Will Substack's Platform Play Boost the Free Subscriber Battle?
The Battle is not for attention, but to develop a legit sales-marketing funnel.
Image: Arizona Agenda, Show you the money.
Reading about the trials and tribulations of the Arizona Agenda really shook me up, this article. I knew discoverability was a major issue for Substack authors, that is, to have a funnel to get new free subscribing readers.
After all, without that, how can you hope to succeed? Where do you expect the readers to magically appear from?
You cannot build a business in writing, if you do not have a marketing plan and real funnel. It turns out, most writers don’t have one, like at all. I “also suck at marketing”, even if it has been part of my job. But this is one of Substack’s favored ones we are talking about here.
The Arizona Agenda won a stipend for Local News and had a major boost. What I mean by this is they got one of those $100,000 forwards where they have to pay 85% of their 1st year profits back to Substack.
Indie Journalism in the Roughing It Days
But outside of people boasting of winning the Hacker News lottery, I haven’t seen much good news on building an audience on Substack. Albeit my premium guides on this Newsletter, are some of the best unread advice around, but I’m not exactly a winner in this playground.
If Substack bets don’t know if they will make it, that is, make writing on Substack sustainable, that’s a bleak realism of how hard it is to write online if that’s your only gig.
That’s because our update isn’t as rosy as our first quarter was. When we were the brand-new kids on the block, our growth took off.((For any questions about how we pay the bills, read our last quarterly update.
I guess my question to myself is will Substack’s iOS app be a game-changer?
Is Substack a Potential Platform ?
A few weeks after launch, the app only has 1.3k ratings, it’s no longer listed or ranked in the “lifestyle” category Substack put it in, oddly not in “News”. That’s not a good sign for the app moving the needle for writers.
I’m not saying Substack isn’t awesome, I’m just saying this indie journalism game is hard. It’s writing on hard mode. When indie creators are trying to hustle their own “promotions” and “ads” on their Substack Newsletter with a mediocre audience or reach, you know we have a problem.
If Substack wants us to succeed, it needs to figure out how to help us succeed in discoverability. Making Substack a reader-centric platform, might be part of the answer. The platform idea is good, at least to some degree. The app still doesn’t get direct subscriptions due to Apple’s absurd tax.
Casey Newton, another chosen one, also talks about his Platformer on the iOS app here.
For the company’s first five years, writers using Substack have published in two places: on the web and via email. As of last week, there is a third place: an iOS app that allows you read everyone you subscribe to on the platform — as well as any other RSS feeds you care to add — in a dedicated spot on your phone or tablet.
The Existential Problem of Marketing Chops
I personally have not had much luck getting my readers to download Substack’s app, with barely 1% coming from that source after multiple attempts to lead them in that direction. I’m just not sure Email alone is the answer, read rates decline, Email lists churn, and you are competing with 120 Emails a day that most people receive.
I’m also not convinced at Substack’s own marketing of its own app, at least thus far. The launch video is a bit a budget product launch. Fair enough, they want to establish a baseline.
Still if you are an indie journalist, you have to plan a marketing scenario for how you are going to grow your business, that’s on you. If you don’t enjoy the growth-hacking challenge of it, you are probably not on the right “platform”. That the platform is nascent and full of untapped audiences is precisely the point of why I came here: I thrive on such a challenge.
Substack has relied on celebrities, political writers and niche writers for the most part to organically grow their audience, as well as leaderboards that are a primitive form of gamification. When I hear about the case studies of the original boosted writers, I scratch my head a bit.
Substack needs to teach its writers better how to do marketing, how to become influencers on social media and how to build a following online with a personal brand. Otherwise 99% of those who try to make it commercially viable, will fail. And, I think that’s in a sense what we are seeing. Rather than do this, a lot of Substack’s events with writers are more random and less practical. They need to lead the Creator Economy, not build it from some grassroots of top leaderboards.
But who is really able to build a following online any more in this day and age? Certainly not necessarily former journalists or writers who don’t have the time to spend hours on end on social media. Many of us on Substack, I will admit, are too old to be making videos on TikTok, Snap or YouTube, that’s just a fact.
So for the majority of writers, Substack has to be their side-gig, just one of their side gigs. To go all-in on Substack, is to fight against the numbers. The plain fact that there is no on-ramp to gaining an audience here, it’s a beautiful abyss of your private journey. Not wordpress barren, but close, let’s just be honest.
The Grit That’s Truly Indie Worthy
Around 7,000 news workers were laid off during the pandemic. A lot of journalists are just squeaking by. When you sign-up to be a Creator full-time on substack, you aren’t just gambling with your life, you are part of a dying breed, someone that believes in the future of writing.
You need to be hardy. You need to, actually love what you do and what you write about. You need to actually be thinking about working on improving your marketing and sales conversion funnel, every day.
Chipping away at it. You cannot rely on Substack to do any of your heavy lifting in this version of the Creator Economy. That’s really the bottom line. You aren’t going to get followers magically on networks like Twitter or Instagram, hint: you’ll have to go to different shores where click-rates and viral posts really attract an audience. Not all social media platforms are created equally at the intersection of what you write about.
A substack artist has no problems toiling in obscurity, because that’s the daily grind and reality.
Not all of us will trend on Hacker News or have some viral event.
Not all of us will get a $100,000 forward to begin the journey, and have that massive career pressure that goes along with it.
Not all of us will have the time or crazy ambition to make this our “full-time gig”.
Even if you are a writer online, giving that up to start a “Newsletter” feels down right retro. But sometimes, retro is cool.
But the internet is also providing new opportunities for writers to monetise their musings themselves: online platforms like Patreon and Substack allow people to sign up in the Creator Economy war. But who are you competing against? Is it for attention or is it just the problem of knowing how to create a Marketing funnel? Could it really be that easy? Just solve that one problem. Add a dash of patience, perseverance and good writing.
The main takeaway should also be: I need a steady and constant stream of new followers.
Because without that, you’re audience and hope will stagnate. No matter how pretty your words!
Even if you write in a niche that’s very saturated with competition and quality Newsletters, if you have a steady flow of an audience checking you out, you might just make it. Sometimes it could pay to write about something a bit more mainstream and trending.
Substack is an online newsletter platform: it was founded in 2017 by developers Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi, and writer Hamish McKenzie – a New Zealander who was raised in Alexandra and edited Critic, Otago University’s student magazine, in 2004. A lot is still missing in how it functions and empowers writers and Newsletters. They don’t sell themselves.
It’s 2022, Substack is not a true platform, yet. In the iOS app, there are four main tabs within the app, accessible from the bottom bar: your inbox, the Discover tab, your library, and your profile. The inbox is all the way to the left, and it’ll show all new posts from the writers you subscribe to. Don’t expect a platform to change your life, just try to time your growth with the growth of the Creator Economy as a whole.
“Email is great for all of the reasons it has always been great,” Best said. “It’s low friction. It’s this direct connection where you can reach out, unmediated by the algorithm. But it’s obviously not the best version of that reading experience.”
Email is also the place where writing goes to die, it’s a graveyard. It breaks all sense of building an audience, it’s a resting place. So if you want to succeed in writing Newsletters, you have to understand and dedicate yourself to getting the mechanics of the waterfall behind the valley of death that is Email.
Secretly, I don’t even think that people like Casey Newton or the Arizona Agenda understand this. They were given too much to have to figure this out for themselves. They didn’t have to walk the valley of death alone, they migrated with a tribe.