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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 a

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.

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.