from Hacker News

Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance

by kevin_indig on 6/29/20, 2:54 PM with 82 comments

  • by kevin_indig on 6/29/20, 2:54 PM

    2 years ago, I started a newsletter on Mailchimp called Tech Bound and built it out to +3,000 subscribers. 3 months ago, I decided to migrate to Substack. One week ago, I went from Substack to publishing on my own site. In this post, I explain why, what my current stack looks like, and a larger trend that has been in full swing for 2 years.

  • by tbran on 6/30/20, 2:38 PM

    I'm planning to launch a newsletter soon for a site I own that gets a moderately decent amount of traffic. Here is a snippet of some handy things I've found:

    The cost of sending email is a lot on some platforms (Mailchimp is $30/month for 2500 subscribers and $50/month for 5000 subs), but a lot cheaper with Mailgun or Amazon SES. Sendy [0] and Mailcoach [1] are both self-hosted newsletter sending apps that use Mailgun/SES if you want to DIY.

    There is a handy blog post [2] from the creator of cron.weekly on his newsletter workflow.

    Don't put "weekly" in the newsletter name because then you're really setting that weekly expectation. At some point, you might not want to be publishing weekly unless you've got some serious automation happening.

    There are some interesting ideas on newsletter businesses on gaps.com [3]. A year ago I thought that a newsletter should link to my own content. But now? Many, many newsletters are link aggregators.

    [0] https://sendy.co/

    [1] https://mailcoach.app/

    [2] https://ma.ttias.be/how-to-cron-weekly-newsletter/

    [3] https://gaps.com/six-figure-newsletter/

  • by cally on 6/30/20, 12:18 PM

    "I’m one of a few that saw the power of RSS, which is now coming back in the shape of podcasts"

    I don't think the rise of podcasts is massively due to RSS. I think it's because of the low cost / high creativity balance of the format, where the format uses RSS.

  • by Sachaniman on 6/30/20, 4:28 PM

    The biggest thing for me is canonical URLs.

    If I'm trying to BUILD an audience, I'm going to write content for free. If I already have a website I post content on, you bet I'm going to keep posting my free content there. Why am I competing with Substack on SEO for my own free content? That's just stupid.

    Eventually, if I actually get an audience that's willing to pay, I would use Substack to offer that walled garden. Just like Youtube creators offer their free content on Youtube, and paid content through other means like Patreon.

    Even Medium supports canonical URLs. I'm not sure why Substack isn't satisfied with being the distributor of my content, but also wants to be the home for it.

  • by monus on 6/30/20, 9:58 AM

    I’d be interested to see if the author will get as much exposure to new potential subscribers without a platform like Substack of Medium promoting it. IMO, it’s always been the community aspect of these platforms that keep the authors locked in rather than the technical difficulties of setting up your own website.

  • by tinyhouse on 6/30/20, 11:36 AM

    I'm surprised Substack's business model is charging ~10% from one's revenue. A fixed pricing would make more sense. Why would anyone who is planning on profiting from their newsletter would go with a deal like that? Building a newsletter site these days is a pretty simple task with many no code solutions. I'm not saying what Substack provides is not worth paying for, just that it's a bad deal for people with successful newsletters that generate money, and a good deal for everyone else. But the former users are the ones Substack need in order to make money.

  • by jetgirl on 6/30/20, 2:32 PM

    Good for you. I quit using tinyletter after two years, switched to substack and quit that last week. https://jetgirl.art/2020/06/27/going-back-to-blogging/

  • by gramakri on 6/30/20, 1:50 PM

    Why is it that one cannot export content from substack?

  • by musicale on 7/1/20, 2:08 AM

    > you can monitor ad or organic performance with tracking pixels!

    Use of tracking pixels is not a pro. It is a dark pattern that needs to go away.

  • by dgudkov on 6/30/20, 3:37 PM

    Is there a self-hosted alternative to Substack?