YouSaid · the spoken record

Sachin Monga

lines on the record: 57
first: 2022-10-30
most recent: 2022-10-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“First of all, thank you, Lenny, for being such an amazing SubStack example setter. We talk about you all the time, as you can imagine internally, and you've been so helpful to the company and to our product team. So it's been a real honor to get to come onto the pod and keep doing what you're doing. You can find me on all the various social media platforms. I'm not super active on them. I must admit, but maybe Twitter would be the one where I spend the most time to just such a manga. My first name and last name is my handle. And I'll make one plug for a role that we're hiring for right now at Substack, which is a data role, a senior data role with kind of a product and growth analytics bent would be the specific sort of archetype we're looking for in this role. And if you are listening to the pod and feel like that might be you, I would love to chat. And I think my email address too, I don't know if it would get shared, but it's just such in my first name at substack Inc.com. So feel free to send me a note anytime.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a tough time answering this question because I have found that there's not one question that will get me the signal I actually want given how diverse the candidates' experiences might be in their context. If you're coming from a Facebook type place or coming from a startup, I might need to ask different questions in order to get the signal I want. So maybe I'll answer it in that way, which is these days, especially for SubStack, what is the signal that I'm trying to get? And I think really for early stage fast-growing startup that's like, you know, we talked so much about how different that is. We kind of just need people who can run through walls to accomplish big goals and maybe grit and endurance in some ways and drive are like the words out throughout there. I find it's really hard to have one question that will get that signal. We need to tailor it to that person's background.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like in this season, every episode was like its own standalone movie or something. It started slow the whole show, I think the first season was a bit slow when I recommended people. I'm like, just power through it. But they really found their groove. I'm soaked for the next season.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's too many. It ended up being a company wide effort, but the product manager on my team, Dane Rathbone, was specifically, I think, the spearhead behind the way that we built it, like you mentioned, that we went into, he was a really big proponent for that. And Gabriel on our design team designed it, and many engineers worked on it, and it'll be hard to shut them all out. But I'd shout out Dane on my team because you ensured that we built it in the way that we ultimately needed to build it for it to work.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bad advertising business for sure. He publishes pretty infrequently and consistently, but it's just like the highest quality stuff. That's the martyrmade podcast. And since I know this is supposed to be a lightning round and I spent too much time on that, the two others that I'll just quickly throw out there, Colin Malloy is one of my favorite musicians. He's the lead singer of the Decemberists. He's doing a really cool thing on the subsec right now of just a lot of interesting behind the scenes stuff on tour, publishing audio and video. It's been really good if you're a fan of the Decemberists. I highly recommend. And one more, let's see. I've been really excited about Ethan Strauss lately. He writes a subset called the House of Strauss. He's a basketball writer. But I think it's a cool example of like he just has subscribers now. He can write about whatever he wants. And he writes about a wide range of topics. And they're all really fascinating. And I love to see that kind of thing happen on SubStack and in general.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was just thinking about this because I don't write on SubStack certainly frequently. And so I don't use the recommendations feature, but who would I recommend if I did besides Lenny, of course? I'll share a couple of random examples, maybe again, outside of maybe the tech product world. There's this guy named Darryl Cooper who has a podcast on subsat called The Martyrmade Podcast that I've gone super deep into lately. And it's hard to describe. He basically takes a topic and he will produce the single best explanation of that topic you will ever find because you'll spend an insane amount, like probably like 10,000 hours per topic figuring out getting to the bottom of this story. So he recently did this amazing, he's doing a series right now on like the labor movement in America. And it sounds like a boring topic maybe, but he's just such an amazing storyteller. And he's, I think, a good example too. This could only really work if he had found, if he finds his thousand true fans as people who are just like, yeah, I'll just pay for this. It would be a very...”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The US. And his premise was we've basically just lost the plot on this. No one likes living in these houses. And if you think about why these houses all feel bad to live in, it's because the people building the houses now for the first time ever are different than the people living in the house. It's these developers, these real estate developers, these big companies mass producing these houses. But for thousands of years, we've figured out what makes a good house. And the people building the house or the people living in it and they get that. But now of the incentive structure got changed and it messed everything up. And I think there's a really interesting parallel there with the internet, specifically how the last decade or so has played out where the people building the spaces that we occupy are operating under a very complicated incentive structure and it's leading to these suboptimal user experiences. And this is what we work on at UPSTAC. This is what I think is fun to work on right now. And if you're working on something like this, I would highly recommend the timeless way of building Christopher Alexander.