Launch HN: Substack (YC W18): Paid email newsletters made simple
Hamish is a journalist who has done everything from writing about indie music in Hong Kong to being lead writer for Tesla. We bonded over our shared love of reading when he worked at Kik, where Chris was the technical co-founder. Last summer, Chris was taking time off and asked Hamish to read an essay he was trying to write about the incentive structures of social media for writers, and how growing outrage and polarization was making it hard to have reasonable conversations. At the same time, we both loved Ben Thompson’s newsletter, Stratechery, which was doing really well off paid subscriptions. We wondered: what if it were easier for writers to start something like that? That felt more like a company than an essay, and so one thing led to another...
An example of a Substack newsletter you might enjoy is Versioning (https://versioning.substack.com), a daily reading list for web developers and designers. We also recommend Mallory Ortberg’s The Shatner Chatner (https://www.shatnerchatner.com) and Helena Fitzgerald’s Griefbacon (https://griefbacon.substack.com).
The product is still in a pretty early phase but we’ve just launched our self-serve beta, where anyone can create a newsletter, free or paid: https://www.substack.com/beta-signup. At this stage, it’s completely free until you start charging, in which case we take a fee: 10% for people who start during the beta.
We know a lot of folks on HN care about this stuff too, so we’re keen to hear your feedback. Also: if you know any writers you’d be happy to pay to read (or if that’s you), we’d love to hear about that too.
90 comments
[ 357 ms ] story [ 2803 ms ] threadI wonder what would be the ideal format for that? It could give you a list of newsletters and their descriptions, with some popularity signals or something.. It might be better to surface the free content though. Maybe "here are some recent free issues by newsletters you might enjoy." Just thinking out loud...
Don't start with what might be the ideal format. Think of something, read comments here and in other places you announced this, consider them, and add a feature, then iterate on it based on experience and feedback.
But try to be somewhat canonical and orthogonal (not 100%). That often helps, IME. I sometimes see startups missing out on these principles, maybe because of the rush to get something out.
My 2c.
> Stay well-informed about the world each week with clear and concise summaries of important news ...
That sounds like an exactly perfect fit for Substack. We've seen that if you have a committed newsletter following (look at open rates and reader comments) that loves it, up to 10% of your list might pay pretty quickly if you just asked them. Depending how they think they could price it could be worth over $1000 month to start. Of course, this depends on the audience etc.
If they want to do it, it's a simple as signing up, connecting Stripe, and importing the existing list. They can send out a 'free' post saying that the newsletter is going paid, and it will go to that list, and come baked with calls to action to subscribe and stuff.
We've done a couple of these now and would be happy to help. Feel free to point them to 'chris' or 'hamish' at substack.com
This highlights one of my favorite things about the newsletter format: sometimes it can be worth more to you to get less content. If the goal is to stay informed, a writer that can do it in a shorter, less frequent email adds more value to your life :)
It would be good if you could put a list of supported features on the signup page. As of now I do not see it. Will let signuppers know what they will get.
I am going to sign up and try it anyway.
We’ll continue to make it better as quickly as we can.
Quick question: when "importing the existing list", what type of confirmation/verification -- if any -- do you require from the recipients?
Let's say, for example, I have an "existing list" and I want to move to your platform for my free newsletter.
That’s just going to heavily incentivize your most successful users to bail. I run a five figure paid email service and I’m using a membership management service that charges flat fee plus 2%, and it annoys me every month. I’ll be replacing them this year. Membership billing plus a synced email list on Mailchimp is really commodity at this point. Doesn’t make any sense to pay a percentage of revenue.
If it was 10%, I’d replace them this week.
I may get pushback because there’s a contingent of people on here who basically seem to think that ever worrying about price for software and services is the wrong move. I think that’s pretty stupid when you’re a small company. It’s stupidly easy for a lot of small companies who are paying hundreds or thousands per month in recurring subscriptions to shave 20-30% off. If you’re a solo founder, that’s a huge increase in your personal bottom line.
