I've been writing about the world of gaming via Substack for the last year or so (https://pausebutton.substack.com/) for somewhat sizable audience, and this is a particularly accurate breakdown.
Links/Round-ups = retention. They make sure your brand stays top of mind for folks, but very rarely are they the thing that makes new subscribers come in. The tradeoff is that this is way more time-efficient that writing your own long-form.
New Long-form Content = Growth. The long-form stuff takes us 10x the time to write, but is consistently responsible for the increase in audience size. If you're going full-time, this is the place to invest. Particularly because Substack is so bad at reader Discovery, you need to invest in getting people onto your publication in your own way (original content), because Substack only really helps the biggest creators drive traffic.
It's why the I think the idea of bundling is going to be so big with newsletters, akin to how traditional newspapers started through a bunch of independent writers coming together. Eventually producing new long-form stuff wont be able to drive sustained growth and there's a cap on how much content a single person can put out.
Most of the time I think Hackernews obsession with self-hosting is misplaced.
But in this case, you're 100% right.
Like Medium, Substack's entire growth strategy is their own users ignorance of how important SEO is and how it works.
When you publish content on Substack, you're sharecropping. Plain and simple.
Just because you can charge for the Corn you grow on their land, doesn't mean you own the land. Your newsletter is building a steady audience of backlinks and users coming to substack.com, so ultimately, you're growing their business. Every time you publish content or advertise your newsletter, you're building authority for substack.com
And their business is the better one to be in. You do all the work, you generate backlinks and send users to their platform. They sit back and build a real sustainable business, while you're stuck tied to the weekly newsletter grind.
While its more work up front, I highly recommend you write your content on your own domain hooked up to a mailchimp or similar service. The importance of SEO and building authority on your own domain should not be overlooked.
Yes and no. I would say those platforms are more like communes. That is, I'll share mine (audience) is you share yours (audience).
It's like any product: starting from scratch to find fit and from that traction is not easy. It's resource intensive. Failure rate is high.
Yes, these platforms get a piece of your action. But they also provide something in exchange; something you'd likely struggle to create on your own otherwise. Then once you find fit, and traction, you can leverage that and transition elsewhere.
I agree, you can use these platforms to get off the ground fast and transition later.
BUT, here's the problem, the more you develop workflows, habits, and a big back catalogue on their platform, the harder it is for you to transition off of it.
Your content catalogue could have been building SEO juice for you on your own domain. Instead, by transitioning, any link anybody has ever posted to your content or newsletter becomes obsolete and a dead end into substack.
The truth is, if you aren't able to set up your own platform now, you aren't suddenly going to acquire the time and skills needed to do that while tied to a weekly publishing schedule later--especially given the vendor lock-in I mentioned above.
The platforms know this. I've never heard of a commune that venture capital investors were willing to put $15M in hoping for 10X returns.
If a self-host blog post falls in the woods and no one is there to read it...is transitioning from Commune Y or Z a sound worth whining about? :)
It's only sharecropping if you allow it to be.Furthermore, SEO take more. There's a reason it's its own industry. So early on, are you better off learning SEO and working at it? Or becoming a better communicator, publishing content, finding fit, and getting traction?
SEO is marketing. It is a tool. Not every business and business model is the right fit for that tool. Full stop.
p.s. VC invest in a lot of things. Most fail. A few deliver marginal returns. A sliver deliver. I'm not so sure it's a lens that applies here.
That said, if Medium, etc. are so bad, why doesn't the market reflect that? If content is king, and you're the content producer, then that makes you the land owner.
Yes, SEO is valuable. But to base your entire decision on it and only it, and apply it in a OSFA way is foolish.
If there's a platform to avoid it's FB. That content is walled in and locked down.
You need a mailing address in the footer of emails in the US and any country with a CAN-SPAM-like law. Substack lets you use their PO box. It's even auto-filled. That adds cost for a self-hosted option unless you want your home address dangling out there or already have a business address.
You can ask that question up and down the yak shaving continuum and get an infinite number of answers. Is it worth it to me? No. How many people would answer yes? That's the 50 billion dollar question.
The reality for people who own homes is that it's more or less trivial to track down an address in general unless someone has a common name and there aren't obvious clues to their general location online.
This is true, but I don't think most people go through a complicated opsec calculus. Blasting a home address out to hundreds or thousands of strangers will feel weird for most people. I found lots of threads from people asking about this when I went out looking to see if this was a normal worry. I know ~three pieces of information is enough to find almost anything on someone and I still don't want to make it any easier for them.
Most people don’t want to run there own infrastructure. Also many newsletters are written by people that aren’t technical so self hosting is for a really limited audience.
Interesting article, however I'm surprised the author only went into the time it takes them to create content.
I run a bootstrapped product called [SparkLoop](https://sparkloop.app) which makes it easy for creators to add a referral program to their newsletter, and by far the biggest (and most annoying) time investment we hear newsletter creators complaining about is marketing, not content creation.
For most newsletter creators, marketing takes as much (if not more) time as content creation does!
Not only that, marketing is hard - even for marketers. Even so, if you commit (read: regular schedule) some time to it you'll likely be less overwhelmed / intimidated / discouraged.
Set a couple reasonable goals. Work towards those, and only those. There's no magic potion. No magic bullet. No magic nuttin'. That's marketing :)
This is fascinating because while tools like Substack lower the technical barrier to entry for starting a newsletter, they don't make it easier to create good content. That part is still a grind.
On a few occasions I've thought about creating a newsletter on a whim, only to think better of it when I consider how long it would take to create great content.
The grind will always be there, but can be offloaded to ghost writers. The focus then lies on building the theme of each issue. Which itself is another grind.
