238: Substack Is Doing What Social Media Promised But Never Delivered

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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. My special guest today is Claire Venus. Claire is an engagement consultant, audience development mentor, and substack expert. Claire, I am super excited to chat with you today, but before we get into all the questions that I have about substack, Katie, you tell the good audience just a little bit more about you and how you help people.

Oh, for sure. Thanks so much for having me on your podcast. This is so nice. So I have a background in festivals and events, and I took all of my work online just after the pandemic when I was pregnant with my daughter. And I found the online space to be so expansive. I found beautiful connections. I found that I was able to express parts of myself that I'd buried for years. And it was just such a beautiful kind of reimagining of what I thought my life and work would be, especially with a young family. So one of the main platforms that I started using as part of that journey was Substack, and I very quickly started teaching how to stay creative on the platform because I felt like people weren't using it to its fullest of ability. So I've been doing that for a few years now. I'm very passionate about engagement for people, and by that I really mean connection. So how we really engage our audience, but how we really engage with each other as colleagues as well. Because I feel like it's a really unique time where we are all doing similar work, but some of us have found different ways in or we found different ways with systems, and we can all genuinely help each other out from across the world. Yes.

And that's how you and I found each other. I had started exploring substack and I had a headline in one of my emails about how I was doing this 1 million hobby school experiment on substack. And that's when you reached out to me. I was like, okay, an expert on substack. I definitely need that because I don't know what I'm doing here. Just exploring it. And that's how we started the conversation. So I have a lot of questions for you about substack, and I think the audience does too. Like, a lot of us might know what it is, but not really know what it is. So can you walk us through based on your experience. How would you describe Substack?

Yeah, and it's really evolved since I've been there. From the beginning, it was described as a new engine for culture. So the idea was that writers and creatives could be paid. So they invited some big name writers onto the platform who essentially sent newsletters or blogs via email and had a paywall. So the traditional paywalled model of journalism was brought into a new vehicle for us to experiment with. When I joined the platform, there were some journalistic voices, there were some fiction writers, there were some incredible writers of memoir. And I just fell in love with long form writing as a reader. So I was spending time reading on the platform, discovering all these new voice. There wasn't any flashy video, there wasn't anything pulling for my attention. It was just very. For me, it felt very romantic. It felt like the old blogging days and going back in time and making these beautiful connections with these writers from all over the world. And then we now see it as a space to host a mixed media publication. So if you want to use all the bells and whistles Substack's got, you can have a mixed media publication. So you can host your podcast there for free. You can host a newsletter, either free or paid. And there's no charge. No matter how many email addresses you get, you can keep growing up to tens of thousands or millions if you want, if you can. And then there's also the video element and we can share photos really easily. It's got its own inbuilt social media as well, called Notes. So we can have that water cooler moment with our colleagues where we're like, pull up a chair and have a coffee and see what people are up to. But we can also have that personal brand on there that kind of attracts people, other people into our space. And they can join our publications, sign up for receiving our newsletters or articles, if you see it that way. So we've all found lots of different ways to describe what it is that we're doing. Some of us call it a mixed media magazine, some of us call it a substack, some of us call it a newsletter. Some of us say, my podcast hosted on Substack. So everybody's calling different ways of trying to invite their audience in from other platforms. And then we've all seen really great organic growth from within the Substack network as well, because they really champion this idea of reciprocity and us sharing each other's work. And they make it really easy for us to recommend each other's work and collaborate with each other as well.

I love that description. And as I was researching Substack and I went down that path because I have my newsletter profit club members membership. And people in there were asking about Substack. They're like, what is this platform? How do you use it? What do you think about it? So I was like, okay, I really need to dig in there to understand a little bit more. And when I started digging into it, I was like, okay, this is a different type of platform. This is not like LinkedIn or social media. And it's not like a traditional email service provider like KID or ActiveCampaign or Flodesk. I said, it's really unique and something new. And as I started digging into it a little bit more, I was like, okay, this is the perfect place for me to do this one million hobby school experiment. I just felt like it was the perfect platform for that. It has a lot of neat features and I feel like I'm still exploring them and finding out about them. You can have your newsletter when it goes out. People can actually press a button and listen to it, which I thought was really neat. I no idea that was an option there.

Yeah, it's really accessible in that way. Lots of people do listen to mine. I don't read mine aloud, but you could do. But the AI voices that Substack have are actually really nice to listen to. So we get a range of different voices we can choose from. But people, especially a year or two ago, they were taking the time. It felt like everyone slowed down the Internet and slowed down time, and people were taking the time to read their newsletters out and then people could press the button to listen to their voices. So some people definitely still do that. And I think for me it was like, there's something there that gives the accessibility tool. So I'll. I'd rather concentrate on podcasting as a medium. So the podcast, that's inside the publication as well. But for me, the writing is one thing and the podcast is separate to that. So, yeah, I just think there's so much opportunity with it. I also really liked. So when I was first building my online business, I had the real scaries around going past 400 subscribers on Mailchimp because Mailchimp was the newsletter provider I used at the time. And it held me back from being more expansive and sharing it more and maybe making it, putting it on business cards and things like that. And I was just at the very start of my business. Whereas with Substack I was soon up to a thousand subscribers and Then now have 16,000 readers. And because there's been no you've got to pay when you reach this many or you've got to pay incrementally. It makes us feel free to share what it is and experiment and try things out. And I've really enjoyed that part of it as well. I don't know whether that's unique to me and my industry, where we've all been so used to running on shoestring budgets that we've come to online and been like, oh, how can we make it work for as cheap as possible or as free as possible or whatever. But I think when you're starting out, your tolerance for risk is small. So being able to just experiment and play and not have someone say, oh, and now you owe me this much per month for the rest of your life is actually quite nice.

Yeah, I want to dig into that a little bit more because I do think this is a distinction between like Kit or activecampaign or mailchimp or whatever. I do think that those platforms need to be part of our kind of business world. I think they're important for the funnels and the automations and connecting with our audience. And basically how I'm using it today, which is a marketing and education and tool like that. I think Substack is different and did dig into their T's and C's. When I read their T's and C's, I was like, okay, you really can't use this as a primary marketing tool if your primary use is to drive back traffic back to your website or to promote your offers. They don't allow that. So I was like, okay, this is different. Yes, it has that newsletter type feel, but you're not going to use it in a typical newsletter way like you would use a newsletter on Kit or activecampaign or flodesk. What, what are your thoughts there?

Yeah, and so I have Podia email. So I have Podia. If you've not heard of Podia, it's really similar to Kajabi. So it's the all in one platform that our website is built on and my courses live there. My webinars can run through there. I can do downloads and nurture sequences and welcome sequences and all of that good stuff. Podia for me is my CRM. So that's the place that my customers live. And then Substack is where I host a paid newsletter, which is different. So I write a paid weekly newsletter that is about wholehearted Business and my life here on the Northumberland coast. And I also run a page, I call it a hub really Sparkle on Substack. So Sparkle and Substack is a community and it's a paid community. So that's more like a membership. So you'll find that all over Substack that people have found ways to make it work for them and make it work with their wider business ecosystem. So a lot of the business owners that I support use Kit or activecom campaign and have managed to set up a zap to zap the people who find them organically through substack to then go into that kit nurture sequence and then end up obviously in that space as well and then they can separate out in their minds what does what. So for me, like my Podia emails are about my products and services. So if I'm launching a new course, there'll be a wait list for that. There'll be people that might have interest. Then I'll do obviously some marketing emails around that. I might mention it on Substack but I wouldn't use Substack to push that stuff out. It is really interesting because we have the facility to send an email on Substack without posting it to the web. So not everybody knows that we can do that. So it's one of the lesser known functions. But we do have some usability when it comes to emailing free subscribers. So we don't have tags, but we can filter. So you could filter by country, you could filter by free subscribers versus paid, you could filter by activity. So like the amount of opens you could filter by like the star rating they give them an each subscriber gets an activity star rating, which means how engaged they are. So we do get some of that there. But the primary objective for Substack is to have us use what we have to turn on paid subscriptions because they take 10% of everything that we get paid. They also have a relationship with Apple. So Apple on the in the App Store, so they have to be paid 30%. We can inflate the price so that we still get the take home as the same. But obviously that's quite difficult because it just means that the person will be essentially paying 30% more that then goes to Apple and then substack take that 10%. So it's a bit tricky that way round. But what writers and entrepreneurs have found is that it has brought this kind of recurring revenue, this income stream that feels like they can be paid properly. Writers haven't felt properly paid. It'll Be paycheck to paycheck. Royalties only come if the book earns out. And there's been all of this kind of cultural shift that's meant that they own more of what they can do with their audiences. So it's been really popular amongst writers. Substack have pushed it out to content creators and lots of other spaces. They're really interested in how we as business owners use our other platforms and how we are finding ways to interact between say Instagram and Substack and bringing people and cross promoting over there. So yeah, I think. I don't know whether I've answered your question, but I've just seen so many different ways that people decide to set up and use it. I feel like we can be really creative there.

