The Substackification of … Everything, and What it Means for Social Commerce
What will it take to finally make "social commerce" a reality?
Recently, I have felt like I am living in a Baader-Meinhof simulation. A trend has risen so quickly, and become so glaringly apparent to me, that for a moment I had to wonder whether this was, in fact, a recent dramatic shift, or if I was just way too online (always a likely possibility).
After the trend was also articulated by voices I respect (and who are typically ahead of the curve) like Emily Sundberg (Feed Me), as well as established publications like Business of Fashion, I realized it wasn’t Baader-Meinhof, we really are collectively experiencing one of the more peculiar shifts in social commerce in recent history, otherwise known as
The Substackification of… Everything
Founders, creators, and beauty & fashion writers have been rushing to Substack faster than the recent MSCHF candy headphone drop sold out.
The examples could fill a long-form Substack themselves: Ghia Founder Melanie Masarin, stylist Juliana Salazar, writer/creator Leandra Medine, LPA & Baroncini Founder Pia Baroncini, writer/creator Harling Ross, most recently Founder Bobbi Brown (of the eponymous label)… The list goes on (and on). Each Substack is a mix of personal musings, styling, shopping recommendations and the like.
Everyone’s apartments look the same and now everyone has a Substack. This is the commodification of identity.
The Revenge of the Blog
Alongside Substack has come the rise of Lucci, formerly known as SMTM. The purpose of Lucci, as stated on their website, is to help creators “launch a beautiful website in minutes and make money sharing the things you love.” So… SquareSpace with really good affiliate links. What might initially seem to be an incredibly simple platform in a vastly over-saturated market has, nevertheless, attracted many of the aforementioned creators/founders, including Leandra Medine and Pia Baroncini, who are using Lucci to create shopping-focused blogs.
It is beyond bewildering to me — flabbergasting even, that nearly 15 years since the “creator economy” entered our lexicon, and thousands of creator monetization platforms and startups later, we ended up with… Blogs? I love a good cycle as anyone who reads this letter likely knows, but this is a step too far even for me.
Which begs the question… Why on earth is everyone launching a Substack?
We Wanted Creator Monetization and We Ended Up With 2000s-Style Blogs
Otherwise known as: How social commerce has gone terribly, terribly wrong.
The answer as to why everyone is launching a Substack is, to be fair, quite simple in reality. Creators, founders and writers alike want to:
Go direct with their audience and own that audience
Monetize that audience via their taste and thoughts
Basically, nothing new — this is what the creator economy has purported to have been working on for the last 15 years. What is more shocking is that today’s major social platforms still aren’t serving these needs. These creators, it seems, have had enough and are taking matters into their own hands. More on this in a moment.
I believe there is a third reason that, though slightly tangential to the previous points, is still an interesting cultural trend:
It’s hot to be intellectual right now
The rise of the Substack has been accompanied by the rise of the celebrity book club. Jessica Defino describes this best, but celebrity book clubs are the new celebrity beauty brand.
“It begins with the news that Dakota Johnson, like Reese Witherspoon and Emma Roberts and Noname and Kaia Gerber and Dua Lipa and Mindy Kaling before her, is starting a book club. “It’s not just beach reads,” Johnson said in an interview. “It’s no silly… People need to deep dive into knowledge about specific things rather than talking about what fucking face serum they’re using and thinking that that’s the most important thing in the world.”
- Jessica DeFino, The Review of Beauty
These two trends may seem unconnected at first, but what they imply is a broader theme: It’s not enough to be pretty and stylish anymore — one has to be smart too. What better way to show off one’s intellect than long-form writing? Of course, this is all rather ironic given… I am writing this in a long-form Substack.
A little book-club and some writing won’t hurt anyone — in fact, it might be a net positive for society. I cannot say the same, however, for shopping blogs.
How Did We Get Here: The Proliferation of the Creator Monetization ‘Bandaid’
News broke two weeks ago that creator monetization platform ShopMy raised $18.5M to do… Well, basically what Instagram and TikTok should be doing. ShopMy is just another version of Grin which is another version of LTK, which all fall into the bucket of what I call Creator Monetization Bandaids.
These platforms all offer digital storefronts, product catalogs, commissionable links, and talent discovery hubs for brands. The vast majority are very simple features that everyone knows are a necessity, yet for a multitude of reasons still do not exist on today’s social media platforms.
