It is fair to say that Substack has had a dramatic week and a half or so, and I talked to their CEO Chris Best about it. The company announced a new feature called Substack Notes, which looks quite a bit like Twitter — Substack authors can post short bits of text to share links and kick off discussions, and people can reply to them, like the posts, the whole thing. Like I said, Twitter.

Twitter, under the direction of Elon Musk, did not like the prospect of this competition, and for several days last week, Twitter was taking aggressive actions against Substack. At one point you couldn’t even like tweets with Substack links in them. At another point, clicking on a Substack link resulted in a warning message about the platform being unsafe. And finally, Twitter redirected all searches for the word Substack to “newsletter.” Musk claimed Substack was somehow downloading the Twitter database to bootstrap Substack Notes, which, well, I’m still not sure what that means, but I at least asked Chris what he thought that meant and whether he was doing it. 

It’s tempting to think of Substack like a rival platform to Twitter, but until the arrival of Substack Notes, it was much more like enterprise software. With Substack Notes, the company is in direct competition with social networks like Twitter. It’s shipping a consumer product that’s designed to be used by Substack readers. It is no longer just a software vendor; it’s a consumer product company. And that carries with it another set of content moderation concerns, that, after talking to Chris, I’m just not sure Substack is ready for. Like, I really don’t know. You’ll just have to listen to his answers — or really, non-answers — for yourself.

This is a wild one. I’m still processing it. Let me know what you think. Okay, Chris Best, CEO of Substack. Here we go.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Chris Best, you are the co-founder and CEO of Substack. Welcome back to Decoder.

Thanks for having me.

It has been a little over two years since you’ve been on the show. We were both effectively babies when that conversation happened. Substack had just started, I had just started with Decoder. I feel like we’ve both been on a real ride in that time.

It’s felt like a lot longer than two years, probably.

Yeah, I think for you maybe more than me. I want to ask just a very earthy question to begin with. You were really new as a CEO the last time we talked. I was reading through that interview, and at the time, I was sorting out how to ask Decoder questions and how to structure the thing. And just reading it back, maybe it was a little unfair because you were figuring out how to answer them in a CEO way. Do you feel more settled now as a CEO? 

I’ve learned a ton in the past two years, and I feel like being a CEO of a startup like this, the job is being bad at the current thing. And then, as soon as you start to feel like you’re getting okay at it, you just earn the right to go to the next mini-game that you’re newly bad at. And so I always feel like I’m constantly learning a lot and struggling to be on top of the thing that I currently have to do. But the whole time, I feel like I’m learning a ton, and it’s been very exciting.

Yeah. I think it’s just a question that rarely gets asked of people who are on this kind of journey. Did it click in? What parts of it do you feel more confident in now than you did two years ago?

The story we’re telling hasn’t really changed, but the way that we know how to tell it, and our confidence in it, and our confidence in what we’re building and what that means for the world has gone up and up. I think the team that we’ve built here is incredible — that’s feeling really good. We figured out how to make a team that can do ambitious things and have a group of exceptional people accomplish audacious goals together. All that stuff has come a long way.

I actually want to talk about that story a little bit. So, Substack has told a lot of stories about itself in the past two years since you’ve started. I think you all started with a big story about how social media was a disaster and the attention economy was a mess. You’ve stayed committed to that. But the part of the story that has changed the most, as I look back at it, is what Substack is and what is the product.

I think of Substack as an enterprise software company. You provide enterprise software to writers who then go build businesses with it, and those businesses can look like one of 100 different kinds of things. But at the core of it, you’re their vendor building a subscription email newsletter product. Is that how you think of it, that this is an enterprise software company? Or is it getting more consumer over time — which is the thing that I would candidly say is the change that I’m sensing?

So the thing that I’ve always loved about Substack, the thing that convinced me to work on this in the first place, is that at any given moment we’ve always had a really big, audacious version  of the thing we’re trying to do. There is a big vision here, and that thing that you gestured at at the start really hasn’t changed. We’re building a new economic engine for culture. We’re building a new part of the internet that’s based on different laws of physics, like a different business model — subscription instead of ads. It’s a different way of relating to people, where you subscribe directly to the people you trust rather than signing up for the platform as a whole. And the potential of that thing to really change the world and to inspire people to want to be a part of it is really compelling.

