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Everyone who is responding doesn’t understand the core benefit of Substack: the writer owns the relationship between them and their subscribers. Substack has no

Everyone who is responding doesn’t understand the core benefit of Substack: the writer owns the relationship between them and their subscribers. Substack has no such ownership. Substack doesn’t take payments from the subscribers and then pay the writer. The subscribers directly pay the writer and the writer is charged a fee by Substack. It is VERY easy for writers to drop off Substack. They own their subscription lists and if they want to move to Patreon they can. But Substack’s incentive is to make their product so good that the writers stay. That is how the company is set up. They could have created a moat where Substack owns the subscribers but they chose to flip it so that it is very easy for writers to leave. Literally writers can leave Substack with the click of the button and they can take their subscribers with them, and that’s a core value of the company. I think the company values are amazing and new and something you don’t see anymore. I actually applied to the company last year but didn’t pass the interview which was very disappointing but I plan on trying again this year. It’s a company I firmly believe in and I love the mission.

infogulch 4y ago
THE business plan for every new company created in the last two decades is exploitative by design, and people are fed up with it. The problem is that the relationships between the person consuming, the person producing, and the business is organized wrong. The plan is for the business to insert itself between people and extract a tax on their interaction instead of collecting a fee for providing a service. Technology has accelerated this trend by reducing the cost of this automated relationship management. This is a gross inversion of normal relationships between people. I hope that Substack's model becomes more popular and people choose to eject exploitative mediators and force them to be third party service providers where they belong. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30420113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30420113

infogulch 4y ago

THE business plan for every new company created in the last two decades is exploitative by design, and people are fed up with it. The problem is that the relationships between the person consuming, the person producing, and the business is organized wrong. The plan is for the business to insert itself between people and extract a tax on their interaction instead of collecting a fee for providing a service. Technology has accelerated this trend by reducing the cost of this automated relationship management. This is a gross inversion of normal relationships between people. I hope that Substack's model becomes more popular and people choose to eject exploitative mediators and force them to be third party service providers where they belong. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30420113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30420113