Chris Best - Co-Founder of Substack Speaks on The Power of Subscriptions

Welcome back to the Casey Adams Show. Today I am joined by Chris Best, the co founder and CEO of Substack. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Chris.

Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. So I've been familiar with Substack and I've just loved, and not only loved what you built, but you've created such an incredible company since you founded it in 2017. And for those that might not know what Substack is, I'd love for you to give a quick, high level overview of what it is that you and your team have built.

Totally. So Substack is a platform where you, as a writer or as a podcaster, or as other types of creator, can publish to the world and make money from subscriptions.

Love that. Absolutely. And as I mentioned, you guys launched the company in 2017. That's right, yes. And previously to Substack, you were the co founder and CTO of Kickstarter.

That's right.

So where, like, where did your drive for entrepreneurship stem from? When it comes to the early days of kick? Like what, what were your early days of growing up? When it comes to business entrepreneurship? And where did that spark come from? Because you've built some incredible companies.

I think I was always a bit of a misfit. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I wasn't sure where I wanted to land or where I quite where I was going. I didn't feel super comfortable in any of the sort of well, trodden paths that I saw in front of me. I knew that I like to build things. I knew that I liked to create things. I knew that I liked to sort of go my own way. I went to, I took engineering in school mostly out of kind of not being sure what I wanted to do. And I kind of fell into Kik the same way. I mean I was, you know, I joined as sort of the technical co founder. I built some of the early software, but my co founder Ted was the CEO was really his baby. And at the start it was just, we were just hacking, we're just building things. We actually started out making a music player for the BlackBerry was the first thing we built back in the day.

Wow.

Back when those things all made sense. Yeah, it was a wild ride.

Wow. It's so funny hearing that because I'm 22 for context and Kik was one of those messaging platforms that it was one of the first things that I remember utilizing from a messaging perspective with friends and I was just like, oh my God, it's so epic. So you Know, transitioning from KICK to. To launching Substack. What. What led to the initial idea of Substack, and what led you to believing that you and your team could take on this challenge and problem that you wanted to solve?

It probably put two things together for me. One was something that I felt like I learned at KICK as I got into sort of building the product and seeing how the thing took shape was how important the spaces that we all inhabit online and the rules that we make and how they work are to people. I just got this firsthand experience of when you set things up well, it can be really good. When you set things up badly, it can be really bad. And you can't change human nature. You can't change the people who are using the thing. But even so, with the exact same people, when you're setting kind of the rules of the game for one of these online spaces, you can create a heaven or a hell with the exact same people who want the exact same things. You can make a space that everybody using it hates, or you can make a space that everyone loves and adds a lot to their lives. So I developed this respect for the power of kind of setting up these systems the right way at kik. And then I've always been an avid reader. I grew up in a house full of books. My dad's an English teacher. And I've always believed that what you read matters, shapes how you think. It shapes how you see the world. It shapes who you are. And so when I was taking sort of a sabbatical, some time off after my time at kik, one of the things I aspired to do was write. I was like, you know, writing is this powerful thing, right? Kind of like great software is this powerful thing. You can write a piece of software, and it can change a million people's lives. If you write a great essay, you could change who a million people are if you do a good job of it. And I was just. I had this hubris. I was like, I could do that. I can. I know how to type. Like, how hard could it be?

Yeah.

And I started writing what was going to be an essay or a blog post or a screed or something, just kind of like outlining my frustrations with the state of kind of the media economy on the Internet. Like, wah, wah, wah. The Internet came along and broke all the business models for print journalism. And now we've got these, you know, engagement maximizing feeds that have all these perverse incentives, yada, yada, yada, kind of just complaining and I sent that essay I was writing to my friend Hamish, who's actually a writer, and he was sort of like, yeah, big deal. Everyone knows this. You know, all the writers that have lost their jobs aren't going to be wowed by these. You're like, it's 2017. You're like, wow, wow. Maybe there's downsides to Facebook. You're not like, super original, but. But he asked me, he was like, if, you know, the more interesting question here is like, let's say this is all true. Let's say everything you're complaining about is correct. What would you do about it? How could things be different? And we basically started arguing about that and backed into the idea for Substack in that conversation.

