Substack's Core Growth Loop — Brian Balfour

 Substack needs some network effects to keep authors tied to the platform, even if they can leave at any moment.  The best way to achieve that is through cross-promotion tools that allow authors to constantly gain new readers that they wouldn’t gain otherwise. That makes their presence on Substack truly valuable.

The second thing Substack is doing to build power within the constraints of their ideology is to create content discovery loops that are driven by people, rather than algorithms. This is why Substack lets writers feature other writers on their sites, and gives readers profiles where they can display which Substacks they are subscribed to.

Substack also seems to understand something that few other technology platforms have understood: that the atomic unit of media isn’t an article, nor a media brand, but instead is the creator themselves.

All of this brings us to the only way Substack can become a high-growth platform with network effects that attracts and retains all types of authors: it needs a way to cross-promote readers from one author to the other, while maintaining the authors’ independence, so that authors need to come to grow their audience.

Compounding Growth Loops for API-First Companies

A common API-First company’s North Star metric is developer adoption, and the number of developers in an API-ecosystem tends to compound naturally in four growth loops that reinforce each other .

1. The Developer Experience (DX) Loop: Developers who explore (and eventually thrive) with the API will bu... See more

The challenge, or opportunity, for companies like Substack is to figure out how to help creators reach new audiences and grow without having to compromise on ownership. The aggregators of the early internet unlocked great power for creators through building central gathering places. We are doing the same with the Substack app and features—like Reco... See more

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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