Surprised something like a simple platform for paid email newsletters would be something that catches the eye of VCs hoping to find the next unicorn. The best case scenario feels like Medium, which to my knowledge has changed course dozens of times and doesn't seem to be going particularly well.

The current subscriber figure I've seen is around 50k paid subscribers across all newsletters. I think even in a best case scenario of having 1m subscribers pay $10/month, that is 1m x $10/mo x 12mo x 10% = $12m in revenue/year (at 20x the current subscriber rate). Unclear how that translates to a VC-sized unicorn biz.

hey! This is andrew from a16z -- substack is still relatively new (~2 years) and the product is solving a real problem for writers. The numbers are already strong, but think about where it might be over the next 5-10 years. I think your calculation focuses too much on where it is now versus where it might go in the future

neotokio

Profits scaling were already discussed in a comment above, ofc, this assumes linear growth where substack is charging (as it is now) only on subscription without going in for revenue from promotional activities (internal promotion of content), advertisements (external sponsors), reader/creator data (google model) or digital/print publishing (leverage of user base substack reach out) in form of a (e)book. Yes, this can make profit multiplier really big (12M/yr subscription + 50x from else)

But what about integrity of service over time then?

All of this means losing initial flavor of 'doing-things-differently', a lot of other companies can provide boilerplate '-stack' for publishing newsletter (ie, recent yc news -https://github.com/knadh/listmonk - self hosted). So, in the end, the only edge of content hosting platform is how well it delivers it's content (UX, rec systems, internal ads), the bigger substack gets, the less of an edge for its creator base it will have - same as medium.com.

I risk a statement that substack is happening only because medium.com is ending.

Yes, as an author I would be interested in hassle free publishing, but after that, i am interested only in how service is helping me grow an audience, nothing else.