That's incredible. Hearing that your drive for writing led to that, you know, that hiatus of time where you had these ideas and that creativity. When you made the decision to start Substack, what were some of the first ideations of the product and the initial go to market? Because, you know, you have experience building and scaling products as a. As now a second time founder in that context, or. I don't know if I know you talked about the company prior, but what was your initial plan? Go to market and what were some of the early days of Substack?

I think the thing that drew me to. To it was that at the start, it was both a very big idea and a very small idea at the same time. And I think that that's. That's kind of the pattern you want to look for. Like, we thought we were onto this big thing of, hey, what if we could make, you know, a better economic engine for culture on the Internet and we could be powered by subscriptions and the people would be the customers and the quality. Like this whole sort of like, utopian dream of what this thing becomes. And there was also a small version that was like, hey, I bet you there are writers out there right now who wish they could charge money for their email newsletter, basically, right? And Hamish was like, I actually have a. I know a guy who writes this email newsletter and has, like, been thinking about charging for it. And I bet if we built a thing where he could take payments and send email, that, like, one person would want that tomorrow. And I think those are the two things you have to put together. You have to be onto something that you think matters and is big, and you have to have a first step that's sort of like within reach. So we talked to this guy, Bill Bishop, and he's like, oh, yeah, I would want to charge. And we were just like, all right, screw it, we'll build it, let's do it. And I think it was fun.

I'm so curious about this. When you're making the decision to let's starting a new company and you're going through those, there's mental models of big ideas, but the small action steps and you could apply your time into so many different directions. What needs to happen for you to commit to that idea and what do you recommend early stage founders think about when they're taking in all this information of different startup ideas and things that they can apply their time to? How do you really narrow down what matters to you and where you want to spend your time for a long period of time? In terms of stuff, starting a company.

That'S a great question. And I don't know if I have a brilliant answer to it. Like in my case with Substack and actually with Kik too was sort of. I started spending time on things that were interesting to me and that I felt like I could do something and became persuaded over time to kind of jump in with both feet. One thing I do think matters a lot that some people underrate is the importance of who you're doing it with, like who your co founders are, if you have them. I think there are people in the world who can be solo founders and succeed and do a thing by themselves. I'm pretty confident that I'm not one of them. I just think it's such a to do something, to really do the thing, to sort of be like, hey, I'm going to try and make this as big as it can be. I'm going to spend the next 10 years of my life on this. If it goes well, doing that is such a moral weight. It's such an emotional roller coaster. There's so much kind of like just the human side of it Y is is hard and under discussed. And so having a set of people that you kind of want to go into battle with, I think is one thing I would definitely put on that list. At least if you know yourself well enough to know that that's something you need.

I love that answer. Absolutely. And I totally agree with you. Just my last startup was a software company. I have one of my best friends for years. We started it together and going on that journey with him made it all worth it in terms of the ups and downs. And it was great. We actually got acquired back in September of last year and just going through that whole process together and reflecting on it, I now even going to this conversation, like think about solo founder because I interviewed a solo founder recently and it just, we dove deep into that topic and it really broke down and made me more self aware of how I believe I need to move forward with co founders and business overall. So definitely appreciate your perspective on that. How did you and your co founders meet?

We all work together at Kick in various ways.

Got it. Very cool. So Substack is this in my eyes as someone that is subscribers to Substacks, I don't have my own. I'm not putting out content and I made. I wanted to a say this to you today on the interview, but I am starting my sub stack. I've been a fan and a viewer of so many friends of mine and I was literally in the gym this morning. Like why did I not. Why do I not have this? Like I've been. I've had my podcast for five years. I need this new outlet. So you're going to have a new subscriber and a new user today that's really excited about it. But Substack overall for those and I want to use this conversation to like even learn myself, but help the viewers and audience learn how they can really maximize Substack, like when it comes to the users that are using the platform. I would love to talk about how you believe consumers and users can maximize the value of Substack when it comes to things like having a podcast or you know, having an online brand and you know, utilizing it as a resource that is just in my eyes, creates so much depth of a relationship with, you know, a fan or anyone that wants to view your content much more than simply a, you know, a 15 second reel on. On TikTok. And that's why I love podcasting so much because that depth and I think that the direct relationship that you guys have built and have enabled is so powerful. So I would love to just, you know, brainstorm with you and hear your thoughts on what you believe makes Substack powerful for online creators and people that have these brands online.

