Hey Everyone,

This is a post specifically to other Substack writers.

We all want to grow our Newsletters in the best way and get high quality referrals.

How can we share traffic on Substack in a more optimized and authentic way? How can we share high quality referrals in a cross promotion? What if we established our own Partner Network of similar peer publications? After two years of experimenting, this is what I’m setting out to do.

On February 19th, 2023 I’ll be doing my first launch of a Native Cross Promotion as pilot.

Hypothesis: Substack Recommendations Don’t Convert

I love the idea of Substack recommendations, but launched in April, 2022 they have been overdone.

Substack recommendations are too passive, too watered down and to readers that are too saturated with Newsletters coming to their inbox already. Even at scale, few of them are going to convert into lifetime readers or paid supporters.

The platform network effect of Substack works for some niches, more than others. The more your niche diverges from the average Substack reader (say of political or cultural Newsletters), the less valuable those recommendations become.

As a rule it’s great to get more readers but what if those readers are already subscribed to over 10 Newsletters. It turns out “secondary passive” recommendations don’t really convert to paid subscribers very often.

They might pad your list size but aren’t necessarily doing much for your growth or business.

“A single name drop, shout-out or single line CTA isn’t going to convert. “

A Better way: Native Cross Promotions

I’ve thought of a better way.

I believe more “direct recommendations” to readers of Newsletters that are aligned is a stronger and more trustworthy CTA to share traffic in a reciprocal manner, but it needs to follow a strong CTA format. A single name drop, shout-out or single line CTA isn’t going to convert.

At least not at rates that are useful or scalable.

This changes however if you try more of a Naive Sponsor design format with a more persuasive multi-pronged CTA.

Format

The format I recommend in early 2024 consists of the following:

1. A shout-out on Notes

2. A Native Sponsor Ad, but for a Partner instead of a Brand

• Two to three links to their articles

• A Logo

• Bullet points

• A CTA

• A sign-up form

For Example:

Links

Pre Native Setup + Bullet points

Embedded Signup Form & CTA Subscription Button!

Let me know what you think?

of Wonder Tools was my guinea pig for this experiment.

Direct Cross Promotion

While the LetterGrowth website has the right idea, it doesn’t have the correct format for it to work well enough.

Read my Guide

Only Works if Both Partners

• Shout-out on Notes

• Super follow them on LinkedIn and like their posts

• Direct Native Cross Promotion Sponsor on a free Newsletter issue

• Using: links, logo, bullet points, embedded sign-up form and paid CTA.

How to Scale?

It’s only scalable if they follow those steps, have a decent sized list and you do enough of them each month to grow your list faster with higher quality readers.

• Both partners need to have significant and similar sized lists with significant reader interest overlap

• Both partners should ideally have similar CTRs or Open rates (less accurate)

• Both partners need to agree to reciprocate all of these steps.

• Doing multiple cross-promotions with aligned partners is what matters here, the frequency (not too often that it feels spammy, but often enough that that trickle of traffic amounts to high quality new reader acquisition in a cost effective way).

Step One - How-To

• Find peers in your nice who started about the same time as you or have a similar sized list

• Contact them

• Create Native Sponsor design templates like I have shown above

• Track results, evaluate

• Do more Cross Promotions with new partners

• Consider doing guest posts and establishing a larger partner network of similar sister publications

The cost of acquiring a new subscriber has gotten higher with the proliferation of Newsletters and the quality of said acquisitions has gotten lower, to beat the odds you really need to do more targeted campaigns.

Never rely on just vanilla organic reader growth. Since your list will go cold, your readers will churn naturally faster than you grow leading to failure.

Let me know what you think?

Leave a comment

The Value of Native Cross Promotions?

In my opinion, Native Direct Cross Promotions, NDCPs, are a more authentic and high-quality way to share traffic with other publications and grow your audience in a semi-targeted way that’s low cost and highly collaborative.

See the Live Pilot

You can see how the NDCP looks for Wonder Tools Newsletter - see how it looks in today’s Newsletter here:

See Native Cross Promotion

Hey Everyone,

Yet again I find myself in need of venting. Substack has a bunch of categories it has pre-chosen with their own respective leaderboards. This is really important for creating incentives for writers to celebrate and improve the growth of their publications, both in terms of size and monetization. But it does not favor business and technology writers, who are lumped together into huge massive categories.

It’s very poorly designed. Banging my hands on the table poor. Let me explain!

Substack with a female dominant writer acquisition and marketing departments, have categories that don’t even represent what male readers are actually interested in reading about in America.

Substack is basically built on by revenue on the following: Politics, Investing and sadly enough culture (not really viable by the way!). So where is the technology and business sections on Substack? In a normal world, Technology would be a major pillar of Substack. So where is it? Why do I have to dig so hard just to find anything good there?

No nobody goes to the business section of the bookstore Bailey Dunn! Substack finally hired a writer acquisition business development person for business and technology. She’s great and penned this guest post: ( I do have a lot of ideological problems with this)

Substack Reads

Substack is the new business section of the bookstore

The tech industry evolves daily—new software is developed, new companies are founded, new roles are created. Yesterday’s career guides are already collecting dust, and generic business books are useless when it comes to figuring out what being something like a “product manager” means, much less how to do the job well. But there’s a new wave of experts e…

Read more

2 years ago · 481 likes · 85 comments · Bailey Dunn @ Substack

However Substack’s internal employees outside of a few members of the growth and engineering team don’t understand the male audience. It’s clear, they just don’t and its hurt Substack growth big-time. They’ve made some poor choices in how to scale the product.

They aren’t really from the tech world. I’m not sure Kik qualifies as a tech startup, but anyways. It failed. But men like it or not are typically in a better position to pay to read something and they are more likely to do so if it enables them to be better at their job.

Substack has a major case of female-bias and a lack of marketing on LinkedIn. I get it, MFAs think differently. So if you are building a subscription network for paid subscription, you might actually want to understand the male audience better.

Not having more categories related to the male audience is the dumbest thing Substack has ever done or not done in its non-existent marketing prowess.

Substack’s head of writer acquisition is from a16z, Substack’s biggest investor, you’d think they would understand how crucial this is! Godammit!

Let me list you the categories I’d like to see on Substack (after two years of asking!) that are currently found buried within the Technology and Business categories. It’s not that Lenny and Gergely are Tech Gurus, it’s that up until recently the Technology and Business sections of Substack were totally barren, totally neglected.

Bailey in her nice Op-Ed gives shoutouts to those who monetize Substack the best in Business and technology. These aren’t actually representative of Substack’s actual writers in business or technology.

But perhaps it’s the lack of categories that make targeting and discovery so very difficult on the Substack app for the male reader. This means Substack’s poor choices of categories makes the app and the ecosystem less sticky, again, for the average American male reader.

If you cannot retain readers to your ecosystem, how do you expect publication in said ecosystem to thrive? Substack needs a CMO. And it’s glaring really.

The reason I hang out on Artifact News (a better app) and not Substack is the poor discovery and lack of personalized targeting. It’s not just bad, it’s really really bad.

Substack Needs to Rehaul and Personalize Categories to the Reader

So this is what I’d do to fix it, create categories for the following:

If you build it, they will come!

It took Substack’s Tech and Business categories 5 years with poor management (and non-existing marketing on LinkedIn) to finally start to take off. Five fucking years. I’ve been around for two of them.

But now, any of these categories are viable. Imagine the excitement of being listed on them even in the top 100? This is what gamification is about, giving people incentives to get better at their publications and at covering their niche. Not hiding them in a massive Category.

Currently Subsack just hides publications in these massive categories, no matter how many writers actually come to Substack to set these up.

Here is a list of some of the more popular tags on Medium. Notice anything odd about this? They are mostly all about tech or business topics or related to them.

You want growth on Substack? Create Categories that people actually want to read about:

Technology

• Artificial Intelligence (I’m fine if you call this Machine Learning, like the back-end tag that already exists)

• Data Engineering

• Product

• Datascience

• Software Engineering

• Web 3 (Crypto, Blockchain) - [Don’t call this “Crypto” for fucking sake!

• Emerging Technology

• UX/Design

• Cybersecurity

• Cloud Computing

• Virtual & Augmented Reality

What you see above and below all need their own categories, leaderboards, and they would be off to the races. But instead, Substack doesn’t pivot the parts of the UX and product, that it should while adding meaningless bells and whistles and features. Hello, this is actual product!

Business

• Management & Leadership

• Entrepreneurship

• Mobile & Android

• Economics

• Finance

• Startups

• Marketing

• Sales and Business Development

• Human Resources

• BigTech (specifically about the biggest tech corporations)

• International Business

• Project Management

• Career Advancement

• Creator Economy

• Life Lessons at Work

• Retail and E-Commerce

SimilarWeb must be drunk, they say that 54% of readers on Substack who visit the site are male. I’d be happy if Subsack had an equal number of men and women internally at the company, but why do the categories don’t seem male reader friendly?

What the Fuck! (For Male Readers)

I should be able to search the major categories as a man and find something relevant to how my brain works and what interests me. For the record I’ll completely ignore:

(I think I’m fairly representative of many men with broad interests in tech and business in a position to have a paid subscription (i.e. above 40)

The Categories I’d Perma Hide Forever

• Staff Picks (please remove this!)

• Culture

• Food and Drink (whatever the fuck that is!)

• Art & Illustration

• Health Politics? WTF is that?

• Fashion and Beauty

• Music

• Faith and Spirituality

• Who came up with these lame categories? It must have not been a man.

• Climate and Environment

• Literature

• Fiction

• Design

• Parenting

• Etc…etc…

Notice anything about this? The Categories are female-biased, they are literally drawn up by a bunch of women. Are women the persona of Substack? Hello? Women don’t have as much time to download an app and read as many Newsletters, I guarantee it! They will pay for fewer Newsletter if they are a mega fan of Substack. Pull the data, I’m 95% sure it is the case.

I’ve come across dozens of male readers with over 10 paid subs to Newsletters. I’ve never come across a female reader though like that! Why is that?

So many male writers are just lost in the current mess of the Technology and Business categories. Capable people, good writers, in their niche. But they won’t be discovered on Subsack due to this simply stupid oversight.

They have no categories in which they write about.

All of my Newsletters on Substack are related in some way to categories that don’t exist. They aren’t necessarily Technology or Business or News. But somehow a subcategory or intersection of one of those that doesn’t even exist.

