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Moving Away from Substack
- keiferski 3y agoNot a good post. Substack isn’t perfect, but Medium is awful. Comparing the two is not a good take, especially as Substack seems to have figured out the individual writer business model while Medium still wants you to pay for their whole platform. But... Substack emails your newsletters directly to the readers and provides the option to export your email list right??. I'm sure these will the axed as soon as profitability becomes an issue since they provide a nice lock in. This is extremely unlikely and would invoke a torrent of anger from millions of users.
- hyggetrold 3y ago> This is extremely unlikely and would invoke a torrent of anger from millions of users. Millions of non-paying users. :) See Reddit, Twitter, etc. - the folks running these outfits don't give a fig about their users. Their goal is to make money.
- keiferski 3y agoSubstack’s entire purpose is to cater to writers. Them preventing the export of emails is about as likely as Burger King removing hamburgers from their menu.
- hyggetrold 3y agoPerhaps there's a compromise: Substack won't do it, but they'll get aquired and then whoever bought them will do it. :)
- peter422 3y agoSubstack’s TOS clearly states that the writer owns their list, so I don’t think Substack could even legally axe the ability to export the list. Even if they did change the terms it couldn’t apply retroactively, and as you say, it would upset everybody. So while I can think of reasons to not use Substack, list ownership is not a particularly good one. Source: I have a small Substack
- frabcus 3y agoThe history of the Internet shows you really shouldn't trust that. If I had a Substack list I cared about, I'd regularly export the emails.
- pavlov 3y agoSubstack hasn’t really figured out a business model. They took $86 million of VC money at the height of the boom and used it for exorbitant payouts to writers, creating the illusion of success. Last year Substack failed to raise another VC round and ended up trying crowdfunding instead. Notably they refused to answer any questions about how much money they’re losing and if they ever expect to be profitable — a weird look when you’re soliciting investors: https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/28/23660473/substack-retail-investors-revenue-profit https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/28/23660473/substack-retail-... Personally I’d give Substack less than 20% chances of survival. This kind of information-free crowdfunded investment round is a mark of high desperation.
- keiferski 3y agoThat can all be true, while the post is still bad. Substack isn’t perfect (as I said) but I think their issues are VC-hypergrowth inflicted and not due to a problem with the fundamental business model.
- jzl 3y agoExactly. And although Substack has done a good job of building their brand, on the technical side they have pretty much zero "moat". The service they provide is incredibly simple. It never made sense as a VC-funded massive growth business. It would have been better off as a self-sustained private company, almost along the lines of Craiglist. Patreon finds itself in a similar boat.
- japhyr 3y agoI think the more important point would be that many of their most prominent writers would not put up with it. I imagine that has way more influence than a large number of writers with tens to hundreds of subscribers.
- colesantiago 3y agoNot to derail the article but what are good alternatives to Substack that are good for an email newsletter?
- keiferski 3y agoGhost.org is pretty solid. You can host it yourself or pay for their service.
- hliyan 3y agoI was recently told (right here on HN) that Squarespace has built-in subscriptions. Not sure if it can be connected to their blog "product", but that might be an option. Of course, readers will have to experience the friction of entering their card details.
- keiferski 3y agoUnless they changed this in the last month, there is no easy way to automatically send posts to email subscribers. You have to manually set up an email and add the posts. This is really time consuming and led me to switch a project from Squarespace to Ghost.
- bernardlunn 3y agoDIY using Wordpress
- aareet 3y agohttps://tinyletter.com https://tinyletter.com has worked well for me
- reidjs 3y agoIn the article they chose to self host. I followed this path as well! So far so good, but I also don’t have a huge viewership so it wasn’t that big a deal
- patch_cable 3y agoI use https://buttondown.email https://buttondown.email
- skybrian 3y agoIf you’re worried about it, backing up your subscriber list periodically seems like a good idea? There’s an export button on the subscribers tab. (And there’s the option to set up a custom domain, but it costs $50.)
- evbogue 3y agoWe really need to solve this issue. I was going to say 'just run your own web server and email your clients' but obviously you can't do that in this current environment.
- Lamad1234 3y ago[flagged]
- simonw 3y agoMy approach is to publish to my own blog at https://simonwillison.net https://simonwillison.net and then copy and paste content from that into a Substack newsletter at https://simonw.substack.com https://simonw.substack.com a few times a month. It's been working really well. Substack don't have an API, but they do support copy and paste - so I built myself a tool that assembles my blog content into rich text I can copy and paste straight into the Substack editor. I wrote about how that works here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/4/substack-observable/ https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/4/substack-observable/
- harryvederci 3y agoI don't mean to sound negative but can I ask why? Seems like a lot of work just to send a newsletter. What am I missing?
- simonw 3y agoI've been blogging for 21 years. Sending the newsletter takes me literally 30s thanks to the automation I setup, and means my blog is now available to email people in addition to RSS/Atom people.