Substack & The Product Life Cycle

Writing About Writing #2

Thinkin’ ‘Bout Strategy

Hello everyone, thank you for joining me here for month two of Gibberish! I hope you have been enjoying my writing exercises so far. It has been fun to write them, I am really enjoying this project—I feel like it is helping me grow as a fiction writer. Aside from fiction writing, I also think about the “business of writing” and that’s what I want to focus on in this month’s issue of Writing About Writing.

Strategy For Writing? That’s Overkill!

It is not overkill! Any entrepreneurial venture you undertake, be it creating a social media following, writing a Substack newsletter, starting a business, selling a product—whenever you need other people to notice you, you are going to need strategy. By strategy, I mean a big picture plan to help you set goals for yourself and to help you manage expectations. Substack is one such venture, and I see a lot of comments at Office Hours asking how to get subscribers, what to do, etc. Newcomers are so excited about writing, but haven’t thought about what they need to do differently to draw people in.

That’s where the product life cycle comes in.

Product life cycle has four phases: Introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline. You need a different strategy at each phase of the product life cycle, and your relationship with your subscribers will also naturally be different at each phase as well.

Introduction Phase

Introduction Phase is the very beginning, when very few people, if anybody, knows about your newsletter. In major corporations, we see this when they introduce a new product, offer a new service, or have some new innovation. The Introduction Phase is characterized by marketing—getting the word out to increase awareness—and the primary customer during this phase is the Early Adopter. Early Adopters like to try new things, are willing to pay a little more to get the new thing first, and are willing to be vocal about their experience to other prospective customers.

For Substacks, we can imagine a brand new newsletter with no subscribers. In order to grow, you need to have 100% of your writing visible to audiences—your best sales pitch will be your quality content. You are going to have to do the heavy lifting in this phase—no one will know about your work unless you tell them, or you make yourself visible. Strategies for newsletters in this phase include engaging in the community—office hours, other Substacks in the same space, just talk to people and be friendly. Curious clickers will navigate through and investigate your newsletter. You can also, in this phase, promote shamelessly. Post your Substack everywhere on social media, print business cards with a QR Code and post them on community boards. Include a link to your Substack in every comment you leave on every website. Your job is to get the word out. You will notice a trickle of Early Adopters venturing in to see what you’re all about. This is where you capture them with your quality content which you’ve been putting out all along.

Every Substack will experience this differently, but in my mind the Introduction Phase is when you go from zero to some hundreds of subscribers. Substack’s own rule of thumb is that Paid Subscribers will be 5-10% of your subscriber base, but especially in the introduction phase expect that to be lower. Your priority in the Introduction Phase should be building a base of free subscribers. The great thing about Early Adopters is that they are communicative—if you build a good community around your newsletter and talk to your early subscribers, they will tell you what they like and what they don’t. Constantly solicit their feedback—and remember these people in later phases, because they will have been with you from the beginning.

Growth Phase

Growth Phase is where things start to pick up speed. Your marketing starts to pay off, more and more people start purchasing a product, they start telling their friends, who go buy it too—this can be described as the phase where the “network effect” starts kicking in and boosting your growth. This phase is characterized by a maturing product, and the customers start to look more like your Target Audience. Your Target Audience are the people you always wanted to reach, and they share your enthusiasm for your subject matter and enjoy your content. They tell other people about your product, because they know other people in your Target Audience who share their interests.

The Growth Phase in Substack, in my view, is when paid subscribers start to pick up. More and more people start seeing your work and your value and are willing to pay for it. In the introduction phase, products usually cost more because there are fewer of them and no one really knows how the market will react. The Growth Phase is when the market says “Yes please!” and the price has to come down, so you offer more of your products. For a newsletter, it’s not really helpful to have that kind of price fluctuation, but you can incentivize growth in paid subscribers by offering discounts or other perks to entice people to pay for a subscription. This is when it behooves you to start putting things behind a paywall. Start differentiating your paid subscribers from your free subscribers—start giving them something they are willing to pay for. You can dial back the self promotion because the word is getting out organically now, and you can put more of your effort into improving your product and luring in paid subscribers.

