Substack is in trouble because of this. They get almost all their revenue from two handfuls of writers, any of which could afford to develop their own ‘pay for an e-mail newsletter’ script and keep more money.
Unlike some companies that look similar, I think Substack is not delivering a lot of value in terms of discovery. People come to Substack for Bari Weiss and not the other way around. It is not Medium, the low value domain of people who want to put low effort into blogging, where people are blown away because they got 70 views on a post. (Prediction: Medium’s user base will defect once somebody comes up with a platform that uses LLMs to write their blog posts for them)
Substack would like to grow to be more than e-mail newsletters but the creators and users will have a say in that.
Unlike some companies that look similar, I think Substack is not delivering a lot of value in terms of discovery. People come to Substack for Bari Weiss and not the other way around. It is not Medium, the low value domain of people who want to put low effort into blogging, where people are blown away because they got 70 views on a post. (Prediction: Medium’s user base will defect once somebody comes up with a platform that uses LLMs to write their blog posts for them)
Substack would like to grow to be more than e-mail newsletters but the creators and users will have a say in that.