The Scarcest Thing on the Internet
On leaving Roblox, joining Substack as Head of Growth, and why authentic human voices have never mattered more.
Hello, Substack. I’m Chris. As of today, I’m your Head of Growth, which means I’m both the newest person on the platform and the one most professionally obligated to make sure you stick around 🙂
I spent nearly 7 years at Roblox, working on growth, discovery, and the messy architecture of getting the right thing in front of the right person at the right time. By the end, I was a Principal Product Manager, watching an ecosystem of artists, developers, and 130 million daily active players find each other across a platform that, when it worked, felt almost alive. Marketplaces do that when they hum. You build the pipes, and then real people fill them with something you never anticipated.
Substack is a marketplace too. The pipes are different. The people filling them are journalists, writers, and podcasters. On the other end are readers who actually want to be there. That symmetry made sense to me immediately, and it’s why I’m joining as Head of Growth.
People ask me whether I’m worried about Substack in the age of AI, in the age of infinite free content generated at a cost approaching zero. I’m not, and I’ll tell you why. The glut has made the signal more valuable, not less. When everything is abundant, trust becomes the scarce resource. Substack is where readers go because they trust the person writing…not the institution, not the algorithm, but the person. That shift has pushed Substack toward the center of how people actually want to consume information right now, and I think we’re only beginning to understand how durable that is.
And then there is the question of format. At a time when nearly every platform is optimizing for shorter, faster, and more disposable modalities, Substack has quietly demonstrated that readers still want to sit with something. Useful investment advice, a reported piece with real texture, a history podcast. It’s reading (or watching or listening) that assumes you are an intelligent adult with 15 minutes to spare. and so far, that bet is working.
Creators come to Substack because they own their audience. That’s the headline. But they stay because growth here is different. Tens of millions of people read, watch, and listen on Substack every week, not just scrolling past something in two seconds. They came with intention and they stayed because the relationship was worth keeping. 1 million+ posts are discovered by potential subscribers in the app every day. In less than 18 months, the number of paid creators on Substack has doubled globally, from 50,000 to almost 100,000, with the app now the top source of subscriber and revenue growth for Substack publishers.
The platform has also reached positive cash flow, hit a $1.1 billion valuation after a $100 million Series C in July 2025, and it still feels early. That combination does not come along very often.
What stays with me, though, is something simpler than any of those stats. Whether you are an indie writer publishing your first piece or a former CNN anchor rebuilding a relationship with your readers on your own terms, Substack levels something that needed leveling. The quality here comes from real human beings who have earned, over time, the right to be trusted. It is not transactional. It is relational. That distinction matters more than most people in the industry want to admit.
And okay, I realize I’m making the growth case for Substack to people actively reading Substack. The irony is not lost on me…
I have seen how growth works at scale. I know what it costs and what it can corrupt if you let it. I don’t intend to let it. I’m genuinely glad to be here.
If this resonated, subscribe. I’ll be writing here from time to time, and this is the place I plan to think out loud.
What you can expect: one thesis per issue, rooted in how platforms actually work. Growth mechanics, creator economies, cold starts, the hidden systems underneath the products you use every day. Told from the inside, with as little corporate varnish as I can manage.
I have spent my career studying what makes people come back. To a game, to a feed, to a platform. Substack has made me think harder about a different question: what makes someone actually pay.
So I will leave you with that. If you subscribe to something on Substack, what finally made you pull out your credit card? Was it a single piece that floored you, a slow accumulation of trust, or something else entirely? I am genuinely curious, and I will read every reply.
@Chris Chen I have become a paid subscriber for a variety of reasons. Let me go through some of them.
The first was for exclusive content that appealed to me in some unique way. For example, I subscribed to @John Toma ⚡️ That 80s Dude because he started offering a pdf version of a zine. He does such a great job with formatting it to look like a relic from the 80s and 90s that I wanted to experience it.
At times I have been persuaded to become a paid subscriber because of the value of the pre-paywall content. @Alberto Romero remains the very best example of this. I was a free subscriber to his AI newsletter for around a year before becoming a paid subscriber for the next two. I was on the fence about paying for his newsletter for a long time (simply because I was paying for so many already), but his consistent releases and the quality of his writing convinced me to start paying for his work.
Sometimes I will pay for content as an expression of support. I won’t tag individuals for this one but there are people who are doing good work here that I simply want to encourage.
The real problem that Substack faces now is abundance. There are just too many great newsletters out there. At one point I was subscribed to over forty. I’ve since cut back because I can’t keep up. I have experimented with moving select feeds to an RSS reader to follow them there, but honestly that doesn’t work as well as I’d like. In-app notifications for articles are easy to dismiss. Email offers a persistent artifact that reminds you to read it every time you see it.
I don’t know what the answer to this is and the answer is probably different for every person. I’m heavy into audio because I wear hearing aides and always have access to Bluetooth speakers which makes it convenient to listen to articles, but audio streams aren’t always available. Other people appreciate video. Still others, text.
There really is a reason that attention is the scarecest thing on the internet.
Welcome, it's so nice to have you here!
I have often subscribed to someone on Substack because of either a piece that delivered extreme value and then I realized that there could be more content behind a paid wall. In the case of Predictive History, I subscribed because there was enough there that I was curious to learn more about it, over time. Sometimes, like in the case of Lenny's Newsletter, I subscribed because there are lots of freebies that you get as a result of the subscription that kind of justify the cost of it. Actually, reading the information is just half of the puzzle. The other half of it is having tools and a guidebook, courtesy of the Substack, to allow me to do more with it.
Really excited to see how this grows. I sincerely hope that the sort of authenticity that's on Substack and the way we were able to connect with one another, that didn't have to do with short-form video content and all the other sort of attention-grabbing ways that other social media platforms have used to create an attention economy, kind of stays off of this. Even the paid models are proven out with some level of genuineness, for lack of a better word.
I say this because I have come across some creators who are like 100% peddling wares and while I may have subscribed to them over time and that time normally is like a day or two, I get slammed with so many emails that it feels like spam and I just have to unsubscribe. I can't imagine what it's like to pay for their content, especially when a lot of it is about maxing Substack and turning it into the next Instagram or the next TikTok or the next sort of attention economy piece. I really hope that this can be a place for people to just sincerely share and create paid followings because of value rather than because of gimmicks.