Review of Substack in 2020
I wrote a review of Substack in 2019 that still ranks on the front page for GOOG search results, and I just refreshed it with a 2020 review. Thought I'd share in case helpful for people interested in using the product.
The article goes over:
- Overview of Substack features
- What I’ve liked so far
- What I haven’t liked
- Crowdsourced feature wishlist
- Thoughts on the newsletter industry
Some takeaways:
- Substack’s big strength is the simplicity of setup and sending your first email.
- Substack is free unless you start charging readers, unlike many competitors
- Writers that will make Substack money are going to want more from it.
- Getting support is difficult
Crowdsourced feature wishlist:
- Custom domains
- Better pricing
- Help in growing audience
Full post is here if you're interested in the details.
I think it's problematic when the customer base wants to use your product and explicitly says "get your brand off of me!" In fact, I bet there's a ton of people who would absolutely pay for branding off, like gumroad's model . But Substack can't do that if they want to continue growing viraly.
Yeah, there's a tension, because unlike other platforms e.g. instagram, there's little demand generation from substack's platform itself
This comment was deleted 5 years ago