Totally. One way that I might put this is Substack is not the place where you're necessarily going to build the biggest audience. Right. You actually can build quite a big audience in Substack. But if you just look at like how many eyeballs ever touched a thing that I did, you know, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that we're going to outcompete TikTok on that. On that front, the thing that we aspire to do with Substack is to say substack is the place where you are going to build your most valuable audience, right? Where they. You have a direct relationship with them, right? Where you have this email list where you can reach them and you can take the email list with you. And it's a connection that you have with them that's not mediated by an algorithm where you can go deep with them, where you can write long form. You know, both email newsletters and podcasts share this property of you have a direct connection and the people are kind of there to spend potentially quite a bit of time with you and to go deep with the relationship, like you're saying. And of course, if and when you want to charge subscriptions, we make that very easy. And that's another way, that's a very important way that that audience can be valuable, but it's not actually the only way. There's people who have an email list that use it to sell books. There's people that have an email list that use it for all kinds of other things. And even if you. You just think, well, maybe one day it would be cool to charge for a thing. Yeah, I would recommend starting the substack kind of right away. And the thing we recommend to people is like, look, when you publish a substack, make it go everywhere, right? If you, if you publish a video to your substack, put it on YouTube too. If you publish your podcast, make sure it's in Spotify. If you publish your newsletter, make sure people are sharing it on Twitter, make sure you, you know, put it in your Instagram story. You kind of want. When you publish the substack, you want it to go everywhere. You want it to use the, like, the size of the audience of every network. And then the value of substack to you is it's the place where you can get your most valuable audience, where you're building the direct relationship, the email list, the people who are looking to connect with you and maybe one day pay you.

I love that. Very well said. And I'm definitely looking forward to maximizing that and bringing more depth and, you know, for everyone listening and watching. When this comes out, I will have a link to my substack in the description. So make sure you go subscribe.

Do you have a subdomain? You should say, do you know if it's going to be CaseyAdams substack or something else?

It will be if it's available. And I will say, now that I'm talking about, I have made an account and I believe I do have that subdomain. So I have to go back. But I haven't actually promoted it in a sense. So for people listening, I'll be sure to link it down below. But now that I know the subdomain is super important, I will make sure I know that. I want to talk about writers you talked about. Even in my background, I'm surrounded by books. Reading is a huge part of how I spend my time. Time and just learning and just diving into different stories. As someone that loves storytelling, I recently interviewed now a good friend of mine, Robert Green, and an incredible author that I love so much in terms of his work and just how he goes about it. Who are some of your favorite writers or people that you learn from when it comes to the writing aspect or just books, overall, writers, et cetera?

Oh, Matt. I'm a huge fan of Scott Alexander, who writes on substack now at Astrocodex 10. I actually had this parlor trick when I was first starting Substack. I would describe the idea. It's like, hey, there's gonna be this place where there's writers and you can pay them and they'll do the thing. And everyone's like, oh, yeah, it sounds great, and it'd be good to have a better media ecosystem or whatever you're talking about. But only one problem no one's ever gonna pay for. Like, I would never pay for some writer like, you idiot. And I had this parlor trick where I would say, well, who's your favorite writer? And they say, oh, well, my favorite writer is so and so. And I'd be like, would you pay five bucks a month for them? They'd say, oh, yeah, of course. But that's different. That's. That's different. That's a special case. They're awesome. And for me, I had a few people that were sort of like. Like that in my head. And one of them was Scott Alexander, this guy that writes Astrocodex 10. Who else is interesting? I'm a huge fan. I. I think if you're into startups, the, like, Paul Graham canon of essays is hard to beat.

