As someone who switched my newsletter to substack from mailchimp (plug: lastweekin.ai) last year, here is my take: * It's free. Mailchimp gets surprisingly exp

As someone who switched my newsletter to substack from mailchimp (plug: lastweekin.ai) last year, here is my take: * It's free. Mailchimp gets surprisingly expensive pretty quick as your audience grows, with no path for revenue. * It's easy to start. Very easy to move over to it from mailchimp and set it all up. Even after two years of additional features, it's quite streamlined. * It's simple. The feature set is pretty minimalist in a good way, puts composing and putting out content first in a way that makes it pretty frictionless to use. * It's monetizable. Kinda obvious, but I was surprised by how many people are willing to be paying subscribers tbh. I do have some gripes: like Medium it provides very few options for customization, and it is very much designed with the assumption the newsletter is stand-alone (meaning no associated website for which the newsletter serves to provides updates). Still, on the whole it's quite nice. From a reader perspective, I would assume it's popular because a lot of good writers/newsletters have been started with it lately due to the above reasons.