There's a giant universe of voices on Substack and I'm sure you'll find many who fit that description. A couple of ways to do so:
Peruse the leaderboards at substack.com and in the new app (in the Discover tab).
Check out the profiles of the writers and readers you most respect (just click on their faces). You'll find lists of Substacks they're subscribed to, which may lead you to some interesting places and new writers to respect.
Hello, I (Hamish) will answer question #1 and leave the rest to my colleagues.
I think what has driven our growth is a nice synthesis between the product, the business dev work (i.e. convincing writers to give it a shot), and the business model.
The model may be the underestimated part. It's compelling for many writers, partly because of its simplicity and transparency: you own the relationship with your audience, you publish stuff that gets sent to them, and then if you're doing good work some portion of that audience will choose to pay you to keep going. That's a good deal for writers, since:
a) It lets them do the work they believe is most important
b) No one can mess with their audience
c) There's a clear path to making money, which is the major thing absent from most other options for writing on the internet (or, increasingly, anywhere else).
These things make Substack a relatively easy "sell".
Of course, some writers are better poised to succeed with this model than others, so we have put in a sustained effort to identify those writers and let them know about their opportunity on Substack. In a small number of cases, that has meant we've offered a financial package to derisk the move for them (you can think of it as like startup funding to get them going; many don't have much financial buffer and may be reluctant to leave jobs even if they are unhappy in those jobs). But the vast majority of writers doing well on Substack have come to the platform of their own accord, without any kind of deal.
Thanks for the quick response! Hopefully that trend continues and we can see some of that diversity move beyond the VP-level and on into the C-suite. :)
If you're talking about getting Substack publications into your RSS reader, you can add /feed to the end of the relevant URL and then add that into your reader (e.g. https://sinocism.com/feed).
For adding non-Substack publications into the Substack app via RSS, go to reader.substack.com (make sure you're logged in) and click on "Add RSS feed" in the left sidebar.
I'm obviously not who you're replying to, but I exclusively read substack articles through RSS readers like inoreader - typically every article (both paid and unpaid) will show up in the feed; the paid articles are just paywalled after the title/image/short paragraph preview. Hope that helps.
Good to know, thanks! In that case, my question for the Substack folks is:
For Substack authors that I subscribe to, will you be making a full-content feed available? I'm quite happy with my current feed reader, and would just like to get my substack subscriptions in there like my other full-content subscriptions.
