Nicolas Cole pitches three underused Substack moves: stashing video interviews behind a paywall to build a searchable library that gains value over time, and having your whole team flood Substack Notes daily to funnel traffic to your product. He calls this Substack's golden years for organic reach.
If there was something that you're seeing right now that you're not doing that you wish you could get to in terms of Substack, what would it be? What would it be?
Oh, that's a fun question. I have trained myself to reject shiny objects so much that I almost don't even want to share, but I will for fun. But like, I have no intention of necessarily pursuing these things, but they are things that I think about. One, I think that I think there's a lot of opportunity in, if you have a paid newsletter on Substack, in doing a video podcast that lives behind the paywall. I think that can become a very powerful incentive where one of the benefits of being a paid subscriber is you get access to these interviews with people. And the reason that I think that that's so cool is because, A, it's a new content format. Whenever I see new formats on platforms, I always kind of spend time exploring it. I think video on Substack is a new format, and so there's something interesting there. Second is the more interviews that you do, the more, uh, that the value of your library grows. Because a year from now, if someone joins paid, they instantly unlock a year's worth of interviews, right? So you think of it like the product is like— continues to get built naturally on its own. And then third is, if you think about the value of paid newsletters being tangible assets, what's cool about interviewing people is now it's not just you creating tangible assets from your IP and yourself, but you can actually make— another benefit of being a paid subscriber is getting tangible assets that you create from the conversations that you have with other people. And so I, I think that there's something very interesting there. If I had more resource, that's probably what I would do inside Write with AI. I think that that would be like an insanely powerful upgrade. Now that I say it out loud, Justin, maybe we should go, maybe we should go pursue it. But I do think that that would be really cool. And then my second is, in a, in an ideal world, if we had even more bandwidth internally, because I see so much internal traffic happening on Substack. Like, so Substack, you guys, I've been, I've been writing online for a long time. I'm telling you right now, Substack is in the golden years. I remember when Quora was like this in 2014. It— you take for granted the amount of traffic and natural organic that's happening inside Substack right now. And so if I had even more leverage internally, I would start ramping Substack notes on various team members accounts. Like, I would take our whole leadership team and go, now everyone is publishing 10 notes a day, and they're all driving to Write with AI and to our funnels and to— and so if we can get there, that's the next layer of leverage that I would add in. It's just more.
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