How Can Writers Make the Most of Substack?

oh hi I didn't see you there or hear you I've just been beatboxing here alone in my office what was I here to do oh that's right I have a new episode of Micron to release for the first time in a really long time this episode is all about something significantly different from all previous episodes hence I'm forgoing the normal intro music for a decidedly more lowbudget theme actually if you look at the list of micron's previous episodes you'll notice that the most recent episode before this one came out almost 8 months ago and the one previous to that came out about 6 months before that I've been creating podcast episodes on a very slow very sporadic schedule

why mostly because I've been spending almost all of my time writing on substack instead if you've been on the internet at all recently you have probably heard of substack substack substack substack it's all over the place everybody's talking about it well that's for a pretty good reason actually it's because it's a pretty darn good content creation platform for writers journalists bloggers and now podcasters yes believe it or not no matter what platform you are listening to this very episode on right now it is actually being hosted and distributed by substack the Micron podcast is now brought to you by this exciting new writing platform that is taking the Internet by storm I'm not a Salesman for substack or anything

like that but in this episode I interview Linda LeBron who actually works at substack as the manager or director of writer Partnerships she wasn't very big into titles a few weeks ago Linda took a significant chunk of time out of her busy workday to talk to little old me all about how substack works why content creators might want to look into substack in the first place how creators can use it to grow their audiences and make money doing what they love with the written word and as a very recently with audio and video as well and by the way even if you're only a passive podcast listener or someone who enjoys reading blog posts or newsletters or articles that other people create I

highly recommend that you go to to substack docomo so you can create your own content I think just about everybody should be writing or sharing audio or video I highly recommend that you give substack a shot even if you have no experience doing anything online at all try it today after all it's free if I were into cliches I might say something like without further Ado we'll get to the episode but as a former member of Toast Masters I know we're not supposed to say without further Ado so I won't say that let's just get right onto the podcast where I interview Linda from

substack I hope you like it and I hope you're inspired to create your own substack account and make content whether that's a podcast or an email newsletter or a blog or whatever just like me I hope you find this helpful and inspiring thanks for listening hi Linda nice to meet you nice to meet you as well thank you for making the time absolutely how about we just dive in does that work for you that would be wonderful I I know only a little about you I listened of course a little bit to your your podcast and looked at your substack but I would love to you know just get into it answer your questions and maybe get to know you a little bit better but yeah let's go awesome and what is your position at substack my only title is writer Partnerships and the the job that I do relates to the

acquisition and development of writers and creators and podcasters on the substack platform so a lot of my job is reaching out to people who may be book authors or they may be creating content somewhere else on the Internet or in the world in general and we might think that they could be a match for the substack model and would like to tell them about it because we're a startup we still go out and sort of have to one by one invite people to come on so that's a big part of my job and another part of my job is writer development so for writers already on the platform if they have been successful and are building businesses of meaningful size often they want to talk to people on my team and how can they do a better best practices and things like that and the last piece

of it is different people on the writer Partnerships team specialize in different verticals and the vertical that I uh spend vast majority of my time on is finance investing macroeconomics and business writers and creators nice so you're good with math yes yeah that's big big part of it okay um well so on that note I guess I'll just be honest and say I heard about substack a couple years ago I don't remember I you could tell me how long the platform's even been around but my first thought was oh goodie yet another platform you know it was like okay one more thing to sign up for I think somebody sent me a link to something that they were writing and it said do you want to create an account and I was like no last thing I want to do is create an account yeah no more

accounts no more usernames and passwords no more logins and what is this thing called substack and is that related to stack Overflow or you know what's the deal with that right because I work in web development yes stack Overflow is a great resource for people who need coding help so anyway so what's the substack thing but then what happened was I signed up for a writing course um in a writing Community with a guy named Tim Denning in Australia um fun guy great course and and a whole bunch of the writers in there were like what's your substack and I was like I don't even know what you're talking about what do you mean they said well well we're all writing in substack and I thought right that platform again okay so finally I got into it and the thing that shocked me it was unbelievably simple I could not believe how easy it was and there were so many tools and I was

thinking like okay well so if I'm writing I I'll bet you they probably don't have this feature and then I click around and I found it and I was like oh isn't that great good oh they have that okay well they probably don't have this feature oh my goodness they have that too and I was just shocked at how much it was very apparent that it was a tool by content creators for Content creators for you know lack of a better way to describe that you know the point being sometimes you find a tool and you think like okay so I see what they were trying to do here but they've never they've clearly never used this before because if they have they would know that when I click this button what I expect to happen is this my experience with substack has been the opposite of that it's been okay I'll bet you I'm I'm what I want to do right now is I want to do this where's the feature for there it is wow they thought about that and it's clear because they're using it which is

fantastic um but I guess my first question would be what is the problem succinctly if possible what's the problem substack is trying to solve it's easier if I say this the problem it was invented to solve seven years ago these three founders got together they met at a tech company they were all working at it was two Engineers uh Chris best and jrj sethy are uh they are today the CEO and CTO which is Chief technical officer of substack they are both are software developers and the the third is HH McKenzie who is a former journalist and he is the chief writing officer and the problem they set themselves to solve was that journalism was in disarray the business models of

Journalism had been dissolved by the internet like a nail in acid and the journalists and writers they knew were having troubled having sustainability of their incomes they had extreme economic precarity so their idea was and you know they went up and down to all the VC offices saying this if you could create a way that people with the proverbial thousand true fans Kevin Kelly had this concept of you have a thousand true fans and they pay you that as a living so if somebody who's non-technical can have a Blog slail newsletter and charge people money and if they can charge those thousand true fans five or seven or $10 a month then that is a living they can do what they wish completely independently and no one can ever yank

that away that was their concept it was to give initially Evol from this but initially was to give writers the ability to establish independent incomes and of course then if somebody wants to come and have a free blog have a free email newsletter Express themselves to the world that all works but the thing that Subs didn't invent neither blogging nor email the the kernel that was different was to easily create a single holistic package where you could go set up in a couple of hours and I have a a writing business and just take it from there and they they had they had nothing but disbelief that this could ever be a a business model and and Chris best tells the story all the time of how people found it so if that could work it would have worked is number one and number two that you know that that

there's just nobody will pay everybody has has decided writing is commoditized and nobody will pay but the problem substack set out to solve which I think all of us who work there would say it's on its way to solving it was the the economic problem for people who uh if you want to say create content a lot of writers don't like this the sort of content characterization but a lot of the finance and business people I work with don't have a problem with the term content but for for writers the ability to go Direct that's it you don't need a gatekeeper you don't need somebody to hire you you don't need you a somebody else to hand you a platform you can create your own yeah that's beautiful so because part of the problem um in years past I think was you know you see content again content creators online and then it's like okay well if you like

what they're doing support them on patreon or you know what's that other one uh buy me a coffee or something like that are all those are all good and fine but yeah so clearly they're these discrete tools that everyone's trying to put together which is like subscribe to my WordPress you know blog here and then uh you know if you like what we're doing click this link and then give us a donation and then it could be a onetime donation or recurring donation but the point there being the creator has to pick and choose and say I'll open an account here and connect it to this here and connect it to this here so sounds like substack was saying let's put it all in one and make it seamless and smooth and it sounds like um make it so that anybody can use it you don't have to be a developer uh you know or a professional content creator who's done this for a very long time to figure it

out right yes and and the last bit is so uh key because you know Ron a lot of people like you if I talk to them about substack they say well why do you even this is like The Hacker News I could build in in a weekend thing right well why do you need substack when you could just have a WordPress instance and then integrate stripe and then then do you know simple pay wall Pro and pay wall your content and then integrate a subscription solution like all these bits that you can put together always did exist and still exist there are lots of people doing lots of Publications that are not on on substack but what didn't exist was something that just worked out of the box and allowed you to charge money on a recurring basis and I don't think anybody at substack would disagree patreon was a major precursor

that that was brilliant in the way that it said so so what was in a sentence what was patreon's thing patreon's thing was people will find out about you somewhere else on the internet and they will look at your art they will listen to your podcast and then at the moment when you're asking them to pay you and support you you are going to have them come over so now we have some friction you're going to have to have them come over to to patreon and it's sort at the time theyve they have integrated more branding for the Creator now but at the time it's like it's very patreon branded and you now you gotta the the at the very moment I'm ready to pay I have to make a patreon account right and then I can pay you so but however just the idea of getting a Creator to get money in their pocket directly that was a great Innovation you know very different than

a lot of other places like the the traditional social media something like Twitter which was like well if you set up a certain kind of account will'll we'll pay you some money and we'll let you know you know just keep checking your accounts and you don't get you don't own you don't this is the other thing ownership you don't own anything so on substack you own the content you own the email addresses that was something that I think they did at the outs that at the time it hadn't been done where there was always this idea of like well if you come and write on our platform we're going to own the content together and we'll we'll kind of okay you're going to get some pay and you're going to get some ownership but but by and large we we want to make sure we keep you so the important thing is that we have to like this is going to be a marriage it's a permanent partnership where we're chained to each other and if you ever even think of leaving this platform you know if you if you leave

