How Substack Got Its First Customers

Substack got its first customer by asking one person. In October 2017 co-founder Hamish McKenzie approached Bill Bishop — a writer whose China newsletter Sinocism had a large, devoted free readership and no practical way to charge for it — and Sinocism became the first publication on the platform. By Bishop's own later account it passed six figures of annualised subscription revenue almost immediately, which functioned less as a growth statistic than as a proof, delivered publicly, that the model worked.

The wedge was not publishing software; it was the removal of a business. A writer with an audience already had the hard part — the readers and the reason they showed up — and lacked the payments, membership management, billing, and infrastructure that turning attention into income requires. Substack supplied all of it and charged nothing until the writer earned, so the pitch asked for no money, no migration risk, and no commitment beyond trying.

Founded in San Francisco by Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi, both from the messaging company Kik, together with former technology journalist Hamish McKenzie (2017).

The first channel was the founders approaching individual writers, one at a time. This is founder-led sales in its purest form: a small number of high-value suppliers, each recruited in a conversation, each chosen because their existing audience meant the platform would be judged on a real publication rather than on an empty product.

After the first writers, the channel became the product's own output. Every Substack publication is a public page and an email landing in thousands of inboxes with Substack's name on it, and a meaningful fraction of any writer's readers are themselves writers. The company also made its early cohort's economics visible, publishing what leading writers earned — which recruited the next cohort more efficiently than advertising could, because the argument was arithmetic rather than persuasion.

The turn was from tool to network. For its first years Substack described itself as neutral infrastructure: the writer brought the audience, Substack handled the plumbing, and the company argued publicly that it was deliberately not a social platform. From roughly 2022 it built the opposite — a reader app, a recommendation system in which writers refer each other's publications, and a social feed — because the one thing writers most want, and the one thing a hosting tool structurally cannot supply, is new readers. That shift changed what Substack sells from software to distribution, and with it the nature of the dependence a writer takes on by staying.