Explaining a16z's Investment in Substack

Overall, building subscription businesses is a great way to incentive creators to make their best content. Paying for content is a signal that users trust and value content creators instead of relying on ads to pay for content creation.

Consumers may not be willing to pay subscriptions for writing. Or, there may not be a combined $1B/year of demand for writing subscriptions

Substack has a business model that creates unique unit economics. Substack isn’t trying to build the next The Economist or The Athletic. It’s not branded; the consumer doesn’t need to know what Substack is. Instead, the growth will come from consumers resonating with individual creators.

Email subscriptions don’t have network effects by themselves. Right now, there isn’t a large switching cost for a creator to leave Substack – the creator owns their email list and content. The interesting part, however, comes in when the platform provides enough value that a writer would lose subscribers by switching platforms and when subscribers ... See more

The current unbundling phase is unsustainable and the long-term media business could look more like the past newspaper model than expected

“Infinite” ad inventory is an important concept created by the internet. The scarcity on the number of newspaper ads (paper space) or TV ads (commercial time) meant that inventory was limited.

Email could be the wrong entry into paid content. Audio, video or something else could be a better wedge

The reason I find this company so interesting is it doesn’t seem like a venture-backable business at first glance. In order to get $100M in revenue, they would have to have $1.0B in gross subscription volume. When they went through YC, they had an average revenue / subscriber of $70. If that stays the same, Substack will need about 14.3M paid subsc... See more

Ad networks, most notably Facebook and Google, provided solutions to advertisers’ buying problems. The main thing they provided was more data on consumers.