On the subject of Substack
Love bombs, money talk & other shortcomings
Hello Friends
Happy Friday
So I teased this in last week's letter and this week, I managed to find time to gather my Substack thoughts together. I feel a bit nervous putting these thoughts out there; there are some very evangelical Substackers out there. I feel like I should clarify at the very beginning that this letter is not hating on Substack. I still believe that Substack is a great social media platform, especially if you are looking for a slower, more sustainable way to market your small business. However, at its heart, it is a social media platform, owned by someone else with their own interests paramount. I’ve had a lot of chats in my DMs about Substack recently, and I thought I would share them here so they may be helpful to any of you thinking about starting one up.
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I’ve seen more and more posts on Instagram recently with artists considering going all-in with Substack. In a sea of more and more social media apps, it seems too good to be true—all your marketing needs wrapped up in one platform. But clichés are cliché for a reason. A couple of which spring to mind here are that all your eggs in one basket are never a good thing, and if something seems too good to be true, it generally is.
A love bomb too far.
In the last couple of months, I've noticed a real uptick in how so much of the content on Substack I get shown is people raving about how much they love Substack. It’s starting to make me feel a bit uneasy… Call me a cynic, but it gives me cult vibes and makes me feel uneasy. Maybe this is just me, someone who generally hates being told what to do or how to think. If you tell me to watch a TV show, I probably won’t watch it. If you tell me I definitely have to watch a TV show, I am 100% not watching it. I’m weird, I know.
When you open the app, you are automatically on the Notes page, which lately is always full of people raving about how much they love Substack. A recent example was this gem:
"I left 500+ comments on Substack last month. It took me 3 hours per day. The results were incredible…100’s of new followers’."
Is this the best use of 3 hours of your time? I’m doubtful. Personally, I’m looking for ways to reduce my time on social media; this doesn’t feel like it fits in with this plan.
And this ‘playing the system’ highlights another sticking point for me right now on Substack. It’s so full of people teaching you how to game the Substack System; the advice is deafening. There are already hundreds of dedicated coaches, courses, and experts all vying for a chance to be the one to help you game the system, so you too can be a six-figure earner from your Substack. It’s exhausting. I don’t want to game the system. I’m tired of optimising everything. I just want to keep improving and growing my Design and Photography skills so that I can help other people who are in need of great Design and Photography.
Money, money, money.
There are so many accounts professing that they have the magic secret to help you ‘monetize your Substack.’ In these never-ending unprecedented times, we find ourselves living in, you can see why that hook is so appealing to creatives. In my honest opinion, the paid subscription model has serious limit issues. It wasn’t that long ago that you would buy a magazine for a fiver, full of articles and photos from a range of contributors; packed full of value.
I get it; we live in very different times now, and the magazine industry is struggling, outcompeted by social media where the inspiration is available for free. Let me be clear, I think that creators should absolutely be paid for their work, rather than be exploited by Meta and the like—but £5 a week for every creator that you like and want to support on Substack adds up pretty quickly to an unaffordable sum, well, certainly for me. I have recently reduced the number of accounts that I pay for down to just three. I can’t afford more than that right now. I am all for creatives getting paid, but this model isn’t going to work for the majority of creatives, and selling it to them as a magical panacea is wrong.
A cool newsletter provider… or is it?
So initially, Substack was a newsletter provider, but I’m not sure that it can call itself that now having introduced smart notifications. The feature is a good one. As you follow more and more Substacks, you can set your app to smart notifications so that your inbox isn’t filled up with Substack emails. I have smart notifications turned on, so I only read Substacks when I go into the app. Sometimes this is every few days, sometimes this is every few weeks. If you are trying to market your business, this is a slight issue. Not what you would call reliable for any email marketing campaigns.
Also, if a newsletter lives permanently on a social media app, is it actually a newsletter? Initially, I was drawn by the idea that these musings got a permanent home somewhere, but now I’m not so sure. Having reflected more on this, there is a far more intimate quality to a newsletter which doesn't live permanently online anywhere other than in the inboxes of your subscribers. Its lifetime depends on their personal email hygiene habits. Some people are the read and delete immediately types, others are like me and currently have 25,000 unread emails in their inbox and who knows how many more read ones. If I am a subscriber of your email list, you can guarantee that your emails will live in my inbox for eternity.
Along with this intimacy, there is the incentive to join your list in the first place. I mean, why sign up for a newsletter if you can just open an app and read that content anyway?
I think, above all, my recent feelings around Substack are that it is, above all else, a social media app. What the app does, where it decides to go is ultimately down to them. It’s not in your control, and you are there contributing content to grow an app for someone else. Yes, Substack is a lovely place to hang out, full of smart, funny, engaging people to connect with. It’s a refreshing place to be, especially whilst Instagram continues to reside in its hot mess era, with no signs of ever moving on.
So what to do when you have these doubts? For me, I have decided to move this letter to an email platform, maybe Squarespace or Flodesk (any other suggestions welcome). I will still write on Substack, but with less frequency and with more intention. I don’t know what this will look like yet but I have some ideas.
My advice to you? If you are thinking about starting a Substack, then do it. But do it with intention and ensure that it is a part of a larger ecosystem, top of which should always be your website and email list.
I hope that this is helpful. If you have Substack thoughts too then please do share; I would love to know your thoughts on this.
Until next week.
Wishing you all a wonderful weekend.
Becca x