I call them bandaids because they are clearly a temporary solution to a much broader problem. Investors who put capital behind these products that have an obvious shelf-life are incredibly short-sighted, in my opinion.
But it is helpful to understand why they are still relevant (for the time being), before exploring how they will eventually be out-competed.
Why Social Media Has Never Evolved Into True Social Commerce
Present-day social media platforms are just bad at social commerce. Yes, TikTok is trying, but they suffer from what I call The Amazon Problem, along with other challenges I plan to explore more in depth in my next letter.
It feels incredibly obvious to me that true social *commerce* platforms would boast a series of features, from individual creator storefronts, to auto-tagged products across all posts, a check-out experience that doesn’t lead to a 90% drop-off (yes, that is a real stat from Instagram), and innumerable other features, the lack of which can be explained by one thing:
The advertising business model.
Social media platforms were built for an advertising business model. Any commerce experience takes users away from the main feed (and thus endless scrolling) and the ads that accompany it. This is bad for business. It’s really as simple as that.
Platforms have historically been unwilling to give up the advertising business model at the risk of chasing an unproven new one, and thus social commerce has never succeeded in earnest.
So Why Can’t Someone Just Create Instagram With Shopping Features?
Well, someone(s) has tried. Repeatedly, in fact. Many will remember the month-long heyday in which we all joined Flip to climb the leaderboard and claim endless free products only for the subsidies to end, and with it our use of Flip (though apparently they’re still alive and well). Rodeo is another example of a product that has been trying to nail social commerce for many years (their UX is great though, I will give them that). I will not bore you with a full list of all the startups that have tried and failed, but suffice it to say it would be long.
The problem is this:
These social commerce platforms are all recreating the exact same content experience one can already have on TikTok and Instagram — Ie. Images and short-form video. They are thus faced with the challenge of convincing you, the user, to create this content on the same platform as TikTok but with a worse algorithm and no network effects. A tough sell.
The value proposition/user incentive offered by these upstarts thus becomes the ability to make money by selling products. Unfortunately, however, this typically only appeals to the 1% of true *creators* on platforms, because the vast majority don’t even realize they could be monetizing their 2k followers and casual posts (though I do believe they could, fwiw), and thus the incentives are not strong enough to abandon ship and sail to unknown territories.
There is a Solution to this Mess
Investors like Marc Andreessen will rightly argue that many of the best products, particularly in consumer apps, are uniquely unlocked by a specific technological advancement. Famous examples include how YouTube was only made possible by advancements in broadband internet, or Instagram was made possible by high-quality smartphone cameras and 4G.
I believe the same will be true for the next era of social commerce — it will be unlocked by a unique technological advancement, that will change the way consumers interact with consumer products and content.
This unique technological unlock is Connected consumer goods.
Connected goods unlock a whole new world of connections with consumer goods, spawning new opportunities for both content and commerce. Yes, some of that content will include images and short-form video to be sure, but I have spoken at length about many other use cases across this spectrum, including:
IRL Social Commerce: The ability to purchase a product via someone you see on the street, and they receive a revenue share in return.
Digital Closets: Profiles in the future might contain your digital wardrobe, full of the pieces you own and love, rather than just a steady stream of the content you create around them.
Activity Feeds 2.0: What you’re doing, and what you’re wearing while you do it. Many can remember the activity feeds once on Instagram, that consisted of who was like whose posts (an effective way of sleuthing out who liked whom).
In the future, one can imagine an activity feed filled with users ‘checking in’ to places (ie. restaurants, cafes, friend dates and the like), simply by tapping the products they are wearing there. Now you can show off that you went to the opening night of the cool new restaurant in New York, and prove you were wearing the new Bottega sardine bag while you did it. No photo or short-form video required.
If you want to come for me about ‘checking in’ to locations and with friends and how it has never worked, know that people are already basically “mis”-using Instagram to accomplish this very outcome:
Blockchain technology is the obvious other technological unlock that allows social media to become social commerce. I’ve written about how tokenized digital twins can better enable revenue sharing, attribution and more many times before, not to mention creators can now properly own their audiences *without creating a blog*, hallelujah.
The Point Is
Social commerce is a failed experiment in Web2. However, Connected goods on-chain will give rise to platforms that enable fundamentally new forms of content and, importantly, interactions with consumer goods, as well as finally unlock the true potential of peer-to-peer (read: social) commerce. This way, we can leave shopping & style blogs in the 2000s, where they belong.
Brilliant article. Have subscribed :)