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will plug some books that have nothing to do with the internet or software or tech, but have been the most informative or instructive books for me, I think, in my career as a product person working on software, which are books about architecture and urban planning. And the reason why I find this field so fascinating is because for like thousands of years people have been figuring out how to build spaces that help people interact with each other and build good spaces to occupy. And we've only been doing this for like, you know, going back to the Kevin Kelly thing, like for basically the blink of an eye on the internet in the digital realm. There's one book in particular by an architect named Christopher Alexander who sadly just passed away earlier this year. He wrote this book in the 70s. It's called The Timeless Way of Building. And this is the book that I recommend to the most people. I have like, I buy it in bulk and I just give it away to people. And the basic premise of the book is that in the 70s, we had just gone through like a couple of decades of just mass produced cookie cutter suburban house development.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's exactly right. You mentioned Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans, which has become this canonical piece of writing on the internet now. My favorite Kevin Kelly blog post, that's my second favorite. My first favorite is a post that he wrote called You Are Not Late, which is exactly what you can probably picture what he says, but it's such a compelling, persuasive argument for the thing you mentioned, which is like obviously he wasn't talking about substack in his post, but he was talking about the internet and how in the grand scheme of things, how lucky we are to I don't even know when he wrote it. Maybe it was probably 10 years ago at this point, but certainly at a time where a lot of people were feeling, oh, Facebook and Google and the internet's done, but battles have been won. And I wish I was come in of aid. I wish I had graduated from Harvard in 2004 or something. And it's just so wrong. Like we are so early when it comes to how the internet will play out that I think getting to work on that in any capacity right now, getting to shape how the internet is going to play out over the next 10.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what's cool about that, I think now with SubStack and with the network effect is if there's a thousand people who are going to pay you $10 a month, there's probably 2,000 and 5,000 and 10,000. Exactly.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of am I just trying to write a blog post? Am I trying to start a media empire? It's kind of like many people won't know yet. Just open up optionality for yourself and see what happens and maybe don't be too worried about what your audience might think. And I think that maybe is one difference between substack and something like Twitter, Instagram, or something. Subscribe as an action is pretty heavyweight. It's like a costly signal, right? It's not as easy as just like mashing the follow button on a bunch of accounts on Twitter or something like that. If someone is subscribed to you, they're kind of granting you right access to their brain is maybe the way I view it in a nerdy sense, right? And so what that means is not just like, I'll let you write your one long form thing once a week, but hey, you've got this other person that you think might have something interesting to say. Cool. Let me know. I'm here for it. And I think writers underestimate that, basically.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, r I think there's like a generalizable piece of advice here that might be my answer to the question what's a common pitfall, which is people are really worried about how their audience will perceive them and like really ultimately their own worth, right? Should I send a newsletter three times a week into people's inbox? Is that too much? Should I ask anyone to pay me ever? Is that crazy? Am I allowed to take a vacation ever, given that I've got people paying on an ongoing basis? And is that like a bad service to provide if I'm taking a two-week summer vacation? I think almost in all of those cases, and then you can imagine five more things like that, readers, especially the people that are subscribed to you who are paying you are pretty forgiving and are really there to support you and want you to take that vacation. And there's probably more people who would want to pay for you that just don't even know about you, that would totally pay if they could. And so go back to that kind of like spectrum.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing that's kind of interesting here that I think we have a big opportunity to improve in the product is that there's going to be obviously varying levels of intent that people have when they hit that start your sub stack button. Some people might come in being like, this is going to be my full-time job. I want to make this work. I want to not just be a full-time writer. I want to build like a media empire on Substack, right? There's certainly examples of that happening now. You can imagine a version of our onboarding and setup flow that the media empire version of it. You can also imagine the version that's just, let me just write one thing. Don't make me make all these decisions. I just want to kind of get in the game. I think that in general, a mistake that people might make is maybe flip it back an anecdote related to what I heard from Chris when I was chatting with him the other day that he had to convince you pretty hard to turn on payments at all. Correct me if this is if I'm spreading misinformation. That's right. Is that right? Yeah.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did talk about whether we should change our default publication. You know how your default name was just like Lenny's newsletter, and we probably gave you a little red square or something as your default publication logo originally that a dolly generated publication logo service would be pretty cool.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Create space for their subscribers to participate and hang out themselves too. Those are two areas that we're investing in a fair bit right now.