With all the drama over whether or not TikTok will be blocked in the U.S., creators who have built an audience on the platform and depend on it for their livelihoods have been left with little comfort. But whatever happens to TikTok, it’s a moment that highlights the pressing need for creators to have control over their own destinies. While social platforms are great for reaching new audiences, relying on them alone is like building a house on rented land.

For years, creators have lived with the norm of renting space on big social media properties so they can amass a following and convert it into income through brand deals, affiliate links, sponsorships, entertainment deals, and so on. The problem is that this arrangement gives far too much power to the landlords. If you fall afoul of a platform’s opaque rules, or it decides an advertiser’s needs take priority over yours, or—God forbid—your government bans it, then you are out of luck.

You need to have your own corner of the internet, a place where you can build a home, on your own land, with assets you control.

Our system gives creators ownership. With Substack, you have your own property to build on: content you own, a URL of your choosing, a website for your work, and a mailing list of your subscribers that you can export and take with you at any time.

You also get a clear way to generate income that goes directly to you and is more reliable than fluctuating ad revenue or other third-party deals. Instead of chasing viral hits and algorithm changes, you can build sustainable income through direct support from your most engaged followers. As TikTok creator found when he moved his political commentary to Substack, this kind of support provides reliable, consistent growth. If a thousand people pay you $50 a year, you have enough for a full-time living. Ten thousand is enough to make you wealthy. It’s a better game to play than hoping for pennies per thousand views from an occasional viral video.

Best of all, you get all this for free. You can build your audience on Substack to any size at no charge, and we only make money when you do—by taking a 10% cut of subscription revenue. That incentivizes us to focus fully on helping you succeed. We are here to serve you, not advertisers.

Being on Substack doesn’t mean abandoning your social media presence. You can think of your Substack as your home base—the place where you can deepen relationships with your most devoted followers while still reaching new audiences through TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. It’s not just another place to post your content—it changes what’s possible. It’s where you can publish the work you most deeply believe in and build a community that cares just as much as you do. It’s where your people can gather around your more in-depth pieces and behind-the-scenes material, and where they can interact with you and each other in group chats.

Substack builds all the infrastructure you need for a thriving creator business. You get a home for all your work—including vertical video—plus built-in tools to chat with your community, host live broadcasts, and collaborate with other creators. You can grow your audience through the app, and even repurpose your existing social content here, knowing it will always be yours to control.

This is a time of peak volatility for creators. It’s not just the TikTok ban, but constant algorithm changes, shifting platform priorities, a fickle ad market, and a thousand other little cuts in between. While social platforms may always be important for discovery, on Substack you have a place to build something that lasts—a house of bricks, resistant to the big bad wolves of the internet. A place to call home.

Learn more about bringing your audience to Substack:

The world of finance is undergoing a profound transformation–not just in the markets but in how knowledge is shared. Finance, business, and economics writers and creators are increasingly recognizing the power of independence. In an age where trust in traditional media is waning, going direct allows these publishers to foster genuine relationships with their readers.

The timing couldn’t be more significant. As economic uncertainty and rapid innovation reshape the global landscape, readers are seeking clarity and authenticity—qualities that thrive when creators are free to chart their own paths.

This transformation is why we are hosting the Substack Market Forecast Summit on Friday, January 31st. The event will feature live video conversations exclusively in the Substack app, where top finance, business, and economics publishers and analysts—, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and more—will share their insights on everything from opportunities and risks in 2025 investment strategies to the broader economic outlook and market trends.

This Summit will shine a light on the finance category on Substack, where tens of thousands of publishers regularly cover all aspects of the industry. Join the conversation on January 31 and connect with fellow experts in the live chat during each session to share insights and build community.

Subscribe to participating publishers and stay tuned for updates on the day-of schedule, session topics, and new additions to the lineup.

Get the app

This event comes at a time when, just like in the mainstream media, the traditional ways of publishing investment research are in decline. Hedge fund managers, traders, economists, and business analysts now use Substack to publish research and analysis to thousands of paying subscribers, bucking the threats to traditional models. “Substack not only offers the average investor unprecedented direct access to the world's top money experts,” told us, “it enables those experts to deliver much more ‘financially nutritious’ content that better informs their readers' investment decision-making.”

Finance legends like Charles Schwab and Ray Dalio started out by publishing subscription newsletter products. Today, that powerful legacy of sharing market and business insights directly with a subscription audience thrives on Substack. Experts with longtime capital markets experience and pedigrees from top Wall Street firms, like , formerly a research analyst and partner at Goldman Sachs; , a former senior executive at JP Morgan; and , who formerly led commodity economics research at Scotiabank, now write independently for both institutional and retail audiences.

Others have used the platform as an entry-point to the investment industry. Andrew Walker of Yet Another Value Blog encourages anybody looking to build a profile in research to start a Substack:

If you’re looking for a career in investing, I’d suggest that starting a Substack is the best call option you can “buy”. The possibilities are endless, but they’re almost literally all good.

In an age where trust in traditional media is waning, going direct allows all of these writers, commentators, analysts and creators to foster genuine relationships with the audiences who most value their work.

If you value insight over noise, depth over brevity, and nuanced insights over surface-level headlines, this summit is for you. The financial world is changing, and the way knowledge is created and shared is evolving alongside it. Those who embrace this shift will shape the future—and we hope that you will join us.

 Android users can now publish directly from the Substack app. 

We introduced the mobile editor for iOS users this summer, allowing writers and creators to publish from anywhere. An in-app editor has been one of our most requested features, and thousands have since published posts from their phones. 

The initial release includes basic text and image publishing, providing a simple way to connect with your subscribers at any time, from anywhere. This is just the beginning, and we’ll continue to make improvements in the coming months. While it will take some time for the mobile editor to match the advanced features of the web editor, our goal was to offer a convenient way to publish whenever inspiration strikes—whether you’re on the move, relaxing on the couch, or capturing a thought you want to share right away.

Learn more: How to publish a post from the Substack app

Since launching the mobile editor, we’ve seen writers and creators use it to post stories, insights, and updates from surprising spots. In honor of the editor’s launch on Android, here are a few of the exotic, quirky, uncomfortable, and homey places where Substackers have pressed “publish.”

Get more from Substack Writers in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Get inspired

On a train in Thailand

Rachel Devenish Ford of captured a photo of her daughter, Kenya, on a train to Bangkok. She meditated on motherhood and their relationship as Kenya prepared to set off on her own for the first time.

The Journey Mama Writings

how it has been 🌱

read more…

Read more

2 years ago · 5 likes · Rachel Devenish Ford

 On a spin bike 

While on a Peloton in Las Vegas, Jess Chermak of reflected on a comically uncomfortable visit to the mortuary following her father’s unexpected death.

Narrative Musings

Grieving a Loss that Doesn’t Feel Like One

My father died unexpectedly yesterday (Sunday, July 21st…

Read more

2 years ago · 7 likes · 8 comments · Jess Chermak

 Attending a fountain pen show 

Baseball writer Joe Posnanski of attended the Washington D.C. Fountain Pen Supershow, exploring collectible pens while sharing his interactions with pen makers and fellow enthusiasts. 

JoeBlogs

Live from the Washington Pen Show

So there is now a way for me to write posts live from my phone. My first thought on this new technology was … why in the world would I do that? And maybe that was the right way to think about it. This post is GUARANTEED to have about a million misspellings and grammatical crimes…

Read more

2 years ago · 114 likes · 40 comments · Joe Posnanski

Getting her first mammogram 

Jenovia of shared her experience at her first mammogram appointment, reflecting on the emotions and complexities of navigating health care as a woman.

JENOVIA'S WEB

Modern Torture Device: Part One

Read more

2 years ago · 39 likes · 42 comments · Jenovia 🕸️

 Enjoying the weather on a summer afternoon

Terry Nguyen of jotted down her thoughts while at Central Park on what she described as “the most perfect July afternoon (windy, sunny with a light cloud cover, low humidity).” She detailed her weekend recommendations, including ’s collection of stories Because They Wanted To.

Vague Blue

Weekender 03: Caked up

Happy Friday! I’m writing this in Central Park, on what might be the most perfect July afternoon (windy, sunny with a light cloud cover, low humidity). If you’re in New York right now, go outside. Other recommendations for the weekend: a Mary Gaitskill essay and story collection…

Read more

2 years ago · 23 likes · 4 comments · terry nguyen

Lying in bed after a back injury 

Will Watson of threw out his back but still managed to post on Substack directly from his bed, sharing a gluten-free banana loaf recipe.

Academy of Self Help

The Fear Of Being Seen & Our Favorite Things

Hey again! If you missed it, earlier this week I released a wonderful interview with Dr. Deniz Ahmadinia in which we discuss the fear of being seen, setting boundaries with people we love, and why it can be so tough to be the cycle breaker in your family…

Read more

2 years ago · 2 likes · 3 comments · Will Watson

Tell us in the comments: Now that the mobile editor is available on Android, where are you most excited to post from? And if you’ve already posted from the app on iOS, what’s the most interesting place you’ve published from?

Leave a comment

Today, Patreon is in the unenviable position of explaining to creators that it must implement Apple’s in-app purchases—along with Apple’s 30% fee—for its app. This means creators will either have to pass on the cost to their subscribers or eat it themselves. Some creators are understandably unhappy about these changes and have been letting Patreon hear about it, in some cases even threatening to leave the platform. 

It’s a tough situation. We’re great admirers of Patreon, which we view as a historically significant company for helping kickstart the creator economy. It normalized the idea that people will happily pay creators and artists directly for their work online. So we feel for the company, which has served its creators well over many years. We know that Patreon and CEO Jack Conte hate to do anything that might upset creators. 