And we’ve always had a very concrete next step of something that we could do that gets us an inch closer to that vision. And at the very start, it wasn’t “build an enterprise software thing”; it was, “help one person turn on page descriptions in their email newsletter.” It was the very smallest instantiation of, “Well, but now that I’ve turned on paid subscriptions in my email newsletter, I own my audience. I have a connection directly to them, I can reach them in their inbox. I can bring my email list with me, I can import it, I can export it. I can get paid directly by my audience. That changes the game of what kind of stuff I’m allowed to create.”

And so, we see that the journey of Substack has been tackling a series of these concrete next steps that get us ever closer to this big thing that we set out to do. We’re still pretty early on if we’re right about the size of the thing that we’re eventually going to be able to create. And you mentioned that this is just a tool — enterprise software, whatever. Is this a tool that is a thing for writers that readers don’t even need to know about? Maybe it’s just Shopify for writers or something like that? Should that be the vision for Substack?

The reason I think that is too reductive and would be too small of a vision is that I think the power of the network that we’re building is a big part of the value that we can create for writers. And so, we don’t want to say, “You can just go off and use our publishing-in-a-box software to start your own business.” It’s great that you can do that. That’s a necessary step one. But you want the power of a network. You don’t want to be totally off the grid, having to figure everything else out yourself. You want to be able to plug into this. You want to have the benefit of independence, of owning your work and owning your list, and also the benefit of being part of a network that helps you grow and interact with other people — that helps bring all of that value. And I think we’ve shown now that we can do both of those things and that, together, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

So I want to hold onto that as we go through this conversation because figuring out where Substack lives in this stack of technologies that create user experiences is important for a host of reasons, and I think the most important one is that the closer you are to the consumer experience, the more responsible for things like moderation you have to be. 

I don’t think Comcast, or AT&T, or whoever my ISP is should be responsible for content moderation. In fact, I think they should do zero of it. That’s the idea of net neutrality. I don’t know if Cloudflare should do it or another web host or service provider. I definitely think Facebook should do it. I definitely think YouTube should do it. And there’s a gradient there, and Substack is in maybe the grayest part of that zone where it’s a brand and now you want me to put an app on my phone, but you do provide an enterprise software product to people, and I think you would prefer to be just the pipes and let the consumers decide. I think that has been where most of your challenges have come from — applying one set of expectations to a different part of your product — and I’m wondering if that has gotten any clearer for you.

So the big vision is we’re building this new economic engine for culture. What that actually looks like is a subscription network. And the thing that we started out believing and I think have become more convinced of over time is that doing this in a way that’s vertically integrated allows us to make something truly new. So the fact that both we are the tool that the writer uses to compose the thing they’re writing and we’re sending the email the reader sees or that we’re building the app that the reader is using to read it in lets us make a combined experience that is different and better than would be possible at all if you just had a bunch of different things that were one little piece of that stack. And so, we are trying to build this new thing and having Substack be providing the different pieces of that together is a core part of what makes it work.

So I think that brings us, inevitably, to Substack Notes, which is the new feature you all just launched. When we wrote about it, we said, “Hey, this looks a lot like Twitter.” I think the guy who runs Twitter looked at it and said, “Hey, this looks a little too much like Twitter.” We’ll come to that part of it, but tell us what Substack Notes is and what you want it to do.

So Substack Notes is a way for writers on Substack to share shortform posts and recommendations on the Substack network and help them grow. So Substack is a subscription network. People don’t subscribe to Substack; they subscribe to individual writers. And a lot of what writers do to grow is promote their work and get into conversation with other people to share recommendations and ideas. And Notes is a place where you can do that within the Substack network.

So I am very sympathetic to this. We launched a thing on our own site called “Quick Posts” because not all writers want to write a whole story every time. Sometimes you just want to write something that’s really short and say “look at this thing” or “go read this other great story.” So I get that motivation very clearly. Our ideas are probably converging more than they’re not in that sense. But Substack Notes really does pull a lot of ideas from Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks into the Substack app. And I’m just wondering how you think about the tension between that and then all the rhetoric around social networks being bad and the attention economy being unhealthy.