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's see. Guest posts are working really well, and I'll say that we have a bunch of ideas for how to make guest posts a much bigger thing. Right now, the way guest posts work, kind of like an op-ed or something, like you invite someone to come and just write a post on your substack. I think there's much more we can do without getting into some of the specifics and scooping the product team that we're working on that I think could make it feel more like you've got a bunch of people who are somewhat more like fluidly able to contribute to your substack and deliver value to your audience. And I teased this community stuff that we're working on a little bit, but we're piloting a feature right now that's been working really well where writers can get a little bit of like a, we kind of view it as like the pub at the back of your subst.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Writing a long form thing every day and doing that for the rest of your life would be really hard. That would make it certainly much harder to keep going. And not to say that it's easy now. I know how hard it is to do what you do. But I think SubStack can do more to turn this ecosystem into funnel this energy into ways for people like you to feel more like a leader of a space and a curator in a lot of ways and still deliver this really valuable service to your audience without having to do all the work yourself. And I think we can do a lot more to support that kind of thing.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will say, though, to that point, too, that I'm really excited for what SubStack can do in the product to make that easier in a way that doesn't cheapen the experience. So there's a bunch of things we could do. We could automatically post stuff to your readers. We could do a lot of things, kind of going back to the like, how do we do discovery? There's a bunch of things that would probably just work, but they would eventually kill what substack is or have all these nasty second order effects and ruin this promise of putting writers in charge, putting readers in charge. I'm really excited and I actually view your subst as a vanguard, as a very kind of leading edge example of this, of you have turned your subst into this not just this thriving community of readers, but also of like contributors and creators, right? You've got these amazing people coming and doing guest posts. You've got the podcast going. You've got these meetups. You've, I think, in a lot of ways alleviated the burden of how hard it would be to just be”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My first piece of advice would be to just start it and see what happens. Start it, have a way to start gathering subscribers, put a link to it somewhere, write one or two things. And if you're not much of a writer, try posting a video, recording some audio turned into a little podcast. Just start basically and see what happens and see what kind of interest there might be out there for what you have to say, especially if you already have a following on other platforms as well. I think that there's a real risk that if your entire following is locked into one platform where you don't have a ton of control over your ability to reach those people deterministically and certainly to like monetize that in some way, that it seems like it's a tenuous place to be in the current age of the internet. And so I'd say just start, it should be really easy. Go to subsec.com, press the start your substack button and see what happens.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best culture is being made, and you have an extreme degree of control over what you see and who you choose to kind of let into that space. And you might not spend two hours a day in there, and that's fine. But it might be the first place you go because it's where all the best stuff is and it's where your best communities are going to live too. And we kind of see subst evolving not as some new type of social media, but true alternative to how you might spend that most valuable slice of your time. And we just launched an iPhone app, I guess now. It's been six months ago and it's going really well and we're going to launch an Android app very shortly. And we're pushing really hard on this reader experience as well. And I think it'll be radically different and much better one or two years from now too.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had, do you think you mentioned to me you had 30 meetups around the world last month or something like that? It's an impressive run rate of meetups. And I think seeing that unfold and seeing how the platform can support that type of community behavior as well is a big thing that I'm excited about. Just more. On the reader side, I think maybe to segue into that, I think we're, again, entering this little potential golden age of the internet for how you experience it as a consumer, where instead of just having a handful of feeds that are basically the same, that you could just like scroll through and consume videos of random people doing random things, not to say that's bad and that should go away. I do my fair share of just scrolling through my phone and watching random videos too, but it'd be kind of nice to have another place you could go to as well where”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's like a new thing. And so when I see the next one to two years play out for the writer side of the equation, a lot of what we're going to try to do is just make it much simpler to get started, to have your stuff stack. If you have an audience anywhere, a substack's never going to be the place where you have the biggest audience probably, but it certainly should be the place where your most valuable audience comes home to, where they get your best work. And we're seeing a lot of really interesting success stories now of people that might have a big Instagram following or YouTube following and certainly Twitter following were able to kind of use Substack now as this home base, this place to try to accumulate their most valuable audience that they own in the sense that they get their email address, they can export them at any time and just build really simple tools to just help them deliver their best work. It could be writing, could be a podcast, could be video. We're investing a lot in some of some really interesting community features as well. You're a great example of this where to call Lenny's newsletter simply a newsletter would be hilariously wrong at this point, right?”