An open letter to Substack
Pondering possibilities
I was smack in the middle of writing this post when this popped into my mailbox:
A better internet for readers from
The good news is that we seem to be on the same page. I am excited to know that you see Substack as a work in progress. Let me help you by sharing some of my concerns and ideas.
What is Substack?
A platform? A business-model? A community? A statement? A dream? A Potential and a promise? I’d say it could be all of the above, but still, the goals, the wishes, the aims should be articulated as clearly as possible. Elon Musk has a master plan. Substack should have one too. A vision of how the whole thing should look and work when you can say “now we are done”. ‘Done’ doesn’t mean unchanging, finished and static, it means being on motion according to the Grand Plan. Just like Musk’s plan it could have a lot of engineering, fiddling and tinkering (or I should say ‘thinkering’) along the way and that is all OK, as long as you have vague idea of what ‘the colonization of Mars’ equivalent would be for Substack.
You already have a great community of thinking people. Why don’t you ask them? You could set up a moderated Substack and invite us, your writers to submit posts to it? Posts of their vision on the future of Substack.
A readers’ platform
This was and is one of the two important concerns I have, and you seem to agree as you were addressing it in your post. Substack was created as a writers’ platform where readers will just appear.
But writers are irrelevant without readers. Writers are essential to your business model, but your focus should be on attracting readers. This is NOT a chicken or the egg problem any more. We, your writers are already creating plenty of content. What we all need is more readers.
I have readers, who got confused when they were creating their accounts, as they have no intention whatsoever to create their own publication or have their own followers. Yet, they are ‘bombarded’ with information on how to become a writer, how to build their own followers with the hints of monetization as a goal in the end.
The two functions, the two classes of users, readers and writers should be clearly separated.
The short version of my vision is a customizable page (or pages) where I can link to all of the stacks I follow and custom searches for the rest. (I could expand on this if you invite me to do so 😊)
A writers’ tool
My first word processor was the DOS version of Microsoft Word. V1.1 released in 1984.
I do all my writing in Word, never in a browser or a phone app.
I started my blog on Wordpress, I migrated to Substack because of the business model and a hope of finding/building a community. The import process wasn’t exactly flawless. Not a total disaster, but not far from it. Some of it are understandable (like not importing tags, categories and SEO settings), but some are inexcusable (like not importing comments and most formatting elements).
These two applications, MS Word and Wordpress, define my expectations.
I can temper these expectations as I cannot expect a browser editor to work like a dedicated word processor, but I should be able to expect a little more than what Substack offers.
I need an editor with far more abilities and formatting options.
What was holding me back from voicing my concerns and expressing my needs is my worry to ask for something that is already there but I am just too stupid to find it. Now, that anxiety in itself is something that should worry you, as I am certain that I am not alone with the feeling, and my background is IT.
@onsubstack did not help me much. It is just another blog with motivational stories and, well, stories.
I found the “Writer Office Hours” events even more useless.
What I would need is a dedicated support page with a well-structured Q&A,
NOT community kumbaya.
What I would need is knowledgeable support staff being able to answer specific questions.
What I would need is a dedicated page, monitored by a developer team, where I can make suggestions about missing features. A page where I can cast my vote for the suggestions of others with my ‘like’ of theirs. ….and I could, of course, continue with a long list of my wishes, but I will give you just one example with an explanation:
As I (may have) mentioned above, the import of my 300+ posts from Wordpress did not work as I expected. I will have to go through a painful process of editing them individually. That requires a lot of moving between the posts. In Wordpress, I had a plugin that provided me with links in every post to the previous and next one. Not just the buttons, but the titles of the posts with the option of displaying the links on the top or the bottom of the page (or both).
Substack has only the buttons, and ONLY at the bottom of the page. As I am going through the painful process of editing my imported posts, I have to scroll down to find the buttons to move back and forth. It is annoying.
Since this is an aside in this post, I would also like to be able to show this paragraph indented. That is a missing feature. An aside is not a quote, but a quote is all I can do.
The bottom line is this: There is a lot of work to do on the tools and just like with the vision, you should engage the community to find out what is needed and desired.
A publishing platform
Substack started with the idea of finding a business model for the advertising free support of independent writers. This focus on a community made it into a sort of social media company. The notes feature is clearly a step in the twitter (sorry, ‘X’) direction.
Your real competition, however, is not social media, but the traditional publishing industry. That is the business model that you are disrupting and any future planning should be made in light of recognizing this fact.
Again, a lot more could be said on the subject, and I would like to see what the ‘community’ thinks about it. I need to do some more thinking about it myself. The implications are tremendous.
Championing free speech
You, meaning the three of you, the founders, made it clear on every possible occasion, that you want Substack to be a platform of civilized discourse without speech control.
I do not want to say much about it here, because I wish to write a post dedicated to the subject.
Here is the essence of the points I will try to make:
The commitment of Substack should be not to bow to external pressure.
Control should be entirely in the hands of each individual user.
More on these in the upcoming post.
Some practical suggestions
My suggestions are basically the different aspect of the same. Don’t just talk to us, LISTEN to us.
Ask us how we would like to see the reader platform evolve.
Take support more seriously. It should be concrete, specific, dedicated and expert.
Not occasional, vague conversation of amateurs.Create a managed wish-list stack of desired features.
The rest you are working on already. This post was meant to be an optimistic addition to yours, not a critique of it. I agree with everything you say, I just want more.
For all of you writers reading this, please help me/you/the community to get engaged in this conversation for the betterment of Substack; to help turning it into the best technology and culture disruptor it can be.
This was a good read, I started on substack two weeks ago and have 70 subscribers and there is certainly a burden to the onboarding process for a reader as you describe.
When reading your comments here, I was thinking how many writers would need to write a post like this to get attention and be heard. And then I was thinking how much effort one or more people on substack would need to invest to understand you and other writers posting such useful and candid feedback.
I've been chief product officer and a COO and a CMO all in tech over last 27 years for fintech platforms. ecommerce platforms, proptech platforms and the recurring theme is that internally there is a roadmap based on something they think is valuable to the business, the customer, and the growth engine.
They also most likely have the same product management view as everyone else, that customer feedback is good until its not, and they need to have a plan and work the plan and eventually they can get to lower priority items.
So blindspots for us is that we dont know whats valuable and high priority to them. We can assume the obvious priority because its permeated everywhere - the platform wants writers to monetize. So I'd imagine a large chunk of the product roadmap is to that end.
Finding a way for the writer community to solidify down to a few high value (to writers and to substack platform) that can be seen through a lens substack has, would be the ideal way to go from an open letter to a suggested valuable opportunity and solution fit.
With tools like google docs and miro, if this was a big enough concern for writers, a few product type writers who care about the same problems you address could help facilitate some ideation and suggestions around value creation. That might also be seen as intersting, not just opinions one at a time, and could bring more eyeballs to the issue. And if its core hypothesis is anchored in a way that writers at all levels are winning, not just the biggest subscribers, then there is exponential impacts that clearly hit the "scaling" button substack cares about as a platform.
Just my two cents as an addendum to your open letter.
#GSD
I generally agree with you. Well put! I have a couple related thoughts.
I've been a reader on the platform for quite a while. From that perspective Substack is expensive. In theory, it should have pretty low overhead, meaning that an author should be able to keep a big chunk of the money, and they do. Good. However, on a per word basis, the platform can be pretty expensive. Having a way to bill per unique visit, not per visit would be interesting. In other words, if I go to a page and decide to go past a pay-bar, I can re-access the page repeatedly for a single entry fee. Visits could be aggregated until it made sense to charge a card on file. This could also be implemented at a general subscription level, without a specific subscription, but authors should be able to choose if they would want to be in the, hey I paid Substack a flat fee reading, "pool". The risk of any aggregate subscription/per view model is possible loss of community. Still, needing to pay money to comment or read does help reduce the BS. For things I like the read. Even the comments are usually worth the time. I'd like that to persist.
I have my concerns about search. Search can be used for abuse. Yet, search is also helpful for building an audience, I mean how else do people find you, in Notes, in the recommendations, in the comments or in the -also reads?
The idea for self promotion in Notes is interesting but it's not the same as the once sort of useful twitter, where people would drive audiences to a piece published through the more traditional editorial process. That is sort of the problem for unknowns trying to publish here. Recommendations are definitely helpful, sure but that also has reputational implications. And when it comes to it, why the hell would I pay so much to read stuff like my own stuff, i.e.? So, yeah, unknowns need a way to ramp their price. Mixing free and full price seems less effective, but maybe I'm dead wrong.
Maybe nothing should be free.