Substack hasn’t taken the time to understand the male reader or the male persona. And they completely ignore good old common sense in customer or writer feedback. That wasn’t always the case.

If Substack created the above categories, they’d instantly find a new crop of writers seeking to rise up on those leaderboards. .

I’m all for Substack’s categories being inclusive, but at least be inclucisve where it matters the most! Is that really so much to ask?

“Categories needed to be tailored and targeted to the right audience”

For the record I’m all for culture and these other categories, I’m just trying to prove an important point. Categories needed to be tailored and targeted to the right audience. At the very least, those categories need to actually exist, have leaderboards and be searchable.

Because that’s what people are interested in reading in the first place! Not just fringe aspects of Culture. Please Substack, at least get a bit more real and in touch with what people really want to read. Your categories need to reflect that and not your own internal biases. .

This is the ABCs of product-marketing. That years later Substack hasn’t gotten this right is worrisome. It’s also fucking annoying as an avid reader! It’s literally preventing adoption and the formation of publications. If you make discovery harder, people just won’t succeed as much.

So who are these mysterious people that actually do visit Substack?

SimilarWeb

According to web ranking site SimilarWeb, Subsack’s audience literally intersects with News and Business topics. So why hasn’t Substack invested in LinkedIn or developing its Technology and Business categories more intentionally?

It would literally super-charge Substack’s SEO. 2023 was already the year academics, engineers, scientists and professionals started to join Substack. New categories need to be launched immediately in 2024.

And Bailey Dunn, nobody opens an app for “career advice”, but they do want to hear about the latest news. They don’t just want to learn from other professionals, they want to immerse themselves in their interests and topic obsessions.

Give people more categories that actually are personalized to their persona. It’s so basic.

1. Create more Categories

2. Create Dynamic matching of Categories with Reader (not static views on the web or app)

3. Expand Categories to create more leaderboards on an ongoing basis

4. Develop new ways for readers to discover these categories and their topics (not just categories and leaderboards!)

One of the best things about Medium back in the day (circa 2014), was that the tags actually meant something. On Substack, the categories mean nearly next to nothing. Where female and male writers and readers hang out, actually matters.

Kaya Yurieff is one of my special readers, and she recently got me thinking. What if Might Networks could be the BFF of Substack in how writers build out a community? Substack hasn’t gotten into courses or live-streaming or many of the features that I’d want to build in an engaged community.

Mighty Networks scaled a bit in 2023, and according to reporting by Kaya, creators have earned more than $370 million this year from its platform, a $300 million increase (!) from a year ago. MN is a well-funded Creator platform.

Should Writers Build Communities?

Gina, their CEO sent one of the most recent primers and I’d like to dig into it in case it’s useful to some of you out there or reading this who are writers and wondering if you could do more to build out a community what tools you could use.

Substack has pushed the idea that writers should build multi-level communities to increase the value proposition of being a paid supporter of a publication and a writer. Podcasts or Substack chat are a common example of the added value writers are now offering.

Indeed, Substack’s new video update speaks to this, well kinda! Let me explain.

Is Substack really for Video?

Creators need more potential revenue streams, if they are struggling with paid acquisitions. Not necessarily more features! Listen I always try to be creator-centric. Beehiiv has addressed monetization with boosts and other tactics, while Substack is more or less doubling down on just paid subscriptions.

This is fine for some writers, it’s not great for most writers.

Might Networks has also been working on product and improving their offering but here the path is more related to how community feeds into educational courses, live-video and a more multi-media and mobile native approach. 1

Read the MN Guide

Celebrities and AI features aside, Might Networks appears to have a grasp of different features in how to build out and scale a community that’s more indepth to Substack’s approach.

Read about their Features

Substack also doesn’t seem to partner well or make friends well with other platforms that could benefit their writers. So I have to myself make these connections, do the research and integrate a flywheel myself if I have a hope in hell of making a living wage.

I could give you a list right now of Creator platforms that scale well together to help writers earn a living. And this is in part the very purpose of this Newsletter. I am in a sense building in public too. You learn a few things after two years on this platform full-time.

Reasons Building a Flywheel Matters for Writers

1. Substack Paid subscriptions likely scales well with Creator communities

2. Writers can build educational communities that lead to paid seminars, consulting, workshops and courses to help fund their more creative work.

3. Writers can build relationships with brands and tailor make native placements that don’t feel like Ads and don’t disrupt the reader experience as much.

The trinity of paid subscriptions, native placement and courses is a diversified way for a writer to live and grow their work and niche. To do just one of them, without the others, is absolutely crazy in today’s mobile digital world. It’s akin to setting yourself up for failure.

Having a Newsletter is not enough, it should be just one element of a flywheel and a business. Now you might not enjoy consulting so courses might be a more feasible option depending on your niche. There are likely hobbyists and enthusiasts out there just like you!

Might Networks is Not a Serious Name but it’s Becoming a Series Community Platform

Learn more about getting started on “Mighty”

Maybe like you I was a bit turned off by the Disney name of this brand (“Mighty Networks”). But if you believe a community matters, we have to explore all options. There are many such platforms after all. For some Maven or another one might be a better fit if courses are what you are after.

Any course building community is similar to some extent: Kajabi, Thinkific Plus, Skool, Hivebrite and others come to mind.

As a writer in breaking news related to the future of technology, building a community to onboard them to courses or seminars might not be my thing, but perhaps live-video impromptu events when something important happens.

Creators Need to Reframe what a Community is

According to MN and their founder:

What is an online community?

An online community “is a group of people with a shared interest or motivation who meet to inspire, affirm, learn, grow, and form connections with each other.”

It’s not…

❌ An audience on social media.
❌ A random collection of courses no one finishes
❌ A dumping ground for AI-generated content

Where to Focus? (don’t focus on guidelines rather focus on positive direction and shared value)

⭐️Start with the community culture you want to build, NOT the one you are trying to avoid.
⭐️Tell members why they are here and what they’re going to achieve together.
⭐️Lead them to shared goals.
⭐ ️Paint the picture of results and transformation they can’t get on their own.
⭐️Get them excited about all the possibilities and opportunities that come from being a part of something bigger than any one person.

Here even obscure writers can slowly get a sense that building a community is not just sending Email blasts to random people interested in the same things, but can be fostered through deliberate dialogue, events and shared meaning that perhaps even leads to revenue sources.

Companies like Substack and Might NEtworks like to work in terms of case studies, and they sort of have to because writers and creators are themselves so diverse. There is no one-size-fits all mould.

How Might Networks Conceptualizes Community Types

• A mastermind group: Founded on the philosophies of Napoleon Hill, mastermind groups bring people together to share experience and advice on entrepreneurship, career and personal development, finance, and even parenting. For inspiration, check out Dan Miller, who turned his podcast and book--48 Days to the Work you Love-- into 48 Days Eagles–a private, membership community that became a connected network of entrepreneurs.

• Group coaching: In this online community model, a coach or expert teaches in a group. But members benefit from sharing inspiration and accountability with the group. For inspiration, check out The Village by Happily Family, a group coaching community for parents started by Cecilia and Jason Hilkey.

• Coaching community: Group coaching is amazing, but 1:1 coaches also use communities to support their clients between sessions. If there are no privacy issues, community can be an awesome supplement to coaching.

• Micro-community: A small community with less than 30 people, and the results can be epic. Usually a much higher price point and super well-defined niche. For example, Kathleen Drennan's 6-week #ForFlorists Business Masterclass is an amazing case study in micro-communities.

• Content community: Who says bloggers, video creators, photographers, or designers need to flock to social media? Content communities bring creators together to share, learn, and grow.

• Online brand community: An online brand community or customer community brings people together for the love of a brand--to connect, learn, and even get product support. For examples of online brand communities, check out Lego's builder community. Or how about Oiselle Volée, a community for runners.

• Online forum: Forums on their own are a bit dated, but most communities have a forum component for asynchronous discussions.

• Communities of practice: For professionals, communities can be places to connect with practitioners and share knowledge. For example, QPractice is a community that connects interior designers.

• Learning communities: Running an asynchronous or synchronous course? A community can make the material stick.

• Event community: An event community is a great way to host thriving virtual events or to keep the magic of an event going year-round.

• Shared purpose community: Most communities fit this model, but a shared purpose brings people together because they want to transform, grow, or even just talk about a common interest.

For writers on substack, likely some kind of hybrid “content community” might work.

Learn about Content Communities

If you can grow a community well around your niche, chances are you can also create educational material around it that might help your build your niche up and fuel the growth of your Newsletters. The whole idea of the flywheel model is revenue from Ads or Courses can super-charge the growth of your Newsletter that could allow paid subs to scale more or faster!

This is an important concept many writers miss out on Substack and Substack sometimes keeps us in their ecosystem in a guarded way where these basic realities of the Creator Economy are not explained easily or properly. I believe platforms need to be creator-centric and not just tout their own horn.

I don’t want to read marketing that might hurt the revenue generation abilities of writers! Please.

A Community Requires a Flywheel of Monetization Opportunities

For as good as Substack Notes and Chat are, they aren’t a substitute for a real community, at least not in their form of 2023. And primarily because you cannot build and sell:

• Digital products (ability to sell one-offs like guides, templates, resources and E-books)

• E-commerce integration (ability to sell actual products)

• Live-streaming (with option of audience to “tip”)

• Courses and Digital events

• Tap into native placements and brand ambassador relationships conventialy

• Offering consulting on the fly (Substack Meet is still in Beta?)

A community constrained to just Email or just Paid subscriptions isn’t a flywheel. It’s not a diversified business model.

A patch quilt of various platforms like Substack and others for the above is needed in 2024 for a writer to begin to become a creator and have a viable future. Pure play writers don’t scale and might not survive easily in the years ahead. If you want a career in this stuff, I recommend you do your homework.

Outside of creating a YouTube channel there are viable options, but you need to keep learning and experimenting. I do think a great (paid) community also improves customer lifetime value and will reduce churn of your Newsletter paid subs.

1. One Subscription for the Newsletter

2. Another Subscription for the Community

Even the subscriptions should be diversified. Blending your community with your writing may not work well depending on your niche and the actual demand for that type of content and those topics. Major constraint is Substack’s audience primarily in the U.S., UK, India and Canada. (Most of my paid audience is U.S. based).

Separating the community from the Newsletter will likely be more profitable. Patreon and Discord have new kinds of competitors. And as they evolve, so should we, that is, if we want to survive.

Paid subs alone is not a resilient business model though, the one-time digital products or consulting or Ads tends to improve the business model. Even if these competing monetization channels hurts the business in the short-term! Having Ads might hurt my paid subs growth, because I’m diverting clicks from my landing-page to a third party, but the cash injection helps me reinvest back into the business for the long-term.

Why does a Writer Need a Community Flywheel?

Community flywheels are the sort of ideology people like ConvertKit like to hype up, but there are tried and true business model related to it that seem to scale profitability faster and I think the diversification can help at least for certain stages of the Creator journey.

According to McKinsey’s study of community flywheels, a good flywheel includes five things:

1. Entering into community with your consumers

2. Choosing “hero” products that reflect your brand value

3. Mixing them with exciting stories

4. Feeding the community with content, which allows your superfans to generate their own.

5. Making a transaction effortless

I think when it comes down to maximizing customer lifetime value and chur-reduction, a Community enables a more sticky and immersive product on the whole even for Newsletter operators. This is also a place where Creator collabs and Creator Ambassador projects can truly come alive. Because Discord is so 2022.

We can and should do things better, and I’m not sure it’s Mighty Networks, but I think courses and education are more solid foundations for many Newsletter operators to at least experiment with.

Why does Membership Community Work?

• So it works also because the subscription is a lot higher than a Newsletter subscription, you just don’t need as many to be viable.

• Paid subscription diversification means more tiers for various readers and fans to be engaged with. Perhaps they get tired of your writing, but stay for the community, and that’s perfectly okay.

What does MN say about this:

Membership community statistics

“Considering selling paid memberships as part of your online community building?

Here are some of the numbers we've seen in our paid Mighty Networks that PROVE it's the ultimate business model:

• The average community with membership fees charge $48/mo. A community of 1,000 members is earning at least $48,000 A MONTH!

• Paid communities earn on top of memberships: things like events, coaching, or courses. 90% of paywalled Mighty Networks are making sales on top of the membership fee.

• Only 27% of our top 250 revenue-generating Mighty Networks offer a Free Trial.

• 82% of paid networks have made a sale in the past 90 days

• Some of the top revenue-earning Mighty Pro Networks charge up to $125 per month per Member.”

So while a Substack lives and dies by the sword of just writing, in the real world of the internet, it isn’t just about writing.

$48 is the average fee for a paid community in MNs

Creating multiple tiers of digital products or offerings to make your niche more viable.

Many writers don’t realize that if they become Creators they could afford to keep growing their writing niche the way they want. To become a Creator you don’t even need a massive social media audience, but developing a more intentional community helps.

I mean as a writer you should be starting a YouTube channel, but if you aren’t, maybe a paid community could be a viable option. After all time is limited, but many Newsletter operators only post a couple of times a week which leaves time for other things. Which leaves time to build out more revenue monetization channels and value for their initial and VIP readers!

• You want to be able to cross-sell and up-sell as a Writer, if you want to be able to live on what you do.

A writer needs to be a multi-platform Creator learning the tricks of the trade on each platform, and of each social network according to their niche and topic’s relevance. Even a political or a fiction writer could create a viable community. I can barely conceive of a writer on Substack that couldn’t create a viable community if they put some love into it.

Community is a Point of Differentiation

The best writers are original and have unique points of differentiation in their niche, that nobody else like them exists in the world. To have a viable community only augments the “unique selling point”.

You are’t just offering readers information or entertainment, but belonging and a group experience with others like them. A Substack Chat or some paid sharing “behind the scenes” content is probably not a real community as it actually exists in 2024.

There has to be a bigger “We” around what you are doing. A bigger shared meaning you aren’t tapping into as a writer that could help sustain and grow your publication.

MN recommends you also brainstorm and think philosophically about this:

For solo community leaders:

• What do I spend my time thinking and caring about?

• What types of people do I love connecting to?

• Who can I help? What struggles have I come through that could teach others?

• If money didn't matter, what kind of community would I build?

• What space to I want to see or create? (Especially if it doesn't exist already)

For brand communities

• Why do we exist as a business? Why did we launch in the first place?

• What do our founder's or leaders' stories tell us about their drive and vision for the brand?

• What transformation do we want our customers to experience? How could we make their lives better?

• What do our existing raving customers say they love about us?

• What causes do we care about?

For a writer, a community can improve your value proposition to prospective readers and show to them that you seriously care about your topic and want to provide value to them in the way of connection, meaning and belonging far beyond the scope of just an Email blast.

Building a Community also helps you get more clear with your Mission Statement (Big Purpose) and who you are writing for.

Building and Researching your Ideal Reader or Member Persona

MN’s language around this is very colorful and subjective, but you get the idea:

To refine your ideal member, start by doing 30-minute interviews of 10-20 people who represent folks you want to serve in your community.

• Ask them to tell you about their goals and motivations around your topic, as well as their fears.

• Try to understand the things they’ve attempted to do on their own to master your interest or create their own results and why they failed.

• Determine how much the transformation or belong they're seeking would be worth to them.

• Identify where they already find belonging and purpose.

The Trinity of Creator Experiences and Newsletter Goals

1. Entertainment

2. Education

3. Belonging

As a Substack writer you want to hit all of these three and always be improving on them, eventually you realize where your magic-spot is. Perhaps you want to go more into an education aspect of your niche and thus communities with courses might make sense for you.

I have no affiliations with Mighty Networks nor have I tried their products or any of their competitors myself.

Given how Substack is evolving, it’s fair to say in 2024 I’ll be forced to diversify more and spending more time on various Creator platforms in the hopes of building a sustainable flywheel. Since after two years, paid subs alone are not a sufficient means for life and livelihood.

As a writer, you might have to find multiple ways to monetize to keep doing what you love. It’s important not to get too caught up in the ideology or moat of a single product, especially if they are not being realistic or being customer-centricto your needs and goals.

Hey Everyone,

I’m currently in beast mode, which means a bit disillusioned, watching revenue decline and totally burnt out after investing two solid years of my life on trying to grow a Substack.

I was genuinely excited about Substack Notes and wanted to do my best to contribute to the product, launch and its success. But over time, something happened to me.

After several weeks of being a DAU (daily active user), I found Substack Notes wasn’t providing enough value as a writer or a reader. I’m going to share a bit of my personal experience of why that was for me.

This is sensitive feedback, and Substack has the ability to penalize actors who are too negative, so better to put this behind the paywall. There are however major issues that need to be fixed and thought out more deeply. I wish Substack’s product folk were open to real genuine feedback, but this does not appear to be the case.

I’m a huge fan of Substack as a whole, but we also need to be honest about what’s not working. Pretending that Notes is great, isn’t the answer. Because both the reader and writer experience matter to make it better.

Subscribe now

Read more

Hey Everyone,

There’s something that has been bothering me.

The idea that we have a 1:1 relationship with our readers is enticing, but is it true? I’ve noticed with my own journey and consumption patterns of Newsletters, a stark reality, most Newsletter get stuck in a Gmail promotions tab purgatory.

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I was recently geeking out on the relenter Newsletter data, and I want to combine this with some of Substack’s recently revealed data on its App for motivational purposes.

You can search for your Newsletter on relenter and claim it. Although the process isn’t the best frankly.

The majority of Newsletters created don’t last long and aren’t even active.

Newsletters Creators Find “It’s a Grind”

• There are a staggering 1.7m newsletters on Substack and LinkedIn alone and only 12% of them are currently active (i.e. they've published fresh content in the last 45 days).

• TL;DR:

  • Only 35% of newsletters make it to two issues

  • LinkedIn newsletter writers are slightly more likely to stick it out than Substack writers

  • The number of new Substack newsletters has increased 23x since 2019

  • Publishing 21 issues over 5 months increases your chances of success

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• I want to take a time-out to celebrate for myself my own milestones on the journey.

• Because we don’t fully appreciate how hard is it to grow an online product, a creator journey or the lessons learned in scaling a Newsletter.

• Can Substack become a full-time job? I hope this is helpful to someone out there.

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Friends,

Are you ready for the great flurry of following in the microcosm of Notes? Where which writer are nuding elbows with whom, might matter? Did you know all of this social graph is visible for all to see?

Each new small feature on Substack is now a sign of the totalitarian world to come and picked apart by the various mobs Substack has inherited from Twitter (apparently!). I was aghast when I saw the comments on this post.

• What is “Following” on Substack primer.

Now it seems on the app there is some forced nudges of sharing of contacts via Google/Facebook (I would not know I don’t use the app).

But I’ve noticed also the Follows are public, so I can see who important people on Substack are following and maybe follow them and maybe get in on some of their Notes with a comment.

Substack’s Social Graph Unhinged and Unveiled

You just need to add “/following” to someone’s ID to see publically who they follow, and gamified and curious as I am it’s sort of amusing as a mini-game:

It’s a bit of a cheat code you see, let’s say I wanted to follow more people from Investing corners of Substack, the former FinTwit gang, well I’d look up Linda who works with them and see who she follows:

https://substack.com/@linda/following

And voila! I have instant access to some of the most important people on Substack in Finance (actually Investing)! Now you get where I am going with this.

1. Our own Notes are not getting much traction

2. What about inserting ourselves into the conversions with bigger writers and Sub-celebrities?

3. What about category discovery? Simply find someone who works in a category or is a big-wig in a category and see who they are following.

Now let me talk to you about what I really discovered here, and sort of ramble a bit.

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Hey Welcome Back!

This is a straight up listicle related to SEO optimization for Newsletters. A lot of Newsletter owners think SEO is some technical jargon that doesn’t apply to them, that would be wrong or possibly incorrect.

• As you begin to turn on paid subscriptions you begin to realize how important SEO is on people actually finding your niche Newsletter. After all, isn’t being discovered the key to finding yoru 1000 true fans?

• A lot of my paid subscriptions on my flagship Newsletter actually come from Google, because they are aligned to what I write about. They pay without hesitation right on arrival.

• Here are some tips on improving that process:

1. Write high quality Content in your Niche

Your Newsletter should be loyal to the core topic or intersection of topics that your Newsletter represents. In covering those topics well, you will organically be mentioning the keywords you should be and starting to rank in them over the process of many months and a few years.

2. Get Shares from Sites Where Human Conversations are Really Happening

Creating content that gets more comments, shares and shares to platforms where comments are more likely to occur like LinkedIn, Reddit, Threads and X is really important. Ultimately Google will also look at the social relevance of what you are writing, and how much it has an impact on chatter around your niche.