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You might not even consider themselves writers, let alone well established writers like Matt Taebe or someone like that, 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.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe I'll answer that in two parts one from like a writer centric lens and one from a reader centric lens, which I mentioned is a bit of a newer thing for us. You know, from a writer-centric lens, I really think that we're just starting into this golden era of what it might mean to be a writer on the internet. Like I mentioned before, the economic model for supporting great writing on the internet has been generally pretty terrible for the entirety of the internet's history. In the early days of subsequent, there's a couple of these glimmers of hope where you'd have people like Matt Taibi or Bill Bishop, some of the early writers on Subsec 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”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The whole thing here is just like parsing out the signal from the noise. There's very little chatter in the blogosphere media sphere that would actually impact our day-to-day when I think about it. And it's not zero, right? Like sometimes there'll be something that ends up blowing up or that people are talking about that we should really take seriously and see how that might impact our strategy. But I'd say 90% of the chatter about substack is going to probably ultimately just be a distraction to our product team at the end of the day that should just be focused on executing on the vision. And maybe my skin got thickened from working at Facebook during a bunch of years that actually when I started at Facebook, generally things were quite rosy in the press, but we certainly went through a bunch of different phases. And a lot of the stuff that I worked on myself at Facebook ended up getting talked about a ton in the press negatively most of the time. You kind of just learned to just keep your heads down and keep shipping. And ultimately, that's all that matters. And I think Subsec.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and so this is just like an invite only little group of 100 or so writers that we know are interested in being on the bleeding edge of what subsex is becoming and specifically like we're investing a lot in just tools to help writers grow. And now we've got this little lab where we can kind of take a feature like recommendations to writers and get quick feedback and ensure that we're never just like rolling something out to everyone without going through this step first. It's just been super helpful to have a bit of this infrastructure in place and often the thing that we end up shipping on day one tends to be pretty different from what we had in mind before we went through this process.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not that hard to just mock up what this could look like, get some feedback. This is the kind of thing that I think a lot of product teams would do. But then maybe a lot of product teams would be like, okay, we got good feedback. Let's just like build the thing, ship the thing. Instead, we just ran a little pilot. And you and a few other writers were gracious enough to lend your time and talk us through how you would see this working and what you would want. We actually have now, we've set up something called the product lab, which I'm really excited about. I think you're a part of it. I hope we asked you. Yeah. I'm curious to see where this all.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think We've learned One of our sort of operating principles, I mentioned that we're going through this one time transition of figuring out how to become a product driven company and how to ship products faster, better, et cetera. And one of the principles, I guess, in this playbook that we're trying to write is we call it build with writers, build with readers. In some ways now I think about it, it's almost like a subprinciple of the like put readers in charge, put writers in charge. Like how do you build product responsibly if you care deeply about that? One way to do it would be to almost as a strong default anytime we're going to make a fundamental change to how substack works, do it in a way where we bring writers along. And in this case, this is still an optional thing. This isn't like changing how subset works for everyone, but this is, we think a potentially profound enough thing that the way we did this was not just roll it out for everyone, put a little dialogue in the dashboard that says, hey, everyone, now go do this thing. It was like, okay, why don't we call up 10 writers who we think might be interested in?”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really interesting social graph that is being built of goodwill and of influence and you now recommend a bunch of other writers. And there's much more that could be done in the network than just show some of those writers in the subscribe flow of Lenny's newsletter.com. There's a lot more we could do there. I'm curious if you have any ideas, but we've got a bunch of ideas that we're cooking up that I think will not only drive more subscriptions, but also probably higher intent ones as well, because these are going to be people that might already have been reading you for years who never right now would know who you're recommending.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you bring up a point too that leads into some of the next things we're thinking about here, which is that right now most of the subscriptions that come from recommendations are coming from one particular flow in the product, which is when someone subscribes to someone else on substack, they will then see a recommendation for Lenny. So it's being serviced to people at a moment where not only are they just hearing about you for the first time, but they might just be hearing about the recommending writer for the first time too, their new subscribers. And so they don't have this longstanding trusted relationship built up yet. Of course, you have people now who've been subscribing to you for years and who trust you greatly and would probably take your recommendation very seriously, but the people that you're recommending are only getting these subscribers at the first moment that someone finds out about Lenny in many cases. And a big part of the next step of this product now is thinking about recommendations less as like a step of the flow and more kind of like a graph.