<story><title>We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA</title><text>Hi! This is Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi, the founders of Substack, with Sachin Monga, the head of product. Yesterday, we launched an iOS app for Substack, so you can read all your Substack subscriptions in one place, with no distractions.&lt;p&gt;Readers have been tweeting at us for years now to ask when we’d have an app. We’ve long wanted one too, and we suddenly got the manpower to be able to build a good one when we acquired Sachin’s company Cocoon (W19) last year.&lt;p&gt;Soon after starting Substack, we found it easiest to explain what we do as “We make it simple to start a paid newsletter.” Even then, a Substack was more than just an email newsletter: it was also a blog, and it could host embedded video and audio, and people could leave comments and participate in discussion threads. But the term “newsletter” was useful shorthand because everyone kind of got what that meant. All along, though, we’ve been quietly building the tools for what we call “personal media empires,” encompassing different media formats (natively) and community discussion (which we intend to make better and better).&lt;p&gt;By a similar token, right from the start we’ve been intending for the company to do more than just provide subscription publishing tools. We’re excited by the vision of Substack becoming a network, where writers and readers benefit from being part of a larger ecosystem. For writers, it means they can be discovered by readers who might not otherwise have found them. For readers, it means being able to connect directly with writers and other readers and to explore a universe of great work.&lt;p&gt;The app is a key part of the network vision. Nothing changes in terms of writers and readers being in control. The writers still own their mailing lists, content, and IP and can take it all with them anytime they want. Anyone who signs up to a Substack through the app still goes on to that mailing list. And readers still get to choose what appears in their “inbox,” with the power to subscribe and unsubscribe from whatever they want (you can also add any RSS feed into the app via reader.substack.com). But now we’ll have more and better ways to surface recommendations from writers and readers, to show people’s profiles, and to deliver notifications inside and outside of the app.&lt;p&gt;This is just a start for the Substack app. We want to keep improving it, so please give us feedback and ask us the hard questions. What do you think we’re doing wrong? What could be better? What could be great? What might we not have thought of?&lt;p&gt;We’re here for the next couple hours. Ask us anything.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;on.substack.com&amp;#x2F;p&amp;#x2F;substackapp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;on.substack.com&amp;#x2F;p&amp;#x2F;substackapp&lt;/a&gt;</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>cjbest</author><text>2: We do have a strong philosophical stance on this. We think taking a strong stance in favor of freedom of the press is both the right thing to do, and critical to the success of our broader mission. We&amp;#x27;ve written about this a few times, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;on.substack.com&amp;#x2F;p&amp;#x2F;substacks-view-of-content-moderation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;on.substack.com&amp;#x2F;p&amp;#x2F;substacks-view-of-content-moderati...&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;on.substack.com&amp;#x2F;p&amp;#x2F;society-has-a-trust-problem-more&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;on.substack.com&amp;#x2F;p&amp;#x2F;society-has-a-trust-problem-more&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;That is incidentally a big part of the answer for (3). We are very public about how we think about this, and the first of those posts was written before there was any real pressure on this stuff. We talk about this with folks we are hiring, and it helps people choose for themselves if the approach we take is something they are excited to get behind.&lt;p&gt;4. YES!</text></item><item><author>native_samples</author><text>Firstly - love love love Substack. It&amp;#x27;s so simple but it&amp;#x27;s so rapidly become a place where I do so much reading. I have a few questions (mostly not about the app though, I&amp;#x27;ll have to wait for Android support to try that).&lt;p&gt;1. How did you guys manage to attract writers? I know you have been signing fronting agreements. Superficially, Substack is a (fairly basic?) blogging platform + email + payment processing system. That doesn&amp;#x27;t feel &lt;i&gt;particularly&lt;/i&gt; hard to put together, though maybe I totally underestimate that. So what&amp;#x27;s powering Substack&amp;#x27;s growth is that you were able to get guys like Greenwald, Taibbi, Scott Alexander etc on board. How much of your growth do you think is product vs business&amp;#x2F;dealmaking?