Dear investors, 

We reflect on 2024 with both satisfaction and impatience. We’re satisfied because the business is strong, growth is robust, and we continue to attract the world’s best writers and creators to Substack. But there is still much work to be done, new territories to push into, and some key improvements to make to the product, and we’re impatient to get started. We expect 2025 to be a milestone year for our customers, the brand, and the company, and we look forward to forging ahead.  

First, an overview of some key numbers.

• Today, there are more than 4 million paid subscriptions to Substack publications and tens of millions of total active subscribers across the network.
• The Substack network, anchored by the app and recommendations, now accounts for more than 50% of all subscriptions and 30% of paid subscriptions on the platform. 
• The app is now the single largest source of growth for publishers across Substack. It has millions of weekly active users. In November, the app reached number 3 on the App Store charts for free apps in the News category, behind only X and Reddit. 
• More than 50,000 publishers make money on Substack, and the top 10 collectively bring in more than $40 million a year. In the Politics and News categories, more than 30 publications make at least $1 million a year. In the past 12 months, we have welcomed a panoply of major names to Substack, including Mehdi Hasan, Miranda July, Paul Krugman, Sam Harris, Yotam Ottolenghi, Tina Brown, Van Jones, Jameela Jamil, Meghan McCain, and James Patterson, to name a few.

We made strides on the company side too. We currently have nearly 100 employees, up from 85 at the start of 2024, and are continuing to hire strategically. In November we closed a small funding round of about $10 million in response to inbound interest from strategic investors. The round included investments from Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Truebill founder (and now Rocket Money CEO) Haroon Mokhtarzada, AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant, and Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight and now a leading Substack publisher. 

The company is in a strong financial position. We have always endeavored to be “default alive,” meaning that we maintain a growth trajectory and budget to get to break-even with the money we have in the bank, and are not reliant on outside funding to survive. Funding from the strategic round will be used to accelerate our work. Substack’s focus at this time is not on short-term profitability but instead on investing in the growth of the business.

A review of 2024: Substack becomes a destination

In the past year, we invested in the mobile app to establish Substack as a destination for great culture. Substack is becoming a place where people come to find great things to read, watch, listen to, and participate in, getting closer to their cultural heroes and helping to mint new ones. 

By establishing Substack as a destination, we help our customers reach new audiences and increase their revenue. Crucially, we do this while preserving their “exit rights”—their ability to export their work and their mailing list at any time. While Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X make it difficult for creators to translate their on-platform followers into off-platform success—or even to share outside links with their audience—Substack offers creators a space to grow with confidence.

To this end, we made several improvements to the app. We paid special attention to the home feed, making it not only a good place to hang out but also a powerful engine for discovering wonderful, relevant work, and the people making it. We refined our content ranking system to drive users to longer-form posts and episodes, and the Substack feed is now one of the top sources on the internet for driving views of posts. But unlike X, or Bluesky, the feed is not the whole product—it is part of a larger ecosystem. It is designed to help people get closer to the creators they already love, and to meet new ones they are only just learning of. 

This year, we also introduced live video to our bestsellers, allowing creators to “go live” with others via the app. During the U.S. election, we used live video to host the Substack Election Dialogues, a series of livestreamed conversations between prominent publishers on pressing political questions. The Dialogues were the cornerstone of an effort that cemented Substack as a key destination for coverage of the election, and they led to coverage in the New York Times highlighting the work and earnings of Mehdi Hasan, Nate Silver, and The Bulwark, among others. Live video has caught on in other categories as well, and will soon be made available to all publishers.

We’ve also continued to build and evolve tools that support big-vision publishers who have sophisticated demands for layouts, high-volume publishing, and numerous editorial contributors. Early in the year, we rolled out new design themes and layouts designed for publications like The Bulwark and Zeteo and available to all. At the end of the year, we announced a partnership with The Free Press that begins work on a suite of enterprise features, which will allow publishers to take full advantage of the platform’s growth features while also enjoying more customization, richer analysis, and automated marketing tools. 

