STOP Using Substack As A Newsletter Platform -- Do This Instead

A few ugly things you'd better know upfront

When I joined Substack in December 2023, I thought it was a newsletter platform.

I wrote 10 newsletters, saw no growth and bounced.

A few months later, I saw writers leaving Medium and treating it as a blog.

Then Substack officially announced they were social media.

• Newsletter?

• Blog?

• Social media?

Which one is it?

After getting over 10,000 subscribers on the platform, here’s what I figured out.

Open rates are a joke

I send daily emails with my regular autoresponder and get a 33% open rate on average.

But on Substack?

I’m lucky if 25% of my subs actually open my newsletters.

One of the reasons is that Substack incentivizes people to opt for app notifications instead of email notifications.

Which defeats the whole purpose of sending a newsletter.

It ain’t automated

I started my first newsletter around 2012.

Back in the day, we used to call the software “autoresponder.”

I like the word autoresponder because it has “auto” baked into it. Read: automated.

The reason is that one of the core functions of an autoresponder is to send… well… AUTOmated emails.

A real newsletter platform sends an automated welcome sequence the moment someone joins. It also allows you to sell stuff on autopilot.

Substack has zero of this. No automations. No segmentation. No sequences.

Substack has you over a barrel

Substack is a great way to get email subscribers. But a terrible way to make money from your newsletters.

I’ve seen creators been suspended for posting Gumroad links.

Here’s what they say in the terms you agreed on when creating your account:

Substack is intended for high quality editorial content, not conventional email marketing. We don’t permit publications whose primary purpose is to advertise external products or services, drive traffic to third party sites, distribute offers and promotions, enhance search engine optimization, or similar activities.

That’s because their business model depends on you selling monthly subscriptions through their platform.

The moment you want to use it as REAL NEWSLETTER (i.e: sell something through an external link) you’re gambling with your account.

Your emails will end up in the promo & spam tab

I love newsletters.

One of the reasons is that you own your audience and are not tied to an algorithm.

But the newsletter model is not perfect.

Why?

Because there are still SPAM and PROMO tabs. Even if your emails are legit.

That’s why you need to build up your sending reputation. In short, it’s signaling to Gmail & co. that your domain is LEGIT.

Every email Substack sends goes out from Substack’s domain. Their servers. Their sending reputation. Their domain authority built up over years of sending millions of emails.

Gmail trusts Substack. But Gmail has no idea who YOU are.

That’s fine while you’re on the platform.

But the moment you export your subscribers and try to email them from your own domain, you start from scratch. No sending history. No reputation. No trust signals.

Your emails land in spam. Or the promo tab.

You spent two years building an audience that was trained to open emails from Substack’s domain. Now you’re a stranger sending from an address they’ve never seen. All that relationship-building, all those open rates, gone.

Yes, you can export the list. You can’t export the deliverability.

So start building your domain reputation from day 1 by sending emails from your own domain.

What Substack really is

How I think about Substack is simple: it’s a blogging platform that notifies some of your subscribers about your latest article.

Some of your articles will get pushed to a new audience if you’re lucky.

But at the end, Substack is nothing else than a platform to build your audience:

• Interact with others

• Post articles

• Post notes

All this is good: But run your newsletter from a real autoresponder.