237: How I’m Documenting My $1M HobbyScool Journey on Substack (And What You Should Know Before Using It)

Foreign welcome to the Creators MBA Podcast your go to resource for mastering the art and science of Digital Product entrepreneurship. My name is Dr. Destiny Kopp and I help business owners generate consistent revenue from their digital product business without the need to be glued to their desks constantly live launching or worrying about the social media algorithms. I hope you enjoy our episode today. Hey friends, Destiny here and welcome back to the Creators MBA Podcast. And today's episode is a little different. I want to take you behind the scenes of something that I've been working on that combines two of my favorite things, experience, experimenting and storytelling. So if you have been following me for a while, you know that I set a big goal for myself and that is to grow Hobby school into a 1 million sellable brand by the end of 2027. Instead of keeping my notes about this project buried in spreadsheets or even locked away into a Google Docs, I I decided to do something a little bit different. I am documenting this journey in public and I'm doing it on substack. So in this episode I'm going to share why I chose Substack, what I have learned so far, and how you may be able to use it in your own business. First, I want to start with what exactly this experiment is is. And I would say it is really two experiments in one for me. The first is Substack itself. In my newsletter, Profit Club, I get so many questions about Substack. Should I move my newsletter over there? Should I replace Kit or activecampaign or Flodesk with it? Is it a good discovery tool? And I didn't want to. And I knew absolutely nothing about the platform until I started using it myself. And I wanted to do that so I could give people honest answers based on my real life experience experiment. The second is I was looking for a way to document this journey that I am going on to turn Hobby school into this $1 million sellable brand. I've always wanted to create a live case study of something that I'm working on. I thought that would be really cool to take you guys behind the scenes of that. And at first I thought, okay, there's different ways I could do this. I could put it in a Google Doc and basically sell that behind the scenes. But when I started looking at different options and explained exploring Substack, the more it really just clicked for me. I was like, this is the perfect place for this experiment. Substack is the lab. Hobby School is the story in the $1 million exit is the goal. If you are new to Substack here's really the quick version of it. Substack started out as a simple newsletter platform, but I do think it's become much more than that. Every post or article or newsletter gets emailed out to your subscribers. Each one of those also lives on your substack site like a blog. So it is searchable in shareable. The platform also has this built in discovery through notes, recommendations, people can search for you, they can find you inside that platform. And if it fits your brand, you can also turn on paid subscriptions for either monthly, annual or even founding member options, which is what I did there. So it's not just about sending out emails, it's about that discovery, the visibility and the conversations that you can have with folks which was perfect for the experiment that I am doing here. I want them to ask me questions about this experiment so they can take it back and apply it to their own business. Now the next question you might have is why did I chose Substack for this? And here's my rationale. The first thing that I went to is really just doing something basic like documenting this in a Google Docs, but they're invisible so nobody would really know about that unless they knew me. They were on my list, they signed up for this kind of behind the scenes experiment. Nobody's going to accidentally really stumble across them. It would require me to do some really strong active promotion of that experiment, which I could have done, no doubt about it. Another place that I looked at was the possibility of doing it on LinkedIn, but that is more like a just a social media platform. It's very algorithm driven and I do feel like your content pretty much disappears and you don't really see that much about it. So I'm like that's not a good option. And then I could do it in my email service provider in using ThriveCart, right? I could pull that content and do it like I do my normal memberships. But again like I said, that would require me to do the promotion of it, which I'm going to have to do anyway, but it will require me to do all the promotion of it. And that's really going to be like a funnel in automation. Substat just felt different for me. I felt like it was more conversational which is what I wanted for this experiment. It was community driven and it was so searchable. So it gave me that place to share, that messy middle, all of those behind the scenes pivots that I'm doing, the mistakes I'm certainly making and going into the real numbers with that paid subscription that I'm doing on Substack. And it is allowing me to do this in a way that feels very natural. So next I want to talk about what am I actually sharing in this experiment. So when you look at my behind the scenes, the paid newsletter, that's where I'm going into those revenue snapshots, the numbers, the pivots, the messy stuff behind the scenes that didn't go to plan. And believe me, I have a lot to share there. I also share the behind the scenes decisions, the stuff that you only hear about maybe months later in a polished type case. I'm also sharing that messy middle. So when an event might flop or when I shut down something like a community, or when I make this big change, which we've had some of those over the past few months. And I think that's what really resonates with most readers because it's real and it's part of a journey that most people never show. Now I want to talk about Substack versus your email service provider, because that's a question that I get a lot. Substack is not a replacement for your email service provider, your esp, whether that's Kit activecampaign, flodesk. That is still your business engine. That is where your funnels live, it's where your automations run and it's where you sell your products and offers. Whether that's through a launch that you're doing, an evergreen funnel, a newsletter broadcast that you're sending out. Substack is different. I consider Substack to be more of a discussion. Discovery engine is for visibility, conversations and community. So don't ditch your email service provider. I would suggest if you're considering Substack to use it alongside your other business tools like your email service provider, your own website that you own. And here's another thing I learned as I dug into this and really started analyzing their T's and C's and that is Substack's content guidelines. They do not allow publications whose primary purpose is to advertise external products or drive traffic off of their platform. Now, I do think that phrase primary purpose is very vague. You can link out, but if all you are doing is pushing offers that you have, like your digital products, maybe a membership, or you are doing a lot of affiliate marketing, you could risk being flagged. And that's why I wouldn't treat some Substack like your typical email service provider. I'm using it for discovery and storytelling. And if readers want to find more they can still find my main website, my creator's MBA podcast, my creator's MBA newsletter and my other offers. The only thing I'm really promoting for the most part on Substack is my paid newsletter that I have on Substack, which is my behind the scenes journey. So if you are thinking about Substack, here are my key takeaways. Do not move your coordinates newsletter and your subscribers over to Substack. I did not do that and I do not plan on doing that. You still need your email service provider for your funnels, your automations, your sales and your weekly newsletter. My creator's MBA newsletter is still staying on kit. You can use Substack as a discovery layer. So I do think it's great for visibility and conversations there. And if you want to experiment with paid newsletters on Substack, if it fits your brand and kind of what you're doing, why not? And think of it as building whatever you're working on in public. You can share the journey, not just the polished outcome. And I think this mindset shift is what makes Substack so valuable. So for me, Substack was the perfect lab to share the $1 million hobby school experiment. So hobby school, it's a story. The 1 million goal is the experiment and Substack is where it all comes together in real time where I'm sharing that story. And if you want to take a peek inside you can follow along. And I'm going to put the link for this in the show notes. You can go to destinycop.com forward/substack and get a one month free trial there. And I'd love to hear back from you. Email me back if you're on any of my email list, my Creators MBA email list, or if you just want to join me on Substack, I'd love to hear from you. Let me know if you are experimenting with Substack and do you see it fitting into your business? Thanks for tuning in and I'll see you next time on the Creators MBA Podcast. Thanks for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you like the show, I'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.