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Substack has spawned a new class of newsletter entrepreneurs

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Re: Substack has spawned a new class of newsletter entrepreneurs

#41

Post by twic »

luckylion wrote: post #13
bawolff wrote: post #7

Maybe this varries depending on interest niche, but for me personally, there is so much quality writing that is available for free, much more than i am reasonably able to consume, its hard to imagine paying a subscription for writing.

You might pay for the curation. Finding what's interesting takes time as well, even if it's just scrolling through HN, and you will miss some things. If somebody saves you that time, that's probably well worth a few bucks a month, isn't it?

If it was a one-stop shop that fed me all the reading i could do, i would happily pay £10 a month for it. Maybe a bit more.

But if it's narrowly focused, the value is proportionally less. If someone does really good curation of obscure Soviet aerospace technology, i'm interested, but that's no more than 5% of my reading.

But then, i am a generalist, and fairly stingy. It seems like a repeat of a very old story to say that niche curators will have to find either price-insensitive generalists ("whales"), or focused obsessives.

Re: Substack has spawned a new class of newsletter entrepreneurs

#42

Post by edouard-harris »

sails wrote: post #31
seemslegit wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's how this plays out. The successful writers on Substack will eventually leave the platform for more control over their audience and lower fees (there's a reason Ben Thompson isn't on Substack). Except the entire model of substack is based on writers not having access even to their audience's mail addresses.

Substack writers do have access to their signups and can easily export them. https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037465992-...

Yes. This has been the case from the very beginning of their platform, as far as I'm aware.

Re: Substack has spawned a new class of newsletter entrepreneurs

#43

Post by criddell »

mvellandi wrote: post #11

Newsletters are the easiest way to retain readers since it just pops in their inbox -- if the writing is good and/or specialized. Good design also really helps. When I managed the newsletters for a New York urban planning nonprofit, we averaged 23% open rates. Another good hook is when issues don't have a public web archive, or it's paywalled. I saw the bundling mentioned in the Digiday article with the "Everything"…

Newsletter fatigue is definitely setting in with me. I was pretty excited about them through 2019 and subscribed to a bunch. They are filtered to a folder in my mail and these days I rarely open any of them. My mail client also blocks remote content (no images) so even if I do read one, I probably will not register on their analytics.

I'm actually using an RSS newsreader more (NetNewsWire on my iPad). For me, it's a much better experience.

Re: Substack has spawned a new class of newsletter entrepreneurs

#44

Post by SyneRyder »

roadbeats wrote: post #36

In bigger picture, this is a natural move from quantity to quality. The free content on internet feel like eating garbage. I follow a few really good newsletters (e.g Craig Mod's) and every episode feels like a chapter in a good book. What I don't enjoy about newsletters is the e-mail clients themselves. They're bulky, filled with features I never use. I wish there was a way to hook my newsletters subscriptions up wi…

> I wish there was a way to hook my newsletters subscriptions up with Kindle.

There used to be services a bit like this. Instapaper used to be able to send a digest of saved web articles to your Kindle, like your own magazine. eg [1]. It sometimes did badly due to web page formatting, but with newsletters you'd have more control layout.

I think you can still deliver the .mobi files to a @free.kindle.com address and the reader won't be charged for WiFi-only delivery. They have to whitelist your email address in their online Kindle account, which might be a usability issue. It's a while since I looked at .mobi, but I don't think it's much different from a single HTML file.

It's not a service I would use, because I love email, and I worry about market size... but it's an interesting idea.

[1] https://www.guidingtech.com/29107/instapaper-kindle-merits/

Re: Substack has spawned a new class of newsletter entrepreneurs

#45

Post by woah »

yoshuaw wrote: post #39
pembrook wrote: post #19

Substack has been successful in creating buzz among the media crowd, and there's definitely a business there riding the trend toward subscriptions in the media biz, but unfortunately taking on $17M in VC money has set them up for a disappointing end. Here's how this plays out. The successful writers on Substack will eventually leave the platform for more control over their audience and lower fees (there's a reason Be…

> Prior to taking on a16z riches, Substack was a cool indie brand. The name "Substack" was co-opted from James "Substack" Halliday [1][2], a well-known hacker in the Node.js community. It wasn't an indie-brand-turned-corporate; it's a person. The way substack.com has used VC money to take over someone's identity and feed off their reputation is incredibly scummy. [1]: https://github.com/substack [2]: https://twitter.…

Do you really think they intentionally chose to collide with someone’s GitHub username???

Re: Substack has spawned a new class of newsletter entrepreneurs

#46

Post by Cenk »

pembrook wrote: post #19

Substack has been successful in creating buzz among the media crowd, and there's definitely a business there riding the trend toward subscriptions in the media biz, but unfortunately taking on $17M in VC money has set them up for a disappointing end. Here's how this plays out. The successful writers on Substack will eventually leave the platform for more control over their audience and lower fees (there's a reason Be…

> As this happens, and as the honeymoon PR period dies off, the journalists will turn on Substack, just as they do on every single thing Silicon Valley puts out (see Lambda School).

This doesn’t really seem true. Journalists “turn on” every single thing SV puts out? Do you think the reporting on Lambda school is dishonest? Or do you think that journalists reporting on a SV company is in and of itself somehow wrong?

Re: Substack has spawned a new class of newsletter entrepreneurs

#47

Post by patio11 »

mikro2nd wrote: post #38
patio11 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are (book) authors professionally, some people are authors recreationally, some people are authors professionally exclusively , and some people are authors professionally but their primary monetization engine is elsewhere. If one believes that writing books generally isn't a sustainable occupation, I think that belief is likely under-nuanced. (Ditto e-books or similar information products, by the way.) Tu…

Thanks for a more nuanced take on the model. The question in my mind is: How much time/energy gets eaten up in marketing a newsletter (or other paid subscription information product)? I suspect that lack of interest or skill in marketing is much more the limiting factor that sets an upper bound on how many people can pull it off to derive a realistic income this way.

I'd imagine it is different for authors in different phases of the business, starting at very substantial while one does not have a lot of a personal platform and decreasing markedly when one does.

Someone, and I'm forgetting who it was, suggested that paid subscriptions is the natural monetization strategy for people who are a) public intellectuals and b) do a lot of their work on Twitter, and in that sense you're doing marketing with a sort of cycles which might not read as "intentionally doing marketing work." (I think as the community distributes the technology of running these businesses, like the technology of running e-book businesses has been distributed, this will get easier, too. One thing all newsletter authors should be doing ~constantly is hitting up podcasts in adjacent spaces, because it gets juices flowing for writing and because every time you talk to 10,000 people you'll sell N new subscriptions.)

Re: Substack has spawned a new class of newsletter entrepreneurs

#48

Post by UnbugMe »

yoshuaw wrote: post #39
pembrook wrote: post #19

Substack has been successful in creating buzz among the media crowd, and there's definitely a business there riding the trend toward subscriptions in the media biz, but unfortunately taking on $17M in VC money has set them up for a disappointing end. Here's how this plays out. The successful writers on Substack will eventually leave the platform for more control over their audience and lower fees (there's a reason Be…

> Prior to taking on a16z riches, Substack was a cool indie brand. The name "Substack" was co-opted from James "Substack" Halliday [1][2], a well-known hacker in the Node.js community. It wasn't an indie-brand-turned-corporate; it's a person. The way substack.com has used VC money to take over someone's identity and feed off their reputation is incredibly scummy. [1]: https://github.com/substack [2]: https://twitter.…

Do you have any evidence that Halliday's reputation has benefitted Substack (the company) in any way or that this was intentional?

I view it simply as a catchy name and nothing more.

Re: Substack has spawned a new class of newsletter entrepreneurs

#49

Post by e_carra »

input_sh wrote: post #40
e_carra wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very easy to convert HTML to ePub, you could create simple script that converts every newsletter into ePub and adds it to your library. I don't know if it would work for Kindle devices, but you could always install custom firmware that has support for Dropbox synchronisation.

ePub in general doesn't work on a Kindle (you have to convert them to mobi), but you can create your own "Kindle magazines" (don't know their exact name) using calibre. One use case of that is that you can feed RSS feeds to your calibre's news feature and schedule them to be sent to your @kindle.com email address at a specified day / time of the week. Essentially DYI magazine filled with whatever blogs you want.

That sounds nice! I have a Kobo e-reader, and I use their beta browser or pocket to read this kind of things, but especially the browser is not very convenient.

Re: Substack has spawned a new class of newsletter entrepreneurs

#50

Post by yoshuaw »

woah wrote: post #45
yoshuaw wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Prior to taking on a16z riches, Substack was a cool indie brand. The name "Substack" was co-opted from James "Substack" Halliday [1][2], a well-known hacker in the Node.js community. It wasn't an indie-brand-turned-corporate; it's a person. The way substack.com has used VC money to take over someone's identity and feed off their reputation is incredibly scummy. [1]: https://github.com/substack [2]: https://twitter.…

Do you really think they intentionally chose to collide with someone’s GitHub username???

Sure do.

Substack the company was founded in 2017 [1]. At that point Substack the person was already a household name in open source — with 76.000 GitHub stars to his name his projects' popularity were on par with the likes of Mozilla [2].

Naming an upstart company after a household name that isn't protected by copyright is incredibly clever. You get to use an established and trusted name, but can't get sued for using it.

[1]: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/substack#section-ove...

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170115065014/http://git-awards... — GitHub stars aren't a perfect metric, but it's the best I can come up with to convey the degree of name recognition back in 2017

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