I recently participated in a lively discussion on Twitter. As Substack now feels more like a landing page for Creators than a Newsletter platform, I wanted to get your opinions on who you think are Substack’s real competitors out there?
Substack now has targeted recommendations, podcasting mass adoption, community management and more scalability if you are able to grow your free subscriptions well. You can further get Sponsored Ad deals with major brands related to your niche to supplement your revenue growth providing a double-stream side gig. If you build courses around your niche, that’s a triple revenue-stream in the “ownership economy”.
I’m no expert in Email marketing or Creator platforms, but: (perhaps you know of better candidates?)
Here is a shortlist of potential candidates:
Tier 1:
Ghost
Medium
Twitter Notes
LinkedIn Newsletters
Facebook Bulletin
Apple (TBA)
Reddit (TBA)
Tier 2:
Mailchimp
Every.to
HackerNoon
Mirror.xyz
Patreon
Revue
Wordpress (Automattic)
ConvertKit
Pinterest (TBA)
Tier 3:
Buzzsprout (podcasts)
Captivate (podcasts)
Buy Me a Coffee (monetization)
Podia (monetization)
Memberful (Subscriptions)
Ko-Fi (donations and monetization)
Moment (Pre-Launch, “Crypto of Patreon”)
Quora
Jianshu (China)
Audience Picks (suggested from comments):
beehiiv
Answer considerations and ideas:
I’d love to hear your opinions on this for Creator landing pages, blogging, Email features, segmentation, scalability, monetization, datacentric analytics, UI, user-centricity, readership base, discovery, community building, customer support, ease of use, SEO and so forth.
If this specific questions doesn’t appeal or apply to you:
Discussion Prompt: Alternatively, why did you join Substack and is it working for you?
Wow I'd much prefer Substack to focus on being the best possible version of itself and not worry about the competition. So many platforms go wrong when they start basing their strategies on outdoing or snaring traffic/creators from other platforms.
Ghost seems to be most customizable and support podcasting too, and now has a hosted option which reduces how fiddly it is to get going.
Beehiiv is improving rapidly and kind of speed-running to Substack level features while having a few niceties that Substack doesn't have (yet) like better analytic and referrals and such, while taking a smaller fee.
ConvertKit I know less, but it seems like the one for power users who want to automated a lot of things and have crazy analytics. Probably not for me, but I keep an eye on it.
I'm actually surprised how low churn is even among the top Substack writers. Most readers are lazy, what are chances we'd go to a Wordpress, Ghost or external website?
Even the habit of reading the same Newsletter for a while is nearly impossible for me to hold. There's just too much good content out there! From a reader experience Substack's app with SmartNews and a lot of my reading is taken care of. I customize SmartNews to have all the News outlets I follow.
Now with Substack's Android app launching, it's realistically going to be hard to compete with them.
What I notice about the space is how underwhelming most Creator landing pages, Newsletter platforms or ESPs or even the blogging platforms scene is. It's in a transition point where there just aren't many good products.
If the app were to scale, it would be very powerful and makes the relationships even stickier, but I doubt it'll ever be a huge percentage of readers. Hard to get people to install things. I've been on the iOS app since the beta, and it's a nice addition, but in my analytics I don't see huge % of readers on the app and it isn't climbing fast.
ConvertKit is a big one I see people move to as they grow, but recently I’ve seen creators come back to Substack!
I just wonder, is too many competitors mean we will need to be omnipresent on things like LinkedIn and Twitter newsletter competitors as well as Substack? I wonder if this is where things are going
Thanks for your comment Matt. Which types of Creators would use ConvertKit, which ones would Substack appeal to more do you think? Twitter Notes could be big, if they can launch it well. Getting lead gen from Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok is getting a bit harder.
Yea I'm with most ppl here that I feel like Substack's recommendation engine and being listed as a top newsletter in a category is gigantically helpful.
Hey Alex thanks for stopping by! I relate to your comment.
Yes the Welcome to Hell dude thing was interesting and I liked the candor of that thing. I'm not sure why but I find Hamish McKenzie very relatable. The twitter joke that he's now a Chief Writing Officers CWO is funny. Their PR person left on mat leave or something.
What I notice also is Substack's editor is comfy, it's not rigid like many ESPs I have tried (like I see Beehiives is as well). The range and flexibility of the editor is super important because that's where I hang out on a daily, sometimes hourly basis.
