Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook)
Today, Sachin Manga, Head of Product at Substack, discusses building product at Substack, contrasting startup life with big companies like Facebook, and the future of the platform. He delves into the impact of the recommendations feature and strategies for working with a product-minded founder.
Deep Dive Analysis
16 Topic Outline
Substack's Vision: A Golden Era for Writers
Sachin Monga's Journey to Substack
Evolution and Structure of Substack's Product Teams
Working with a Hands-On, Product-Minded Founder
Challenges of Rapid Change in a Startup Product Role
Prioritization Differences: Facebook vs. Substack
Substack's Principled Approach to Prioritization
The Genesis and Impact of Substack's Recommendations Feature
Substack's 'Build With' Principle and Product Lab
Navigating Negative Press as a Product Leader
Future Vision for Substack: Writer and Reader Experience
Advice for Aspiring Writers on Substack
Common Mistakes and Product Opportunities for Creators
The 'You Are Not Late' Philosophy for Online Creation
Book Recommendations: Architecture and Urban Planning
Substack Recommendations from Sachin
7 Key Concepts
Paid Subscriptions Internet Model
This model rewires the internet around direct payments between creators and consumers, allowing for a clearly better user experience by removing the reliance on advertising. It enables creators to focus on high-quality work for a dedicated audience, rather than playing 'attention games' for mass viewership.
Customer-Oriented Team Structure
Instead of organizing product teams around specific product surfaces (like an app or dashboard), Substack structures its teams around timeless customer problems. This means having dedicated teams for 'writers,' 'readers,' and 'growth,' ensuring a consistent focus on core user segments rather than ephemeral product features.
Control Principle in Product Design
Substack's core principle is to give writers and readers maximum control over their experience. When making product decisions, the company prioritizes options that empower users, ensuring writers own their audience and content, and readers have agency over what they see and who they engage with.
Network-Driven Discovery
This refers to how users find new content and creators within the Substack ecosystem, primarily through organic, writer-curated recommendations. It leverages existing relationships and trust between writers and their audiences to facilitate cross-pollination, rather than relying on algorithmic suggestions.
Build With Principle
An operating principle at Substack where fundamental product changes are made in collaboration with writers and readers. This involves bringing users into the development process early, gathering feedback, and piloting features with small, interested groups (like the Product Lab) before wider rollout.
1000 True Fans
A concept suggesting that creators can make a living by cultivating a relatively small number of highly dedicated fans who value their work enough to pay for it. This model allows creators to focus on quality and niche content without needing a massive, broad audience.
You Are Not Late
A philosophy that argues against the feeling that all major opportunities on the internet have passed. It suggests that we are still in the early stages of the internet's evolution, and significant new possibilities for creation and connection continue to emerge.
12 Questions Answered
Sachin joined Substack about a year ago through the acquisition of his startup, Cocoon, a photo-sharing app for close friends and family. Both Cocoon and Substack shared a common motivation to explore business models beyond advertising that could unlock better user experiences.
Substack has four product managers, including Sachin, and three full-stack product teams aligned around customer segments: a writer team, a reader team, and a growth team. There's also a fourth engineering team focused on systems and infrastructure.
The biggest challenge is that any process or structure established quickly becomes obsolete as the company grows and evolves. The role demands constant adaptation and comfort with feeling like you don't always know what you're doing, as the rate of change is extremely high.
At Facebook, prioritization often involves managing complex trade-offs where doing one thing might permanently hinder another. At Substack, the main variable is time, and decisions are often about sequencing to unlock future capabilities, with fewer 'one-way door' decisions.
Substack prioritizes based on core principles, particularly empowering writers and readers with control over their experience. Decisions often favor options that provide more agency to users, even if they seem harder to implement, aligning with the vision of rewiring the internet around direct relationships.
The feature emerged from observing organic reader discovery through writers. Instead of an algorithmic 'you might like' approach, the team opted for a writer-controlled system where writers explicitly recommend other newsletters, aligning with Substack's principle of user control.
The recommendations feature has driven millions of new subscriptions for tens of thousands of unique writers. More than one in three new subscriptions across Substack, and about one in ten paid subscriptions, now come from the Substack Network, with these numbers continuously growing.
Substack focuses on parsing signal from noise, recognizing that most external chatter is a distraction. The approach is to keep heads down, continue shipping product, and maintain focus on the vision, as ultimately, execution is what matters.
Substack aims to usher in a 'golden era' for writers, making it simpler to start and build a sustainable living. It seeks to be the 'home base' where writers accumulate their most valuable audience, own their content, and build thriving communities, supporting various formats like writing, podcasts, and video.
Substack envisions becoming a true alternative to traditional social media, offering a 'golden age' internet experience where readers have extreme control over what they see and who they let into their space. It aims to be a destination for the 'best culture' and communities, rather than just endless scrolling.
The main advice is to 'just start.' Begin by gathering subscribers, writing a few posts, or trying audio/video, especially if you have an audience elsewhere. The goal is to experiment and see what kind of interest exists for your content without overthinking the long-term plan initially.
A common pitfall is overthinking how the audience will perceive them, worrying about frequency, charging for content, or taking breaks. Writers often underestimate how forgiving and supportive their subscribers are, and how much readers want to support their work.
