TinyLetter had a big moment

Thankfully, the founders figured out a subtle shift in positioning around the time I joined that made a big difference. They kept all three core elements in place, but started pitching it as a newsletter platform rather than a paid publishing platform.

In its early days, Substack primarily catered to a certain set of internet-savvy writers and journalists, lured by the promise of monetizing a direct relationship with their readers. But as it morphs from a niche publishing concern into a heavyweight start-up mentioned in the same breath as Twitter and Facebook, its user base is proliferating accor... See more

A Substack newsletter is both a product and a portfolio: a way to make money, but also a venue for displaying personality, intelligence, and taste.

Substack has built a fantastic platform for independent writers to not only reach their audiences directly, but to support themselves financially while doing so without having to depend on increasingly stultifying media institutions.

Newsletters are booming right now: since the pandemic started, the number of readers and ‘active writers’ on Substack have both doubled, and other providers such as Mailchimp have seen similar spikes in users. Newsletter platforms are attracting big names: Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, New York Magazine columnist Andrew Sullivan and Buzzfeed’s Anne ... See more

Many (if not most) successful Substacks are built on the back of pithy tweets. Substack offers minimal to no demand aggregation so creators with large Twitter followings funnel their followers to their email newsletter. Similarly, TikTok stars also point their viewers to their Youtube page because Youtube offers more robust monetization options.

In Substack’s case, life in the “paid publishing platform” market was rough, because very few people thought they wanted it, and the people who did were locked up by switching costs from the complex systems they rigged together. But competing in the “newsletter platform” market was a dream in comparison. Hamish could email writers on Mailchimp and ... See more