Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook)
Sachin Monga (guest), Lenny Rachitsky (host)
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, featuring Sachin Monga and Lenny Rachitsky, Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) explores substack’s Product Playbook: Empowering Writers, Building a Reader-First Network Head of Product at Substack, Sachin Monga, discusses how Substack is evolving from a simple publishing tool into a writer- and reader-centric network that reimagines the economics of online writing.
Substack’s Product Playbook: Empowering Writers, Building a Reader-First Network
Head of Product at Substack, Sachin Monga, discusses how Substack is evolving from a simple publishing tool into a writer- and reader-centric network that reimagines the economics of online writing.
He contrasts building product at a fast-growing startup versus a giant like Facebook, emphasizing principles, sequencing, and accepting constant change over rigid process.
A major focus is Substack’s recommendations feature, which routes growth through writer-to-writer endorsements and has become a powerful, principled growth engine without algorithmic feeds.
Monga also shares advice for aspiring Substack writers, the importance of starting small, and how Substack aims to support sustainable careers and communities around niche expertise.
Key Takeaways
Principles, not algorithms, drive Substack’s product decisions.
Substack optimizes for writer and reader control—avoidance of opaque recommendation algorithms, ownership of email lists, and optional features—rather than ad-driven engagement metrics.
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Orient product teams around customers and timeless problems, not surfaces.
Substack’s product org is split into writer, reader, and growth teams, each focused on enduring user needs, which reduces reorg churn and keeps priorities clearer as the product surface expands.
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Startup PMs must be comfortable with constant obsolescence of process.
At Substack’s stage, any planning or execution process is temporary; success means the company changes fast enough that today’s “right way” quickly becomes outdated, demanding continuous adaptation.
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Writer-driven recommendations can be a powerful, ‘principled’ growth engine.
Instead of algorithmic “you might like” modules, Substack’s recommendations let writers explicitly endorse other writers, creating a high-trust, high-intent discovery loop that now drives millions of subscriptions.
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Sequencing matters when evolving from a tool to a network.
Substack first had to earn trust as a great single-player tool for writers before layering on network effects (like recommendations and an app), enabling more complex, multi-sided experiences without breaking trust.
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You don’t need millions of followers to build a viable writing business.
Stories like Lenny’s show that ~1,000 true fans paying for high-quality, niche work can produce a substantial income, and Substack’s network effects can expand that “ceiling” far beyond initial expectations.
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The biggest barrier for new writers is starting and then continuing.
Monga urges aspiring writers to simply launch and experiment, then discover intent and direction over time; consistency over months, not immediate growth, is what enables meaningful monetization later.
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Notable Quotes
“I really think that we're just starting into this golden era of what it might mean to be a writer on the internet.”
— Sachin Monga
“Substack's never gonna be the place where you have the biggest audience, but it certainly should be the place where your most valuable audience comes home to.”
— Sachin Monga
“Doing the thing well means that you're not going to know what you're doing.”
— Sachin Monga
“If you describe Substack now as simply a newsletter tool, that would be kind of reductive.”
— Sachin Monga
“There’s no way that I would be doing what I’m doing now if not for Substack.”
— Lenny Rachitsky
Questions Answered in This Episode
How far can Substack push network effects and discovery without reintroducing algorithmic feeds or eroding writer control?
Head of Product at Substack, Sachin Monga, discusses how Substack is evolving from a simple publishing tool into a writer- and reader-centric network that reimagines the economics of online writing.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What trade-offs will Substack face if AI-assisted writing tools become popular among its writers, and how might that affect reader trust?
He contrasts building product at a fast-growing startup versus a giant like Facebook, emphasizing principles, sequencing, and accepting constant change over rigid process.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How should emerging writers choose between building audiences on social platforms versus focusing early on owned, high-intent channels like Substack?
A major focus is Substack’s recommendations feature, which routes growth through writer-to-writer endorsements and has become a powerful, principled growth engine without algorithmic feeds.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
At what scale might Substack encounter the same incentive distortions (e.g., growth vs. principles) that affected platforms like Facebook?
Monga also shares advice for aspiring Substack writers, the importance of starting small, and how Substack aims to support sustainable careers and communities around niche expertise.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How can Substack productize community features (discussions, guest posts, meetups) without turning into “just another social network” and losing its differentiated feel?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
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 (laughs) for like 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, 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 you might not even consider themself 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.
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 Manga, 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 Manga. Who has an opinion on internal tools? Internal tools are something you probably don't think about until you have to, or it probably didn't even occur to you to think about them. But if you work at a big company, you probably have a bunch of one-off custom apps or dashboards that are laser-focused on just one job to be done for one specific team or just one role, and they're always such a huge pain to build and maintain. And that's why I'm such a big fan of Retool and why I think Retool is so popular. Retool allows teams as small as just one person to build a suite of custom internal apps in a fraction of the time that you think it takes. The productivity gains of custom apps is now within reach not just for large enterprises but for small teams as well. And as you scale your company, Retool scales with you. Snowflake saves about 26 hours a week of manual spreadsheet work with custom internal apps built on Retool. Amazon uses Retool to handle GDPR requests. Thousands of teams at companies like Coinbase, DoorDash and NBC collaborate around custom-built Retool apps to operate with greater efficiency. Maybe you've thought about using Retool before but just haven't, and I'm here to tell you that now teams of up to five can build unlimited Retool apps for free. Get started today at retool.com/lenny. Do you want to reduce friction in your onboarding flow? Then let me tell you about Stytch, and that's Stytch with a Y. Stytch is on a mission to eliminate friction from the internet. They're starting by making user authentication and onboarding more seamless and more secure. They offer super flexible, out-of-the-box authentication solutions for companies of all sizes. From email magic links to SMS passcodes, one-tap social logins to even biometrics, Stytch is your all-in-one platform for authentication. Stytch customers have been able to increase conversion by over 60% after spending just one day integrating. And with their API and SDKs, you can improve user conversion and retention and security all while saving valuable engineering time. Your engineers will come and thank you for using Stytch because Stytch keeps you from having to build authentication in-house and the integration process is super fast and super smooth. To get $1,000 in free credits, just go to stytch.com/lenny to sign up. And that's Stytch with a Y. Sachin, welcome to the podcast.
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