EDIT: I'm probably coming across as too negative here, so let me add a few thoughts:
1. You built something useful, launched it, and have paying customers. That's HUGE and puts you ahead of 99% of "startups" so congrats :)
2. I strongly believe in the power of paid publishing and email marketing (it drives almost 100% of my income these days), and I think more cool tools and platforms in this space is excellent. This is the kind of thing that I would use.
My only real issue is just that I think what you're doing with the pricing model is shooting yourself in the foot (since it incentivizes people to switch away) AND it's unfair to users (since switching away is REALLY hard, and you probably know that and are counting on it to some extent).
Maybe charge flat + fee up to a cap? It'd be really comforting to know that I'd never pay more than $495 / month for this or something, and that would only be once I hit $10k / month in revenue or whatever.
When does it make sense that the 2% is worth it? Or is it in your eyes, that there should never be an extra fee?
Have you thought about it from the other perspective? That they are giving you the cheaper price at a cost to themselves, hedging the bet that the 2% will make them whole?
The 2% is for card charges. The service charges a flat fee, probably tiered based on audience size (delivery requirements).
And yeah, maybe the loss leader thing is their pricing strategy, but it's about to cost them a customer and I doubt I'm the only one.
One way to look at it is "I'm losing 10%". Another way is "I'm now making 90% I couldn't have otherwise made."
We’ve seen writers doing this report that they spend up to 40% of their time messing around with the platform - if we can improve on that by a chunk and let them focus on writing it adds up!
There is no way that it's a better use of your time and money to pay thousands of dollars per month vs. just switching to a flat rate provider. You're not providing much more value for someone making $10k / month vs. someone making $1k / month (the email sending costs here are super negligible), so why am I paying 10x as much?
So again, it's just an incentive to switch as soon as you start making real money.
I just think it’s the right challenge for us to solve for: how do we continue to deliver that much value (or as much as possible) vs. being the lowest cost option for email + payments + website.
In all seriousness, this is a good attitude to have, except that switching from you guys to someone else is going to be genuinely painful. The provider I use now has an API and provides full CSV and JSON exports of everything, and then all the actual payments live in Stripe. Switching should be a snap, right?
But it's still a pain to migrate over the user accounts, force users to reset their logins, setup new subscriptions with the same different billing amounts (prices have changed over time), discount codes, and billing dates, ensure that everything continues smoothly so I keep getting my money, switch over all the integration points with my site and analytics, etc, etc, etc.
It's such a pain to switch that many just won't bother to pay that big upfront cost in order to save money every month going forward and will just put it off, which is why I find this pricing model to be particularly aggravating. They wouldn't have signed up for it in the first place had they known, but they didn't know and now they're "trapped".
I hope you're just underestimating the difficult of switching away and not counting on it!
EDIT: I also hate the logic of "meh, fees don't matter, my revenue would be zero otherwise!!" It's not true (you have other cheaper alternatives), but even if it was, doesn't that mean you should be fine paying 99% in fees to platforms and credit cards and whoever else? After all, 1% is better than 0%!!!"
And if 10% of revenue uncapped isn’t too much “because not interested”, why not 20% or 50%?
You’re obviously welcome to pay 10%, I just think it’s foolish once revenue hits a certain point.
Edit: think of it this way: you already have $20k per month of paid newsletter revenue and you need a new membership billing provider. Other options are $20 - 100 per month and won’t go up any more. Would you even consider one with the same or fewer features that’s $2000 per month (and will take 10% of every marginal dollar from there)? I really doubt it. I love sleek, simple, elegant tools, but I won’t pay any price for them.
I am not discounting the points you've made. I understand that there are definitely cases where 10% might be too high. Hell, it might even be applicable here.
Respectively, I disagree with your quoted comment. Are you sure its zero? Uber Rush delivery drivers make 75-80%. Where do you think the rest of the delivery fee goes? This was just from my first Google. I am sure you can find more examples of this being not the case.
Going back to the topic at hand. For a dev like me, I think 10% is high but agree with the points made. There are 100s of posts online of people writing shit for free. I am sure you can even find a dozen of subreddits alone for writing. From their POV this can be seen as a secondary source of income.
Most people who are GOOD writers - at a point where anyone would buy their 'product - have been writing for many years. They could even be doing this as a profession (think book writers). For them, do also see 10% being a high fee?
