Substack is an American online platform that provides publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure to support subscription newsletters.
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19 Facts About Substack
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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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In 2019, Substack added support for podcasts and discussion threads among newsletter subscribers.
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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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Substack announced in January 2022 that it would begin private Beta testing video on its platform.
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Substack reported 11,000 paid subscribers as of 2018, rising to 50,000 in 2019.
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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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Substack has provided some content creators with advances to start working on their platform.
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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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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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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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Substack founders reached out to a small pool of writers in 2017 to acquire their first creators.
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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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Substack had aimed to raise between $75 million and $100 million.
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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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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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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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Substack has been criticized for not disclosing which writers were part of Substack Pro.
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Substack provides legal advice to its writers through its program, Substack Defender.
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