Ghost starts at $9 per month though -- obviously depends on people's circumstances but I would say that's reasonable for many people as a personal blog
I tried it once. It's extremely limited with only being able to use their few built-in integrations and stock themes with no ability to edit them. $108/year is a lot of money to not be able to touch your theme. An extra $72/year will get you wordpress.com with custom theme and plugin support. Drop $3/month and you can get write.as.
I think there's a way to skip that with a URL parameter, I just unfortunately can't remember what it is -- something like /about?welcome=false or whatever. (I realise that's a hacky workaround and only solves part of the problem, but at least you can save some readers from the welcome screen)
I just want to get this prediction down in writing in as many venues as possible: Substack will eventually offer (opt-in) bundling for authors, where the customer pays $x per month and Substack distributes that to the authors in the bundle.
This will offer some genuine benefits to readers (one monthly payment, maybe a discount) and to writers (lower transaction fees, since Stripe has a fixed cost that eats into small payments), but it will also sever the thing that currently makes it possible for authors to leave Substack and take 100% of their paid subscribers with them: every single reader has a unique subscription object in each individual publisher's Stripe account, which can then be ported to any other platform using Stripe. So when writers leave Substack they won't be able to take with them any subscribers who arrived through a bundle.
I think writers won't realise the danger here, and that Substack will therefore be able to lock in writers, against their original promise.
I would be delighted if this didn't happen, and happy to retract this if Chris could just promise that Substack will never do this kind of bundling, even if it's opt-in for publishers.
You continued taking your cut from my subscriptions after I'd left your platform (I think because you didn't really understand how Stripe Connect works) and just refused to pay the money back for over a year. What was the deal with that? It struck me as both deeply dishonourable and not even sensible as a business move. Why did you do that, and what does it say about Substack as a company that you did it?
ha! Yes I definitely think the original overbilling was incompetence not malice, but not just saying "we're so sorry we overbilled you, we're not sure how much we took exactly but please let us give you $x to definitely cover it" was more like malice than incompetence (in practice my guess is something closer to pridefulness than malice, but I can't pretend to understand what's in their hearts etc)
It’s obviously undesirable, but it makes sense to me that a busy company that doesn’t understand Stripe Connect would struggle to research and rectify this. That’s assuming you identified the technical issue correctly, of course.
I would say it was partially sorted -- I eventually dm'ed their PR person (once they hired one) and somehow she pretty quickly figured out how to pay back part of the money, but refused to send any documentation of what she was paying back or answer questions about various discrepancies, which made it a big hassle on the bookkeeping side. And I never got an explanation or apology from the Substack guys, or any thanks from them for giving them a chance to make it right for more than a year. Truly one of the weirdest life experiences to me -- aside from the moral aspect, I would have thought screwing over one of your biggest customers for no obvious reason is bad for business. But it seems to be working out for them so far, so, what do I know!
Hi Hamish -- how much of your success do you attribute to the secret benefits you offer certain writers to prevent them from leaving? And is it sustainable in the long run (or does that not really matter to you?)
> the secret benefits you offer certain writers to prevent them from leaving
Can you elaborate? I know some people were paid big $ up front to make the move, but it didn't seem very secret -- the ones I'm thinking of were pretty open about the deals they'd taken, so presumably Substack wasn't pressuring them to keep quiet. And as far as I know they were paid up front for the first year, before moving to an ordinary revenue split and being free to leave.
Yeah I'm not talking about the advances, although way more writers than people realise have been given advances. Basically Substack has been forced to offer pretty hefty benefits to (try) to stop writers from leaving, there's a ton of "special programs" with various kinds of disguised cash that they offer to writers they want to keep (To my knowledge they've never given discounts on the 10% fee, but they give in-kind benefits to skirt around that). Hamish knows exactly what I'm talking about, if he wants to chime in!
There are a number of writers who have disclosed their “offers too good to refuse” from substack, including their first big name who they paid well into six figures to jump platforms.
ubac framed the question in a hostile way which is probably why he was ignored.
What you're describing sounds like a cash advance/guarantee which Hamish mentioned about 'de-risking' offers.
If you have good data that a writer could make X money, but they're afraid to leave their day job - it's easy to just say to them "we'll pay you your day job salary to de-risk this jump for you" if you know they'll make way more than that. You can even offer more.
That's not a 'secret benefit' to prevent them from leaving - it's a smart economic move to help people anxious about perceived risk.
hey! Sorry, there's a lot of history here, Hamish has been very unpleasant to me and many writers I love, as well as wrongly continuing to bill me after I left his platform -- I realise otherwise I might have sounded unduly hostile, sorry for that.
The benefits I'm talking about are not the advances or guarantees, there's basically a ton of secret programmes at Substack where they give favored publishers special in-kind benefits to effectively pay back some of the 10% fee. Hamish knows what I'm talking about, but can't mention it publicly because their business model is reliant on a pretense that every publisher is paying 10% and not a hodgpodge of subsidies and kickbacks. Does that make sense?
Sure, I didn’t know this but I’m also not surprised big fish that bring in massive revenue and readership get better negotiated rates (or some value equivalent) that are not publicized. They provide more value and have more negotiation leverage. Their use of the platform is basically marketing for substack.
It’s also possible to directly discuss this openly/honestly like you did in this reply (thanks for clarification) vs. indirectly via disingenuous hostile snark in your first comment.
Also looks like there might be some sort of conflict of interest based on the work you do in your bio which could be having a possibly unintended influence.
Chris can we get a promise in writing from you that you will never implement bundles in such a way that writers couldn't leave your platform and take 100% of their paying subscribers with them?
also, I'd love to know more about how/when people apply this:
> “The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There’s something wrong with the way you are measuring it” -Jeff Bezos
Because I don't actually think it's crazy, I think data is often mismeasured and that when they go against against common perceptions that's sometimes a sign that the data is wrong. But obviously anecdotes are also often wrong/misleading/unrepresentative!
p.s. actually I wonder if this is like the "herniated discs cause back pain" thing -- everyone has herniated discs, but we only found that out for people who have back pain. Maybe ~all data is mismeasured, but we only find out when the data clashes with anecdotes, and therefore investigate it....
This is incredible. Also this bit struck me specifically:
> That sounds bad, until you take a closer look at where the reports are coming from. Or more specifically, the one store where nearly half of all reports originated
So often it seems that reported trends are just something like this. But the existence of the trend becomes a highly sticky meme, and it's hard to then dislodge it.
