Sachin Monga: observation

Transcript context

…Sure. The way it came to be was that we noticed this organic behavior emerging, which was that a lot of readers of Substacks were starting to discover Substacks, but the way that was happening was typically through the lens of that original writer. This could happen in a bunch of different ways, right? I think you've used the guest post feature to have guests write post on your newsletter. Obviously that is a really good way for your readers to go and discover some of these other writers in a way that you're curating. There's some less obvious ways that this happens too. If you have comments on, which I think you do, if I scroll down and click on the profile of someone who's commenting on your post, it'll show me the other Substack that person reads too. Again, this is a very personalized and very writer centric way of doing discovery. At the same time, we talked about the supply and demand side of the marketplace. The supply side of Substack has just grown over time consistently to the point where now there's a huge amount of amazing writers on the platform and a huge number of collective readers on the platform too that we knew that this sort of like cross-pollination, this discovery loop could be a really powerful thing. If you'd start from the first principles, you're like, "All right, how do we help readers discover more things?' The most obvious way to do this would be something like, "Here are some Substacks you might. Based on what we know about your reading habits, here's like a few that Substack is just going to recommend you." This is the thing that worked really well. At Facebook in particular, I think when I joined in 2011, it was definitely still during the era... I think Facebook maybe had just over 500 million users and was on this path to a billion and beyond. This thing that we called PYMK, which was People You May Know, this little unit that would show up in the newsfeed and it would just tell you that eight other people that you obviously know because you have million mutual friends. That kind of thing drove a very non-trivial amount of Facebook growth in the early days. Of course, lots of other products have done things like this. We could have done something like that. But then going back to that principle of like, okay, well, if we were to do that, let's say we were to insert it at the bottom of our post or in an email or something, it's clearly a thing now where the writer who owns that space is not really in control over what the experiences that they're offering their readers. The reader who signed up for Lenny is now seeing these other things that have nothing to do with Lenny. Does that break this control principle, like putting writers in charge, putting readers in charge? Okay, so then back to the drawing board, what would be the most obvious maximal way to just put writers in control? What is the simplest version of this? What if we just ask writers, who do you recommend? , so then back to the drawing board, what would be the most obvious maximal way to just put writers in control? What is the simplest version of this? What if we just ask writers, who do you recommend? What if we just put that in the subscribe flow and just made it as simple as possible? I think Chris' reaction to that originally when that idea came up was that's probably just going to be really hard to pull off. There's a lot more things that have to be true. You need writers to opt in. You need to pick good people. You need to find a way to surface those recommendations to the readers in a way that's going to generate a good amount of surface area. I think it was a bit of skepticism that something like that could work, but we tried it and it took off really quickly. There was this virality at play now where when you recommend a bunch of people, those people will get an email that say, "Hey, Lenny's recommending you and here's all the readers that he's sending you. " It created this goodwill viral loop, which was really interesting to see play out. I think there was a bunch of interesting lessons in there. We could stick into anything that seems interesting, but I think Chris' skepticism was not, should we do cross-pollination discovery? Clearly this is something that's working, but is this kind of thing going to work given how many steps are required for it to be true that this becomes really impactful? It turned out that it took off way faster than I think we had imagined. Is there any stats you can share about just the impact it's having, what it's done to Substack?…

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