[HN Gopher] We're the founders of Substack, we just launched an ...
___________________________________________________________________
We're the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AMA
Hi! This is Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi, the
founders of Substack, with Sachin Monga, the head of product.
Yesterday, we launched an iOS app for Substack, so you can read all
your Substack subscriptions in one place, with no distractions.
Readers have been tweeting at us for years now to ask when we'd
have an app. We've long wanted one too, and we suddenly got the
manpower to be able to build a good one when we acquired Sachin's
company Cocoon (W19) last year. Soon after starting Substack, we
found it easiest to explain what we do as "We make it simple to
start a paid newsletter." Even then, a Substack was more than just
an email newsletter: it was also a blog, and it could host embedded
video and audio, and people could leave comments and participate in
discussion threads. But the term "newsletter" was useful shorthand
because everyone kind of got what that meant. All along, though,
we've been quietly building the tools for what we call "personal
media empires," encompassing different media formats (natively) and
community discussion (which we intend to make better and better).
By a similar token, right from the start we've been intending for
the company to do more than just provide subscription publishing
tools. We're excited by the vision of Substack becoming a network,
where writers and readers benefit from being part of a larger
ecosystem. For writers, it means they can be discovered by readers
who might not otherwise have found them. For readers, it means
being able to connect directly with writers and other readers and
to explore a universe of great work. The app is a key part of the
network vision. Nothing changes in terms of writers and readers
being in control. The writers still own their mailing lists,
content, and IP and can take it all with them anytime they want.
Anyone who signs up to a Substack through the app still goes on to
that mailing list. And readers still get to choose what appears in
their "inbox," with the power to subscribe and unsubscribe from
whatever they want (you can also add any RSS feed into the app via
reader.substack.com). But now we'll have more and better ways to
surface recommendations from writers and readers, to show people's
profiles, and to deliver notifications inside and outside of the
app. This is just a start for the Substack app. We want to keep
improving it, so please give us feedback and ask us the hard
questions. What do you think we're doing wrong? What could be
better? What could be great? What might we not have thought of?
We're here for the next couple hours. Ask us anything.
https://on.substack.com/p/substackapp
Author : internet_jockey
Score : 75 points
Date : 2022-03-10 21:51 UTC (1 hours ago)
| rkapsoro wrote:
| I have no useful questions to ask, just want to say that I really
| appreciate you guys and your product.
|
| Cheers and thank you!
| internet_jockey wrote:
| That is very kind of you. Thank you.
| cjbest wrote:
| Oh thanks! I've grown to expect a lot of intelligent skepticism
| on HN, so this was a nice surprise :)
| [deleted]
| Mandatum wrote:
| About fuckin' time!
|
| I've been a subscriber and spend about $2K/yr on Substack
| subscriptions thanks to a generous Enterprise educational
| budget/policy (and then cheat/steal all my other media/news
| content).
|
| This is great news.
| ihodes wrote:
| How does the Substack App fit into the picture with apps like
| Matter and Instapaper (and their integrations with programs like
| Readwise?) Is this for the more casual / sane reader, and is
| meant to coexist alongside the more power-user apps like Matter?
| cjbest wrote:
| Our ambition is to make the Substack app a great place to read,
| and as a writer a great way to have a direct connection with
| your audience. We have a lot of respect for apps like Matter
| (and Google Reader back in the day).
|
| For now it's probably most compelling for folks who already do
| a lot of reading powered by Substack, but we're interested in
| adding more support for reading non-Substack things (and we
| already have some basic support for reading Substack stuff in
| other RSS readers.)
| cgb223 wrote:
| Hi Chris, Hamish, Jairaj, and Sachin!
|
| I'm a huge fan of your platform, and love that its empowered some
| of my favorite journalists and other others to write freely while
| continuing to be able to provide for themselves.
|
| One question I have is as a small time blogger, I currently use
| Medium as my platform. The reason I do so is because it has an
| audience baked in, so I'm easily(-ish) able to attract new
| readers to my blog and grow the list of people who follow what I
| write.
|
| What does Substack have or is planning to have product feature-
| wise that might allow for smaller writers to get the word out and
| have a social network-like following to help grow their own
| readership?
|
| I would love to switch to support your product, this is the one
| thing holding me back.
| [deleted]
| HHC-Hunter wrote:
| Are you going to pay Tim Dillon his 20 milly?
| cjbest wrote:
| Chris here, one of the founders. Hi HN, thrill to be here.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| klabb3 wrote:
| A popular sentiment on HN is "don't make an app when you can just
| have a web page". Reading articles is an an almost perfect fit
| for the web. What are your reasons for having an app?