3. Make a List of the Keywords related to your Niche

Having a map of the keywords and some more long-tail evergreen keywords related to your niche that you might want to rank in over time is a good idea. Doing research on SEO and keywords will give you a better chance of creating content that’s optimized for it.

4. Optimize the URL Stub and Write Good Short Subject Lines / Titles

Taking out connecting words on the URL stub is pretty important so you have a higher chance of ranking with the keywords in the Title. You can do this on the advanced SEO settings.

48 characters is not a lot to work with.

Take some time and deliberate on the best choices of Titles that are somewhat keeping SEO in mind and the keywords you want to rank in over time and what people might actually be search for around your topic.

5. Get Referrals from Platforms with a High Domain SEO Strength

You want to be getting clicks from places that already have really incredible domain SEO. These places have been around for years (decades often) and have millions of monthly active users. Places like LinkedIn, Reddit, Medium and so forth. Getting traffic from these places will help improve your SEO.

6. Link High Quality Sources and Articles

Having some links in your content is usually good for SEO, but take care that those links are recent, high quality, provide references or additional context to what you are talking about in your Newsletter.

7. Visual Design and MultiMedia

A lot of Newsletters now make their own infographics, charts, audio voice-overs and embed videos. All of this can drive more clicks to your Newsletters, especially the visual design elements of adding infographics, charts and visual stimuli that can be teasers on social media. All of this tells Google you are optimizing your content for the real environmental press of declining human attention.

So when you invest in designing an infographic, chart or visual (even a doodle), it actually tethers with your SEO strategy. Anything that benefits the “reader experience”, the RX, is actually improving your SEO and clickability of your content. Don’t sleep on this one.

8. Write Great Content in your Niche

It’s not enough to write great content or write in your niche, you need to put the two together. Do research on your top competitors and identify what they do well and how you could do it even better. Sometimes on a Newsletter this will mean writing a longer piece and doing more indepth research. Writing a higher quality product takes more time and research. Some the tradeoff on content quality vs. frequency is worth it in SEO terms too.

What if you wrote some of the best content on your niche available on the internet? You’d see the SEO bump. It’s that simple, but writing great content on a consistent level in a specific niche is relatively hard.

9. Create an SEO Strategy and Battle Plan for your Newsletter

Dive into SEO and create an SEO strategy for your Newsletter, identify the current traffic you get from Google and set a goal for how much you’d like to get in the next 3 months, 6 months and 1 year from now, and take concrete steps to get there and implement your plan. A lot of Newsletter writers imply don’t take the time to understand SEO optimized content well enough. Try to be the most professional ambasador to your niche that you can, and it will pay dividends in the future.

10. Consider Using A.I. to Improve your SEO

Considering using a tool like ChatGPT to come up with better Titles, subtitles, and subheads within the Newsletter post you write. Use A.I. to help you find related quotes to your topic, and other kinds of miscellaneous add-ons that you can use to create higher quality content. Use A.I. to help you determine the most important keywords to go after and use some SEO tools to determine long-tail keywords you also want to target. A mix of A.I. and SEO tools in your toolkit will enable you to be more focused with how you optimize your content for this important parametre.

11. Consider Having Sections or a Series in your Newsletter

Having Sections in your Newsletter or a multiple different Series of articles on a specific topic or keyword that is part of your core pillars of your Newsletter niche is rather important. This enables you to keep covering those things in a way that’s easy to read since it fits into a coherent narrative that your Newsletter represents. A series of posts on a common theme can obviously help you rank in keywords related to it.

12. Get Press to Coverage on your Newsletter and Insights

Getting links from major publications and the Press is rather important for the SEO benefits. A substack peer who was employed at a publication, it was Fast Company, randomly interviewed me and it got me a steady stream of traffic but also some SEO credibility. Substack has a nice guide on how you might consider reaching out to the Press. You are your own PR agency for your Newsletter, nobody else is going to do it for you.

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I go into quite a few more salient points below.

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Hey Friends,

When it comes to gamification, the way you setup your default categories and tags influences the writers and influencers you attract. I’ve monitored Substack’s growth right from the beginning and their category, tag and leadership board choices impacted the entire growth trajectory of the network.

I’m also going to cover Twitter Articles in this article. Which I find rather interesting.

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Hey Everyone,

Meta is bringing a trifecta of new products that I think will be potentially impactful for Creators like Substack writers. WhatsApp Channels, Instagram twitter clone Barcelona, and perhaps less relevant to us, the Instagram chatbot that will have at least 30 different personalities.

Since Substack Chat has a limited engagement due to low app usage among our readers, and other channels struggle to provide community for readers such as Facebook Groups, Slack, Discord or other tools, I think WhatsApp Channels might actually be an agnostic good bet with higher open-rates.

Google is also releasing News Showcase to more countries, which could impact some Substack writers as well. The other place to try to get positioned would be the Artifact news reader app.

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Whatsapp Channels

• Instagram Barcelona

• Instagram Chatbot

• Google News Showcase

So why could WhatsApp Channels be a big deal?

• On WhatsApp, Channels messages will show up in a new tab called Updates.

• Channels are a one-way broadcast tool for admins to send text, photos, videos, stickers, and polls.

• It’s for local updates and following creators.

• It could benefit Creators as a go-to way to reach more people and given Meta’s promise to “embed AI into everything”, it could be an upgrade from Discord and other community channel tools.

• This is mostly since Substack’s app and Chat and Notes is immature and only reaches a fraction of our readers.

Read the Channels Announcement Blog

WhatsApp was officially launched in November 2009 as a chat app service for iOS. 14 years later it has over 2 billion users globally. And is ranked among the most popular mobile messenger apps in the world.

While Email open rates average out at around 30%, SMS have much higher baseline open-rates. Word of mouth might also happen for writers more on an app like WhatsApp. Think also about the synergy it might have with the new Twitter clone by Meta, which has a code name Barcelona.

Meta starts and tries a lot of things that don’t work out though, particularly related to Instagram. But WhatsApp is an untapped oasis to be honest, always has been, especially in countries where its use is more tied to the social fabric of things.

“a private way to follow what matters”

Your Substack Newsletter audience really is like your private club, so I see some synergy here. If you are too lazy or unable to have a YouTube channel, this seems like a sound community investment.

• You can also get to a channel from invite links sent in chats, e-mail, or posted online.

• WhatsApp says it’s aspiring to build the most private broadcast service available.

• As a channel admin, your phone number and profile photo won’t be shown to followers. Likewise, following a channel won’t reveal your phone number to the admin or other followers. Who you decide to follow is your choice and it’s private.

• Notably, these are one-way conversations, so users won’t be able to reply to those messages.

• The company has plans to build payment and other monetization services into Channels, too.

So WhatsApp says they will bring Channels to more countries and the ability for anyone to create a channel over the coming months.

What’s happening in 2023 is more Creator tool are becoming more accessible. ConverKit building a “Creator network” is evidence of that, but that’s not free. WhatsApp has a long tradition of being free and easily accessible.

Channels is also a creator tool, to some extent, a place for those with an audience to “send text, photos, videos, stickers, and polls,” according to WhatsApp’s launch blog post. While I like the app Geneva, it doesn’t seem to have grown very well as a young startup. WhatsApp has had many years to mature with features and a huge global audience which means it’s valuable real-estate for a Creator, since the majority of people will have it already on their device.

WhatsApp is still Growing

As more people around the world join the internet, WhatsApp will be one of the first tools they are exposed to. With the going down of relevance of Facebook and Facebook Messenger, Instagram and especially WhatsApp might stand best the test of time.

Substack tries to do community features, but at the end of the day its app is just too small, clunky and even unappealing as a reader to be useful for Creators that want really engaged communities. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t do discussion threads, Notes, Chat and so forth. But it’s not going to attract new readers or anything.

Does your Niche Need a Channel?

WhatsApp Channels could be a top-of-the-funnel device and community interaction around your niche topic.

A WhatsApp Channel on your Newsletter’s topic could be the way people globally discover your Substack better. Think about it.

WhatsApp might be one of the better mobile places to reach an audience and engage with your existing audience.

WhatsApp could have higher “open-rates” than traditional Email Newsletters, which might have reached saturation in your niche topic already.

Google News Showcase is also relevant here. News Showcase product is a set of features and dedicated spaces within Google's search products that elevate high-quality information for readers. The products are meant to help deliver more traffic to the websites of participating publishers.

It remains to be seen if more Substacks will be seen in Google News, Google Showcase and important news related apps like Artifact. On Artifact, a pop-up appears to subscribe to the Newsletter, which means it could be really valuable for Substack writers.

The Twitter Clone Meta is building is also focusing on decentralization, which means it might have staying power on a more web-3 friendly internet with services like Bluesky Social, Mastodon and others that will eventually be connected in different ways.

Social Media is Bifurcating

Getting your LinkedIn posts to go more viral is already somewhat important if you want more traffic to your Newsletters. I’m noticing more influencers on Twitter also doing paid Subscriptions, though often these are people without a Substack to work with.

News is Changing online

Google Showcase was created as more countries began to introduce legislation that would require tech firms to pay for news. WhatsApp is quickly turning into something other than just a messaging app. It’s dipping its toes into media and the Creator Economy and in the macro scope of things, it’s really important and could be rather impactful.

LLMs will also change search less into a textbox and more into a conversation. This could drastically reduce how websites are found and how publications are read or discovered.

Peer to Peer (P2P) Ecosystems tag “Recommendations”

With recommendation ecosystems of peers, Newsletters on Substack, SparkLoop, beehiiv, ConvertKit, and Refind already have ways to increase their Newsletter audience faster and easier and with paid boosting better than ever before. Some of these feels more like paid acquisitions and aren’t right for most Substack writers, who are just building smaller publications and aren’t yet at that stage yet.

Some Newsletter writers swear by Telegram or Slack or Facebook Groups, but even Discord might not be the right channel for your audience. You might need to go with something more mainstream. WhatsApp broadcasts are more of a one-way street, but they can still potentially be a great source of on-boarding to for new readers to discover your Newsletter and niche topic better.

If feels like WhatsApp Channels will also learn from some of the mistakes of Instagram broadcasts in the past. They still need to flesh things out, but the core idea is good.

TikTok Series is an Important Feature

For Creators, perhaps even more impactful might be TikTok Series long-video behind paywalls.

