Hey Substack, you up?

The grass wasn't greener.

---

You know how we said a few weeks ago that we were leaving Substack for Ghost. Wasn't that funny? SO funny. No, you stop it. No, you!

I said stop it.

Yeah, so we're bringing our diary back to Substack. Why? Oof, deep breaths…

We started our journey on Substack in January of last year with this newsletter. It was a way to bring users behind the scenes, grow our audience, and blow off steam. It went pretty well. 

Then we launched Sub Club that May, and things went very-very well. It became the primary source of funding for Chill Subs. 

Then, with Substack becoming its own "growth" focused platform, we figured we'd move our regular newsletter over here so they could feed into each other like some giant snake? Worm? Centipede!

We grew, launching The Forever Workshop and folding in our Write or Die weekly newsletter, treating Substack like our proverbial wall. And, yeah, it sorta worked. 

Sub Club is the 13th biggest literature Substack, and The Forever Workshop is 8th in education.

But as we grew, so did Substack, and we've found some major drawbacks over time.

1. We don't have much recourse when they do things we disagree with. 

2. It's much more expensive than any other platform (10% of revenue).

3. The stats and audience segmenting suck.

4. People will get burnt out with newsletters very soon.

There is nothing we can do about those first 3. Every platform has its gives and takes. But #4 has been on our mind for almost a year. And it's obvious, right? Nobody wants their inbox flooded with emails all day. And Substack knows this as well (I imagine that's why they push their app so hard). They don't want to be a newsletter platform, and I don't blame them. Who wants their content popping up next do Victoria's Secret Holiday Sales and half-written birthday emails from grandma? Random examples, no relation. And internally, we wanted to unify our content.

We started all of this because our website is custom-coded with no built-in blogging platform and no resources to build one. But we're in a better place now, so we started shopping for solutions. This led us to Ghost. They seemed perfect—an all-in-one blogging website designed for a customizable newsletter strategy that wouldn’t exhaust readers. We met with their concierge team, were well-assured it was right for us, and started making the leap. And….

You ever wake up in a shit mood? Then can't find your glasses? Then knock your elbow on the door frame? Then, forget to turn off your alarm? Then your alarm goes off while pouring your coffee, so it spills all over the floor? Then after cleaning it up, you open your email to find that Ghost's concierge team still hasn't emailed you back six weeks later, and your entire content structure is in limbo between two platforms, and you think fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck, but that first platform was problematic and limited and now you have to go back and tell your team that has been working on this transition for the past three months that we are, in fact, going to get blind drunk and text our ex.