Sachin Monga
Head of Product at Substack, former Cocoon co-founder and Facebook PM
Where to hear and read about Sachin Monga1 episode or test
Sachin Monga is Head of Product at Substack, where he leads product and design after co-founding Cocoon and spending years as a PM at Facebook. The most useful thing to learn from him is how one guiding principle, control for writers and readers, settles product decisions and produced the recommendations feature.
all things equal, like do the one that kind of holds constant this principle of control.
Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook)
Sachin Monga: the story and the lessons
1Sachin Monga's path from Facebook to Cocoon to Substack
Monga spent years at Facebook working on sharing and growth. He started at Facebook in 2011 on the growth team, then worked on platform, ads and the sharing team for the main app.
Press about Facebook was rosy when he joined and turned mostly negative on much of what he worked on, which thickened his skin.
He co-founded Cocoon, a photo-sharing app for close friends and family. Cocoon was started about three years before the recording with Alex Cornell, who had also worked on sharing at Facebook.
Monga reached Substack through the sale of Cocoon. He joined about a year before the recording and now leads the product and design teams.
Ads blocked his sharing work at Facebook, and Substack removes that block. An ad model forces a product to turn time and attention into sellable eyeballs. Substack replaces it with direct paid subscriptions between readers and writers.
Monga shared a mission with the founders. He sees writing on the internet entering a golden era because a small paying audience can now sustain a writer.
2How Monga structures Substack's product teams
Monga organizes teams around customers, not product surfaces. Substack has writer, reader and growth teams, plus a systems team that keeps the lights on. There is no app, dashboard or podcasting team.
Serving writers or readers is never finished, so the structure stays stable. Facebook reorganized what felt like every three to six months.
Each product team is small and complete. When Monga joined there were no PMs, a handful of designers and about 15 engineers. Now there are four PMs besides him.
Each team has a PM, an engineering manager, a data person or designer, and engineers.
Monga improves process weekly instead of chasing a perfect one. He says growth of 2x makes any working process obsolete, so he never worries about a perfect planning, execution or communication process.
"The main thing I care about is are we just getting better every week, every month, certainly every year."
Facebook prioritization instincts translated less than he expected. At Facebook trade-offs were often permanent: a watch tab might mean no marketplace tab at all. At Substack the main question is now or later.
Doing one thing now can unlock another later. Frameworks like high impact, low effort still hold.
3How Monga works with a hands-on founder
He began as a facilitator, not a decision maker. The company had outgrown one weekly meeting where CEO Chris Best set the next two weeks. For his first couple of months, Monga's goal was to help teams model Chris's vision better.
Now he and Chris spend an hour at the start of each week on the big problems and worries, then check in again at week's end.
Monga caught up to Chris Best's long-held vision before adding his own. Chris has held the vision of Substack as a network, not just a tool, for about five years. At an all-hands the team watched his 60-second 2017 Y Combinator demo day pitch.
That pitch already described podcasting and a network effect where writers help each other grow.
Monga filters press noise and keeps the team shipping. He estimates about 90% of the chatter about Substack is a distraction from executing on the vision.
The signal is not zero, and some stories deserve a look at whether they change strategy. His rule is heads down and keep shipping.
He hires for grit and tailors questions to each candidate. Substack needs people who can run through walls to reach big goals, and no single question gives that signal.
He adapts questions to the candidate's background, such as Facebook or a startup.
4How control shaped Substack's recommendations feature
Monga breaks ties by choosing the option that gives users more control. Writers control their work, audience and income, and readers control their experience. Recommendations got the maximum writer-control design even though it looked harder to pull off.
A Facebook-style 'people you may know' box was rejected because the writer would not control what their readers see.
The team formalized discovery readers were already doing. Readers were finding new Substacks through guest posts and by clicking commenters' profiles. The simplest design was to ask writers who they recommend and show it when readers subscribe.
"we noticed this organic behavior emerging"
Recommendations took off faster than the founder expected. Chris doubted it because many steps had to work. It has brought millions of new subscriptions to tens of thousands of writers.
More than one in three new subscriptions, and about one in ten paid ones, now come from the network. Recommended writers get an email saying how many readers came, which creates a goodwill loop.
Monga piloted with writers before launch and built a product lab. The team called about 10 writers and mocked up the feature, then ran a pilot. A product lab of about 100 invited writers now tests features first.
The feature shipped on day one is often quite different from the first idea. Some piloted features go nowhere and the team moves on.
He wants to treat recommendations as a graph of goodwill. Most recommended subscriptions come from one moment, right after someone subscribes elsewhere. Long-time readers never see who a writer recommends.
Reaching them should bring more subscriptions, and higher-intent ones.
5What Monga tells new writers
Monga says to start with no plan and keep your audience portable. Set up a way to gather subscribers, link to it and write one or two things. An audience locked in one platform can't be reached deterministically or monetized.
Substack wants to be where an audience built on Instagram, YouTube or Twitter comes home, with email addresses the writer can export any time.
He says paying subscribers are more forgiving than writers fear. Writers ask whether three emails a week is too many, whether asking for payment is crazy and whether a vacation is allowed.
Subscribing is a costly signal. "readers, especially the people that are subscribed to you who are paying you, are pretty forgiving."
He frames the test as 1,000 people paying about $10 a month. About 1,000 people paying $10 a month earns around $100k, so no mass audience is required. Network effects mean the real market is often larger.
His question is whether there is a niche you're excited about where you can find those 1,000 people.