Of course, we also feel for the creators affected by these changes. There are already too many barriers to making a living as a creator. Making any money at all off your creativity is hard, let alone making a living. And this new tax, albeit limited to purchases made in the Patreon app, is a big one. 

But we also don’t think that Apple should be wholly blamed. This unfortunate situation, in which creators ultimately bear the biggest costs, is a structural issue rooted in how the commercial internet has evolved (or not) over the past couple of decades. 

Apple’s in-app purchase system is powerful. It makes online purchases trivially easy, maximizing the flow of dollars from consumers to vendors and keeping both parties happy. It’s a low-friction experience, which can make a big difference in how much a creator earns from their effort. It’s also trustworthy, stable, and private. It has global reach, so consumers can make purchases from almost any country in the world, and it simplifies less visible but important details like settling taxes. And that’s to say nothing of the massive distribution power that app makers get from being in the App Store. 

But creators aren’t Apple’s traditional customers. They’re not app makers or game developers. They don’t actually have a piece of real estate in the App Store. They instead find their distribution through media platforms, including the likes of Patreon and Substack. It might feel weird for someone who publishes a podcast through Patreon, or a publication through Substack, to receive the same treatment from Apple as Netflix. 

The emergence of the creator economy presents an interesting challenge and opportunity for Apple, and some delicate questions for Patreon and Substack. We want creators and subscribers to benefit from the power of Apple’s in-app purchases. In fact, at Substack we have been working with Apple to bring in-app purchases into our app, because we believe that anything that reduces the friction of a subscription is great for creators. We’re doing everything in our power to make the implementation of in-app purchases as creator-friendly as possible. 

How much is the ease of in-app purchases worth to creators? It’s a salient question. We’ve found that creators are comfortable with sharing 10% of their revenue for Substack’s publishing and growth tools. How much might they be willing to share to unlock more revenue from the simplicity of one-tap payments, to know subscribers will feel confident and safe sharing their payment information, and to be able to access potential subscribers from almost anywhere in the world? For Apple’s existing customers, that answer is between 15% and 30%. At first blush, that price seems high. But we have firsthand experience of seeing the potential that can be unlocked when a company gets its model and execution right—we’re grateful for our relationship with Stripe for similar reasons. 

We don’t presume to know what’s justified in this situation. We’d rather work closely with Apple—and all kinds of other stakeholders and partners—to figure out how the commercial internet’s fundamental tools should evolve as the internet itself changes from an era dominated by aggregators (Facebook, Netflix, Spotify) to one that must also accommodate direct relationships between consumers and creators. 

We’re moving out of the era of platforms owning people and into an era of people owning platforms—an era in which creators will rightfully demand more ownership, and more say over their relationships with their communities. It’s the age of the sovereign creator. There is tremendous potential to develop tools that enable that sense of ownership, and to accelerate and amplify creators’ success. Apple has a huge role to play in that future, and so does Substack. 

And so do you. We’re very open to hearing from the Substack community as we embark on this work. Please share your feedback in the comments below. We’re listening.

Last month, the analyst Ben Thompson quietly marked a milestone: 10 years since he turned on paid subscriptions for his one-man publication, Stratechery.

That milestone has significance to Substack for two reasons. 

The first is that the business model that Ben devised for Stratechery inspired the earliest version of Substack. At that time, in 2017, Ben would publish one free weekly article on stratechery.com and then offer readers three more posts a week by email if they subscribed for $100 a year or $10 a month. He accepted no advertising and considered his subscribers his customers. Ben was clearly very successful with that model—Substack CEO Chris Best and I calculated that he was making a seven-figure income from a spare bedroom in his Taipei apartment—and frequently said that more writers should try it. We wondered why more didn’t. 

One of the common excuses at the time was that Ben was writing about the technology industry for investors and executives who, of course, wouldn’t think twice about paying to subscribe to a newsletter but that his approach wouldn’t work for other areas. That didn’t sound right to us. Why would this model work for tech but not, say, finance? Or even politics? People were getting used to paying for content online—Netflix and Spotify were well established, Patreon was on the rise—and niche expertise was becoming increasingly valuable in a world where, thanks to social media, we were being flooded with cheap pabulum.

We guessed that perhaps the biggest reason more writers didn’t do what Ben was doing was just that it was hard. Ben had strapped together various tools, like WordPress, Mailchimp, and Memberful, to constitute Stratechery’s “stack”—we counted 19 tools in total—and it took a lot of work to make them play well together. We wondered what would happen if we made it one-click easy for any writer to try the Stratechery model for themselves. What if a writer could go to a web page, type into a box, click “publish,” and then have money from their readers magically appear in their bank account? 

In October 2017, we tested the idea with my friend , who had been publishing a free newsletter about China, Sinocism, for about five years. On the day Bill went live with paid subscriptions on this new thing called Substack, he reached six figures in revenue. The idea worked. 

hasn’t stopped growing since, and tens of thousands of other writers have followed. Seven years on, there are now more than 3 million paid subscriptions to Substack publications. 

The age of the “sovereign writer,” as Ben would later describe it, had begun. 

Making the internet work for creators 

The second reason why Ben’s milestone is significant is that he, better than anyone else, has identified and articulated the force that has overwhelmingly shaped online media over the past decade: Aggregation Theory.

Ben’s theory describes how and why a few major platforms have come to dominate the flow of information and entertainment—and the associated economies—online. 

An aggregator like Facebook or Airbnb brings all the relevant goods, services, or information that a consumer might seek into one place, and it gathers all the consumers there, too. Netflix is a one-stop shop for film and television. YouTube is a one-stop shop for user-generated video. Uber is a one-stop shop for car rides. These aggregators amass attention and then monetize accordingly. In online media, the money has come mostly through advertising (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok) and platform subscriptions (Spotify, Netflix, YouTube Premium). Crucially, the aggregators own the relationships with the users, even if those users primarily show up because they care most about the people who produce something of value within the aggregator’s system. 

There are some immense advantages for creators in these kinds of systems. Since the aggregators have brought everyone to one place, creators have the chance to reach people in huge numbers, and in many cases—especially when their products are digital—they don’t have to pay for distribution. You can publish a photo on Instagram and, if the algorithm’s winds blow just right, within minutes it can reach millions of people around the world. 

But there are also some pretty serious disadvantages. By definition, there can be only so many aggregators—only so many Instagrams, or Amazons, or TikToks. As they grow, the aggregators that rise to the top become so successful that they ultimately squeeze out competition. Because of that enormous distribution power, the vast majority of new internet businesses must play by the aggregators’ rules, which includes accepting that the aggregators control the relationships with the customers. 

This dynamic also makes those businesses extremely vulnerable to any changes or priority shifts enacted by the ruling bodies. One famous example of this uncomfortable dependency is BuzzFeed, which rose to prominence through its savvy use of Facebook in the early 2010s but has been in decline ever since the social network decided to deprioritize news. By the same token, MrBeast is a giant YouTube success story, but even he remains subject to any C-suite decisions that might result in the down-ranking or demonetization of certain types of content that, for whatever reason, YouTube might deem less desirable in a given moment. Everyday creators are also affected. The dominant feeds are becoming more and more like TikTok, which prioritizes compelling “For You” content over relationships between creators and their followers. A large Instagram following doesn’t mean what it once did. 

The Aggregation Era has thus birthed significant new economies, but it has also given the individuals and small teams who rule these platforms almost godlike powers. Today, for good or ill, the fate of the vast majority of the world’s creators rests in the hands of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, and the Chinese Communist Party.

But that simple model that Ben came up with for his one-man publication is a crack in the dam. We are now seeing the beginning of an economic and technological shift that will reshape the media economy. Writers and creators are branching out from old institutions and building new online properties where they are in charge. ​​These creators have found not only more freedom and autonomy but also a stable income. The top writers on Substack earn millions of dollars a year.

This shift has the potential to correct a power imbalance that, in the internet’s primitive commercial era, has delivered tremendous benefits to platform owners while leaving creators to hustle, struggle, and pray for scraps. This shift is happening not because of a smarter algorithm, the arrival of a more callous kingpin, or some kind of government intervention—it’s happening because of the rising demand that creators must have ownership of their audiences. 

If you control your relationship with your audience and can reach them directly, then a fickle autocrat can’t nuke your work with the tap of a button. Even better: if that audience is paying you directly, then you don’t have to cross your fingers and hope that the advertising market happens to be enjoying fair weather, or that a particular corporation’s McKinsey-driven marketing priorities have determined that it is desirable to attach its name to yours this quarter. You can make money from subscriptions without needing to amass a mammoth or perfectly targeted, ad-friendly audience, and without needing to answer a single sales email. The way to grow your subscription revenue is the same way you produce your best work: by spending almost all your time focusing on the work itself. 

I spend a lot of time telling people that Substack’s real product is its business model. It is a model that is, by careful design, friendly to creators. On Substack, the creators own their relationship with their audience—captured in a mailing list that they control—and all their content, which they can export anytime they want. The creator holds onto the vast majority of the financial value generated on the platform: Substack gets 10%, and the creator gets 90%. We only make money when they make money. Imagine how much money creators could have made in the past couple of decades if the work they did on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok resulted in their getting 90% of the advertising revenue that those platforms instead keep for themselves. 

This deal also puts the onus on the platform. To survive as a business, Substack must put itself in service of creators; we must keep proving our value to them. Because if we don’t? They can simply pack up and leave, in search of a better deal elsewhere. Indeed, to some business analysts (including, ironically, Ben Thompson), this approach leaves Substack too vulnerable to losing creators. What this critique misses, however, is that there are now enough examples of creators enjoying financial success and true independence for others to feel more comfortable demanding control. They don’t want to be stuck in a digital Hotel California, where they can log in anytime they like but never leave. For a platform of the post-Web 2.0 era to succeed, it will need to keep creators’ trust by guaranteeing their ownership. It’s the way things should be. Platforms should not own people; people should own platforms. 

