Read until you can't anymore

Substack

Or: how I spent my entire Saturday night inside one website and didn't even notice

It's Saturday night. I stayed in. No regrets, no FOMO, just me, the couch, and what I thought was going to be a twenty-minute scroll.

Here's how the night actually went.

I read three articles on Substack. Then I found a recipe on Substack-  and then I thought I could make that better- and I actually got up and cooked it. (Herbed Garlic Butter Cod ) Then, because apparently I can't leave well enough alone, I read a business article on Substack that got me so fired up I opened my laptop and worked on my own business for an hours.

And now it's late, my brain won't shut off, and what am I doing?

Blogging. About Substack. On my blog and then I will probably put it on Substack

I need magnesium. Or an exorcism. Possibly both.

So naturally, I looked up some facts

Because if I'm going to lose a Saturday night to a website, I want to know exactly who to blame.

It started in 2017 with three guys and one very good idea. Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi launched Substack because they were obsessed with one writer's subscription newsletter and thought, "What if everybody could do that?" Two of them came from the messaging app Kik. One was a tech reporter. None of them, I assume, anticipated ruining my weekend.

The first year, they had 11,000 people paying for newsletters. That's it. Eleven thousand. Today? Over 5 million paid subscriptions — and that number doubled in about two years. More than 20 million people open something on Substack every month.

Over 17,000 writers are actually making money on there. Not "exposure." Money. Fifty-two newsletters pull in more than $500,000 a year. The top ten writers on the platform bring in roughly $40 million a year between them, and the #1 earner — a history newsletter called Letters from an American — is estimated at around $5 million annually. From a newsletter. That someone writes. At a desk. Probably in pajamas.

Substack takes 10%. That's the whole business model. The writer keeps the rest, keeps their email list, and keeps their subscribers if they ever walk away. That last part is the thing that really got me thinking because that is not how most platforms work, and it's the entire reason so many people jumped.

It's not just newsletters anymore. Podcasts, video, recipes, notes, threads, comment sections that don't make you want to lie down. Which explains how one person can go from "reading an essay" to "cooking dinner" to "restructuring my business plan" without ever leaving the app. That's not an accident. That's design.

The part I keep chewing on

Somewhere in the last few years, a bunch of us quietly swapped scrolling at people for reading from people. Stuff someone actually sat down and made.

And the wild part isn't that it's huge- it's that it's huge because it's small. A writer with a list and a reader deciding this is worth five bucks a month.

Anyway. It's late. The kitchen's a mess, my notebook's full of business ideas that I know have to move onto my website that I haven't updated in years. I'll either love or laugh at in the morning, and I still have seven tabs open and 10 followers.

So here's my question for you: what's the ONE thing you've actually paid for online that turned out to be worth every penny and what's the one you're still paying for that you totally forgot about?

Hit me. I read every reply- probably at 11:47 on a Saturday night.