7 Comments

I agree. Sometimes I scroll down in the hopes of finding something about marketing and business related. All I see is fiction or personal blogs about "culture." I can't spend more than 20 minutes on this platform without being bored.

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Well thanks for being honest Ali. While we should celebrate all types of writing, I'm not understanding Substack's philosophy of trying to make things look like one huge book club. It's as if their target audience is a woman in their 50s.

I'm getting a bit old and I can understand maybe the demand for tech and business news and investing material is not what it once was, but on the other hand the reader should have more control which categories and tags to exclude.

Otherwise it's just full of cringe non-sense.

Substack could be a much more interesting place, but they have chosen to keep it boring. It's not very appealing to many male readers. I'm just afraid the demand for fiction, literature and fringe culture topics is not that high no matter what NYT best seller you lure here.

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True.

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Agreed!

When I first signed up I thought the categories could do with an overhaul and I haven't changed my opinion.

Love writing on here and reading other people's work, but Substack really needs to find new ways to categorize newsletters. Tech, business & finance are so ridiculously broad I could pretty much include anything I write about under any of those three 🤷‍♂️

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Yes for sure Harry it needed this overhaul like two years ago. That it isn't not adapting or evolving what is for many the front page of its app and website is odd.

Because Email isn't a great channel. Most people lose and forget about Emails as a rule. The company needs to put more attention in marketing and their app.

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So why does this actually matter for the future of Substack? It matters because the future English readers are not from the U.S. They are from young entrepreneurial countries like India, Nigeria, and even places like Pakistan.

Those people, the ACTUAL future readers of the internet, will want to read about these categories.

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Substack clearly don't have much clue about marketing, product-marketing and reducing friction for new readers who first discover Substack, the app and the home page. It's all about the category discovery.

If I need to work to find what I am looking for, I just won't get to the publications that actual cater to my interests. The reader experience is truly astoundingly bad. What is the point of improving writer product features, if you ignore such salient parts of the reader experience and discovery?

Marketing isn't about building a community of writers, it's about attracting new readers and helping them find publications so the writers can thrive!

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