Sachin Monga: belief

Transcript context

…It's been interesting to see a growing percentage of the great content that I come across be on Substack, and so I think that's a cool trend for y'all. For writers that are thinking about starting a newsletter, thinking about joining Substack, what sorts of advice, tips, guidance do you have for folks that are thinking about getting into the Substack world? My first piece of advice would be to just start it and see what happens. Start it. Have a way to start gathering subscribers. Put a link to it somewhere. Write one or two things. If you're not much of a writer, try posting a video, recording some audio, turn into a little podcast. Just start basically and see what happens and see what kind of interest there might be out there for what you have to say, especially if you already have a following on other platforms as well. I think that there's a real risk that if your entire following is locked into one platform where you don't have a ton of control over, your ability to reach those people deterministically and certainly to monetize that in some way, it seems like it's a tenuous place to be in the current age of the internet. I'd say just start. It should be really easy. Go to Substack.com, press the start your Substack button, and see what happens. That advice may sound to people like, "Oh yeah, that's not actual advice." But I will say that is exactly what I did and that's exactly how I got to what I do now. I had zero intention of ever doing this. Charging for writing that I'm writing, that's crazy. Just the fact that Substack existed and let me try stuff out for free. You sign up. You start it. My newsletter, it's called Lenny's Newsletter because that was like the default recommendation when I signed up, because I told them my name's Lenny and it's like Lenny's Newsletter, because I had no plan to do this. It was just like, let me just sign up and try blogging here for a little bit and that little path. I think about Chris and Hamish and the founders mapping out a user journey of a vision of how somebody onboards to Substack, to go from never writing to doing it full-time. I feel like I went through that exactly, if they even had that, where I sign up just to try it out. I start writing consistently. It starts going well, then I think about charging, and then I launch the paid plan, and then that goes well. It keeps growing, and then I do it full-time. That's exactly what I went down and there's no world where I would've done this if not for those magical combination of features of just a really simple blog a d newsletter and collecting emails and maybe monetizing down the road.…

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