Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance

kevin-indig.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 83 posts

Re: Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance

#71

Post by jacamera »

kevin_indig wrote: post #69
jacamera wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should charge through another platform! There's nothing exclusive about the relationship that we want to have with writers. As long as you're producing any content that is a) freely available and b) worth reading we want it surfaced to our community of readers and we want to compensate you on a per-read basis for it. The writer compensation is both a value prop for our users (it's the #1 reason that users say the…

Got it. What's the incentive for readers? Discovery of better content?

Yup! Essentially a premium "social reading" experience. Sounds kinda like marketing speak but it really is both a reading app and a social network that's powered by the reading activity of its members. The idea of having half of your subscription allocated to tipping the writers of the articles you've completed is also an incentive for readers (a powerful one based on the user surveys we've done).

I really appreciate the honest feedback. Also sorry for kind of blowing up this thread with all my replies but I'm pleasantly surprised that some other people were interested in checking it out and asking questions as well!

Re: Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance

#72

Post by kevin_indig »

Sachaniman wrote: post #62

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.…

That was one of the reasons I decided to go with my own platform. But Substack is not like Medium because it provides less discovery and more of a platform for writers. Medium, on the other hand, is more like an aggregator.

Re: Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance

#73

Post by pier25 »

kevin_indig wrote: post #46
pier25 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was on Medium not much traffic came from Medium itself. Probably around 10-15%. I had a couple of decently popular articles. The most popular had about 170k reads before I deleted my Medium account.

What did you switch to?

I moved some of the articles to my own static blog. This experience was actually the inspiration for the project I'm working on. See my profile for links.

Re: Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance

#75

Post by whycombagator »

tbran wrote: post #41

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 Mailgu…

For SES there is also this repo from freecodecamp[0]. And also Moon Mail[1][2]. I am sure there are more too.

For a paid, non SES, option I personally like SendGrid[3] more than Mailgun.

[0] https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good

[1] https://moonmail.io/

[2] https://github.com/MoonMail/MoonMail

[3] https://sendgrid.com/

Re: Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance

#77

Post by Sachaniman »

kevin_indig wrote: post #72
Sachaniman wrote: post #62

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.…

That was one of the reasons I decided to go with my own platform. But Substack is not like Medium because it provides less discovery and more of a platform for writers. Medium, on the other hand, is more like an aggregator.

I was glad to see the canonical URL issue mentioned in your post, since that was the main thing bugging me about Substack. Thanks for writing this!

When I sent Substack Support an email about the issues of content ownership and canonical URLs in late May this year, I got this response:

>On Substack writers own all of their content, but we don't support synchronizing with external website or have external websites as the canonical url. Substack is meant to be the home for individual writers. Sorry about that

I love many things about Substack. Chiefly, the user experience of setting up the newsletters, and the iframe embed (though it can be improved) are great.

But I hope Substack reconsiders what their idea of being a "home for individual writers" means. Substack shouldn't have to be the source of my content, but rather be the plumbing for it. It seems not supporting custom canonical URLs was a conscious decision to force me to make Substack the source of my content, which is disappointing.

I'll have to look into ConvertKit in the meantime.

Re: Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance

#78

Post by MR4D »

tbran wrote: post #41

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 Mailgu…

That last link is a helluva read!

Thanks for sharing that and the others too.

Re: Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance

#79

Post by coopsmgoops »

tbran wrote: post #41

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 Mailgu…

What are the limitations of just using Gmail or something? Paste in the email list from somewhere and off you go.

Re: Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance

#80

Post by Isomorpheus »

jacamera wrote: post #70
Isomorpheus wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only reason is because I'm the only developer and simply haven't had time to build it yet! I see you're using React on the frontend. And, you only have an iOS app but not (yet) an Android app. Are you not using React Native? In that case it's fairly easy to target both platforms. I know RN is a bit of a shitshow but not supporting the biggest mobile platform in the world is arguably worse > We gather "tag" and…

You weren't kidding about being dialed in on this space! > Are you not using React Native? Not even! Our iOS app just uses WKWebViews for the main UI so yes it would be pretty trivial to do the same thing on Android. Only excuse is that it's in our backlog with 100 other things that we also really want to build. > If you're taking this metadata directly from the articles I'm skeptical about the accuracy/completeness.…

> Something else to think about would be looking at the ratio of clicks to completions instead of just the sum of completions alone.

Good idea. In addition to better metadata for boring titles, penalizing articles which have a low completion rate would probably help

Good luck! I'll keep an eye on the progress

Post reply on HN