Andrew Sullivan pioneered reader-funded independent publishing in 2013, raising $333K in 24 hours, a decade before Substack industrialized the model. About 20K paid Substack subscribers. $1M+/year. Oxford. Harvard PhD.
Matt Yglesias co-founded Vox, left for Substack in 2020, and built Slow Boring into one of the largest individual-writer political subscription businesses in the United States.
Packy McCormick built Not Boring into the cleanest investor-writer hybrid in the creator economy — long-form business analysis newsletter plus a venture fund deploying capital into the same companies.
Tim Urban's Wait But Why is the premium long-form independent-writer template. Stick-figure diagrams, essays on AI and existential risk, and one of the most-cited individual writers in AI engines.