&lt;p&gt;2. You&amp;#x27;ve been strong defenders of free speech, especially in the last two years where there&amp;#x27;s been a ton of censorship. Really, it&amp;#x27;s helped a lot, I&amp;#x27;ve felt like Substack was one of the few places I could find rational and logical takes on things like lockdowns at a time when everyone else was losing their minds. Do you have some sort of strong philosophical take on this, or is it a sort of default because censorship takes specific effort and you&amp;#x27;re busy with growth?&lt;p&gt;3. Related to that, the pattern of tech firms being open access and supporters of free speech for some years and then later losing that as they hire more and more people (especially, new grads) seems to be a recurring one. Given you&amp;#x27;re based in San Francisco, do you have a plan to actually &lt;i&gt;keep&lt;/i&gt; Substack the way it is, in the face of hiring employees who might demand you constantly cancel the witch-du-jour?&lt;p&gt;4. There&amp;#x27;s IMO a ton of potential for innovation with group discussions. To me, Slashdot was actually the peak of innovation in large scale anonymous forum discussions with many clever features, crowdsourced moderation, friends&amp;#x2F;foes, meta-mods etc. Do you plan to try new things with discussions, or stick to a conventional approach? Right now it&amp;#x27;s pretty basic.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>no_butterscotch</author><text>&amp;gt; We talk about this with folks we are hiring, and it helps people choose for themselves if the approach we take is something they are excited to get behind.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m interested in hearing more, I recently had a Substack recruiter reach out to me and was curious about this because I work at a tech company w&amp;#x2F; some internal &amp;quot;activists&amp;quot; (I don&amp;#x27;t consider them to be activists).&lt;p&gt;How would you talk about it with them while hiring? It seems like you might need to bring up uncomfortable (and potentially risky) things like politics (?) during an interview?&lt;p&gt;What to do if your employees start doing walkouts or what not? At the company I work for this happened. A lot of people don&amp;#x27;t feel comfortable standing up to the ones who are most vocal about cancel-culture (if you disagree with them you may be labeled and considered a &amp;quot;fascist&amp;quot; (ugh) or even worse a &amp;quot;nazi&amp;quot; and your career impacted), I find that most people just stay silent in the face of this and the organizers of these movements seem to rule the roost in the workplace.&lt;p&gt;Great job either way I&amp;#x27;m a Substack supporter! :thumbsup:</text></comment>
<story><title>We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA</title><text>Hi! This is Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi, the founders of Substack, with Sachin Monga, the head of product. Yesterday, we launched an iOS app for Substack, so you can read all your Substack subscriptions in one place, with no distractions.&lt;p&gt;Readers have been tweeting at us for years now to ask when we’d have an app. We’ve long wanted one too, and we suddenly got the manpower to be able to build a good one when we acquired Sachin’s company Cocoon (W19) last year.&lt;p&gt;Soon after starting Substack, we found it easiest to explain what we do as “We make it simple to start a paid newsletter.” Even then, a Substack was more than just an email newsletter: it was also a blog, and it could host embedded video and audio, and people could leave comments and participate in discussion threads. But the term “newsletter” was useful shorthand because everyone kind of got what that meant. All along, though, we’ve been quietly building the tools for what we call “personal media empires,” encompassing different media formats (natively) and community discussion (which we intend to make better and better).&lt;p&gt;By a similar token, right from the start we’ve been intending for the company to do more than just provide subscription publishing tools. We’re excited by the vision of Substack becoming a network, where writers and readers benefit from being part of a larger ecosystem. For writers, it means they can be discovered by readers who might not otherwise have found them. For readers, it means being able to connect directly with writers and other readers and to explore a universe of great work.&lt;p&gt;The app is a key part of the network vision. Nothing changes in terms of writers and readers being in control. The writers still own their mailing lists, content, and IP and can take it all with them anytime they want. Anyone who signs up to a Substack through the app still goes on to that mailing list. And readers still get to choose what appears in their “inbox,” with the power to subscribe and unsubscribe from whatever they want (you can also add any RSS feed into the app via reader.substack.com). But now we’ll have more and better ways to surface recommendations from writers and readers, to show people’s profiles, and to deliver notifications inside and outside of the app.