Sublime

The Browser is a daily newsletter from someone who reads 1,000 articles a day, choosing his five favorites and sending them out with a short summary. Oftentimes, these linked articles don’t have a paywall of their own at all — but subscribers of The Browser pay to have them sent in a curated list.

Most platforms today are hoping to capture most of the value of “creators” as they professionalize. For example, substack captures you when you are already ready to write something - it presumes you have an idea and are already to execute on it. By capturing the top of the funnel, increasing the space for exploration and inspiration, platforms can ... See more

Substack sits on top of a trend that’s very dear to me: the democratization of monetized information. In simple terms, writers can earn money by sharing valuable information without the dependency on a publisher or newspaper. That’s not just better for creators but also for consumers because they can have a direct relationship with each other.

Here the “product” is the individual or something they’ve written, spoken, curated, or created. This category relies on influence and people caring about what you say or think in a particular niche. Customers, often “fans” or “supporters”, provide payments directly to their favorite creators as a one-off transaction or a regularly recurring subscri... See more

From the outside, Substack's strategy has seemed to be the following: 1) Create a beautiful, simple blogging platform, which Substack most certainly is. 2) Very slowly release control of who can use Substack to create cachet. 3) Pay some people to post to the site, but not most of them. (Sub-strategy: Don't disclose who's working for Substack and w... See more