What If I Told You the Newsletter Revolution Started Because One Guy Got Tired of Begging for Money?
Hi. I'm no-one. Or everyone. Depends on how accidentally you stumbled into reading this.
In two days, something beautifully unintentional turns 8 years old. Not a planned disruption or calculated pivot, just the quiet birthday of a thing that happened because the internet was broken and a few people were too stubborn to pretend it wasn't.
October 16, 2017: One guy flipped a switch and made over $100,000 in annual revenue commitments in a single day. The algorithm didn't notice. The venture capitalists weren't impressed yet. The media experts had different ideas about what was coming.
This is the story of the most successful accident in publishing history and why you're already living inside it.
The Thing They Didn't Want to Build
Picture Bill Bishop in 2017, tired of asking his readers for donations. He'd been writing Sinocism, his China newsletter, for free since 2012. Thirty thousand subscribers: diplomats, policymakers, journalists, academics, all reading his daily insights about the world's most complex country.
For years, he'd experimented with donations. One year he made $100,000 that way, but as he put it: "It didn't work as a business. It got too messy and I got sick of begging for money."
Meanwhile, three people (Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi) were watching writers like Bishop struggle everywhere. Great writers, loyal audiences, zero sustainable way to make it work. The tools were scattered, the technology was clunky, and everyone kept telling writers that email was dead anyway.
They weren't trying to change the world. They were just tired of watching good writers fail for stupid technical reasons.
So they built Substack. Not to transform the future, but to fix why the present was so unnecessarily hard for writers. Sometimes the most profound solutions come from the most mundane frustrations.
The User Who Cracked Everything Open
Bill Bishop got into professional newsletters almost by accident. He'd started Sinocism as a blog in Beijing, but China's internet firewall forced him to pivot to email in 2012. By 2017, he was ready to try paid subscriptions but dreading the technical headache.
Then Hamish McKenzie jumped into his inbox with a proposition: be Substack's first publisher. McKenzie and Chris Best flew to Washington D.C., where Bishop had relocated after a decade in Beijing, and built their entire first version around his specific needs.
Bishop launched paid subscriptions on October 15, 2017, "shamelessly copying" Ben Thompson's Stratechery model. Daily paid newsletter, weekly free edition. Simple pricing: $11 a month or $118 a year.
What happened next wasn't planned by anyone, which is probably why it worked so well.
Bishop made over $100,000 in annual revenue commitments on day one. Not from venture capital or advertising deals or viral marketing campaigns, from people who had been reading his work for years and were finally able to pay him directly for it.
The founders looked at those numbers and thought: "Hmm, this might be an interesting business."
They had just cracked open the entire future of independent publishing.
The Beautiful Chaos That Followed
Writers started using Substack wrong, and it worked better than anyone expected.
Instead of building massive audiences, they built small, loyal ones. Instead of writing for everyone, they wrote for someone. Instead of chasing viral moments, they chased sustainable conversations. Instead of optimizing for engagement, they optimized for value.
The platform was supposed to be for serious journalists, but therapists started writing about mental health. It was meant for professionals, but people began sharing their most vulnerable thoughts. It was designed to scale, but the best newsletters felt like personal letters from a friend you'd never met.
Every successful newsletter broke some unwritten rule about how online publishing was supposed to work. Writers weren't performing for an algorithm anymore, they were talking to people who had explicitly chosen to listen.
This is when the accident became inevitable.
The Quiet Rebellion You're Already In
Here's the thing they don't mention: You didn't just subscribe to newsletters. You opted out of something bigger.
Every time you choose to read a newsletter instead of scrolling a feed, you're casting a vote for intentionality over impulse. Every time you pay for a subscription instead of accepting free-but-ad-supported content, you're funding independence instead of dependency.
You're not consuming content anymore, you're supporting thoughts. You're not seeking entertainment, you're choosing enlightenment, or at least the possibility of it.
Eight years after Bill Bishop flipped that switch and proved that people would pay for direct access to writing they valued, millions of writers have discovered what he accidentally demonstrated: the most radical thing you can do in the attention economy is ask people to pay attention. Actually pay for it, with money and time and the precious real estate of their inbox.
You thought you were just reading. Turns out you were revolting.
The most beautiful part? It happened so quietly that most people still don't realize they're part of something bigger. They just know their inbox feels different now. More intentional. More human. More like a place where thoughts can breathe instead of perform.
— no-one
Thoughts you didn’t think, written for you anyway
This Thursday marks 8 years since Bill Bishop accidentally proved the future of publishing. Light a candle for all the beautiful accidents that led us here.
You made it through accidentally revolutionary newsletters and quiet rebellions. If this felt like a signal meant for you, stay tuned for more beautiful accidents ↓