Twitter do you get to export your Twitter followers no that's comedic but substack promise is look if you do want to pick up and leave substack someday you will bring with you your your content your your email addresses and indeed the payment relationship since those are in stripe so those are some things that were different than the the patreon idea or you know even we could talk about the medium idea medium was you're going to get paid but it was very much not direct drive and not ownership of the audience and they never represented to be it was just a different model well um I'm glad you pivoted to medium because that was another thing so I signed up for medium I think right when it came out immediately when it came out however many years ago that was and I couldn't quite figure that out either I thought okay so this is kind of like a blogging platform sort of um there's a social element to it also but um and then then

there was the partner program and I'm laughing because I I think I just gave up because they changed it so many times where it was like if you want to monetize your medium account here's what you do you sign up for this and then you have to pay us every month and then you get to be a part of this program and then we'll share Revenue with you um but then you get to decide okay I want you to monetize this post but not this post but then when you do that you have to like pay wall them so then you know you got to bring in new users and if they can only see so many free um articles per month or something like that and then then it was like okay well now just kidding everybody's a partner and either you're in or you're out and it's $50 a year or something like that and the point is like it changed so many times that I just gave up I I thought like so what is the plan here like how do you

how do you become a successful writer on medium and I don't think they knew either I think like it was very clear they're trying out one model and then said okay well that didn't work so now let's try another one okay that didn't work let's try another one and then you know through a couple of different CEOs that the direction has shifted left and then right and then left and then right or you know up and down or whatever um so clearly there's there's a a secret nut like they're trying to crack and and I don't think they found it and it's funny because I checked my stats um uh the the amount of money that I've made in the medium partner program over the years and I never took it seriously um but it was more of an experiment just like where's this platform going what's it doing uh I made 35 cents one month and 38 cents another month and that's it yeah because I just I kept turning off the uh the pay wall

on the on the post cuz I thought like well either everything's in or everything's out anyway so it was just it was interesting to to see all that and then substack you know I found that and then I said okay well this this seems a little bit more they've really thought this through and there's a plan and there's a strategy behind it and the big thing that you mentioned you can take your audience with you which why is everybody I mean maybe this is an obvious question but why is every other brand out there absolutely dead set against that Facebook Twitter medium all the platform YouTube you want to take your emails and your users and your subscribers and go somewhere else they either don't let you or make it as hard as possible and yet substack has said okay you want to do that fine how's that possible when I came to substack three

years ago I had people who worked in Tech friends tell me flat out substack will never work because you let people leave too easily you charge a 10% platform fee nobody is going to come to substack and make a million2 million $3 million a year here and pay you that much money they will just leave these predictions were made so confidently that people will leave and that's why all the other platforms don't let you leave the the first reason is they think that the have being able to lock you in is a precondition of being able to grow because they say well you know borrow the exits and let's get as many people in the theater as possible and that is how we are going to have success and we've got to make sure nobody can leave the second reason which is an incentives

reason an in explain everything is because their business model is based on Advertising again this is they don't represent anything otherwise it's very clear that Twitter's business model is mostly based on Advertising they've tried they've tried to Pivot a little bit to you know you pay and and then people are going to pay you and all this other stuff fundamentally something like a a Facebook a Instagram YouTube they're Advertising based businesses so why would they ever let anybody who's a a writer or Creator or anything on them they basically the purpose of both the creators and the viewers audience is just to be there to look at advertising so the the minute they say okay you can move your audience like that that's just it's it's not fundamentally what it's about so there was this I think tremendous skepticism of being now okay

you always could have an email list on aweber Constant Contact MailChimp you always could have an email list and that you totally own and you could carry it anywhere okay this is so on one side we have social media where I'm trying to build an audience build reputation get visibility uh um Discovery reach that's one extreme and then the other extreme is I can build my email list maybe I could try to funnel people from social media to my email list so I can actually own them but hey Weber constant contacts of the world they certainly never said they're going to help you anybody to see your stuff they're just you know you totally own it you can bring it wherever you want it's your list so there was just there was never any idea anybody who wanted to make a big scaled social media platform it just would not be a

match with their incentives to be able to ever let people move or leave so you know and you have seen Ron substack writers and creators that it's it's a great project of theirs to say okay I have uh 20,000 LinkedIn people who follow me and how can I get them to come on over to my substack and this is kind of it's the the it's a slog because LinkedIn just like all these other ones we've mentioned has no interest whatsoever in letting you and Linkedin is LinkedIn is not Advertising based but they are because they're a jobs platform their constituency is recruiters HR people again it's that kind of 90s term of eyeballs they just if you are on LinkedIn you're doing a newsletter people are interacting with it all you are is stuff to go in between the

corporate content and the jobs content so all of it goes back to what is the incentive of the platform and I think what the substack founders had in mind was we are going to be um ex not exclusively as wrong because it it's not really a model of exclusion area I'm sure you know you've seen the odd substack where somebody will put some sponsorship somebody will put an ad and that's fine but the drive of what we what uh we the founders at that time were building is that it would be motivated by helping writers and content creators actually earn money so the and the other thing is think of some of the people who are on substack who are very high-profile people the Kareem Abdul Jabar and Margaret Atwood and Adam grants of the world they would

be disinclined to come if the promise were well you can work hard and build something up here and then we're partnered together forever and we're married and we're chained to each other those people are all far more likely to come and to have paid subscription uh Publications if they are secure in the knowledge that we are in a a partnership that they have a lot of power because if they are dissatisfied or feel they're not getting their money's worth uh or feel the fees are not worth it they can leave and most have stayed so the only way that you prove your value proposition I think is if you say that you know you can fire substack right that's a good point well so maybe on a similar note one thing that has happened recently and I think

this is new um and and this is how you and I got connected in the first place was I have a podcast and it's a very small podcast and it's just me right um and that's my whole pitch so the micro R show is it's you know a microphone and Ron that's it it's just uh a oneman podcast about small experiences you know little things um in life people I meet conversations I've had um experiences that sort of thing but so all of a sudden with substack now they're saying they being you um hey podcasters we also want podcasters now that's very different than an email newsletter right and knowing that um and I did switch my podcast from from anchor um to substack and again I could not believe how simple

it was I redirected my feed I plugged it in and I hit you know publish and I thought yeah right we'll see what happens I came back the next day all the episodes were there all the you know the cover art was there the links were correct the episode names were right I could not believe that but now I've got this so I have a bit of a challenge and I'm I'm struggling to understand maybe you can help me what is the difference now between substack the newsletter platform plus now there's pod s and how do you differentiate between you know here I am Ron stoffer uh you know the Micron podcast but also I can write a newsletter like you know how do you differentiate that especially when you throw in the fact that now you can do voiceover audio on your written content you know what's the difference between

when you when you write the things that you're writing versus the podcast episodes that you're making I don't exactly know how to decide this is worthy of a newsletter this is worthy of a podcast episode and am I asking people to Subs subscribe to my podcast or my substack or both long question open to your no this this is a great question that I think is uh it's pertinent because substack is not yet fully appreciated as a podcasting platform when I say appreciated I just mean know I think people when I am talking to people about substack or pitching they're like oh I like substack I like Heather Cox Richardson I get some emails but sometimes I have had the experience of saying to somebody who's been on substack for a long time you know you can do podcasting and upload video and

they're like oh I didn't really know that you had that so we I think we as substack employees overestimate how much people are going to be looking through the features of the product with a fine tooth comb which of course one does not do you know I'm when I'm using any other product I'm not necessarily you know aware of all the the bells and whistles that may have so some of the bells and whistles that we have made over the past two years is just what you were describing run where we have created podcasting features that make it very easy to rep platform your podcast from other posts to be hosted on substack I think the best okay so I'll answer the technical part briefly first and then I'll talk about the Strategic part because when you talk about what deserves to be in text what ought to be in audio that's it's kind of strategy

it's kind of very personal it's part of the creative process but the technical part is it's best to just think of your substack as a substack and within that publication what do we have we have a publication page and it will have posts that we do and those posts can be of different types it can just be a traditional sub when you do a traditional substack text post you can embed audio and video in it or you can do what's called an episode when you see the new post drop down menu one of those is called episode and that is a podcast episode where you are uploading an MP3 or other audio file and it's actually a podcast and for people listening who might want to do that it's a one-time setup if you want to take that podcast it's an RSS feed setup where you can set

it up that it sends it to Spotify Apple podcasts and all the other podcasting platforms do that one time and now when you upload to substack it goes out to all the other platforms so somebody may never get an email from you or go to your substack URL on their browser but they may be seeing your work in the proverbial wherever you listen to podcast and I mentioned that because I think some people think substack oh it's this closed system if I have a podcast on substack then it's just a podcast on substack no podcasting is I mean this is the great thing about RSS which is a a it's not a platform it's you know it's it's something that's existed on the internet as a way of sharing content so think of the substack as like one big thing and then you can have your text post your audio post that that's a

