3 ms·

Substack don't seem interested in opinion making. Perhaps one day they will be, but for now their advances appear to be driven by some very smart BD guys and ar

Substack don't seem interested in opinion making. Perhaps one day they will be, but for now their advances appear to be driven by some very smart BD guys and are given to whoever will be profitable. The story is always the same: they approach some writer who was just attacked by some woke institution and is now out on their own. They tell them, hey, did you know you could make some six figure sum by charging for newsletters? And they say, no you're wrong, I can't earn that much. So they say, OK, we'll give you a much smaller six figure sum guaranteed and take the rest. If we're right, we win. If you're right, you win. Sounds fair? It does, so they say yes. And Substack always wins.

KirillPanov 5y ago
> Perhaps one day they will be Unfortunately if they survive they will become quite fixated on opinionmaking. It's structurally inevitable, manufacturing consent.
- ghaff 5y ago
  One aspect of unbundling (ads/opinion/news) is that there nothing to subsidize your foreign bureaus or multi-month investigative journalism that may not even pan out, to say nothing of hyper-local news.
rchaud 5y ago
Did Medium 'win', though? Substack only wins if the company goes public. A bunch of paid newsletters isn't going to cover their bills.
- native_samples 5y ago
  Why not? Their bills should be trivial. Substack's tech is primitive, it's basically a (very) basic blogging and commenting platform connected to a mail relay and a billing system. Text is cheap. If Substack can't run the whole tech operation with 5 guys and a tiny hosting bill they're doing something wrong (e.g. probably using AWS). The cost and innovation at Substack is all business development. Are they cutting good deals? They can prosper. From a software and overheads perspective there's really nothing to see here.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    I have lost count of the number of HN posts questioning why Company X "should" need anything more than Y number of staff. If all it took was the tech stack, then everybody would be on ConvertKit or MailChimp or Tinyletter, companies with a long track record. And yet, within months of is announcement, Substack is better known than any of those other tools. They are paying six-figure advances to shore up their portfolio of writers. And, like all VC-backed startups, they are spending massively on Google and Facebook ads. Building name recognition that quickly isn't cheap.
    - native_samples 5y ago
      No, I'm not claiming they aren't spending money. They clearly are, but it's all going on business development to create growth. Unless they mis-manage things in the typical way and end up with 1000 engineers building their own programming language or something, they can scale back on those deals at any point. In fact they have to. The deals that are winning so well for them can't be repeated because they awaken authors to their true value, so next year they won't re-sign them. Nonetheless, the business calculations for this are presumably quite easy to do, so I doubt they will have difficulty converting those writers to profitable revenue streams even if the profits aren't as high as when Substack is exploiting some kind of apparent informational asymmetry.

KirillPanov 5y ago

> Perhaps one day they will be Unfortunately if they survive they will become quite fixated on opinionmaking. It's structurally inevitable, manufacturing consent.

ghaff 5y ago
One aspect of unbundling (ads/opinion/news) is that there nothing to subsidize your foreign bureaus or multi-month investigative journalism that may not even pan out, to say nothing of hyper-local news.

rchaud 5y ago

Did Medium 'win', though? Substack only wins if the company goes public. A bunch of paid newsletters isn't going to cover their bills.

native_samples 5y ago
Why not? Their bills should be trivial. Substack's tech is primitive, it's basically a (very) basic blogging and commenting platform connected to a mail relay and a billing system. Text is cheap. If Substack can't run the whole tech operation with 5 guys and a tiny hosting bill they're doing something wrong (e.g. probably using AWS). The cost and innovation at Substack is all business development. Are they cutting good deals? They can prosper. From a software and overheads perspective there's really nothing to see here.
- rchaud 5y ago
  I have lost count of the number of HN posts questioning why Company X "should" need anything more than Y number of staff. If all it took was the tech stack, then everybody would be on ConvertKit or MailChimp or Tinyletter, companies with a long track record. And yet, within months of is announcement, Substack is better known than any of those other tools. They are paying six-figure advances to shore up their portfolio of writers. And, like all VC-backed startups, they are spending massively on Google and Facebook ads. Building name recognition that quickly isn't cheap.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    No, I'm not claiming they aren't spending money. They clearly are, but it's all going on business development to create growth. Unless they mis-manage things in the typical way and end up with 1000 engineers building their own programming language or something, they can scale back on those deals at any point. In fact they have to. The deals that are winning so well for them can't be repeated because they awaken authors to their true value, so next year they won't re-sign them. Nonetheless, the business calculations for this are presumably quite easy to do, so I doubt they will have difficulty converting those writers to profitable revenue streams even if the profits aren't as high as when Substack is exploiting some kind of apparent informational asymmetry.