Emily Sundberg on Feed Me's seven-figure Substack, California expansion, and why both Substack and Patreon should stop poaching each other's creators

Summary

Emily Sundberg's Feed Me newsletter is generating seven-figure Substack revenue and now expanding into audio with Expense Account, a food and dining podcast co-hosted with restaurant columnist Jason. Substack and Silver Oak Wines are presenting sponsors of season one, a meaningful signal that Substack is investing in creator-led audio beyond the written format. Sundberg describes the show's concept as covering business-oriented restaurants, the kinds of places where someone slaps a corporate card down, with guests like Joe Weisenthal of Bloomberg offering a different register than their usual financial commentary.

Around 20% of Feed Me's readership is based in California, a concentration large enough that Sundberg is planning a West Coast expansion in January 2025, starting with a San Francisco trip. The initial product is likely a monthly letter, with Sundberg explicitly opting against building out a small newsroom, preferring to report it herself. The California audience has been vocal about wanting dedicated local coverage, giving her a pre-existing demand signal before launch.

Jack Conte's Patreon is actively trying to poach Substack writers, and Sundberg confirmed she received an outreach email. She has not responded. Her read on the platform war is pointed: both Substack and Patreon are making a strategic mistake by trying to trade creators between platforms rather than recruiting talent from legacy media that is structurally underpaid relative to the value it generates. She describes herself as "Substack coded" and skeptical that Patreon's email CMS product would be compelling enough to move her audience.

On platform positioning, Sundberg draws a clean line. Patreon's cultural identity is podcasts and audio, anchored by properties like Red Scare. Substack's identity is newsletters and written media. Attempts to blur that line through creator poaching read as defensive rather than growth-oriented. Her preference is for each platform to double down on its core format rather than compete for the same pool of established names.

The Expense Account podcast is also seeing meaningful video consumption, with Sundberg noting that audiences are watching the show as much as listening to it, consistent with the broader trend of podcasts being consumed as ambient video content on smart TVs and in work-from-home environments. Netflix's distribution push into podcasting, including acquiring the Ringer catalog, is cited as further evidence that the format boundary between audio and video is dissolving.