podcast episode you can have a video post and similarly if you if you upload a video you can set it up on substack such that only the audio part of that video goes out through RSS to the other platform so even by the sort of details I'm giving here you can see we've chopped a lot of wood in the past two years with the idea being that people on substack who were publishing written content really liked the ability it gave them to have independent income charge money for things and they might also have a podcast they might also have video content they do they wanted to bring it on substack and the center of substack being the ability to pay content the ability to have things that are just for the community of people who's supporting you financially everything I've just mentioned you can have it for free or paid so I can have a

video where I post the whole thing for free I can post the whole thing and have it all behind the pay wall I can also have a video where I it's an hour long only paying people can see the whole hour but people who are signed up for free can see the first two minutes that has been as you can imagine a very powerful conversion tool or if you have say a podcast episode you can have two versions of it uh I'll give an example so Andrew Sullivan has the dish cast on substack longstanding substack podcast and he will upload for his paying subscribers there's a I think the last time I was looking at it he had like an hour and a half episode for paying subscribers and then for for free subscribers he had 45 minutes or an hour so he is deciding you know it could be two minutes for free an hour for paid or

it could be a really full episode for people who are free subscribers but then it's the super fans who are supporting him in pay he wants to give them that extra so sometimes people are like okay well what's the what's the reason I would move if I'm on anchor I'm on podbean I'm on any other uh and it's it's satisfactory what is the main reason that people would move to substack and I would say the one main reason would be if they're doing something else on substack like you are they often just feel like I want to bring everything under the same umbrella so that my audience base can just know that we they have one destination to come see me to comment on my stuff they get an email every time I do something Etc so it's to have one home but probably really a big reason is in order to have something behind the pay wall because all of those other well uh most

of the other hosting platforms are predicated on your content is all going to be free or if there's a way to pay wall some it's you know on on I think on Apple podcast and Spotify you can have some stuff pay walled but it's kind of within their system within their world so as always with substack sort of agnostic people can enjoy and appreciate your stuff anywhere and for substack podcasters who have some paywalled content you know again listen to Andrew Sullivan as a good example he will say at the end of the free content that he puts out it goes on on Spotify he will say you know if he would like to hear more of this and gives his substack URL and if you are a paying subscriber to his podcast you can still listen to what you've paid for on the other platforms

you receive a custom RSS link you put it in Len to it yeah so I think that the the paid podcast and there are other people trying to come at this problem trying to solve this problem but I I would I would offer that substack is the the only solution where we have both the ability for you to really easily have paid uh video audio podcasting content and we also have you can do lots of types of content if you want to go beyond just audio and a lot of podcasters do they're like you they have they want to both communicate something with writing and communicate some things with video too so I think for I'll give one more example that people can kind of look at who I think is a wonderful one which is medy Hassan who used to be on MSNBC and

he left and he is now on substack he has a publication called zeteo and it has podcast content it has video content it has written content it's just a good example of how you can have a media Empire and when you go to Zeto it's z.com you can on substack have a custom domain rather than your brand. substack docomo he has z.com you if you go went on it and you didn't know substack it doesn't say substack anywhere it's very much brand forward of his brand and that's going all the way back to the beginning of our conversation that's another piece because when I'm on Facebook I'm on Twitter I'm on threads I'm always very aware that I'm on those Brands see they're very branded to those companies but when I'm on a substack of

course if you or I or anybody else who's knowledgeable of substack we can kind of recognize the formats and we're like sure what the signup box like we know it's a substack but it substack doesn't feel like okay here is our brand first and then you are somewhere back there it's much more what people want which is that their brand comes first and and they can customize and and they can have it look and feel the way they want so I wandered from the original question but the I think that the thing that that is really less well known is that substack does have all these podcast features that often work very well for people with Niche podcasts where they have a a dedicated audience doesn't have to be big you know you don't don't have to be somebody who's big enough to have the eight sleep uh you athletic greens ads running but maybe instead of the ads uh

have your audience uh support you directly and have some paywall content that's a really good point actually because um what you mentioned there is there's different ways to Brand it and and make the look and feel and that sort of thing because one of my questions was you know how do you avoid the Twitter problem and when I say the Twitter problem I could be talking about 27 different things but specifically what I mean is there is only a certain percentage of people who are ever going to join Twitter my wife is never ever ever going to get a Twitter account because it just doesn't make sense to her so if I tell somebody follow me on substack or check me out on substack and they say subst I don't know what that means what does that mean I'm confused where do I go you know what I mean that same sort of thing so it sounds like there is a solution to that which is to say just like follow me right like in

follow Micon and that's it and that's all they need to know and they don't necessarily need to know or care about anything like wait what is a substack what does that mean where do I go right right now I would say I'm gonna just make up some data based on nothing but I don't think I'm too far off 95% of people who come into the substack ecosystem the substack platform speaking grandly are coming in because they have been brought in by the hand by a right or podcaster because what happens is I don't think people really hear about substack and say I've got to Google that unless they're like you and me and are interested in new platforms and and things like that they're or if they're they're sort of like uh Coastal Elite journalist and their friends are all

talking about and they Google it what usually happens is they are watching CNN and they see somebody come on and it says this you know the geopolitical analyst and he has a substack and they Google that person's name or they Google it their name plus the word substack and hopefully the first Google results on the first page is that person substack they don't know or care that it's substack probably in this moment but they click on it and what did they see they see the famous welcome page that all it has is the the name and that box and it's funny just to give you some inside baseball for some writers that page is the bane of their existence oh it looks too pushy I don't want it to go there but I could tell you after seven years and every Brainiac engineer optimizing it up down and sideways that

that page every pixel on that page is designed so that you can capture and an email address without you know you're not tricking anybody into it when they if they put their email they know they're going to get email from you but so okay that is how people are coming into substack is because some specific person they care about is using substack as a platform okay now substack has a problem right so sub Stack's problem is okay how do we invite people to participate more in our substack Network without we can't do what medium does and put a bunch of advertisements for other Publications or advertisements for other stuff on your substack publication page because our promise to you is that you totally control that so what we did was we one of the best features that we ever introduced was recommendations which is

if you if you are a substack writer and you subscribe to other substacks you can recommend them which simply means that when other people sign up for your substack after they're done signing up for yours they will see a selection of the substacks youve rec recommended and it will say Ron also recommends these substacks would you like to check them out that has been a really powerful tool because let's go back to that uh geopolitics uh analyst um if you if somebody is interested in what he is doing chances are the recommendations which are made because he actually likes them no money is changing hands he authentically thinks that they are good things to read they may like those other Publishers too and now they're coming deeper into subst now the other thing I'll mention I said 5% the other way

that people are coming in now is the substack app so people are downloading the app I think this is if people hear about substack and they don't come in because of of wanting to follow a writer or podcaster it is right now they downloaded the app a friend of theirs maybe told them about the app they download it and when you come into the app it asks of course what topics are you interested in and if somebody is interested in finance and they click Finance they're going to be shown here are some things you might want to get into and look at and follow and they can choose to do that so I mean I I think that every platform tries to do that Twitter does try to do that uh for anybody listening to this you know try going into an incognito browser window and making a brand new Twitter account and you'll see that the signup flow is

different than it used to be but it's still sort of you know I'm thinking of your wife not using Twitter if she were just gonna use Twitter the first time it sort of gives you this assortment of people to follow here's some celebrities here's some people who they're not making their own tweets here's some funny Brands you know it's like stuff you never care about on substack what Rises to this to top at substack is only if you look at the leaderboards on substack so anybody who's listening if you go to substack docomo on your browser and you click on there's magnifying glass icon at left and that'll take you to an area where it will show some leaderboards of different topics the leaderboards are by Revenue so unless somebody took out their credit card and actually paid that is to become a top substack there's this it it can't

really be gamed because it it has to be an authentic person who decides it's not you know Linda is at substack and she's like oh I really like this one let's make this be the top of the leaderboard that's oh interesting yeah so you're not even curating that necessarily you're not saying like we really want to push this author because we like what this author has to has to say we don't we don't do that with the we don't do that with the leaderboards the leaderboards are very pure and by revenue and I do I have had writers on substack say well how do I get higher on the leaderboard or and it's kind of you know what a what a glib answer make more money but it really is like as you are as you are more successful you make more there are some surfaces that are curated by substack if people do what I just mention and go to explore with the

magnifying glass there's something called staff picks and so I have a colleague who's a marketing person and she's putting what's there in staff picks but I will tell you you know what surfaces is far more what people are sharing with their friends what what writers are cross-pollinating and every time you look at a substack post you'll see a share button the number one way people are finding out about new substacks and getting new substack subscribers is somebody clicks that share button and shares it with their colleagu shares it with their friends and then those people come and they get the welcome page and they put their their email so like substack is not like YouTube where YouTube uh perspective is I'm just going to give you an endless algorithm of here's a video what do you think of this what do you think of that and it just wants you to be kind of born along by a a current you know substack is much I'm not going to say substack

