Chris Best

“I started writing what I thought was gonna be an essay or a blog post or a screed of some sort, like, detailing my frustrations with the media economy on the Internet. And I sent it to my friend Hamish, who's actually a writer. And he let me down very gently. He's like, these are all good points you make, but it's 2017, and you are not quite as original as you think you are. He's like, here's how you could make this essay you're writing better, is you should add a section that just says, so what do you do about it? And we started arguing, basically. And that argument turned into what became the core idea for Substack.”

“Often, this is the thing you want when you're making a new product. It's like, you don't want it to be kind of good for a lot of people. You want it to be really good for, like, one person. And he was that guy. He had been he'd been already writing an email newsletter. He already had this audience of dedicated business and government people that loved it.”

“I'd, you know, I'd say, hey, you should consider starting a Substack. You'd make money. And they'd say, well, sure, I'd love that, but I've committed to stick around at my current place until such and such a time, and I wanna do right by my editor. I would say, well, just fuel up your getaway car. You don't have to use it. Just create an account. Don't tell anybody about it. Try out the editor. And very often in that time, you know, I'd get a call three days later. You you'll never guess what happened.”

“I think part of what social media does is create a false illusion of consensus. It would feel like everyone was mad at you or everyone hated you. When really it would be like, there's like a couple 100 people that are really ginned up about this. And I think it's very tempting if that happens to you to give in and to say, okay, okay, okay. I I hear you. I'm listening and learning. And I think as soon as you do that, you are lost. Either you're in control or the mob is in control.”

“There's two sculpting classes, and the teacher for the first class says, okay, at the end of the semester, I'm gonna just take your very best piece. A 100% of your grade is gonna be based on the quality of only the best thing you made. And the other teacher goes to the class and says, I'm going to give you a grade by the pound. And in this made up story, what happens is the people in the second class, if you when you go back and look at the best thing they made, it's much better. Because when you set out to only make the one best thing, it can be so paralyzing.”

“And so he saw us launching this feed as kind of, I think, a declaration of war, and he banned all mention of Substack on Twitter. There was a week where not only could you not share a Substack link, if you just said the word Substack, nobody would see your thing. And if you search for you literally, you'd search for Substack on Twitter, it would say, no results. Like, doesn't exist. We were like Voldemort. You can't say the name.”

“One of the things you can do is you have you don't have to, but you have the option to have commenting be only for paying subscribers. And the joke I sometimes use is that people will hate read something, but they won't hate pay for it. And the honestly, if they do hate me, if it's like, I cared and I hated enough to come and give you my $10 to leave this angry message, well, maybe that's worth it.”

“I think this is often this is how countercultures work, I think, is that you have things that are sort of the that start out as sort of rebels or challengers from the outside. It's not that the mainstream becomes the counterculture. It's that the counterculture becomes the mainstream. Like the the upstart, the rival elite, the people who are making the new thing, it it kind of wins.”

“The problem of algorithms is that is the same as the power. It's they're good at whatever you ask them to do. And so if you're a platform that's has an algorithmic discovery feed and your goal is to get people to spend the maximum amount of time there, it can be very, very good at that. And if you push that goal to the extreme, it'll end up being good at that in a way that is exclusive of you feeling like you're using your time well, or maybe staying sane.”

“We found the percentage that you can expect varies quite widely. In those early days, we often saw kind of, like, five to ten percent of people converting depending on sort of where your audience was coming from. But it was maybe the common theme was it was often much higher than people had expected. And I would say, even to this day, people probably slightly overrate the ads business that they could have, and then they dramatically underrate the subscription business they could have.”

“I started writing what I thought was gonna be an essay or a blog post or a screed of some sort, like, detailing my frustrations with the media economy on the Internet. And I sent it to my friend Hamish, who's actually a writer. And he let me down very gently. He's like, these are all good points you make, but it's 2017, and you are not quite as original as you think you are. He's like, here's how you could make this essay you're writing better, is you should add a section that just says, so what do you do about it? And we started arguing, basically. And that argument turned into what became the core idea for Substack.”

“Often, this is the thing you want when you're making a new product. It's like, you don't want it to be kind of good for a lot of people. You want it to be really good for, like, one person. And he was that guy. He had been he'd been already writing an email newsletter. He already had this audience of dedicated business and government people that loved it.”

“I'd, you know, I'd say, hey, you should consider starting a Substack. You'd make money. And they'd say, well, sure, I'd love that, but I've committed to stick around at my current place until such and such a time, and I wanna do right by my editor. I would say, well, just fuel up your getaway car. You don't have to use it. Just create an account. Don't tell anybody about it. Try out the editor. And very often in that time, you know, I'd get a call three days later. You you'll never guess what happened.”

“I think part of what social media does is create a false illusion of consensus. It would feel like everyone was mad at you or everyone hated you. When really it would be like, there's like a couple 100 people that are really ginned up about this. And I think it's very tempting if that happens to you to give in and to say, okay, okay, okay. I I hear you. I'm listening and learning. And I think as soon as you do that, you are lost. Either you're in control or the mob is in control.”

“There's two sculpting classes, and the teacher for the first class says, okay, at the end of the semester, I'm gonna just take your very best piece. A 100% of your grade is gonna be based on the quality of only the best thing you made. And the other teacher goes to the class and says, I'm going to give you a grade by the pound. And in this made up story, what happens is the people in the second class, if you when you go back and look at the best thing they made, it's much better. Because when you set out to only make the one best thing, it can be so paralyzing.”