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| (I'm just a random person)
|
| While I agree with the overall message of web over app (and
| have bugged some of my colleagues for going "App First",
| locking themselves into particular ecosystems before gaining
| audience), for consuming content, there are benefits to Apps,
| _when done properly_ .
|
| Most pertinently, offline content - I will always use
| Prime/Netflix/Disney in app form rather than Web form.
|
| Offering an app as an _option_ is a brilliant way to meet
| everybody 's needs.
|
| (nagging/pushing an app and deprecating web, however, is
| devil's work:)
| cjbest wrote:
| Reading articles may be an almost perfect fit for web, but we
| see a really clear pattern among the 70% of our users that read
| in mobile: they _discover_ stuff to read on the web through
| links that get shared, but once they sign up they
| overwhelmingly read in their email client.
|
| Email is actually pretty great for this, and email is
| especially powerful for giving writers direct connection to
| their readers. But there are limits to what you can do there,
| and stuff like community discussion, audio and video, and even
| 'not accidentally going to the promotions tab' can get a big
| upgrade.
|
| Somewhat related: developing for email is still a pretty big
| pain. It's kinda like the bad old days when you had to support
| IE6 - lots of people still use old versions of outlook or
| whatever.
| the_reformation wrote:
| Hey guys, big fans of Substack (writer/reader since 2019.)
|
| My favorite part of Substack was how it built on top of email, an
| (actual) distributed protocol. I'm able to access my Substack
| writers alongside other writers/publication, since everybody
| integrates into email.
|
| I like the reader experience of the new app and the
| recommendations, but I'm worried it will become another walled
| garden like Medium. How do you plan on protecting against that?
|
| FWIW, Matter (https://hq.getmatter.app/) has a workaround (albiet
| complicated) for getting all emails forwarded to app, is that on
| the roadmap?
| cjbest wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| Our goal with the app is to give a seamless upgrade to the
| email experience -- which is why the home page works just like
| an inbox -- while having writers retain ownership of their list
| (which therefore gives them exit rights.)
|
| We don't want to be a walled garden. We want to make a great
| reading experience, with porous boundaries. If you publish on
| Substack, it goes everywhere - email, the web, other networks,
| but as the writer you can pull your most valuable audience to
| the place that you own and can get paid from. If you read on
| Substack, you can read things on Substack, and then maybe
| things from other places, like RSS etc. I like the idea of
| having emails that you can get stuff delivered to.
| polski-g wrote:
| How are you going to prevent yourself from becoming whatever
| Apple demands you to become? Apple was forcing Gab to comply with
| _Apple 's_ content policy for user-generated content. You are now
| essentially subservient to Apple for content moderation.
| pedalpete wrote:
| Maybe harkening back to the old-school days of HN, but I'd be
| keen to hear about the tech stack you decided to use in building
| the app, what your considerations are for multi-platform, and
| advice for start-ups getting ready to launch their own apps.
| demosthenes714 wrote:
| John here, one of the app engineers at Substack. Our team has
| lots of experience with Swift and values the level of polish
| you can achieve natively, so went with that. We try to avoid
| third-party dependencies so native implementation and
| customization of UIKit, URLSession, and CoreData are important
| to us.