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sure. Recommendations specifically now have driven in the millions of new subscriptions for writers across the board, across, I think, like tens of thousands of unique writers that have received subscriptions from the recommendations feature. Of course, recommendations in particular is still just one component in this broader basket of network-driven discovery. And I think we recently shared a set more than one in three new subscriptions across Subsequent are coming from the Substack Network and around one in 10 paid subscriptions now too. And these numbers are just, as you can imagine, growing up into the right, getting stronger every day. And I think we'll have some more interesting stats to share on that soon.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pick good people to find a way to surface those recommendations to their readers in a way that's going to generate a good amount of surface area. And I think it was a bit of skepticism that something like that could work. But we tried it and it took off really quickly and there was this like virality at play now where when you recommend a bunch of people, those people will get an email that say, hey, Lenny's recommending you and here's all the readers that he's sending you. And it created this sort of goodwill viral loop, which was really interesting to see play out. And I think there's a bunch of interesting lessons in there. We could dig into anything that seems interesting. But I think Chris's skepticism was not, should we do cross-pollination discovery? Like clearly, this is something that's working. But is this kind of thing going to work given how many steps are required for it to be true that this becomes really impactful? And it just turned out that it took off way faster than I think we had imagined.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of other products have done things like this. So we could have done something like that. But then going back to that principle of like, okay, well, if we were to do that and let's say we were to insert it at the bottom of our post or in an email or something, it's like clearly a thing now where the writer who owns that space is not really in control over what the experience is that they're offering their readers. And the reader who signed up for Lenny is now seeing these other things that have nothing to do with Lenny. Does that kind of break this control principle, like putting writers in charge, putting readers in charge? Okay, so then back to the drawing board. What would be the most obvious maximal way to just put writers in control? What is like the simplest version of this? What if we just asked writers, who do you recommend? And what if we just put that in the subscribe flow and just made it as simple as possible? And I think Chris's reaction to that originally when that idea came up was that's probably just going to be really hard to pull off, right? It's just like you need, there's a lot more things that have to be true. You need writers to opt in.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Consistently to the point where now there's like a huge amount of amazing writers on the platform and a huge number of collective readers on the platform too that we knew that this sort of like cross-pollination, this discovery loop could be a really powerful thing. So if you start from first principles and you're like, all right, how do we help readers discover more things? The most obvious way to do this would be something like, here are some substs you might like based on what we know about your reading habits. Here's like a few that substack is just going to recommend you. This is the kind of thing that worked really well in Facebook in particular. I think when I joined in 2011, it was definitely still during the era. I think Facebook maybe had just over 500 million users and was on this path to a billion and beyond. And this thing that we called PYMK, which was people you may know, this little unit that would show up in the newsfeed and it would just tell you that eight other people that like you obviously know because you all have million mutual friends like that kind of thing drove a very non-trivial amount of Facebook growth in the early days. And of course”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. The way it came to be was that we noticed this organic behavior emerging which was that a lot of readers of substacks were starting to discover other substacks, but the way that was happening was typically through the lens of that original writer. And this could happen in a bunch of different ways, right? So, you know, I think you've used the guest post feature to have guests write posts on your newsletter. And obviously that is a really good way for your readers to go and discover some of these other writers in a way that you're curating. There's some less obvious ways that this happens too if you have comments on, which I think you do. If I scroll down and click on the profile of someone who's commenting on your post, it'll show me the other subset that person reads too. And again, this is like a very personalized and very writer-centric way of doing discovery. At the same time, we talked about sort of the supply and demand side of the marketplace, like the supply side of Substack has just grown over time.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of a much greater degree of agency over, or if you download the app than if you maybe opened up TikTok or something. I think where that leads you down from a prioritization standpoint is often starting from, okay, if we could do something in a bunch of different ways, is there a way that provides more control to the writer or more control over the experience that the reader has to them? And is there a way that provides much less control? And all things equal, like do the one that kind of holds constant this principle of control. We could talk about a few other examples like this, but I think from a prioritization standpoint and from a strategic standpoint, SubSec is a pretty principled company, and I think it's been really fun and interesting to get to work in an environment like this and also see how it actually can work. You are excited about recommendations, the recommendations feature, and we can talk about that in more detail. And I think that's a good example where there's certainly a way to do that where writers have the max amount of control. And we picked that way, even if it might seem harder.