I'm 3 months into risking my career for Substack, how's it going?

Substack is a better platform for Podcasts than it is Newsletters

Hello, if you are new to my content my name is Justin. I am a politics podcaster. I built a career at Patreon and on October 3rd I switched to Substack as my exclusive home.

This was terrifying for all the reasons you would imagine. To add the pressure, my wife gave birth to our first child less than two months prior.

“You did what?”

Here are my thoughts on the transition. Hopefully they are helpful for people thinking about the transition or just curious about the feral world of independent media.

Here we go…

GOOD:

- A Platform That Cares Moving from Patreon to Substack was a terrifying process and the lingering fear it could ruin a good thing was palpable. It greatly helped to have someone to email and Substack not only provided that but they’ve kept in touch. This has given me a bridge to contact other creators as well, which has been nice.

- Discoverability Let me be very clear, podcasts are impossible to discover. They are inconsistent, hard to find and annoying to sample. They just are. Substack Notes allows me to post in an ecosystem that puts my free sub an impulse click away. Substack Network gives me a steady pipeline of possibly qualified listeners. If only 10% ever try the show and 10% of those become paying customers I am still growing simply because the platform built tools to do it. This, and I cannot stress this enough, doesn’t exist anywhere else.

- Tools Writing and publishing is easier and more aesthetically pleasing on Substack.

- Community My audience loves chat. That's neat.

BAD:

- Transition Day We did not have a button for people to subscribe to the Substack when I made my first announcement. Not sure why that was the case. It was nerve wracking to say I was going to move and then not have an immediate place to direct people. Everything worked out, so this is minor. But it gave me a heart attack.

- Domain It took longer than expected to get the PoliticsPoliticsPolitics.com domain to resolve to this page. Again, not sure why.

- Migration Pain This is by far the worst, and most predictable, side effect of the switch. No one likes change. No one likes being given a task with little tangible benefit. No one likes spending money they wouldn’t otherwise spend. To move from one site to the other I foisted all of that on the audience. Add to that any confusion that comes along with the subscription process or adding an RSS feed to the jigsaw world of podcast players. There is no perfect way to do it but there is a bad way to handle it: inaction to complaints. The angry emails will come, you are judged by how fast you respond. The nasty comments will be posted, you will be judged by how long they linger. Nothing you can really do besides try and do rapid response, which Bailey and the Substack team were often faster than I was on when it came to the comments.

- Delay In Charging Substack offered all of my Patrons a free month of bonus content on Substack. This was very important because it made my decision less jarring because one action could continue their experience without pulling out a credit card. Most of my audience subscribed within that period but Substack did not start their subscription until the free period lapsed. Some listeners hit me up toward the end of the free period and asked if they were really subscribed. Minor issue.

- Stripe Name This is a pretty major change between platforms. Patreon handles all payment processing behind the scenes. Substack has you set up a Stripe account to handle it. Functionally, this means that I now get paid from Stripe and not Substack. I did not know that Stripe had a character limit on what name is displayed when charges hit the customer. This led to "Dog and Pony Show Audio Productions" the name of my LLC to be shortened to "Dog and Pony Show Audi". I had two chargebacks because people thought it was some automobile-focused scam. Emails to both of them resolved it. But this is something to keep in mind for Patreon refugees.

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The numbers:

1,203 Patrons when l left the platform on October 3rd, 2024

1,167 Substack paying subscribers as I publish this on January 6th, 2024

I am down on paid subscribers. Which obviously isn’t ideal. However, on Patreon I was Per Creation meaning I billed every week. However, Patreon allowed people to cap how much they spent on each account in a single month. As I found out after digging through the numbers it was a very common practice to cap our $3 tier ($12 a month) to $3 a month. Meaning they would get the extra content but not pay for more than one or two weeks.

That cannot happen in a monthly and annual model. Also, our $99 Annual deal has been very popular.

I suspect I will make more my first year on Substack than I did my most profitable year on Patreon mostly because I have already been paid close to 70% of the money I would otherwise make from the year. My monthly payment is roughly half of what it was on Patreon. But on that trajectory, I’ll be up which is nice.

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4,798 free subscribers when I made Substack my main hub for political writing and podcasting

6,185 free subscribers today

Substack has built the rarest thing on the internet, a growth engine for the impossible to find.

Podcasting is a lonely medium for die hards. Sure, the megastars are the megastars but by and large it’s people like me. Dedicated to a hardcore audience of a few thousand. But how do you grow?

Sure, there are charts on major platforms. Search exists, which helps you if you are dedicated to a certain niche topics like the Arizona Diamondbacks or Fintech. You can advertise on other podcasts, but making your first impression interrupting a podcast someone already likes has always struck me as odd.

The upside for podcasts is that if you do find your way into our web, you will probably never leave. These are your friends. You know the inside jokes. You crave their opinions on news you see outside of the show.

On the other hand, newsletters are very easy to sample. You can read them anywhere, you can skip to any portion of it you want, you might decide you like based simply on the headline or lede.

Since they are written, you can amply prove you are good at writing on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

The Substack product is clearly built around community. When you go to your page, you get the Notes section and a revolving carousel of content you’ve subscribed to. While chat can be intrusive, it’s been a hit with my audience. All of these features designed to give a user a reason to spend time on Substack as a destination for content and not just a delivery method for the content creator you like.

This is in stark contrast to Patreon who was designed solely as a paywall. No one goes to Patreon itself, they go to the page of the creator they enjoy. Therefore, no one gives much credence to what Patreon might try to recommend which they are starting to do now as they begin to adjust to Substack’s success.

I’ve been in independent media my entire adult life and will probably be until the day I die.

Substack is a remarkable achievement and I really, really hope we continue to grow together.