Substack has spawned a new class of newsletter entrepreneurs

Newsletters are the easiest way to retain readers since it just pops in their inbox -- if the writing is good and/or specialized. Good design also really helps. When I managed the newsletters for a New York urban planning nonprofit, we averaged 23% open rates. Another good hook is when issues don't have a public web archive, or it's paywalled.

I saw the bundling mentioned in the Digiday article with the "Everything" brand, and I unsubscribed since I just wanted the business analysis and not other topics (like productivity advice) mixed in. Maybe bundling is okay for other readers.

I have to check out what Substack offers in terms of analytics and email design templates. Personally, I'm interested in series-based newsletters for storytelling that's pubdate agnostic (everyone gets the same first issue). I'm going to look closer at ConvertKit and BareMetrics.

You might pay for the curation. Finding what's interesting takes time as well, even if it's just scrolling through HN, and you will miss some things. If somebody saves you that time, that's probably well worth a few bucks a month, isn't it?

Can those people actually make a living wage from it, or are they "entrepreneurs" like all those Instagram "influenzas"?

In my experience, it's even worse: those people who spend time and effort into becoming famous on the internet tend to have less interesting content than those who just silently post to their own blog and then move on to their next adventure.

That's why I like HackerNews, because users can recommend someone unrelated to the community purely for their content.

Substack kind of reverses the incentive here, because there's no money to be made in sending visitors off their platform. So either, it'll be a little echo chamber where Substack users only link to other Substack users, or even worse it creates an incentive for Substack's "creators" to copy content from people who didn't join.

Substack has been successful in creating buzz among the media crowd, and there's definitely a business there riding the trend toward subscriptions in the media biz, but unfortunately taking on $17M in VC money has set them up for a disappointing end.

Here's how this plays out. The successful writers on Substack will eventually leave the platform for more control over their audience and lower fees (there's a reason Ben Thompson isn't on Substack).

As this happens, and as the honeymoon PR period dies off, the journalists will turn on Substack, just as they do on every single thing Silicon Valley puts out (see Lambda School).

Prior to taking on a16z riches, Substack was a cool indie brand. Now they're officially "big, evil tech." The fickle journalist twitterati just haven't realized it yet.

Inevitably as more non-influencer writers head to Substack they'll start to see, like with Patreon, that only a small minority of creators will ever generate enough income to make a living.

This, combined with competition from Patreon, Podia, Memberful, Ghost, Revue, the next indie platform darling, etc. will spell doom for a16z's growth goals for the platform.

My guess is 3-7 years from now, after more funding rounds, they get acquired by Patreon for roughly the same amount of money investors put in. Employees will get nothing, founders might get Cush jobs and possibly a minor payout, VCs would have done better investing in the S&P.

This is the type of business that works better bootstrapped IMO.