A very enjoyable and thorough read. I sometimes wonder if we haven't incentives to be bullish on substack that biases us. We try our best to be brand ambassadors because we have skin in the game.
You know as well as I do the VC environment for growth. Startups has hit a wall and it's going to be pretty brutal for cash burning teams. Outside of costly substack pro deals that burn cash at a rate that's no longer sustainable, my amateur impression is that substack has no idea how to do sales or marketing or app marketing in particular. Substack has 17,000 paids creators likely 20k by now. But it's literally depending upon their reach to grow its own product.
Medium isn't even profitable with 40 times the daily content. Substack's only getting around 60 million visitors per month. In silicon valley terms, even if you generously give them 40 million active monthly users, That's not great for a 5-year startup that only takes 10% of revenue. How do we justify the valuation of the community around?
Those are all great points! I personally didn't invest in Substack's community round for that reason, probably a bit overvalued. I do think its a great product, and maybe a good investment later. Eric Newcomer had a really good point he uses Substack because "they might invent something new that benefits his business".
The model is a lot different than Medium I think. Way more focus on capturing and retaining readers and monetizing. Or at least, appears to be more focused on that.
A very enjoyable and thorough read. I sometimes wonder if we haven't incentives to be bullish on substack that biases us. We try our best to be brand ambassadors because we have skin in the game.
You know as well as I do the VC environment for growth. Startups has hit a wall and it's going to be pretty brutal for cash burning teams. Outside of costly substack pro deals that burn cash at a rate that's no longer sustainable, my amateur impression is that substack has no idea how to do sales or marketing or app marketing in particular. Substack has 17,000 paids creators likely 20k by now. But it's literally depending upon their reach to grow its own product.
Medium isn't even profitable with 40 times the daily content. Substack's only getting around 60 million visitors per month. In silicon valley terms, even if you generously give them 40 million active monthly users, That's not great for a 5-year startup that only takes 10% of revenue. How do we justify the valuation of the community around?
Those are all great points! I personally didn't invest in Substack's community round for that reason, probably a bit overvalued. I do think its a great product, and maybe a good investment later. Eric Newcomer had a really good point he uses Substack because "they might invent something new that benefits his business".
The model is a lot different than Medium I think. Way more focus on capturing and retaining readers and monetizing. Or at least, appears to be more focused on that.