Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance
kevin-indig.com
kevin-indig.com
I'd be really curious to hear your thoughts on our proposed business model since it's based on compensating writers when Readup users read their articles to completion. In short, users pay $10/mo to use Readup, we keep $5 and divide the other $5 among the writers whose articles the user has read to completion during that month.
You keep your own stack and there's nothing you have to do other than verify a Readup account with us so we know who you are and collect any money earned. Readup users can read your articles using our browser extensions or mobile apps (I just did! [2]). You can view the full pitch [3] on YouTube.
[2] https://readup.com/comments/kevin-indig/why-i-left-substack-...
1. Doesn't work on Safari. Definitely not a great first impression.
2. Sure, let's switch to Chrome (one of the three supported platforms: Chrome, Firefox and iOS). Now all I get is a blocking modal "To read on Readup, add the Chrome extension. Add to Chrome — It's Free". Sorry, not about to install an extension for something that hasn't explained why it needs an extension, let alone demonstrate any value to me, whether it's free or not.
Stalemate.
So let me ask: how do you tell a skim from a read? How do you distinguish a complete read from scrolling down to comment section (maybe even slowly)? Reading speeds vary greatly, and there's no mind-reading web API yet.
1. Safari uses a completely non-standard extension model and right now I'm the only developer so we're Chrome and Firefox only for the time being. Definitely sucks.
2. That's great feedback on that modal. Seriously, it never even crossed my mind that we don't explain why the extension is required before displaying it. Also that the "Add to Chrome" button makes it seem like it will trigger an install instead of bouncing you over to the Chrome store where you can see screenshots and a description of how it works before choosing to install. We really need to fix that ASAP.
Re tracking: When the extension is triggered (limited permissions, it only runs when you click the icon) it runs a script on the web page that tries to identify the primary text of the article. Once identified, we mark the individual words as having been read, starting at the top left of the viewport. Since we keep track of individual words you can scroll around and read out of order and the tracking will still work properly.
This process runs on a timer that allows for a pretty fast reading speed (probably around 500-600 wpm) but doesn't allow a user to just sit on the page for a long time or scroll right to the bottom. As you point out you can cheat it by scrolling very slowly through the entire article. Still waiting on that mind-reading API!
Re extension: I'm not clear on why an extension is needed for reading on readup.com (as opposed to on publishers' sites). Seems to me you can do all the tracking just fine with regular sandboxed JavaScript running on the web page? To be clear, when I'm not logged in or on an unsupported browser, I'm presented with two options: "Read it on Readup" (with a "Get Started" button) and "Continue to publisher's site", the former apparently being the recommended path; when I'm logged in there's only the "To read on Readup, add the Chrome extension" modal, but if I understood what you track correctly, reading on Readup shouldn't require any extra capabilities, whereas reading on publisher's site should. So in theory a user should be able to read everything on readup.com without using an extension, just like they would on instapaper.com or feedly.com (but with some added tracking). Is that not the case simply because you haven't had the time to develop native tracking, or did I miss some fundamental limitations?
Re timer: 500-600 wpm is pretty fast on average but I can certainly beat that when reading information-sparse content (e.g. most digital magazines) or when I consciously try to read fast, and I know people who read way faster than me... Also note that some people can maintain a high comprehension level even at high speed while others struggle to comprehend even when reading word by word. I guess your compromise may be okay, but it's certainly rather crude (not that I have a better idea).
Btw, Safari 14 is adding WebExtension API support.[1] (You're probably already aware of this but doesn't hurt to share.)
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/saf... (documentation is crap though, at a glance)
> I guess your compromise may be okay, but it's certainly rather crude (not that I have a better idea).
Haha 100% agree. One day, maybe a reading speed calibration during new user onboarding? As you pointed out though, speed varies even for an individual depending on what kind of content they are reading.
> Btw, Safari 14 is adding WebExtension API support.[1] (You're probably already aware of this but doesn't hurt to share.)
Wow, I was not aware! This is awesome! Thank you for sharing.