|
| Cross platform frameworks like React Native, Flutter, Xamarin,
| etc are super interesting but in our experience can hold an app
| back long term. As you're able to dedicate more resources to
| the product, it's more likely that you'll want custom UI
| (animations, transitions, etc) and functionality that require
| full access to native APIs. It's a tough decision to make for
| early stage start-ups but we also went with native at Cocoon
| (our last startup which was acquired by Substack). I think some
| important factors that should go into the decision are 1) how
| important you think both Android and iOS support are out of the
| gate 2) how soon you'd expect to be able to hire native
| engineers for both platforms 3) your long term vision for the
| product and its desired complexity. We love Android (I've got
| some Kotlin experience myself) and will have it out ASAP, but
| with the existing email/web product there is less pressure for
| cross platform in our case.
| cjbest wrote:
| We'll get you a real answer about how the tech stack is today.
|
| But for now I can tell a war story that might be fun. I'm one
| of the founders, and am in a very much non-technical role now
| as CEO, I did write a bunch of the very early code (some of
| which people curse my name for to this day.)
|
| When we were starting, I was limited by how many new
| languages/frameworks I could learn at once. I started writing
| the backend in python, because I knew it a bit. But our first
| writer often needed to use Chinese characters, and in python
| 2.X I could never get unicode strings to work properly. I
| couldn't upgrade to python 3, because on google cloud I would
| have had to learn Docker and I was already learning too many
| things at once.
|
| Eventually I got so frustrated I threw out several days work
| and started the whole backend over, with node + Postgres hosted
| in Heroku. This ended up defining much of the stack we use to
| this day, which might be good or bad depending who you ask. At
| least unicode works though :)
| sachinmonga wrote:
| I tagged in one of our lead engineers to talk about the tech
| stack, but can chime in re: considerations for multi-platform.
|
| We are sprinting as fast as we can to get an Android app out
| the door. We're also planning on investing more in the reader
| experience on web. Some time ago, we launched a web reader
| (reader.substack.com) in beta and have some exciting ideas in
| the works to evolve that surface.
|
| Beyond Android, when it smaller platforms like iPad / Desktop
| apps, it's mostly a matter of looking at the data and listening
| to users. With a small team, we have to be judicious with
| prioritization, and as we increase the surface area for readers
| it's important that the experience for _writers_ remains clear
| (right now their readers can already read on email, web, and
| mobile).
| rvz wrote:
| Any plans for a native macOS app for Substack?
| sachinmonga wrote:
| Sachin here (from Substack). I for one would be stoked about a
| MacOS app, although it's probably not the highest priority
| thing right now :)
|
| Our next step within the Apple universe will most likely be to
| build an amazing iPad optimized experience. Right now the app
| works on iPad, but it's definitely not as great as it could be.
| A better iPad app would also be a good starting foundation for
| MacOS (and work on Silicon macs out the gate).
| paulcole wrote:
| What will make the optimized experience on iPad amazing as
| opposed to just opening a tab in Safari?
| t00 wrote:
| Is it viable to launch an app only for one major platform (iOS),
| excluding Android with it's payment system entirely? Another
| question, since I cannot check it - are you collecting payments
| for subscriptions through the App Store with it's 30% mark? Or
| are you exempt?
| wpietri wrote:
| For publications I subscribe to, how do I get them in my RSS
| reader? (And if I can't yet do that, when will it be available?)
| internet_jockey wrote:
| If you're talking about getting Substack publications into your
| RSS reader, you can add /feed to the end of the relevant URL
| and then add that into your reader (e.g.
| https://sinocism.com/feed).
|
| For adding non-Substack publications into the Substack app via
| RSS, go to reader.substack.com (make sure you're logged in) and
| click on "Add RSS feed" in the left sidebar.
| wpietri wrote:
| Thanks, I'm asking about the former.
|
| Does that work even for paid subscriptions? I was thinking it
| would require some sort of separate URL.
| mccorrinall wrote:
| Just a thing on the sign up in the app: let me use apples private
| email thingy, or even better: add a "sign up with apple" button
| and drop the confirmation link via email. Entering my email, and
| then having to switch apps to press on the confirmation link and
| then switching back is just annoying.
| cjbest wrote:
| I definitely hear this, but there is some tension here for us.
