Why I'm Going All in on Substack's Platform Going Forward
Behind-the-scenes #7: Accepting limitations and that there is no ideal platform
Note: As I’m writing this, I’m also running my Digital Advent Calendar event and dropping one resource in full from my catalog every day onto my Substack! These resources require a paid subscription. You can get a yearly subscription here (20% off!) or if you want a smaller commitment, you can get a month-to-month subscription here.
Additionally, this post is too long for email, according to Substack. It also cuts off at a paywall about 30% through. The post is really great though, and full of detail about subscriptions, so you should read it. You will just want to read it from the website:
This post is Day 4’s gift, and I hope you enjoy it!
Well…I’ve decided to go all in on Substack. It’s taken me years—literally years—to make this decision, and I thought it could be helpful to dig into why that was and share my framework for finally coming to a choice about the matter.
A Quick Background on My Experience With Subscriptions
I started on Substack back in 2021 (!!) and have been posting little tidbits here for the last four years. In 2023, I attempted a subscription, and that went fine aside from me getting pregnant, having a second child, and not being as consistent as I needed to be.
This subscription is easily my most successful one, with over 100 paid members for most of its time, with the highest numbers at 213 paid members. I’ve let those numbers dwindle this year, though I’m still close(ish) to 100 paid members (currently at 87).
Outside of Substack, I’ve dabbled in Ream, Patreon, and even a fiction Substack, but right now this is my most successful traditional subscription.
We also have subscriptions at Writer MBA, and we see our events as a subscriptions or memberships of sorts too. More often, we do recurring revenue across 12 months, which provides a baseline for us. I count it, because selling is a spectrum with one-time payments on one end and subscriptions on the other; 12-month payment plans fall strongly toward the subscription side of that.
All to say—while I don’t have a huge subscription, I do have some experience building and running one for several years…And I knew I wanted to stick with the business model, even though it can be really challenging.
My Decision-Making Framework For Choosing a Platform
I’ve spun on my answers to a short list of questions about this decision for a long time. I asked myself each these questions and considered each one for months, if not years in many cases. I’m fully aware that during that time, I could have been spending my energy on building a subscription. I could have been doing things. I could have been making things happen.
In my defense, I did do things! I maintained a presence on Substack, I tested Patreon (and hated it for whatever reason), I researched Ghost and Wordpress but felt exhausted at the thought of maintaining them, and I set up shop on Ream for awhile before deciding I wanted more stability.
Here are the questions I kept asking myself over and over again.
Do I need to do this? (In my case, do I need to do subscriptions?)
What are my options?
What am I actually going to do?
What are my reservations about this platform?
What doesn’t work with my current attempts to do subscriptions?
How can I make those pieces work?
The rest of this post is my answers to those questions.
Do I Need a Subscription?
This year has not been a banner year for really anything for me aside from staying afloat with kids and my job. I’ve gotten a lot of books done; they were mostly books that should have been done two years ago. I’ve written and recorded things that I’ve only posted to the smallest of audiences. I’ve also helped build a conference that is going to be awesome. I’ve made a lot of plans for the future, and I’ve laid a lot of foundation this year that I hope pays off for my future self.
But I’ve desperately wanted to have a simplified business model, and I feel like subscriptions + a storefront for one-off purchases are my ideal solution.
I still like retailers and those are somewhat set it and forget it. Or at least, set it and forget it aside from refreshing your ads once a month. (Which by the way I need to do that.)
And I still like Kickstarter, though I need to wrap up all my projects (getting there and doing another push before the end of the year). In the future, I need to do projects that I’m super ecstatic about. Kickstarter is so much excitement and so much presence and so much customer support, and I don’t have as much of that as I need right now, at least not for the projects I tried to do. Lastly, I need to not use Kickstarter like it’s a storefront. It worked/works well for Russell as a Tundra to use it as a storefront in place of a web store, but I’m not a Tundra.
As a Grassland, the steady effort of a few sales a day, or of adding a few new people a day to a subscription, is really soothing to me. Processes for upgrading are soothing for me. Automated emails are soothing for me. Scheduling ahead is soothing for me. The subscription model, especially here on Substack, is so well built for a Grassland, so it felt like a no brainer to have/keep my subscription going.
What Were My Other Options?
As I said, I’ve looked at a lot of other platforms. Some of my considerations included:
Multiple tiers vs. single tier? - I knew I wanted multi-tier, so that actually ruled out Substack for the longest time! For years, the lack of multi-tier was a dealbreaker for me here on Substack.
NSFW vs. clean content? - I want to serialize fiction with on-page sex in it and I knew people were getting shut down on Patreon and elsewhere for posting. Ream or self-hosting seemed like the best option.
Self-hosted vs. hosted with higher fees? - I went back and forth but ultimately decided that I just didn’t have the energy to self-host my subscription. That would be a requirement for Wordpress or Ghost, and made it somewhat easy to rule both of them out. I do already run WooCommerce for my shop, and my website is on Wordpress, but it felt so daunting to try to run all of that on one site. There’s also a lot of extra work to get people there when you are going at things self-hosted. It’s really no different from having a website store. I didn’t want my subscription to be a deep cut, I wanted it to be a main event and a clear, separate product.
Stability vs. features? - Stability is of course, very important for a subscription that you plan to go all-in on for multiple years! At this point in my process, I was pretty much set on Ream because I had ruled out all the other platforms. But Ream was young and incredibly buggy. There were some good things about it, and I loved the scheduler, but I knew the features I needed to run my subscription could be years out to release, still.
I think a big reason I took soooo long to choose a platform is because my considerations slowly ruled out every platform, which just left me spinning. And although I landed on Ream for a time, the stability issues in both the software and the team just became too big of red flags to overcome. So I had to start over and see what I could compromise on. I went back to Patreon and hated it again. (No real reason, I just don’t enjoy the experience of trying to use that platform as a creator.)
At some point in Q3, I realized that I don’t want to (and maybe can’t) spend the time and energy on supporting multiple tiers of a subscription. I don’t want to do this for fiction or for nonfiction, even though you can make a lot more money from a lot fewer people if you have multi-tier. Why? Well…