has no algorithms because clearly when you go on the App something is deciding what to show you but by and large when you go on the substack App what you're going to mostly see is content from people you follow and from people they recommend and it's sort of you know one or two levels out because that's a very good guide as to what people will like and we'll go farther with this in the app so that our desire is that say if I tell somebody about substack they come to the app they're interested in Finance they should be seeing content about oh there was a Fed meeting today or whatever is going to interest them they should not be unlike Twitter seeing you know oh here's a video of a fight be beside a dumpster behind a Dairy Queen because it's getting every a lot of interaction and engagement and people

are are you know flipping out and reacting to it and then there are ads in the replies to it because you if you're interested in in fights maybe there is some stuff stack about that it would surprise me if not actually it's like 100,000 substacks but by and large we don't have an incentive to just show people things that are going to get them uh heated up we want to show things that they're interested in enough to sign up and potentially pay someday that excellent that kind of bleeds into my next question which is I I work in digital marketing web development search engine optimization and SEO is one of the most obnoxious things on the planet I do it I make a lot of money with it but I hate it because it's a very compli at whacka uh you know industry of like all

these Byzantine algorithmic changes and there are people you know SEO professionals who lie awake at night sometimes literally at 3 o' in the morning saying oh my goodness I heard that Google's going to make another algorithm update and it's going to be called the you know there's the search plus your world update that happened many many years ago but then like there was the pigeon update and then there's you know local ranking updates and it's constantly changing so how do you know unlike on the internet and on Google how can people who are especially creators in particular and especially not Tech you know non-technical creators um who don't even understand SEO or how Al algorithms work how can they avoid becoming slaves to the algorithm how can substack users not say like oh well people told me that it's best to post on

Tuesdays now so I'm gonna post on Tuesday or you know the top five list those are doing are doing really well right now so everything I'm going to do for the next six months is the top five this and that you know how how would you recommend people avoid chasing the you know the algorithm yeah honestly this is going to sound like the most capitalistic answer but what really tells whether people value what you are doing is whether they will pay okay even as I say that I know a couple of people listening are feeling hostile to it the the discussion of money discussion of asking for money it it always is delicate and sensitive particularly when you talking to journalists and creatives who may uh uh cope with unpredictability

around this but here's what I mean if you are on medium you have every incentive because people are just looking for attention and you are in this frantic tournament for it and everybody is all lumped together and they are dangling the carrot of maybe your work will get spread I I know a tiny bit about this because I have talked to people who've moved over from medium to substack and they get very incented and they have said to me you know if you make a medium post about medium they completely algorithmically suppress it so nobody talks about medium and I was like wow this sounds very kind of fascistic like if you make a substack POS about substack it actually travels a lot and we are not encouraging that necessarily it's just that people are trying to learn so I think that with the chasing of the algorithm people are

asking a lot should I post on Tuesday um you know if you guys are trying to encourage video maybe I should post video ultimately just like getting views and getting interaction is not the currency of making a real business out of your writing podcasting or video the currency the real currency is currency is money and if somebody somewhere is willing to pay so I think the way that you get out of that is what is the reward system the reward system on Twitter is you're going to get more followers and more likes and you're going to get hypnotized you're going to get hypnotized that that is what you should actually care about and I have for sure have people i' reached out and they say well I have you know 100,000 Twitter followers how many of them are going to come over and I really don't

know because it depends on how compelling is what you're doing what is the again like NBA words but like what's your value proposition to the reader how much are those real or are they Bots or do they all log off in 2016 so I think that the best way to think about what I should create is not people have been trained that they should want to serve an algorithm and regarding the SEO thing would like to talk to you about this offline because I want to pick your brain about the SEO stuff I know you know a lot about it it's very mysterious and it changes all the time we have all as people who make any kind of writing content video on the internet we have been trained that we have to be be sitting there reading the tea leaves all the time of how we're going to get our stuff to be looked at and surfaced and

that belief does still it's it's sort of I'm not going to say PTSD but they people have this this sort of deep set thing of like okay that's what I have to do on on substack as well but what really you should be thinking about I I think I would offer is uh value and and human nature like what do people really want to read and what will people pay for I I am never going to make it so that or anybody at substack or any algorithm is never going to make it that people will have the same propensity to pay for poetry as they do for stock picks right so that no matter what we would do now am I saying that everybody listening to this who writes poetry should like get into stock picks no not at all but people should they should pursue their their personal Bliss and what they think that they have to offer

again might sound corny but whatever they think they personally have to offer that might be different and special and that they can keep doing it and do it sustainably that's what they should do so the whole algorithmic thing like on substack you are not going to or really nor on any other place are you going to have more success by sending something out on Tuesday rather than Wednesday those are just kind of tweaks around the margin and I would say the kind of thing where it's sort of a lowest common denominator content like my example of a video of fights or like the proverbial medium six things successful people do before breakfast I think if you if you just think in your head like would anybody pay for this or is it is it just sort of a dopamine hit in the moment often that is the answer now even as I

say all that there is lots of stuff on suback that people are paying a lot for that is not stock picks and is personal essays and is you know reflective in-depth research all different kinds of things but I think you know if there's any message for people um the SEO era let me ask you this what do you think about the meme of SEO is dead that's an seo's favorite thing to say they love to say that because they themselves right love yeah because it's such a joke it's like picture a headstone you know that says like SEO you know from 1994 to 2000 or 20 2 or 2003 2004 2005 every year everybody says that um you know so the point there being uh

no SEO is not dead it never has been dead everybody wants it to to die a slow death but ultimately I think the the trick with SEO is to figure out what users want and Google is actually when people say SEO they almost always mean Google yes um but the the optimization of content across platforms is actually something that's good to do and important to do and the the thing that Google is pretty good at even though everybody hates hearing this an is they say just create good content like for years so a webmas uh Central or webmas tools uh YouTube channel and for years they would just crank out all these videos and people would send in questions and I used to send in questions a lot of times the answer was yeah that's not such a big deal I wouldn't worry about that so much just create good content just create good

content I think that is true actually to a certain extent it really is just create good content um so I I don't think seo's dead but the trick is figuring out what works on every single platform right because kind of going back to what I said before you can do a really good job optimizing your Twitter profile and getting a lot of Twitter followers but there is an percentage of people on the internet um who have not and never will never will come into contact with Twitter content ever because the only way they'll ever see it is if there's a screenshot of a tweet let's say in a new story but they're only reading that news story because they're on Yahoo News or MSNBC or something like that they're not on Twitter right they're just seeing you know hey did you see the president tweeted this thing here's a screenshot of it um so it's all about optimizing for each individual platform so you know

in the case of video video is a great example and I don't know it's interesting because I don't know that people are doing this on substack yet to the point where when people go on YouTube they're asking usually they're asking questions yes the algorithm feeds them a lot of stuff that they didn't ask for you know here's here's this uh YouTuber giving away 50 Teslas you know watch their reactions um but a lot of times that search box is Prime real estate right so Google is the number one search engine in the world but YouTube is number two and it is owned by Google so for the most part people go to YouTube to get answers to things um either they want to watch a video or you know like a video video like a movie or they want to find a trailer for an upcoming film or they're doing diy things like how do I you know replace the oil filter on my 2008 uh Volvo S80

or where is the battery you know my daughter drives a uh 24 year-old it's 2000 Volvo S80 where's the battery it's in it's in the trunk right like you wouldn't know that you pop the hood and you're looking for it thinking like where is it you know it's not here it doesn't have a battery and it does it's in the trunk Who would know that so you're on YouTube and you're searching for you know where to find the battery in Volvo S80 and then here's a video and then it shows you with a thumbnail and you know arrows and stuff like shock a shocking surprise here's where your Volvo battery is watch this video so everybody's but but YouTube's one of the most crass examples of optimization because they're con the YouTube creators are constantly saying like Okay well I'm going to change out this uh thumbnail oh the thumbnail is not working I'm gonna re change out it you know they'll

they'll try they'll do testing with thumbnails on videos and say like well I I launched it and then a week later I changed it to this thumbnail and then I changed it to this thumbnail and this thumbnail worked the you know the best and to me that's the most obnoxious excess of like you're looking at all your video content and saying okay well if I tweak this 1% and I tweak this 3% I tweak this 2% but for the most part those are the people who are like trying to make a living off of doing that that's right so maybe to kind of answer that question SEO is important for the people who are obsessed with it and have the time and make lots of content yes you can definitely make small changes here and you're going to add an H1 here and you know make sure there's alt text on this image and that sort of thing but yeah for the most part most small businesses um they should they don't really need to worry about that so much but they do need to worry about creating

