A few days ago I made a post on IndieHackers about my recent accomplishment. I counted my articles on Hackernoon related to #food-tech category and realize that during these years I published 24 articles. It's a huge accomplishment for me and I was happy to share it with others.
But comments went in another direction. I get asked if I want to create a newsletter, related to food tech. And yeah, I'm thinking about it, but there are a lot of things to take into consideration.
I get asked if Substack is a great option to build your newsletter. So I want to share my takeaways here. Let's start with the basics.
Substack is a SaaS (Software as a Service) platform that allows writers to monetize their newsletters via a subscription model for various prices starting at $5 per month.
its focus on writers and WYSIWYG editor is easy to learn. Plus you can pick if it's a free piece or if you want to send it to your paid users only. While it's easy to write a post, there are still limitations to layout, i.e. you can't put everything there. which is probably fine.
it's can be a great idea to start from scratch, especially when you just want to start publishing your content and don't worry about everything else. It put readers first, which I also like. Not sure if I like an idea about "premium content" that is hidden under paywalls.
People that know me well, know that I have the motto "Fuck Paywalls". For years I'm skipping magazines with paywalls and published my content on Hackernoon.
But there are some Pros and Cons, for sure. You own your content and it's great. You can also easily export your email list, posts, and other data from your settings page.
From that page, you can download everything that is allowed by Substack right now. sarcasm.
I remember times when you can download all your business contacts from Linkedin into a simple CSV list. But it's not allowed right now I think... Private companies can easily change their directions, ie pivot and update their terms.
I also remember that I was able to download contacts to my 60k students on Udemy and use them. But now I have a limited option to reach my students via 2 fields form on Udemy and I also should watch my words and didn't try to steal any traffic from Udemy(they better focus on applying some tools to DRM protection of video courses instead, so nobody can download them).
Making money from newsletters is also fine. And the ability to set up paid subscriptions is a great way for monetization.
Here is a guide from Substack to take a deeper look: https://substack.com/going-paid-guide.
I think they allowing you to connect your Stripe account via Settings But what if your country doesn't support Stripe(yeah, there are so many countries worldwide, you know)... or what if I'm a crypto fan and I want to put some QR code or include unstoppableDomains links? not sure if it's possible.
As a company that wants to be profitable, there is some fee for sure.
Substack allows you to use Stripe to accept payments. Stripe is available in select countries if you are not located in one of those countries then you cannot receive payments.
Both Substack and Stripe take their cut from each transaction. Substack charges 10% and Stripe charges 2.9% + 30 cents on each transaction. This means if you charge $10 per subscriber then the Substack + Stripe fee will be 1.59. This may not sound a lot but let's suppose you have 100 paid subscribers each paying $10 per month. You'll be paying $159 each month and $1908 each year.
While I'm fine with that(my Udemy profile has "your IRS withholding tax rate is 24%"), someone might be angry to share their profits.
SEO is a huge topic to talk about too. Basically, when you try to grow and promote your newsletter - you'll send traffic to the substack website and work for growing their SEO index. And if you decide to part ways - you'll need to start from scratch with all those links, etc.
Limited integrations also limit your potential to access other tools that may help you convert more visitors into paying subscribers.
A huge plus is simplicity. You don't need to be a pro in order to start. But again, you will be limited by a platform for sure.
There is a limit to earning from a single model of monetization. The only paywall is available, so...
Imagine this situation: you work hard and be able to grow your reader's list. let's assume it's related to tech.
Your archive page(list of previously published pieces) gets a lot of traffic and you want to add it to the sidebar. CarbonAds(https://www.carbonads.net/) you wouldn't be allowed to do that.
Another issue is SEO limitation. All images are hosted on their CDN. Probably they wouldn't be indexed as part of your newsletter here is a link: https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_704,h_396,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F590aa007-1c00-4f98-abcb-f717db528128_4032x3024.jpeg
they don't put alts, so ...
<img class="post-preview-inner-image" src="{URL}" alt="">
Censorship. I don't know about situations where substack limited free speech or anything, but as a public company, I'm sure they have some rules or moderations inside. While I'm sure that HN readers are following some rules, there is always another side.
A few years ago there was a situation when Patreon decided to ban some accounts because of a violation of rules. Jordan Peterson was affected I think
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8_OrrvaVVw&feature=emb_title
Quick mention(I didn't explore this tool).
ConvertKit can be an alternative, btw: https://convertkit.com/.
Again, substack is a great choice if you want to focus on content and don't distract your users with ads or something else boring. But if you will need some additional features that aren't in their roadmap - sorry.
You can also benefit from their userbase. substack has more than 500k paying subscribers. And if you get featured, you can get some additional users from that. But as a starter, it will be hard to get featured. And I'm not sure if you are ready to do it.
Plus, it's a competitive field. Like if you have your own website, your marketing, your newsletter, and people go to it to read your content - it's your users. with the substack case, your visitors can end up on some other profiles and as it's a platform that unites - they have the right to switch. is it good or not - it's upon you.
When I was running my previous company, we don't have a website and got clients from Elance website for freelancers. We have quite a good profile, reviews, etc. We get into 14th LVL which is a quite good accomplishment in my opinion. But when they decided to merge with oDesk and become an Upwork, shit things start to happen.
But for details, I'll advise reading articles from Nebojsa Todorovic: https://hackernoon.com/u/nebojsa.todorovic.
After that situation, I'll probably advise you to build your own website and invest money into promoting it, instead of promoting your profiles.
Let's imagine another situation. You have an upcoming product that you want to promote to your readers. In my situation, it's tools for newsletters or modules for food tech startups.
Will you be able to use your current userbase? I don't know.
Let's imagine that you created Landing Page with a lead magnet. Will you be able to add people that subscribed to that product to your Substack list? I don't think so.
As substack controlling subscription flow, you wouldn't be able to change something there.
Or what if you want to grow your newsletter and sell it later? I don't think someone will buy access to your Substack account 🙂 And if you decide to migrate away, you'll probably lose some users.
Recently I find this marketplace for selling newsletters: https://duuce.com/
I recall a similar situation with Youtube creators. While recently Youtube added some features for monetization, there are still a lot of cases when people lost their monetization or got some claims from copyright owners.
If you react to some videos - you can get demonetized, if someone reports your video - it can be deleted, etc.
This is why some creators are leaving YT or exploring other alternatives.
There are a lot of great people that doing cool education videos. And as they want to grow and expand their businesses - they moving part of their content into https://curiositystream.com/ or https://nebula.app/
From Nebula website:
Exclusive content. Original productions and bonus material.
Support creators. Nebula is creator-owned and operated.
No pre-roll ads. No need to skip what isn't there.
Download videos. Watch offline in our mobile apps.
https://www.tubefilter.com/2021/09/21/youtube-creator-owned-nebula-curiosity-stream-investment/
Will continue this thread later.
Main Page layout on some popular newsletter for foodies.
