Why I changed my mind about Substack

I want to be a writer much more than I want to be a marketer.

The most popular blog on my website by far is the one titled "Should I start a Substack?" I credit this mostly to SEO. It's a pressing question for writers right now, and I optimized the title, URL, alt image text, first line of the first paragraph and all of the subheadings to ensure it would show up when people ask Google the question.

This, I think, is a good enough reason as any to illustrate why I changed my mind.

Part 1: The Resistance

For years, my case against Substack was threefold. First, I saw it as another version of what I call the Patreon Problem: A business model that works for the top percentage of creators but often leads to low-wage work for the majority.

Every so often, a brilliant mind shows up on my business' doorstep and asks me if they should sell a $5-7/mo subscription. Each time, I offer them a gentle "Sure, and."

Sure, make your low-tier offer. Sure, make it easy for people to support your work. Do this and be mindful of what you are promising in exchange. Try and know that there are other ways to package up and sell your ideas, and that they don't all require you to become a subscription service provider who is constantly worried about things like "churn."

I stand behind that original blog post, and especially this part:

"If you’re not careful, that pricing strategy will have you jumping through hoops, working overtime to produce all of the content you promised when you thought you’d be rolling in dough.

Often, at least with clients I’ve worked with, this ends with a regular person working at a rate much lower than minimum wage.

I don’t care what anyone tries to tell you or sell you, it is not that easy to convince a thousand people to spend $7 a month on something. Like with any other offer, you have to build a case for that subscription’s value — you have to be able to demonstrate what it will add to the life of your reader."

I also argued, and still believe, that it's important for a business like mine to have a much more robust email marketing tool, one that allows you to segment your audience by the products or services they're specifically expressing interest in.

I often advocate for artists and writers and knowledge workers to design self-advocating systems. I know the power of leading people through an intentionally designed journey of learning more about who you are and what you sell. This is often made easier by segmentation and automation. You might create a free or low-cost resource, for example, and then send people who opt-in to to that lead magnet a sequence of emails written specifically for them. This, to me, is an invaluable form of connection for a business.

Personally, I need to be able to know who on my list has bought one product or the other. When people fill out a form to access a free training, that tells me something about what they're focused on right now. That data is important to me, as it helps me curate an experience that specifically answers their questions and meets their needs.

Perhaps one day Substack will adopt these tools, but it would seem they are currently advising not to funnel our lead magnet form submissions here.

The third part of my resistance to Substack has to do with leadership. I'm not persuaded on Substack's philosophy of content moderation. As

Anne Helen Petersen

wrote in a reply here, this platform's policies don't seem to account for what it's like to actually experience harassment on the Internet. I'm critical of which voices and ideas are platformed (and funded) above others on Substack. With the addition of Notes, I'm weary of entering yet another drama and algorithm-fueled social media platform with the naive belief that this time will be different.

All of this was all bouncing around in my head when the nudges started.

Part 2: The Quiet Knowing

As a part of my job running The Study, I host a gathering called the Strategic Intuition Circle once a week. Over the last 6 months especially, the question of what to do about Substack started coming up almost weekly.

I listened intently as artists I admire (

phoebe taylor

,

Gabrielle Ione Hickmon

,

Bonnie Orbison

,

Taylor L

) described their thought processes around using Substack as a tool to grow their audiences and generate revenue. Together, we workshopped ways to use Substack as an addition to their other marketing efforts, and we weighed the pros and cons of moving an entire existing email list over.

I weighed in on these conversations as a participant and a facilitator, not as the expert or sole provider of the answers. Over time, I started wondering what this approach to Substack we'd co-created together might look like for me.

Most of my ideas start with a nudge in the form of a name. Big Paper Planning Day was a phrase I walked around with in my head for years before I understood what it wanted to be. Trying In Public, the name of this publication, was a 2021 episode of my brief experiment in podcasting before it asked to take on a new life here in a form I'm only just beginning to understand.

The biggest nudge, though, was the realization that'll come as a surprise to no one who knows me well. In every meditation and journaling exercise and Big Paper Planning Day I do, it becomes clear that I want to be a writer much more than I want to be a marketer.

This is a hard thing for me to come to terms with, in large part because marketing and strategy is how I pay my bills. I really love teaching these subjects and want people to trust me with them. I am constantly filled with ideas about how to help artists make money doing what they love, and I enjoy translating these ideas into products and services. I also happen to be good at it.

This is true, and: My dreams do not revolve around Stripe notifications or viral videos or speaking to hundreds at a marketing conference. These things would be nice, sure, but in every visualization of my future, I imagine myself doing exactly what I'm doing now: Sitting down at a desk and putting words to my thoughts.

This is what fulfillment looks like for me. And while I'll probably never be able to erase the knowledge I have of SEO and content strategy and writing what people want to read, I'm curious what it might look like to prioritize my self-expression first. Not as a brand, but as a person. As a writer.

Which is why I changed my mind.

Part Three: Deciding To Try

So why did I join? After all of that hand-wringing, what brought me here? I wish I could tell you it was an easy choice, one I'm completely sure of.

The truth is, I'm simply here to experiment.

There were a couple of thoughts that helped me decide, but the most pressing one was this: "This is where my people are right now."

I love to work with artists, writers, thinkers, public speakers and subject matter experts. That is my audience—it's who I make things for. And more and more, it would appear those people are opting to spend less time on Instagram and more time in their Substack inbox.

These are the people I spend most of my waking, working hours trying to reach, trying to talk to. Why not meet you all here, where you already are?

The other thought that supported me in deciding to try was this: I can always, always change my mind. I've moved my writing around on the Internet a dozen times over and there's nothing stopping me from doing it again, if need be. I've lived and worked and written on LiveJournal, Tumblr, Wordpress, Medium, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Threads, MySpace, Blogspot and now Substack.

It's never about the platform in the end, nor the men that own them. It's always about the practice of writing, the trying in public, the showing up letting people see.

So that's why I'm here: To experiment.

What about you?