good content and that's always been the case on that note there's some strange content creators out there and I wonder your perspective on that um so you stock stock picks great example A lot of people follow that a lot of people care about that it's very obvious what it is it's very clear but then I I saw there's this guy subscribed to on YouTube recently Dry Creek Wrangler school and he's just a guy wearing a cowboy hat who lives out in the midwest I don't even remember what state I don't think he even tells people what state and he just sits in a camp chair and he smokes a cigar and he gives life advice long form content 20 minutes 30 minutes he's just talking about you know hey if you want to be a good husband and father men here's what you ought to do and the

cattle were given birth to a calf the other day and it made me think about that's kind of like life I never thought I would subscribe to you know a cowboy smoking a cigar but it works and a lot of people like that yes what kind of things do you see on substack there where in in his case I think his success is due to the fact that he is just himself he's not trying to be he's not I don't think he's asking other people like well what should I talk about or what should I say or how should I do it I mean this guy's uniquely himself he's doing his thing it's like you just you happen to stumble on his farm out in the middle of nowhere and you you're like seated at the table with him do you see that on stub saac do you do you recommend that you know how can people really Embrace that I think the kind of

writer or Creator you're talking about it's the person who is deeply authentically themsel and then people feel very attracted to it there may also be a fantasy aspect where it's like I am dreaming of having a life as simple as this man's life of course in my cified head it's way simpler than than it is in reality right so there's there's an element of fantasy I also think people make it look easier than it is like they they come and they they do this uh thing that looks like they're just inhabiting the role but it is it's it may be very intuitive to them but it also is like they are really special and for sure there are people like that on substack where they are you know a lot of the time it will be

somebody who is just in a in a deep Niche like there are a couple of I'm going back to the the stock pick thing but there are some stock market writers and financial writers where they will just talk here's here's a good example I think so if you work at Goldman Sachs JP Morgan all these places the number of stocks that you can talk about you're always talking about the biggest ones you're always talking about the most liquid ones because you're talking to institutional investors who need to move Mill billions of dollars around billions so they cannot invest in little quirky small situations they that are on weird secondary markets where you know you can only buy $20,000 worth at a time well guess what there are a lot of retail investors that like those kind of situations which are less efficient and they do deep work on them and then it's not new to substack they've been

blogging about them for years and what I think substack helped that group of people with is they can now easily put what they're doing behind a pay wall if they wish and it's not just their work is not just available for free to everybody but there are lots of investors who love having a community of people to chew the fat with and bounce their ideas off of I was talking to somebody who he has a a a you know modest following for his stock ideas and does make money talking about Capital markets on substack and he posted about an idea and he had somebody reach out to him and say I've been doing work on this company for like 10 years and I'd love to share everything I've done with you that is something that does not show up in substacks statistics right that doesn't there's we're not getting any 10% of that but that's tremendous value so I think that if you if you look at

what kind of quirky different things people are doing on substack it is being an obsessive and I wanted to touch on something you talked about before about the optimization and having a different thumbnail so I think that it relates to what we're saying about you know should I post on Tuesday how do I feed the algo I think this is saying as an and as an observer right so I say this with humbleness because always when somebody at substack is giving advice to writers and creators we always have to say you guys know more than us but based on my observations often people might trip themselves up or become frustrated when they focus on the optimization around the edges versus the basics what are the basics it's so tedious to talk about

being consistent oh my God Gary vaynerchuk in 2016 be consistent just keep doing the same thing do the same thing a hundred times and then say what's next I will tell you my colleague I have a colleague at far store and if people want to look at her substack it's far. substack do.com and when she started working at substack uh about the same time as me about three years ago in addition to starting her job at substack she had a background in journalism she was the editor of luk and other Publications and she started a sub and I'm mentioning her as an example because she was consistent above all I don't know that a week has gone by where she hasn't and she posts every Sunday if you go to her substack she has some content free and some paid content and she's done remarkably well she has you know publicly shared she is making six

figures off her substack evenings and weekends thing okay and like I said there's no you know there's nobody pulling strings and we can't magically reach into people's pockets and take out their money and have them pay her they pay her if they want to this is she I think is also a great example of people are thinking like well I like writing about lifestyle or or fashion or relationships and Linda is saying that you only make money writing about stocks go and look at fars and go and look at other fashion and Lifestyle Publications and you will be able to see from you know the fact that some have the bestseller check mark some are doing very very well but the true commonality is consistency which going back to optimization versus the basics you know if somebody says to me should I I post at at 7: a.m. or 10: a.m. and I say to them going back to the Google advice you know just post good cont content and

just be consistent they're going to be like wow that was waste of time asking you for advice you told me the most obvious thing what works what works in life is the most obvious thing and then a certain ineffable magic that comes usually after experimentation trying different things banging your head against a wall a lot some luck and figuring out what is the essential genius deep inside you that you can bring the world okay and I don't blame people if they roll their eyes at all that but there is no there's no secret sauce to making money from content on the internet other than that I don't think if I ever do find it I will disclose it exclusively on this podcast so stay tuned but I don't think that there is I've noticed there are two very

different kinds of people who are now joining substack and I watch the announcements that you make and I believe Chris also makes um Chris best and uh he you know I'd like to welcome so and so to substack and the craziest thing is I look at that and then you know I I will click on that link okay John Smith has just joined substack and there's 78,000 subscribers or something insane like that I still can't quite figure that out but clearly those are that's an example of what we were talking about earlier you're people who I'm gonna guess have taken their audience with them that's what it is but then there's also people like me who start at zero right I found out about substack in January of this year and I started zero followers zero connections zero subscrib I didn't know anyone on the platform I

just created an account because the people in my writing group said you should probably and they weren't even adamant about it they were like as long as you're writing you should probably create a substack account also if you have time and I thought okay well I'll try that those are two very different kinds of people creating accounts on substack and there's two very different approaches right so because if I come to you with 100,000 followers already and let's say 78,000 of them become subscribers versus I'm a brand new person who's talking you know I'm smoking a cigar and I'm sitting out in the Midwest and I'm talking about life lessons on a farm is there a different approach is it the same approach it is a different approach I will say if somebody just starts a substack and you click and they have 78,000 subscribers half of all people

who start substacks import some kind of existing mailing list so this could be somebody who they were on MailChimp for 15 years for all we know accumulating email signups via their website and then they decide to come to substack often the Inception of that is I have this email list I've been emailing them every week or every month they are engaged with what I'm doing I want to I want to offer more or I want to pay well something I want to instead of paying MailChimp thousands of dollars I want and again I I shouldn't say anything negative about what be considered a competitor MailChimp is incredible for what they do if Banana Republic contacted me and said we want to come on substack and sell sweaters using substack I would say the Love of All that's good and holy call MailChimp they are amazing for you they want to serve

the Enterprise but if you have if you are a writer or Creator and you're using MailChimp you are are probably like oh my gosh I'm paying all this money instead you can come over to substack and if you we we are fully featured for what you need we're not fully featured to sell the sweaters we're fully featured for what you need and you can turn on paid and pay well some of your content and and it it works absolutely beautifully so often if for people who are using substack and they see somebody comment it seems like they got all these people overnight it's the proverbial overnight success that took five or 10 or 15 years because they did not you know substack isn't like here you go huge success they were grinding and the same thing where very often it's they don't have an email list to import but it's one of these platforms we've been talking about that doesn't let you export what you're doing but they tell their Instagram subscri people want a

cool example of this would be um Sam Harris the writer just started a substack and if you go and look at his Instagram when he started his substack back he made an Instagram post about it and he said I'm still going to have my podcast I'm still going to you know he has a meditation app but he said I'm going to be working more on writing I'd like to lean back into writing because he isn't a writer and you can come over to substack now you asked about what might be different with the strategy when Sam Harris started his substack he turned on paid from the very first day and he right from the get-go was inviting people who want to engage with what he is doing and support uh him as a as a creative to and as a thinker to to pay for him and if somebody is I would say

by and large it is always good for people if they have any kind of importing list any kind of following that they're porting over turn on paid subscriptions from the first day even if you don't have a fully sketched out plan of what you want to offer behind a pay wall because your super fans will rush to to pay you from the very first day uh now let's take the other situation of where somebody is starting somebody say somebody from like your writing group where they have been a writer but they kind of they just have you know their their friends and family uh Facebook page or Twitter they haven't like decided to do the I'm gonna build an online following thing so they don't have I mean most journalists don't have an email list I remember one time a journalist quite famous journalist in Canada in my country was coming to substack after a 30-year career and I

said to him well do you have any email list to import and he looks at me like I have two heads like why if I worked for you know newspapers and magazines they don't they're not they don't give you the emails of people who are so that's their list that's their list obvious but in his case he had some following so word of mouth was very useful so our general advice is to if you have some following to turn on paid from day one but if somebody is listening to this and they do not have any kind of following whatsoever I might do them a disservice by telling them at the very beginning of their Journey when they only have five people signed up to their list five six seven people when they're doing that really tough cliff face to climb which is your first hundred um and I if I say now I turn on paid and you know pay wall half your stuff they might feel okay I'm pay Walling and and why am I reducing my

