sloppification of of social media where it's like, you know, doing a slot machine uh with information and and it feels like Substack is orienting around long form content. We had Jason Freed on yesterday. Yeah. So that's sort of rambling, but No, I I completely agree.

I was going to ask the same question. I feel like if I land on a Substack link, it's going to be written by a human. It's not going to be particularly sloppy. I might not like the particular topic or something, but I feel that it's going to have like this premium uh like vibe to it, I guess.

And I'm wondering if there's is there are we just early and there's a coming wave of slop that you're going to have to fight or or Well, I mean, here's my take on this is, you know, I think if you put yourself in a the position you described where it's like, hey, we've got this business, we're trying to make the number go up and we either need to make the number go up or we need to make something that's good that we believe in and we kind of have to like make that choice.

I think as soon as you have to make that choice, that already sucks because both of those choices suck, right? It sucks if you kind of give up your principles and make the number go up. But it also sucks if you stick with your principles and the business like it hurts the business and the business doesn't thrive.

Ultimately, the business of Substack needs to grow and support the thing we're making. And so the thing that we've tried to do is yoke the success of the business, set up the business model and the fundamental way that it works so that in order to make the number go up, we have to do the thing that's actually good.

So, an example of this is, you know, the way that we make money is it's completely free to publish on Substack to any size audience. You guys should cross-publish on Substack, by the way. That'd be sick. And then we only make money when you make money, right? So, we're trying to help you grow.

We make money when you make money. And so, you know, we have an algorithm the same way that Twitter or Tik Tok has an algorithm. We even support short form video. You can see clips. You can read long form stuff. You can watch a long form podcast.

But it turns out that when you're tuning the algorithm to introduce thing people to things that they deeply value and might pay for, the emergent effect of that is very different than if you take the same technology and point it at the goal of get people to spend as much time here as possible.

Yeah, that makes sense because I I I might pay and then be satisfied, close the app, but that's a win for the algorithm. Our algorithm says great, right? Whereas, you know, Elon's been public about the links thing. It used to be just Substack, now it's everyone.

He's like, "Yeah, if you're scrolling your feed, you click into a long form post, you go and read that thing and get deep value from it, you just tank the metrics. " Yeah. You're not seeing any ads. Like, what are we doing? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense. Uh, how is the health of the overall creator economy?

There was a big boom where venture capitalists were investing in the creator economy. Uh, that's kind of died down, but uh, how healthy is the creator economy broadly? We were joking yesterday that uh Aerowan in many ways in LA is a product of the creator economy.

There has to be double digit percentage of Arowan's revenue. It's just creator revenue, you know, that that flows in in different ways and then goes into in there for sure. A lot of G Wagons in the parking lot. It's the LA equivalent of like the dot bubble. Yep. Um air bubble.

You know, I've never liked I've never liked the term creator economy. Even the term content creator kind of gives me hives. Here's the thing that I think is not going away is, you know, the the media landscape is shifting.

The legacy models have been eaten up by internet things that don't necessarily support, you know, the old businesses.

And there's this shift to p a shift in power to independent creators, people like you that can just set up, start a thing, make something that matters, earn the trust of people by building, going direct, building an audience. I think that trend is extremely robust.

I think that thing is gonna is sort of inevitably going to happen at this point. But I do think it's sort of undecided which version of that future we get. And so we see our you know the thing we're working on at Substack is to try to bring about kind of like the best and most valuable version of that future.

But I think that I think that shift is not going away. Yeah. I mean, you uh talking about the the uh content creator as a bad term. Do you prefer journalist, writer, like more specific scalpel like terms? Is that what you're getting at?

Or what specifically don't you like about the idea of the word content or the word content creator? The phrase it's pretty rational, man. It just kind of feels it it it feels like a slop version, right? Yeah.

You're a journalist, you're a writer, you're a podcaster, thinker, analyst, broadcaster, filmmaker, you know, comic. There's a million things you can be. And I listen, I'm I've made my piece with creator. Like, it's it's a good generic term.

Um, but I think there was I think there was a moment where we kind of like cargo culted the creator economy and everybody got really sort of hyped up about it in a fluffy way and missed the the the deeper thing that is actually still happening.

What actually happened is that there was like a specific data point which is that VCs realized that creator content creators were the fastest growing SMB category and they were just like okay we should deploy like a billion dollars. We got to make money off this.

We got to make we got to find a way to make money on this. And the the thing that the thing that people missed is that that had been a sort of they were it was sort of like a decade into that trend.

And so people funded a lot of businesses that were like banks for creators, but a creator is like, you know, why would a creator not just use ramp, you know, we use ramp, right? Like or why would a creator not just go to bank of America and just get a bank account, right?

And so I think the the sort of interesting investable opportunities uh were the Substacks which is like a new economic you know not to use your tagline but like an econom creating a new economic engine for media. They should have invested in Arowan because that's like the grocery store for creators or it's all down.

They should have just bought stock in Mercedes because they make the the the small SUV for the for the for the creator economy. Um I want to talk about uh the value of curation versus instantiation of ideas.

is I'm not sure if you've been following uh Ben Thompson's erosion of like the evolution of like the printing press to the internet making distribution zero marginal cost to the instantiation of ideas with uh GPT and deep research and language models. It's become easier and easier to create a deep research report.