On top of all the announcements and product updates, we saw another year in which Substack featured prominently in the press. The media was particularly enamored with the rise of fashion as a category on Substack, with Glossy magazine declaring “Substack is the new Instagram” and naming CEO Chris Best one of the most influential people in the fashion business, which nobody who knows him would have predicted. Substack’s rise in fashion was also covered in the Washington Post, Vogue Business, and The Business of Fashion. Substack made frequent appearances in major U.S. publications, including the New York Times (Tina Brown, Jane Pratt, events dedicated to bringing writers together), the Wall Street Journal (James Patterson, Joanna Goddard), and New York Magazine, which profiled Nate Silver and Mehdi Hasan and included Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie among its “media power elite.” At the end of the year, Joe Rogan, who hosts the most-listened-to podcast in the world, said during an interview with Substack investor Marc Andreessen: “I love Substack.”

A look ahead: Substack in 2025 and beyond

Our company’s ambition is to build a new economic engine for culture, which gives the brightest, most interesting, and most creative people on the internet the power of their own publishing platform. The terms of our culture should not be set by dying legacy media or by chaos-fueling social media, but by the people who make and participate in the culture. The Substack model, based on direct subscriptions, has supported an explosion of independent publishing that can challenge the status quo, and it’s an economy that now generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year for our customers. This model also gives subscribers real power in shaping their media environment, by letting them make conscious choices in who to support with their attention and their money. It’s a media system that makes everyone smarter. 

Substack is now well known in the worlds of journalism and technology—especially among people with experience in blogging, who came from newspapers and magazines, and who enjoy podcasting. But the overall media ecosystem encompasses many more formats. In 2025 we’ll work to bring the benefits of more media types to Substack publishers, and the benefits of Substack to more creators.

We launched the Substack mobile app in 2022, and its feature set has only grown since then: Notes, the activity feed, Chat, direct messages, and a media tab have all given creators and subscribers new ways to discover and connect over great culture. And it’s now possible to start a Substack directly from the app, post your work, and make money without having to touch a desktop computer. However, these additions have made the product more complex, and it is not always instantly understandable to new users. This year, we will work to make the app simpler and easier to navigate on first contact, even as we add more powerful tools for video, community, and more.

We see this simplification and video work as critical not only because it will make the app more user-friendly, but also because it will be key to helping people on Substack attract audiences from other platforms. There are a great many people who spend most of their time on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram and who stand to benefit from the Substack model. Our hopes for a new creative culture cannot be realized if Substack doesn’t reach the audiences and creators who are spending their time in those apps. 

Winning over these audiences will bring millions more people into Substack, which will dramatically increase the “total addressable market” for everyone who publishes on Substack. Everyone on the platform can get more cut-through for their ideas, and their work can connect with more people. It will mean that people on Substack will have more cultural influence and power. It will also mean there is more money in the system, which means more people can make a living from that work. It might sound trite to say it, but in this particular case, more is more.

All of this is also helpful to Substack’s bottom line, of course, since we make money only when our publishers make money. We think that supporting media of all types will vastly grow the earning potential of our customers, and therefore revenue for Substack.

To serve these ends, we will continue to adapt the product and build the destination, and direct our partnerships and marketing efforts toward a broader range of media. We are at the very beginning of this effort, but we are already seeing some encouraging signs. For example, Violet Witchel, a star TikTok creator with millions of followers on that platform and nearly a million on Instagram, is making several times more money from Substack subscriptions than from brand deals resulting from her social media presence. “Substack provides me with consistent income,” she told us. “One Substack post can bring in a significant number of new subscribers, providing a steady revenue stream compared to the variability of brand deals. It’s reaching a point where brand deals are less appealing, and focusing on Substack seems more sustainable.” 

Today, there are more than 4 million paid subscriptions to creators on Substack. But as we attract more people to the app and reach creators who aren’t already familiar with, or present on, Substack, we see a clear path to 40 million. With improvements to the feed; the app; and more tools for video, audio, and community, we will be producing an environment that is ever more conducive to creators and their audiences alike coming to Substack to curate their own little corner of the internet—a cozy place where they are in charge, and where they reap the benefits of their work. 

This is important work that will produce not only great business outcomes but also a better, more exciting, more enriching, more delightful, and more intelligent culture that benefits everyone while delivering financial independence to the people who create it. 

Thank you for investing in this mission and in this company. Thank you for supporting a better future for culture. 

Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi