If you’re a subscriber to my Substack (Creators Getting Paid) you may have noticed that things have been a little quiet on my end. There are a few reasons why. There was a death in the family and I’ve been grieving. My heart just needed some time to grieve. It was also summer, I had already planned to. slow down content creation because I thought (rightfully) that the interest in content consumption and focusing on building an online brand would taper off during the summer. I was right and I noticed a number of creators who were freaking out about engagement numbers going down and I’m like…hello, it’s summer? People have other things going on. Then there was a third issue that I’ve been working through and thinking about that I’m going to talk about today which is my plans for my Paid Substack tier as we head into the rest of 2025 and the start of 2026. I think what I’m going to share with you may surprise you and I think it’s an important conversation.
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Show Notes
I began hosting my Creators Getting Paid project on Substack in August of 2022. I initially had the idea of growing a newsletter and leveraging the platform and tool in a fairly straightforward way. Email my list. I should mention before I go further into this conversation that I have a website that I pay for and a podcast that I host on the Libsyn platform. As the years went by, Creators Getting Paid grew differently than I expected. It became more of a community space and hub, I loved meeting the different wonderful humans who found their way into my community.
In fact, I’m 300 subscribers away from having 4,000 folks on that list and will likely hit that number by the end of this month. As I began working on my fall content push and just imagining what I planned to do with Creators Getting Paid this fall, next winter and spring-I began to realize that I wouldn’t be able to do the things that I wanted entirely on Substack. I should also mention that part of my concerns came up as a result of building a course called “How to Make Money on Substack” I believe that Substack is a wonderful place to build a brand, connect with other creators and to make money. However, there were some issues specific to Substack and my specific brand that I kept thinking about.
- Substack’s Terms of Service and how I imagined monetizing Creators Getting Paid-I will have outbound links, software that I want to reference and just a more aggressive approach to monetizing that’s a bit more typical in the business and education space which is where Creators Getting Paid is positioned. I don’t want to do anything that is in violation of the Terms of Service which are always changing (like any SAAS tool)
- I want to do pre-sales for my products partly because there are so many people who are new to what I’m doing. The referral engine within Substack is amazing. New people are finding me daily-but, there is an amount of warming up that you have to do when you’re new to someone else.
- Unexpected and confusing bias on the Substack platform specific to the following-Marketing, focusing on growth and the language around how to grow your project and the finally anti-monetization sentiment that I think is a deep rooted issue specific to creatives. Earning money and being unapologetic about it is viewed as “bad”
- The Paid Subscriber Tier-I think that there’s an issue within the app related to the pricing of people’s subscription tier. I think that if I wanted to price my tier higher, because it’s a membership-that there would be pushback that wouldn’t exist off the platform.
- Customer Service-I’ve actually mentioned this issue in previous podcast episodes and I personally don’t want to be dealing with a bot when I have a large number of people paying a monthly subscription. I have two friends in particular who have an Orange checkmark on Substack. This means they have more than 1,000 paying subscribers a month. They are making good money on the platform and they can’t get quick customer service when things come up. Both of these friends have thought about leaving the platform or at least changing how they’ve set things up on the backend of their newsletter. One for sure is leaving Substack as soon as they can. Not because they don’t love the platform, but because they’re frustrated as they deal with issues that are stalling out their earnings growth.
- Tech stack changes and the timeline that I’m on-The other really important thing is that there’s momentum and growth happening within my brand. Despite the break that I’ve been on, me being depressed and sad. While I’m still feeling those feelings I’m ready to get things going. And the things that I’m wanting:
- A way to facilitate a membership community on the platform
- Different ways to imagine monetization on the platform that aren’t connected solely to monthly subscriptions (which are really freaking hard to grow-ask me how I know)
- A way for my community members to communicate with one another
- The type of brand that I’m building-I love Substack for monetizing with the following projects:
- Resources such as Danielle Desir Corbett’s Grants for Creators
- Amazing serialized projects such as Jill Tew’s Melee dystopian romance
- Fleur Hill’s The Substack Bookstore
- Blackstack curated by Jacquie Verbal
- These are projects that aren’t really staying (for the most part) within the Substack eco-system. They’re not as focused on sending people off platform. As a result, this helps the creator to unintentionally break the Terms of Service.
Community Growth for the Win
I love the organic growth that I’ve experienced on Substack. I’m excited to see what improvements and changes happen on the platform as they begin to use the $100 million that they raised during their Series C funding campaign. I would absolutely be open to adding a paid something again again on Substack. I just don’t want to stress out if I’m sharing the following: Buy Me a Coffee links, links to a different SAAS tool, etc. I don’t want to slow down my current momentum and my dream while Substack is building their dream. I’m so excited to see what they dream up next and look forward to being a continued part of the Substack community.
