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

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Most of the signups for the newsletter came through stories on the Guardian’s website. The top ones to convince readers to hand over their email address include the “one life” article that caught my eye, a launch piece with data on screen time, a feature on a Massachusetts school that banned smartphones, and a follow-up piece featuring readers who... See more

We’re also seeing the emergence of new models that take advantage of Substack’s network-centric design and flexible features, including Katelyn Jetelina’s Your Local Epidemiologist, which recently sprouted local variants in California and New York, and spinoff publications created and funded by individual writers who have found success on the... See more