He argues it is not too late to start. He points to Kevin Kelly's essay You Are Not Late and says the early stage is slow and steady, so keep the stakes low.
Next steps include richer guest posts, a community space the writer controls, a better reader app and an Android app. He wants easier creation without automating away the writer's voice.
Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook)
Substack's head of product explains how the team is organized around timeless customer problems, how a guiding principle of control for writers and readers shaped the recommendations feature, and how to work with a hands-on founder as the company grows. Recommendations now drive millions of new subscriptions, and more than one in three new Substack subscriptions come from the network.
Monga spent years at Facebook working on sharing and growth. He started at Facebook in 2011 on the growth team, then worked on platform, ads and the sharing team for the main app.
Press about Facebook was rosy when he joined and turned mostly negative on much of what he worked on, which thickened his skin.
He co-founded Cocoon, a photo-sharing app for close friends and family. Cocoon was started about three years before the recording with Alex Cornell, who had also worked on sharing at Facebook.
Monga reached Substack through the sale of Cocoon. He joined about a year before the recording and now leads the product and design teams.
Ads blocked his sharing work at Facebook, and Substack removes that block. An ad model forces a product to turn time and attention into sellable eyeballs. Substack replaces it with direct paid subscriptions between readers and writers.
Monga shared a mission with the founders. He sees writing on the internet entering a golden era because a small paying audience can now sustain a writer.
Monga organizes teams around customers, not product surfaces. Substack has writer, reader and growth teams, plus a systems team that keeps the lights on. There is no app, dashboard or podcasting team.
Serving writers or readers is never finished, so the structure stays stable. Facebook reorganized what felt like every three to six months.
Each product team is small and complete. When Monga joined there were no PMs, a handful of designers and about 15 engineers. Now there are four PMs besides him.
Each team has a PM, an engineering manager, a data person or designer, and engineers.
Monga improves process weekly instead of chasing a perfect one. He says growth of 2x makes any working process obsolete, so he never worries about a perfect planning, execution or communication process.
"The main thing I care about is are we just getting better every week, every month, certainly every year."
Facebook prioritization instincts translated less than he expected. At Facebook trade-offs were often permanent: a watch tab might mean no marketplace tab at all. At Substack the main question is now or later.
Doing one thing now can unlock another later. Frameworks like high impact, low effort still hold.
He began as a facilitator, not a decision maker. The company had outgrown one weekly meeting where CEO Chris Best set the next two weeks. For his first couple of months, Monga's goal was to help teams model Chris's vision better.
Now he and Chris spend an hour at the start of each week on the big problems and worries, then check in again at week's end.
Monga caught up to Chris Best's long-held vision before adding his own. Chris has held the vision of Substack as a network, not just a tool, for about five years. At an all-hands the team watched his 60-second 2017 Y Combinator demo day pitch.
That pitch already described podcasting and a network effect where writers help each other grow.
Monga filters press noise and keeps the team shipping. He estimates about 90% of the chatter about Substack is a distraction from executing on the vision.
The signal is not zero, and some stories deserve a look at whether they change strategy. His rule is heads down and keep shipping.
He hires for grit and tailors questions to each candidate. Substack needs people who can run through walls to reach big goals, and no single question gives that signal.
He adapts questions to the candidate's background, such as Facebook or a startup.
Monga breaks ties by choosing the option that gives users more control. Writers control their work, audience and income, and readers control their experience. Recommendations got the maximum writer-control design even though it looked harder to pull off.
A Facebook-style 'people you may know' box was rejected because the writer would not control what their readers see.
The team formalized discovery readers were already doing. Readers were finding new Substacks through guest posts and by clicking commenters' profiles. The simplest design was to ask writers who they recommend and show it when readers subscribe.
"we noticed this organic behavior emerging"
Recommendations took off faster than the founder expected. Chris doubted it because many steps had to work. It has brought millions of new subscriptions to tens of thousands of writers.
More than one in three new subscriptions, and about one in ten paid ones, now come from the network. Recommended writers get an email saying how many readers came, which creates a goodwill loop.
Monga piloted with writers before launch and built a product lab. The team called about 10 writers and mocked up the feature, then ran a pilot. A product lab of about 100 invited writers now tests features first.
The feature shipped on day one is often quite different from the first idea. Some piloted features go nowhere and the team moves on.
He wants to treat recommendations as a graph of goodwill. Most recommended subscriptions come from one moment, right after someone subscribes elsewhere. Long-time readers never see who a writer recommends.
Reaching them should bring more subscriptions, and higher-intent ones.
Monga says to start with no plan and keep your audience portable. Set up a way to gather subscribers, link to it and write one or two things. An audience locked in one platform can't be reached deterministically or monetized.
Substack wants to be where an audience built on Instagram, YouTube or Twitter comes home, with email addresses the writer can export any time.
He says paying subscribers are more forgiving than writers fear. Writers ask whether three emails a week is too many, whether asking for payment is crazy and whether a vacation is allowed.
Subscribing is a costly signal. "readers, especially the people that are subscribed to you who are paying you, are pretty forgiving."
He frames the test as 1,000 people paying about $10 a month. About 1,000 people paying $10 a month earns around $100k, so no mass audience is required. Network effects mean the real market is often larger.
His question is whether there is a niche you're excited about where you can find those 1,000 people.
He argues it is not too late to start. He points to Kevin Kelly's essay You Are Not Late and says the early stage is slow and steady, so keep the stakes low.
Next steps include richer guest posts, a community space the writer controls, a better reader app and an Android app. He wants easier creation without automating away the writer's voice.