So I think that the difference between Substack and a social network is not in how it looks. The difference is the business model. The difference is what you don’t see. You don’t see ads, you don’t see the incentive structure that ads necessarily create. It runs on a totally different business model, it runs on paid subscriptions. The customers are different — the readers on Substack are the customers. On a social network, it’s the advertisers.

Wait, you don’t have to pay to use it? You can just download the Substack app, read everyone’s free Substack posts, and then read their Notes for free?

You can read their Notes for free, but at some point, you may discover that when you find writers who you deeply value and you care about what they say and they have a paid Substack, that might be something that you choose to be a part of and is actually a big driving force for why the whole thing works. And so, to look at Substack Notes and say “well, it looks like other products that I’m familiar with” is looking at a Tesla and saying, “It’s the same as an Aston Martin because they both have a steering wheel.” You drive them, they’ve got four wheels. They’re completely different because the thing that powers them, the fuel, is completely different.

Was it meant to compete with Twitter?

No.

What was it meant to do besides post recommendations? Because it feels like you want writers putting more content in the app so people use the app more, which I totally understand. Again, that’s our motivation for our product and our site: we want our writers to participate more, be more present, build more audience, build more community.

I think that the incentive structure of the social media business model pulls in a certain direction. It pulls in this direction of being maximally cheaply compelling, maximally addictive, and trying to get you to spend more and more of your time there, regardless of how much you value it. And I basically think that the truest instantiation of that today is TikTok. And I think that every company that has this business model is going to get pulled in the direction of getting closer and closer to TikTok and then whatever comes beyond TikTok. TikTok but everything’s AI, or TikTok plugs into your brain, or whatever it is. I don’t know.

There’s some gravitational pull that’s pulling every platform that works that way to be that way whether they want to or not. And I think that opens up an opportunity for something that is in opposition to that that works a totally different way. That says, “Hey, over here, you are the customer. You are going to subscribe directly to things you care about. The job of this app, of this inbox, of this feed is not to keep you here at all costs. It’s to find you things that you value so much that you might want to pay for them.”

And so, my mental model of this is basically that everybody’s going to either have to turn into TikTok or turn into Substack. We are already Substack. In the broad sense, that creates an alternative to the attention economy. Substack, as a whole, is an alternative to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, and over time, we think this alternative model will grow. But it’s just obviously not the case that we’re going to release one feature and everybody from some other thing is going to jump over. It doesn’t work that way.

Just to be clear, the users of Notes are expecting that. Just browsing Notes for the past couple days that I’ve had access to it, there’s a lot of hope that everyone will just move over from Twitter. Obviously, there’s some Twitter-related drama that we should get into very directly. But right now, looking at the users of Notes, who are a bunch of Substackers, they’re saying, “Hey, this feels like an early Twitter. I hope we can keep this going and this replaces Twitter.” Do you think that’s a fair or appropriate expectation?

I’ve seen the meme that you’re talking about. That’s not the story that we’re telling, and that’s not the way that we believe it’s going to work. We don’t think that Substack anything is going to be the new Twitter. And we think, even if that were possible, that’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re not trying to build the same thing.

I can understand how people, especially writers who really want to have a reliable platform for their work, a reliable place to share, could be feeling the heat and looking for alternatives. I think that simplistic understanding just doesn’t hold water.

Let’s talk about that part of it for just a quick second. The last time we talked, you said that you were keeping track of various writers’ Twitter followers as you were considering recruiting them to Substack, and there have been a lot of different deals that recruit writers to Substack. But the idea that people with a lot of Twitter followers were attractive targets to recruit to Substack came through loud and clear.

I have certainly heard from a lot of people in Substack over the past two years that their primary source of conversions to paid is Twitter. Twitter is their best marketing engine. Substack maybe monetized Twitter better than Twitter ever monetized itself. This has been a real relationship that we’ve seen play out. And now, Twitter’s going through whatever it’s going through. I think there is a lot of fear from that community that their single best top-of-funnel network is going away or will be inhospitable to them in some meaningful way.

And Notes might be the replacement, or Mastodon might be the replacement, but it’s certainly not