The Substack Life Cycle
Writing About Writing #5
I wrote a note that generated a bit of buzz about paid subscriptions and I boosted the idea of the Product Life Cycle which I wrote about in Writing About Writing #2.
The product life cycle doesn’t quite line up with how substack works because the product life cycle was designed for selling products. I learned about it when I was getting my MBA. When iPhones were first released, they were introduced and expensive—then they became popular—now they are a mature product, and eventually something will come along to replace them to make them decline.
Substacks don’t really fit this. We aren’t exactly selling something, we are hoping to be discovered. Most of our marketing work is done by ourselves, and the thing we earn by our marketing might not even be revenue—could be free subscribers or paid subscribers.
and emphasized this in their responses to that Note, where SE Reid emphasized that Substack is more of a flea-market and Ramona Grigg suggested that a High End Gallery is probably more apt. These ideas both suggest that “selling products” is not going to fit. So let’s try to retool the Product Life Cycle and create the Substack Life Cycle.This should be construed as a working first draft. Comments, Criticisms, and Questions are welcome!
What Makes The Life Cycle Useful?
We want the Substack Life Cycle to be useful and speak to everyone, no matter where they are on the Substack growth journey. It should suggest milestones and indicators that tell you which phase you are in, and should suggest strategies for how to move into the next phase.
It should include things like:
Free Subscribers
Paid Subscribers
Marketing Strategies
Content Strategies
Most of what I am going to suggest for the Substack Life Cycle is going to be speculative based on my own observations and experiences. You can help make this better by sharing your own observations. Where do you think the model breaks down? What about it works? Examine your own substack given what I suggest below, and tell me which phase you think you are in and whether my suggestion matches your own self assessment. Tell me whether the strategies or metrics I suggest are actually useful, and what other questions you would like answered.
The Number One question new substack writers have is “How do I grow?” And the number one question existing substack writers have is “how do I get people willing to pay?” The Substack Life Cycle should help answer these questions. If it doesn’t, I have not succeeded.
Let’s Begin: Zero Phase.
Who Are You? You just started a substack. You have no existing following. You know what you want to write about and have maybe written an introductory post or two. You have followed a couple substacks that seem interesting to you.
What do you want? You want subscribers. In order to get subscribers, you need to get noticed.
What should you do? The most important thing for you to do, at this stage, is to begin writing. Set a schedule for yourself, define your subject area, and start writing. Get into a rhythm of it. Don’t worry about subscribers yet, they will come eventually. Right now, you are trying to build your house—your next step will be inviting people into it.
Go Paid Or No? My personal belief is that everyone should allow paid subscriptions out of the gate. In the zero-phase, do not paywall anything. If people find your work and find that they are willing to pay for it, why let yourself miss out on that? But set expectations now: you will probably not get paid subscribers yet. At least the infrastructure is already established so it will be easy to transition when the time comes. If you decide not to turn on paid subscriptions yet then you really aren’t missing out on anything. People who find your substack valuable can pledge their support when you do go paid. You should decide, though, what the threshold is that will prompt you to turn paid subscriptions on. Define this threshold immediately—so that you don’t delay when you hit it and you know it is time.
Network Phase
Who Are You? You have been on substack for a little while. You’ve started writing and you are writing consistently. You know your topic area and your schedule and you’re sticking to it. You have followed a few more substacks, and probably a few people have started following you.
What do you want? You still want subscribers, above all else. You need to get noticed, and this is the phase where you will start making yourself more visible.
What should you do? The advice here is going to breakdown into three areas: Substack Native Tools you can use, Community Engagement you should do, and having Constructive Dialogue.
The first and most important is Community Engagement. This means you should find substacks in your niche and follow them and engage with them. I recommend that you find the one or two biggest substacks in your niche, read back on a few of their articles, leave constructive comments engaging with their content. Look at who these people recommend, pick a few to follow. Look at the people who are commenting on their articles—pick a few to follow. Find a substack in your niche that is about the same size as you. Comment and engage with their stuff.
What this is going to do is it is going to make you visible to the community that is centered around your niche. People will see your constructive engagement and they will click through to see what you’re about. Because you’ve already built your house they will find plenty of quality content already there for them to see.