The challenge, or opportunity, for companies like Substack is to figure out how to help creators reach new audiences and grow without having to compromise on ownership. The aggregators of the early internet unlocked great power for creators through building central gathering places. We are doing the same with the Substack app and features—like Recommendations and Notes—that facilitate cross-promotion, cross-pollination, and discovery while keeping creators in control. Today, the Substack network accounts for more than 25% of all paid subscriptions on the platform—the kind of free growth that we hope makes 10% feel like a bargain. 

This new model takes what we have learned from the Aggregation Era and finds a way to blend it with the independence enjoyed by the “sovereign writer”—or, to be appropriately expansive, let’s call it “sovereign creator.” It is, I believe, the natural model of the internet, taking advantage of the web’s massive scale and interconnectivity and merging it with the exhilarating power of true ownership. 

The sovereign creators will take their best work and most valuable audiences to places like Substack, even if they continue to use the aggregators for shallower engagement with mass audiences. In effect, the likes of Facebook and TikTok will become marketing channels for creators, who will consider those platforms to be valuable only for as long as they continue to do that job well. This arrangement is a key inversion of the prevailing power relationship: the internet starts working for creators rather than the other way around. 

Ben hasn’t written much about the sovereign creator, but I hope he and others will dive deeper. He is, after all, one of the pioneers of the form. Over the course of the past decade, he has shown how Aggregation Theory has characterized and ruled this era of the internet. But the next decade will be about taking the lessons from that era and applying them to the realm of the sovereign creator. The companies and technologies that best serve those creators will be the ones that facilitate the best relationships, the best content, and the best communities on the internet. 

Anything that takes the power and wealth that was previously concentrated in the hands of a few and distributes it instead to millions of the world’s most creative minds is a step forward for society. My bet is that the Sovereign Creator Era will be better than the Aggregation Era—not just for creators but for everyone. 

Get more from Substack Writers in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Today, we’re excited to open applications for Substack Creator Studio, a fellowship for the next wave of video stars to turn their TikTok channels into Substack shows and communities. This is an opportunity for video-native creators who want a more direct, intimate relationship with their audience and to make money from subscriptions. 

We’ll select 10 fellows who cover a wide range of subjects and give them access to world-class strategic support and promotion. We’re thrilled to partner with Adam Faze and the team at Gymnasium, the short-form television studio behind the hit show Boy Room, as part of this program. Each creator will receive consulting and production support from the Gymnasium team, which has a track record of developing innovative, original series that have been watched more than 250 million times. On top of that, these 10 winners will get white-glove technical support during their launch process, a robust marketing commitment, and a program-culminating event to celebrate their work. 

The deadline to apply is May 17. Find out more with our FAQs here, or head straight to the application form: 

Apply

Substack is evolving into video and beyond, because the people who want to benefit from this model are pushing us forward. 

Substack will always remain the destination for the internet’s best writing. The Substack model—where writers have a direct relationship with subscribers, while maintaining ownership of their work and mailing list—has proved to be a boon for independent writers, who make up the backbone of this platform. But we’ve also seen this model work well for audio. While the ad-based podcast industry fell into disarray, the secret got out that Substack is a thriving alternative for audio shows and their communities.

Now the best video creators are exploring how they can build their home on Substack, too. As instability hits their medium, they’re looking for a reliable platform where they can grow a business and have complete ownership over their work. 

We’re not introducing this fellowship because of panic over a TikTok bill or ever-changing algorithms. This is about helping creators get ownership, money, and peace of mind. While they are extremely powerful for building audiences, ad-based platforms—controlled by a central authority that determines the viewer experience and how creators make a living—are unreliable partners. They can’t provide a true home for creators; they merely offer rentals with unfriendly leases. At the same time, their business models can’t deliver the stability and predictability that creators need to produce their best work. It is hard enough for creators to get by without having to worry about constant fluctuations in viewership and brand partnership revenue.

“I’ve been a content creator on TikTok and Instagram for four years now. It’s been amazing building an audience but at times difficult to monetize,” says , who has more than 2 million followers across those channels and runs a food Substack with thousands of paid subscribers. “Revenue ebbs and flows with the economy and brands’ budgets, which makes it harder to reinvest in my content and scale long-term. But Substack has fixed the main problems that full-time creators face. It’s given me consistent income the way a W-2 job would, and allows me to connect directly with all of my followers via email. It’s become the first app I reach for in the morning.”

Substack is already proving to be a stable place to start a video- and community-based subscription site. Here, can launch and build a news organization where he isn’t censored or throttled. of can increase his revenue by 60% in five months through insightful football breakdowns behind video paywalls. Michelin-starred chef can create stunning cooking demos with premium recipes.

Launch your show

“Even though I just launched my Substack a month ago, it’s already clear that the possibilities are endless in terms of income and growth with my community,” says , who has more than 650,000 followers on TikTok and runs . “After being active nearly every day on TikTok and Instagram for two years, I am more excited and thoughtful about posting on Substack. And that’s because I feel like it’s my own slice of the internet where I can cultivate my community in a more meaningful way, while simultaneously paving a path for financial freedom—a goal for any creator and business.”

Over the past few months, we’ve rolled out new product features to accelerate this push at Substack: next-level recommendations, robust Chat, essential upgrades for shows, beautiful themes, DMs, and improved search. These tools help every kind of creator grow, while providing a better experience for the subscribers who pay them for their work. 

We’re developing all these features for creators with the same goal in mind: Build a bigger, better version of what you do, right here on Substack. Make money more reliably, and have a better time doing it. 

Apply here

The past two decades of social media have shown that conversation is the most powerful driver of online discovery. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram in particular have proved that they can bring attention to stories, video, and audio at a scale never seen before.

A year ago, we introduced our own place for online conversation: Substack Notes. For the first time, people in Substack had a place where they could “snack” on content and discover, discuss, and share great works and writers from around the ecosystem. 

In the past 30 days, Notes has generated more than 3,000 paid subscriptions and 230,000 free subscriptions for writers and creators on Substack. 

Individual notes now have the power to send publishers thousands of dollars in paid subscriptions. One note on its own—an 11-word post announcing a new research report—resulted in $8,000 worth of subscriptions. Another—a one-paragraph TL;DR that introduced a news story about political espionage—drove more than 50 paid subscriptions. A note by celebrating the recent launch of Zeteo sent ’s new venture close to $2,000 in subscriptions. 

There’s so much more to come. Today, we’re making two important additions to Notes. 

We want to help Substack writers’ work travel widely across the web, so we’re making it possible for anyone to embed notes on external web pages—for example, as part of a news story. To find a note’s embed code, you click on the three-dot menu in the top right corner and select “Embed note.” We hope that these external embeds will help writers’ notes get more reach and recognition outside of the Substack network. 

Learn more: How do I embed Substack posts or notes on a website?

Meanwhile, as more writers and creators use Substack’s video tools and start new shows on the platform, we’re making it easier for them to share their creative work on Notes, too. Beginning today, you can post videos directly to Notes in the Substack app and on the web. We’re excited to see more movement and sound in the Notes feed as people explore possibilities beyond images and text. To post a video to Notes, you can select a file from your phone’s camera roll or your desktop—or just open the camera to record a video directly. 

We are making these investments in Notes because we think that discovery powered by online conversation is critical for writers and creators but at risk of disappearing. 

Social media is increasingly at odds with the rest of the media ecosystem. Once upon a time, social media was symbiotic with traditional media. The two systems fed each other: social networks pushed traffic to the media, and the media provided content for social networks. Unfortunately for traditional media, the two systems relied on the same business model: advertising. In a zero-sum competition for ad dollars, traditional media didn’t stand a chance. Social media’s success has now been corroding the traditional media business for more than a decade. 

As ad-based social media platforms have grown, they have increasingly turned away from links to outside media sources, which makes them ever more insular. These companies want people to spend as much time as possible glued to their feeds so that more ads may be put in front of them. Or, as Elon Musk himself has put it: “The algorithm is trying to maximize what is most interesting to you, based on time spent on X.” That’s bad news for writers, creators, and publishers, because their links then get treated as irrelevant, or even harmful, to the social media companies’ bottom line. It’s also the reason that X is attempting to replicate the features that Substack offers, and it’s why Musk has suppressed Substack’s links on his platform. 

Substack serves as a home for both traditional and social media, encompassing the publishing and the conversation. Notes offers a new place on the internet where posts can go viral—as seen in the poet ’s piece in praise of crying, for example, and ’s appeal to bring back dance-floor make-outs—and where readers are only a click away from subscribing. 

Notes is especially valuable for people who don’t have large pre-existing audiences, since it allows them to collaborate with other writers and connect with new communities. Writers such as , , and have dramatically grown their mailing lists through their savvy use of Notes. 

Notes is a growth machine for writers and creators built right into the place where they also publish their work. What’s more, they get real ownership. They own their mailing lists and their content, and they can take it all with them at any time. And, in contrast to traditional social media, the vast majority of the revenue generated on the platform goes directly into their bank accounts. 

Notes blends the fun and immediacy of social media with the creator-friendliness of the Substack model. While other platforms tune their algorithms to maximize ad revenue, we tune the Notes algorithm to maximize value for audiences and money for creators. This machine becomes only more powerful when it operates alongside Substack’s other growth features, including Recommendations, Explore pages, and Boost, which handles subscriber conversion and retention without writers having to lift a finger. Today, the Substack network drives more than 50% of all subscriptions on the platform and 25% of paid subscriptions. 