This is such a nitpick, but do the economics work at 40% (or even 49%)?
It seems intuitively wrong to me that your value captured is greater than the content creators.
If the economics don't work, feel free to instruct me to take a long walk on a short pier
We don't want to over-promise on the revenue share at the beginning because we've got 3 key promises that we never want to compromise on but do limit us somewhat financially:
- Absolutely no advertising.
- Absolutely no selling/sharing of user data, even in aggregate or "anonymized".
- Reach profitability ASAP so we don't have to fund raise endlessly and lose control of the company.
I'm not sure if the incentive for creators is there, e.i. why would a creator share revenue for fully read articles?
I think you found a value-add for the demand-side of the market but not the supply-side. That's something I'd iterate on :).
Glad you like the completion filter! I've found myself reading articles just so I could leave a comment about how much I disagreed with the headline only to have my mind changed half way through. Taking the time to read really matters!
Gotcha. So, what's the value I'd get as a creator, i.e. why should I not charge through another platform?
The writer compensation is both a value prop for our users (it's the #1 reason that users say they would want to pay for a Readup subscription) and a growth mechanism for us since some writers will have an incentive to tell their readers to read them on Readup. We think that initially writers who have a non-existent or small subscription base would be most inclined to want to promote Readup to their readers but that should scale up as we grow.
I really appreciate the honest feedback. Also sorry for kind of blowing up this thread with all my replies but I'm pleasantly surprised that some other people were interested in checking it out and asking questions as well!
My first impression is that a 50-50 split doesn't seem very fair to the writers. You created the platform but most of the value comes from the writers.
That doesn't feel great. Telling creators that people are paying you for their work but they have to create an account to get paid feels shady. Do you make it clear when something I read is from a creator who has signed up and therefore will be paid?
If one of your users were to read something I published, would they see it exactly as they would if they visited directly? Same ads, same layout? Will the reader look any different to me as far as my analytics go?
Edit: Also, how do you manage abiding by all the crazy terms and conditions on different sites? For example, on your homepage is a link to an Atlantic article and their terms and conditions prohibit the use of their RSS feed for commercial reasons or selling access to their site. Do you have a deal with the Atlantic? Have they signed up with you?
I get that, but isn't it better than paying for a utility like Pocket or Instapaper that strips ads from writers' articles and doesn't offer them any compensation? Those companies aren't asking writers to opt-in to that. We're trying to do the right thing in a financially sustainable way.
Also just to be clear, writers won't be required to sign up for a paid Readup subscription in order to collect their revenue share. If they don't want to use the platform they can just verify with us via email.
> Do you make it clear when something I read is from a creator who has signed up and therefore will be paid?
Yes! There will absolutely be some sort of "blue checkmark" verification indicator. (To be clear we have not yet started charging users. We're still in the building stage!)
> If one of your users were to read something I published, would they see it exactly as they would if they visited directly? Same ads, same layout? Will the reader look any different to me as far as my analytics go?
On the browser: Initially yes, before activating the extension which will strip ads and enter the "reader mode" layout.
On mobile: No, javascript and stylesheets are not executed while rendering the article.
For your analytics: It depends. If you're looking at server logs then everything will look the same. If you're relying on client-side javascript for analytics then you don't see it at all for our mobile users and the results might be different for browser users depending on how your scripts are interacting with the page.
> Also, how do you manage abiding by all the crazy terms and conditions on different sites? For example, on your homepage is a link to an Atlantic article and their terms and conditions prohibit the use of their RSS feed for commercial reasons or selling access to their site. Do you have a deal with the Atlantic? Have they signed up with you?
We don't crawl any publisher websites or use their RSS feeds. All article curation on our site is crowdsourced from our users - 100% organic human spidering. We just track their reading progress and use that data to rank the articles so that everyone can find the best content. We'd love to eventually partner with publishers but especially larger ones probably won't want to talk to us until we have millions of paying users and can offer them a significant revenue share.
So until then, is the revenue share that you owe to them a permanent liability on your balance sheet?
