| Substack has been successful in creating buzz among the media crowd, and there's definitely a business there riding the trend toward subscriptions in the media biz, but unfortunately taking on $17M in VC money has set them up for a disappointing end. Here's how this plays out. The successful writers on Substack will eventually leave the platform for more control over their audience and lower fees (there's a reason Ben Thompson isn't on Substack). As this happens, and as the honeymoon PR period dies off, the journalists will turn on Substack, just as they do on every single thing Silicon Valley puts out (see Lambda School). Prior to taking on a16z riches, Substack was a cool indie brand. Now they're officially "big, evil tech." The fickle journalist twitterati just haven't realized it yet. Inevitably as more non-influencer writers head to Substack they'll start to see, like with Patreon, that only a small minority of creators will ever generate enough income to make a living. This, combined with competition from Patreon, Podia, Memberful, Ghost, Revue, the next indie platform darling, etc. will spell doom for a16z's growth goals for the platform. My guess is 3-7 years from now, after more funding rounds, they get acquired by Patreon for roughly the same amount of money investors put in. Employees will get nothing, founders might get Cush jobs and possibly a minor payout, VCs would have done better investing in the S&P. This is the type of business that works better bootstrapped IMO. |
Interesting that "The Browser" is on Substack (one of the top 5 newsletters) but the affiliated and more recent "The Viewer" is on Ghost.
Of course Ghost still has a relatively small ecosystem compared to Wordpress which I think is why Ben Thompson still expressed a preference for a Wordpress based setup.
[1] https://thebrowser.com/
[2] https://theviewer.is/