6
10 Comments

Mailchimp or Substack?

Hi indie hackers!!

I am Taishi from Vancouver, Canada.

I have been writing a few newsletters with Mailchimp since last year.
And these days I am curious about Substack.

Is Substack better than Mailchimp?
What part of Substack is better if so?
Should I switch to it?

Any opinion is welcome😁

Thank you in advance.

  1. 1

    Mailchimp and Substack are different tools.

    Substack - Newsletter. Info is the product. You want to get new subscribers from the platform.

    Mailchimp - Mass emails. Product can be anything. You find your own subscribers.

    If you want to see jam, use Mailchimp (or an alternative they are expensive and bloated)

    If you want to write a newsletter, use Substack.

  2. 5

    Hey @taishikato!

    I can share my experience. I moved from Substack to Mailchimp.

    When I joined Substack I liked how it was suited to long-form content. My original newsletter was meant for publishing personal essays. After I launched my first digital product this year (an ebook), I realized that Substack wasn't the right platform for maintaining an email list, for a few reasons:

    • Branding: The branding of the newsletter was the same as with all Substack newsletters. I wanted more control of that.
    • Promoting/selling: The recipients of my Substack newsletter didn't fit my customer profile, so it didn't make sense for me to use this platform for that.
    • Subscription model: Your entire archive is visible to anyone who has the link to your Substack, so running promotions for free subscribers didn't make sense. But I didn't want to offer paid subscriptions, either.
    • Marketing automations: You can't build out funnels or create segments in Substack.

    If the newsletter itself is a product you're selling, Substack is a good way to do this given its entire business model is to help creators make money from newsletter subscriptions.

    If you're interested in building a mailing list and are keen on marketing automations, an email service provider like Mailchimp is a good way to go. Another alternative to Mailchimp is ConvertKit, which has gained significant traction among bloggers and other content creators.

    Hope this helps!

    1. 1

      Hi, @radiomorillo !
      Thank you for your comment!

      Interesting…
      I just wanna publish my weekly newsletter, thus the simple app is enough for me.
      Maybe Substack for me??

      1. 2

        If it's just a weekly newsletter and if you don't mind non-subscribers having access to it (in other words it's not totally "exclusive, subscriber only" content), then Substack is a good choice. :)

  3. 2

    Hard to tell better or not. Because these tools are tapping into different purposes. But in short, I'd prefer the simplicity of Substack nowadays. Recently started a new series. Would be awesome to hear your feedback!

  4. 1

    Sorry for the shameless self post, but I just (5 minutes ago) launched Maildown, which I'm also targeting at dev newsletter creators. You can check it out here: https://maildown.dev. The idea is simple - its just an email API that lets you quickly create and send beautiful emails using markdown.

    1. 5

      Hey @chrys_davies, the hero image on your website does not load, and I don't see any icon either. I thought it would be useful for you to know it :)

      1. 1

        yep, forgot to commit the assets to git... total amateur. Anyway, its back up now....

    2. 1

      Hey, @chris_davies. Thank you for letting me know!!
      I will check it out.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 28 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 15 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments