If I want to fully support myself from my blog, is substack basically the only reasonable game in town? I'd like that to not be the case, but it seems like it might be?
From numbers people have posted, substack has a much higher conversion rate for writing than patreon, GH, etc.
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If your "work product" really is writing, then I think you'll get much better performance using a product designed for that. Patreon's do-it-all product model induces a lot of compromises. The most important thing, though, is to own the billing tokens:
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I've had success with Patreon, and I'm grateful to them—particularly as trailblazers in this space—but I really can't recommend them to anyone starting out now. I've been disappointed in their product execution; I suspect their billing lock-in creates less pressure to improve.
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Because Substack doesn't (yet) add any meaningful platform-level distribution, I don't think there's a strong argument to use it instead of Ghost, which is OSS and doesn't take a cut.
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I'm not sure how that 10% conversion rate is calculated (the % of unique viewers of a single article subscribing for $$$?) but it seems quite optimistic! Quantum Country alone has had order 100k readers; I have 600 patrons, total.
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But then, my "value prop" as a membership is quite different from a Substack. It's not "I write regular paywalled content; subscribe in order to read it'; it's "I do creative work you find interesting; subscribe to make that keep happening, plus sometimes get bonus writing."
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I'd definitely suggest offering some "premium" subscription to superfans, many of whom are surprisingly cost-insensitive. This fairly offhanded decision has generated enough marginal revenue for me (vs "everyone pays same") as to make crowdfunding plausible for me, vs. not.