"Editor and CEO Stephen Hayes (former editor in chief of the now-defunct Weekly Standard) told me that his vision for The Dispatch was to “slow down the news cycle.” That doesn’t mean ignoring the day’s headlines. But rather than just recycling the same stories about, say, Bernie Sanders or the COVID-19 pandemic, The Dispatch aims to “take a breath” and try to approach important news in a fresh way.
“We’re not trying to monetize eyeballs,” he said. “What Substack was doing fit pretty much exactly with what we wanted to build — a company with an editorial-first philosophy.”
I wrote this question down on a post-it and I've been thinking about it a lot in the last few days!
I can't find an exact answer anywhere online, but I think it's two things:
Substack users (newsletter writers) are natural promoters of Substack because every time they send a newsletter it's a little bit of Substack marketing to their audience. In other words, I bet they "manually" got ~100 great newsletter writers who each got ~1000 paying newsletter subscribers.
Twitter integration. It's really easy to Tweet good stuff on Substack which looks like it drives a ton of referral traffic.
"Editor and CEO Stephen Hayes (former editor in chief of the now-defunct Weekly Standard) told me that his vision for The Dispatch was to “slow down the news cycle.” That doesn’t mean ignoring the day’s headlines. But rather than just recycling the same stories about, say, Bernie Sanders or the COVID-19 pandemic, The Dispatch aims to “take a breath” and try to approach important news in a fresh way.
“We’re not trying to monetize eyeballs,” he said. “What Substack was doing fit pretty much exactly with what we wanted to build — a company with an editorial-first philosophy.”
I’ll have to check it out! Substack is going to be huge.
Hey Bill, find out how they attained 10,000 paying customers?!?
Yooo!
I wrote this question down on a post-it and I've been thinking about it a lot in the last few days!
I can't find an exact answer anywhere online, but I think it's two things: