The installment #1 of my “For Starters” substack was about how failure is inevitable
https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-1-the-end-is...
I grew my Substack from 439 to 451 free subscribers in just 11 months
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Re: I grew my Substack from 439 to 451 free subscribers in just 11 months
#62Darn, I've been doing it all wrong! Guess I need to migrate my entire blog to Substack so that I can have a concept of "subscribers" and the necessary analytics to give me a dopamine rush any time the number gets bigger.
The person writes for a living, so having analytics is necessary. Subscribers are the most direct possible audience for a book, which is usually part of how writers support themselves.
Re: I grew my Substack from 439 to 451 free subscribers in just 11 months
#63> So, considering that you’re likely going to fail, at least pick something you’re going to enjoy failing at! This is the golden nugget that got me subscribed. I love satire (and am pumped Jon Stewart is back on TDS) and this is a good perspective to trying out side projects.
> Jon Stewart is back on TDS
I thought you meant Trump derangement syndrome. Which is also a totally valid statement.
Re: I grew my Substack from 439 to 451 free subscribers in just 11 months
#64I never understood the appeal in platforms like Medium and Substack. But then I am a pathological contrarian and have an allergic reaction to anything any kind of advertising signal to buy, force you to have an account for consultation, subscribe, send like and whatever and tend to avoid most of these platforms. You are free to add an rss xml file to your website though.
The appeal of Substack is akin to sharecropping on the land of a different feudal lord. Instead of fighting SEO optimizers on Google, you can now be a guinea pig for Substack as they figure out how to make money.
Re: I grew my Substack from 439 to 451 free subscribers in just 11 months
#65haha. nice. man i can't grow shit online like the old days.
It was always hard, but it used to be possible. These days, though, you have to compete for visibility against people who are as good at manipulation as you are at actually doing stuff. Platform capitalism has made the “idiot box” age of TV downright civilized in comparison—at least they didn’t eat Tide pods in the trash cable era.
Ypu can throw generative AI/LLM summarization into that heap as well. Previously, juicing one's numbers for platform visibility meant churning out content in a labour-intensive manner. Now, there's no limit to how much marketing garbage they can spew out to try to catch every stray eyeball.
Re: I grew my Substack from 439 to 451 free subscribers in just 11 months
#66Darn, I've been doing it all wrong! Guess I need to migrate my entire blog to Substack so that I can have a concept of "subscribers" and the necessary analytics to give me a dopamine rush any time the number gets bigger.
Journaling is great. It helps organize your thinking. Why do you publish, if not to reach readers? If you want to reach readers, why not put some effort into that part too?
I did put effort into that - I built an RSS feed for my site. In fact, if you use a well-behaved reader with partial fetching, I'll even include the full text of each article.
Re: I grew my Substack from 439 to 451 free subscribers in just 11 months
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not limited to side projects. "Failure" is the norm. It's what happens nearly every time, all the time. Once you embrace this then you're spitting distance from, "What do I have to lose?" If you don't try, you end up in the same place. If you do try, you also likely end up in the same place. But oh the joy of pulling that slot machine handle and watching the wheels spin. There's simply no joy at all in not tryin…
+1 The sooner in your career (or life) you get used to failing and learning from it, the more potential (or happiness) you will have.
I put "failure" in quotes because it's only failure if you don't pause to learn. If you try and come up short but also learning something, then it's not failure, it's a learning experience.
So...ya can't learn (read: grow) if you don't try.
Re: I grew my Substack from 439 to 451 free subscribers in just 11 months
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I write to organize my thoughts and sometimes that writing is useful to others and then I publish it. But that's more like 1:50 or so these days, most of the stuff I do I'm pretty sure nobody would be interested in. Last week's project: to recreate an old Romanian kitchen implement. I highly doubt anybody would be interested in something like that.
I’d be interested, should you ever decide to post that content!
Hah, serves me right :) It's a wooden mallet/knife combo that is used to mash eggplant, nothing special really but you can't just go out and buy them here. So I chopped one out of a piece of acacia wood and then endless sanding to get it to as close as the original as I could.
This the real thing:
https://www.dedeman.ro/ro/tocator-pentru-vinete-lemn-euro-sa...
And here is my clone:
If you want an SVG for the outline let me know (mail in profile).
That's four hours of work, most of it spent on sanding, Acacia is pretty hard.
Re: I grew my Substack from 439 to 451 free subscribers in just 11 months
#69Darn, I've been doing it all wrong! Guess I need to migrate my entire blog to Substack so that I can have a concept of "subscribers" and the necessary analytics to give me a dopamine rush any time the number gets bigger.
>Guess I need to migrate my entire blog to Substack so that I can have a concept of "subscribers" and the necessary analytics to give me a dopamine rush any time the number gets bigger.
I get what your sarcasm is about but a friendly FYI if you didn't know... the purpose of Substack is writing for subscribers. Building subscribers (and hopefully paying subscribers) is why the founder of Substack created it. (My previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31083741)
Stratechery's writer Ben Thompson quit his 6-figure job at Microsoft and was able to make millions per year by writing for an audience of email newsletter subscribers. That's the type of financial success that many writers using the Substack platform are trying to replicate. (https://www.google.com/search?q=Stratechery+writer+subscribe...)
You're not "doing it wrong" because you're not the intended user of Substack. An analogy would be me saying "I guess I'm playing music wrong because I just sat around the campfire with my guitar and sang "99 Bottles Of Beers On The Wall". I guess I need to put my songs on Spotify to get a rush from watching the # listener streams go up."
My mockery of the musicians on Spotify by me playing dumb about not also not putting my music on it -- is irrelevant to those artists on that platform trying to make money.
The author of this thread's article is also trying to monetize his writing. He admitted he's not there yet so wanted to "blow off some steam" -- via some satire -- about the endless advice to "work harder" to grow his audience. His satirical piece doesn't change the fact that he still wants to grow his Substack audience to some success like Ben Thompson.
If people don't know what the Substack platform is actually about, then I can see where it looks like the writers are just there for unhealthy vanity gazing.
Re: I grew my Substack from 439 to 451 free subscribers in just 11 months
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Content curation and creation is really full time job. Especially if you have a publishing cadence that you don’t want to break. Publishing every day must have been really exhausting.
Yes, in publishing we call this “the content treadmill”. You’re publishing into a vacuum; you never know if you’ve published enough, and there’s always more that can be published. Then, your competitors out-SEO you, and you’re constantly updating your existing content to keep up. It’s why I sold my how-to site and I focus now on building tools instead.
Even if you write fairly regularly it's not the same as a formal cadence. When I was an analyst one of my least favorite tasks was a weekly newsletter we did for one of our clients because you could not just punt on it one week or shove it out a few days.