Substack

“But what Substack has done first is make the tool to do the newsletter. What they are clearly will do over time is make the tool for people to find them.”

“And then 10 people will do that to Shopify. Like, theoretically, I could sell a subscription newsletter in Shopify, except no, it's a lot easier to do it the way that I, in Substack or Memberful, depending on what you wanted to do. And I'm, there's a lot of pe…”

“Because if you're just the software, then I don't think you ever have to worry that much about content moderation. But the moment that you're a little bit more, in my opinion, than just the software, then the content moderation piece is a huge part of your bus…”

“Email newsletters for, like, insidery gossip around newspapers and tech strategy are, like, a super micro niche. Entertaining ten-year-olds, that's where the money's at.”

“Substack is also easier than WordPress plus Stripe plus MailChimp plus plus plus plus. And so you can just go and go and get started.”

“Substack is in this kind of interesting place in the middle where, like, on one level they are squares, they are a Squarespace or MailChimp, they're a tool, and you pay them, or if you're charging, you pay, if you're not charging, it's free, and that's it, whi…”

“What is it going to look like when you've got 10,000 people on your platform, and everybody's got signed up to 200 newsletters, You're going to have an algorithm. You are. Or you're going to be MailChimp, and you're going to say, that's not my problem, in whic…”

“Look at all the people on the leaderboard on Substack. You know, they're all well-established big brand, big names. Yeah, all white men, which is basically because they all entered journalism 30 years ago. So they're all people who have a pre-existing audience…”

“I have to say there's something there for me that, I don't know, it's been top of mind for me of why, why all the hype around Substack, because it hasn't reinvented anything, to your point, and it came top of mind for us because they just announced that they'v…”

“And they spent 20 years, like, building that audience, and then they can take, put that audience in the knapsack and take it to Clubhouse, and take it to Sostak.”

“I also feel like how many people can write that much once a week? How big is that going to be? I feel like that's thousands of writers, not millions of writers, whereas Instagram is millions, can be millions of creators.”

“Clubhouse, while you were driving people to Clubhouse from your Twitter account. To begin with, because it didn't really have a network, and it was, you know, that was one of the things they had to try and build, was to build a network. And the same thing with…”

“Substack comes along and builds an email newsletter platform, and the joke was always, has been Substack is Twitter's Playwall, because you build your user base on Twitter, and then you monetize it on, on Substack. So if I've got 300,000 Twitter followers, I c…”

“Substack has basically massively disrupted Medium. Substack has done what Medium was supposed to do. It's a publishing platform. It's not actually a newsletter platform. It's a blog post by email platform.”