Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook)

**Sachin Monga** (0:00)
I really think that we're just starting into this golden era of what it might mean to be a writer on the internet. The economic model for supporting great writing on the internet has been generally pretty terrible for the entirety of the internet's history. And in the early days of Substack, there was a couple of these glimmers of hope where you'd have people like Matt Taibbi or Bill Bishop, some of the early writers on Substack that were really well-established writers who were clearly just being undervalued and now could come to Substack and see their true value. And that was awesome. That was really cool to see.
But in the last year or so, even in the last few months, I think there's been so many really interesting success stories now from writers who might not even consider themselves writers, people who are able to make a living, maybe even make a fortune just doing great work and not needing to have millions and millions of viewers or play the sort of attention games of other networks, but just do really high quality work and have a relatively small number of people value it highly enough to pay for it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:06)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. Today, my guest is Sachin Monga, who is currently the head of product at Substack. Before Substack, he had a startup called Cocoon that he sold to Substack. And before that, he spent over seven years at Facebook, working on the video and camera products, building out the developer platform and leading the ads growth team. In our conversation, we dig into all things Substack, what it's like to build product at Substack, how different it is to work at a startup versus a big company like Facebook, the future of the Substack product. We also spent a lot of time on what I venture to say will go down in history as one of the most legendary growth features ever created, the Substack recommendations feature. Substack as a product and a company has changed my life and allowed me to do the work that I do now. And it was such a treat to be able to chat with Sachin. I hope that you find this conversation as interesting as I did. With that, I bring you Sachin Monga.
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