We will continue to pour our efforts into making Notes an enjoyable and edifying place to hang out, packed with smart conversations and a different social dynamic than the ones offered by other platforms. It’s the way the internet should be.

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At the tail end of 2021, I became Substack’s first U.K. hire. My remit: to help British writers and creators find an exciting new home on Substack.

Since then, some of Britain’s most revered writers and culture makers have found their way to Substack: Stephen Fry, author Elif Shafak, journalist India Knight, and superstar philosopher Slavoj Zizek, to name just a few. But also—and this is the bit that especially excites me—thousands of lesser-known names showed up, putting their creative hearts on the line and in the process finding a new global audience.

Connecting culture makers across the world is something we’ve been thinking about a lot at Substack. Over the past year or so, for example, we have been overwhelmed by the number of creators connecting both on and off the platform through Substack meetups. We have seen writers swapping tales and celebrating their successes at bars in Amsterdam, bookstores in London and Berlin, cafes in Paris, and pubs in Dublin. Creativity can be a lonely gig—finding a tribe to celebrate and support you is a magical thing. 

Which is why, no matter where you are in the world, we want to make connecting with others on Substack easier. Our new world map allows readers and writers to find out which publications are currently being enjoyed and shared across the globe. Within a few seconds, you can now discover what’s being widely read across the Substack network in the UAE or Mexico at any given moment. This will not only make discovering writers and creators in other territories easier (and a lot of fun, by the way) but will help publishers on Substack to grow audiences far beyond their home turf. After all, great writing and original ideas should never be limited by geography.

Explore Substacks around the world

Many writers are already proving that the appetite for their work travels well beyond their home borders. Take New Zealand’s Bernard Hickey; the U.K.’s David Aaronovitch; Kana Chan, who writes about life in rural Japan (she is both a writer and a farmer), and Chinese musician Wu Fei, who treats her Substack readers to an original piece of music every single day. This isn’t just a way to get more exposure for creators; we’re actively investing in helping all publishers grow in these markets, whether they’re writing about food, sports, local politics, fashion, or anything else. 

In Germany, former editor and onetime head of editorial for Netflix DACH has joined us as the new Head of Partnerships for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Andreas will help writers and creators build their own creative channels on Substack, whether that’s through the written word, video, or podcasts. There are already many exciting names in this region doing exactly that, such as Suse Kaloff, Sebastian Meineck, and Philipp Mattheis, and we are excited for Andreas to build on that momentum by bringing the country’s best and most promising voices to the platform and helping them succeed.

In France, —who has a storied background in book publishing and fashion—will help fan the growing appetite for writers and style creators joining Substack in her home country, including fashion creator Mathilde Lacombe, food writer Simon Auscher, and the team behind the best-selling personal finance Substack Snowball.

And journalist and author will be helping Australian writers and creatives make Substack a home for their work. There, as in all of these regions, we’ll be building on the vibrant and growing Substack network and organic momentum we already have, with names such as media guru Tim Burrowes, writer and broadcaster Clementine Ford, and the team behind the New Yorker–style Melbourne publication The Paris End. 

To make sure all of these writers and creators in new regions do well, we’ve introduced some important global tools. We have new payment methods available for readers in Europe, and readers can pay in any of 13 local currencies. Writers can now choose from five other languages in which to be read: French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. 

To help you get to know some of our new international team members, we will be running a series of masterclasses beginning on March 25 (details below). These are introductory classes to the platform that share some best practices and strategies for success—so if you or someone you know are thinking about starting a Substack, feel free to come along.

Of course, this is just the beginning of our international work. As Substack continues to grow, we hope you and the connections you make here will continue to grow too.

Substack masterclass timetable

Each masterclass will be one hour long. To take part, please sign up below and, if you don’t have a Substack already, please follow the link to sign up before the course. You will be under no obligation to use the one created long-term, but it will help with understanding the content each tutor will be going through.

MARCH 27: 6-7 P.M. CET
An Introduction to Substack with Head of Partnerships for DACH region Andreas Laux (please note: this masterclass will be in German). Eine Einführung in Substack, sein Erlösmodell und die verschiedenen Wachstumsstrategien durch Andreas Laux, Head of Partnerships DACH (diese Veranstaltung wird auf deutsch gehalten)

Sign up

MARCH 28: 6:30-7:30 P.M. AEDT 
An introduction to Substack in Australia with Head of Partnerships for U.K. and Europe, Farrah Storr

Sign up

APRIL 3RD: 6-7PM BST
An Introduction to Substack with Head of Partnerships U.K. and Europe Farrah Storr

Sign up

APRIL 4: 7-8pm. CET 
An Introduction to Substack with Marissa Cox, Partnerships Associate for France (please note: this masterclass will be in French). Une introduction à Substack avec Marissa Cox, responsable des partenariats en France (veuillez noter que cette masterclass sera en français)

Sign up

There’s a billboard on one of the main streets in San Francisco that seems almost designed to trigger creative people. It’s advertising an AI startup that has raised more than $126 million in venture funding to provide automated writing tools to large companies. “Empower people. Transform work,” reads its tagline. But it’s the name of the company that really rankles.

Writer.

Many writers are anxious about how their lives and work will be affected as artificial intelligence becomes more powerful. Companies like Writer offer tools to instantly generate materials that might otherwise have been created by humans. Some news organizations have already started publishing automatically generated stories, even as they lay off writers and editors. With a one-sentence prompt and 20 seconds of thought, one can now get ChatGPT to turn out an essay that rivals something an experienced writer might have taken days to produce.   

Whether you’re for or against this development ultimately doesn’t matter. It’s happening. The AI hype cycle may go through some ups and downs, but the new epoch has unquestionably begun. These technologies are already real, effective, and proven, which makes this particular technomania different from other hype cycles.

Given this set of conditions, writers—and all other culture makers whose livelihoods will in some way be touched by AI—are entitled to feel worried and perhaps even a little pissed. After all, these new machines are trained on a vast corpus of work produced by humans. And those humans, most of whom have never found a way to turn their art into riches, aren’t getting compensated along the way.

To many, this revolution might feel like the super-expression of a trend that has been commoditizing the work of writers and artists for decades. First, Google and Facebook broke the business models that once supported their work. Then social media turned everyone into content drones. Now here come the mega-robots to vaporize everything writers ever stood for. And of course the techies will make billions, while writers will get less than scraps. 

Imagine how humiliating it might feel, then, for one of those opportunists to take the name Writer. 

But now is when we tell you that we don’t think this will be bad for culture makers. In fact, it will be very good. While AI will take over the rote and the replaceable, it will give superpowers to people doing original work, while at the same time increasing the value of that work. 

When it comes to Substack, we have focused on using the internet’s powers to serve, rather than subsume, writers. There’s nothing in the AI revolution that suggests we will have to change this approach. From image generation and audio transcription tools we’ve already built, to a future where a single writer can make a feature film, and beyond, we will focus on harnessing the power of these tools for human users. If the computer is a bicycle for the mind, AI will be a jumbo jet.

The cost of “content creation” will be driven to almost zero. But content isn’t culture. 

This same surge in AI-led content production will simultaneously fuel a tremendous need for cultural connection: real humans in communion with one another. These relationships help us make sense of the world, and to know where to direct our attention. Their value will dramatically increase. Culture will become the most important and fastest-growing slice of our global domestic product. 

Humanity has seen a story like this before. Prior to the industrial revolution, more than two-thirds of a country’s labor force had to work in agriculture to be able to feed its entire population. Since the automation of agriculture, that share has fallen to less than 5%. And yet we have abundant food and more jobs to do than ever. Today, many people have the kind of work and prosperity that their great-grandparents could only have imagined.

No matter how advanced AI gets, there will be unceasing demand for human connection. We will want to show each other how we feel as people. We’ll tire of getting what we want, and instead yearn to figure out together what we should want. We will share our hearts and compare our scars. We will long for the sound of each other’s voices, and to shape our own and each other’s stories, in wild and wonderful new ways. 

AI will never be able to replace the dynamic that is most central to Substack: human-to-human relationships. New robots may rise and try to claim the mantles of writers and other culture makers, but none can seriously lay claim to what is most important about these people and groups—the human connections they are built on. That’s why we are making Substack the place for trusted, valuable relationships between thinking, breathing, feeling people. 

A hot new startup that is riding the revolution might call itself Writer, but it will never have the writer’s heart. And that is where the opportunity of the next century is to be found.

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The Substack writer community has been wowing us for years. You show up week in and week out for one another, sharing insights, celebrating wins, and answering questions. To date, most of these connections have happened online. But in the past few months, writers have gathered in person in cities from Paris to Los Angeles. When writers fill a room, there is a palpable energy. More feels possible. 

However, finding writers in your neighborhoods, city, and region can be difficult. That’s where our team can help. Today, we’re excited to introduce a new Substack meetup program designed to fuel writer get-togethers around the world.

Although these gatherings feel magical, they don’t come together by magic. We need writer hosts to raise their hand to realize them. If you’re keen to meet other writers in your area and interested in hosting a meetup, please tell us about yourself below. 

Become a host

Hear from a host:

is a photographer and curator based in Amsterdam. He writes Process, a weekly newsletter about photography and finding your creative voice. We asked him about the goals he is working toward for his Substack and his plans for the first Amsterdam meetup he is hosting with on October 18.

What was your goal when you started on Substack? 

When I first started on Substack, it was a pre-pandemic era and I was a working photographer with a busy schedule. I felt something was missing. Coming from a family of teachers, I’ve always had a passion for sharing the lessons learned, and I wanted a platform where I could share more deeply.

Social media didn’t seem like the right fit. I wanted a dedicated space where I could share my work, experiences, and lessons, and, most importantly, inspire others to tell meaningful stories through photography.

Through my Substack, I wanted to provide a consistent weekly presence that showcased my work, shared my processes, and encouraged others by essentially saying, “You can do this too! Give it a try!”

What stands out to you about the Substack writer community? 

It’s just so dang generous and supportive! It’s not crabs-in-a-barrel in any way, which has been such a nice surprise. People are not shy about sharing best practices, neither proactively or when asked.

Why are you hosting the first Amsterdam writer meetup? 

Writing and photography can be quite solitary, and we all need community to keep us going. As creative freelancers, we don’t have that IRL office watercooler, where we can vent and commiserate and laugh and support. 

What do you think makes Amsterdam uniquely suited to a writer community?

Something that Amsterdam does really well is create spaces for creative folks to do their thing. There is a long-standing squatting culture, which led to a reactionary anti-squatting movement, which in turn allows creatives to temporarily use empty spaces legally. Sometimes that might mean a school building that is not currently in use being turned into temporary artist studios until the city gets around to re-assigning the building for their own use. Having a third space where people can gather is such a boon to the idea of building community. It’s like there’s all these clubhouse opportunities around.

If you are in Amsterdam on October 18, join Wesley at the writer meetup. RSVP

Keep your eye on in the Substack app to learn about meetups hosted in your city. If you want to host a meetup, learn more and apply to be a host.

Become a host

Substack writers are meeting up around the world to celebrate wins, swap stories, and support one another on their journey.

Writer meetups take a variety of shapes, and we encourage writers to bring creativity to how they get together. Most commonly, we’ve seen writers getting together for informal drinks at local cafes, bars, and parks. While most gatherings are in person, virtual meetups offer the opportunity for writers to connect across categories, identity groups, regions, and more.

You don’t need our permission to host a meetup; you can do so at any time. In this guide, we’ll help you host your first meetup, step by step.

A guide to hosting

Although meeting fellow writers can feel magical, it doesn’t come together by magic. Finding a space that accommodates your group, sending an invite that sets the tone for the event, and welcoming your fellow writers thoughtfully are little touches that help realize the magic. Below we’ll guide you in the making of a great writer meetup, step by step.  

Dream up what you’ll do together

The best meetups happen around a shared activity. Sometimes the activity is one that’s impossible to do alone. Other times it’s one that’s fine solo but 10 times better when experienced with others. 

If you are just getting started, keep it simple, like a discussion prompt over drinks. You could even use the first meetup to discuss how you want to spend your time together in the future. 

If you have a lot of creative energy around getting together, run with it. Maybe you want to host an open mic or a book swap. Get creative!

Get inspired: Our friends at People & Company share resources on doing something together

Pick a location

Here are three qualities of a great meetup location: 

• Central: Pick somewhere that has parking or is accessible from public transportation.

• Flexible: Parks and libraries are great options for hosting that are usually no-cost. Bars, cafes, bookstores, restaurants, or co-working spaces are other spaces worth exploring. Try working with a venue that allows you to block off a small area or reserve a big table with no charge. At off-times for businesses, they are often excited by groups coming in. Some places may have a minimum spend if you bring a group, but ideally you don’t have to put down a deposit or pay a fee to use the space. 

• Vibes: Where do you like to hang out? It’s likely the people you are gathering will be excited to hang out there too! 

It’s helpful to have a location on your invite, but if you end up having more people RSVP than the space can accommodate, you can always pivot. You might even consider putting out the invite with just the city or neighborhood location and then finding a venue based on interest. 

Virtual is always an option too. Zoom or Google meetups allow you to meet with anyone, anywhere, with ease. Check out Alexa Kutler’s virtual event guide for extra Zoom tips and tricks. 

Create an invite

The meetup starts with the invitation. It sets the tone for who shows up and why. While it is important to clearly state the date, time, and location of the meetup, it’s even more important to help people imagine who will show up and how you will spend your time together. 

Put your invite together on an event landing page you can share with others, and collect their email addresses for communication leading up to the event. We recommend Lu.ma, a free tool. Some other tools you might consider: Partiful, Paperless Post, Eventbrite, or Facebook Events.

Watch: Setting up a Lu.ma event

Resource: Make a copy of our event page art using Canva.

Spread the word

Now it’s time to let people know!

• Share your meetup via Notes. Be sure to tag @Substack Writers so that we see it and can help restack it.

• Share it directly with writers you know. A personal note, whether it’s over email, text, or DMs, goes a long way. Don’t be shy about reaching out to writers you don’t know yet. Do a quick search for your city on Substack—see who is writing about the city or has mentioned it in their profile.

• Share it on the socials. You never know who in your wider network may be looking for the type of meetup you are hosting.

One week before you meet

Here’s a checklist for the week leading up to your meetup.

• Remind your guests. Some event tools have built-in reminders, and most allow you to send a blast to everyone who has RSVP’d. If you choose to use Lu.ma, these emails are automatically scheduled the day before and the day of the event. Update the emails to include anything guests should bring and any relevant information about how to find you. 

• Get to know who will be in attendance. Look through your RSVP list so you know who is coming and can offer them a warm welcome.

• Make sure people can find you. Consider printing a sign that displays the name of your meetup that you can place outside the venue or wherever you’re hosting.

Resource: Download our poster template.

During the meetup

Here’s a checklist for your time at the event. 

• Check in with the venue. Make sure someone on the staff knows who you are so that when guests arrive, they can point them in the right direction.

• Welcome guests. Walking into a room of strangers can be overwhelming. As people arrive, and before the main activity of your meetup starts, give people something to do. Name tags and a discussion prompt can help break the ice before the main event. If you are co-hosting, have someone take the lead in standing at the door so everyone is greeted when they enter the space. 

• Make a moment. If you are keeping the meetup casual, with mostly mingling and discussion, take a moment at the beginning to welcome everyone as a group. Suggest a prompt for people to use to start their conversations. At the end, thank everyone for coming and let them know what they can expect going forward. 

• Take photos! If you plan to host again, having photos can help market the next meetup. Plus, they are great keepsakes for attendees. 

Above all, have fun! 

Follow up

Send a thank-you note to all who came out. Consider including information about everyone who attended, like a link to their Substack profile, so people can keep in touch. Attach any photos from the event or links to relevant things you talked about. 

And, post about it on Notes. Tag so we can share it, and help get out the word to more writer for next time.

Keep it going

Real community happens when you keep getting together. If you enjoyed meeting up, put a date on the calendar to do it again! Pass the torch and invite a guest to host the next one.

In between meetups, consider setting up a space to continue the conversation online. Keep it simple, with an email thread or a text message group. Formalize the channel with a private Substack publication with Chat enabled for all subscribers. 

Disclaimer

Substack does not exercise control over, or have responsibility for, the actions of any individuals at these gatherings. Substack is not responsible for any loss, damage, or injury that may be sustained by any participant or any property belonging to participants, attendees at any meetup, or of any business or venue where the meetup may be held.

Sometimes it can feel like the online spaces you spend time in are working against you, pushing you toward things that their owners value instead of what you value—and harnessing your energy to fuel the very things you hate. Like me, you probably know the feeling of spending too much time gorging on digital junk food, wasting precious moments of your life that you can’t get back. Maybe you’ve even felt yourself becoming someone other than who you want to be. Angrier. More distracted. More distant from human connection. 

In these states, it’s tempting to blame “the algorithms”—and plenty of people do. (In fact, we ourselves have at times been guilty of muddying the waters.) But algorithms in themselves are neither good nor bad. They’re just technology. The root problem lies in the master that the algorithms are serving. 

Who is that master? Well, another sophisticated take you might hear about social media algorithms is that the master they are serving is the advertiser. You’re not the customer; you’re the product. But while it’s true that the legacy social platforms are funded by ads and have built huge businesses by harvesting your attention and selling slices of it as a commodity, that’s not really the whole story. After all, these platforms still have to serve their users. To capture your attention, they must win an incredibly competitive game by serving you the content that gets you to click, watch, and keep scrolling, minute after minute. 

Ultimately, the big bad enemy that the legacy platforms’ algorithms are serving is … us. The algorithms have been studying us, and they know what we want. They serve our desires with ruthless intent. 

The problem is that the version of us that they serve is the basest version of ourselves. They skip past our values, aspirations, and even our conscious thought, and go straight to pressing the buttons in our lizard brain. Just as with fast food, or in a casino, or taking a drag of a cigarette, we are of course still making a choice—and it can even be an enjoyable one. But if you have higher aspirations for yourself, if you want to feed your mind with something better, you probably want an algorithm that plays by different rules. 

Can you imagine how your view of the world might change if you spent your time online in a place optimized for reading what you care most about, rather than just endless scrolling? What would it feel like to check a feed that’s trying to catch you up on what you deeply value rather than keeping you feeling anxious, angry, and alone? 

We intend to find out. 

On Substack, tens of millions of people already connect directly with writers and creators in an online universe of amazing stories and ideas that’s based on a different set of rules from legacy social media. Increasingly, people are finding new writers and creators to fall in love with in this universe, driving growth that previously had to come from elsewhere. Some of the brightest lights in our culture, both established and new, find the freedom to do the work they believe in here—and they’re starting to find each other, too.

This is rare magic, and we feel an intense responsibility to help it reach its potential. You’ll see a manifestation of these efforts very soon in a new version of the Substack app—a personal portal into the Substack universe—and in improvements we are making across the platform. You can expect these improvements to support discovery across the Substack network, while maintaining the direct relationship between readers and writers.

We’ve set up our business model so that, in order to succeed, we have to serve the best version of you. We are committed to building technologies that cater to the version of you that sits at the breakfast table on a Sunday morning and thinks carefully about what you’ll spend the next 30 minutes reading. We’ll be serving the version of you that is excited to financially support the writers you trust. We win when subscribers are happy. Our business model succeeds when you spend time with the work that you value the most; the work that helps you grow and progress; the work that helps you fall deeper in love.

This is the stuff we’re talking about when we say we’re building a new economic engine for culture. It’s not a perfect system, but it is new, and it allows a kind of work to thrive that is different and better than what wins on other platforms.

We are not against algorithms. We’ll enthusiastically use algorithms, or AI, or any other technology we can get our hands on, as long as we can use them to serve the human ends that we care about. For readers, that means letting you decide what you read as the best version of yourself—helping you take back your mind.

The real trick is that culture is not just about getting what you want. What you want is not set in stone. Culture is also about learning why you want what you want, refining your tastes, challenging your convictions, and promoting humanity and agency over the process. Systems that work against you can erode your will over time, and cause you to drop your standards ever lower. But a system that serves your aspirational self can kick-start a positive loop.

The more you read with agency and are able to curate your attention, the greater the return your mind will get from the time you’ve invested in reading every day. One morning you may even wake up to find you are no longer feeling angry or distracted but, rather, pretty confident that—when it comes to reading, at least—this is going to be a day well spent. 

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In recent years, the way political discourse has played out on social media has been incendiary. The business models of the legacy social platforms have favored the promotion of content that piques emotion, stokes conflict, polarizes, and tribalizes—to the extent that it has become almost impossible for productive, civil discourse to take place there. But on Substack, we’ve seen that the tenor and quality of discussion can be much better. Our business model promotes deeper engagement and more considered back-and-forth. The rewards go to those who prove they can respect the reader’s trust and attention over the course of an ongoing relationship, not to those who come up with the best dunk in a fleeting moment. So even while the legacy social networks shy away from politics, or throw fuel on a bad dumpster fire, we are going to lean in. Political discussion is important. Debate and dissent drive progress. And Substack is the best place for those conversations. We are going to keep proving that to be true. 

Some of the best political writing is already happening on Substack, from writers more and less known, from big names like Matt Taibbi and Robert Reich to up-and-comers like N.S. Lyons and Martyr Made. Millions of readers trust writers and publications like Heather Cox Richardson, Dan Pfeiffer, The Free Press, Dan Rather, Simon Rosenberg, Ann Coulter, Neal Katyal, The Bulwark, Erin Reed, Chris Rufo, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Mike Cernovich, Michael Moore, Bryan Caplan, Joyce Vance, Nate Silver, Matt Yglesias, Josh Barro, The Fifth Column, and Andrew Sullivan—along with myriad others—to make sense of what is going on. With the election season ramping up, we expect even more people to turn to the voices they trust on this platform as it becomes more obvious that the Substack model leads to better work and better conversations than those that have dominated legacy social media in past elections. 

The smartest analysis, commentary, campaigning, and reporting about this election year will all be happening here. Substack is already the place where independents, outsiders, nerds, contrarians, deep thinkers, and established voices interpret the election and the currents that are shaping the political landscape in America. The cable news channels, public radio stations, YouTube shows, and podcasts will all turn to Substack to find informed and opinionated writers to book for their programs. More and more, politicians and interest groups will look to Substack writers to help make their case for their policies and positions. Candidates will cut out the middlemen by using Substack as a home for their editorials—a direct channel to voters so they can make a full, intelligent case for what they will do if they’re elected. These politicians, like Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, will find that they don’t have to be reduced to tweets or sound bites in reports compiled by unsympathetic media outlets. Substack offers them a way to take control of their own narratives. 

As we spread the word that Substack is playing an increasingly important role in the political world, we’re thrilled to announce that we have hired Catherine Valentine, a communications professional from the Washington Post, to lead our politics initiatives. At the Post and, before that, CNN, Catherine earned a reputation as a sharp thinker with brilliant instincts. At Substack, she will work with politicians, candidates, analysts, and policy experts across the political spectrum to help make Substack the central place for thoughtful, rigorous conversations.   

We can’t wait to send her into the political world as a representative of Substack. Catherine is going to show Washington, D.C., what Substack can do for politics, handshake by handshake—through meetings, communications, attracting new voices to the platform, and hosting events. We’ve given her the task of making Election ’24 “the Substack Election.” If you have ideas for how she can do that, please let us know! 

The quiet underlying current that powers so much of Substack is intimacy. It’s what writers talk about the most—the direct relationship they are able to create here. No intermediaries or gatekeepers between them and their audience, financial, editorial, or otherwise. It’s what readers come for too: that special access directly into the thought universe of their favorite thinkers. 

What is more intimate than an email directly to your inbox? A voice directly in your ear. Podcasts, first known as “audioblogs” in the 2000s, are what took the audio medium from its widest distribution (over the radio waves, to all of us) into the sanctuary of the one-to-one. As podcast lovers well know, it feels like your favorite thinker is talking to you, right into your brain. 

Which is why there’s such a natural home for podcasting here. At Substack, we’re always building on the same core foundation—that close, deep relationship with the people who are most obsessed with your work. So here, we’re taking podcasts further away from the radio waves and deeper into the domain of that intimate, direct space. Here, podcasts are a place for your listeners to hear from you, straight into their inbox or any podcast listening app, and be able to pay you for the shows they love—without your having to hock mattresses or mortgages in ads. Unlike almost anywhere else on the internet, it’s a place for listeners to hear (or read, or watch) both free and paid content, and reward you for either or both. It’s a place for your listeners to come back to respond to you, and to each other, and to form a community around your work. 

All of that means podcasts look different here. They look like Substacks. 

They look like ’s Martyr Made, where episodes can be six hours long, with weeks going by in between—but in between epic episodes, readers and listeners get sent fascinating bits of research or participate in discussion threads or read related essays (or listen to audio versions of essays). It looks like , where paid subscribers get a regular bonus episode every week, plus roundups of other podcast episodes, articles, and videos they might like that are related to that week’s discussion, and a place to hang out in the comments and dissect favorite moments of the episode. It looks like Lenny’s Podcast, a natural outgrowth of the wildly popular, deeply practical career and professional wisdom of . It looks like the all-star launch of ’s Courtside—featuring guests like Regina Spektor, Heather Cox Richardson, and Katie Couric—with a blend of free and bonus content that subscribers get in the same RSS feed in their podcast listening apps. It looks like or —both podcasts with roots in public radio, where fans can now pay the hosts directly and jump into comments to share their own take on topics like “economic false prophets” or the risks of using ChatGPT for legal briefs. And it looks like Burnt Toast by , who moved her podcast over from Libsyn to incorporate it more directly into the broader Burnt Toast universe of content. Virginia says:

“[Substack podcasting is] more seamless to work with, since I’m already working in Substack every day anyway. And being able to send pod episodes directly to the newsletter list has given me way higher downloads—it was very hard to build an audience in Apple Podcast or Spotify because they are so thoroughly saturated.” 

Over the past year and a half, we’ve been quietly building tools for these kinds of podcasts to evolve and flourish here—all based on the powerful fuel of a direct relationship with your listeners, all meant to encourage your listeners to reward you directly for the content they love. More than one in 10 of Substack’s “bestseller” publications now include a podcast of some kind. 

You can create a post around your episode that’s so much more than show notes could ever be—with data and graphs, photos, videos, references, your amazing pre-production materials or extra thoughts from research—and encourage vibrant discussion from listeners in the comments. You can use our best tools and, with one click, publish your episode to all the major podcast players, so that you’re always maximizing your distribution and ways of bringing new listeners into your Substack universe. 

And maybe most powerful of all, we’ve got a flexible audio paywall, allowing you to share the majority of an episode with the public while keeping some bonus content for paid subscribers only. This is built on a premise that fuels growth for many writers already on Substack: readers fall in love with the free content, and that leads to paying subscribers. 

of Serious Trouble (with tens of thousands of paid subscribers) has found success using the flexible audio paywall. “The audio paywall has been a fantastic feature for us,” he says.

“It allows us to seamlessly send different versions of the same podcast episode to free and paid subscribers. This means we can put out a substantial free show that serves our whole listener community, while also effectively encouraging free listeners to convert to paid. And then, once they upgrade, they never have to hear another pitch.”

Podcasting—like so many media businesses built on legacy models that revolve around advertising and attention-grabbing incentives—is hitting a rough patch. Advertising deals are shrinking, while podcast marketplaces and players are more saturated by the day. We wanted to create a space where writers don’t need to play games to reach, cultivate, and grow audiences, and where they can earn a reliable income directly from their subscribers.

Podcasters can find another way here. Open the doors to let your listeners into your podcasts. Let them pay you for the work they love. Speak to them directly; don’t fight for airspace. Give them more of your brain, more space to talk to each other, and more space to thank you for it. 

It’s not a podcast anymore. It’s a Substack.

Start a podcast

Add a podcast to your existing Substack or start a new one. Visit the Help Center to learn more about podcasting.

Today, we’re making it much easier to find and follow your friends on Substack, helping you explore the network and be discovered by new readers. Since we launched Notes in April, following has been one of the most requested features from writers and readers. 

Update your app to find friends

Following helps writers grow their audience via the Substack network, which is already home to millions of the world’s most valuable readers. We built this feature to help maximize—and not replace—subscriptions, which will always be the most important type of relationship on Substack.

