The best startups aren’t just an artifact, they’re a change in human behavior centered around the artifact.
Substack’s big contribution to date is successfully bootstrapping a Schelling point:
Expert writers: I would write more but my only compelling options are day job or gift economy.
Readers: I get incredible value out of people I follow on Twitter.
Substack: I have a proposition.
Interestingly I think that Schelling point is probably going to be substantially bigger than the universe of Substacks (as currently conceived), both on their platform and off of it.
I’ve had a WSJ subscription built into my assumed cost structure since I became employed. Now, I’ve got probably a gym membership or so worth of budget for “things that have a value proposition similar to @ByrneHobart’s Substack.”
My next business? Same story but B2B prices.
Let me clarify: I model purchasing these sorts of things as more likely (~100%) than producing them.
(When I pencil out the economics of prestige content they always look much better attached to a software or financial services company than they do attached to a media company.)
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