About Substack
Substack was founded in 2017 by Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi, based on the observation that independent writers and journalists had limited good options for building a sustainable, direct paid subscription business around their own writing, since most existing publishing platforms either required writers to work within a traditional media company's employment or contractor relationship, taking a significant share of any advertising or subscription revenue generated, or required writers to separately handle the technical infrastructure of email delivery, payment processing, and subscriber management themselves if they wanted to publish independently, a combination of technical requirements that most writers, however talented at writing itself, were not necessarily equipped to handle on their own.
Substack's platform lets writers publish email newsletters directly to subscribers, handling the underlying technical infrastructure of email delivery and payment processing for paid subscriptions, letting writers focus on writing and building their audience rather than needing separate technical expertise in email infrastructure or payment systems, while charging a percentage of subscription revenue as its primary business model, an arrangement that has let many writers build meaningful independent publishing businesses reaching directly interested subscribers without going through a traditional media company's editorial and business structure. The platform has been used by writers across an extremely wide range of subject matter and political perspectives, including established journalists who left traditional media positions to build independent Substack publications, as well as writers without prior traditional media careers who built substantial subscriber bases directly through Substack, reflecting the platform's role in the broader decentralization of media and journalism away from large traditional media companies toward direct writer-to-reader subscription relationships. Substack has periodically faced scrutiny and public debate regarding its content moderation policies, particularly concerning how the platform handles writers publishing more controversial or extreme political content, given the company's stated commitment to relatively minimal content moderation and support for a broad range of viewpoints on its platform. The company has raised substantial venture funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator's Continuity Fund, reaching a valuation exceeding $1 billion.
