I'm leaving Substack (Soon)
With so many newsletters launching off late, it's gonna be difficult to fight for email space.
Readers will prefer bundling over paying many individual creators.
Users will benchmark pricing with other free/low priced and find it difficult to keep paying you a higher fee.
It'll be difficult to differentiate/add value with Substack's current feature/discovery/design constraints.
If you want to play the long game, think about this.
IMO, Quickly build a considerable audience using substack. (And thus avoid paying huge to MailChimp)
Switch to paid, then get them on your website where you can add more value and differentiate.
Easier to differentiate and justify paying higher subscription fee. (And easy for you to pay for plugins, themes etc)
What do you think?
How can you create a moat around your content? (Relationship with subscribers is one but not sure good enough)
I'd love for you to document how you transition off Substack (if you do).
I've never taken the plunge to do it because I fear if I build a big paying base, there will be no easy way to move off substack and take:
To be honest. I'm uncertain about how the transition will take place but surely.
https://2pml.com/ , Trends.co did this simply by informing their current free users that they're starting a new paid NL and posted a link to the website.
Substack does allo exporting subscribers and posts via settings.
Hey Saurabh! I sell easy-to-setup themes on my website buildfaster.co
I would suggest Lightning Blue News or if you want a free one, I just published Half-Half.
Let me know what you think :)
I love what Paul Jarvis does -- he has a super simple weekly newsletter that is easy to follow as it doesn't ask you to visit a website or anything. https://pjrvs.com/
This sounds about right. We've moved some folks off Substack to Pico when their lists started to take off (so fees added up) but their growth plateaued because they had no website.
The migration isn't the easiest but definitely doable. Good options would be Pico + Convertkit or Pico + Mailchimp or Memberful + Mailchimp (though I'm obviously biased to Pico).
Just tried. Hard paywalls are not working on my site for some reason. Double checked your knowledge base, I've set the content access settings correctly. Just the Subscription form pops-up, which can be closed with the little 'x' at the top left and content can still be accessed.
Can you please list websites using Pico, I checked out the ones you've mentioned on your site.
I want to make something like trends.co , possible?
Hey! What CMS are you on? If it’s live can you send me a link? Best is to open a support chat at trypico.com. I’ll check it but that way I can rope others in easily too.
I'd love to hear options of a non-substack stack that will be optimal for paid newsletters.
Wordpress CMS + a news/blog/magazine theme + Mailchimp + Memberful/woocommerce memberships
Stratechery is Wordpress + Simple yet customized WP blog theme + Mailchimp + Memberful
Self-hosted Ghost with their newsletter/membership features!! I'm loving it so far.
Problem with ghost is that it is kinda rigid as compared to Wordpress.
If you want to add more features for your community, you'll find it very easy on WP.
Can build a blog on Ghost, but a full fledged website is difficult.
Yeah, it's a fair point but I'm just so sick of Wordpress bloat :D