Best: Writers rarely realize subscription earning potential until shown the math
Chris Best · Substack: Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie · May 12, 2025 · at 53:02
Chris Best is the co-founder and CEO of Substack. He discusses writer psychology and how unintuitive subscription economics were for traditional writers.
0:00 / 0:24exact quote · 24.9s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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, uh-huh, they're charging a hundred dollars a year, uh-huh, so they're making a million dollars a year. What? And it's sort of like, you know, you could have got there yourself, but you sort of have to, like, point out what's, what's happening.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Chris Best
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…”
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 …”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”