Moving Away from Substack | Hacker News Reader

Moving Away from Substack

prakgupta.com

33 pointsprakhar89725 comments

My approach is to publish to my own blog at https://simonwillison.net and then copy and paste content from that into a Substack newsletter at https://simonw.substack.com a few times a month.

It's been working really well.

Substack don't have an API, but they do support copy and paste - so I built myself a tool that assembles my blog content into rich text I can copy and paste straight into the Substack editor.

I wrote about how that works here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/4/substack-observable/

I don't mean to sound negative but can I ask why?

Seems like a lot of work just to send a newsletter. What am I missing?

I've been blogging for 21 years.

Sending the newsletter takes me literally 30s thanks to the automation I setup, and means my blog is now available to email people in addition to RSS/Atom people.

Not a good post. Substack isn’t perfect, but Medium is awful. Comparing the two is not a good take, especially as Substack seems to have figured out the individual writer business model while Medium still wants you to pay for their whole platform.

But... Substack emails your newsletters directly to the readers and provides the option to export your email list right??. I'm sure these will the axed as soon as profitability becomes an issue since they provide a nice lock in.

This is extremely unlikely and would invoke a torrent of anger from millions of users.

> This is extremely unlikely and would invoke a torrent of anger from millions of users.

Millions of non-paying users. :)

See Reddit, Twitter, etc. - the folks running these outfits don't give a fig about their users. Their goal is to make money.

Substack’s entire purpose is to cater to writers. Them preventing the export of emails is about as likely as Burger King removing hamburgers from their menu.

Perhaps there's a compromise: Substack won't do it, but they'll get aquired and then whoever bought them will do it. :)

Substack’s TOS clearly states that the writer owns their list, so I don’t think Substack could even legally axe the ability to export the list.

Even if they did change the terms it couldn’t apply retroactively, and as you say, it would upset everybody. So while I can think of reasons to not use Substack, list ownership is not a particularly good one.

Source: I have a small Substack

The history of the Internet shows you really shouldn't trust that. If I had a Substack list I cared about, I'd regularly export the emails.

Substack hasn’t really figured out a business model. They took $86 million of VC money at the height of the boom and used it for exorbitant payouts to writers, creating the illusion of success.

Last year Substack failed to raise another VC round and ended up trying crowdfunding instead. Notably they refused to answer any questions about how much money they’re losing and if they ever expect to be profitable — a weird look when you’re soliciting investors:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/28/23660473/substack-retail-...

Personally I’d give Substack less than 20% chances of survival. This kind of information-free crowdfunded investment round is a mark of high desperation.

That can all be true, while the post is still bad. Substack isn’t perfect (as I said) but I think their issues are VC-hypergrowth inflicted and not due to a problem with the fundamental business model.

Exactly. And although Substack has done a good job of building their brand, on the technical side they have pretty much zero "moat". The service they provide is incredibly simple. It never made sense as a VC-funded massive growth business. It would have been better off as a self-sustained private company, almost along the lines of Craiglist. Patreon finds itself in a similar boat.

I think the more important point would be that many of their most prominent writers would not put up with it. I imagine that has way more influence than a large number of writers with tens to hundreds of subscribers.

If you’re worried about it, backing up your subscriber list periodically seems like a good idea? There’s an export button on the subscribers tab.

(And there’s the option to set up a custom domain, but it costs $50.)

Not to derail the article but what are good alternatives to Substack that are good for an email newsletter?

Ghost.org is pretty solid. You can host it yourself or pay for their service.

I was recently told (right here on HN) that Squarespace has built-in subscriptions. Not sure if it can be connected to their blog "product", but that might be an option. Of course, readers will have to experience the friction of entering their card details.

Unless they changed this in the last month, there is no easy way to automatically send posts to email subscribers. You have to manually set up an email and add the posts. This is really time consuming and led me to switch a project from Squarespace to Ghost.

DIY using Wordpress

https://tinyletter.com has worked well for me

In the article they chose to self host. I followed this path as well! So far so good, but I also don’t have a huge viewership so it wasn’t that big a deal

I use https://buttondown.email

Substack is a web site. The alternative that's good for an email newsletter is that you send out an email newsletter.

(Substack will do this, but as far as the email functionality goes, they're not doing anything you can't do by hand, and it's not the way readers are expected to consume the posts.)

Self hosting since Yahoo! glory days.

We really need to solve this issue. I was going to say 'just run your own web server and email your clients' but obviously you can't do that in this current environment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com