What I’ve Learned In A Year On Substack

This thing is for real. The incentives are right. And the community is the key.

About a year ago, I decided to take a leap and go independent. I had just released Always Day One and was eager to expand on ideas in the book and continue reporting and writing wherever my curiosity took me. Looking back, I had no clue where this all would lead. I knew I loved emailing readers and figured having some distance from the news cycle might help me build a differentiated product, but that was about it. This was before a parade of big-name writers left their newsrooms and turned “Substacking” into a verb.

Today, I feel so lucky to do this work and write to you each week. To mark the moment, I thought I’d step back and share what I’ve learned over the past year:

1. This is for real You can do serious, sustainable journalism through Substack. Without a major media brand, sources still trusted me to break news on an FTC funding crisis, a Facebook executive’s memo on security, the inner workings of the Microsoft board, and more. Big Technology is now well over 10,000 subscribers, just hit 150,000 podcast downloads, and reached a record number of unique email openers last week. The business is healthy and advertisers are happy. It’s working.
2. Email’s incentives are…