[Guest post] How Substack Became Milquetoast

- “I think RSS is the most undervalued thing in the entire universe”– Robert Cottrell

Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi started Substack in 2017, but their history dates back years before. Chris co-founded the anonymous posting app Kik during his third year at the University of Waterloo (2010). He spent the better part of eight years at the company where he met his soon-to-be co-founders. When Chris left Kik in early 201

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When Substack launched their reader web app last year, I thought it was interesting but faced an uphill battle. It’s really hard in today’s age of addiction to get people to habitually come to a new URL. That’s why blogs died and became reincarnated as newsletters.

What’s special about personal blogs is not just the actual writing, it’s also the design the content is presented in. Newsletters lack the unique design aspect that blogs have.