ubac

thanks, fixed!

Ghost starts at $9 per month though -- obviously depends on people's circumstances but I would say that's reasonable for many people as a personal blog

Incredible. Well done to the Ghost team -- every new update is a dream.

I think there's a way to skip that with a URL parameter, I just unfortunately can't remember what it is -- something like /about?welcome=false or whatever. (I realise that's a hacky workaround and only solves part of the problem, but at least you can save some readers from the welcome screen)

I just want to get this prediction down in writing in as many venues as possible: Substack will eventually offer (opt-in) bundling for authors, where the customer pays $x per month and Substack distributes that to the authors in the bundle.

This will offer some genuine benefits to readers (one monthly payment, maybe a discount) and to writers (lower transaction fees, since Stripe has a fixed cost that eats into small payments), but it will also sever the thing that currently makes it possible for authors to leave Substack and take 100% of their paid subscribers with them: every single reader has a unique subscription object in each individual publisher's Stripe account, which can then be ported to any other platform using Stripe. So when writers leave Substack they won't be able to take with them any subscribers who arrived through a bundle.

I think writers won't realise the danger here, and that Substack will therefore be able to lock in writers, against their original promise.

I would be delighted if this didn't happen, and happy to retract this if Chris could just promise that Substack will never do this kind of bundling, even if it's opt-in for publishers.

ha! Yes I definitely think the original overbilling was incompetence not malice, but not just saying "we're so sorry we overbilled you, we're not sure how much we took exactly but please let us give you $x to definitely cover it" was more like malice than incompetence (in practice my guess is something closer to pridefulness than malice, but I can't pretend to understand what's in their hearts etc)

hey! Sorry, there's a lot of history here, Hamish has been very unpleasant to me and many writers I love, as well as wrongly continuing to bill me after I left his platform -- I realise otherwise I might have sounded unduly hostile, sorry for that.

The benefits I'm talking about are not the advances or guarantees, there's basically a ton of secret programmes at Substack where they give favored publishers special in-kind benefits to effectively pay back some of the 10% fee. Hamish knows what I'm talking about, but can't mention it publicly because their business model is reliant on a pretense that every publisher is paying 10% and not a hodgpodge of subsidies and kickbacks. Does that make sense?

Oh thanks that means a lot to me!

I would say it was partially sorted -- I eventually dm'ed their PR person (once they hired one) and somehow she pretty quickly figured out how to pay back part of the money, but refused to send any documentation of what she was paying back or answer questions about various discrepancies, which made it a big hassle on the bookkeeping side. And I never got an explanation or apology from the Substack guys, or any thanks from them for giving them a chance to make it right for more than a year. Truly one of the weirdest life experiences to me -- aside from the moral aspect, I would have thought screwing over one of your biggest customers for no obvious reason is bad for business. But it seems to be working out for them so far, so, what do I know!

Yeah I'm not talking about the advances, although way more writers than people realise have been given advances. Basically Substack has been forced to offer pretty hefty benefits to (try) to stop writers from leaving, there's a ton of "special programs" with various kinds of disguised cash that they offer to writers they want to keep (To my knowledge they've never given discounts on the 10% fee, but they give in-kind benefits to skirt around that). Hamish knows exactly what I'm talking about, if he wants to chime in!

You continued taking your cut from my subscriptions after I'd left your platform (I think because you didn't really understand how Stripe Connect works) and just refused to pay the money back for over a year. What was the deal with that? It struck me as both deeply dishonourable and not even sensible as a business move. Why did you do that, and what does it say about Substack as a company that you did it?

Hi Hamish -- how much of your success do you attribute to the secret benefits you offer certain writers to prevent them from leaving? And is it sustainable in the long run (or does that not really matter to you?)

Chris can we get a promise in writing from you that you will never implement bundles in such a way that writers couldn't leave your platform and take 100% of their paying subscribers with them?

also, I'd love to know more about how/when people apply this:

> “The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There’s something wrong with the way you are measuring it” -Jeff Bezos

Because I don't actually think it's crazy, I think data is often mismeasured and that when they go against against common perceptions that's sometimes a sign that the data is wrong. But obviously anecdotes are also often wrong/misleading/unrepresentative!

p.s. actually I wonder if this is like the "herniated discs cause back pain" thing -- everyone has herniated discs, but we only found that out for people who have back pain. Maybe ~all data is mismeasured, but we only find out when the data clashes with anecdotes, and therefore investigate it....

This is incredible. Also this bit struck me specifically:

> That sounds bad, until you take a closer look at where the reports are coming from. Or more specifically, the one store where nearly half of all reports originated

So often it seems that reported trends are just something like this. But the existence of the trend becomes a highly sticky meme, and it's hard to then dislodge it.