The writing is good. It still feels like you can tell when it's AI written, but it's at least fine. Yeah, it's at least fine. Um, but I guess the question is, are there any uh are there any Substackers out there that are openly using AI tools to write, but the value that they bring it the human element is just curation?

Um because sometimes I I feel like uh I should just share all the deep research reports that I put together because they're cool and they're I'm asking interesting questions and the and the humanness comes from the question that I'm asking and very few people would think to ask that question to deep research and the the answer is less important than the question.

Um versus just the general trend in in language models if you have any takes there. Yeah. I mean, the way I think of it is, you know, we even before AI, we already lived in a world of infinite content. You can't get bored. You can't run out of stuff to see or watch. Yeah.

And so the limiting factor is like your attention and your life. Like what what should you pay attention to? Who are you going to trust? What matters? Like sort of it's it's the human alignment problem. Like this is what culture is. It's not just getting what you want. It's figuring out what to want in the first place.

And that's the thing that's actually valuable. Even before AI, nobody's subscribing to Substack because it's like, "Oh, I don't have enough emails to read and I want to pay money for that. " You're subscribing for a perspective. You're subscribing for some connection, some piece of trust, some piece of curiosity.

And so I think all of these these technology tools that just give people superpowers kind of supercharge both sides of that. There's now there's, you know, a thousand times infinity content. there's more than you could even more. But also the people who who have those relationships can have so much creative leverage.

And I I I think like literally writing for me is the is one that's not that exciting yet. Although it's not impossible, but like yeah, help me do the research. Help me figure this thing out. Help me, you know, put the pieces of this together.

I think there's, you know, there's even people that have, you know, Lenny Richitzky has his Lenny bot that people subscribers can talk to. Um I think all that stuff is awesome. uh talk about growth hacks. If uh someone out there is starting a Substack today from zero, they have no audience.

Uh what can they do to turbocharge their business in the short term? The biggest growth hack I often have to give people is just start the the start the thing. A lot of people I talk to are thinking about, oh, I should do this. Should I write 10 things? Should I come up with this plan? Should I do this?

Everybody that succeeds that I see just goes, just gets going, just starts writing, starts publishing, you know, try to make something good, try to share with people.

Um, and really just have a very strong bias towards action, towards thinking and moving in public and then kind of like correct based on feedback rather than trying to come up with some genius scheme. Um, all that said, you know, make great stuff, share with people.

Have you been able to dig into any of the quantif quantitative metrics around the most successful Substacks? Like is there a correlation between posting weekly and and revenue or length of post?

Can a deep dive ever be too long on Substack or too short or is are there any patterns that you've seen amongst the the top performers? you know, there is a there is a trend that says, look, all else being equal, being consistent and publishing pretty frequently really does help. Yeah. Um it's it's a lot easier.

You know, if you're publishing multiple times a week consistently for a long period, your chances of success really do skyrocket. Other than that though, we sort of have the problem, you see this in marketing, too, where sometimes the like the uh the opposite of a good idea is a good idea. Yep.

where it's like one thing works but also like the opposite of that thing also works. You just got to find something that's sort of good and differentiated. So yeah, make something that's interesting, authentic that you actually like and then make a lot of it is pretty we found that 100%.

I mean 15 hours a week, three hours a day. And not only that, but I mean I think we posted on X 20 times yesterday and like 10 clips and like uh some of them don't do very well, but you just set the quality bar where you set it and then you just try and get those, you know, let the winners ride basically.

Well, I'll tell you what, you cross stream to Substack. Easy peasy doing it. We got AI auto clips. You can make your own, but also people will just find them. I love it. Let's hear it for that. Let's hear for that. I like the sound of that. No, I'm excited to get over there.

To be honest, we've been uh so, you know, the core challenge for TBPN is that we're a startup, but we're, you know, John and I are the founders, but we happen to be live for three hours a day, and then we have to spend like a couple hours prepping the show, and so there's just like, and we've built out, we're individual contributors, an amazing team now.

Uh, but it's just about adding these other channels. But I I see a ton of opportunity on Substack and I just love how thoughtful you guys have been about, you know, building the platform and staying true to your values. It's awesome to see. I have one last question and then we'll let you go.

Uh lessons from Lulu going direct. Uh what did you learn from working with her? What have you learned from the most recent uh Lulu ideology and what it means to communicate as a CEO to an audience of investors, employees, customers, etc. I'm a huge Lulu stan. I've learned a lot from her.

Maybe one thing that is is nonobvious that I got from working with her that I wouldn't have necessarily picked up on just from the output is kind of like the in in many cases the the principles and the morals and the facts come first.

The most important part of the go direct comms thing is not just how do I spin this or how do I posture it or how do I say it's like are you doing the right thing? Are you you know are you are you willing to stand behind the message that you're coming with? Um, I think that thing matters a lot. Yeah, that's great.

Well, thank you so much for joining. We'll let you This is awesome. Come back on again soon. We'll talk to you soon. Great. See you on Substack. We'll see you over there. Bye. Let's tell you about Bezel. Get bezel. com. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.

Also, potentially creator economy startup. A lot of creators getting watches. Yeah, lots of folks in tech getting watches. Their cap table is absolutely stacked. It is talk about numerals benchmark series A. Talk about a stacked cap table. Uh anyway, our next guest is here.

We have Sean from stored announcing a uh a major size gong moment. Welcome to the stream, Sean. How