Yeah to move anywhere would be sort of counter productive, unless you had literally 1000s of paying subscribers willing to move with you. Luke left just as Substack's recommendations were coming out, it was super odd timing.
Old dogs leaving worries me less if there is a new guard to replace them. The problem is some people aren't really replaceable. They are fucking creatively unique.
As someone who used to use Mailchimp for our newsletter, I have found their efforts to lure me back to be laughable. And even if they add half the features Substack has, I have no interest in leaving the platform that has made us $12,000 more than MailChimp ever did. Because I'm a big Facebook user (Note: that doesn't mean fan), I was initially very intrigued by Facebook Bulletin. But as far as I can tell it's turned out to be a complete joke. Something they threw up to say "Look, we're doing newsletters too!" and then just let sit there.
Never say never, but right now it's very hard to imagine leaving Substack.
Facebook hasn't launched Bulletin? Maybe we're talking different things because I subscribed to a couple of different newsletters of theirs, including two where the writer immediately flamed out.
I don't know their so-called Launch felt more like a Pilot for pre-selected Creators. It took LinkedIn a very long time to get goings with theirs (I was in the Pilot).
The new platform is “focused on empowering independent writers, helping them reach new audiences and power their businesses,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a live audio call discussing the launch.
However I don't think they opened it up to the general public yet? And there have been reports that this pilot launch did not go very well.
The Verge reported: " But the product seems not to have made much of a splash since then, with Facebook instead stressing its slow and “meaningful” development. In a blog post last year, one of the few hard stats the company offered on the size of Bulletin was that “half of the creators on Bulletin have over 1,000 free email subscribers, with many having more than 5,000 or 10,000” — small numbers considering Facebook’s mammoth size."
Starting anything new on Facebook's seems difficult (as Twitter or LinkedIn) these older platforms seem to be bleeding active users. Facebook pushing the Creator Economy too late without sharing enough of the revenue seems weird.
I have hope for all of these including LinkedIn Newsletters as they have hyped the "Creator Economy" and "Diversity and inclusion" as part of their app-retention campaign and News editor and Creator Manager hires. Right now, perhaps it's LinkedIn that has the greatest incentive to make their Newsletters better.
I don't know a lot about Facebook Bulletin. The problem is Meta is not great at launching new products or apps.
I guess at the end of the day the biggest competitor for Substack is likely LinkedIn Newsletters, where I see the most scalability, but the service is free and Creators on LinkedIn don't have a mechanism to monetize directly. Many copywriters on LinkedIn have made courses on LinkedIn Learning and are thus allowed to go viral in posts as cheer-leaders for creating posts on LinkedIn and for LinkedIn Learning's growth.
Considering LinkedIn also has live podcasts, sort of like Twitter Spaces, it appears Microsoft is actually Substack's closest competitor in a sense. They have the budget to actually compete with Substack and build out the sort of hybrid platform that Substack has found a tentative product-market fit in.
Michael have you and your partner considered making "Courses for Nomads", your audience would certainly purchase those elite tips for navigating new countries, visas, etc... My favorite startup is that does courses is called Thinkific: https://www.thinkific.com/
Your other revenue possibility is brand sponsored Ads? I think we have to start thinking more about a Trifecta of revenue streams if our paid subs aren't scaling quickly enough.
You've got me paying more attention to LinkedIn and if they monetize newsletters, I'll definitely be interested. But otherwise, definitely not posting for free there.
As for courses, that's a hard pass. LOL. We're enjoying the writing and have zero interest in creating courses. But we have had some luck with sponsored ads and will continue to do those as the opportunities come up.
For neophyte creators like yours truly, the improving discoverability and the whole expanding "landing page" offering you are referring to makes Substack's initial attractiveness hard to beat Michael.
(I do hope this is also the impression after having spent say >6 months here)
A Twitter product could of course scale faster in terms of attention-grabbing for some type of ad/sponsor or private community model. But how well would it work for high-value subscriptions? Would there be platform-related issues in areas of ownership (copyright), portability (subscriber contact lists), or subscriber long-term willingness to pay (churn/retention)?
For creators with marketing experience, massive followings, and/or other products to offer, I guess that other setups would offer customizable features.
Now, look forward to leaning back and learning from you and all the creators in the thread who actually know something here
Substack could be the "BeReal of Newsletters." BeReal is the viral app of the day for some GenZ. Where the "sharing is the fun part", not the consumption.
