Building Product at
Substack

Sachin Monga

Head of Product, Substack

OCT 2022

The Shift

From Ads to Subscriptions: Rewiring the Internet

"If you imagine rewiring the internet around paid subscriptions, direct subscriptions between readers and writers, what could that unlock and could it unlock a clearly better user experience?"

Ad-driven model forces accumulation of time and attention to sell eyeballs
Substack's alternative: direct reader-to-writer relationships
Enables experience design without the ad constraints
One-time shift: from maximizing engagement to maximizing writer value

Product Structure

Organizing Around Customers, Not Surfaces

full-stack teams

systems team

Three full-stack product teams: Writer, Reader, Growth
Plus one systems engineering team (no PM)
Oriented around customer problems, not product surfaces
Survived longer than expected, most teams reorg every 3-6 months
No app team, dashboard team, or feature-based silos

The principleAlign teams around timeless customer missions, not ephemeral surfaces. Writers will always need help. Readers will always need discovery. These problems don't go away.

How to Lead with a Product-Minded Founder

Trust, Facilitation, and Weekly Syncs

Start as facilitator, not decision-maker: Your role is to translate founder vision to teams and teams' work back to founder
Solve the information problem: When the team was small, everyone had a sense of what others were up to. As you hire quickly, that context stops carrying over
Weekly syncs with the founder: Start of the week, sit down for an hour on what the big problems are. Check in again at the end of the week
Build context through reps: Chris has been thinking about this for 5 years. Your job is to catch up, not override

Watch the original pitch

Substack did Y Combinator 6 years ago. Watching that 60-second demo showed that Chris envisioned podcasting, network effects, and discovery, now being built.

The transparency tax

Open communication about what you're worried about, what problems matter, what you're unsure of. This creates the trust that allows the founder to let you lead.

Operating Truth

Comfort with Obsolescence

Every process you build will be obsolete in 3-6 months if you're doing it right
The moment you figure out a system, you've grown 2X and it no longer works
Success = knowing you don't know what you're doing
Not for everyone: requires being humbled constantly

Sachin's insightThe rate of change is the huge factor. Some PMs thrive managing trade-offs at scale. Others thrive in constant flux and invention. Know which type you are.

Discovery Wins

Recommendations: Millions of Subscriptions Driven

Recommendations now drive millions of new subscriptions across tens of thousands of writers
1 in 3 new subscriptions come from Substack network discovery
1 in 10 paid subscriptions now network-sourced
Higher intent than expected, discovery users have strong engagement

The future: beyond flows

Right now recommendations appear in subscribe flows. Next: treating recommendations as a real social graph of influence and goodwill, much more powerful than a single moment.

Build with writers

New principle: involve core writers in beta before launch. Created Product Lab, 100 writers on bleeding edge. Ship different than planned after feedback.

Based on Sachin Monga's episode on Lenny's Podcast. All ideas on this page are from the episode.Watch on YouTube Follow @sachinmonga on X

GO DEEPER IN THE EPISODE

07:11 The evolution and structure of teams at Substack 10:11 What it’s like working at a smaller company with a hands-on founder 12:07 How to share in a founder’s vision 14:02 Why the rate of change is the most challenging aspect of the job 16:37 Why prioritization at Facebook worked differently than it does at Substack 20:03 How Substack thinks about prioritizing for writers and readers 22:17 Substack’s recommendation feature and how it came to be 27:13 How recommendations have led to an increase of millions of subscribers 31:34 Moving forward with network-driven discovery 32:17 The “build with” principle and the product lab at Substack 35:02 How Substack deals with negative press 36:45 The writer experience at Substack 39:13 The reader-focused experience on Substack 40:41 Advice for writers 44:45 Substack’s vision for making creation easier 46:39 Common mistakes creators make, and how product improvements could help in some cases 49:57 Why you’re not too late to join the game 52:52 Lightning round

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