Series, was first announced in March and only open to select creators. Participants can charge money for access to exclusive content. It’s like Twitter Subscriptions but better since obviously it’s geared to video and to people who have cultivated a significant TikTok following already. There are some Substack creators who fit this category actually.

internet princess

writing to make you feel crazier & writing to make you feel sane

By rayne fisher-quann

This is Internet Princess on TikTok.

So yeah, maybe one of these new products will work out for Creators:

• TikTok Series

• Twitter Subscriptions

• Meta’s Twitter clone: Barcelona

• WhatsApp Channels

Don’t spend all your time on Substack Chat, threads, Notes - it’s not going to necessarily reach many people or much of your audience, think bigger too! Think about how to patch Platforms together in the quilt that’s best for your niche and Newsletter topic and for your own habits of creativity and consumption.

I hope this helps and gives you a guide post to some of your influencer activities and personal brand management.

Your Newsletter doesn’t have to be an island in the wild, you can do commerce with the other natives in your pocket of the internet sea.

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Hey Everyone,

Substack isn’t just a Subscription Network.

• It’s a marketplace of ideas. A marketplace for inspiration and even entertainment. Your readers barter value for what you offer them.

• It’s also not a meritocracy. This is fairly evident when we consider price ranges per category in this marketplace.

While Americans find politics entertaining, sharply increasing paid conversion rates (on average) for Substack’s political Newsletters, there’s another category that deserves some attention. Incidentally this is where Substack is hiring in business development (Finance & culture).

No it’s not the throngs and hoards for culture Newsletter who must somehow earn a side gig on $5.

It’s the investing category of “Finance” Newsletters. By far if you wanted to earn a buck on Substack, you’d better have some investing advice to offer up! Hands down the niche to pick if you want to turn Newsletter writing into a thriving business.

So I wanted to illustrate this with a number that makes some sense. If we head over to the leaderboards we can see how much some of the top paid Newsletters change, and Investing Newsletters are incredible for this. Their ROI, return on investment is substantial.

That investing Newsletters can charge very often 6x what a Culture Newsletter can charge for a paid monthly subscription is also an example of how our society views the contributions of men and women differently. I’d argue, the majority of Investing Newsletters are written by men, and the majority of Culture Newsletters are written by women. I won’t speculate on why this is, but illustrates the kind of economies we’re building into the Creator Economy, the kinds of bias we have to deal with.

Substack of course is agnostic on price, it lets the market decide.

Even on how subscriptions are based on U.S. American dollars via Stripe, making access to these Newsletters highly skewed to the U.S. Middle class. Now I am not here to talk about inclusion, but I thought I’d point these things out. (And it does concern me on ethical grounds).

What should you charge for your Newsletter depends on its Niche ‘Category’

What I’m more interested in this post, is the average price Creators can charge for their category of work. This helps manage realistic expectations too about the ROI of having a Newsletter on Substack.

Finance

So what would constitute a baseline for an average price per category, is it the average of the top 10, top 20, top 25 or something else? Let’s look at Finance, which Substack really means Investing Newsletters.

In the top 5:

• We have a high of $59 a month , or $590 a year. To reach a liveable wage of $70,000 it would take just 118 monthly subs.

• And a low of $23 a month, or $230 a year. To reach a liveable wage of $70,000, it would take 304 monthly subs.

These strike me as highly attainable figures. What is $500 for information that could make you thousands of dollars? Right?

• Clearly Investing Newsletters have a significant advantage to lead to a full-time income on Substack.

• Now with calculator in hand, I’m going to tabulate the mean of the top 25 as an exercise:

In the Top 50 in Finance

The average monthly subscription would cost you $76.53.

To have a living wage of $70,000, you’d need just 91 paid subscribers.

That’s crazy!

• It also shows you how Substack isn’t just a subscription Network or a community tool for Creators, it’s really in reality, a marketplace.

The sooner you understand this, the faster you can build a media or solo-entrepreneur business around it. Your Substack income should just be one of the income streams of your business and supplement and act as a lead-generator for the rest of your digital products.

The top 50 Paid leaders in Finance, have an average monthly subscription of $76.5.

• If we assume the majority of culture writers on Substack are women and charge the basic fee of $5 a month, this means top Finance writers in this marketplace (of supply & demand), charge in the area of 15.4 times more.

• I’m not an expert in pay equity between men and women in the Creator economy, but it catches my attention. The marketplace definately does seem skewed to favor male creators, as a kind of default setting.

• The bias in the marketplace gets grandfathered to the Creator Economy, in ways we have to be honest about.

Top Categories in the Substack Marketplace by Average price

I have not seen data on this to date, though I have compiled it here before. For simplicity’s sake I’ll be tabulating only the top 25 for other categories.

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Due to the sensitivity of this data, it’s probably best I make this for paid readers. I’m a huge advocate of inclusion, accessibility and data transparency. I wouldn’t be crunching the numbers if I wasn’t.

• Inclusion

• Accessibility

• Data Transparency

• Platforms need to be creator-first

There are stark conclusions to draw from these numbers, my best conclusion is that a subscription network is just another marketplace with its own supply-demand rules and consumption economic patterns.

As someone that follows the stock markets as a “global consensus mechanism” of macro patterns, on some level I have to tolerate this as a “as is” mechanic of the ways things work for the time being. It’s obviously not going to be optimal for all participants or Newsletter niches.

But if you need to make this your full-time gig, these are important patterns to understand. The market-place default rules. How the game is slanted to certain topics, categories and Creators over others. We are not talking about a level playing field, meritocracy or a game where everybody wins.

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Hey Everyone,

There is an SEO practice I do almost instinctively and I’d like to share it with you all.

A few hours after a Newsletter goes out, your titles have already been indexed/crawled, but you can still type the Title in various search engines to give them a boost.

1. Copy the title of your article, and past it in search Engines.

2. If it doesn’t come up yet, add the + Substack

3. If it doesn’t show up yet, wait and repeat.

4. If it does show up, click on the link. Do this on PC web and mobile.

5. Always link your article on Reddit, to give it added real human discovery.

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What Search Engines to Prime?

So here are the Search Engines I like to cover.

1. Google U.S.

2. Google India

3. Bing

4. Duckduck

5. You.com

6. Perplexity

7. Neeva

8. Yahoo

9. Yandex

10. Reddit

11. Youtube

12. Twitter

13. LinkedIn

14. TikTok

15. Facebook

16. Baidu

17. Toutiao

Or on any other site where your work gets traffic that has a search.

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What I think this Does

• Gives them slightly better start

• Increases chances of them appearing in Google News and news aggregators like Artifact

• Gives them some human signal that someone is really looking for that exact match topic.

• The more you do this, the more you are learning also about what ranks and what sorts of keywords you are competing against/sources and so forth.

• I consider this very basic marketing SEO homework each time I hit publish, the day of.

• This is also you strengthening the domain name authority of Substack as a community member.

• SEO is a long-game but so is Newsletter development, it’s a marathon and being attentive to these sorts of details can help in the long-run.

• Especially if it’s a free article you want as much exposure as possible, including the number of shares on your article which on Substack is the most important metric for a post’s success that week.

• If it does especially well, you can break down the post into a Twitter thread or share it on Notes and BlueSky.

• Suffice to say that you want to be doing this for your Newsletter title often and see how different search engines are handling the authority of your personal brand.

• You want to signal to the Search engines (who are like distributors) that your content has authority, which it will slowly develop over time.

Thanks for reading!

Hey Everyone,

One of Substack’s key findings on its subscription network is that open-rates are correlated with conversion rates of free to paid readers. Creators, this is important!

How can we improve Open Rates?

• Write high quality content

• Create a personal connection to the reader (personal brand + community)

• Attract the right readers, those who are highly aligned to the topic

• Have highly engaging Titles and Subject lines (that are optimized for clicks)

• Use emojis in a creative way that promotes skimming (how people ‘actually read’)

• Have amazing visual branding and enough visual material: doodles, pictures, infographics, charts, embeds, etc…

• Write high quality highly shareable content, that’s not too frequent (nobody wants too much from one Publication in their stuffed inbox).

• Strive for original clever storytelling that is universally enjoyed, that keeps attracting the reader back.

Let’s think of this another way:

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Hey Everyone,

I read a couple of reports on Substack Pro, which got me thinking.

• My year as a Substack Pro

• Why Substack Is, and Isn't, the Right Platform for Gaming Journalism

Substack’s top writers do make the bulk of profits from the recommendation and Notes and Substack Network funnel.

Niches that are too defined (like the Gig Economy or Gaming) might be too specific for Substack’s audience and reader ecosystem maturity.

Ali and Jacob are incredible writers, and they essentially got grants from Substack, money that isn’t available to those of us who are investing our heart and soul in the platform. Since Substack didn’t publically even admit the existence of Substack Pro until 2021 (according to Ali), it makes me wonder about data transparency at this company.

Substack thought giving grants to viral journalists around things like anti-vaxxing was a good idea. But if we are serious (whether professional or not) journalists or ethical Creators, how do we rectify the wealth inequality and topic choice of Substack Pro and how it has set up a pyramid shaped ecosystem? I’ve never quite found a solution.

For every Casey Newton, there are other niches that don’t quite make it, it has little to do with the writer. It makes me wonder about the product-market fit of various categories on Substack. The gig economy or gaming are relatively unsmet sub-categories of technology.

Even Venture Capital, which you’d expect was thriving on Substack doesn’t have that many decent Newsletters outside of Newcomer and a few others. Tech should be thriving by now on Substack, but outside of A.I., I’d argue it really isn’t. This is I’d argue because Substack Pro has harvested mostly political journalists (from the little information I can gather).

Here is another run-down of a Substack Pro deal. My feeling is that Subtask Pro has generally created a two-tier system. When I interviewed Jacob after Substack Grow, it was obvious to me he knew how the experiment would turn out, his Podcast is awesome by the way. Getting a grant from Substack it turns out, it’s not always the best intrinsic motivation.

No these aren’t startups Substack is investing in. I could tell you on paper, which likely would and which likely wouldn’t succeed from day one. Any Chatbot could tell you, so why did they do it? Substack thinks network effect, mostly from Twitter, was an optimal way to grow. I’d argue that myth has basically been busted. Substack I’m sure has some data on Substack Pro, and what went right or wrong.