I think this is when your Paid Subscribers should start to reach the 5-10% mark. If you go over 10%, good for you! If you are still under 10%, let it ride for a while. Experiment with the price of your newsletter—a cheaper subscription will make you less money but might draw in more subscribers; a more expensive subscription will make you more money but fewer people will be willing to pay it. Make sure the perks of going paid are balanced to the price of the subscription. Remember to talk to your community of subscribers about what they are experiencing and use them as a resource—a pool of people willing to share their ideas with you for how to make your newsletter better.

Maturity Phase

Maturity Phase is where businesses start getting comfortable. Most people have your new product, so sales are down, maybe you start offering new and improved versions every now and again just to keep the revenue stream up. Competitors start to crop up in the same space to offer similar products in a different way. Companies spend less money on marketing because everyone knows what your product is, and sales are down because everyone has a product or competitors start leeching customers away at the margins.

For Substack, this is where your subscriber growth will slow down and you’ll have a comfortable base of paying subscribers. There’s no competitors for your own original thoughts, so there’s no danger of other people stealing your customers unless you stop producing writing at the same level of quality your subscribers have become used to. Major corporations at this stage will start thinking about launching a new product, doing something different, trying to drum up some excitement somehow. This is where you can start thinking about doing something different, too. Maturity phase is comfortable but it is important not to let it become complacent. If you want to kickstart growth again, you need to do something different that makes people excited. Make a book out of your previous posts, plan a book for something new. Add a premium perk to incentivize paid subscriptions—just get creative. It’s comfortable, so you have the liberty to experiment and see what people get excited about. Or, if you are happy where you are, just invest into improving quality of the product you are putting out.

This phase is everyone’s dream, but it can be difficult to get to and hard to keep. Just remember that readers will notice if you lose your respect for them or if you lose your enthusiasm for the subject you write about. Stay in love with your writing, and your readers will stay in love with you.

Decline Phase

Decline Phase is the beginning of the end: Sales go down, customers go down, new marketing doesn’t generate any interest, “new and improved” doesn’t convince anyone anymore. Most major corporations will use new product ideas they’ve developed in the maturity phase and launch them in the decline phase to kickstart the product life cycle all over again. Sometimes there’s no new product you can launch, and the market has moved past your product—there’s no market for a Sony Walkman anymore, right? The way to halt a decline phase is innovation. Portable Music was dominated by the Sony Walkman in the 90’s, and then then along came the iPod. When everyone had a Sony Walkman, everyone wanted an iPod, and the product life cycle kicked off again.

I don’t know what “Decline” looks like for Substack. Perhaps a lot of ancient subscriptions begin to expire. The community fades, interest passes on, your subject passes out of the spotlight or the zeitgeist or the flavor of the month. The good news is—what income you do get in this phase is from loyal subscribers whose interest in you and your topic have not waned. You can consider these people reliable sources of income, they are lifers. Like early adopters, you should be in frequent contact with these people because they are invested in your success and get a lot out of what you write.

If you are not comfortable with things dropping to a comfortable minimum, then what you need is innovation. How do you make your topic exciting again? How do you generate interest for it? What you need is to do something different, something engaging, something that will capture people’s attention. This sounds an awful lot like the Introduction Phase, and that’s because it is—the Decline leads naturally into introduction, because this is a CYCLE and not a linear path. But the good news here is that you aren’t starting from zero—you are starting with a comfortable baseline of enthusiastic subscribers. Whatever you do from here, you will never go below this point.

Anyway

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, so I hope you found it interesting. Maybe there’s something in here that you can use to guide your own thinking about your own newsletter? Let me know in the comments if you thought of something you want to change based on this!

God bless you all!

-Scoot

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Ad Jesum Per Mariam