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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In the language of Ben Thompson, Substack has two choices. It can become a full fledged aggregator, build network effects and community, personalized content and so forth, but risk the moral purity of being one of the last ad-free algorithm-free corners of the internet, or it can become a platform, provide valuable infrastructure and flexible... See more

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