A lot can change in a year

Everyone who’s reading this has some kind of writing practice and most of us could benefit from putting more time into it. Starting this Substack has obviously changed my life and career, but the act of writing everyday for years has also changed me.

Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi started Substack in 2017, but their history dates back years before. Chris co-founded the anonymous posting app Kik during his third year at the University of Waterloo (2010). He spent the better part of eight years at the company where he met his soon-to-be co-founders. When Chris left Kik in early 201

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I used ChatGPT to find role models who had tread this path before me. While I had feared that no one else had successfully combined being a writer with building a valuable business, I learned that I was wrong. Sam Harris, Bill Simmons, Kevin Espiritu, and several other creators had done exactly this—and well.

I hired Kate Lee as our editor in chief ... See more

In the wake of the Summer of Substack, the novelty of launching a newsletter where readers pay directly for your work has given way to the reality of, well, keeping that newsletter up. And keeping those readers happy. And finding new ones when, inevitably, some of those readers decide they’re kind of over you (nicely termed as “churn”). Inevitably,... See more

The most successful sub-categories we’ve observed are those that start as “side hustles” but can eventually evolve into lucrative careers. A great example of this is Substack, a platform that makes it easy to start an email newsletter subscription.