reach so much or why even turn on paid at the beginning for that person maybe the the thing to do would be to get some momentum and I'm not going to say an exact number of people because I have seen people with you know they get to a couple hundred and then they they turn on paid and good things happen the the here here's a a trick when you set up a substack by default pledge pledges are turned on pledges and you will know this Ron pledges allow people to say if this person ever turns on paid I will pay so and I I think I remember when substack introduced pledges as a feature and I I was sort of skeptical I was like are people gonna understand this I was thinking oh is this too pushy which writers worry about a lot yes well again it ended up being if recommendations is the best feature we ever ship pledges the second best feature because what it

did was show a lot of writers who might not as many followers as the Sam Harris and Pamela Anderson of the world but showed them hey if I have a couple of people a handful of people who Express willingness to pay for me maybe I should turn on paid and collect that money and then sure enough when they do there there are more people who want to so so yeah if I if we were going to kind of boil out one strategic thing from this it would be if you are starting out and you feel you have any kind of uh traction or if you have a list to import or you have a a group of people that you're moving strongly strongly encourage you to turn on paid right from day one because it like it it doesn't hurt you at all you don't need to payall anything and okay I'm biased because subst doesn't make any money unless the writers make some money but really what we have seen from people is the minute

they have their first pank subscriber on the internet that is someone they don't know it's somewhat of a a Magic Moment it's very inspiring and motivating for them and it's hard to it's hard to keep going it is a grind to make content all the time right so it so that's why I'm always promoting with with perspective substack creators I'm talking to try to turn I paid but if you are really starting from scratch and you don't want to muck around with that you just want to put your toe in and start seeing if you can have a consistent Writing Practice if you're just let's say you're part of a writing group and they say you know try to write something once a week it's totally fine to just start your substack and just go for people in that situation my strong recommendation would be to download the app and start interacting with people on substack notes because that's a group of people

who are already bought into the ecosystem they already have signed up for sub they have a very open mind to checking new stuff out you can network with other writers so if anybody is listening to this download the app and start a substack and start to get into this system a little bit more and they're going to learn way more from other substack writers than they ever could from anything I would say wow that's great um which reminds me of another thing which is um like the fact that you and I are talking is kind of shocking to me because I have one of the smallest you know followings of anybody on the entire platform I'm just starting out right like I said I I just found out about Sub in January I didn't have a list so it's not like I said okay I'm going to import my thousand raving fans from years in the past um but it's

very unusual to see a platform take small creators seriously and as a great example on just I'll keep picking on Twitter I have a LoveHate relationship with Twitter just like everybody does right um and you can get monetized now on Twitter sort of right you have to reach a threshold like there there's very specific thresholds of your your content has to have well first of all you have to be a paid subscribers you have to do that first and then you have to turn on um you know the ability to monetize uh but you only are offered that if you're a verified user and a paid user and you have X number of followers and then you can offer paid subscriptions at a certain level and then if you actually want to monetize it to get ad Revenue your content has to reach a certain number of views you're probably familiar with that but it's

like 5 million views in 90 days or something like that you actually you don't even get the option the button is gray out you can't monetize till you reach a certain threshold of like hey people notice me I I have a following I'm famous um substack has to a certain extent it seems almost the the opposite where it's like this as a platform and as a company you know substack is saying hey small creators people with small followings people starting out people with no list whatever come one come all that seems very different you talk to that for a second like I mean again the fact that you're you and I are talking here is it's shocking like I'm talking to a person who is employed at the platform that I'm trying to build my audience at if I called someone at Twitter or you know sent them a message and said hey can I interview you for my

podcast which has almost no listeners whatsoever probably they'd say yeah I get those requests all the time I don't really have time yeah yeah substack I think sometimes people think that it is thousands of employees making billions of dollars and we look bigger than we are we are three kids in a tranch coat and the reason for that is because we serve and compete with the traditional mainstream media which went through a phase of paying a lot of attention to us because some names that they knew came to substack and did very well on substack and continued to do well on sub so we got all this coverage it's kind of funny because you have probably Silicon Valley

venture back companies who are thousands of people and are making billions of dollars and they work in payments or cyber security and the New York Times and Washington Post and Wall Street Journal never pay attention to them but meanwhile here you have substack which I can tell you is fewer than hundred people doing all this and that really is part of why we do things like like me being on this podcast with you and wanting small creators like look we are the underdog in all this were there have been numerous times again like I said I came to subte about three years ago I can remember when I came a friend saying well aren't you worried about Twitter has review which is a newsletter product and and don't you think that they'll

kind of kill substack which it it didn't and then I remember like a year later Facebook came out with bulletin and it was aren't you kind of Facebook is gonna steamroll you guys now and that didn't happen so but we're still small we're still at the beginning of and so what we're going back to what you said at the very beginning of the conversation of things on the the platform tend to work it's I think it's how we set up the incentives how the how the the founders and the engineering team built it in the first place it seems to be working but if this is going to be way bigger then we just are very oriented to we need lots more new people coming in and taking advantage of the of the tool and the the platform and the network and everything we're we're trying to be when people are coming on substack if they are going to be writing Finance content I especially younger people who are kind

of newer to well how do I position this and what's should my strategy be sometimes they think they should have a very formal sounding name and very corporate sounding and they should get somebody to make a logo for them and I always sort of say you're not gonna out JP Morgan JP Morgan people really like it and I tell them to go as an example and look at what Noah Smith who writes a substack no opinion is doing his name is Noah and his substack is called No opinion and when you go on the about page he has a picture of himself and when you look at his welcome page he has a picture of his rabbit that's his pet it's very personal it's very clear it's this this individual his thoughts his ideas his opinions nobody is paying him a salary there's no Advertiser governing what he can and can't say it's very oneto one and so I think substack for

where we are right now that's why you see Chris best on substack notes and he's posting away and people can reply to him and stuff like that that's why you would see me saying something like you know I if if people are coming I can go on a a podcast we can't do everything you know sometimes I do have people reach out to me and they're like Linda can we you know do a call I want you to show me how to use the platform I cannot do that because for myself and other people on my team we have to really be very sort of mercenary with our time and really focus on I mean you you will get this like people who are going to come to substack and bring a a lot of attention bring a lot of money and that's that's a shame I wish there were were a hundred of us just on my team rather than half a dozen of us and then we could talk to everybody but things like podcasts you know it's at scale because you know what writers and content creators and and video makers

are really good at doing Googling they will Google and when they are doing research it's so funny because sometimes if I am talking to somebody who has a big audience somewhere or a long career writing or whatever and I'll and I'll get on a call with them and they'll say oh I listen to your podcast with so and so and that answered some of my questions but here's what I have they people you know educate themselves it's amazing so I think that's why it's it's worthwhile and worth us doing but I think we just have um Underdog mentality maybe still and and startup mentality and we should and people should not think that we sort of see ourselves as this you know big incumbent where oh it's it's so obvious we're winning like we we still I think really have we're trying to have that kind of Scrappy

mentality of still wanting to talk to people about how we're doing like I think if you are stuck in an elevator with a substack employee you're probably going to get an earful about how how great substack is and even if they're an engineer they're going to try to recruit you well it reminds me of um Gary Vee who we we mentioned before um I found Gary Vee many many years ago right when he first started Wine Library TV uh and that was back when he went by Gary vaynerchuck but he would always say this is Gary Vayner Chuck yes said it very so you could Google him yeah exactly so I guess now he goes by Gary ve but the point being um so he started this website that had embedded videos and it was called Wine Library TV and he would do these reviews of sometimes very silly you know sometimes he'd say things like you know what wine goes the best with um Captain

Crunch uh you know he had like silly cereal and wine pairings and ridiculous stuff like that but the platform he chose was viddler and I don't know if you even remember that that was before YouTube YouTube was around but he looked at his options and he chose a platform called viddler which may not even be around anymore uh and it had these little highlights with little screenshots and you could kind of say like okay I want to skip ahead to this part and I see on the thumbnail that he's holding a box of Captain Crunch I want to I'm going to scrub all the way to that so it had some neat kind of um esoteric features that YouTube didn't have and somebody asked him why did you pick vidler instead of YouTube and he said because first of all they welcomed me and um second of all I could be a big fish in a in a small pond I just thought that was fascinating so he built up his

um kind of Empire now I guess with a very very tiny platform that no one had ever heard of and might not even still be in business now so you know who knows maybe someday you'll maybe already have some Gary Vees who started on substack you may have multiple or maybe there's a Gary ve out there that um you know listens to something like this a very very small one person show and then says you know huh I think I'll give that a try and then turns it into you know vinner medium and then eventually someday he's gonna buy the New York Jets yes yes and and you know it's such a great story of him making that choice even if the the platform didn't persist and survive I think it's also a story of why do people come become skeptical about all these platforms and feel like

