Sachin Monga, Head of Product at Substack, explains the founding product philosophy established by Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi to host Lenny Rachitsky.
“It starts with like an opinion for how the internet should work, where people should be in control over their destiny to a much greater extent than has ever really been the case over at least, you know, the last 1015 years where all of a sudden everyone just started spending all of their time in a handful of these like public squares that were powered by ads. And when you think about what that means for sub-site right now, that, that means Writers are in control over being able to deliver their best work on their terms to their audience, make money directly from their subscribers. And also that readers should be in control over their experience.”
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Organize product teams around customer segments, not specific features
“The teams aren't oriented around product surfaces. Like we don't have a team that's like the app team or a team that's like the dashboard team or the podcasting team. We have teams that are oriented around customers and. Solving a bit of a timeless customer pr…”
“No, I think actually at Facebook, it's not necessarily whether we do a thing. It's not like we do this now, we do this later. It's doing this thing might mean we can't do this other thing at all. Or it'll mean that instead of that chart being. Steady until we …”
90% of media chatter about Substack is a product distraction
“But I'd say, 90% of the chatter about Substack is going to probably ultimately just be a distraction to our product team at the end of the day that should just be focused on Executing on the vision”
Substack prioritizes most valuable audiences over maximum audience size
“If you have an audience anywhere, a sub stack's never going to be the place where you have the biggest audience probably, but it's certainly should be the place where your most valuable audience comes home to where they get your best work.”
Subscribing is a far higher-intent signal than social media follows
“Subscribe as like an action is pretty heavyweight. It's like a costly signal, right? It's not as easy as just like mashing the follow button on a bunch of accounts on Twitter or something like that. If someone is subscribed to you, they're kind of granting you…”
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