Yep, absolutely.

Really good stuff in there. I really like Jane Jacobs and think that it's. I think that she's like, she talks a lot about cities.

Okay.

But it has a lot of interesting lessons for people who are building kind of virtual spaces. There's like a mode of thinking there that's really interesting.

I love that. I was just curious. Those are solid when it comes to Substack, right? You said something that I want to Dive into. Right in the early days of sharing the idea, getting feedback, people say, oh, I wouldn't pay for that, I wouldn't do that. And some are like, yeah, absolutely. How did you determine and get product feedback initially? Of course, you know, having the experience of building KIK and building product, that's one thing. This wasn't something you just started and you're like, hey, let me go figure out startup life. You had the experience there. But in the context of Substack, how did you initially get product feedback? And what were some of the early day, early days feedback that really impacted you, that you'd want to tell founders like, hey, this was important to me in the early days of getting feedback and iterating and actually learning from the customers and our users. Overall.

One thing that's often said about building products and building startups that I think is really true and worth internalizing is it's much better to start with something that really works for a very small number of people, or even one person, and then be able to take that and make it valuable for more people. Like, that's a, that's a very viable path to building something great in my experience and in my sort of general philosophy of how these things work. Whereas if you start with something that's like kind of compelling for a lot of people, doesn't really give you a. A path.

Yeah.

And so the most important feedback early on was finding someone who wanted to use it, finding someone who as a writer wanted to use it. And one of the cool things about Substack is because the readers have this direct relationship with the writer that was sort of enough. There wasn't a chicken and the egg problem. Like if there's one writer that has an audience that people care about and want to pay for and we make that whole thing work, that's actually valuable in and of itself. There's all kinds of other value that happens now that there's many, many writers and there's always network effects. But at the early days it was just, hey, this person you like is here and you can pay them and get this thing. So I think that getting a customer that is actually going to use it is by far the best thing. And you realize this interesting thing where asking people if they would use something or what they would want or for feedback on your idea is not always a reliable way to get real signal. In fact, I would say it's often very unreliable. But asking someone, like trying to sell someone, trying to get someone to say yes to use your thing is a Very reliable signal. It doesn't, you know, the things they tell you they want aren't necessarily the case or the reasons they tell you no aren't necessarily the case. Yeah, but the, like, you can sort of trust the yes or no. Right. If, if people are not trying to use it, that's important to know. And if people are able to use it, that's very valuable. So I think, like, get people to use the thing is a really important heuristic. And I would also, I would. I'll use this as my soapbox for like, I think this is a principle of product design in general is like, how to listen to people is really important. It's. It's completely necessary that you talk to the people. Talk to your users.

Yeah.

And stupid. But so many people don't. It's completely necessary that you understand where they're coming from, that you hear how they feel about the thing and how they're thinking and what they're experiencing with your product that you believe, like, what you know, you believe the impact that it's having on them and whether they understand it and whether they want it, like, those things are really important. If you ask them what you should build, they're not generally going to be right.

That makes sense. And when you, when you say not, they won't be right. Do you say that in the sense of do you believe that question is not valuable to ask or what do you think about that?

I think you can ask it, but the thing you're actually trying to do when you talk to people is develop an understanding of them, develop empathy for them, develop a mental model for how they feel and how they behave. And this is sort of. If you're making a product for people, figuring out what that product needs to be to serve them well is your job. It's not their job. And so it's actually. It sounds kind of. It could sound kind of arrogant to be like, don't listen to what people tell you they want. Exactly. But it's actually, I think an important piece of humility is. It's like, it's not your user's job to figure out what your thing needs to be for them. Right. It's not, it's, it's. It's an, It's a, you know, an abdication of your responsibility to go and say, well, how would you want it to be and how would you want it to be? And I'll just try and, like, do whatever you say you're actually trying to figure out, like, what do you need? And the thing you're doing when you're building a product is an act of service. You are trying to figure out how to serve them, how to figure it out so that they don't have to.