As someone living in poverty and who has struggled with other platforms, I’m really sensitive to the feeling of living in a pyramid scheme, but if you have incentives for different tiers of Creators, it becomes very problematic. Journalists have training and are talented, but they aren’t exactly irreplaceable (as the media industry is showing us now). Buzzfeed News shut down and Business Insider had to fire 10% of their staff, it’s likely just the beginning.

A Newsletter niche has to be specialized enough to be original and have a large enough TAM to grow quickly. Without “tens of thousands” of free subscribers, there’s little chance it will succeed, no matter how many followers you have on Twitter. As someone who has worked in marketing, this is so elementary.

Hamish even wrote an explanation of why Substack does Substack Pro, it only led me to more questions. Bro it’s not a “transparent business model” if Substack Pro is not made public. A two tier pyramid system is not congruent with Chris’s ideological brand narrative. I’m sure you get that on some level right? Writers aren’t total idiots.

In short, Substack is in financial trouble because they over-invested in this sort of marketing, the pay to play and pay to win variety. They burned cash to grow, thinking this was the best way to do it.

We started experimenting with advances, paying a small number of writers sums ranging from $10,000 to $30,000 to cover them for a few months as they got established on Substack. They paid back the money over time through a revenue-sharing agreement. We also introduced a fellowship program, where, over two cohorts, we offered writers coaching, business advice, and more cash advances. - Hamish (read)

I don’t know the hit rate of Substack Pro, it must have been high in the political category where the bulk of Substack’s revenue come from.

A Costly Risky Approach to Marketing

Hamish continues:

The advances worked well. They helped writers start high-quality and profitable publications beloved by their readers. And they gave us confidence that we could invest even more deeply in writers in a way that would help both them and us. 

But the advances also had limitations. On a per-deal basis, we could never really do better than break-even. A Substack advance was effectively an interest-free loan that would never be paid back if a publication failed.

By not creating a Gaming sector for Jacob, they basically set him up for failure (my categories of Future, A.I. and Venture Capital to this day don’t even have their own categories in the leaderboards.)

Jacob wrote:

For starters, there’s not a gaming section on Substack’s homepage or its explore page. To find my work, there’s a few ways you get here….

For early Substack Pro deals, they were always at the top of the leaderboards, so they grew by virtue of the social proof signalling. Today, they make millions. Subtack is perhaps 3-6 years from having liveable middle class. But they are pretending that they are 1-2 years from it. As someone who has grinded up the ladder by myself, I take offense.

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Let’s go into some more controversial details, where I can feel a bit more free to have my own opinions on this.

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Hey Guys,

While some creators increased paid subs revenue by 19% or more with Substack Chat, that’s more internal to your private audience, Substack Notes is coming. Upvote them on Product Hunt here.

Subsack says it’s building a system that fosters deep connections and quality over shallow engagement and dopamine hacks. We turned away from advertising and the attention economy and toward subscriptions and direct relationships.

But is a Note in Substack’s app really a direct relationship or a top-of-the-funnel impressions juicer for shorter attention spans? It certainly has nothing in reality to do with Twitter.

Though Twitter Notes were supposed to offer long-form content on Twitter, I’m not sure where we stand with that. I’m in the camp that Twitter will go bankrupt in three to eight months in 2023 from now April, 2023. That is, there’s a 75% probability it won’t last the year. Twitter could be gone from the internet well before TikTok gets banned, if it ever will.

GenZ is reinventing what the Creator Economy means to them. So how do legacy networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook even survive the onslaught of mobile video and others more immersive forms of communications and entertainment? Substack is neither here nor there.

Substack can raise $7.2 million on WeFunder (legally it can only take $5 million a year), but can it build an app? Substack Chat did not make Substack’s app more useable or sticky. So what now? Trying to kill Twitter seems like low hanging fruit. Twitter has lost the majority of its advertisers and its paid subs hasn’t worked at all.

So is the Substack Notes to Tweet analogy even true? Well, Substack announced a new Notes feature on April 5th, 2023. It apparently closely resembles Twitter in its design, and, much like “tweeting,” allows users to share posts, images, and ideas. It also has a “restack” feature that allows for easily resharing of posts, the same as a retweet. It keeps count of “likes” and comments too.

Silicon Valley media coverage of Notes basically goes like this:

Substack’s new short-form ‘Notes’ feed looks a lot like Twitter

I was hesitant myself to use Substack chat, based on what I was seeing. But if I’m forced to do chat and notes, it’s just “more work” for me as a Creator. Not all of us will be podcasters, entertainers and jugglers of digital dopamine, some of us just want to make it on our own terms, as a writer.

In the mid 2020s that may no longer be possible.

Substack introduced Chat in November, 2022. Perhaps not one of their better product features.

On Substack

Introducing Substack Chat

Watch now (47 sec) | Today we are launching Chat, a new space for writers and creators to host conversations with their subscribers. Chat is a community space reimagined specifically for writers and creators— it’s like having your own private social network where you make the rules. Writers set the topic and the tone for every discussion, and can turn the feature on or off a…

Read more

3 years ago · 292 likes · 173 comments

I was concerned seeing some of the comments about Notes yesterday and today:

On Substack

Introducing Substack Notes

We started Substack in 2017 because we wanted the internet to be better for writers and readers. We were dismayed with the clickbait and content farms, the listicles and liars, the cheap outrage and culture wars. We thought there could be something better if writers and readers were given more control and treated as a higher priority than advertisers, a…

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3 years ago · 1161 likes · 546 comments · Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best, and Jairaj Sethi

Mobile is hard guys, especially when you lack of a real marketing budget like Subsack has.

They mostly promote on Twitter, not even LinkedIn. They mostly focus on community, not marketing. They mostly rely on their 17k paid creators to “refer traffic” to their platform, then spread this traffic via their recommendation engine.

Somehow they haven’t implemented referral systems where Creators can incentivise their readers to refer others in a very effective way.

I love Substack, but this isn’t the best of both worlds.

They attribute Ads to what is toxic about social media, but in this they are both right and wrong. They seem to be making a dig at Medium when they wrote:

When Substack is mostly known for political clickbait, misinformation and cheap culture war propaganda, it really makes me pause. I need Substack to welcome all writers, not just culture writers. I write in the Technology category, and my folk are only starting to build on Substack. (The way Substack is going with news and tech, it’s basically gifting these categories to the competing beehiiv). Culture eh?

I want Substack to be an economic engine for writers, not culture or entertainment. To call it an economic engine for culture, is a very subjective arbitrary statement. Does Substack enrich my cultural understand and reading IQ? Can I find great news on the platform? I would pay for great news. So do Millennials and GenZ.

However Substack is not known for factual news. It’s known for dramatic political writing and exaggerated op-eds that are highly speculative. Hey, if that’s your thing! In the U.S., they hold politics close to their bosom, in most other places in the world we couldn’t’ care less.

Without caring about breaking news and trending world events, how can Substack even be compared to Twitter? It makes no sense.

1. The company seems to agree that the new feature looks similar to Twitter, as Substack noted in its announcement post that Notes “may look like familiar social media feeds.” However, Substack argues that Notes differs from traditional social media feeds because it doesn’t run on ads.

2. “The lifeblood of an ad-based social media feed is attention,” the company wrote in a blog post. “By contrast, the lifeblood of a subscription network is the money paid to people who are doing great work within it.

No, the competition for attention does corrupt entirely into clickbait, and Substack has not been different just by not incorporation Ads. If Substack wants to play an ideological card, at least be honest. I say this because I grew up on Medium where the ideological playbook was nearly exactly the same. I spent years investing in a false promise, that turned out to be a gimmick.

Substack Notes Has To Work

But Substack may not have the luxury of listening to its customers, writers and readers at this stage in its evolution. The stakes of its survival are too high.

Substack Tweeted its Notes feature yesterday. On the only platform it’s ever done actual marketing, Twitter.

If I’m on a platform that claims to be a pure-play paid subs approach, do I need to be an entertainer just to survive and thrive? Does Substack need to have real app features beyond just great writing to grow? In this day and age of mobile video competition for attention, pretty much.

By growing its audience from politics on Twitter, Substack is basically tied to laws of clickbait that are all-corrupting. As a humble writer attempting to make a living on Substack, I’m tied to these norms too.

I’m forced to do a Sponsored Ads/paid subs approach just to make anything approximating a working wage. Why wouldn’t Substack try to empower me, it’s customer and marketing associate? By making the false claim that Ads are what makes social media toxic, I am being penalized. I have to look out for myself in how I grow an Email list and peddle my value to potential advertisers off-platform. There is a deep dichotomy here in the launch of Substack Notes.

The Philosophy is Idealistic but not Practical

TechCrunch tries to contextualize it as such: Here, people get rewarded for respecting the trust and attention of their audiences. The ultimate goal on this platform is to convert casual readers into paying subscribers. In this system, the vast majority of the financial rewards go to the creators of the content.”

Even though Substack Boost has helped me grow my paid subs, I don’t pray at the altar of this kind of idealism, because I’ve seen it fail too often in the past, well before Substack came to my town.

If I can earn a modest living after three years of writing a Newsletter, what is the price of my loyalty to the platform? I’m the sole breadwinner of my family guys. The livelihood of real people is at stake.

There are more than 35 million active subscriptions to writers on Substack, including more than 2 million paid subscriptions. There are just 17k paid writers on Substack after five years. The churn rate for Creators is high, those that stick around may get rewarded by the Substack Network.

I’m in my 40s, do I have the ambition to gamble in this kind of game? I wonder how others feel about it. From LinkedIn, Twitter to Medium the gamification and declining ROI is noticeable as the internet continues to evolve. If Substack is mostly for the top 1%, if I’m not creating ROI for engineers or from a tech journalism background, do I have a chance?

Substack is launching a new feature that actually is a lot like other social media feeds: Notes.

After spending years being critical of social media, Substack is trying to inherit it on its own terms.

Twitter or Reddit aren’t toxic places because they have the occasional Ads, bro.

Notes feature will allow Newsletter Creators to be set free: it will "give them the power to recommend almost anything — including posts, quotes, comments, images, links, and ideas," co-founders Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi wrote in the announcement. The feature will be available to all users in the coming days.

You know the things that would set me free? More diversity of revenue streams. NOT relying on just paid subs that scale very slowly. Too slowly for most to even keep up writing Newsletters.

Even misinformation at scale, I can somehow accept. But limiting the revenue of your own customers and creators? That’s just bad leadership. It’s poor business sense. It doesn’t make you different, limiting their revenue is not a unique selling point (USP).