| One of the big values of Substack for writers is that it is the
| place where you can build your most valuable audience, which
| means:
|
| 1. When folks opt in, you can reach them whenever you want,
| unmediated by an algorithm 2. They can pay to subscribe, and
| you keep 90% of the economics and 3. You own your email list.
| You can leave Substack and take them with you.
|
| These things create the incentive structure that allows great
| work to get done on Substack. But doing the secret email thing
| breaks #3. Part of the bargain as a reader on Substack is that
| you're giving your email.
|
| Definitely hear you on the confirmation link thing.
| shagie wrote:
| Consider that if one does a "sign up" from the webpage on a
| Mac using Safari, you get the option to use an Apple
| generated hidden email address.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/PTwWor3
|
| Adding that to the phone app would only be exposing it on the
| phone app - not hiding it from functionality for anyone who
| wanted to do it.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Isn't this post abusing Show HN? Since it's essentially just a
| marketing post and is void of all technical detail? I understand
| there's an essence of Show HN posts that _are_ marketing but at
| least most are technically oriented in some way...
| dang wrote:
| I don't think it's abusing Show HN, because they made an app
| and are sharing it. Actually I told them to make the post say
| Show HN in the first place.
|
| However, it's true that the /show page is mostly side projects,
| new companies, and so on. I don't think we need to push the
| point, so I took Show HN out of the title now.
| gnicholas wrote:
| They have a live free app that you can download, play with, and
| give feedback on. So far so good.
|
| However, it appears you have to create an account to interact
| with the app at all, which is not in the spirit of Show HN.
|
| If a new startup posted a Show HN that required giving a live
| email address, they would be criticized for it (and most people
| probably wouldn't go any further).
|
| EDIT: it would be great if one of the founders could create a
| dummy account that we could log in with. That's something other
| founders have done in the past, and it would be more in the
| spirit of Show HNs:" _Please make it easy for users to try your
| thing out, ideally without barriers such as signups or emails.
| You 'll get more feedback that way._
| afavour wrote:
| Yeah I kind of agree. I'm used to Show HN posts being new
| startups, technically interesting small projects etc, not
| established companies that just happen to have launched an app.
| Most Show HNs have an element of marketing of course but this
| feels like pure marketing. At least tell us something about
| what inspired the technical choices behind what is, let's face
| it, a pretty straightforward app.
| schoen wrote:
| Wouldn't the title make more sense as "AUA" instead of "AMA"?
| altdataseller wrote:
| When will you make it easy for Substack authors to sell ads?
| legalcorrection wrote:
| You have held firm so far on not acquiescing to cancel culture.
| But I imagine Apple will start demanding you censor content
| available through the Substack app, like they have with Parler
| and others. What will you do in response?
| NationalPark wrote:
| _Harmful and illegal activities
|
| We don't allow content that promotes harmful or illegal
| activities, including material that advocates, threatens, or
| shows you causing harm to yourself, other people, or animals.
|
| ...
|
| Nudity, porn, erotica
|
| We don't allow porn or sexually exploitative content on
| Substack. We do allow depictions of nudity for artistic,
| journalistic, or related purposes, as well as erotic
| literature. However, we may hide this content from Substack's
| discovery features, including search and on Substack.com._
|
| Plenty of censorship in those paragraphs to any free speech
| absolutist who strives for ideological consistency. They're
| "cancelling" enormous amounts of what many consider free
| expression.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| Parler has a much stronger association with socio-political
| subcultures that like to say things that are, speaking with a
| generosity that borders on divinity, "controversial". Substack
| has cultivated a much less culturally biased/extremist
| writerbase, to my observation. They seem to have successfully
| targeted writers who just want to write, and not writers who
| are _specifically_ the angry and disaffected from one side of
| one part of the world 's political binary.
|
| I.e. I think Substack's content is _less likely_ to violate any
| rules (though I can only speak with so much confidence, having
| not read every article on Substack).
| [deleted]
| cjbest wrote:
| We definitely care a lot about about freedom of the press, and
| have written a bunch about it at e.g.