oh my gosh I don't want to make yet another new account on yet another new platform is because things get I mentioned earlier about review all the people who set up on review and did all that work to learn how it used and then Twitter just deprecated it and the the people who created and founded review and okay they had an exit but you know do you think that they felt fantastic I don't know them but they probably didn't feel fantastic about that simply being uh sunset or Vine is another example I'm thinking of a comedian who I know Canadian comedian and he had built quite a following on Vine invested a lot of time learning it learning how the algorithms of that worked uh and then they just shut it down one day and so when I when I talk to him about substack he's not inclined necessarily to be be trusting oh here's another platform

that's gonna make me Rich no they he's going to be skeptical he's going to say well how do I know these guys are aren't going to sell out to LinkedIn or something because of the way substack is set up he has the assurance that he own owns his email list and he owns his payments and he he owns everything so he can clearly still it's would be rather discombobulating if if anything happened to substack but people have the the choice they have the option of their own so yeah it's and it's funny I have emailed Gary vaynerchuk and asked him like would you like to come on substack I'll give you the full walkthrough I'll talk to you about it he didn't reply to me so if anybody's listening to this who knows Gary or if Gary is listening to this you know stranger things have happened go on notes and tag me in a note and we would love to talk to you

one thing is often we are talking to people and they may be known for one thing but they come to substack because they want to do something different uh how like they want to they've been talking about one thing for 10 years and they want to talk about something different Pamela Anderson is a good example right she's very much known for being on Baywatch and being this glamorous celebrity she just started a substack her her substack is not pictures of herself it's writing she's in a different phase of her life and she has this tremendous fan base and they they want to be engaged with her in in a different way so sometimes people come and they want to start something different and new and and we're delighted when they do that that's a really good point so maybe a person who would be an ideal fit for substack would be like a retired police officer who like done done with the 40-year career

and is on to the next thing and thinks you know i' just like to share some stories about what it was like maybe for the first time ever right oh yeah honestly who I find very often perspective to talk to will be people who are quite young like they 25 26 27 28 because they might be before they get into their uh journey of starting a family they it's not that they have a ton of time on their hands but they have a lot of drive and passion to build something and then who I also often find is very perspective to talk to people who are 65 and up because their Journey with the very complicated part of you know their highest earning years or their really intensive taking care of of kids is is ending but they have a huge amount of of stories and you know their kids might be tired of hearing it but they can come on substack and and share

about that and many of the people I have reached out to I mean with the power of compounding and creating an audience sometimes if you are older you have created some kind of audience some kind of reputation so often I find myself I'm reach out out to older people all that said still there's a lot of people in their 30s in their 40s who it just depends on what their path is the example I gave of my colleague far like she is a you know a person who is kind of in that very busy part of her life she's has this very demanding job but she still was able to make it on substack through that consistency so let me ask you something though how old are your children because you mentioned your daughter I know you have five kids but you mentioned your daughter driving yes that's why we bought a Volvo I I bought the safest car I could possibly uh find let's see uh 18 to 12 we had five kids

in six years oh wow that's amazing so I mean you are the cohort of people that I would stereotypically think is way too busy to be doing too much content and here you are he's got a podcast he's got his substack so how do you um that that totally sounds like the sexist question people ask women of how do you balance it all but how do you how do you determine like or how do you carve out maybe is the better way of asking how do you carve out time to to do the kind of work that you want to do with what I'm sure must be a lot of other responsibilities you just make it a priority right I mean so I don't know if anybody listening to this has listened to any of my previous podcast episodes or or you know maybe will in the future my podcast episodes are about crazy things right like being an opera singer

and um becoming an EMT just your life yeah exact okay so you you've you've looked at some of that yeah so I went to EMT school and then ended up not working as an EMT um I was a professional Opera chister for a couple years that was ridiculous I had no business doing that I was so busy I was literally going to college and raising five kids and running my business and singing opera all at the same time it was inan I don't know how so to answer the question I don't know how other than just saying I see an opportunity I want to do this I'm going to put in the time I'm GNA do it and then you know uh I got a degree in storytelling right I made my own custom college degree where I learned about journalism and uh digital photography and video editing and script writing and public speaking and um broadcasting and

photo journalism and all these things and I just thought you know let's find a way to if I'm going to go back to school I'm going to do it in a way that is interesting right so I'm only going to take the classes that aside from the ones that are required I'm only going to take the classes that I find worth my time so learning German oh my goodness that was difficult yeah I learned German growing up you know my family is of German origin um so my dad taught us German we were growing up but like taking it seriously as an adult okay I'm going to go take German classes I'm going to learn I'm going to study I'm going to read you know I'm going to do it the right way academically I'm going to get quizzed and test and graded and stuff like that that was really hard but it was definitely worth doing um so for this th this stage that I'm in right now is actually I'm kind of chilled out like

I had this insane life for all these years doing all this crazy stuff and now we just we moved to Arizona um my wife and I our school is done we're just chilling out and just trying to get through the teenage years right now but I have a lot of stories from you know the time I met a fourstar general and the time I met an astronaut who drove a lunar rover on the moon right like I've met some Fascinating People uh Brian Den the actor right like Weird Al Yankovic like Co a lot of these little tiny stories about little tiny things that happen in life and now I don't necessarily have the time but I'm making the time and saying okay I can sit down for an hour and I can talk about uh you know the time that I applied to become a Foreign Service Officer and I got a couple of steps into the interview process and then they pulled the rug out

from under me okay what was that like well it was confusing it was frustrating it was depressing and it was exciting right like taking the fso T the fsot taking the test and then passing it and thinking like oh my goodness I might actually have a shot at working for the Department of State it was almost on a lark that I took the test in the first place but then I passed it and I thought oh okay well gee now let's see where this goes right so anyway just stories about you know what has happened in the past and if people find that interesting great if they don't that's okay too but substack for me has been a really great platform for that because not only can I import my podcast like we've talked about but I'm also creating new stories and so adding the new and the old and I'm still not sure about you know that question that someone asked me a while ago which is when are you going to decide or how do you decide this is worthy of an episode a podcast this is

worthy of an article I'm still not sure fig how to do that and one thing that I've struggled with is recording and doing the voiceover afterward it's it's timeconsuming enough to write an article right like anywhere between 30 minutes and five hours let's say generally speaking and then saying okay all right that's done it's spell checked I hit publish good okay now I'm going to sit down and record myself reading it out loud I have done that but I don't always do that so I'm very inconsistent about that so I think there's just going to be a trick where it's like I got to get in this Cadence of you know every day that I'm GNA write I'm GNA sit down for an hour and then write and and either publish it at the end of an hour or you know do an hour today and then an hour tomorrow and then an hour on Wednesday or you know whatever and then say okay

now it's good enough I'm going to public that and as part of my process I'm going to record the voice over but you know substack has been a really great platform for me in that regard because like I said it has everything I've thought of like there's not a single thing yet that I've found where I've thought I really wish they had this feature but they don't I can't think of one usually it's the opposite it's like okay well someday I'll get around to that because that's a nice benefit but I don't have time for that right now um things like that so yeah anyway where does the time come from it's just a matter of saying I'm going to do this and I'm doing in faith that 10 years from now I'll look back and say boy was I glad that 10 years ago I made an account on substack and I turned on monetization and I started writing even though nobody was listening because

there are lots of things in my life where I've done that um you know I started blogging years ago 2008 I think I started and I never made a lot of money from blogging but what I did was I learned an unbelievable amount of internet marketing how people search for things what people click on you know how to write calls to action what things rank well in Google what doesn't um you know getting your images indexed getting videos indexed all those things what broken you know how to check for broken links all those things that um naturally very well fit into becoming a web developer um and those go hand inand and one of the biggest problems that I see a lot of people making in SEO or web development is they understand this knowledge about their business or the company they work for but they never do anything on the side so one thing I've

always told people I was a marketing director at a a digital agency in 2010 so however many years ago that was 14 years ago um and uh we hired a a marketing manager and she said what can I do to learn because I just got out of college and I've never really done this before um I have a degree but I don't have any almost any experience to speak of I said write create your own blog now this is before substack right create your own blog and just write and she said about what I said anything it doesn't matter so she started writing about being a teacher of gymnastics um at at at a place for kids it was a kids gymnastics it's not even like a a really athletic gymnastics thing it's more like a daycare but she was the gymnastics teacher I said great write about that share pictures about that talk about that express your

feelings um you know get people to click on things get people to uh not even subscribe but just like see what happens when you put content out there and and it will make you a better writer it will make you a better internet marketer and it will also make you give you a habit a good habit of you know I'm going to sit down and write something now and here's my process for doing that and once you do it once then it's easier to do it the second time and then by the time you hit you know blog post number 88 you're you're a champ you're a whiz you've been there you've done that you know exactly what to do and how to do it so well substack this is why I think everybody who works at substack should have a substack and it's a completely different level of empathy when you

actually are making posts or you are on notes and posting and it's not everybody's personality to write or to share but I think it just lets you just like what you're saying about just do it and try it and go through it and develop a process and feel the feelings and you just learn so much from walking the path and it doesn't have to be instant greatness I think one of the best sort of uh Frameworks that I have heard when it comes to writing for the the public using the internet to share what you're doing and what you're thinking and actually just getting started writing there are these two uh entrepreneurs slash writing content creating creation teachers Dicky Bush and Nicholas Cole