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> I just think it’s foolish once revenue hits a certain point.
including your edit are home run!
Which membership management would you recommend?
That said, I wonder what YC is bringing to the table here, since this is marked as YC W18. Shouldn't there be some experienced people advising on pricing and such while a venture is being launched? From the OP's responses, it seems like YC wasn't involved. Or it's highly likely that I don't understand the significance of YC W18 here.
We let you import them so it’s only fair :)
And at 10%, you're definitely going to want to migrate at some point if you succeed, so keep this in mind.
https://github.com/marteinn/The-Big-Username-Blacklist
How do you foresee sub domains being a problem otherwise?
Would love a tip if anyone knows an easy way to fix this properly.
Yeah, seriously, spend $1/month and use Route 53 or somebody -- anybody -- else.
Please delete the account (and my apologies for the hassle).
If one can grab "admin", "webmaster", or one of several others, she can also get SSL certificates for the domain.
let's assume i'm using this and churning out valuable content every week / day / whatever.
Someone hears about my thing and thinks "that sounds nifty. Not sure it's worth $x a month though"
I'd want some way for folks to be able to "try before you buy" let them get some specified number of newsletters before the system says "hey, you've been reading this newsletter for Y weeks now but we're at the end of your trial. <compelling message from author> To keep receiving this letter please <initiate payment process>."
The way we try to handle that now is by having an option for writers to write free posts - which are visible to anybody, and get emailed to non-paying subscribers. That way you can get a sense of the writing before committing (and regular readers are the ones who subscribe anyway...)
You’re right that that doesn’t let you “preview” the paid content though. We’ll think about that.
overall i really like the idea and i agree with one of the other commenters who says you don't really need many more features.
One thing in future that’s really exciting to us is the idea of building community, and using the paid barrier as a way to solve a whole bunch of the problems that normally come with that. Some writers have slacks, and people who follow a niche writer often delight to meet each other.
Need to find a way to keep it just as simple though.
Currently you would need to link to the main page which has a subscribe form, but doing and embedded form would be much better.
I'd like to start writing but I want to be sure that I can connect my stripe account again in the future. Any ideas?
Email me your account details if you’d like. Chris at Substack dot com
Do you have anyone using Substack for a 'news aggregation' sort of newsletter? I am curious.
I have written software that makes it simple for me to curate ice hockey news and place links and article summaries on http://HockeyBias.com every morning. I have been thinking of providing the data in an email newsletter as well.
Thank you.
Curation with commentary can be very valuable. That's a lot of what Bill Bishop does with Sinocism (https://nb.sinocism.com/)
If you can do a roundup that lets people stay up to date in a way they find valuable, it could definitely be a good idea. I'd encourage you to try it as a free newsletter on Substack and see if you can get people reading it regulary!
Why take a cut from the publisher? Why not instead open up access to the publishers via a marketplace on your site so people/companies can sponsor the mailing lists? You can take a cut from the sponsor for having given the opportunity to introduce them to publisher(s) that cater to their market. It's a win-win-win for the potential sponsors(advertisers), the publishers as well as Substack. As a sponsor, I would have immediate market access through these publishers who cater to my niche. As a publisher, I would have outsourced the task of attracting sponsors and managing sponsor timelines to Substack so I can focus more on creating content and expanding my mailing list. As Substack, you wouldn't have to annoy your publishers by taking a cut and instead carry over your fee to be paid by sponsors/advertisers. A bonus would be allowing your publishers to carry over their existing sponsors to use your system which would possibly attract a huge populace of publishers who are currently manually micro-managing their existing sponsors and timelines instead of focusing on creating content.
Our product is also exposed to our customers' customers, so this has been a huge growth driver for us. Similar story for Statuspage, Intercom, etc.
On a side note, I like how you have written the body of this post. Not to mention a very useful product.
I love the fact the product is so minimal at the moment, that it opens doors for real user feedback; I've been wanting to make something similar for a long time now, but was always stuck in the feature loop.
would be great, if others could comment on the MVP or Launch Early nature of Substack.