Substack had a few things that worked for it
* Patreon kind of sucks for writing / newsletters or else they could have captured part of this market. Medium was supposed to fix this but they had an epic collapse.
* Single point where subscribers can manage their subscriptions and preserve a common identity across subscriptions in the comments etc. Again, Medium/collapse.
* A rapid adoption of substack by well known online writers with loyal followings. These writers either had their own blogs or were exiting traditional media or getting dumped out by the collapse of online media (gawker network, buzzfeed news, etc). Again, could have been Medium if not for their collapse.
* I suspect Substack spent a lot of that VC money guaranteeing 2 years of X revenue for a non-trivial number of high profile writers so they would onboard.
Reading this story I didn't realize just how much they had taken over the years (I use to operate in this media space, but haven't in a long time). I'm not sure what the headcount is but that amount of money is staggering and I can only imagine it was all used to acquire DAUs and very little novel technology has been created with it.
I think Substacks first 10m/100m (their keep of rev/total rev from subscriptions) was extremely impressive and fast. But also it was a kind of low hanging fruit. There was a market already there for this and Medium/Patreon couldn't capture it. Now if they are really at 45m/450m that is much less impressive. It will be extremely hard to get to 100m/1000m and IMO impossible to get much higher than that with their current approach.
* Patreon kind of sucks for writing / newsletters or else they could have captured part of this market. Medium was supposed to fix this but they had an epic collapse.
* Single point where subscribers can manage their subscriptions and preserve a common identity across subscriptions in the comments etc. Again, Medium/collapse.
* A rapid adoption of substack by well known online writers with loyal followings. These writers either had their own blogs or were exiting traditional media or getting dumped out by the collapse of online media (gawker network, buzzfeed news, etc). Again, could have been Medium if not for their collapse.
* I suspect Substack spent a lot of that VC money guaranteeing 2 years of X revenue for a non-trivial number of high profile writers so they would onboard.
Reading this story I didn't realize just how much they had taken over the years (I use to operate in this media space, but haven't in a long time). I'm not sure what the headcount is but that amount of money is staggering and I can only imagine it was all used to acquire DAUs and very little novel technology has been created with it.
I think Substacks first 10m/100m (their keep of rev/total rev from subscriptions) was extremely impressive and fast. But also it was a kind of low hanging fruit. There was a market already there for this and Medium/Patreon couldn't capture it. Now if they are really at 45m/450m that is much less impressive. It will be extremely hard to get to 100m/1000m and IMO impossible to get much higher than that with their current approach.