&lt;p&gt;This is just a start for the Substack app. We want to keep improving it, so please give us feedback and ask us the hard questions. What do you think we’re doing wrong? What could be better? What could be great? What might we not have thought of?&lt;p&gt;We’re here for the next couple hours. Ask us anything.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;on.substack.com&amp;#x2F;p&amp;#x2F;substackapp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;on.substack.com&amp;#x2F;p&amp;#x2F;substackapp&lt;/a&gt;</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>cjbest</author><text>2: We do have a strong philosophical stance on this. We think taking a strong stance in favor of freedom of the press is both the right thing to do, and critical to the success of our broader mission. We&amp;#x27;ve written about this a few times, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;on.substack.com&amp;#x2F;p&amp;#x2F;substacks-view-of-content-moderation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;on.substack.com&amp;#x2F;p&amp;#x2F;substacks-view-of-content-moderati...&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;on.substack.com&amp;#x2F;p&amp;#x2F;society-has-a-trust-problem-more&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;on.substack.com&amp;#x2F;p&amp;#x2F;society-has-a-trust-problem-more&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;That is incidentally a big part of the answer for (3). We are very public about how we think about this, and the first of those posts was written before there was any real pressure on this stuff. We talk about this with folks we are hiring, and it helps people choose for themselves if the approach we take is something they are excited to get behind.&lt;p&gt;4. YES!</text></item><item><author>native_samples</author><text>Firstly - love love love Substack. It&amp;#x27;s so simple but it&amp;#x27;s so rapidly become a place where I do so much reading. I have a few questions (mostly not about the app though, I&amp;#x27;ll have to wait for Android support to try that).&lt;p&gt;1. How did you guys manage to attract writers? I know you have been signing fronting agreements. Superficially, Substack is a (fairly basic?) blogging platform + email + payment processing system. That doesn&amp;#x27;t feel &lt;i&gt;particularly&lt;/i&gt; hard to put together, though maybe I totally underestimate that. So what&amp;#x27;s powering Substack&amp;#x27;s growth is that you were able to get guys like Greenwald, Taibbi, Scott Alexander etc on board. How much of your growth do you think is product vs business&amp;#x2F;dealmaking?&lt;p&gt;2. You&amp;#x27;ve been strong defenders of free speech, especially in the last two years where there&amp;#x27;s been a ton of censorship. Really, it&amp;#x27;s helped a lot, I&amp;#x27;ve felt like Substack was one of the few places I could find rational and logical takes on things like lockdowns at a time when everyone else was losing their minds. Do you have some sort of strong philosophical take on this, or is it a sort of default because censorship takes specific effort and you&amp;#x27;re busy with growth?&lt;p&gt;3. Related to that, the pattern of tech firms being open access and supporters of free speech for some years and then later losing that as they hire more and more people (especially, new grads) seems to be a recurring one. Given you&amp;#x27;re based in San Francisco, do you have a plan to actually &lt;i&gt;keep&lt;/i&gt; Substack the way it is, in the face of hiring employees who might demand you constantly cancel the witch-du-jour?&lt;p&gt;4. There&amp;#x27;s IMO a ton of potential for innovation with group discussions. To me, Slashdot was actually the peak of innovation in large scale anonymous forum discussions with many clever features, crowdsourced moderation, friends&amp;#x2F;foes, meta-mods etc. Do you plan to try new things with discussions, or stick to a conventional approach? Right now it&amp;#x27;s pretty basic.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wpietri</author><text>That philosophical stance is very common at the beginnings of a platform. E.g., Twitter being the &amp;quot;free-speech wing of the free-speech party&amp;quot;. Or Christopher &amp;quot;moot&amp;quot; Poole, who created 4-chan. But over time, tensions develop between the theory and the practice.&lt;p&gt;So what sorts of things do you folks find personally odious but see it as important to support?&lt;p&gt;From your terms of service, obviously porn isn&amp;#x27;t in that category. What about, say, open antisemitism? Will you host and help fund the American Nazi Party or the KKK? How about more borderline actors, like people who promote racist conspiracy theories and ethnic cleansing, but stop short of direct calls for violence?</text></comment>