Absolutely. I want to talk about growth. You know, it's been six years since you launched 2017 to today. What has growth looked like and what have some of the biggest growing pains looked like when it comes to launching the product, to getting to where Substack is today?

So we've been basically growing the entire time and the way that we've done it has always kind of been a bit of a two step. Like we've always gone and spent a lot of energy trying to get individual people who we think would be really good substack, who substack would really work for them.

Yeah.

And convince them to use the platform. And in fact, early on our ability to do that was sort of the thing that got it going. Like we got people using Substack who we. We had no business recruiting as customers, but we kind of, you know, sold them on the big vision and then sold them that we were gonna like hustle to do a thing for them that they could use. And then the product is such that, you know, every writer is also a reader and so and everybody that. That these communities kind of exist and people will follow and respect each other. And so every time we, every time we could make Substack really work for someone and they would come back and say, holy shit, this changed my life. That would cause like 10 and then a hundred more people to come over time. And then we sort of had to just like make the rest of the product work for them. So we sort of have this very manual, like let's go and convince a few people. And then this sort of like, we want it to be open to everyone, anyone who wants to. To be able to start a substack in a few minutes, we recommend anybody who's thinking about it. Our advice is always like, just go do it. You don't have to wait for us. Like it's very eas. And then those two pieces kind of combine and then over time you get, you know, sort of go through the pockets of different writers who know each other, of people who read each other, and you get this kind of like steady growth.

I love that. Where do you spend your time today? Now day to day, you know, talking about in the early days of convincing these incredible writers to join the platform six years into it as CEO, like, where do you spend your time and what's Important to you today?

In the early days, we followed the YC advice of basically talk to users and build the thing. And I spent all my time doing those things. Today I still like to talk to users a lot. I think it's important to just keep that. And then I spend most of my time with the team in meetings, talking about things, planning, getting the people things. One substacker I read is obsessed with this saying of, like, people, ideas, machines, in that order. You sort of. Those are the. At some point, as you're building a company and organization, it becomes very true. And it's counterintuitive if you are naturally an ideas and machines person to realize that, hey, actually, the people stuff comes first if you want to do something really ambitious.

Yeah.

And so I think I spend most of my time and focus thinking about how can we get Substack, the company set up to unlock the amazing people we have here, to, like, have the biggest impact they can have.

Absolutely. And I think, you know, I want to talk about team. So how big is the team now? And I would love to just dive into some of the core values of, you know, what it means to work at Substack and just what the principles are inside of the organization.

Yeah. So we're 85 people. One principle that I have, or one thing I think is true for a company like ours, because we're building something new, Right. We're not building something that's there's an exact thing that we can copy or an exact playbook that we can use. You know, to the extent that we're succeeding, we're creating this new economic engine, this new space on the Internet. Whether or not we succeed at that over time is going to depend on ultimately how quickly we can learn. The thing that's compounding is our rate of learning. Because we're not just executing. We're not just following a playbook. We're trying to discover what's possible with this thing we're making. If you take that seriously, if you think, okay, the rate at which we can learn is going to determine whether we succeed or fail, there's a bunch of things that kind of fall out from it. Right. You need people who are curious and want to learn and are excited to learn and do a new thing and aren't. Don't necessarily want to follow an established pattern. You want people who are comfortable with some degree of ambiguity. You know, if you think about your learning cycle, you only really learn when you ship. Right. Especially if you're making a thing where all of the Interesting effects are emergent. Right. Like, there's nothing about what we do at Substack that matters until it gets in people's hands and we see how writers use it, how readers use it, how. How it affects the network. And so your learning cycle is kind of, you know, you have some ideas, you do a thing, you get contact with reality, you see how it works in the world, and then you draw conclusions from that. And so you want to build a culture where you can do that as quickly as possible and have a set of people who are sort of hungry for that. And it's actually quite an exciting way to work if you get it right.