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going back to your question about Chris, too. I think Chris and Hamish and Jay, the founders, I think, really start from a place of principle in a lot of ways. Like, why are we even doing this thing? It's not just to help writers make money. It's not just to unlock these cool things. It starts with like an opinion for how the internet should work, where people should be in control over their destiny to a much greater extent than has ever really been the case over at least the last 10, 15 years where all of a sudden everyone just started spending all of their time in a handful of these like public squares that were powered by ads. And when you think about what that means for subset right now, that means writers are in control over being able to deliver their best work on their terms to their audience, make money directly from their subscribers, and also that readers should be in control over their experience. Like when you show up to subsite.com, that experience should be something that you”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It might go down by doing A, it might mean B is harder to do, like forever. And so I think whereas at a startup, a lot of it is time. Time is the main variable. We can do this now. And it means that we can't do this other thing until later. There's also an element of sequencing that matters, I think, a lot at a company like SubStack that is in this formative stage of becoming an entirely new thing in a lot of ways. Like SubStack started off kind of like a single player tool for writers. It was like software for writers. If you describe SubSac now as simply newsletter tool, like that would be kind of reductive. And it's really now much more of this ecosystem that's evolving in all sorts of interesting ways. And there is a bit of an order of operations at play here where doing something right now might unlock our ability to do something later. And that matters a lot in a situation like we're in at SubStack.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think actually at Facebook, it's not necessarily whether we do a thing. It's not like we do this now or we do this later. It's doing this thing might mean we can't do this other thing at all or it'll mean that instead of that chart being”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't get a marketplace tap. What does that mean for this whole org and like what the product is? So I think when it comes to something like prioritization, it's a very different ballgame. There's certainly some things that are consistent. Like you generally want to prioritize things that are going to be high impact, low effort. These types of product management frameworks, I think a lot of it can hold constant. But when you really get into the object level, like what is your day look like? I think being a PM at a high growth, or I can at least, I can't generalize this. But the job at SubStack right now, it looks quite different than what I recognize as my job from Facebook circa 2018. And I think it's maybe even gotten more the case that the PM's job in a situation like that will be navigating these types of internal trade-offs. So I think on something like prioritization, very different.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over time, I'm finding that less translates than I thought. I don't know how much of that has to do with Facebook specifically, though, and I'll maybe mention one thing. So working on the core Facebook app, which was what I was working on for the bulk of my time there, Facebook, maybe the most extreme example of trying to solve so many different problems for so many different people in one tiny rectangle, basically, that a big part of the product manager's job in a situation like that is going to be managing trade-offs. It's a super fascinating intellectual problem. And I think going back to the previous point, I think a lot of people really thrive in that kind of environment where if we do this thing really well, it is going to directly trade off against doing this other thing. And it's not even like a sequencing thing. I mean, you think about prioritization, sometimes you think we'll do this and then we'll do this and then we'll do this. Facebook says sometimes it's though if we do this, we just can't do this. Like it's going to be bad for this other thing. If we put a watch tab at the bottom, will that mean that people...”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As soon as you figure it out, it's obsolete. It's just really hard. I think that's true of basically just startups in general, high growth companies doing the thing well means that you're not going to know what you're doing. And maybe that leads into my answer to the second question, which is that's not really for everyone, I think. Being humbled all the time and feeling like you don't know what you're doing. And I think you could be an amazing product manager at a company that is a bit more stable and consistent and get really good at what you're doing. And someone who's going to be really good at a company that is on a bit of this sort of trajectory for folks who aren't watching the video, making a motion with my hand that's like not growing too fast. It's kind of a different job. The rate of change is a huge factor.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll start with the first one. I think the biggest challenge with this role slash company phase, like I mentioned, we're going through this one-time transition from not really having a product function or a product process to having one is almost by definition, anytime you figure out how to do a thing, you'll now reach this next phase of growth and it'll be obsolete. Like something that I've repeated a bunch of the teams is I'm never too worried if we have the perfect planning process or the perfect execution cadence or the perfect like communication process like whatever our process is we're never going to have a perfect one and even if we did it would soon be obsolete because we did a really good job and now we've grown 2x or something and we have more people and the process needs to change. The main thing I care about is are we just getting better every week, every month, certainly every year? And I think that's easier said than done. Like it sounds good in theory, but then when you're in the thick of it and you're constantly basically feeling like you don't know how to do the thing because.