Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook)

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

Lenny Rachitsky

Technology, Business, Entrepreneurship

5 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 30 October 2022

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sachin Monga is the Head of Product at Substack, a platform that I personally use every day, and love. Before Substack, Sachin co-founded an app called Cocoon, which he ended up selling to Substack. Before that, he spent over seven years at Facebook as a PM working on video and camera products, building out the developer platform, and leading the ads growth team. In today’s episode, we dive deep on all things Substack. Sachin shares what it’s like transitioning from a large product team at Facebook to a small growth team. He discusses how to work with a hands-on founder and why you must be comfortable with rapid change in a PM role. He also shares unique features of Substack that make it an optimized experience for readers and writers, how he’d like to see it improved, and tips for anyone wanting to get started writing online.

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Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/building-substack-sachin-monga-substack-facebook/#transcript

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Where to find Sachin Monga:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/sachinmonga

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sachinmonga/

• Email: [email protected]

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

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Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for making this episode possible:

• Retool: https://retool.com/lenny

• Stytch: https://stytch.com/lenny

• Vanta: https://vanta.com/lenny

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Referenced:

• Substack: https://substack.com/

• Matt Taibbi on Substack: https://taibbi.substack.com/

• Bill Bishop on Substack: https://sinocism.com/

• Jasper: https://www.jasper.ai/

• DALL-E 2: https://openai.com/dall-e-2/

• 1000 True Fans: https://www.amazon.com/1000-True-Fans-Kellys-Simple-ebook/dp/B01N9P9O4G

• You Are Not Late: https://medium.com/message/you-are-not-late-b3d76f963142

• The Timeless Way of Building: https://www.amazon.com/Timeless-Way-Building-Christopher-Alexander/dp/0195024028

• Martyrmade podcast on Substack: https://martyrmade.substack.com/

• Colin Meloy on Substack: https://colinmeloy.substack.com/

• Ethan Strauss on Substack: https://houseofstrauss.substack.com/

• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on Substack: https://kareem.substack.com/

• Dayne Rathbone: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daynerathbone/

• For All Mankind on Apple TV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/for-all-mankind/umc.cmc.6wsi780sz5tdbqcf11k76mkp7

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In this episode, we cover:

(04:34) Sachin’s background

(07:11) The evolution and structure of teams at Substack

(10:11) What it’s like working at a smaller company with a hands-on founder

(12:07) How to share in a founder’s vision

(14:02) Why the rate of change is the most challenging aspect of the job

(16:37) Why prioritization at Facebook worked differently than it does at Substack

(20:03) How Substack thinks about prioritizing for writers and readers

(22:17) Substack’s recommendation feature and how it came to be

(27:13) How recommendations have led to an increase of millions of subscribers

(31:34) Moving forward with network-driven discovery

(32:17) The “build with” principle and the product lab at Substack

(35:02) How Substack deals with negative press

(36:45) The writer experience at Substack

(39:13) The reader-focused experience on Substack

(40:41) Advice for writers

(44:45) Substack’s vision for making creation easier

(46:39) Common mistakes creators make, and how product improvements could help in some cases

(49:57) Why you’re not too late to join the game

(52:52) Lightning round

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I really
0:02.0	starting into this golden era of what it might mean to be a writer on the internet.
0:08.0	The economic model for supporting great writing on the internet
0:11.0	has been generally pretty terrible for like the entirety of the
0:15.4	internet's history. And in the early days of SubSek, there was a couple of these glimmers of
0:19.6	Hope where you'd have people like Matt Taibi or Bill Bishop,
0:23.7	some of the early writers on SubSak that were really
0:26.3	well-established writers who were clearly just being undervalued
0:30.0	and now could come to SubSAC and see their true value.
0:33.2	And that was awesome. That was really cool to see. But in the last year or so,
0:37.8	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,
0:47.0	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.
1:06.8	Welcome to Lenny's podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the
1:11.6	craft of billing and growing products.
1:14.0	Today my guest is Saatchin Manga, who is currently the head of product at Substack.
1:19.0	Before Substack, he had a startup called Cocoon that he sold to Substack and before that he spent over seven years at
1:24.4	Facebook working on the video and camera products building out the developer
1:28.1	platform and leading the ads growth team in our conversation we dig into all things Substack, what it's like to build
1:34.7	product at Substack, how different it is to work at a startup versus the company
1:38.4	like Facebook, the future of the Substack product. We also spent a lot of time on what I venture to say
1:44.8	will go down in history as one of the most legendary growth features ever created,
1:49.3	the Substack recommendations feature. Substack as a product and a company has changed my life. StepS I hope that you find this conversation as interesting as I did.
	...

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