Challenge
Substack launched in 2017 with the ambitious goal of empowering writers, thinkers and creatives to connect directly with their communities. With monthly subscription payments, Substack offers customers a business model that is independent of freelance assignments and ad sales. Instead, it prioritises and monetises direct relationships with readers. To successfully bring its concept to life, Substack needed to simplify every aspect of the subscriber and the writer experience on the platform.
Solution
Substack’s team built its service on Stripe’s infrastructure, which bypassed significant investment in engineering. By leaning on Stripe’s expertise, Substack could scale quickly and focus its energy on fulfilling its promise to writers. The company offers better services because it can continue to lean on Stripe and direct extra bandwidth toward customers.
Results
Substack now supports subscribers from all over the world, which means that writers can grow their communities (and
their income) exponentially. Customers easily manage all subscriptions through Stripe’s dashboards. They receive direct, regular payments in more than 100 currencies into their bank accounts within 48 hours of a transaction.
A simple onboarding and intuitive sign-up process for newsletters ensure there’s zero friction for writers and newsletter subscribers. As Substack’s team looks to the future, it plans to leverage Stripe to expand into different languages and new markets.
It was really important to us that signing up was a smooth experience for any reader. Stripe has already figured that out, and it’s easy to use their dashboard. We benefit from Stripe’s ease-of-use and the fact that we didn’t have to set up new infrastructure.
