Substack launched in 2017 with no writers on it. Cofounder Hamish McKenzie had spent almost a decade as a journalist and had known Bill Bishop for most of that time, reading his newsletter Sinocism, a daily briefing on China that Bishop had written for free since 2011 and grown to more than 30,000 subscribers among diplomats, policymakers, and journalists. Bishop had been telling his own readers he wanted to start charging for it, but kept putting it off. "If you're a writer or editor, most people don't want to deal with those hassles," he said. "They just want a nice, clean interface that makes it easy to charge money, and then to move on with it."
McKenzie messaged Bishop and asked him to be Substack's first publisher. Bishop agreed. He and cofounder Chris Best flew to Washington, D.C., where Bishop lived, and built the first working version of the paid product around exactly what Bishop needed: one clean way to charge for a newsletter without the setup work he'd been avoiding.
Bishop launched paid Sinocism on October 15, 2017, charging $11 a month or $118 a year. By the end of that first day he had brought in six figures of revenue. It proved, for Bishop and for Substack at the same time, that people would pay directly for a newsletter they already trusted.
Substack didn't open the doors to everyone and hope writers would show up. It went to one specific person the founders already knew and read, solved his exact problem, and turned his result into the story it kept telling for years to make the case to everyone who came after.
- Targeted one specific writer, Bill Bishop, chosen because a cofounder already knew him and already read his newsletter.
- Built the first version of the paid product around that one writer's specific need instead of a general feature set.
- Let the writer launch first and prove the model with his own audience and his own money on the line.
- Used that single, provable result as the pitch to recruit the next wave of writers.