The Pragmatic Engineer goes more viral due to this on LinkedIn as well.
Substack's architecture, support and product seem like a good baseline.
I think discoverability could improve with the Android app launch to a good degree.
So for us early stage creators Johan, Substack maybe makes it the most seamless and solves many of our scalability concerns e.g. Substack Network's impact on our growth.
The other thing Substack captures better is the micro-audience, that feeling that you only need 100-500 super followers to have a legit side gig.
Substack needs to scale before 2025 while it has this "first-mover advantage" relative to more broken products like LinkedIn Newsletters or Revue. There's no version of the future where a16z doesn't continue to back Substack, just have to wait for more favorable environment for the Series C.
I consider the UX and UI pretty strong on Substack too, even if the analytics and segmentation are underwhelming. Subscription customization and special offers are surprisingly deep. So the product-timeline has actually moved very fast in 2022, roughly since I started to write here. We missed the pandemic bump, but we are arriving on a more mature product.
So biggest things in 2022 so far are recommendations, podcasting (adoption is good here), community building norms and the App improving discoverability and text-to-speech audio listening. They don't seem to be spending much on Marketing or Sales since they can focus more on their ideological differentiation/product with the current funds.
Their PR and PR woes is overall good for the growth of the product. I'll be watching with the Android launch where the app ends up in free app downloads. The iOS launch was a bit underwhelming.
As neophytes Johan, I'm excited and still bullish, and immensely enjoying the challenge of scaling and growing. When I looked for Substack competitors, that I had trouble finding any good ones was a bit shocking to me.
Glad you see yourself as a bullish neophyte on the Substack eco system Michael!
Good point on the micro-audience aspect Michael. With tinkering and healthy amounts of luck/timing with positioning that community support can grow and even pivot into big things.
Agree on your VC analysis for the near term. Substack is in a great position so more of a question of valuation, strategic direction, and execution. Substack's ideological prioritization of the creators is indeed very promising and should sustain great traction in attracting even more talented creators to join.
Neophytes entering Substack now will have multiple role model success stories who scaled from zero by tinkering and executing focused micro business/brand building. Substack Grow made this more than obvious to me. Plus the more powerful platform features and improved discoverability that you mention.
The odds of quick, first-attempt commercial subscription success are still very stacked against the average neophyte creator, but that is just economics. Additional upsides in terms of very creative learning, the chance to make meaningful connections, and pivoting all increase the attractiveness of "failing" to commercialize (in a more narrow traditional sense).
/Neophyte among neophytes
PS: Love Kyla Scanlon's newsletter(!). Very original visual thinking. Who said economics had to be formulaic or boring. Will have to study The Pragmatic Engineer as well, thanks for the tip.
beehiive is actually a Morning Brew mafia project. By Morning Brew alums Tyler Denk, Benjamin Hargett. Back when they launched in October, 2021 Beehiiv said it was looking to differentiate itself by focusing on making it easier for smaller creators to monetize their work, instead of focusing on the top 1% of creators that already have big audiences.
How do you scale the micro niche? Morning Brew went from college newsletter to $75M in 5 years, so you'd think these people know how to scale a product?
Someone on Hacker News said: "I thought the newsletter trend was a bit ridiculous, and then I started writing one. Writing a blog feels a bit like throwing messages into the wind, and tweeting sometimes feels like trying to start a conversation in the middle of a concert.
Writing a newsletter and knowing there's a group of people who signed on to hear directly what you have to say feels so much more personal."
A lot has been written about their growth playbook (I mean Morning Brew Newsletters):
I think it's important to point out if Twitter Notes falls flat even Google via Google Drive "had" an interesting project. https://area120.google.com/
The company’s internal R&D division, Area 120, had a new project called Museletter, which allowed anyone to publish a Google Drive file as a blog or newsletter to their Museletter public profile or to an email list. While "Museletter" shut down after only 3 months, Google is still in a position to create a Substack competitor if it wanted to.
Since Google understand what people are into at scale, this could be very high-value for Creators.
If someone in the future were to combine some of the features of Medium, Patreon and Substack into one platform, it would do pretty well. ByteDance or Snap would be in a position to do this if they ever wanted. There seems to be little motivation to do this because written content is so hard.
It is possible Web3 might give some of the future competitors in the space by giving more of the revenue to the Creator and monetizing in different ways. Subscription burnout for consumers in 2023 is probable. For Web3 NFTs could be leveraged to form new incentives in such an ecosystem.
