How to get a Reader for a Paid Subscription on Substack?

free vs. paid - some thoughts.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Hello Everyone,

I read Substack’s contribution to How to motivate readers to upgrade their subscription article on On Substack, with great interest.

Some things to keep in mind:

• Free content grows Newsletters the fastest

• There are alternative business models besides paid subscribers (that Substack emphasizes)

• Your open rate correlates to your paid conversion rate.

• Peer recommendations are a cheat-code to Substack’s Network effect accelerator

The “approaches” Substack outlines really depend more on the stage of your Newsletter’s growth and the category, than they readily imply.

Substack maintains a generic “everyone is different” approach to this problem: how to get reader to pay for a subscription. This diverse rapid fire approach to solutions becomes highly diffuse and not very actionable. (Namely since you need a lot of free subscribers to turn paid conversions into a thing!)

Sadly for many Creators this is not very helpful, but the safe approach if they are unwilling to share the data (e.g. conversion rates of free to paid) on the 5-years of case studies Substack themselves have.

Substack’s approaches seems to be skewed to ideology, creating communities and vague celebration of their case study champions.

I’m interested to know what happens to writers once they realize these aren’t good baselines for performance on the platform?

However in the real world, business models Creators must think about is a reality that is bigger than Substack’s particular approach and philosophical bias. Indeed how the startup makes the majority of its revenue is completely independent to the writer’s workshop vibe it portrays.

We don’t live in an echo-bubble of one platform, nor should we as Creators rely on one single approach to making money. Substack’s own infatuation with Twitter is yet another problem in how it’s mined many of its case study champions.

Substack remarks:

There is no secret recipe of what to put behind the paywall to convert free readers to paid subscribers. Writers have found success with a variety of approaches, including offering everything for free and putting everything behind a paywall. 

For many Creators, this is frustratingly vague and branded advice. In reality, the stage of your newsletter’s growth, the scale, the category and your personality will dictate not just which approaches you will use, but which approaches are optimal.

• Stage of Newsletter

• Is free subscriber growth or paid monetization the priority?

• Choosing the right value proposition and price for your Newsletter category

• Finding diversified streams of revenue outside of just paid subscriptions

Homework

1. Drafting a pitch, pivoting the pitch depending on the growth stage of your Newsletter

2. Drafting tailored special offers (e.g. discounts), pivoting special offers and A/B testing them for conversion

3. Drafting Yem-like conversation-optimization strategies, drip campaigns, tiered content.

4. Keeping your open-rate high with the best quality work that’s discoverable, e.g. writing “hits” in your category and sharing them best to scale your free subscribers

5. Acquiring social proof, including testimonials, writing Newsletter launch, origin story and anniversary posts - on regular basis and optimizing them

6. Growing your free subscriber list as fast as possible (this is more important than your pitch by many degrees)

Substack writes about Paid conversion as if Email marketing was a writer’s workshop course, but it’s not. You cannot replace best practices of Email marketing with writing course material or ideological frameworks of where your Newsletter fall such as:

For me, this doesn’t give you tangible advice or actionable insights. Edutainment for a mobile attention spans is about intersectional writing, not being good at just one of these areas.

• Some “pitches”, “special offers” and value props will be optimized for certain categories, i.e. Finance or Fiction or a Book club, etc.…

• What some groups of audiences find valuable may differ vastly on category topic, and not the philosophical incentive.

• If I’m reading an investing crypto Newsletter, as a reader I may be looking for tips on making money and thus willing to spend $30 or $50 on a monthly sub.

• For a cultural Newsletter, my incentives might be quite different.

• It’s difficult to work with Substack’s info since they don't provide data and analytics baselines for our category nor is it practical to obtain our own in their dashboard.

The Internet is Being Disrupted

How does a Creator doing Newsletters compete against a shrinking mobile attention span and increasingly long, short video and audio?

It’s not even video taking up the majority of mobile attention, it’s now A.I. generated content. So how do Substack writers combat the digital trend?

If Substack were any indication, it’s by hijacking sentiment in a headline and having a rather outrageous thesis and or topic primed for a Twitter, Reddit or LinkedIn “hit”. Of course not all of us are inclined to write for maximum effect or ROI. Some of us just really like writing or are passionate about a topic.

The reality is monetization on Substack is for a few, and comparing newbies with the 1% of top Creators is not realistic or justified in any objective sense. That’s not to say that all of us can’t or shouldn’t have a paid Newsletter where we offer additional value to our top readers and intrinsic audience.

A Great Pitch isn’t just about converting a free reader into a paid reader but about doing what we actually believe in and writing about a topic or a cause that we deeply and authentically resonate with. It never was about the money, if we are a writer’s writer.

The Brand Ambassador Model is Failing

Substack’s constant use of Case studies isn’t data-based or a viable replacement for marketing or internal community building. Yet one has to wonder why they keep relying on the tactic since after five years, there aren’t a great deal of Creators on Substack itself in total. Nor does it seem logical why all the comments on such articles are universally positive and grateful with hardly any brainstorming.

Substack bills itself as platform for community building, and thus its psychology of case studies (those who benefit the most from the recommendation system) is low-hanging fruit, if not incredibly honest to its new users. For my own belief system, this is a point of conflict.

Paid subscriptions and community building is hard, but there’s no mention of this. Yet it also remains extremely difficult to build an intimate and scalable community on this fragmented internet. We should not let new writers have an unrealistic idea of what the process will be like, since if they fail they will be even more broken-hearted about it.

Comparing a new writer with a Substack influencer: (is like comparing Apples to Oranges)

Many of Substack’s stars came with huge lists to begin with or were picked by the platform as evergreen case studies due to organic growth or other reasons that are impossible to gleam (e.g. the preferences of Substack . Thus comparing ourselves or our own humble Newsletters to these “top Creators” doesn’t make much sense for the majority of new writers or Creators.

At best, Substack’s article is a signpost of what is possible for Creators and not an affirmative strategy guide. Perhaps Substack wants Creators to experiment and find their own niche in the challenging pursuit of converting free to paid readers, without explicitly explaining how challenging it is or which categories take home the majority of the loot. This is a bit like false advertising which will turn some more intellectual writers off.

In the marketing of On Substack though, there’s the occasional obvious truth:

The more subscribers you have on your free list, the bigger the opportunity you have to market paid subscriptions directly to people who know your work.

Substack does not mention potentially useful information to create realistic benchmarks such as:

• Baseline conversion rates per Category

• Overall Newsletter conversion rates of free to paid Newsletters

• Conversion rates of readers obtained via the Substack Network (who presumably are deluged by too many Newsletters)

• Or any actual useful empirical platform data for that matter!

I have some more opinions on this topic, that may sound somewhat contrarian. There’s no such thing as accountability journalism in the Creator Economy sadly.

If you want to read some of my more honest thoughts on the paid conversion dilemma feel free to subscribe.