With regard to building on Substack?

Absolutely. Someone I know used to refer to it as digital sharecropping. Dangerous, dangerous game. It's good to start out, but at some point, you need to protect yourself—and the way you do that is with your own platform.

"Down with the billionaire class and let's hold them accountable" is marketing... same as "Democracy dies in darkness."

How about: We're going to serve our audience with great information that will either delight them and help them make better decisions? Or both?

Because Substack has a growth engine perfectly built for political publications. The recommendations will be flawless.

What many of these publishers are realizing is that their businesses will just be smaller for a while as they recalibrate and get to true sustainability.

Any reason you can think why they’d shut down versus trying to sell?

People getting rugged day after day and they always come back hoping that this time, it'll be different.

Just have to keep showing up, doing the work, and when people say no, figuring out ways to get them to yes. It’s exhausting, but rewarding.

Yeah — I can behind that logic.

We all use growth hacks. You had LinkedIn Groups IRRC, Morning Brew had $0.05 per subscriber Instagram ads, and I'm sure others have their own strategies.

The hacks come *after* the value proposition.

When I spoke at the newsletter conference in May, someone asked if we were in a newsletter bubble. I said, "we're in a shitty newsletter bubble... many of you in the crowd will be dead in a year."

I was feeling morbid that day.

Did I? Whoops. Rectified.

To say what you said in a different way:

Morning Brew/The Skimm knew who they were and what they were doing for the audience before they supercharged the growth hacks to get to mass scale.

Many of these newsletters are growth hack first, value proposition second.

How dare you insult our bagels, Scott.

I’ve never really believed an ad free experience was the reason someone would pay for a digital subscription.

If they cared that much, they’d use Brave or an ad blocker.

Now if the only way to read was to first watch a 30 second video ad… that’s why I pay for ad free streaming.

Congrats! Always nice to have a sponsor before you've even launched.

I wasn't all that great on Twitter either to be fair...

But I suspect it boils down to a few things:
1. Commenting on other people's stuff
2. Quote tweeting other people's stuff
3. Posting unique stuff either as one off posts or threads

I don't know how else to grow on social.