However who can compete with Substack's ideological differentiation I am not totally clear? Substack is in this sense all that Medium could never be in terms of moving away from Ads and algorithms. This is a strong unique value proposition that appeals to me and many other writers.
In Terms of actual reach, a Newsletter services around Reddit or Apple makes a lot of sense. Apple News could open up a Newsletter service to the public. That would immediately be a major competitor. A lot of real discussions on the internet now occur on Reddit or Discord.
I am not sure comments on Substack posts or in discussion threads at this point will ever reach much scale. Why would I debate on Substack if it didn't have the traffic or diverse points of view, what would be the incentive? While Substack does give the ownership economy a 1-1 indie media feel, it's an uphill battle for us to create communities of scale, although I know some of you have incredible micro niche communities.
As a futurist and Venture capital watcher, I often imagine who is most likely to acquire Substack should they fall on hard times? As with all startups, we always have to remember this is a distinct possibility in the years ahead.
As for Revue, by all accounts, and correct me if I'm wrong, since the Twitter acquisition it's momentum has basically died? Twitter would not be doing Twitter Notes if that wasn't the case.
Is it just me or is it literally even to come up with a name that is really Substack's competition? Substack appears to be a category leader in its own niche, a quasi third space community platform where Newsletters are only the medium. But podcasting, discussion, essays, op-eds and a wide range of formats actually occurs.
It's surprising that nobody really did this before in quite the same way? LinkedIn acquired Pulse in 2013 but literally did nothing with it until itself was acquired by Microsoft in 2016 - this was a massive missed opportunity.
There's just no way we can consider Ghost or beehiiv (whatever that is!) competitors of Substack. Even Medium or Twitter Notes would probably be closer competitors just in terms of mind-share. But Substack for monetization and scalability is better than all of these others combined for the moment.
I guess for me even without "category competition", my worry is Substack's growth while okay, is not tremendous. It needs to scale in the 2020 to 2025 period to have a real first-mover advantage that benefits us all.
Wow I'd much prefer Substack to focus on being the best possible version of itself and not worry about the competition. So many platforms go wrong when they start basing their strategies on outdoing or snaring traffic/creators from other platforms.
Thanks for your comment Anne. I think for the time being Substack doesn't have a whole lot of competition, nor does it seem competitor focused.
It is already a category leader for Newsletter monetization and has successfully onboarded many journalists and well-known writers.
The ones most on my radar are Ghost, Beehiiv, and ConvertKit. But that's just me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thanks for sharing, what makes each of them appealing for you?
Ghost seems to be most customizable and support podcasting too, and now has a hosted option which reduces how fiddly it is to get going.
Beehiiv is improving rapidly and kind of speed-running to Substack level features while having a few niceties that Substack doesn't have (yet) like better analytic and referrals and such, while taking a smaller fee.
ConvertKit I know less, but it seems like the one for power users who want to automated a lot of things and have crazy analytics. Probably not for me, but I keep an eye on it.
I'm actually surprised how low churn is even among the top Substack writers. Most readers are lazy, what are chances we'd go to a Wordpress, Ghost or external website?
Even the habit of reading the same Newsletter for a while is nearly impossible for me to hold. There's just too much good content out there! From a reader experience Substack's app with SmartNews and a lot of my reading is taken care of. I customize SmartNews to have all the News outlets I follow.
Now with Substack's Android app launching, it's realistically going to be hard to compete with them.
What I notice about the space is how underwhelming most Creator landing pages, Newsletter platforms or ESPs or even the blogging platforms scene is. It's in a transition point where there just aren't many good products.
What makes it sticky is email delivery, whatever the platform. A minority of readers will just go visit the site.
Do you think if the app scales, discovery could come more from the mobile web over time? Not sure if you are an android user: https://8g5zau8cti6.typeform.com/to/YPiI2mMg?typeform-source=t.co
If the app were to scale, it would be very powerful and makes the relationships even stickier, but I doubt it'll ever be a huge percentage of readers. Hard to get people to install things. I've been on the iOS app since the beta, and it's a nice addition, but in my analytics I don't see huge % of readers on the app and it isn't climbing fast.
ConvertKit is a big one I see people move to as they grow, but recently I’ve seen creators come back to Substack!
I just wonder, is too many competitors mean we will need to be omnipresent on things like LinkedIn and Twitter newsletter competitors as well as Substack? I wonder if this is where things are going
Thanks for your comment Matt. Which types of Creators would use ConvertKit, which ones would Substack appeal to more do you think? Twitter Notes could be big, if they can launch it well. Getting lead gen from Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok is getting a bit harder.
I’ve seen convertkit used for larger newsletters that value extensive customization.
I just wonder, is there a world where we will need to publishing to all of these?
Or using different ones for different segments of our audience for different streams of revenue?
Yea I'm with most ppl here that I feel like Substack's recommendation engine and being listed as a top newsletter in a category is gigantically helpful.
I have looked at Ghost - it could be cool, but idk I feel like I would need to have a giant audience before moving like the Welcome To Hell World dude did https://luke.substack.com/p/leaving-substack-check-your-promo
Hey Alex thanks for stopping by! I relate to your comment.
Yes the Welcome to Hell dude thing was interesting and I liked the candor of that thing. I'm not sure why but I find Hamish McKenzie very relatable. The twitter joke that he's now a Chief Writing Officers CWO is funny. Their PR person left on mat leave or something.
What I notice also is Substack's editor is comfy, it's not rigid like many ESPs I have tried (like I see Beehiives is as well). The range and flexibility of the editor is super important because that's where I hang out on a daily, sometimes hourly basis.
Yeah to move anywhere would be sort of counter productive, unless you had literally 1000s of paying subscribers willing to move with you. Luke left just as Substack's recommendations were coming out, it was super odd timing.
Old dogs leaving worries me less if there is a new guard to replace them. The problem is some people aren't really replaceable. They are fucking creatively unique.
As someone who used to use Mailchimp for our newsletter, I have found their efforts to lure me back to be laughable. And even if they add half the features Substack has, I have no interest in leaving the platform that has made us $12,000 more than MailChimp ever did. Because I'm a big Facebook user (Note: that doesn't mean fan), I was initially very intrigued by Facebook Bulletin. But as far as I can tell it's turned out to be a complete joke. Something they threw up to say "Look, we're doing newsletters too!" and then just let sit there.
Never say never, but right now it's very hard to imagine leaving Substack.
Thanks for your insights Michael.
Sadly Mailchimp was acquired, and we all know what happens to products and teams often when that happens.
You are right, regular ESPs have little chance of competing against the scalability and ideological appeal of something like Substack.
There are some early reports that Facebook Bulletin's pilot hasn't gone well and they might not even launch the service.
That's how I feel, hard to imagine ever leaving Substack. Definitely one of our new home bases I guess.
Facebook hasn't launched Bulletin? Maybe we're talking different things because I subscribed to a couple of different newsletters of theirs, including two where the writer immediately flamed out.
I don't know their so-called Launch felt more like a Pilot for pre-selected Creators. It took LinkedIn a very long time to get goings with theirs (I was in the Pilot).
The new platform is “focused on empowering independent writers, helping them reach new audiences and power their businesses,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a live audio call discussing the launch.
However I don't think they opened it up to the general public yet? And there have been reports that this pilot launch did not go very well.
The Verge reported: " But the product seems not to have made much of a splash since then, with Facebook instead stressing its slow and “meaningful” development. In a blog post last year, one of the few hard stats the company offered on the size of Bulletin was that “half of the creators on Bulletin have over 1,000 free email subscribers, with many having more than 5,000 or 10,000” — small numbers considering Facebook’s mammoth size."
Starting anything new on Facebook's seems difficult (as Twitter or LinkedIn) these older platforms seem to be bleeding active users. Facebook pushing the Creator Economy too late without sharing enough of the revenue seems weird.
Well, I expect absolutely nothing from it at this point.
I have hope for all of these including LinkedIn Newsletters as they have hyped the "Creator Economy" and "Diversity and inclusion" as part of their app-retention campaign and News editor and Creator Manager hires. Right now, perhaps it's LinkedIn that has the greatest incentive to make their Newsletters better.
I don't know a lot about Facebook Bulletin. The problem is Meta is not great at launching new products or apps.
Meta has a new live-streaming platform called Super, to try to boost social commerce. (https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-tests-a-new-livestreaming-platform-for-influencers-super-2022-8). But their track record in starting new things is very poor.
I guess at the end of the day the biggest competitor for Substack is likely LinkedIn Newsletters, where I see the most scalability, but the service is free and Creators on LinkedIn don't have a mechanism to monetize directly. Many copywriters on LinkedIn have made courses on LinkedIn Learning and are thus allowed to go viral in posts as cheer-leaders for creating posts on LinkedIn and for LinkedIn Learning's growth.