Because what makes social media toxic is complicated and goes well beyond the competition of Ads.

Substack also argues that Notes won’t feel like traditional social media, and that the goal with the new product is not to create a “perfectly sanitized information environment,” but to allow for constructive discussion where there is enough common ground to seek understanding “while holding onto the worthwhile tension needed for great art and new ideas.” In other words, they won’t have any content moderation. They are frankly way too poor to do content moderation at scale. Which you know, doesn’t even bother me.

Anti-vaccine conspiracies just isn’t for everyone. Anti Trans commentary is not for everyone. Hyping what’s trending on Twitter isn’t my cup of tea, but maybe it is yours.

What if Twitter Goes Bankrupt

Along with Post News, Mastodon and so many others, where will Twitter users go if Twitter dies, which appears highly likely in 2024? Substack Notes in this context makes sense.

If Creators are in a battle for attention, platforms are in a battle for users. Substack has room for improvement, it needs to be opportunistic. This isn’t a cultural revolution, this is business.

I’m all in on Substack, and sure I wouldn’t mind if it got some of Twitter’s users but it needs to get better at what I do, covering the actual world and the news. That’s what makes Twitter so special, breaking-news and watching it on a global scale.

"Our goal is to foster conversations that inspire, enlighten, and entertain, while giving writers a powerful growth channel as these interactions find new audiences," Best, McKenzie, and Sethi wrote

Guys this is more than just entertainment, I want news that is trustworthy and indie journalists who take it seriously, not just dramatizing one part of the story! I’ve been reading subjective op-eds on Medium for years and it never really goes far into the truth. The subjective route is adolescent, at best. I also want reliable information, sources I can trust.

Mechanics of Notes

1. Notes appear in their own dedicated tab, and the feed looks pretty similar to what you might see on Twitter or other social media platforms.

2. On individual posts, for example, you can see familiar icons for likes, replies, and reshares (which Substack will be calling “restacks”).

3. The character limit on Notes is not yet public.

4. The Notes tab also has two feeds separating “Home” and “Subscribed.” The Home feed will show content from sources across your “extended Substack network,” according to Tobin, while Subscribed will show content from “a smaller universe of sources tied to your subscriptions.”

5. With Substack Chat, Subscribed and Home Notes is going to get a bit confusing.

What is the Goal of Notes?

To my understanding, Notes is a way to create more buzz and impressions at the top of the funnel through a teaser post of content.

“Here, people get rewarded for respecting the trust and attention of their audiences,” they write. “The ultimate goal on this platform is to convert casual readers into paying subscribers.”

All of this being said, Substack may be well positioned to capture some people who are looking for a new place to post, especially if those people want to build a subscription business. Who would not want a side income or a place that connects the dots with their existing:

• Podcast

• YouTube channel

• Books or Ebooks

• Courses

• Other Creator activities (.e.g. IG, TikTok, Snap, etc…)

Substack is a stack that isn’t an all-in-one, you really do need to connect it with other things you are doing online, even if that’s just LinkedIn and Twitter. Not everyone wants to be a YouTube Creator or sell Sponsored Ads in their Newsletters, but those that do, obviously have an advantage to scale their Newsletters and their Creator brand online as a media business.

TechCrunch makes a rather half-hearted argument stating that:

It’s worth noting that with Notes, Substack is not only taking on Twitter, where many back-and-forth threaded discussions between writers and readers already take place, but also other online communities where writers have been building out networks of their own, like Discord, Slack and Telegram.

That’s a pretty laughable argument and simply is not true. Nobody uses Substack as an alternative to Discord, Slack, Telegram, Snap or WhatsApp.

Finally Substack said this about Notes:

Notes is designed to drive discovery across Substack (think top of the funnel). But while Recommendations lets writers promote publications, Notes will give them the ability to recommend almost anything—including posts, quotes, comments, images, and links. Our goal is to foster conversations that inspire, enlighten, and entertain, while giving writers a powerful growth channel as these interactions find new audiences. 

If I’m a Creator on Substack who wants to grow faster, this means not doing Notes is non-negotiable for me.

I don’t have high hopes, I just want Substack to be more than a ponzi scheme for the top Creators (the top 5 of each category earn the lion’s share of all revenue).

The company recently revealed that readers have paid writers more than $300 million through Substack, and that the platform now has more than 35 million active subscriptions, including two million paid subscriptions. Substack also revealed that more than 17,000 writers are earning money on Substack, with the top 10 publishers on Substack collectively making more than $25 million annually. Don’t even get me started on whether its community funding round is a great way to raise capital or exploits its uniquely flawed ideology for profit.

I love Substack, but it needs to do better in audience growth, ideological leadership and actually supporting Creators and writers survive and thrive. If only it actually put the Creator first, and not its own rigid and somewhat outdated ideological foundation which is a superficial way of seeing the future of the internet.

Now I have to put on my Twitter hat, and grow some entertainment balls. While creating clickbait on Substack. See you around.

Hey Everyone,

Lately for myself I’ve been thinking about the intersection of conversion optimization and community in a Newsletter readership.

Signs of Community

• Comments on articles

• Interaction in dialogue threads and Substack Chat

• Your articles get shared on Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc…

• Your Readers hit REPLY on your Emails and you get valuable information from it

• You get comments on social media posts that link back to your articles

Value-Ads on Newsletter Platforms

• Podcast interviews

• Asking your audience what they want you to cover

• Seminars (Zoom or calls recorded sent to Paid subscribers as unlisted YouTube)

• Workshops (e.g. Gumroad) or Courses (e.g. Thinkific)

• Video rants (Substack)

• Video content: YouTube Shorts, TikTok and YouTube Channels

• Polls: on Substack or somewhere like a LinkedIn or Twitter post.

The big reveal for me was recently when Substack said their in App Chats were coming to desktop. So from a November 2022, launch of Chat to a Desktop launch in March, 2023 they have had time to refine the product based on feedback. That’s when you want to join it, after the Beta testing.

So I’m struggling with “conversion optimization”, getting free readers to become paid readers. So the deal-breaker for me is that Substack says creators that do two or more Chats earn 19% more! Guys that’s a lot of potential revenue for a bit of extra nudging of free readers.

Substack Chat to me is like an augmentation of dialogue threads, which were already fairly good for inciting interaction especially if your content pushes buttons or has a sentimental or communal aspect.

• You can read the Chats you follow now on desk here.

• You can set your paid or free readers to be able to create discussions on Substack Chat. (more customization).

• Reading community, I myself have elected to create a Reddit for my Newsletter that’s my own version of a value-add (I cover A.I. news).

You always want to be improving on iterations of what community might mean to your Newsletter growth and revenue generation. Ultimately the more you give, the more the incentive for your free readers to convert to paid subscribers will be. Although this will also depend on your niche, so don’t take it personally if your conversion rates are lower than others.

My impression is that political Newsletter have the highest conversion rates, followed by investing Newsletters. Substack has some kind of bias in the kinds of Creators it attracts which has to do with how they scaled their product.

For actual journalism around news, conversion rates tend to be way lower. So you want to pick a niche for your Newsletter with enough emotional and communal (a cause) content that touches people personally. Otherwise it may be difficult to build a profitable side gig.

The Social Media Great Death - Twitter and TikTok Could be on their Last Legs

Twitter has lost over 40% of its advertising revenue and its Paid subscriptions have not gone well, thus I believe Twitter may actually fail in the 2023 to 2026 period. TikTok is about 65% likely to get banned in the same period. This means you want to be investing in places that are more secure like YouTube, LinkedIn and Substack.

For your Newsletter to be fortified to churn, you want to produce great community experiences for readers and not just great reading experiences. This means eliciting:

• Comments

• Shares

• Substack Chats

• Dialogue Threads

• Private Email Replies

Basically anything that improves time on site on your Newsletter, anything that creates more immersion.

The whole only idea of why Substack is better than beehiiv comes down to fundamentally two things, a laser focus on paid subs and a product emphasis on community development.

Thus if you happen to be on Substack, you want to double-down on these two things, to get the maximum out of the effort and creativity you are putting in.

Subscribe now

Substack Improves Chat

• Substack announced in March, 2023 that it’s expanding the controls regarding who can start new conversations in a Substack. Publishers can now choose to give all subscribers, only paid subscribers or only founding members the power to start a chat.

• Substack notes that writers who have hosted two or more chats on Substack are earning 19% more annual revenue than those who have not (from their PR with TechCrunch).

Read Introducing Substack Chat

Community also Means Collaboration

• Many Substack Creators create Twitter audio events with other creators.

• Doing guest posts and appearing on Podcasts is another way to get known

• Calling others to do guest posts on your Newsletter is also great

• Interviewing others in your space on your Podcast

• And of course, recommending the Newsletters of your peers so you can boost targeted traffic (while also doing this on beehiiv to grow your list faster is a no-brainer).

• Community to me therefore means immersion, iteration and diversification.

You may find out that Podcasting is more trouble than its worth, so you will go back to interacting via text and thus this makes Substack Chat (now that’s it’s on a desktop) worth it to begin once your free list is big enough to warrant the added investment.

If for example you are doubling down on conversion optimization like I am, then perfecting your Substack Chat is crucial. Observer how others are using the product feature.

Chat is a community space reimagined specifically for writers and creators— it’s like having your own private social network where you make the rules. Writers set the topic and the tone for every discussion, and can turn the feature on or off at any tim - Substack

As popular as the Substack for text called Subtext is becoming, Substack Chat is best viewed on mobile. That instant chat feel that feeds real debates and dialogues can be a valuable reason why a new reader keeps coming back to your Newsletter. It’s not all about just reading.

A lot of popular Substack writers build a community where access to people with the same interests is a huge incentive to join. Think about it, people want to discover good content but also people like them. People who have the same interests, values, passions and causes they follow.

Read this to see how to get started (watch the video).

I was surprised to see the 19% boost to Creators who use it, as for me that’s a significant amount. As a reader I find the feature (very spammy) a bit intense. As a writer I’m worried that it will be draining to start, but I’m willing to try it even in moderation. I’m already a high-frequency writer that resembles more of a blogger than a Newsletter writer.

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The Last Resort - Community Building is Non-negotiable

But as conversion slows down and churn is rather high, I see it has a no-choice option now. To survive as a Newsletter Creator, you have to do community. It’s non-negotiable. Especially if you are serious about this stuff. You have to give to get in this Universe.

