"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
5
teams total
3
full-stack teams
1
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 you have 5 people in a room, everyone knows what everyone does. At scale, you need systems
Weekly syncs with the founder: Sit down every Monday to discuss big problems. Check in Friday on what happened
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.