What is Subtask Boost

And why does it matter? Substack is amplifying Network Effect at Scale

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.

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.

Baremetrics

Get your latest customer and product metrics.

ChartMogul

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?

Substack Has More Ways to put Growth on Autopilot