I don’t see Substack Chat as taking on Twitter or Discord, but it’s yet another layer that we should be experimenting with. A lot of comments on Substack are tied to how well you are doing on Twitter, which isn’t ideal. Consider that realistically Twitter could fail as it’s lost a lot of momentum and is barely worth the $20 Billion Elon Musk says it is worth.

At the end of the day, people are lonely. They aren’t just looking for information.

We aren’t just educators, entertaining but connectors. That’s our job guys.

We connect people with inspiration, ideas and community. That’s the best case scenario.

Many of the most successful Substack Creators are just examples of people who have built incredible Communities, look around if you don’t believe me. You can find dozens of examples of how this is true.

Now in 2023, I think Substack Chat is ready to be adopted more by Creators. It’s more of a boost to revenue it looks like than creating a Podcast, as far as I can tell. Granted, it’s a lot less work. (It does look like a grind though). A grind I can manage on desktop (I’m old).

Another crazy idea I’m interesting in is creating a Private Substack for your paid subscribers. Substack recently introduced Private Substacks, which are publications that you can host alone or readers can request to subscribe to read your posts. I like the idea of tiers and exclusive clubs. After all we put a lot of work into this.

• Creating Live-events e.g. Twitter audio or a YouTube or TikTok Live seem like a good idea to me to develop rapport with readers and tap into larger audiences.

• Doing Substack video and YouTube Shorts for other kinds of mobile video immersion also makes sense to me.

So a writer can choose to diversify into video and community, and eventually they will have to just to survive. We have to keep up with digital trends. I was previously skeptical about Substack Chat (because I write so many Newsletters), but now I need to double down on it as well.

19% more revenue is a deal-breaker.

Substack said:

As the quality of writing on Substack has blossomed and comments sections lit up with intelligent discussions, subscriber communities began to take shape. Some enterprising writers have taken matters into their own hands, hacking together integrations with Discord, Slack, and Telegram to cultivate communities of supporters. 

I’ve started a Pallet, and that’s definately a communal thing. I’ve also started a LinkedIn Group related to my Pallet. Even having your Newsletter on Paved, is a way to show that you are serious about the business aspect of your Substack content. Don’t take my word for it though, I’ve only been doing this a little over a year. Why not try yourself.

Substack on Chat

As of March 15, 2023 Chat is also available on the web. For the most up to date guidance on getting started with Chat, visit our guide to Substack Chat.

4 key steps to launching and succeeding with your chat:

1. Get the Substack app

2. Start your first chat thread

3. Announce Chat to your readers via email—the most important step!

4. Keep the conversation going

Substack Chat could be fun! What do you think?

Leave a comment

Hey Everyone,

Please go into your Settings and turn on Substack Boost.

This will enable Substack automation to help convert free to paid subscribers for your Newsletter.

I am very happy Substack acquired Yem (September 30th, 2022), that had worked with some of Substack’s biggest players to help show paid subs are a more scalable business model than Sponsored Ads or any other hybrid model.

This is important for Substack that must compete with the likes of Ghost, beehiiv and LinkedIn Newsletters, which have automated ways to increase signups of new readers in their global network.

In my humble experience, Yem’s expertise is now spilling over into Substack’s own recommendation engine, the two are combining to form an ability to be powerful catalysts for Substack’s best feature that is growing an audience automatically in the Substack Network.

You can find additional tips here. So what does all of this mean? It means the paid subscription model is legit for more and more Newsletter Creators on Substack in early 2023 and should only get better.

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This is a testament to Substack’s product and growth team. But it’s also a testament to a new kind of internet, one that’s more peer driven and less algorithm and Ad driven. Substack is thus amplifying network effect at scale. I was so impressed with this, I even made a dedicated YouTube channel (amateur) about it.

This means that in early, 2023, it’s not just recommendations that are working well, it’s how Substack Boost can leverage conversion optimization, churn reduction and other somewhat more secret dynamics in the backend.

When you turn on Substack Boost, you are literally getting super-powers to help build a paid audience, including automated discounts, sign-up expiration offers and many other things.

And it really is an autopilot for Newsletter Creators, who can then focus on the important things like:

• Writing

• Building Community

• Offering immersive value to paid subscribers

• Advanced offersing for premium readers including Webinars, Podcasts, Voice-overs and one-on-one consultations.

Four months ago Substack itself described Substack Boost as follows:

Introducing Boost: Growth on autopilot

Put the Substack team’s data and expertise to work for your publication. Substack Boost will automatically show discounts and special offers at the right moment to maximize your revenue. Turn on Substack Boost — it’s completely free to use and requires no time to set up or manage.

and

Tell me more…

Growing a Substack publication isn’t all on your shoulders. The Substack team is building tools that will grow your Substack on auto-pilot so you can focus on the hard part: the writing itself.

Boost is our most comprehensive investment to date in helping writers accelerate their businesses. For writers who opt into Boost, we’ll work in the background to optimize your revenue by determining the most opportune times to offer a particular subscriber a special offer, including free trials, discounts on paid subscriptions, gift subscriptions, or the likes. These upsell efforts require no time from the writer to manage or implement – and you can opt out at any time.

Once you turn on Boost, we’ll automatically use special offers at just the right moments to maximize your earnings. For example, we may use Boost to optimize free to paid conversion on promotional surfaces and to help prevent subscribers from churning.

So while beehiiv is very innovative with more traditional ESP options and an Ad network, Substack is literally proving that paid subs are more scalable with more and more case studies in diverse categories.

When you use Substack Boost you can focus instead on creative things, while they are doing its best work you that can over many months and years lead to incredible growth, as I’ve known experienced a little bit just in my beginnings as a new Newsletter Creator.

The customer lifetime value of a paid subscription on Substack is a lot more than you think, just look at your Stripe accounts and make use of their new apps.

Do more with Stripe by using Stripe Apps to boost your productivity and streamline your workflows. Apps work well with Stripe Billing for advanced analytics to run your business with more clarity directly within Stripe.

Get insights on your subscriptions.

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Get your latest customer and product metrics.

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Missing MRR Movements? Track your key subscription metrics on Stripe.

Analytics by Syft

Graphs, analytics, benchmarks, and reports for subscription and product businesses.

Retain and upsell your customers.

Churnkey

Get revenue and cancellation insights, such as the top reasons for customer cancellations.

Stunning

Failed payment recovery stats and tools right from your Stripe Dashboard.

Profitwell Health Scores

Pinpoint customers likely to churn or upsell based on MRR and engagement data.

Visit the Stripe App Marketplace

So the advantage of being integrated with Stripe, where we are paying 3-6%, usually closer to 6% depending on the combination of our monthly and yearly subs, we can just assume we are making about $0.84 on the dollar, as a convenient round-up.

So given how prolific Substack Boost is and recommendations (including writer referrals which you shouldn’t sleep on), I’m more than happy to give 16% of revenue to both of these companies.

Even people who have a day job of attacking Coms, can make a good side gig on Substack. How to grow your Newsletter audience is no longer as mysterious as it once was, and it’s becoming free. Substack is free to start and that’s an important thing for places like India, where there are so many new solo entrepreneurs. To democratize the Newsletter Creator economy, I like Substack since it’s free and its stack is improving on a weekly and monthly basis.

Substack Boost is a powerful growth engine to:

• Help convert free to paid subscribers

• Help reduce churn of new readers

• Help reduce churn of paying subscribers

• Help automate discounts and A/B test various growth campaigns

• Help Substack Newsletters gain more revenue automatically.

That is at least how I see Substack Boost. Yem had a lot of experience with Substack’s 2021 and 2022 pioneers. Given the pedigree of Substack’s engineers and product team, I think 2023 and 2024 will continue to be big years for them as Revue and other competitors failed. With a Twitter exodus and that we are trusting the News less and less each year, Substack is a huge beneficiary of those macro trends.

Growing a free audience with peer recommendations is great, but it would be meaningless if the free to paid conversion failed or didn’t scale. It’s Substack’s job to make sure their focus on paid subscriptions proves scale, time and time again until that Creator that’s getting boosted, is you.

My feeling after a year of writing on Substack is that paid subs begins to scale faster than Ads or hybrid models after the $50,000 ARR revenue mark. It’s at that point where you “afford to worry less” about diversified revenue as a full-time Newsletter Creator. Substack Boost, is at the center of that pivot, according to my own personal data on the subject.

What do you think about Substack Boost?

Leave a comment

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Substack Has More Ways to put Growth on Autopilot

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Hey Everyone,

So I’ve been watching and learning and listening.

I have some reads for you today.

• The best Newsletter for Newsletter creators I have found to date is this one.

• Signup for the Newsletter by Who Sponsors Stuff. Subscribe here. Their links have proven invaluable!

• Read this latest primer by a former Substack employee and PR superstar, here.

• Or click on this tweet:

For Motivation I found this so lovely:

I’ve been randomly talking to myself, a lot. I don’t have a proper mic or a video camera, but if you can overlook that poor production quality, you might find some use in what I’m trying to say.

Substack Creator Tips YouTube Vlog - Covering all things Substack

• Peer Recommendation Economy

• How to grow a Newsletter

• My own experiences going Paid

• How I made $18,000 in ARR in my first year.

How to Convert Free to Paid Readers on Substack Newsletters?

Read more

Hey Everyone,

In 2023, we’ll see more Creators pivot into having a Substack, and I wanted to create a super-thread about it and here it is, feel free to browse through it for some context, coverage and collections.

I’m just a nobody on Twitter, but if you are thinking of building a niche, there’s increasing reasons to do so.

Super Thread (see the comments)

1. The Recommendation Feature of Substack (April, 2022)

Changed everything for first-comer Substacks.

2. Niche Creators ride current event waves

3. A Newsletter is a Minimum Viable Product

4. Book Authors are making Substacks and Substack Creators are Becoming Writers and Starting YouTubes

5. Fiction Writers are finding their 1000 True Fans

6. TikTok and YouTube Influencers are Building Monetization Streams on Substack

7. Publishing is Dead, but Serializing your Books online is Going Strong and things like BookTok

8. Substack Writers also Start Podcasts, and sometimes it goes well:

9. Politician Writers can build Media Empires out of Substack. Don’t underestimate this trend. The Dispatch and TFP are’t unique.

10. As Audiences Mistrust Mainstream Media more, they are turning to Independent Voices

11. More Women and Female Independent Voices are thriving as Solo Entrepreneurs

There are about 30 other topics on the thread.

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