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Substack
How two frustrated journalists and a friend toppled the clickbait model of media and forged a $750m startup in the process.
💡 Idea Validation - Aha Moment
💡 Building with Early Users
💡 Doing hings that don’t scale
🏢 The Company
Substack is an online platform designed to serve as a resource for people wanting to start a subscription newsletter. Not only can you access publishing tools, but Substack makes it easy to monetize your newsletter, setting you up with a payment system as well as easy ways to track your analytics.
✨ The Initial Idea
Working as journalists, the founders of Substack noticed that media channels made it difficult for users to find valuable information. Particularly the rise of social media amplified existing advertising issues in publishing. Clickbait titles, attention-optimizing content and an overload of free content in general made it increasingly difficult for readers to cut through the noise to find quality information.This sparked a question in the Substack founders' journalistic minds:
How do we deliver high-quality content, free of a traditional ad-based model’s constraints and incentives?
🧪 Testing the Idea
Their hypothesis for what would solve the above: a subscription-based newsletter that connected readers directly with independent writers.
There were a couple of things to test within that vision:
- Would people be willing to pay for content?
- Would writers be swayed away from publications to write independently?
🏆 Building the MVP
Substack utilize typical broad-based methods to validate PMF like Market Research, Talking with Users and Domain-expertise but what set them apart was their intense collaboration with their target market.
They leveraged their journalist network to partner with a couple prominent independent writers. From there, they effectively built a product for a handful of people with the belief that many more would have the same use-case. This is an effective B2B method to reach PMF.
By building for prominent writers, they validated their initial question of whether writers would join for the tool. And with writers who already had audiences, they had their best opportunity to understand if users would be willing to pay for this content.
🚀 Growth & PMF
As they built with these early partners, they recognized a key growth unlock. The more writers they could partner with, the more audiences of there's would be brought to the platform.
They expanded their writer network via two major buckets:
- Creators who had existing free newsletters with large subscriber bases.
- Writers with large fanbases who had recently been laid off from major publications.
They accelerated direct outreach to writers and their extended network utilizing Bill Bishop and Kelly Dwyer as prominent names to help convince more to join the platform. The more writers that joined, the faster their developing growth loop spun.
This loop was strong enough to keep Substack growing without the need for significant growth tactics like paid ads and other costly marketing channels.
💡 Startersss Tips
- Narrow down your offering to appeal to a specific niche and build a 10x product for that specific subset. It’ll be easier to deliver something meaningful and you will be able to grow from there.
- Build with your first users. Or better yet, find an initial user that you can build your product for. This works really well in the B2B space and evidently, worked well for Substack too.
- Focus on building out your community early-on. That means treating your early users like gold and delivering in ways that make them want to stick with you and share the product widely.
