Does substack allow (paid) anonymous writing? I could not immediately find how this works from the faq. Will they protect their writers?
How would you collect payment? Monero or some similar crypto currency?
Custom domains now available on Substack
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Re: Custom domains now available on Substack
#12> To use custom domains, you’ll be charged a one-time $50 fee per publication. I wonder why they're doing this. Substack is already taking 10% of revenue which is huge. I think a better model would have been to offer it for free to paid newsletters so it's considered a premium feature and it can't be abused by their users not generating any revenue.
I suspect they are gauging general interest on whether people are willing to pay for custom domain or if they could pivot to a SaaS enterprise model on the side.
Re: Custom domains now available on Substack
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1. Custom domains are (less than) table stakes in my book.
I took this approach in the e-commerce space a decade ago, and assumed that no serious merchant would ever dream of paying for an e-commerce solution that required them to link to a subdomain on another company's domain to take orders. I was wrong. In fact, a lot of merchants saw the third-party domain as a status thing. There were thousands of merchants in one tribe and thousands in another. They are still doing it…
It depends on how much trust they put behind the domain name and operating company. People trust amazon which trickles down to sellers on it.
People trust few domain extensions more than others even though many of them are similarly priced and available. It's all about who else is using the same extension. .com? Used by most companies. .news ? no one? not trust worthy then.
It's somewhat fascinating to me that the bigger the company, the more trust people put in their verification of actors employed on the platform. Intuitively, I would think the more actors in a company - the less trustworthy or verified the actors would be.
Re: Custom domains now available on Substack
#14> To use custom domains, you’ll be charged a one-time $50 fee per publication. I wonder why they're doing this. Substack is already taking 10% of revenue which is huge. I think a better model would have been to offer it for free to paid newsletters so it's considered a premium feature and it can't be abused by their users not generating any revenue.
But then it's not available on free newsletters, even if the author would prefer to pay for it. Not sure what the problem is with this model. $50 isn't really meaningful hit -- it's not a recurring cost or anything.
I also disagree that 10% of revenue is a "huge" chunk. Running your own mail list and custom domain isn't trivial (not to mention acquiring readers in the first place).
Re: Custom domains now available on Substack
#15Honest question: Is it actually hard to implement (securely) custom domains? In the long term I want to offer custom domains for my product (which does not exist yet).
Re: Custom domains now available on Substack
#16Honest question: Is it actually hard to implement (securely) custom domains? In the long term I want to offer custom domains for my product (which does not exist yet).
It is with SSL and a CDN. Many pipelines aren't setup well for the new world of SSL everything.
Re: Custom domains now available on Substack
#17> To use custom domains, you’ll be charged a one-time $50 fee per publication. I wonder why they're doing this. Substack is already taking 10% of revenue which is huge. I think a better model would have been to offer it for free to paid newsletters so it's considered a premium feature and it can't be abused by their users not generating any revenue.
My guess is that they have a manual pipeline where it requires some effort from a physical person to setup SSL. This $50 is to offset their cost of setup.
Re: Custom domains now available on Substack
#18Does substack allow (paid) anonymous writing? I could not immediately find how this works from the faq. Will they protect their writers?
You can be pseudonymous but I'm sure they have KYC requirements of some kind.
Re: Custom domains now available on Substack
#19> To use custom domains, you’ll be charged a one-time $50 fee per publication. I wonder why they're doing this. Substack is already taking 10% of revenue which is huge. I think a better model would have been to offer it for free to paid newsletters so it's considered a premium feature and it can't be abused by their users not generating any revenue.
But then it's not available on free newsletters, even if the author would prefer to pay for it. Not sure what the problem is with this model. $50 isn't really meaningful hit -- it's not a recurring cost or anything. I also disagree that 10% of revenue is a "huge" chunk. Running your own mail list and custom domain isn't trivial (not to mention acquiring readers in the first place).
$50 is a lot for a feature that most SaaS are offering for free.
> Running your own mail list and custom domain isn't trivial
Regardless of whether this is trivial or not, Substack is a service, not a partner.
If one day you decide to increase your prices and work your ass off to produce more valuable content to your readers, why should Substack get more money?
If instead of sending newsletters we were talking about ecommerce (which is way less trivial) would you be ok with Shopify charging 10% of revenue?
What about AWS charging you 10% of your revenue?
Re: Custom domains now available on Substack
#20Honest question: Is it actually hard to implement (securely) custom domains? In the long term I want to offer custom domains for my product (which does not exist yet).
No. Caddy does this: https://laravel-news.com/unlimited-custom-domains-vapor
Keyword you want is "on-demand TLS"