You did answer it because your main message there was it needs to be part of this greater ecosystem that we're building with our business. And I think it's up to us to figure out how it fits into all of that. So I love what you said there. Let's talk a little bit more about the discovery aspect there because Substack does have built in discovery feature. So hopefully that's one of my goals. Right. With using it as a platform like that that other people who would not have known about me will find out about me. So walk us through what those options are.

Yeah, so you've got three main options currently you've got the Recommendations tool. So if you recommend another publication, it's got its own, its whole kind of platform and page that you can do that through. So you would write a little blurb about the reason that you recommend that publication and then that would be shown to your readers as they are going about their ecosystem. Within Substack and Substack find a really clever way to present us as readers with new things to read that they think that will. So the Recommendations network has grown my publication. I think I'm at nearly 8,000 subscribers, email subscribers through the Recommendations Network. So large a lot of my subscribers have come through that and obviously people move on, things churn but ultimately the total number is about 8,000 now and then we have Substack notes. So this is a little bit like Twitter. It's substacks and kind of version of social media. And so again I invite everybody to curate their feed, make sure that they mute everything they're not interested in or anything triggering and just have a beautiful time. Find the categories that interest you, like the things that you like, follow the people that you want to follow and make sure that when you go into that ecosystem. You want to comment and you want to chat and you feel like you're showing up with your colleagues. And that does drive subscriptions. Sometimes it'll drive paid subscriptions, Sometimes it'll drive website clicks. Like, we can share YouTube links. We can do anything we want within that network. It is literally just like Twitter. It's very easy to use. We can also restack other people's work. So you would take a piece of their writing or a whole article and you would share it to the Notes Network. So that would mean essentially that all of your followers on the Notes network would see it. So it is great to be using Notes daily if we can, just to get a little bit more visibility for who we are and setting up that personal brand on there so that people resonate with, oh, this is destiny. She talks about hobbies and she has hobby school and she also did this other thing. And this is so just building up the picture. And then the other side of it that I really like is Substack Live. So this is live video. So we go live from the Substack app. If we go live with the collaborator, then their notifications go to their audience and obviously we have the option to notify our audience as well. And then Substack push out that content in the app. So anybody that's reading in the app, it'll pop up, it'll say, how many people are watching. And I've done quite a lot of these now, and I remember the first one or two. It was rolled out to best selling Substacks first. So bestsellers are Anyone with over 101 paid subscribers and they're identified by a little check mark next to their name. So it was rolled out to us first and I was like, I've got to make the most of this. And I know I do, but I just feel so awkward. It's brand new technology. Even though I'd done Instagram stories, it felt bigger than that. It felt like a bigger sea of people that I was being pushed out too. Of course, you soon realize that it's primarily the people that subscribe to you. And maybe some other people are in the mix as well, and you get your comfort zone with that. But there's been some beautiful conversations on lives. The really great thing for business owners is that not only do we get a draft of that to play around with and add more in, put links in, all that good stuff, but we can tether it to our YouTube. It pulls through automatically to our YouTube channel, makes a couple of YouTube shorts and gives us the assets to share to Instagram or anywhere else that we want to share them. So it makes them for you. It's this suite of assets and I really like that because it just feels like I do something once and I have the content to put in lots of different places and I can push and pull which kind of snippets of the conversation might live on what platform. I think things like that are really helpful because I don't feel like we've ever as online business owners had so many choices of like where to show up and where to grow and what to do here. So for me, like the collaborative effort of lives is really worth it because I get so much from that. I get loads from the conversation. I can share it back to my audience and then I get all of these gorgeous assets as well. So if you're confident to show up live, that is another really great growth tool at the moment.

I love all of that. What surprises me is all the different ways that you can like interact with substack and use that content in your business. So I did see your live pop up yesterday, right?

I did.

You did one yesterday, right? Popped up on my app. I opened it up. Oh, there's Claire again.

She's again. I know this is it. So I have like my four days of the week where I'm like here, there and everywhere and then I have three days off. So this is the only way I've found the balance with it. But yeah, I find with lives, like if I'm in a good energy space, I'm just like, oh, I'll just pop on a live. We'll just chat to everybody and it's nice. I'm comfortable with it.

Now I want to go back to something you mentioned a few minutes ago and I just want to make sure I understand it a little bit more. You mentioned that some business owners are basically using a zap to take any subscribers or newsletter subscribers that they have that have subscribed to their substack and move them over to their email service provider. Like Kit. Come me through exactly how that works because to me I'm not, I think I'm not getting it.

