Update ... China Diction #87

Sorry for the interruption in services, but Substack has made it impossible for me to post full newsletters for the moment ...

Pro-tip: Don’t start a Substack right now. Everyone’s doing it and the company doesn’t have the resources to deal with it.

Last year, Substack abandoned an effort to raise as much as $100 million from potential investors, the New York Times reported. It also laid off about 14% of its staff.

It’s now asking us, the content providers to invest:

The San Francisco-based company is letting its authors put in as little as $100 for shares. Co-founders Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi said in a blog post Tuesday that recent regulatory changes allow businesses to tap more money from less-wealthy investors, a move they see as advantageous to the company.

“We’re doing this because the dynamics of a platform like Substack change if the people who are building their businesses on it are owners of it, too,” they said.

Wefunder.com, the site Substack is using to collect the investments, has made such “community rounds” easier, they added. On Wefunder, they warned investors that the company is a startup “on an extremely ambitious mission” and writers shouldn’t participate unless they could afford to lose their entire investment.