| https://on.substack.com/p/society-has-a-trust-problem-more
|
| I think the Substack model gives us a bunch of advantages here:
| readers are choosing to subscribe to writers they trust, and
| who they then have a direct relationship with. I don't think
| that Apple is likely to try to police that too heavily, and if
| they do there is always web and email that exists as a
| fallback.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| Your response to how censorship of sex workers and sexual
| content was no big deal but pretended you were anti-
| censorship was juvenile at best. You don't care about freedom
| of the press for shit, just platforming racists and abusers.
| jjulius wrote:
| This follow-up question is being down voted for the
| personal attack at the end, and rightly so, but I would
| still be curious to see a response to the larger point
| about that kind of content from someone at Substack.
| Meekro wrote:
| Censorship happens when a writer is de-platformed, and has
| nowhere to turn to re-platform themselves. People on HN
| then give snarky, insincere advice about creating your own
| web hosting company or whatever. On the other hand, there
| are lots of platforms catering to nudity and sexual
| content, so I don't think this is going to be a problem
| there.
|
| In a society where the government isn't allowed to censor,
| the greatest fear is that speech platforms will become few
| enough, or homogeneous enough, that particular kinds of
| legal speech have nowhere to go. Substack provides a home
| for some speakers who had nowhere else to go, and is
| therefore decreasing the total amount of censorship that
| happens in the US.
|
| Some of your "racists and abusers" may be people that
| others want to read. If you don't like what they're saying,
| don't read them. If you're going to try to stop me from
| reading people I want to read, I'll financially support
| companies that don't let you do that.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > I don't think that Apple is likely to try to police that
| too heavily
|
| As someone who uses and loves substack precisely because of
| its censorship resistance, this sounds like wishful thinking
| at best. Even if substack is primarily web based, introducing
| a dependency on the ever-changing Apple content policing
| system is a potential conflict of interest.
|
| A cynical take is that smaller platforms compete early by
| allowing more speech, only to close it down when they become
| bigger and tied up in corporate relationships.
|
| How do you remain independent as you grow?
| Austin_Conlon wrote:
| What's the general breakdown of use between UIKit and SwiftUI?
| demosthenes714 wrote:
| John here, one of the iOS engineers. We're 100% UIKit but
| keeping a close eye on SwiftUI. It's certainly beautiful
| vosper wrote:
| Will there ever be bundles? Or some kind of bulk discount? Pay-
| per-article?
|
| I'm a paid subscriber to a number of Substack writers, and I'd
| like to subscribe to more, but it can rapidly run into the
| hundreds of dollars per month - so I really have to pick and
| choose.
|
| I can imagine bundles aren't really your model, and maybe aren't
| in your authors interest either. But I'd love to get like an
| Economics bundle and a New Zealand journalism bundle (shout-out
| to Bernard Hickey here, doing great work with his The Kaka
| Substack).
|
| Or even a pay-per-article model - some of the free newsletters
| I'm on publish paywalled things I'm interested in, but I don't
| want to subscribe to the full deal. But I'd pre-load my account
| with $50 and pay a couple of dollars for a single article.
|
| In a similar vein, LWN used to have a thing where people could
| pay to make the article free. There are sometimes paywalled
| articles I'd love to share around, but I don't want to deprive
| the author of revenue. If I could pay for a link that can be
| shared X number of times, or could chip-in to a "if enough people
| pay this article becomes free" fund, I would.
| gargron wrote:
| If you support subscribing to RSS feeds maybe you'd want to also
| support ActivityPub? Let your users follow Mastodon accounts and
| vice versa, become part of the growing fediverse.
| jjulius wrote:
| >This is Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi, the
| founders of Substack, with Sachin Monga, the head of product.
|
| Are there any female top brass at Substack?
| [deleted]
| internet_jockey wrote:
| Yes. VP of Partnerships, VP of Communications, Head of Talent
| are all women at the top table.
| Bespin wrote:
| Bespinuk wrote:
| harry8 wrote:
| Specifically and precisely how did you decide what data you are
| going to collect and keep on your users with the app? Of that,
| how much of it is only accessible with an app rather than
| providing the same thing through a web-browser?
