Also published on LinkedIn!
From followers to subscribers, and subscribers to customers; actionable lessons on newsletters, lead magnets, and automations.
Substack: Is It Actually a Newsletter Platform?
Short answer: not really.
Substack is closer to Medium with a subscription button than it is to a real email service provider. And that's fine, as long as you know what you're signing up for.
Here's what Substack actually is: a publishing platform where your content also gets emailed to subscribers. The writing experience is clean. There's no setup friction. You can start publishing in minutes. If you already have an audience there and you're running a paid newsletter, it makes sense.
But if you're building an email list to grow a business, to sell products, run automations, segment your audience, connect your tools, Substack will hit a wall fast.
What it doesn't do:
No automations. You can't send a welcome sequence, trigger emails based on behavior, or tag subscribers by interest.
No integrations. There's no native connection to your other tools, no CRM, no landing page builder, no lead magnet delivery. (You can work around this with automation tools. If you need help connecting Substack to other platforms, let me know.)
No control over monetization. Substack takes 10% of your revenue, plus payment processing fees on top. At 1,000 paid subscribers paying $10/month, that's $1,000/month going to Substack before you see a cent.
The Medium comparison is fair.
Medium was the hype five or six years ago. Everyone moved there because the built-in audience was real. Then the algorithm changed, the reach dried up, and people realized they'd built on someone else's land.
Substack has the same dynamic. The recommendation engine encourages readers to subscribe to multiple newsletters at once, which makes it easy for your content to get lost. You're not just competing for inbox space. You're competing inside the Substack app too.
When it does make sense:
If you're a writer doing paid long-form content and your audience is already on Substack, stay. The discovery features are real, and the simplicity is genuinely good. The network exists, with over 35 million active subscriptions.
But if you're starting from zero and building toward an email list that actually works as a marketing asset, use a proper ESP. You'll have full control, your content lives separately from everyone else's, and you can connect it to everything else you use.
Mathew Brown and Daniel Bustamente is running a Substack-focused course and community if that's your direction and you want to go deeper, contact to them.
See you tomorrow.
— Selim
Originally published on LeadLetters.digital, also published on LinkedIn!