A follow offers a lightweight way to start a relationship with a writer or reader, with the option to convert it into a subscription at any time. By following them, you can stay up to date with what they’re reading, liking, publishing, and subscribing to—through the Notes feed and on their profiles.

To find friends to follow, you can now sync your phone contacts with Substack. Make sure you update the Substack app so you can see what friends are reading.

A subscriber base is the most important asset a writer or creator can have online, since it offers ownership, independence, and the opportunity to earn money. Accordingly, the Subscribe button will remain the primary call-to-action on most surfaces where you encounter writers you’re not already following, including on individual notes and on profiles. However, in addition to the Subscribe button, you’ll now see a smaller Follow button, indicated by the outline of a person and a “+” symbol. You’ll also see Follow buttons on lists of suggested accounts. 

On Substack, a follow is a gateway to a deeper subscription relationship, which implies the ability for a writer to reach a reader directly in their inbox and to retain their email address. You can think of it as like dating before deciding to marry—but we’ll make sure that Substack always takes the opportunity to pop the question on the writer’s behalf.

For example, each time you publish a note, your followers will see it and be prompted to subscribe to your publication. In the future, we’ll make “upsells” to subscriptions easier by automatically notifying your followers about trending posts and other milestones.

In addition to creating this new subscription pathway, the follow feature will help readers more easily share your writing. For example, if a reader likes or restacks one of your posts, their followers may see that activity in their Notes feed. That means that writers will benefit from these new features even if they’re not active on Notes. For example, if you follow and “like” his posts, your followers will sometimes see those liked posts—and the option to subscribe to Kareem—in their Notes feed.

These new features are part of our ongoing work to create a media ecosystem that benefits both writers and readers by bringing publishing and discovery tools together in one place. We have big plans in this area, and you can expect much more to come in the months ahead. We’d really value your feedback along the way. 

To learn more about how following works on Substack, visit our support center.

At the end of June last year, I got an email with a subject line that said: “It’s cold out here.” The body of the email didn’t elaborate much. “Very cold. Can we chat, please?” 

The message came from , the publisher of Exponential View, who had been an early mover to Substack in our early days but who, in search of more customization and perhaps some savings on fees, decided to try his luck with a more DIY publishing platform. 

Azeem was away for about a year. A few months after bringing Exponential View back to Substack, he tweeted about the effect that the experiment had had on the publication’s growth. In the tweet, he showed a chart with a growth line that was steadily increasing until a sudden and prolonged plateau. Then, at some point, it mysteriously started picking up speed again, faster than it had ever grown before. 

“Can you spot the year when my newsletter @exponentialview was off the @SubstackInc platform?” he asked.

Unlike most other online media platforms, we don’t seek to lock our customers into a walled garden by controlling their relationship with their audience. On Substack, writers own and control their mailing lists and their content, and if they choose to leave, they can take their paid subscriptions with them. While it is uncommon for today’s online media platforms to guarantee such freedom of movement for their users, we believe it is critical to establish trust and align incentives. Platforms should lift people up, not lock them in. 

Over five and a half years of working on Substack, we have been fortunate that only a small number of publications have ever left the platform (although some do so quite loudly). With each departure, we have reflected on what we would need to do to win them back—and we’ve been making progress. Over the past couple of years in particular, we have greatly improved Substack’s marketing and design customizability, and we’ve built up a suite of features that drive enough growth to more than justify the 10% fee we collect to run the business. The Substack network now drives 20% of paid subscriptions across the platform. The fee pays for itself and then some. 

While a few publications, like Exponential View, have tried their luck on other platforms, we’ve been pleased to see an increasing number coming back to Substack. Among the recent returnees are , , , , and , to name a few. We always welcome returning publications with open arms and make the migration process as simple as possible with our importer tools. 

So why do writers return to Substack? They come back for the simple, powerful tools, and the growing advantage of the Substack network.

Each one of these publishers has reported that the other tools were more complicated than they anticipated. When he brought Exponential View back to Substack, Azeem talked about how easy Substack is to use compared with alternatives. “Time and effort that could be spent on sharing our insight through essays and analysis was spent worrying about email deliverability, spam, HTML templates, or user authentication,” he said. Now he and his team can focus on the most important work: the writing itself. 

But writers had also noticed their peers talking about Substack’s network effects, which help publications get subscribers they wouldn’t otherwise have found. Substack offers what , publisher of The Generalist, has called “a holy trinity of media: tool, network, and destination.” Features like Recommendations, cross-posting, mentions, and now Notes have not only connected readers with new writers but also helped writers feel less isolated. On Substack, they are part of a cooperative ecosystem where writers can collaborate with others, highlight each other’s work, and help each other reach new heights. 

“Because it’s a true network, it’s easy to interact with other writers and create, together,” wrote Mario about the cooperative dynamic on Substack. “If our friends at Not Boring by write a great breakdown, we can cross-post it. If Exponential View by publishes a new fascinating update, we can link it seamlessly. If Newcomer and I want to have a conversation about a shift in the venture landscape, we could try out a Letters series.”

is another writer who has heralded the growth benefits of Substack’s network. Austin brought his newsletter, Growth Curve, back to Substack after a brief foray with an alternate newsletter tool. The growth Substack brings is compelling, he said over email. “First, 37% of my paying subscribers had existing Substack accounts. 27% had saved credit cards on the Substack system, which made it a one-click experience to sign up for my paid newsletter. 11% came from platform features like Substack leaderboards, recommendations, or promotions.”

When I asked , editor in chief of The Pillar, why his team brought the Catholic news outlet back to Substack after a brief period on another platform, he said: “We learned on the open market that Substack had offered us much more than we’d realized—that its features and customer service were excellent for our subscribers, and that the network effect of subscription growth, which we’d been skeptical about, was for real.”

There is a word from the past couple of decades that understandably causes an allergic reaction among some writers and creative people who have been burned by how online platforms have worked in recent years. Centralization. The large media platforms of the last 20 years have shown that there is great power in centralization: large numbers of people can interact in the same place; anyone can broadcast or communicate to almost anywhere in the world, almost instantly; and the consumption experience—viewing, listening, reading, conversing—can be simple, delightful, and in some cases amazing. But there are also significant trade-offs, including compromises on surveillance and privacy. Perhaps the most profound trade-off, though, is in the power dynamic: on the centralized platforms the world has known to date, almost all the power and wealth accrues to the owners.

Substack changes that power dynamic. On this platform, you get the benefits of centralization—sharing and collaboration, growth and conversation, and elegant publishing and consumption experiences—but you also get control. You own your content and mailing list. You can have deep relationships with writers and even other subscribers. You choose what you see and who you hang out with. It is a system that brings people together while respecting their individual agency. It offers power and growth coupled with full creative freedom. It’s warm in here. 

If you are considering switching to Substack, visit our guides on moving your blog or newsletter over in four simple steps. We are able to help some writers with hands-on support moving to Substack. If you have an existing audience and plan to turn on paid subscriptions, get in touch by filling out this form. If we are able to help, we’ll get back to you.

Switch to Substack

In the last few weeks, following the launch of Notes, Twitter has chosen to restrict writers’ ability to share their work by hiding Substack previews and limiting the distribution of Substack links. It has also cut Substack off from its API, which means writers can no longer embed tweets in their posts. We are deeply disappointed by Twitter’s actions and have been trying to resolve the issue (unsuccessfully so far). We badly wish writers weren’t in this position. Writers should be able to share their work freely on Twitter and any other social network, wherever their readers may be. This is a challenging moment for writers who have used Twitter to help build their audience and who now find they need to revise their strategies.

At the same time, we recognize that—fair or not—this was probably inevitable. Twitter’s actions are part of a well-established history of social media platforms limiting writers’ and creators’ ability to share their work. Ad-based social platforms want writers’ and creators’ audiences glued to their feeds, and they design their products to keep them from leaving. In 2012, Twitter stopped embedding Instagram posts after Facebook acquired the photo-sharing app. Today, Facebook deprioritizes links that take people away from its feed. Google prioritizes YouTube search results over TikTok and Vimeo. While Twitter has now come for writers on Substack, it is extremely likely that we won’t be the last publishing platform to receive this treatment. 

Substack was created in direct response to this kind of behavior by social media companies. Writers cannot build sustainable businesses if their connection to their audience depends on unreliable platforms that frequently change what you see or what partners they prioritize. That world is built on shaky foundations that are crumbling all around us. You need only look at the fates of BuzzFeed, Mic, and Upworthy to see what happens when a media business over-relies on social platforms. That history demonstrates why it was so important to establish that any publisher who uses Substack retains ownership of all their content and their relationship with their audience. 

Of course, for writers to realize the impact they seek for their work, they need ways for readers to find them. One compelling path is for actual humans, loving their work, to share it with other actual humans—by email, word of mouth, or in conversation over drinks about a new writer they’ve found who’s changing their entire worldview. That peer-to-peer support is the foundation Substack is built on, and it’s why we’ve invested so much in SEO—to make sure the people who would love your work most can find it. But we also know there are many ways these behaviors can be amplified.

For the past year, we have been building tools for writers to grow their audience and business without needing to rely on social platforms. In the Substack network, the major growth drivers are not opaque algorithms that reward viral content, but the writers and creators themselves. Our top growth features include Recommendations, through which writers can promote other writers, and Notes, through which anyone can post their work and where readers can find new writers to fall in love with. While we’re still in the early days with these features, the Substack network already drives 20% of paid subscriptions across the platform. A year ago, that figure was 8%.

Meanwhile, Twitter’s share of Substack traffic, already relatively small, has been waning since even before its recent actions. At the start of the year, Twitter on average drove less than 3% of all views across Substack. Today, it accounts for less than 2%. 