22 Actionable Insights
1. Just Start Your Substack
Begin by simply starting your Substack, gathering subscribers, and publishing one or two pieces of content (writing, audio, or video) to gauge interest and see what happens.
2. Be Patient and Consistent
Commit to a slow and steady approach, consistently publishing for several months (e.g., nine months for free) before expecting significant growth or monetization, to build momentum and assess viability.
3. Aim for 1000 Paid Subscribers
Focus on building a base of around 1,000 paid subscribers, as this number can be sufficient to make a living, demonstrating the power of ‘1,000 true fans’.
4. Don’t Underestimate Audience Support
Don’t let worries about audience perception or your own worth prevent you from charging for content or taking breaks, as paying subscribers are generally forgiving and supportive.
5. Focus on Quality, Not Scale
Create high-quality work for a relatively small number of people who value it highly enough to pay for it, rather than chasing millions of viewers or attention games.
6. Build a Home Base for Audience
Use platforms like Substack as a home base to accumulate your most valuable audience, where you own their contact information and can deliver your best work on your terms.
7. Adopt “You Are Not Late” Mindset
Counter the feeling that it’s ’too late’ to start something new on the internet; recognize that the internet’s evolution is still in its early stages, offering immense opportunity for those willing to engage.
8. Prioritize User Control
When making product decisions, prioritize options that provide more control to the user (e.g., writer or reader) over their experience, even if it seems harder to implement.
9. Leverage Organic User Behavior
Observe and build upon organic user behaviors, like readers discovering other Substacks through their favorite writers, to create powerful, user-controlled growth features.
10. Empower Users to Curate
Instead of algorithmic recommendations, empower users (writers) to personally curate and recommend content, fostering trust and driving high-intent subscriptions.
11. Build Products With Your Users
When making fundamental product changes, actively involve your users (e.g., writers, readers) through pilots and feedback groups (like a ‘product lab’) to ensure the product meets their needs and aligns with core principles.
12. Facilitate, Don’t Just Decide
When working with a product-minded founder, act as a facilitator rather than solely a decision-maker, ensuring clear communication between the founder and teams to align on vision and priorities.
13. Maintain Open Communication
Establish a routine of open communication with the founder, such as weekly check-ins to discuss big problems and concerns, to build trust and ensure alignment.
14. Internalize Founder’s Vision
Actively seek to understand and internalize the founder’s long-term vision and historical context of the problem, then help your teams do the same to align efforts effectively.
15. Prioritize Continuous Process Improvement
Don’t strive for a perfect process, as it will quickly become obsolete in a high-growth startup; instead, focus on continuously improving your processes week by week, month by month.
16. Embrace Constant Change
Be comfortable with constantly feeling like you don’t know what you’re doing, as success in a high-growth company means processes and knowledge will frequently become obsolete.
17. Rotate Recommendations to Share Growth
If you have a platform, rotate your recommendations among different quality creators to share growth and give others a platform, assuming you genuinely like their work.
18. Filter Out Media Noise
When facing negative press or chatter, focus on parsing out signal from noise, and generally keep your head down to continue shipping and executing on the vision, as most external chatter won’t impact day-to-day work.
19. Study Architecture for Product Insights
Explore books on architecture and urban planning, such as Christopher Alexander’s ‘The Timeless Way of Building,’ to gain insights into building good spaces for human interaction and avoiding suboptimal user experiences caused by misaligned incentives.
20. Don’t Overthink Initial Setup
Don’t overthink initial decisions like your newsletter’s name or a grand plan; just sign up and start trying things out to see if you enjoy it and if there’s an audience.
21. Leverage Retool for Internal Tools
For small teams (up to five), use Retool to build custom internal apps for free, streamlining operations and gaining productivity without the usual time and cost burden.
22. Streamline User Authentication with Stytch
Integrate Stytch’s flexible, out-of-the-box authentication solutions to make user onboarding more seamless and secure, potentially increasing conversion by over 60% and saving engineering time.
9 Key Quotes
I really think that we're just starting into this golden era of what it might mean to be a writer on the internet.
Sachin Monga
Substack as a product and a company has changed my life and allowed me to do the work that I do now.
Lenny Rachitsky
If you imagine rewiring the internet around paid subscriptions, direct subscriptions between in Substack's case readers and writers, what could that unlock? And could it unlock a clearly better user experience?
Sachin Monga
The main thing I care about is are we just getting better every week, every month, certainly every year. And I think that's easier said than done.
Sachin Monga
Substack is a pretty principled company. And I think it's been really fun and interesting to get to work in an environment like this and also see how it like actually can work.
Sachin Monga
I feel like it's maybe the most underappreciated radical shift in Substack and just like platforms in general. I think this is going to go down as one of the most legendary, impactful features of any platform or marketplace.
Lenny Rachitsky
The whole thing here is just like parsing out the signal from the noise.
Sachin Monga
Substack's never going to be the place where you have the biggest audience probably, but it certainly should be the place where your most valuable audience comes home to, where they get your best work.
Sachin Monga
If someone is subscribed to you, they're kind of granting you right access to their brain is maybe the way I view it in a nerdy sense, right?
Sachin Monga