you probably know those names and they have been doing for years they have done books and courses and guidance about this sort of thing and they like have a number of good quotes that in mind one is not clickbait if you keep your promise love that one which is if you have a a title and it's a title that is designed for somebody to click on it and people say oh it's clickbait because you're trying to make them click it's not clickbait if you keep your promise but another one was you don't have to be a worldclass expert on the thing that you are writing about you just have to be a few steps ahead of the person doing the reading right so I might say okay what what do I know something about uh how about how to get a job at a tech company well I've got one job at One tech company that's kind of like if somebody's been married once and they're going to write a book about how to get married or have good relationships it's like okay you you did it once in a row

it's mostly like but what could I say that would be interesting well here was if you are somebody who works in finance and you would like to leave finance and go and work in Tech I did that and I could say without overstating it here is what I did and here's a story about what I did and for someone somewhere it might be useful because it might be more than they have if they don't have anybody in their Network that they can ask those questions and so a lot of what you see on substack it will be people who are especially a lot in this sort of community of the meta substack Community where it's people substack writers writing about substack which always exists everywhere you know on medium they were always writing about medium like right on Twitter people are always like why am I Shadow bandn there's always this thread of people writing about writing or writing about the platform itself and so I think within

that Community there are people who um have not been doing it a long time sometimes people who've been doing it a long time they're super successful and have assistance and they making all this money they're they're so deep in the weeds that it you know you have to yank them back but I think often it's interesting to hear about what people's experience on a given platform has has been and it's useful even if they are not Masters of the Universe quite yet it's just if they they are a couple of steps ahead just like you know who Whose advice are you going to take or who who are you going to find interesting if somebody is saying sort of here's how I did so far that can be really fascinating and compelling so yeah going back to to Nicholas Cole and Dicky Bush they they give a lot of this threat of advice where they are trying to get they

have a course they offer they are trying to get people to write and they emphasize number one you don't have to be this world-class PhD expert in order to talk about what you're doing it's it still is going to be something worth putting out into the world and you are worthy and number two be consistent and try to do something every day so like yet again we're back to the advice that makes people roll their eyes because it's obvious but the sometimes the obvious stuff is what works best that's great um okay so last question thank you for your time this has been a lot of fun for sure so um I made this kind of a silly question but in when people created YouTube nobody ever envisioned YouTuber as a word right instagrammer as

a word this concept of influencers um is substack wanting people to become sub stackers and and if so like you know it is that the next step and if so what does that look like like what is a successful sub stacker what's the Pinnacle of achievement there that's such a great question you know what I was just Googling I read a book about YouTube that I wanted to mention I think it was called like share and subscribe something like that but I read a book uh I was on a vacation a while back and it was about just what you mentioned the Genesis of YouTube and the original idea of YouTube was not we're going to be the world's place to post video it was originally going to be a dating site and they had all these different ideas and then it developed into the idea of you Uber and what I liked about the book reading it from the point of view of somebody working for a company that is a

platform was how number one how many slings and arrows they had of uh scandals and setbacks that's good to read Because you realize it was not all a Flawless trajectory of success and then the second thing of how they shifted and changed and they went through a period of time when they started to compensate creators much more and share much more with the creators of the creator for making and that was the Advent of somebody who would focus their life on okay I'm going to focus on YouTube and and make a career and just be a a YouTuber going back to medium I don't know that that's something medium ever fully did there are people we mentioned Tim Denning early in this conversation he had a tremendous career on medium he focuses on substack now if

you have too many pivots and too many changes it doesn't really work and medium isn't something that evolved but sub but YouTuber is so with I think with substack I mentioned earlier in the conversation like you can be on substack and you don't have to have the substack logo obviously placed on your publication you are a sub stacker but only if you choose to identify yourself that way you could completely just say I you know substack is my platform but like Medi Hassan Medi Hassan has a media Empire and it's called Zeto and he he has guest people who come in he has employees he doesn't have to say I'm a sub stacker but but he might if he gets enough of a good experience off being on substack because

substack does not is is not a marriage and you're not tied forever people have to stay happy in order to to say stay on substack so I think as as substack ourselves I think our conception is we are making something and a sub stacker in our mind is somebody who is they are using whatever aspects of the platform and the tool and the network that are the most useful for them they might be only writing they might be only podcasting they maybe in the future that there aren't too many subsect that are only posting pictures but there are some art and fashion ones that are really leaning into a lot visual so whatever they want to use the tool for they are using it and they are having an independent income based off that that nobody can ever take away from them and they are they're happy they are growing they are thriving they

you know we have a good relationship together because they're choosing to stay very evolved and engaged and I think over the seven years of substack there has developed like quite a cohort of people who who who are that and are are making their money off it and we haven't seen that people say okay I'm making x amount of dollars and now to heck with substack I'm going to go off and go somewhere where it's it's like it's that it has some different kind of combination of features or or create my own stack from scratch in general they they haven't and I think that's because we are trying to be better and better at fulfilling the promise of we will help people find you we will Aid in Discovery and we will bring you new audiences while not breaking the promise that you're going to have total control of your publication so I think yeah the concept of sub stacker is very

much it's it's probably more defined by what the writers creators podcasters want it to be and you don't have to identify that way or you don't have to like celebrate substack by any means whatsoever you can also just like use it use it as a tool and we're delighted by that too wow that's fantastic well I'm very excited for you know again I'm in seven months so who sees what who knows what happens at the end of the year or two years or five years or 10 years but uh it's been a great journey so far I've had a lot of fun um I've enjoyed uh you know learning about substack here on this uh this conversation but it's a great platform and I'm gonna keep using it and I encourage other people to do the same where can people find you on substack so the best way to talk to me

is on substack notes and my handle on uh the app or on notes or on substack in general is at Lind so if you go to substack docomo and then Linda to find me the first Linda on substack I guess so uh notes is for people who might not be familiar notes is very similar to Twitter SLX where it is a short form hosting surface but beyond that it's very different than Twitter SLX because number one there are no ads and number two it is really built on top of this big ecosystem we've been talking about of people having their own independent substacks but it is really a cool place to interact I find that people will if they have a product idea for substack they will tag the substack employees that they kind of know this is also cool

that you feel like you know people at substack right they'll tag Chris best or they'll tag Hamish or they'll they'll tag Linda uh some people might think that I'm more important at s than I am if they see my name a lot I am just an employee uh but you can tag the founders you can tag me and if you tag me on something I will pass it along if you and if you tag me on a question I'll try to answer it so I think that's really you know I had some asked the other day I was in a webinar for something and a writer was like you guys have you thought about making a forum like a slack Community or something where all the the writers can connect with each other I said well that exists and it's called substack notes so we really want we want notes to be the place and um right now there's there are readers and writers in notes definitely like when you look visually in terms of the the uh what comes up a lot it will be a lot

that's it's the writers but I can tell you like I see the data there are a lot of people who are reading and following Along on notes who may not be posting but they're there so it's a great place to self-promote and yeah it's a great place to bug substack employees about features that you want built whatever they are so that's what I'd really recommend if people want to chat well you heard it here first folks uh if you have complaints send them all to Linda at substack on all the complaints just no cursing uh just if you have if you're upset just say it with an emoji okay awesome well thank you so much for being here thank you for letting me on the platform and letting people people like me on the platform without a significant following at all and just get our start and see where it goes well thank you for being on the platform Ron and thank you for being an evangelist of substack because the way that substack

grows is not by employees of substack talking about it it's by people who use it and just like how you found out about it it is word of mouth and people saying hey this is something you should you should try and it's it's a very lightweight pitch and it's a very lightweight onboarding and I think that's how more and more people are going to come so thanks for the awesome questions this was a different conversation than I often have when I've been going on podcasts because of your background so I really liked I learned from it I've enjoyed talking about SEO and some of these factors so thank you too I appreciate it absolutely great to chat and uh I'll see you on substack notes okay super take care bye thanks you've been listening to Micron a one-man podcast about okay you know what I'm not going to do the old outro it takes too much time so here's a new one

yes this show was all about living learning and the people I've met blah blah blah blah blah long story short I have a mic and I'm Ron get it Mike Ron it's pretty simple these episodes are still recorded here in my office in the scorching heat of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona but a few months ago a Hispanic Barber Shop School moved in next door so I'm constantly hearing loud mariachi music and Cho rap with a wild thumping bass that makes it hard to focus you may even be able to hear it in the background right now anyway connect with me on substack just visit Micron FM online and follow me there that's where I'm doing a lot of writing and now I'm adding new podcast episodes so if you want to comment or give feedback or

follow or whatever fine just go to Micron FM and that's where everything is okay good oh yeah uh I think it's time for a new tagline too uh how's this A Man A Plan A Canal Micron good boy I'm feeling fight today thanks for listening