Lots of questions here, but as I stated in another answer on the topic we're committed to keeping all payments open and transparent. This can only work if everyone has insight into who's getting money for what.
The only way to prevent our users from reading your articles though would be to require some sort of authentication to access them. Same way you block anyone from accessing your content through any web browser or extension.
1. You are taking money directly from customers 2. To serve content that you do not have the right to sell access to.
> If we had paying subscribers that were reading your content and we reached out to you
That sounds like a lot of ifs. It sounds like you're making money directly off access to my content which makes me deeply uncomfortable. If you reach out to me, and you're unsuccessful in contacting me, you're still making money directly off my content whether I chose to monetize it or not.
2. No. We are not serving content. The user's device makes a GET request to your server and you serve the content. Readup just displays the metadata and a link to the article just like reddit or Hacker News.
Couple questions
1) You mention a paywall, but your video says that users who sign-up before paywall stay in forever. You honoring that (the video was posted 5 days ago)? I see that the median comment count on your site is about 3 so I should hope so
2) How exactly are you paying these authors? We can post articles from anyone and then trust you're able to get in contact with them and hand them their money?
1. Yes, we are honoring that! It's a reward for being an early adopter and it's important to keep the community "starter culture" intact as we move to a paid membership model.
2. We don't want you to have to trust us. That information will be transparent. Check out our current writers leaderboard [1] as a prototype of how that will look. Minutes reading to completion is our basis for payments to writers so you can imagine a pie chart on your account page that shows who your $5 went to for that month in addition to a community-wide distribution that would look similar to the current leaderboards.
As you can imagine there will be cases where we can't get in touch with writers or they're not interested or something like that. We'll probably have to have some sort of time-out period where the uncollected funds might be reallocated to writers who have verified with us or something of that sort. The important thing is that we're committed to making these rules and decisions transparent.
Why is there no tagging or other organization (besides per author)? Skimming through the frontpage I either have no idea what an article is about or it appears to be some lowest-common-denominator politics article. With reddit I can go read my niche subreddits with topics I actually care about (yeah, I know you don't have enough users to replace this quite yet, but still). With no other hooks for following my interests I feel like this is still abusable with clickbait titles.
Could you have like moderator-written abstracts for the AOTDs, at least? Even better would be an abstract for every article (not sure how you would accomplish this)
The only reason is because I'm the only developer and simply haven't had time to build it yet! In fact right now I'm working on a new "Discover" screen that will allow filtering by publisher and topic. We gather "tag" and "description" metadata for articles even though it isn't currently displayed in the UI.
> With no other hooks for following my interests I feel like this is still abusable with clickbait titles.
It's not a perfect filter by any means, but keep in mind that even if an article title looks like clickbait it will only rank highly if users are finishing it so the real garbage usually doesn't float up since people chose to abandon those articles. Again, not perfect by any means but it is something to consider if an article is more than a few minutes long and has a lot of reads on it.
> Could you have like moderator-written abstracts for the AOTDs, at least?
Yes! When the AOTD email goes out (midnight PST every night) it includes the "description" metadata provided by the publisher if present (seems to be available about 90% of the time). We should definitely show that in the UI on the web app too for the AOTD at least (and maybe have some expandable toggle to show it for other articles).
I see you're using React on the frontend. And, you only have an iOS app but not (yet) an Android app. Are you not using React Native? In that case it's fairly easy to target both platforms. I know RN is a bit of a shitshow but not supporting the biggest mobile platform in the world is arguably worse
> We gather "tag" and "description" metadata for articles even though it isn't currently displayed in the UI.
If you're taking this metadata directly from the articles I'm skeptical about the accuracy/completeness. Anyway, it's better than nothing I guess
> It's not a perfect filter by any means, but keep in mind that even if an article title looks like clickbait it will only rank highly if users are finishing it
This is something, but still high-quality articles with clickbait titles will outcompete high-quality articles without clickbait titles. Incentive still being: write clickbait titles. Anyway, if someone is 0.25x as likely to finish a bad article having clicked it, but 10x more likely to click a clickbait article, you still have a major problem beyond "not perfect", imo
I know it's a big ask for you to solve every single problem with online reading/discussion but this one is so tangled with the rest it's kinda hard to ignore.