People dont realize that running a newsltetter is akin to publishing a magazine. They tend to see it more as publishing a blog, but are super wrong. Blogs are suspended in time. Newsletters expire (most do).
You're certainly right. It takes quite a commitment to write a good newsletter.
I started writing one last year myself. I have always been passionate about investing. And having grown up working in the tech and venture world, I've always had this theory that approaching stocks like Venture Capital can outperform the market, so I decided to write about it. It's been an interesting journey.
Time goes into 4 areas:
1) Research (figuring out what to write about...in my case, investment ideas and philosophy)
2) Writing (developing your writing style, actually putting your thoughts down on paper, and simplifying the topic as much as possible)
3) Outreach (actually finding the people who will find your writing interesting)
4) Discussion (email, dms, zoom calls with readers can be insightful, fun and motivating, but take time as well)
That's in addition to a full time job (if you do it on the side).
And do it on a schedule. In a prior job, for a time, I was responsible for a weekly newsletter we created for a client. Even if you have some flexibility (which we really didn't in this case), sending a newsletter every Tuesday morning (or whatever) through travel, other projects, life, and so forth really got pretty old. I do a lot of writing but it's mostly in the when I have time and inspiration vein.
The Marshall Memo [1] is one I happily subscribed to for a while. Kim Marshall went through the journals and gave a summary of the research and news most important to educators, weekly.
I understand why journalists are starting newsletters en masse, but I think most people in tech are going about newsletters the wrong way.
Instead of trying to start a media business (which is by nature, a low margin slog, save for a few B2B markets), why not use the newsletter as lead gen for a much more lucrative business like Saas or Courses or high end consulting?
In which case substack is not a great platform for you, given they provide zero SEO value for your domain. Like with Medium, when you write on substack and share your content, you’re growing substack’s backlinks and authority. Not your own.
The newsletter being the product itself is only going to work for a very tiny group of writers in the end. If you’re not writing about a niche business topic, or don’t already have a massive audience, forget about it.
Remember, Bloomberg created the media company as a distribution channel for selling their terminal (one of the most profitable SaaS businesses on earth). Not the other way around.
What’s frustrating about discovering Substack content is I would have no idea Simon Owens wrote about why Patreon’s business model is under threat if I didn’t see this post on HN. I’m unable to come for the topic, and then stay for the author.
If I search “Patreon” on Substack I get a bunch of people who moved there from Patreon:
From the Substack-related interviews/content I've consumed, it seems like the company is more concerned with tools/support [0] [1] for its creators, before it worries about consumer growth.
The idea is that once you have an excess of supply (writers), who are all bringing in their own readers, it's easier to connect the dots for readers to other publications. Whereas if your reader demand outweighs supply, people will not see any value from sticking around.
As a writer on the platform[2] itself, I think the general tools/support for the non-Top 20 creators leaves a ton to be desired, so would love to see them step it up in a number of ways if they're really trying to get behind the average writer.
Glad to see more writers & content creators starting small businesses like this! I’ve been working on a set of podcast and vlog pre&post-production toolkits as well as an invite-only virtual event/work space creation & live-streaming platform (http://lo.fish) for independent creatives/writers/publishers/etc to organize online events & interviews ads-free, in a highly-customizable 2d setting and with a more friendly price point vs services like Zoom. We are going public beta next week! For any hn reader who would like to grab an early-access sign-up code just drop me an email at a@castella.art =)
That said, I met a digital nomad who wrote for Steemit, he figured out the cheapest place to work was in a sauna/spa. Steemit sure created interesting people and I'm sure he just pivoted. Assuming Steemit has collapsed, maybe it's still going strong.
Substack is amazing, it's like Tumblr meets Medium for newsletters. The UI is quite bare, the publishing tools are quite primitive, but it works so well. The ease of use inspired me to start my own newsletter where I talk about ideas and trends, I called it The Ideas Digest (https://theideasdigest.substack.com/).
Admittedly, I've been going for barely a week now, but I've got a months worth of content already in the pipeline that I am working on and I am hopeful in the future that I can grow it into something I can make a little side income from. Not having to manage my own infrastructure is highly motivating, to be honest.
The thing is, I am a developer and more than capable of getting something like Wordpress setup and self-hosting my own Substack type newsletter, but it just seemed like a waste of time, especially for an idea I wasn't even sure I could pull off or people would be interested in. But, I am surprising myself and although I didn't have a preexisting mailing list, I've got a few subscribers now with almost zero marketing.
I see the value in no-code solutions like Substack that cater to specific niches like newsletters.
The struggle for me is long-form content writing usually comes natural to me, but given Substack is newsletter-focused, I feel like I need to not go too overboard with the word count. I know long-form content gets social shares and whatnot, but I feel like Substack is more of a private network type of thing where people are emailed content. I would be interested in knowing if any research has found what the ideal content length should be for Substack specifically.
Links/Round-ups = retention. They make sure your brand stays top of mind for folks, but very rarely are they the thing that makes new subscribers come in. The tradeoff is that this is way more time-efficient that writing your own long-form.
New Long-form Content = Growth. The long-form stuff takes us 10x the time to write, but is consistently responsible for the increase in audience size. If you're going full-time, this is the place to invest. Particularly because Substack is so bad at reader Discovery, you need to invest in getting people onto your publication in your own way (original content), because Substack only really helps the biggest creators drive traffic.
It's why the I think the idea of bundling is going to be so big with newsletters, akin to how traditional newspapers started through a bunch of independent writers coming together. Eventually producing new long-form stuff wont be able to drive sustained growth and there's a cap on how much content a single person can put out.