Why Substack strives to 'encourage a better kind of culture,' according to its co-founder
Hamish McKenzie of Substack sat down with members of the Iowa Writers' Collaborative for a deep dive on what makes his publishing platform tick (and distinct from TikTok).
Since you’re reading this, you’re likely familiar with Substack on a basic level as a handy platform that directs my words—these words—into your email inbox.
Or maybe you got a push alert and are reading me on the Substack app.
Here’s a chance to get to know more about what’s behind this storytellers’ tech firm, thanks to an hour our Iowa Writers’ Collaborative spent last week in a videoconference with one of the company’s three co-founders, Hamish McKenzie. Collaborative ringleader Julie Gammack led the discussion.
McKenzie, 43, said he hadn’t encountered a comparable regional group of creators on Substack. In other words, Iowa in some sense here is plowing new ground.
Substackers in a given city such as Los Angeles or Chicago meet up in person for social events. But the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, as he sees it, has managed to organically build the type of structure—independent publishers cross-pollinating each other’s audiences—that he and his co-founders envisioned for the platform.
In McKenzie’s words, his company is pursuing “an ideological mission to create a better system that can encourage a better kind of culture.”
No small feat.
That echoes the language on Substack’s “about” page, where it declares its intention to build “a new economic engine for culture”:
“We think the internet's powers, married to the right business model, can be harnessed to build the most valuable media economy the world has ever known—an economy where value is measured not only in dollars but also in quality, in good-faith discourse, and in creating an internet that celebrates and supports humanity.”
Substack by its own accounting is now home to more than 35 million subscriptions—at least 3 million of those paid, if not more than 4 million according to the latest reports.
Substack is putting money behind wooing creators from other platforms, including TikTok. It’s an effective place to host a podcast and recently added the ability to livestream video.
McKenzie co-founded Substack seven and a half years ago with two friends he met at a Canadian tech company (and messaging app) called Kik: Chris Best (the systems engineer of the trio) and Jairaj Sethi.
Substack today is based in San Francisco and has a small satellite office in New York. It employs about 100 people in those two cities and dispersed around the map.
“Everyone who works at Substack has some interesting side thing going on,” McKenzie said. “They’re a published author, or they’re in a band, or they’re a musician, or they make amazing woodwork.”
McKenzie is a self-described “middling journalist” from another smallish corner of the globe: New Zealand. He caught the journalism bug in high school, earned a master’s degree in journalism in Canada, and helped launch Time Out magazine in Hong Kong, among his varied resume. He married an American, and her law career took him to cities such as Baltimore and New York. He even worked for Elon Musk and Tesla for just over a year, circa 2014. He “took a detour to working in tech” as he was trying to reestablish himself as a freelance writer and book author.
Some of the key points and insights McKenzie shared during his chat with our collaborative:
Modern media solutions need to acknowledge the billions of mobile-first (or mobile-only) consumers.
We no longer can expect people to sit at a computer to browse for their favorite stories any more than we can expect them to page through a printed newspaper while lounging by the fire. Yet Substack, as a subscription-based platform, also is an attempt to help creators build a sustainable audience on their terms.
In the ad-focused game, as McKenzie put it, you need to reach millions of people to have a shot.
With Substack subscriptions, if you’re “appealing at a deep level to 1,000 people,” that may be enough to get a financial foothold depending on what you charge for a subscription.
Media institutions are much weaker compared to 10 or 20 years ago in terms of their ability to withstand powerful (including governmental) forces that may object to independent coverage.
Substack is attempting to alleviate some of the erosion in business and legal foundations through its Substack Defender program that keeps attorneys on retainer to help creators evaluate drafts before they’re published, or respond to cease-and-desist letters.
“We don’t want people to think that just because they’re independent they are vulnerable to legal pressure and legal attacks,” McKenzie said.
More traditional media brands do exist on Substack.
McKenzie cited the Ankler, which covers Hollywood, or the Arizona Agenda, or the Free Press.
“You’re running sort of the newspaper playbook or the magazine playbook, but you can do it with a much leaner staff,” McKenzie said. “You don’t have to hire a ton of tech people and design people out of the blocks.”
Substack also is researching new tools for what would essentially be these enterprise clients—a metered paywall, deeper analytics, and the like.
Substack is led by its ideological mission, but McKenzie believes it also can become a “huge business.”
So do the platform’s investors. So do companies and moguls (such as Musk) that have explored acquiring Substack. McKenzie said that selling the company now would represent a “breach of contract” with the platform’s publishers.
“If they woke up tomorrow and all of a sudden actually, they’re doing business with Amazon or Google or Meta, I think they would have the right to be outraged,” he said.
Two basic principles to generate audience for a successful creator (of any format, not only writing) on Substack:
Reward subscribers’ trust in you with the quality of your thought and the consistency of your output. (I do my best, dear readers, but this isn’t my primary gig. My apologies.)
Cultivate the most courageous version of your authentic voice. You can be bold to build audience on Substack without resorting to the shallow and shrill tendencies of social media.
Can we ‘build a different kind of media ecosystem’ on Substack?
I want to retain shreds of optimism that Substack may help all of us wade through today’s digital sludge to eventually manage a less toxic future online. One thing that keeps darkening my thoughts is having lived through the social media euphoria of the 2010s, when “the Arab Spring” suggested that Silicon Valley was only a democratizing force. Meanwhile, news publishers willingly gave away their content to social platforms, chasing clicks for advertising scale. In retrospect, news outlets realized they were behaving like drunken gamblers after midnight on the casino floor, deluded into thinking they could beat the house at its own game.
McKenzie said something similar to our collaborative, noting how the early social era enabled individual voices to “go viral” without truly democratizing the publishing economy.
The ethics of late-20th century journalism weren’t perfect and only gradually become more inclusive to better reflect society. But that era also supported more professional journalists to cover their local communities and keep watch over elected leaders.
Money made the difference: Lucrative local ad markets forced publishers to speak to all political stripes and focus on broadly appealing solutions. The internet shattered that business model, and now an extreme partisan audience is what’s more lucrative in media—and a more feasible operating system in state and federal government.
McKenzie says Substack is “wired differently at the fundamental level, which is the business-model level.”
Can Substack help money make the difference again in the interest of a better dialogue focused on substantive solutions for real communities? Or will modern media increasingly kowtow to special-interest groups so they can mount attacks and pursue power for those who are very online and very partisan?
“The social media system creates these incentives for types of behavior and content that don't have much to do with seeking truth and don't have much to do with fostering mutual understanding but have a lot to do with keeping people scrolling on their feeds, which is driven by the types of behavior and content that polarize us and divide us and pit us against each other,” McKenzie said.
“Our game is not to try to keep people addicted to a scroll and a feed. Our game is to try and foster deeper relationships that ultimately result in paid subscriptions.”
Here’s hoping Substack really can restore a nobler purpose and good-faith discourse to our jittery lives scattered across a messy digital landscape of addictive platforms.
The Iowa Writers Collaborative has grown to include more than 70 members and a Letters From Iowans column. Each member is an independent columnist who shares two things in common: They have made a living as a journalist or storyteller (or songwriter) and are interested in the state of Iowa. Subscribe to the main account for a convenient way to be notified each Sunday and Wednesday (the midweek “Flipside” edition) about most posts by most members. You can support individual members according to your unique interests by becoming a paid subscriber to any newsletter. We are also proud to be affiliated with Iowa Capital Dispatch, where some of our content is regularly republished.
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