Substack Native Tools include Recommendations and Referrals, and your public list of subscribed publications. As you engage with the community around your niche, you will find a few that very closely align with how you write or what you write. You will find a few that you enjoy more than others. Recommend them, leave a thoughtful comment as a blurb. Emphasize the things you like, what value people will get from reading the publication you are recommending. The recipient of the recommendation will see this, will appreciate it. They may not do anything but it won’t go unnoticed. People might recommend you back—especially the similarly sized publications. This is a passive referral tool—as you grow, they will grow. As they grow, you will grow. Every new subscriber will see your recommendations and be given an opportunity to automatically follow the people you recommend. Keep the number of your recommendations minimal, be selective, so that you direct growth within your community, and the community directs growth to you.
Referrals are an active recommendation. Your subscribers can go out and share a link and tell people about your publication. When they hit milestones, you can offer rewards like a comped paid subscription or something custom. You should have the referrals system active right out of the gate as well, and this will let your subscribers really help you grow when they share your work, and help you reward them. You can also use other publications referral links to help them grow. Include a referral at the end of each post.
Constructive Dialogue is the name of the game for using Substack Notes. You will see on the Home tab of Notes all the people you subscribe to plus the publications they recommend. You will see on the “Subscribed” tab just the people you subscribe to. You will see on the “My subscribers” tab just the people who susbcribe to you.
Define early on what things you are willing to talk about and what things you are not. Engage constructively on these topics, and try to stay in the lane you’ve defined for yourself. If you stray outside of that lane, the people you subscribe to, the people who recommend you, and a wider swathe of people will see your comment and the person you are commenting on, and if it’s not something you find helpful to your sphere then it’s better to not engage. This is what Constructive Dialogue is. Engage in conversations with people in your space, and try to stay within that space. Lift people up, have fun, form relationships. People will see you as a positive influence within your niche and will subscribe to you because of your constructive dialogue alone. They will be happy to discover you also post high quality content, which you have been doing all this time.
It is important to note—you’re still only in the Network phase. Your sphere will be quite small. Notes will feel quiet at first. As you subscribe to people, and as more people subscribe to you, your network will grow.
What Is Your Paid Strategy? If you followed my advice and turned Paid subscriptions on immediately, your paid strategy should not be different from your free strategy. Your goal right now is to gain subscribers, and as you network and grow, you might gain a paid subscriber or two. Invest your effort into quality, and maintain consistency, and this will pay dividends later.
Growth Phase
Who Are You? Your networking has paid off and you have a little community forming around your work. You are known in your niche. You are starting to get comments consistently on your articles and Notes. Your clue that you are in the growth phase is that you are starting to get subscribers organically—you don’t really know where they are coming from, there is a network effect taking place and these new subscribers are outpacing your own marketing efforts.
What Do You Want? You are starting to get subscribers, now you want to convert people to Paid subscribers. You don’t have to spend so much energy promoting yourself now because your engagement with the community is bearing fruit. Now you want to differentiate yourself and earn a little bit of money at the same time.
What Should You Do? This is a good opportunity to re-evaluate your house. You built your house in the Zero Phase, and it has been largely untouched up until now. You’re starting to grow, so you should re-look at everything you’ve done given the community that has formed and find ways to make life easier for them and to assert your own value to them. This is a good place to start differentiating a paid subscription from a free subscription, and if you have not already turned on paid subscriptions, you should do so now.
When I talk about differentiating a paid subscription, that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to offer something different. Different strategies will work for different niches, so see what other people in your space are doing. Do some market research about what your community wants and is willing to do. My personal philosophy is that a paid subscriber is not paying for a paid perk, they are paying to support you because your writing is already worth it to them. If you have fewer than 100 paid subscribers, it does not make sense to put things behind a paywall either because there are too few to make this worthwhile.
What you are doing is you are beginning to say “I write and I feel confident my writing is valuable. Please consider supporting me financially so I can afford to continue providing something valuable.”
You can start doing research about what things might make a good paid-exclusive perk and you can experiment here.