| Bespinuk wrote:
| native_samples wrote:
| Firstly - love love love Substack. It's so simple but it's so
| rapidly become a place where I do so much reading. I have a few
| questions (mostly not about the app though, I'll have to wait for
| Android support to try that).
|
| 1. How did you guys manage to attract writers? I know you have
| been signing fronting agreements. Superficially, Substack is a
| (fairly basic?) blogging platform + email + payment processing
| system. That doesn't feel _particularly_ hard to put together,
| though maybe I totally underestimate that. So what 's powering
| Substack's growth is that you were able to get guys like
| Greenwald, Taibbi, Scott Alexander etc on board. How much of your
| growth do you think is product vs business/dealmaking?
|
| 2. You've been strong defenders of free speech, especially in the
| last two years where there's been a ton of censorship. Really,
| it's helped a lot, I've felt like Substack was one of the few
| places I could find rational and logical takes on things like
| lockdowns at a time when everyone else was losing their minds. Do
| you have some sort of strong philosophical take on this, or is it
| a sort of default because censorship takes specific effort and
| you're busy with growth?
|
| 3. Related to that, the pattern of tech firms being open access
| and supporters of free speech for some years and then later
| losing that as they hire more and more people (especially, new
| grads) seems to be a recurring one. Given you're based in San
| Francisco, do you have a plan to actually _keep_ Substack the way
| it is, in the face of hiring employees who might demand you
| constantly cancel the witch-du-jour?
|
| 4. There's IMO a ton of potential for innovation with group
| discussions. To me, Slashdot was actually the peak of innovation
| in large scale anonymous forum discussions with many clever
| features, crowdsourced moderation, friends/foes, meta-mods etc.
| Do you plan to try new things with discussions, or stick to a
| conventional approach? Right now it's pretty basic.
| [deleted]
| bmelton wrote:
| This probably isn't the venue for it, but your refusal to engage
| in the sort of content moderation the entire rest of the industry
| has determined "necessary" cannot be commended enough
|
| Societal pressure on this has been intense, and your team's
| tweets in support of individual expression have been absolutely
| landmark tweets, and I am a paying customer because of it
|
| Sincerely, thank you
| [deleted]
| gnicholas wrote:
| To what extent did you expect to see the magnitude of recent
| defections from major media outlets, which have proven to be a
| boon for your business? If substack hadn't existed, do you think
| people would have defected in similar numbers, but just gone
| elsewhere?
|
| Congratulations on all of your successes!
| cjbest wrote:
| We were not totally surprised.
|
| One of the good things Substack can do is put competitive
| pressure on traditional outlets. If people want to go
| independent, having a good way to do so helps them. But also
| that possibility creates pressure on existing institutions to
| give writers more freedom, pay them better, etc. etc. I don't
| think it's a coincidence that you see more legacy publishers
| starting "newsletter" divisions that give writers more leeway.
| All of this is good for writers in our minds and we're happy
| for it.
| wildbirds wrote:
| I noticed some of the magic of Cocoon when I started up the
| Substack app. While I hate to see Cocoon get neglected (please
| keep it alive!), I do love to see the Substack app so well
| designed. It's a pleasure to use. Well done!
|
| Have you ever considered offering subscription packages? I find
| it hard to justify making multiple paid subscriptions (they add
| up fast), but would love to be able to build a package of
| newsletters that I could subscribe to at a bundled rate of some
| sort. Something like a cable tv plan for Substack newsletters?
| The_rationalist wrote:
| I hope the app is using Ionic/capacitor so that it can reuse
| parts of the web frontend code.
| george0812 wrote:
| What were some of the surprising technical challenges you faced
| developing the app?
| mccorrinall wrote:
| https://on.substack.com/p/substackapp
|
| https://apps.apple.com/de/app/substack-reader/id1581650857?l...
| zakshay wrote:
| Whats the tech stack for the iOS app?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-03-10 23:00 UTC)