To be clear: we encourage writers to publish on any platform they choose so they can raise their profile and engage with ideas, or even just because they enjoy it. But writers cannot rely on those platforms. To become independent, they need the direct connection with their audience that the Substack model provides. And fortunately, the growth benefits of the Substack ecosystem already far outweigh the benefits from sharing links on social media.

While we have no say over how social media companies treat writers and creators from this point on, we can commit to continuing to build a strong, reliable platform that not only provides great publishing and growth tools but also puts writers’ needs first. Our business depends on it.

Our mission of building a new economic engine for culture is a long-term project. It can be achieved only in partnership with writers and creators, and with real, steady gains that can’t be undone by a third party. In the Substack ecosystem, writers can focus on what they do best: producing great writing that earns readers’ respect and support. For our part, we’ll focus on creating a platform that makes everything else—from starting to managing to growing an independent media business—simple and powerful. 

Thank you for your trust, patience, and continued support of independent writers and a better media system for us all. 

Start a Substack

Hardly a week passes that there isn’t grim news about the media industry—downsizings and mass layoffs, bankruptcies and closures. Much of the failure is tied to the decline of advertising, the crumbling foundation upon which most media has rested for a century. As ad sales dry up, budgets are slashed, and people are set adrift. This news is always painful to hear. We care about writers and their wellbeing, and we believe in the critical importance of a thriving media ecosystem in its many forms. 

I work with writers on Substack, and several of them made the decision to go independent as a direct result of losing their job. , for instance—who writes about labor, politics, and inequality—started How Things Work earlier this week after a long career at Gawker and a few other outlets.

The majority of us [journalists] will float around like barnacles, resting for precious periods of stability before getting scraped off and sent floating once again, desperately freelancing and hoping the next resting place appears soon. We are, all of us, buffeted by big economic and technological and political forces almost completely out of our control, just like most other people, from the gas station to the classroom to the coal mine.

Hamilton is one of countless writers who’d searched for an alternative to the ad-driven, attention-fueled media structure and ultimately decided to work for himself and build his own business on Substack. “The ideal economic model for any writer is to be directly funded by readers. No investors, no advertisers, no bosses.”

recently launched after NPR laid him off, and he is self-funding his reporting on the ground in Ukraine through his Substack subscription revenue. and monetized , which had been a side project, when their decade-long career at the HuffPost came to an abrupt end during a round of layoffs. started On Montlake, a Substack about University of Washington sports, when The Athletic cut him loose without warning.

Pulitzer-winning reporter spent decades as a freelancer and staff writer in legacy media. He announced his move to Substack in February:

Here, I have the kind of freedom I’ve always fought for. I’ve watched writer after writer on this platform as they’ve freed themselves from their publishers’ economic interests, run deep with stories without fear of word counts or column inches, and—most importantly—spoken directly to their readers. And that last point, for me, is the clincher. I’ve never been interested in socializing with pols or cozying up to money types at the self-important cocktail get togethers—the star-fucking parties, I always liked to call them. I’m at my best when I swig cheap bourbon with the servicemen, work over the first-year law firm associates for intel, or swap stories with the junior minister from a country most people can’t name. That’s always been my style. And as it turns out, it’s the ethos of this online community as well.

If you’re a writer who has been laid off or have had enough of the turbulence of ad-supported media, and you’re sorting through your options for what’s next, we’re here to help you explore independence. Send us an email at partnerships@substack.com. If you know a writer at a similar crossroads, please urge them to get in touch.

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Here are resources to help you get started today:

Below are some testimonials by writers on Substack who have grappled with these same concerns:

of :

Start a Substack. Best thing I ever did. No more living in fear that the next layoffs will hit you. No more dealing with terrible corporate people who have no idea what doing something creative for a living is like.

of :

My Substack began as a way for me to break free of the tumultuous and layoff-prone world of media and to start something of my very own, complete with full editorial freedom. Since then, what began as a simple newsletter has grown into a full-fledged community of readers and fellow writers alike. Thanks to the company's ever-updating list of writer-focused products, I've connected with a much larger audience than I'd have otherwise been able to reach on my own.

of :

Substack has changed my life. Full stop. I'm so grateful for its existence. No more screaming at editors to say, yes. No more waiting around until someone wants to publish my words. No more waiting to get paid or wondering how I'll pay rent this month.

of :

My Substack has been up and running for an entire year now, and I am able to support myself on the revenue. This is huge. The financial freedom has afforded me a lot of editorial freedom - the most I have experienced in my two decades in journalism. It has been incredibly satisfying to be able to do the work that I most wanted to do. And I've had one of the most productive and successful years of my career. I also now have a community of readers that I'm in constant contact with. It's truly wonderful.

of :

I've been a syndicated columnist, freelancer, successful blogger, and written 11 books over a 25 year writing career. But being on Substack and having a direct relationship with my readers has changed my life, approach to the craft of writing, and sense of vocation.

of :

I've never been involved in any media project like Substack. In journalism, you struggle just to stay afloat. Something is changing in media and I'm fortunate to be part of it.

Start a Substack

Now that I am well in my 40s, the only things that manage to surprise me are those that shake my cynicism. This happens rarely, but when it does I am disarmed by peaceful resignation: despite all its horrors and all my bitterness, the world is going to be just fine. These moments unfailingly find me outside or beyond screens, where humans interact with other humans and exhibit small but essential signs of a persevering generosity. Rarely–no, never–had I experienced such a feeling while witnessing people interacting online. Partly because the majority of the exchanges I saw were antagonistic, but also because I was aware, like everyone else, of a constant audience that rendered every positive act, however genuine, into a performance. 

Here at Substack, we keep talking about a subscription network and what that means. The word we most often use to describe its wiring is trust; there is a bond of good faith that unites writers and readers here because they are both choosing to invest, not waste, time and money in each other. And where there is trust there is always intimacy. 

With the release of Notes this month, our subscription network has lit up, and thanks to that foundational trust what we saw run through it was an electrifying goodwill that can shock back to life even the hairy heart of a cynic. Though we are still in the early days of Notes, a clear trend that has made itself known is that of writers promoting the work of other writers they love. Here, where they are even more incentivized than on other platforms by financial reward to grow their own audiences, writers choose instead to shine the spotlight on other writers that nurture their minds– 

They endorse them,

quote them, 

encourage readers to subscribe to them,

make it their mission to surface and highlight those deserving attention,

In just one week, we watched subscriber charts shoot up as writer fellowship drove growth and discovery across the platform. 

There was an authenticity in these endorsements that moved me in a way that I had not experienced on an online forum before, precisely because the stakes here were higher. To recommend a Substack is to recommend a habit, an ongoing communion with a certain consciousness that feeds yours. It is not an act of charity but one of generosity to other writers, readers, but also to the self because writing is the one gift we can enjoy more the more we share it with others. A subscription network sparkles bright and expands with what we are willing to share rather than claim from each other. 

As Ted Gioia put it:

I can confirm what other Substack writers have reported—the launch of Notes has accelerated subscriber growth. I’ve gotten a noticeable boost, and other writers here have enjoyed even bigger gains.

This is more validation that the platform grows by creating a community (or a group of overlapping communities). This not only benefits all participants, writers and readers, but also sharply differentiates our work from most other legacy media outlets—where the stratified, hierarchical approach and (let’s be honest) poor comment quality make community building almost impossible.

We have a genuine chance to do something different here. Maybe it has already started.

The magic of the digital space we aspire to build will not be powered by code, but by the same principles that underline good human behavior. Thank you for bringing that fellowship on Notes and giving even the most jaded among us reasons to remain optimistic.

Try Notes

In two days, we’ll be closing our community round to new investments. If you would like to invest in Substack, you still have a chance. You can do so via the link below until April 20: 

Invest in Substack

When we embarked on a process to let writers and readers invest in Substack and own a piece of the company, we hoped our community fundraise would bring people who value the same things we value closer to us—people who believe that writers and creators should be able to make a living, even a prosperous one, from doing great work; people who believe that what you read matters; that the internet’s rules need to be rewritten to give more agency to culture makers; and that the internet’s powers can be married to a better model that unlocks untapped potential in the world and restructures the media economy.

We have been truly overwhelmed by the response.

You only need to look at wefunder.com/substack to see why we’re blown away. Thousands of people have expressed interest in investing in this community round. More than a thousand have posted comments on the “What People Say” page to say why they’re investing. Here’s a small sample: 

“I believe Substack is the future of media.” ,

“I’m cheering on Substack’s laser-like focus on readers paying publishers, rather than gathering eyeballs and data for advertisers. It completely changes the incentives and therefore the places we live in online and offline in the best way. I’m thrilled to be able to stand with Substack in this way.” ,

“Substack is making it possible for me to make a living at work I love, on my own terms. I’m excited to see and be a part of how it grows.” ,

We extend a huge THANK-YOU to all the people who have committed to investing in Substack. Your investment in this mission and this company is incredibly meaningful, because it shows us that you believe in Substack as much as we do.

Startups are risky, and our mission is extraordinarily ambitious. We are here to build a new economic engine for culture. This kind of pursuit is not for the faint of heart, so we have emphasized to everyone who has been considering an investment that they should not do so if they’re not prepared to lose the entire amount they would put in.

Having said that, we have been extremely encouraged by the outpouring of support and belief that has come through this community round. We feel a strong sense of duty to build Substack into something truly great. Substack is much more than the collective efforts of the employees of the company—it’s a movement that draws on many thousands of writers and creators, and their many millions of subscribers. It’s a joint effort to make a better internet.

We’re at the start of that journey now, and we are so grateful, and energized, to have thousands of writers and readers with us as part owners in this enterprise. Thank you, again and always, for your belief. Let’s do amazing things together.