Considering LinkedIn also has live podcasts, sort of like Twitter Spaces, it appears Microsoft is actually Substack's closest competitor in a sense. They have the budget to actually compete with Substack and build out the sort of hybrid platform that Substack has found a tentative product-market fit in.
Michael have you and your partner considered making "Courses for Nomads", your audience would certainly purchase those elite tips for navigating new countries, visas, etc... My favorite startup is that does courses is called Thinkific: https://www.thinkific.com/
Your other revenue possibility is brand sponsored Ads? I think we have to start thinking more about a Trifecta of revenue streams if our paid subs aren't scaling quickly enough.
You've got me paying more attention to LinkedIn and if they monetize newsletters, I'll definitely be interested. But otherwise, definitely not posting for free there.
As for courses, that's a hard pass. LOL. We're enjoying the writing and have zero interest in creating courses. But we have had some luck with sponsored ads and will continue to do those as the opportunities come up.
For neophyte creators like yours truly, the improving discoverability and the whole expanding "landing page" offering you are referring to makes Substack's initial attractiveness hard to beat Michael.
(I do hope this is also the impression after having spent say >6 months here)
A Twitter product could of course scale faster in terms of attention-grabbing for some type of ad/sponsor or private community model. But how well would it work for high-value subscriptions? Would there be platform-related issues in areas of ownership (copyright), portability (subscriber contact lists), or subscriber long-term willingness to pay (churn/retention)?
For creators with marketing experience, massive followings, and/or other products to offer, I guess that other setups would offer customizable features.
Now, look forward to leaning back and learning from you and all the creators in the thread who actually know something here
Substack could be the "BeReal of Newsletters." BeReal is the viral app of the day for some GenZ. Where the "sharing is the fun part", not the consumption.
In Finance and investing, I'm really attracted to Newsletter with "strong visual cues": https://twitter.com/kylascan/status/1555159253043892225
The Pragmatic Engineer goes more viral due to this on LinkedIn as well.
Substack's architecture, support and product seem like a good baseline.
I think discoverability could improve with the Android app launch to a good degree.
So for us early stage creators Johan, Substack maybe makes it the most seamless and solves many of our scalability concerns e.g. Substack Network's impact on our growth.
The other thing Substack captures better is the micro-audience, that feeling that you only need 100-500 super followers to have a legit side gig.
Substack needs to scale before 2025 while it has this "first-mover advantage" relative to more broken products like LinkedIn Newsletters or Revue. There's no version of the future where a16z doesn't continue to back Substack, just have to wait for more favorable environment for the Series C.
For people that prefer to stay anonymous on this debate go here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Newsletters/comments/wg8ci6/what_are_good_alternatives_to_substack_in_late/
I consider the UX and UI pretty strong on Substack too, even if the analytics and segmentation are underwhelming. Subscription customization and special offers are surprisingly deep. So the product-timeline has actually moved very fast in 2022, roughly since I started to write here. We missed the pandemic bump, but we are arriving on a more mature product.
So biggest things in 2022 so far are recommendations, podcasting (adoption is good here), community building norms and the App improving discoverability and text-to-speech audio listening. They don't seem to be spending much on Marketing or Sales since they can focus more on their ideological differentiation/product with the current funds.
Their PR and PR woes is overall good for the growth of the product. I'll be watching with the Android launch where the app ends up in free app downloads. The iOS launch was a bit underwhelming.
As neophytes Johan, I'm excited and still bullish, and immensely enjoying the challenge of scaling and growing. When I looked for Substack competitors, that I had trouble finding any good ones was a bit shocking to me.
Glad you see yourself as a bullish neophyte on the Substack eco system Michael!
Good point on the micro-audience aspect Michael. With tinkering and healthy amounts of luck/timing with positioning that community support can grow and even pivot into big things.
Agree on your VC analysis for the near term. Substack is in a great position so more of a question of valuation, strategic direction, and execution. Substack's ideological prioritization of the creators is indeed very promising and should sustain great traction in attracting even more talented creators to join.
Neophytes entering Substack now will have multiple role model success stories who scaled from zero by tinkering and executing focused micro business/brand building. Substack Grow made this more than obvious to me. Plus the more powerful platform features and improved discoverability that you mention.