Yeah. I first learned about this from the co author of my book. So I wrote a book last summer called how to Build a World Class Substack with a co author and LA based guy, Russell Nolte. And Russell is incredible on the Internet. He's like a wizard. Like he just knows how to do things. He runs Kickstarter campaigns, reads books, he's published so many books, traditionally published, self published, and he's really into the weeds of how things work. And so when he was using this ZAP technique to zap people that were coming from the Substack network into his wider ecosystem through Kit, it was so that they would get the welcome sequence that welcomed them to his world. I'm Russell and I also have the author stack on Substack, but I also run writer MBA and I do all of these other things. So he was really good at experimenting with how that all worked and how to welcome someone. Because on Substack we only get one welcome email. And so if that goes to spam and somebody subscribed and then the first email they get doesn't quite make sense, where they're like, what have I signed up to? It's just that little bit savvier to welcome people in and have people feel seen. And I have this for my paid membership on Substack, the zap, because the welcome email does its job, I also send everybody a direct message because we can do that on Substack. So I feel like I'm welcoming them that way, but because there's so much in there, I want them to feel like they have been welcomed properly and can find the things that they need. And I know what my ideal reader and ideal member wants. I know what the beginners need, I know what the creative expressionists need. I know what the business owners need. This week's email is going to be around collaboration and whether or not you should collaborate with your competitors. And there's a clickbait title in that. And then obviously I'll go into everything. But if someone's just joined the membership, then that pulled into that and they're like, oh, do I need to read this? Is this for me? And they might still be at the setup stage and then we get the overwhelm. So the thing that I hear most about Substack from my beginners is I'm really overwhelmed. I don't know how to do it properly. Have I set it up correctly? I've got all of these different emails from Substack. I've signed up to too many people. There's so many things that add to the overwhelm. So my reason for doing a zap is to hold people and make sure that people understand what's gonna happen and the fact that they can access some of the resources that they need by logging into our website. So because I've made things for them now that exist there as well, but that is A hybrid approach. It's not something that you have to do, but obviously the technology exists to be able to do it if you work with the right person that knows the tech. So that's what I had to do. It's not my area of expertise, but I got someone to do it for me.

Yeah, I understand the tech. I use zaps all the time. I just was trying to like, understand the bigger picture. And as you started talking through that, I'm like, okay, I'm definitely missing something there because I do have paid subscribers on Substack as I've launched this new publication, but I have not tagged them in my kit, in my email service provider. Definitely need to be doing that. And they probably do need an additional welcome sequence. As you were walking through that, I'm like, I'm dropping the ball there for sure. Claire, any last minute tips for the audience before we wrap it up here?

Like I said at the beginning, I feel for me, it's all been about connection. So I have met people for coffee, met people for zoom coffees, hosted little writerly meetups, chatted to people on voice notes, on Instagram, on WhatsApp. Like, I really thrive on that and I love that. And I feel like when we take the numbers out of everything and just connect to the human, so that could be someone that subscribed today, like I might just drop them a little message and reach out and say hi and are they having a nice day? I just love that. I feel like we somehow, somewhere along the line, got numbers obsessed and numbers became this big benchmark, this kind of vanity metric of it meant something. If you had this many numbers and. And haven't evolved through all of that and felt the discomfort and the joy and the jubilation and everything in all of it, I think for me, all of it comes back to the joy of connection. And I know that we can do that online and I know that we can do that on any platform. But I think it is easier on Substack because the attention span is there. So, you know, having somebody read a piece that you've put time and energy in, that's long form is just different to them scrolling past a reel. Having someone listen to your podcast on a dog walk and want to message you afterwards is such a beautiful thing. So I tend to go for deepening the connections and really witnessing when the energy comes in, like how that feels. I just love all of that. And I think it keeps us in the right space, the right headspace space to keep showing up online long term. Because it can be tiring. Like it can be a big thing, can't it, to plug into. So that's what I'd say.

Claire, thank you so much for joining us today and I want to let the audience know where they can find you.

Yeah, so I have Sparkle on substack and for your audience, I have 30% off the membership and that'll be valid if you want to join as a monthly or an annual subscriber, which I don't normally do. So you're very welcome to jump in with us if you want to save the 30%. There's also a seven day free trial which most substacks have switched on. So if you did want to do a seven day trial, you can come and check that out. My website is creatively conscious co.uk and that is my all of my office suite. But if you're just looking for substack stuff, Sparkle on substacks where you need.

To be and we'll make sure all of those links are in the show notes. And Claire, thank you so much for joining me today.

Oh, thanks so much, Jesse. It was great to connect.

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.