19 Facts About Substack

1.

Substack is an American online platform that provides publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure to support subscription newsletters.

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2.

Substack was founded in 2017 by Chris Best, the co-founder of Kik Messenger; Jairaj Sethi, a developer; and Hamish McKenzie, a former PandoDaily tech reporter.

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3.

In 2019, Substack added support for podcasts and discussion threads among newsletter subscribers.

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4.

Major writers on Substack include historian Heather Cox Richardson, journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, authors Daniel M Lavery, George Saunders, and Chuck Palahniuk, novelist Salman Rushdie, tech journalist Casey Newton, blogger and journalist Matthew Yglesias, and economist Emily Oster.

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5.

Substack announced in January 2022 that it would begin private Beta testing video on its platform.

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6.

Substack reported 11,000 paid subscribers as of 2018, rising to 50,000 in 2019.

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7.

Substack raised an initial seed round in 2018 from investors including The Chernin Group, Zhen Fund, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, and Zynga co-founder Justin Waldron.

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8.

Substack has provided some content creators with advances to start working on their platform.

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9.

However, Substack competes with subscription site The Athletic in this submarket, so McKenzie says the company does not recruit as strongly in that market.

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10.

In 2020, following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Substack extended grants of $1,000–$3,000 to over 40 writers to begin working on the platform.

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11.

Substack expanded into comics content in 2021 and signed creators including Saladin Ahmed, Jonathan Hickman, Molly Ostertag, Scott Snyder, and James Tynion IV, paying them while keeping their subscription revenue.

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12.

Substack founders reached out to a small pool of writers in 2017 to acquire their first creators.

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13.

Bill Bishop was among the first to put his newsletter, Sinocism, on Substack, providing his newsletter for $11 a month or $118 a year with daily content.

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14.

Substack had aimed to raise between $75 million and $100 million.

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15.

On July 28,2020, Substack sent out email notifications to all its users about changing privacy policies and notification about CCPA compliance.

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16.

Substack acknowledged the issue on Twitter and said that it was remedied after the initial batch of emails but did not disclose the number of users affected.

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17.

In March 2021, Substack revealed that it had been experimenting with a revenue sharing program in which it paid advances for writers to create publications on its platform; this became a program known as Substack Pro.

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18.

Substack has been criticized for not disclosing which writers were part of Substack Pro.

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19.

Substack provides legal advice to its writers through its program, Substack Defender.

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