The odds of quick, first-attempt commercial subscription success are still very stacked against the average neophyte creator, but that is just economics. Additional upsides in terms of very creative learning, the chance to make meaningful connections, and pivoting all increase the attractiveness of "failing" to commercialize (in a more narrow traditional sense).
/Neophyte among neophytes
PS: Love Kyla Scanlon's newsletter(!). Very original visual thinking. Who said economics had to be formulaic or boring. Will have to study The Pragmatic Engineer as well, thanks for the tip.
beehiive is actually a Morning Brew mafia project. By Morning Brew alums Tyler Denk, Benjamin Hargett. Back when they launched in October, 2021 Beehiiv said it was looking to differentiate itself by focusing on making it easier for smaller creators to monetize their work, instead of focusing on the top 1% of creators that already have big audiences.
How do you scale the micro niche? Morning Brew went from college newsletter to $75M in 5 years, so you'd think these people know how to scale a product?
Someone on Hacker News said: "I thought the newsletter trend was a bit ridiculous, and then I started writing one. Writing a blog feels a bit like throwing messages into the wind, and tweeting sometimes feels like trying to start a conversation in the middle of a concert.
Writing a newsletter and knowing there's a group of people who signed on to hear directly what you have to say feels so much more personal."
A lot has been written about their growth playbook (I mean Morning Brew Newsletters):
https://thegrowthplaybook.substack.com/p/how-morning-brew-grew-their-business
A/B testing headlines and titles for higher open-rates for example and the referral programs.
I think it's important to point out if Twitter Notes falls flat even Google via Google Drive "had" an interesting project. https://area120.google.com/
The company’s internal R&D division, Area 120, had a new project called Museletter, which allowed anyone to publish a Google Drive file as a blog or newsletter to their Museletter public profile or to an email list. While "Museletter" shut down after only 3 months, Google is still in a position to create a Substack competitor if it wanted to.
Since Google understand what people are into at scale, this could be very high-value for Creators.
If someone in the future were to combine some of the features of Medium, Patreon and Substack into one platform, it would do pretty well. ByteDance or Snap would be in a position to do this if they ever wanted. There seems to be little motivation to do this because written content is so hard.
It is possible Web3 might give some of the future competitors in the space by giving more of the revenue to the Creator and monetizing in different ways. Subscription burnout for consumers in 2023 is probable. For Web3 NFTs could be leveraged to form new incentives in such an ecosystem.
However who can compete with Substack's ideological differentiation I am not totally clear? Substack is in this sense all that Medium could never be in terms of moving away from Ads and algorithms. This is a strong unique value proposition that appeals to me and many other writers.
In Terms of actual reach, a Newsletter services around Reddit or Apple makes a lot of sense. Apple News could open up a Newsletter service to the public. That would immediately be a major competitor. A lot of real discussions on the internet now occur on Reddit or Discord.
I am not sure comments on Substack posts or in discussion threads at this point will ever reach much scale. Why would I debate on Substack if it didn't have the traffic or diverse points of view, what would be the incentive? While Substack does give the ownership economy a 1-1 indie media feel, it's an uphill battle for us to create communities of scale, although I know some of you have incredible micro niche communities.
As a futurist and Venture capital watcher, I often imagine who is most likely to acquire Substack should they fall on hard times? As with all startups, we always have to remember this is a distinct possibility in the years ahead.
As for Revue, by all accounts, and correct me if I'm wrong, since the Twitter acquisition it's momentum has basically died? Twitter would not be doing Twitter Notes if that wasn't the case.
Is it just me or is it literally even to come up with a name that is really Substack's competition? Substack appears to be a category leader in its own niche, a quasi third space community platform where Newsletters are only the medium. But podcasting, discussion, essays, op-eds and a wide range of formats actually occurs.
It's surprising that nobody really did this before in quite the same way? LinkedIn acquired Pulse in 2013 but literally did nothing with it until itself was acquired by Microsoft in 2016 - this was a massive missed opportunity.
There's just no way we can consider Ghost or beehiiv (whatever that is!) competitors of Substack. Even Medium or Twitter Notes would probably be closer competitors just in terms of mind-share. But Substack for monetization and scalability is better than all of these others combined for the moment.
I guess for me even without "category competition", my worry is Substack's growth while okay, is not tremendous. It needs to scale in the 2020 to 2025 period to have a real first-mover advantage that benefits us all.