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do I catch up? Chris has been thinking about this problem for five times as long as I have. And if I can get a good sense of where his vision kind of starts from and catch up those few years and help the teams do the same, that'll go a long way. Because at the same time, everyone now is coming at it from a different perspective. We've a lot more data and evidence. It's really good to have people on the team that have come from other companies and comply that perspective. It's a lot of, again, facilitation. And I kind of view that as a big part of my role.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing that I think about a little bit because like any startup, there's going to be times that are really difficult, times that are really fun, and SubStack is certainly going through this really transformative time. We're really evolving in a lot of ways from a tool into a network. We're sort of in the thick of seeing this vision through that in a lot of ways Chris has had in his mind for like five years. We actually, we did a thing at an all hands a little while ago where SubSec went through Y Combinator, I think it was maybe now six years ago. And we watched the 62nd demo date pitch from like 2017. And what was so cool about that was we're actually doing all those things now that Chris got up on stage and talked about like, you know, one day in the future, Subsex is going to get into podcasting and we're going to have this network effect that helps writers grow by virtue of there being other writers in the platform. And there's all these things that we kind of couldn't do until we earned our place at the table and the right to be able to do those things that we're doing now. And so to go back to your question, I think.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meetings, and when I first joined, I felt like my main role was actually just solving that. And if nothing else, if Chris could have a really good sense of what all the teams are doing and if the teams knew where he was coming from and could start to get better at modeling him and his vision, that would be a win. So for the first couple months, I'd say that was all I tried to do. I think now Chris and I have some reps under our belt and the teams have some reps under their belts too. And that trust just starts to form. We start the week. Chris and I, we sit down for an hour. We go through what we feel like are the big problems to focus on this week. What are the things we're worried about? We sit down at the end of the week and we check in again. And there's just a lot of open communication, I think, that helps a lot.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. I don't know if I have the recipe for this, but I can just maybe share a few of the things that come to mind. I think the first thing was really treating my role in the beginning more as a facilitator than a decision maker when it comes to product. I think the team was also small enough that everyone in theory could have a good sense of what everyone else was up to. like a specific problem we had, I think, when I joined was that we were just getting to the point where we wouldn't have one weekly meeting where Chris could be in the room. Chris is the CEO of SubSec, and the person you're mentioning. And decide what we're doing in the next two weeks. We were just emerging from that phase. And we had this problem, which was all of a sudden, Chris didn't really know what all the teams were doing. And the teams didn't really know what Chris had in mind for what they should do and what the vision was. And we were hiring really quickly and hiring people who might not have all the context of being in the room with him for years and being in all of the all hands.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm actually kind of shocked that it's lasted this long and stayed consistent. I remember at Facebook we would change our team structure what felt like every three months or six months and just have a reorg every once in a while. And part of why I think it's remained pretty consistent is exactly what you mentioned, which is the teams aren't oriented around product surfaces. Like we don't have a team that's like the app team or a team that's like the dashboard team or the podcasting team. We have teams that are oriented around customers and solving a bit of a timeless customer problem. We'll never be done serving writers. We just started honestly having a concerted focus on serving readers. Growth is never a problem that you check the box off on. So I hope that we are able to maintain this general structure. I think as the subsequent grows and expands, I'm sure we'll have more than three teams. This is where we're at right now. But I really like the focus on a customer and a timeless.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Three teams are we have a writer team that serves writers, we have a reader team that serves readers and we have a growth team that does growthy things. And I should mention we have a fourth engineering team that's like the systems team that doesn't have a product manager on it but is keeping the lights on and helping us scale.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. Maybe to start from when I started at SubSac, we had zero PMs. We had a handful of designers. We had maybe 15 or so engineers. I think we're coming to the close of this kind of one-time inflection point of becoming product-driven company and having a product process and structure and PMs and full stack product teams. And so when I started at SubSac, there was really not much of this. And we're still pretty early, but we have something going now. So we have four product managers in addition to myself. And we have three essentially kind of like full stack product teams now that have a PM.”
2022-10-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source