Today's AOTD: "If Everyone Else is Such an Idiot, How Come You're Not Rich?"
From the past few weeks, some selections:
- "Meet the social media echo chamber that is radicalizing you & your friends. - Alexa Rohn" - "Racism Is Terrible. Blackness Is Not." - "A White Woman, Racism and a Poodle" - "The American Press Is Destroying Itself" - "Dear Fuck Up: How Do I Figure Out What I Want in Life When Every Day Feels the Same?" - "You Should Be Feeling Miserable" - "Tom Cotton: Send In the Military" - "The Sickness in Our Food Supply"
I'm sure some of these are great, but be honest: did the title have anything to do with people clicking through?
> Are you not using React Native?
Not even! Our iOS app just uses WKWebViews for the main UI so yes it would be pretty trivial to do the same thing on Android. Only excuse is that it's in our backlog with 100 other things that we also really want to build.
> If you're taking this metadata directly from the articles I'm skeptical about the accuracy/completeness.
Haha yes, it's an absolute clusterfuck that I'm currently trying to clean up enough to make useful. The descriptions are usually actually pretty solid, but there is so much noise in the tags/topics.
> This is something, but still high-quality articles with clickbait titles will outcompete high-quality articles without clickbait titles.
Yes, yes, yes! I think providing more context in the way of the description could help to cut down on this, but you're very right that there is no easy or complete fix (at least not that I can imagine!). Something else to think about would be looking at the ratio of clicks to completions instead of just the sum of completions alone. That way in your example the 10x likelihood of a click could be cancelled out by the low 0.25x completion rate.
Good idea. In addition to better metadata for boring titles, penalizing articles which have a low completion rate would probably help
Good luck! I'll keep an eye on the progress
Thanks!
The cost of sending email is a lot on some platforms (Mailchimp is $30/month for 2500 subscribers and $50/month for 5000 subs), but a lot cheaper with Mailgun or Amazon SES. Sendy [0] and Mailcoach [1] are both self-hosted newsletter sending apps that use Mailgun/SES if you want to DIY.
There is a handy blog post [2] from the creator of cron.weekly on his newsletter workflow.
Don't put "weekly" in the newsletter name because then you're really setting that weekly expectation. At some point, you might not want to be publishing weekly unless you've got some serious automation happening.
There are some interesting ideas on newsletter businesses on gaps.com [3]. A year ago I thought that a newsletter should link to my own content. But now? Many, many newsletters are link aggregators.
For a paid, non SES, option I personally like SendGrid[3] more than Mailgun.
[0] https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good
Thanks for sharing that and the others too.
I don't think the rise of podcasts is massively due to RSS. I think it's because of the low cost / high creativity balance of the format, where the format uses RSS.
I think it matters for the creators, though.
If I'm trying to BUILD an audience, I'm going to write content for free. If I already have a website I post content on, you bet I'm going to keep posting my free content there. Why am I competing with Substack on SEO for my own free content? That's just stupid.
Eventually, if I actually get an audience that's willing to pay, I would use Substack to offer that walled garden. Just like Youtube creators offer their free content on Youtube, and paid content through other means like Patreon.
Even Medium supports canonical URLs. I'm not sure why Substack isn't satisfied with being the distributor of my content, but also wants to be the home for it.
When I sent Substack Support an email about the issues of content ownership and canonical URLs in late May this year, I got this response:
>On Substack writers own all of their content, but we don't support synchronizing with external website or have external websites as the canonical url. Substack is meant to be the home for individual writers. Sorry about that
I love many things about Substack. Chiefly, the user experience of setting up the newsletters, and the iframe embed (though it can be improved) are great.
But I hope Substack reconsiders what their idea of being a "home for individual writers" means. Substack shouldn't have to be the source of my content, but rather be the plumbing for it. It seems not supporting custom canonical URLs was a conscious decision to force me to make Substack the source of my content, which is disappointing.
I'll have to look into ConvertKit in the meantime.
And actually the effect can be negative as, Substack is known to make payment based newsletters, people could avoid those links
I think the only way you can really have a true "free speech" platform is to make it entirely self-serve. As soon as there is algorithmic content discovery, bad actors will attempt to game it to get their ideas in front of people.
I had a couple of decently popular articles. The most popular had about 170k reads before I deleted my Medium account.
Often they do the promotion for you (newsletters, twitter, etc.).
That’s not to mention the medium algo that can pick up on your article and recommend it to others.
I’ve had one post reach 100k+ reads, unlikely that would happen on my own site.
If you leverage their algorithm cleverly, yes. But you still don't own your content or the platform. You're at the same mercy as on Facebook, Twitter, or Google.
Maybe a better example I can think of is a referral site. Maybe a site like Kayak can charge Marriott 10% each time they refer someone who books a room. If that room wouldn't be booked otherwise it's probably a good deal for Marriott. Substack does help with discoverability, and that's probably where their main value is (similar to FB, Instagram, etc), but the problem is that unlike the Marriott example, the fee is not a one time payment.
No cure no pay.
They take care of everything for you and will provide more and more tools for you.
Furthermore it's a white label solution which means you aren't on some platform like medium. People pay for removing branding on platforms these day.
I am biased as we are currently launching a similar model for live video 1-1 sessions, classes and events but I believe you will see much more of these types of solutions in the future.
10% + credit card fees isn't a lot to pay and if you become really big you can always pay someone to build your own platform.
> Substack does help with discoverability, and that's probably where their main value is (similar to FB, Instagram, etc), but the problem is that unlike the Marriott example, the fee is not a one time payment.
No, they also provide the platform, the tools, the analytics. They are not just an aggregator. Also, Marriott has to pay for every transaction, just like someone using Substack. You pay per transaction.
Maybe I'm in a bubble but I don't see it as their main value for successful users who make money from their newsletter. I've setup a newsletter with analytics a few weeks ago without writing a single line of code and with a fixed cost (and custom domain...). Yes, starting with Substack is cheaper to start with but long term it'll cost you).
> Marriott has to pay for every transaction, just like someone using Substack. You pay per transaction.
I guess I'm not familiar enough with Substack. What does it mean you pay per transaction? It's a newsletter - you make money from paying subscribers who pay monthly let's say. Are you saying Substack users pay per email sent to their paying subscribers?
> Substack fees work the same, you pay a fee to Substack whenever a person renews (transaction).
> So to make the loop back, no the Kayak example works the same way as Substack does.
Replying here since HN doesn't let me reply to the comment directly (probably reached the max number of nested replies).
I now understand your example but I disagree with it. A newsletter, unlike a hotel, relies on a small number of paying users who are likely to renew their membership. Many even pay for annual membership. The main cost is finding a new paying user. Once the user is subscribed it's the newsletter's job to keep that user paying. Marriott pays Kayak only for new users. Next time the user can book a room via the Marriott site. It doesn't need to keep paying Kayak for life every-time that user books a room.
No, I was referring to the whole Marriott thing. If you book a Marriott hotel with an aggregator (like Kayak), Marriott has to pay for that booking. If you do it the next week again, Marriott has to pay again.
Substack fees work the same, you pay a fee to Substack whenever a person renews (transaction).
So to make the loop back, no the Kayak example works the same way as Substack does. It just happens to be the case, that customer retention is higher with Substack (or lower-cost transactions in general)
If I launch a paid newsletter with one reader, I'm getting a lot of value from the platform. Once I gain a second reader the platform isn't doing twice as much for me. It's gone up a smaller, incremental amount.
It’s and automated, easy to understand freemium model.
Use of tracking pixels is not a pro. It is a dark pattern that needs to go away.
Could use the substation theme: https://substation.rdnthemes.com
Disclosure: I work for Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com and WooCommerce.