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Ask HN: Anyone here making money writing on Substack?
Hey there!
I've been blogging on Medium for almost a year.
Some of my articles got quite high and I could make a few hundred bucks a month from it. But, Medium is behind a paywall, and many of the articles there is clickbait & low quality. I do not want to be a writer there.
I always wanted to start writing a newsletter. A few weeks ago I found out about substack. It looks pretty neat, plus, I could migrate all of my Medium posts.
So, my plan is to write a small daily recap of TIL & articles I was reading over the day for free subscribers. And, writing my long reads for paid subscribers.
My questions:
1. Anyone making money on Substack here?
2. How do you promote it?
3. Could you recommend any good example of a Substack on tech & entrepreneurship?
My substack: https://codarium.substack.com/about
Thx!
- uberman 6y agoI don't know Substack, but I checked out a couple of blogs prompted by your question. I read their "how to get paid on Substack" article and they work up some revenue projections/examples based on things like a conversion of email subscribers to paid monthly subscribers of 10%. That seems really really high. I would have estimated an email campaign open rate of 10% not a conversion rate of 10%. I would have expected a conversion rate in the 1% range or less. In my experience, people in general don't really want to or expect to pay for information on-line. They will pay to be "entertained" through for example Patreon, but not for information and particularly not text based information. I hope you find success but I would be cautious about using some of Substack's estimates. Hopefully I am wrong. For what it is worth, your NewsCatcher project looks interesting. Is your intent to use this new blog as a practical example of using it?
- artembugara 6y agoThx for reply. Regarding NewsCatcherAPI, I plan to do some examples that I will post on our website (newscatcherapi.com). Some big works will be also posted on my sub stack, yes.
- JS2Java 6y agoI think it's going to be hard to build an audience with a paid newsletter from the start. It seems like you should write for free + Patreon. As you build your email list and audience you can then start including non-intrusive ads or your own offers, for example an ebook. Eventually once your audience is large enough, you can add a premium list and convert your existing, already highly targeted audience. Nathan Barry has a book called Authority which basically talks about this.
- javaIsGreat 6y agoi assume this guy is hes well know and continues use substack, idk if he gets a special rate due his previous success https://taibbi.substack.com/ https://taibbi.substack.com/