Early Maturity Phase (Innovation Cycle Step 1)
Who Are you? You have crossed the threshold of having over 100 paid subscribers. If paid subscribers are 5% to 10%, you probably have 1000-2000 subscribers. People clearly see your value and your consistency and quality stand for themselves. People are finding you on their own and you don’t have to do much in the way of marketing.
Innovation Cycle: If the above doesn’t describe you, it’s because you’re revisiting this phase as part of the innovation cycle and you are trying to drum up interest and/or enthusiasm, which has slowed down.
What Do You Want? You want to accelerate paid subscriber conversions.
What Should You Do? Now is the time to really think about what you are offering exclusively to paid subscribers. If you don’t already, you should put some content behind a paywall or start producing content exclusively for paid subscribers. You are established and have enough trust that your free content is drawing people in, but is your paid content strategy enough to make them want to convert to paid? Here are a few questions to ask:
How am I adding value?
What kind of content do your subscribers in your niche need that they are willing to pay for?
What can I do differently?
What is something you haven’t tried yet? A podcast? A collaboration? Have you found new ways to get yourself in front of other audiences? Have you written guest posts? Have you invited guest posts?
What is something tangible I can offer?
People are almost always willing to pay more for a physical thing than a digital thing. Can you write a book? Make a print of some work of art? Can you write letters? What is something you can put in people’s hands?
Middle Maturity Phase (Innovation Cycle Step 2)
Who Are you? You have hundreds of paid subscribers, you have thousands of free subscribers, you are well established and well known. You’re in a comfortable, stable, situation.
Innovation Cycle: If the above doesn’t describe you, it’s because you are revisiting this phase as part of the innovation cycle and things are going steadily.
What do you want? More than anything—to keep what you already have.
What Should You do? Things are steady. You don’t have to do much—just keep being consistent. Think about new ideas and innovations you can add, but you don’t have to execute on anything. You’re doing ok. Just keep consistency. This phase is the ideal, it is most comfortable, and it is hard to stay here, so enjoy it while you can.
Late Maturity Phase (Innovation Cycle Step 3)
Who Are you? You have hundreds of paid subscribers, you have thousands of free subscribers. You are well established and well known. Enthusiasm has died down a little bit and you aren’t getting as much engagement as you used to. Some paid subscriptions are starting to lapse.
Innovation Cycle: If the above doesn’t describe you, it’s because you’re revisiting this as part of the Innovation cycle. You’ve tried something new, it worked for a while, and things have cooled off again. Time to get back to the drawing board.
What do you want? You want to reinvigorate the community centered around your niche and your publication. Things seem to be cooling off and you want to remain relevant and interesting and you want people to keep coming to you for the foremost thoughts in your Niche.
What Should You Do? Take this time to strategize. How can you re-invigorate this topic? What is something that draws people in? This is where it’s time to think outside the box. Do you go on a speaking tour? Do you do a book reading or a book signing? Can you collaborate? Is there a workshop you can attend? Do something different to generate buzz.
If you have some ideas and want to invest in them—go back to Innovation Cycle Step 1. Otherwise, proceed to the next phase.
Decline Phase
Who Are You? You’ve been writing successfully for a long time and you have lots of subscribers both free and paid. Some of the paid subscriptions are starting to lapse, you’re finding it difficult to maintain consistency in your writing. Enthusiasm seems to be cooling off.
What do you want? You want to manage your own expectations. Do you really have the energy and enthusiasm to breathe life back into this project? Have you just been going through a difficult time? It’s OK to take some time away from writing, just understand that things will decline while you are away.
What Should You Do? This is another time to re-examine your house. What is your writing schedule? Is it sustainable for you? What is your topic/niche? Are you still knowledgeable about it? What are you offering paid subscribers—is it still relevant?
If you are recognizing your publication is in decline, you can breathe new life into it at any time by revisiting Innovation Cycle Step 1. Otherwise, you can embrace the decline and accept that lower energy means a lower level of engagement from the community. That’s OK! You don’t need to be number 1. And the people that are paying subscribers through this time are lifers—at any point, you can pick back up and go back to the Innovation Cycle and light a fire again. You don’t have to feel obligated or rushed to do anything.
