🙌 We are investing in Substack
We are happy to share that we are investing in Substack in a community round led by one of the earliest investors and writers on the platform,
.Exponential View was one of the earliest newsletters on the platform back in 2017. From the get-go, founders
made us feel confident that they had what it takes to build a newsletter platform for some of the best publications on the internet. We launched a proper subscription-first business that thousands of our members make possible. For a more detailed post about our journey with Substack, read this.Six years on, the promise of Substack is larger than any individual publication on the platform today. The creator economy made it possible for individuals to earn a living doing what they do well — write, perform, create podcasts or play video games — on the internet. It lifted many, many boats. Especially the winning boats. Winner-take-all dynamics of the creator economy are such that only 12% of full-time creators are making more than $50,000 per year, while 46% of full-time creators make less than $1,000 annually. In addition, creators are heavily dependent on brand deals for revenue, bringing into question the ability to safeguard their independence and serve their communities above all else.
Our newsletter arrives to 80,000 emails via Substack every week, and a portion of our readership regularly pays $120/year to receive our work. What our readers don’t see is that we, as one Substack’s top publications, support over a dozen smaller publications through Substack’s recommendation network. We have funnelled as many as 2000 subscribers to individual publications we love and want others to know about. Similarly, thousands of new readers come to Exponential View from other writers who appreciate what we do. There’s more to this flywheel of network effects than mere numbers — publishing on Substack today doesn’t feel like rivalry; we are not competing against other writers. The better
and others do, the better we’ll do.
We are investing in Substack because we want to be part of their evolution into a mature subscription network: taking the trust between creators and audiences to the next level; rewarding deep connections, and supporting creator ownership.