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We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

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Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#231

Post by gonehome »

svnt wrote: post #227
miiiiiike wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a guess? Do you have any evidence of “secret offers”?

There are a number of writers who have disclosed their “offers too good to refuse” from substack, including their first big name who they paid well into six figures to jump platforms.

ubac framed the question in a hostile way which is probably why he was ignored.

What you're describing sounds like a cash advance/guarantee which Hamish mentioned about 'de-risking' offers.

If you have good data that a writer could make X money, but they're afraid to leave their day job - it's easy to just say to them "we'll pay you your day job salary to de-risk this jump for you" if you know they'll make way more than that. You can even offer more.

That's not a 'secret benefit' to prevent them from leaving - it's a smart economic move to help people anxious about perceived risk.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#233

Post by tsycho »

First of all, I have been reading a lot of publications on Substack, thank you. I have been using your app for a few days, and have a few feature requests:

1. Can you please support signing in to multiple accounts? Ideally, you would merge the subscriptions together into one view, but even if not, easy account switching is good enough.

2. Can you gray out the read posts? The "inbox" doesn't distinguish between read and unread, archiving is the only option. But sometimes I might want to refer back, and don't want to archive it yet. (EDIT: I just found the orange dot, but it's not very visible)

3. When you know that I have read the post via email (from the tracking pixels), can you show them as read in the app?

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#234

Post by gonehome »

cjbest wrote: post #54
klabb3 wrote: post #32

A popular sentiment on HN is "don't make an app when you can just have a web page". Reading articles is an an almost perfect fit for the web. What are your reasons for having an app?

Reading articles may be an almost perfect fit for web, but we see a really clear pattern among the 70% of our users that read in mobile: they discover stuff to read on the web through links that get shared, but once they sign up they overwhelmingly read in their email client. Email is actually pretty great for this, and email is especially powerful for giving writers direct connection to their readers. But there are…

Yeah, the app is great - I loved the email newsletters and read them in my client, but filtering quickly becomes a hassle.

Being able to open the app to read when I want to will be much nicer.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#235

Post by garbagetime »

alisonatwork wrote: post #228
ellegriffin wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I hope this doesn't change. As an author, I think the reason why the comments section of my newsletter is such a positive place is because all of the commenters are doxed and have a profile. In addition, that's how I find other writers to follow—you can see who follows what and follow that thread which is nice.

I don't think people being "doxed" is the secret to creating positive interactions. See Facebook, for example. Even LinkedIn has a surprising amount of toxic threads, considering people's professional reputations are at stake. The issue I have with Substack in particular is that it was essentially founded around political newsletters. I'm not sure, but I think Bill Bishop might've been their very first newsletter...…

I think it's a helpful but not sufficient condition

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#236

Post by marcellus23 »

shagie wrote: post #45
cjbest wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely hear this, but there is some tension here for us. One of the big values of Substack for writers is that it is the place where you can build your most valuable audience, which means: 1. When folks opt in, you can reach them whenever you want, unmediated by an algorithm 2. They can pay to subscribe, and you keep 90% of the economics and 3. You own your email list. You can leave Substack and take them with…

Consider that if one does a "sign up" from the webpage on a Mac using Safari, you get the option to use an Apple generated hidden email address. https://imgur.com/a/PTwWor3 Adding that to the phone app would only be exposing it on the phone app - not hiding it from functionality for anyone who wanted to do it.

Not a Substack employee, but that would be tacitly endorsing users bypassing #3 — even if Substack doesn’t mind, their writers might. Safari is one thing, where it can’t be disabled. But going out of their way to add support for it in the app is probably a step too far.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#237

Post by gonehome »

demosthenes714 wrote: post #67
pedalpete wrote: post #6

Maybe harkening back to the old-school days of HN, but I'd be keen to hear about the tech stack you decided to use in building the app, what your considerations are for multi-platform, and advice for start-ups getting ready to launch their own apps.

John here, one of the app engineers at Substack. Our team has lots of experience with Swift and values the level of polish you can achieve natively, so went with that. We try to avoid third-party dependencies so native implementation and customization of UIKit, URLSession, and CoreData are important to us. Cross platform frameworks like React Native, Flutter, Xamarin, etc are super interesting but in our experience c…

Thanks for building a native app!

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#238

Post by rockemsockem »

syshum wrote: post #203
cgati wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'll find you misread the post you're replying to and you're in agreement on owning your content.

You are correct, I read that as "Medium" the blogging platform that is a competitor to substack...

Really illustrates the brilliance of choosing the name. Obfuscating normal conversation.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#239

Post by decryption »

stereoradonc wrote: post #176

Substack is a pyramid scheme in terms of "payments" - I am sure they will start up a "search" for the newsletters and then paid advertisements. To all the HN regulars here - own your medium instead. Own your content. There's no need to stick to yet another VC funded "writing experience". Many potential readers will eventually hit a subscription fatigue. There are several proven strategies to monetise your content (an…

I 100% agree with this take.

I've got an email newsletter that 874 people pay me $5/m to read (The Sizzle - https://thesizzle.com.au). I set it up outside of Substack a few years ago, then migrated when Substack launched with the hope their platform would bring in new readers and make my life easier.

This turned out to be a massive waste of over a year, as not only did the newsletter stop growing, it lost subscribers. There was no platform effect by being on Substack, so I left it, setup my homebrew solution (where all the bits, like billing, email sending, customer info are interchangeable) and growth has resumed and I'm doing better than ever - all without giving Substack a 10% cut and further locking myself into their ecosystem.

Here's a blog post explaining in more detail why I chose to remove myself from Substack if anyone is interested: https://blog.decryption.net.au/t/why-i-use-a-mishmash-of-ser...

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#240

Post by pjscott »

onefuncman wrote: post #121
cjbest wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll get you a real answer about how the tech stack is today. But for now I can tell a war story that might be fun. I'm one of the founders, and am in a very much non-technical role now as CEO, I did write a bunch of the very early code (some of which people curse my name for to this day.) When we were starting, I was limited by how many new languages/frameworks I could learn at once. I started writing the backend i…

A few (but not too many) years ago I inherited a custom compilation of python2.x to make unicode strings work properly. You made the right call, lol.

I’m curious: what was the issue? I’ve used python 2.7 with Unicode pretty extensively, in a wide range of languages, and have never had problems that weren’t my own fault.
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