Insight
Best: Platforms should not decide what is right or who to trust
“I don't think our role as a platform on the internet should be to tell you what's right and what's wrong or who to trust and who not to trust. And it's a seductive idea that it should be that role. And a lot of platforms took that stance and it just didn't wor…”
Disclosure
Best: Substack was pitched to journalists as a media 'getaway vehicle'
“I had this speech that I would give to people at the time. I was like, think of sub stack as your getaway vehicle. You don't have to get in it right now, but like, Fuel it up, have the engine idling, like create your account, like claim your handle, have this …”
Disclosure
Best: Substack does not change content enforcement based on public pressure
“If something comes to our attention that is against the broadly applicable substack rules, we're going to take action. But we're not changing what we enforce based on pressure.”
Disclosure
Chris Best: Substack does not need to raise outside capital again
“We're not running the company to, like, turn a profit, but the thing that is true, and we've kept true pretty much the whole time, is we don't need to raise money again. We're not on this clock. We have, like, we are in control of our financial destiny.”
Insight
Best: Losing half a cross-platform messaging network destroys 95% of users
“And if you're a messaging app, and your big drive is your half on Blackberry and half on iPhone, if you lose half your users, you don't actually lose half your users, you lose like, 95% of your users.”
Insight
Best: Facebook's core issue is working too well without serving its users
“The problem with Facebook is not that it doesn't work, right? The problem with Facebook is that it works too well. And doesn't serve the people who use it. Right. Yes, it kills all the newspapers, but it's a massively successful business that takes, takes adva…”
Assertion Supported
Best: Kik launched a cryptocurrency to solve free messenger monetization
“In part to raise money, and in part kind of like as a, in answer to the question, what do you do if you have a very popular messenger that lots of people use, but you don't know how to make money from it?”
Insight
Best: Audiences refuse to pay for internet content, except for favorites
“I devised this like parlor trick where when somebody told me they would never pay for something on the internet, I would say, well, who's your favorite writer? And they'd say, oh, you know, Guy Raz, or whoever. And then I would say, would you pay five bucks a …”
Assertion Supported
Best: Facebook charged creators to build audiences then charged again for reach
“And this had happened with Facebook pages at this point. They created a thing where people spent all this money getting people to like their Facebook page on the assumption that that meant they'd built up an audience. And then they said, oh, just kidding. Actu…”
Assertion Supported
Best: First publisher Bill Bishop made six figures on day one
“Bill's launch happened. And we had no, I had no idea what to expect, but he made like six figures his first day through this like duct taped, like stripe setup that I had built in the preceding weeks.”
Insight
Best: Writers rarely realize subscription earning potential until shown the math
“It's surprising how much you have to do that multiplication for people. Like, it's not that they can't do it themselves, it's that they won't do it. And the number of times I've had a conversation that's like, you know, so-and-so has 10,000 subscribers paying,…”
Insight
Best: Substack's direct subscriber model insulated the platform from advertiser boycotts
“I mean, a big part of it is the business model, right? Like the fact that we was paying subscribers, we didn't have Advertisers who were getting spooked and boycotting us, bringing us under pressure.”
Assertion Supported
Best: Substack traffic from Twitter had steadily declined for years by 2023
“By the time it went down, the share of Substack traffic that was coming from Twitter had been on a steady decline for years.”
Assertion Supported
Best: Substack has surpassed 5 million paid subscriptions
“I think we can say there's over five million now.”
Opinion
Best: Waterloo's mandatory co-op program is more valuable than its classes
“The most important thing about Waterloo, though, is not actually what you learn in the classes, it's the fact that they have this mandatory co-op program.”
Assertion Partly supported
Best: Kik Messenger was used by 40% of US teenagers
“I mean, at one point, there was, I think, 40% of U.S. Teenagers were using Keck for a few years.”
Assertion Supported
Best: Substack grew roughly sixfold during the first year of the pandemic
“I mean, we grew something like six X in that first year of the pandemic.”
Assertion Supported
Best: Substack operates with approximately 100 employees
“About a hundred.”
Chris Best