The coming year - 2024
Some thoughts of the past year, why I did this, and how it has become part of my core psyche. Thank you for all your support, and I look forward to more in 2024
I began this as a simple vehicle to explore Substack as a venue for my product management blogs. I had gotten tired of the back-end grind to maintain Ghost (self-hosted) and wanted something low maintenance. At the time, my relationship with Twitter was near the end1, and that was really where I had focused my efforts to grow and maintain an audience.
At the time, Substack was beginning to get aggressive about attracting refugees from Twitter, and they have added some network effect accelerators (chat, notes, and re-stacking) to help your audience self-reinforce.
And frankly, it works. While I am not a huge site, I went from 0 subscribers to mid-double digits without any external help from my shameless self-promotion.
My migration of my product blogs to Substack were easy, and both of them did grow significantly in subscribers over the year (more that tripled, again without any flogging by me). Prior to the move I hosted them on Ghost, and while I loved the freedom Ghost provided, there were always some functionalities that was just borked. The search is a homeless abortion (and after almost 9 years, you would think their devs would have implemented something that Wordpress has had for almost 2 decades, sheesh) and there was no integration with third parties, so you had to roll up your sleeves and leverage automation tools like Zapier. And don’t get me started on the weirdness of integrating Mailgun2.
But all these little add-on services started as pretty generous “free” tools, are beginning to lower the threshold for their free tier, and for a hobbyist like me, it isn’t in the cards to spend $5 here, $10 there, and more per month to do the simple things. Yes, I know it costs money, but seriously, to just drop a tweet when a new post goes live shouldn’t be tied to a $19.95/month service, FFS3.
But Substack isn’t perfect. If you are happy with its formatting and constraints it is fine. If you have a large audience who is willing to pay you, then it is great. They skim only 10% and to not have to deal with the shit on building and maintaining the back end tech stack is worth it. But I hate that they are pre/post pending notifications to try to get my readers to encourage me to go paid (so they can get their skim). Fuck that. This is free, and will remain free. Also, they seem to have some moral blindspots. They ban sex workers and adult writers, ostensibly because the payment servicer - Stripe - prohibits it, but it is clear that they are A-Ok to take money generated by some of the worst white nationalist, racist Nazi’s.
I am not going to leave, but I am going to monitor that situation. I do have an exit offramp, using Wordpress/Buttondown to replace the functionality4, and it gives me more flexibility to boot!
I am writing this in the morning on December 31, 2023, looking forward to a new year, and many many posts to share with my small, but fun audience.
Thank you all from the bottom of my heart that you have taken the time to read and subscribe to my ramblings here. I do greatly appreciate you all!
Musical Interlude
An organist playing the Wagner epic, “Ride of the Valkyries”.
This deserves its own post.
Ok, it wasn’t terrible, but there are a lot of moving parts, and one non-intuitive thing that when you fail to set it up right, sure the messages get out, but you get zippo mail performance analytics. This is not a knock on Mailgun. They are a worldclass service and they are super reliable and robust. It is just that the Ghost documentation is somewhat garbled
Of course, in April, in a spat with Substack, Musk cut off their ability to post to Twitter as part of the “rationalization of the API” (read: massive cash grab) and then Twitter blocked any substack links from being posted, warning that the links were “dangerous” (yeah, to his fucking bottom line). Twitter is dead to me.
Check it out at The PM Dude - my snarky product management persona. Now cleaned of any posts that might get me fired!
Great post that's similar to my thoughts re the situation here. I'll always be grateful that a misplaced post enabled me to discover this channel of yours, Geoff. Best wishes to you and yours for the new year.
"I hate that they are pre/post pending notifications to try to get my readers to encourage me to go paid (so they can get their skim)." I have never seen those notifications in my always-free nook, and actually had to hunt down where you might be able to disable those. On the Settings page, scroll down to payments: I have a toggle there to turn on/off pledges. I hope that fixes it for you.