Absolutely. And talking about that learning process, when it comes to shipping and getting the feedback, how do you guys think about feedback and product iteration and shipping new features and products in terms of the internal process of just getting new things out there and testing that aspect of things?

We love the phrase contact with reality. Like, I sort of love this idea of, like, you. You got to get stuff out there. You got to kind of, like, be able to feel the road.

Yeah.

There's a bunch of ways you can do that, and some of it's art and some of it's science. Right. When you. Depending on what you're building, you know, you kind of want to see how people use it. You want to talk to people who are using it. You want to, like, you know, you have a story for how it's going to help people. You can kind of like get it out there and then see if that story plays. Plays out the way that you expect. See if people are excited about it. You know, sort of use that empathetic model of. Of the people using it that you've built up over time and see if it's correct. See if that people are reacting the way that you'd hoped. And you can look at the data, right. You can look and be like, you know, hey, we're trying to get more people to subscribe. Like, did that happen? You know, which things, which things actually happened? And you sort of. You want to have a story in your mind of what you're doing and what you're trying to unlock. And then you kind of want to be hungry to answer the question, like, is that story turning out to be true?

Yeah, absolutely. I do want to. I want to take a step back and really dive into your experience as an entrepreneur and a leader. If you were to go back in time and give your, you know, younger self the day one of starting substack advice on what it is you that you're building. What advice would that be and why?

That's really interesting. I mean, there's a lot of things that I could be like with the benefit of hindsight, like, of course. And I think those are kind of. Those would be sort of cheating, I guess. One thing that I've learned is that being CEO is different than not being CEO. And the job has felt a lot to me, like sort of like a video game where you have like a series of mini games and it's like you suck at every. At the start, you suck at every one. And then as you finally gonna get your arms around it and get to the point where you're just kind of okay at your job, all that happens is you pass that minigame and you earn the right to like suck at the next thing. And I don't think there's like a. Necessarily a way to avoid or accelerate that, but just knowing that that's what you're doing can be helpful. Or having the framing of that. It's like we're going to get to learn a lot. That's very exciting. I think maybe advice like that this is what to expect.

Totally, absolutely. Even being CEO, what does that mean to you in terms of your, your thought process around team? Even just like the way you said that of like, you know, being CEO is new and it's different. It's what does that mean to you and what type of responsibility and thinking do you bring to it and what advice do you have to other new or aspiring CEOs?

I think the big difference is just sort of having to be responsible for the whole thing. Like, you know, in my past life as sort of a technical co founder, I could kind of, I could be like, I'm just going to build a good product and like, you know, what do the investors think or what's going on over there? How should we do? Like, I'm just, I get to kind of like tune out pieces of the thing and it's different. Anybody who's been in that situation, one thing that I've got now is my co founder, Jay, who's our cto, is like a million times better engineer than I am. And that really helped me make that transition because it would have been really easy for me, I think, to be. To not be able to unstick myself from wanting to be in all the weeds.

Yeah.

And as it was, I was able to in large part because I had, you know, a co founder, in fact, two co founders who, who had pieces of the thing that they were Very, very good at. Yeah, that's it. It's the people. It's always the people.

That's awesome. Who are some of your business mentors that have impacted you along your journey, that have really played a role in how you think about business in the world overall.

I mean, I already mentioned the PG essays. I think those are really good.

Yep.

We had a really good experience doing Y Combinator. I think I would definitely do that again.

What did you learn from Y Combinator that, you know, obviously we can't get into everything, but what did you learn that made it impactful for you, and what was your biggest takeaway?

I think the magic of it is not like giving you complex advice. It's like telling you to do things that are actually simple and obvious but hard and creating a space where you feel the urgency to do those things. So, like, one example of this was we came to YC and we didn't have a way to. For people to sign up for Substack. So every time somebody wanted to sign up, we'd manually recruit them, and I'd, like, type them into the database, and we'd go to our office hours, and Jared, who was our. One of our partners, would be like, so can people sign up for Substack yet? No. And he'd be like, what's wrong with you? We'd be like, well, blah, blah, blah, Excuse, excuse, excuse me. But then after a couple weeks of this, we were like, shit, he's right. We're idiots. Like, there's value to that. That thing is really important.

