I've noticed a significant increase in submissions here from Substack recently; it seems to be supplanting Medium as a preferred platform for independent long form articles.
Medium started off with seeming decent quality and goodwill but a lot of that has been jettisoned with walling off content and barrel-scraping in "expert" contributions.
I hope Substack will avoid some of those mistakes; it will need to if the sub-platform described in the article here (or others like it) is to succeed.
Founders need to avoid the VC trap. Stop raising money from investors that demand hockey stick growth. Find investors that expect reasonable growth and returns. If an investor encourages every single one of their investments to be a 1000x return, expecting only 1 in 100 to be so, and kills any company the moment they realize they won’t fulfill the investment thesis, many companies do nothing but pivot until they run out of capital. Very few companies can accomplish such a high level of growth and most only do so through gray means (regulatory violations of UBER and Airbnb).
I don't see how they can avoid going down the same path as Quora, Medium, and others. At the end of the day, they are for-profit entities, and not only that, but they are startups which means they are after growth and need to eventually N-fold their profits year-after-year in some future. They need to grow faster than the S&P index plus a healthy premium for risk, in order for investments to make sense.
I don't think anyone at Medium thought their service was better for their users by putting up paywalls, requiring accounts, and broadening their SEO by soliciting contributions. But they need to grow either in users or in profits, and there's only a certain number of ways you can squeeze money from internet readers.
Substack has a different and fundamentally better business model. They make money when newsletter authors charge subscribers. This means they are aligned with helping newsletter authors create and host amazing newsletters. I think this gives them a much better chance of serving authors rather than serving advertisers.
Or just clickbait newsletters. Because let's face it, subscriptions correlate with traffic. Besides "awesome" content always had the Patreon alternative. Integrating the two together might be of value, but i dont think they 'll avoid the issues.
Is it though? I click a lot of clickbait because I am human. I don't think I give a lot of direct money to clickbaiters. It is a hell of a mountain to climb before I feel compelled to go grab the credit card and type all those numbers.
The basic premise of almost all internet firms - at enough N, 0.01% is profitable. The long tail guarantees that people mash that dopamine grabbing button.
I've noticed a significant increase in submissions here from Substack recently; it seems to be supplanting Medium as a preferred platform for independent long form articles.
Medium started off with seeming decent quality and goodwill but a lot of that has been jettisoned with walling off content and barrel-scraping in "expert" contributions.
I hope Substack will avoid some of those mistakes; it will need to if the sub-platform described in the article here (or others like it) is to succeed.