TL;DR
The phases I have outlined are:
Zero Phase
Network Phase
Growth Phase
Early Maturity (Cycle Step 1)
Mid Maturity (Cycle Step 2)
Late Maturity (Cycle Step 3)
Decline
Zero phase and Network phase approximate to Introduction on the product life cycle. There’s some overlap between Network phase and Growth phase in the Growth phase of the product life cycle. Maturity here is itself a cycle, because there’s no reason it has to automatically decline. You can live in the maturity/Innovation cycle forever as long as you have the energy. Eventually that energy will decline and you will enter the Decline phase which parallels the same phase in the product life cycle.
I hope this has been interesting and useful. Again, consider this a working first draft. Have I hit the nail on the head? Have I missed the mark? This is all just my own guess at how things go, so your comments and criticisms would help make this model better and more useful for everyone.
Thank you for reading!
God bless you all!
AJPM
Scoot, Hambone, et al., I can’t tell you how genuinely surprised I am to read such a thoughtful post from your collective. This is not the Scoot I exchange barbs with in Notes. And to learn that you have an MBA as well? I’m shocked to say the least. Is Gibberish the home for all of your articles like this? I can’t tell you how much I eat up this business strategy stuff.
I think there’s probably some value in understanding the lifecycle of various platforms and products. It can certainly help you figure out the appropriate strategies to consider, but I think most of us are in those beginning phases. Maybe you could do a follow up article that doesn’t expand on what you’ve already said, but rather addresses different topics that newbies should consider.
For example, I’ve been reading various business strategy/development books for decades. Probably hundreds of books by now. I’ve been following Seth Godin (marketing guy) since the 90’s. Like every blog post, every book, a lot of his podcasts. I’ve absorbed so much of his thinking into my own that many times my default response to something will be based off of how a tactic I picked up from him.
I have paid for a subscription to Ben Thompson’s Stratechery for about five years now. I read it obsessively and listen to all of his podcasts (Sharp Tech, Stratechery, Dithering).
I don’t know if you’ve heard people say this, but there’s a rumor that when the Substack founders pitched their idea to venture capitalists that they basically said, “We’re going to make Stratechery in a box.” They referenced Ben Thompson’s newsletter because it’s the most successful and most well-recognized paid newsletter in the tech industry. He pulled it off by cobbling together his own solutions for membership, payments, etc. Substack was built on the idea of them offering all of the things he needed to pull off his newsletter to all of us. I don’t know whether the founders look up to Thompson or just saw a need in the market that they could address. Regardless he was an inspiration to them.
You know who inspired Ben Thompson? Bill Simmons. Simmons was a bartender when the internet first started to go mainstream. He was also a sports nut. Every day after closing down the bar and getting home at 3 or 4 in the morning, he’d go home and write these e-mails where he would analyze all the games he’d seen while tending bar. He’d provide analysis for how players could be better used, criticize different sports trades, or make fun of different things that were going on in the sports world.
After all of the books, blog posts, and podcasts I’ve listened to you know the big thing that stands out in my mind from all of this stuff? It was when Ben Thompson spoke about Bill Simmons. He said (and this is from memory and paraphrasing other bits of the conversation). You know why he didn’t go straight to bed after working till early in the morning? It’s because he wanted his e-mail to be sitting there and ready for the moment that his friends woke up. He wanted to beat the local paper. He wanted to beat the TV announcer. He wanted to be the guy they all turned to when they wanted to find out about sports. It was about his passion and his dedication. If you follow sports at all, you’re probably already familiar with Simmons work. He ended up leaving the bar, starting a popular blog, worked for ESPN for a while, started a popular podcast that he’s still doing, and is now an executive at Spotify. He was also the guy who inspired Ben Thompson to start Stratechery because Thompson realized that he could write about technology as passionately as Simmons wrote about sports.
I think the very first thing all of us need to do is to really latch on to that type of passion. If we really develop that type of drive, then, we can figure out the rest. The tactics and strategy are things that can be taught or picked up during a question and answer session. The passion though— that has to come from within.
I think I’m currently in early growth phase according to this. Getting subscribers organically without knowing why, but still hardly any engagement. Also maps out with how I just wrote out ideas for paid elements of my substack, so nice timing there.