Substack-like newsletters are pretty generalist in their features and I see a room to niching them down for specific food creators. Food blogging constitutes a major part of blogging, and there is room to make a lot of food-specific newsletter features, and maybe some futuristic integration with cloud kitchens? (think of everyone contributing recipes to a hellofresh-like infrastructure?). What do you think?
If you're talking about competing with Substack and focusing on food, and doing it right now, no. It will not work - yet. The fast growing generalist platform will frustrate you at this stage, it will consume all the oxygen in the room. The food blogs & food lists will all try that first, possibly for several years, before finally becoming dissatisfied after a long duration experience; and with their experience with the product they will then look for something more narrowly fit, more specialized, to their food needs.
If the generalist platform/s become very large (and the segment overall), then you can split off from them at some point down the road. The generalists are training a large userbase, which you can then seek to acquire - by giving them things Substack & co can't, such as further customizing to eg food - as they become dissatisfied. That training process is difficult and massively time consuming, it more often than not eats a small company alive (plainly you won't tend to get enough of a userbase because the training process is so slow for any given niche to get big enough fast enough, meanwhile the giant generalist is booming). You first need mass adoption, mass understanding of the platform that Substack represents (mailing list / newsletter + blog hybrid with optional subscription built in, or whatever the hell it is), which is what Substack is going to deliver. You need an ecosystem built out, after that you can build smaller, niche services that compete with Substack & co. in particular areas like food.
Do I think that could work long-term? Sure, assuming the Substack segment gets large (which I think it will). If you do it now, prepare for a very slow, very long journey. Giant platforms are always candidates for spinning services out of, sites like Craigslist or Reddit are prime spawning ground for such. To the extent you move too early, is the extent to which you'll suffer an unnecessarily long journey, and it's likely that other competitors will arrive when the time is right for the niche break-out and you'll have to fight with them anyway (and their service will be new; people like to use new, trendy Internet services like they do anything else in the physical world).
That's very helpful. Thank you so much. What you said makes a lot of sense, from an unbundling perspective.
I guess one way to start is to experiment with a recipe API that would read through ingredients and takes you to a pre-populated amazon fresh card ready to be ordered.
If the generalist platform/s become very large (and the segment overall), then you can split off from them at some point down the road. The generalists are training a large userbase, which you can then seek to acquire - by giving them things Substack & co can't, such as further customizing to eg food - as they become dissatisfied. That training process is difficult and massively time consuming, it more often than not eats a small company alive (plainly you won't tend to get enough of a userbase because the training process is so slow for any given niche to get big enough fast enough, meanwhile the giant generalist is booming). You first need mass adoption, mass understanding of the platform that Substack represents (mailing list / newsletter + blog hybrid with optional subscription built in, or whatever the hell it is), which is what Substack is going to deliver. You need an ecosystem built out, after that you can build smaller, niche services that compete with Substack & co. in particular areas like food.
Do I think that could work long-term? Sure, assuming the Substack segment gets large (which I think it will). If you do it now, prepare for a very slow, very long journey. Giant platforms are always candidates for spinning services out of, sites like Craigslist or Reddit are prime spawning ground for such. To the extent you move too early, is the extent to which you'll suffer an unnecessarily long journey, and it's likely that other competitors will arrive when the time is right for the niche break-out and you'll have to fight with them anyway (and their service will be new; people like to use new, trendy Internet services like they do anything else in the physical world).