After flirting with the idea of Substack for a while, ended up settling for a new site with Ghost on Digital Ocean.
Set up and designed site, added sample content, and generally tweaked it until it worked at least as a proof-of-concept. I decided that November - December would be a soft launch of the site, and I'd properly launch in 2021.
Put out news to my (relatively small) network, and got a healthy 70 signups for testing and initial feedback.