Odds and Ends

Some noodling on 2 years on Substack. What I have learned and divined, the friends I made along the way, and what the future may hold

a bazaar with odds and ends for sale

I am still shell shocked by the first 5 weeks of the Trump administration, so I am still hesitant to write about politics, or any of the insanity.

Instead, I do have a few things to say in general about my experiences on Substack to share.

Substack Notes

A year ago, I moved my professional blog, The Product Bistro to Ghost. This was mainly due to the shit ass response by the Substack founders towards the proliferation and monetization of some truly fucked up nazi shit.

But I kept this one here as my little “Fuck You” to Hamish MacKenzie and Chris Best. Since this is a free Substack, with a bit over 2,000 subscribers, every time I press the send button, the costs of distributing that email to two thousand plus subscribers takes a little of their money.

And because A16Z (Andreessen-Horowitz) are the primary backers of Substack, that is a little “fuck you” to them.

Because those fuckers are twat waffles.

Now, I have published 594 posts (this will be 595), and that takes some time to do. If I average it out, it is probably one post every 1.2 days or so. Of course, for the first 7 months or so, I was writing for myself. But then a few people began subscribing, and it was off to the races.

The initial growth in subscribers was almost undetectable.

Well, not exactly. I was writing about music, my guitar playing, and then I was making some political posts. The Human Garbage of the Week, and This Fucking Guy were things that I would post. And to be honest, it was easy picking. It was like taking candy from a baby.

These drove spikes in new subscribers.

Now, I use a fair bit of profanity. This is an outlet for me, and at times, I have visitors or readers who either chastise me for my profane language, or try to tell me that if I would pull that, my message would be better communicated.

Look, if you are so fucking puritanical, you should just leave. This isn’t going to be a safe space.

Now, about AI art

I often will use the built in AI Image generator to create capstone images for posts. It is built into Substack, and as in the section above, it is no small part of my “fuck you” to Marc Andreessen. Each iteration of using it costs them money (compute, and API access).

But every fucking time I do use it, someone will barge into my comments or send me an email that I am “screwing” artists, and that I should use stock photos or images from the public domain.

Look, I get that position, but seriously, the AI genie is out of the bag, and boycotting it isn’t going to put an end to it.

That said, I take a little bit of joy when I use one of these images, knowing that I am taking some cash from Marc Andreessen.

Free vs. Paid

I purposely keep my page free. I write as an outlet, a way to blow off steam, to share music that I find, or to commune with my audience.

This is not a business for me. I am a product manager in IT education and certifications, and I make a good living. I am comfortable, but not wealthy.

That said, there are downsides to being a free Substack.

If you go paid, you are agreeing to split your earnings with Substack. They take a rather reasonable 10%, leaving you 90%.

Ultimately, this is how Substack hopes to become a profitable business. I am not sure that 10% is enough to make that a reality, but Substack knows that their growth and profitability lies with getting enough big Substacks with enough paid subscribers to generate enough recurring revenue to keep the lights on.

And Substack does have some bills. They use a 3rd party mailing service, Mailgun, that can get pricy. At the rate I publish and with my audience, I am probably pushing 50,000 emails sent a month. Checking Mailgun’s site, if I was self hosting this on Ghost, I would be cutting a check of $35 a month, or $420 a year. And if I post extra in a month, there will be overage fees.

That is some real coin.

But let’s say I go paid, the expected conversion rate is about 2.5%, so with today’s total subscribers being 2,034 subscribers, I would have maybe 50 subscribers.

Let’s say that I charge $5 a month, so $5 times 50 is $250. Now, my split with Substack is 90/10, so they would get $25 of that $250, and that is not enough to cover the emailing costs from Mailgun¹.

No, I believe that Substack’s small to medium (say 1,000 to 10,000 subscriber stacks are money losers. They need people like Matt Yglesias, and Bari Weiss, and Heather Cox Richardson and their ginormous audiences to make the economics work.

But Sweaty, why did you spend this much time on this rat hole?

Because I want to get to a demonstrable truth: If you do not turn on paid subscribers, Substack is incentivized to not uplift your writing and posts in their social media side (Notes).

It is this deprioritization that makes it difficult to really grow your audience. And it is why two similar sites with similar editorial directions will have vastly divergent subscriber counts².

But, if I did go paid, it would accomplish two things that I really don’t want to do.

First, I would feel pressured to generate content. I feel that if someone is paying, I am obligated to deliver.

But why did they subscribe? Was it my posts on the musical discovery that I do? Or the ad-hoc political ranting with a left of center bent? Or is it about my writing about my journey to play guitar and my addiction to buying more gear and instruments?

If I went paid, I would feel like I would need to pick a lane, because hell, you paid for this, so I am on the hook to deliver the goods.

Second, it would fuck up my taxes.

This sounds like a bullshit excuse, but it is true. The last thing I need is to have a few hundred dollars of “passive” income to tag onto my annual ritual with the IRS and the Franchise Tax Board.

Yeah, I just got my taxes done, and I am shocked at what the adjusted gross income is. No, I do not feel that wealthy, but as I said, I do quite well in my profession.

So, now, and forever, I will keep this “free”. And I will live with the consequences of Substack squelching my reach in favor of paid newsletters, and the slow pace of subscriber growth.

Last point - pinky swear

If you’ve gotten this far in this treatise, I want to thank you. Sincerely and with the deepest gratitude that more than two thousand of you signed up to have me invade your inbox. I do not know what caused you to press the button to subscribe, and why you are still here. But I am deeply in your debt.

Whenever I get someone who comments about how a musician or video I posted brightened their day, or someone restacks one of my posts to Notes, I am humbled, knowing that I touched you enough to take an action.

And that makes me unbelievably happy!

Thanks for coming on this trip with me, let’s see where we are over the next two years.

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1. Naturally, Substack operates at a far greater volume than I would, and negotiates a pretty sweet deal with Mailgun for their services, so perhaps their costs for my 50K emails per month is a lot less. But it sure as fuck ain’t $0

2. I wanted to tell this story because I had someone tell me it wasn't true, and I argued with them in email until I gave up.