Substack seems to be everywhere these days. As someone who has been writing more or less consistently on Substack for the last two years, I’ve had quite a few people ask me if they should consider starting their own. To cut to the chase: I almost always say yes. 

I’ve had a positive experience with Substack all around, and I think it’s a phenomenal platform with even more potential than has already been proven. However, there are limitations to it that limit the cases in which Substack is the best choice. I want to quickly highlight three pros and three cons to the platform to help you think through whether you should start a Substack or not.

Pros:

1. The email capture. Even if Substack went under tomorrow, you could take your email list with you. With Substack, you’re not just building an audience, you’re building an asset that has value beyond the platform. If you lost Substack, you wouldn’t lose your audience. You’re no longer renting from other platforms; you actually have an asset that you own. That’s extremely valuable. 

Not only that, but email is the most effective way to reach your audience. On social media, someone might decide to follow you passively, but when someone has given you their email, they have given you permission to talk to them. The average open rate for most email marketing campaigns is about 21 percent. My current Substack open rate is 53 percent. An email audience is engaged in ways that a social media audience never will be.

2. The blog. The great news about Substack is that you aren’t limited to just email. There is a front-facing blog, too, so you can still publish your articles to social media like any other blog platform. It’s the best of both worlds.

The blog allows for minimal customization. You can choose from a few pre-made layouts, select custom colors, and add some custom images, but that’s about it. While this may seem like a negative on the surface, I view it as a positive. When I started blogs on other platforms, I would get bogged down in the design, trying to make it look just right, and do very little writing. Design can become a distraction from doing the real work of writing. Substack eliminates most of those distractions.

3. The discovery engine. If TikTok’s discovery engine wasn’t controlled by the Sith, it would be a lot like Substack’s discovery engine. Writing good newsletters and building relationships leads to other publications recommending you (and you can recommend theirs). You can even write blurbs for each other that go on the welcome page, kind of like book endorsements. If a writer recommends you, when a reader subscribes to their newsletter, your newsletter will be recommended to the reader. 

Once you start to get recommended by other publications, it puts your newsletter in front of more people and creates a sort of snowball effect. Subscribers start pouring in at a higher rate. Thirty-eight percent of my subscribers have come from the Substack network. Another 15 percent has come from Substack features like their app, Notes, leaderboards, and more. In other words, over half of my subscribers come from a feature that Substack has built into their platform. As you can imagine, that is incredibly valuable to me as a writer.

In my opinion, these three things make Substack worth using for the majority of people who are looking to write on the internet.

However, there are a few things about Substack that limit its usability. For instance, we custom-built the Endeavor website to function similarly to Substack, but it’s not Substack. There are a few reasons we did that, and it reveals some of Substack’s cons.

Cons:

1. The lack of data. I know I said that Substack’s email capture is its best feature—and it is. The only problem with it is the surprisingly small amount of data you get with that. You only get email addresses. You don’t get names, IP addresses, cookies, or anything else. Just emails. There is also no integration with any ad platform like Meta or Google. As a marketer, this ties my hands a little bit. That means I don’t have the ability to run ads to my audience or create look-alike audience based on my subscribers in order to run an awareness campaign. For me as an independent writer, it’s annoying, but not the end of the world. But as an organization, that could be a dealbreaker.
   
   
2. The lack of customization. You might be picking up on a theme here. Sometimes Substack’s helpful limitations can be too limiting. While it's good that Substack limits your ability to design the website, it’s not helpful that there is basically no good way to create a standalone landing page. It’s possible, but you’re limited to creating a simple, linear page without any formatting. Even in blogs, if I want to add an image, it has to be in the center of the page. I can’t put it on the left or right and wrap the text around it. There’s also no way to add a contact form or a button for someone to email you (that I can find, at least).

For instance, I’m entering book promotion season, and I want to use my Substack to help promote my book. I created a page for my book, but my inability to customize it makes it look clunky, and it doesn’t have the functionality that I want it to. I can’t create a contact form for someone to reach out and ask a question about the book or inquire about a podcast or speaking event. So as an author, it limits my ability to do the things around my book that I want to do to promote it. 

3. No microtransactions. This is a little nitpicky, but it’s still a problem I have with the platform. I love that Substack allows writers to monetize their writing, but right now it’s limited to monthly or annual subscriptions. However, there are some newsletters that I don’t want to pay a subscription to because I don’t read them enough to warrant it, but I do want to read one of their paid articles and I am happy to pay them something to support them. In those instances, I wish that I could pay a small $1 fee to read one article.

Also, as a writer, I often feel like not being able to make this an option is causing me to miss out on monetization opportunities. If I paywall something and expect people to sign up for a $5/month subscription just to read one article, most people aren’t willing to make that commitment. But if I was able to set up microtransactions and my article was able to reach 1,000 people who were willing to pay $1 to read it—or even just $.50!—all of a sudden, the financial sustainability of writing just became much more feasible. I’m sure they have a reason for not implementing this, but I can’t think of one. I wish this was an option. I’d take advantage of it immediately both as a reader and a writer.

So those are my pros and cons for starting a Substack. All in all, I think it’s worth it. On balance, the limitations don’t outweigh the benefits to me. I hope Substack continues to grow and succeed. There aren’t many platforms out there these days that tie their success to the user's success. Substack is one of them. The incentives are aligned well, and because of that, I see a bright future ahead for it.