Substack Needs more Tech and Business Categories

Female bias seeps into everything about how Substack sells and markets itself.

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 is the new business section of the bookstore

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. Reid DeRamus.

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. Hamish McKenzie.

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.