That's awesome. Was that the first accelerator you've been through or have you been through any previously?

That was it.

First one. Got it. Your. Your journey as an entrepreneur, being technical co founder to now CEO, making that transition, like, was that not only a challenging aspect, but how do you recommend maybe other founders make such a big transition? Whether that's from CTO to CEO or maybe it's the vice versa. Right. Like, understanding your role in an organization, how do you believe in your experience, founders can think about that or maybe have just a different perspective on that. Right. When co founders are really needing to make changes like that or really identify, you know, where they should focus their time and effort.

I think it's valuable to know yourself, to know what you're good at and what you want to do. That's easy to say and hard to do, but, you know, it's worth. It's worth keeping in mind that ultimately, you know, you're kind of trying to figure out what. What you have to give and what you're going to be happy doing and what's going to put you in the place that that's good. And then I do really think just the other people you're with matter a great deal. Right. If you, if you are in some role, if you have co founders and you're splitting up the thing, if you have people who their piece of it, you. You trust them and you feel really strong, like you've got this kind of like, implicit thing. I think that helps a lot. Like if you're trying to become a. If you're trying to go from CTO to CEO and you don't have some. If you're also the cto, I think that's going to be hard.

Yeah, I would guess absolutely. Totally. And I have a couple more questions here. Chris, just looking back on your entire entrepreneurial journey, like before the days of Kik to Sub Stack, what drives you and what makes you tick?

What makes me tick? I like building things. I think I'm pretty disagreeable in sort of like the personality trait sense. Like, I'm. I enjoy thinking independently and doing things differently and I like working with other people to make ambitious things happen. I think ultimately the thing that I get most excited about, that feels the most rewarding to me is when the things that we're building work for people, when it works for the customers, when it works for the team, when we sort of can look back and be like we've done something incredible. I think that's like a very powerful reward.

I love that. And looking into the future, right? It's been six years along this journey of Substack, looking into the future of the journey ahead. What excites you and what should users, readers, and anyone that's following Substack, what can they look forward to? And really, what are you excited about as the CEO looking into the future of the company?

It's a little bit. It's a cliche to say that, you know, we're only just getting started. This is only the beginning, for sure. But I do think it's true for us. I mean, we talked at the beginning of like sort of the small vision and the big vision of Substack, where the big vision is, hey, we are building this better economic engine for culture on the Internet. And I think that the journey that we've had so far convinces me that we're onto something, that we were right about that, that that space still exists. And I think if we are successful at the thing that we set out to do, it's going to transform how we experience culture on the Internet. And, you know, the substack as a tool for people who are publishing things, as a network of those people who are helping each other and creating kind of like a rising tide and as a destination where people are readers and consumers are coming to take back their mind to spend time with things they deeply value. I'm just really excited about that. I think it's going to be a big business and I think it's going to be a big piece of the world if we get it right.

I love that. And that's beyond impactful, and I'm excited to be a part of that journey as well. So before we wrap up here, Chris, I do want to give you the opportunity and also let you tell the viewers, listeners and and watchers of the show where is the best place to not only follow you, but learn more about Substack and just get involved? Right? Follow, like, start learning different things, subscribe to people. Where's the best place that they can do all this?

So if I give you one thing, I would say go to substack.com if you're thinking, if you've ever thought about starting a substack, about having your own thing, you can click, you know, start publishing, start your substack. Takes a few minutes. You don't have to think too hard about it. If you're thinking about it, just do it is my advice. And if not, you can check out some of the amazing writers and podcasters and other people on Substack and check it out.

I love that. Well, Chris, I just want to say once again, thank you so much for your time today. I'm looking forward to getting my substack launched and I will absolutely let you know and keep you posted on how it goes. But thank you so much.

I will subscribe.

I appreciate it. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Appreciate your time, Chris.

Likewise. Thank you.

Of course.