This is why it is short-sighted to complain about their high fee percentage (10% on top of credit card fees as opposed to say the fixed fee of ghost or mailchimp). They need to be making enough money off the long tail to resist the pressures created by 800lbers.
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I don't grudge them that. I'm open to things like ghost and memberful, but it is polyannish to believe they resolve the issues. I was on mailchimp for a long time (still am for my basic ribbonfarm list) but their incentives for eg. push the product towards marketing clients.
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Ghost is new enough that it isn't showing its own vulnerabilities, but there will be some. No free lunch. Content platform Pick 2 of 3 triangle: optimal featureset for you, low cost, high variance/low-bias.
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An instructive precedent is the adjacent courseware sector. The el cheapo platforms really don't work for indie course creators. Teachable does, BUT costs an arm and a leg and STILL had to sell itself to a Brazilian PE firm to survive.
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Courses require way more work to turn into profitable low-touch income streams. My teachable account just barely pays for itself because I don't put in the work to keep publishing new courses, running live cohorts, or updating old courses.
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I'm considering EITHER kicking my teachable stuff up a notch next year or shutting it down entirely. I'm in an untenable place with it long term. Kicking it up a notch will require periodic effort spikes, as opposed to newsletters which require steady effort commitments.
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But to return to substack. I a) like the product b) am willing to continue paying the price premium to keep it long-tail/variance oriented c) don't like the alternative incentive pressures competing platforms face.
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But one thing I'm not doing is moving home base from blogging like I was considering last year. Wordpress is an aging monster in many ways, but it is still the worthwhile foundational piece of the puzzle.
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The one wildcard in this picture is where static sites will go -- gatsby, jekyll etc. I've now been on the sidelines of one pretty ambitious static site (yakcollective.org) and developed a better appreciation of the potential there, but definitely not for pure writers
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Still rounding out the views I put forth in my text renaissance post earlier this year, and might potentially use the ideas to expand the longform course on teachable so I can make money off all this content industry prognistication
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This is my art of longform course. I need about 2-3 weeks uninterrupted time to record a 2x expanded version covering all this new stuff, but haven't been able to find the time. I don't think I'll have the time to run a live cohort, which would be ideal.
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This is a good point. WordPress violates my platform point by... simply not being a platform at all. It is featureset optimal, can be low cost (if you self host and have low traffic) and high variance.
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Funny how bluechecks never ruined blogging, or even WordPress. This is how having a brand cuts both ways. twitter.com/vgr/status/132…
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I think this is because Automattic failed at making wordpress dot com a true platform level competitor to things like Medium. It never outgrew roots as basically an open source product rather than a platform. What it actually competes with are hosted WP players like WPengine
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I've been on WPEngine a long time, happily paying premium to not have to think about the headaches of self-admin'ed WP. But hosted WP is not a platform and can never be. The tech is fundamentally a digital mansion. At most you can create a feudal landscape of mansions. Not a city
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Will read and comment later on this thread. Stopping for some Real Work™
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Ok, read it. Kinda meh. The writer kinda doesn't get it I think. The choice to center the kind of writer who is hoping to go to a secure paid gig at the same level of effort, lower risk, and more pay, is not really the interesting kind of writer for the future.
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Like many rearview mirror analysis, the writer is looking at this through the lens of old media and the unexamined assumption that the same people must succeed on the new medium, for the same kinds of value/recognition. Begging the question basically.
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If you assume the status hierarchies of the old world must self-evidently be sustained in the new world, of course you'll reach the conclusion that that is what will happen. The problem is there may soon be no "traditional" world for people "passing through" substack to aspire to
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If you've been substacking with the hope of getting a NYT op-ed gig... you are kinda missing the whole point. The point is that utopian destination is increasingly not a tenable one at all and its own top people are abandoning ship. So this sort of thing is "it."
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Also, I'd like to know how many fires I have on their 1-4 fire scale. I'm guessing a 1-fire.
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My unsolicited top-3 advice items:
1. Stay the course focusing on writers over readers
2. Avoid cross-promotion
3. Build more individual writer branding tools and push tech into the background. Avoid temptation of making the platform the brand.
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Basically the product would benefit from being more product-driven. True north is not NYT but WordPress. Deeper, more feature-ful product, more customizable for all. Definitely do NOT create 2 classes of writers (rating system is fine, different feature sets starts to get dicey)
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tldr of strategy recommendation for substack: commoditize your complement, ie writers to the tune of 90% but not 100%. Putting all writer brands on an equal level playing field instead of creating *feature* tiers for bluechecks is the key to being a good platform.
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There is no royal road to geometry
There is no special iPhone for special people, everybody gets the same price points.
No special substack for special writers. But fee tiers for ++ services are okay. Like the extra fee for own domain mapping.
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This is possibly a problem for history-completist readers, but is frankly not a big deal for me. I'd be fine with most of my content just vanishing into random blackholes so long as I've gotten what I want out of creating it.
Quote Tweet
We just need to go back to blogs. This cycle keeps happening, and all of this content is going to end up in abandoned silos. twitter.com/vgr/status/132…
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