Building a Digital Campfire on Substack
Platforms that allow creators to build and monetize their own audiences are on the rise. Here’s how you can use Substack and other creator platforms to build yours.
On Episode 11 of the Download I had a wide-ranging conversation with Nadia Eghbal and Packy McCormick. Nadia currently oversees writer experience at the fast-growing newsletter platform Substack (where she focuses on what writers can do to become successful at scale), and is the author of the new book Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software (Stripe Press), in which she examines the evolution of open-source software development, in particular on platforms like GitHub, where she formerly oversaw developer experience, and places this evolution in the context of the broader rise of creator-centric platforms across the Web.
Packy is the founder of the Not Boring Club, a roaming social club for people who never stop learning, and the Not Boring newsletter, an incisive and endlessly entertaining semi-weekly report that mines topics at the intersection of business trends and culture and that. In the past year alone, it has ballooned to 9000+ subscribers by employing a number of crazy-smart growth strategies (much of that growth has happened in the last two months).
I spoke with Nadia and Packy about the technological and cultural forces that are currently reshuffling the dynamics of digital campfire platforms across the Web and driving the growth of creative communities online. Below, 8 takeaways from our conversation that can help shape your approach to building a creator presence on any platform—not just Substack.
1. Pick your primary platform with intention. Choose wisely.
Before Packy discovered Substack, he’d drafted several posts but had never hit “publish.” Substack motivated him to publish because no other platform he’d tried made it as easy to write or engage with an audience. Apart from loving its clean and easy to use design, Substack was already in a newsletter format, so it offered him a “forced structure.” He continues: “Every week I know I owe one newsletter to the people who’ve been generous enough to sign up to receive it.”Finding the platform that’s right for you at the outset is super important—while it’s easy to migrate to another platform if you belong to, say, a Facebook group, says Nadia, it’s much harder to jump ship from a platform where you have grown a dedicated audience as a creator. Case in point: Ninja, a top gamer and one of the most popular content creators on Twitch, was lured to Microsoft’s (now-defunct) streaming platform Mixer with a lucrative exclusivity deal, but eventually returned to Twitch, because that’s where his audience was. “Even with all the best incentives,” she says, “it’s really, really hard for creators to leave these platforms.”
2. Don’t be afraid to show your vulnerability
Last year, Packy took a writing course, where one of his assignments was to get subscribers for his just-launched newsletter. Since he was starting from scratch, he figured, why not just be honest? “I had 300 Twitter followers and zero subscribers, so I sent out a Tweet that was like, ‘Look, I have this assignment for this writing course and I need to get 20 subscribers. Can you please save me the ignominy of asking each individual person?’” He continues: “That’s what I love about this format in general. I’m not writing academic papers. I can be a little more open and vulnerable.”
3. Know your worth
Just as it has become possible to become a full-time Instagram influencer, now it’s also becoming increasingly possible to become a full-time newsletter writer. A big part of Nadia’s job at Substack is helping writers get comfortable with the idea of sending a newsletter out into the public sphere—especially a paid one. She has learned that writers, much like open source developers, whom she views as “an under-appreciated form of creator,” need help valuing what they have to offer. “You have some incredibly brilliant people who in some cases have huge audiences already” who “downplay their own efforts.” While she acknowledges that it’s “terrifying” for creators to ask for money, she advises all writers to charge 10 or 20 percent more than they think they need to. “People always come back to me afterwards and tell me they’re so glad they did—and should actually have charged more,” says Nadia. While Packy’s newsletter isn’t paid, he views it as a starting point for “10 different revenue streams.”
4. Use other platforms to grow your primary audience
Some people argue that if you’re building a community on another platform, you no longer need external platforms like Twitter, but both platforms need to co-exist. Says Nadia: “If you create a completely closed-off community in one corner and don’t have new people flowing in, eventually that community is going to die.” Packy (who’s active on Twitter and uses it to build awareness about Not Boring) concurs, adding that they reach different audiences: he can talk to the wider world on Twitter, while his newsletter is a place where he can just talk to his people.
5. Know what makes your offering unique
When he began writing the Not Boring newsletter, Packy’s challenge was to offer readers already familiar with the ideas he was writing about a fresh perspective, while simultaneously speaking to others who were discovering the concepts for the first time. He quickly realized, though, that many of the ideas he thought were original he’d actually picked up elsewhere—like from Ben Thompson, whose subscription-based newsletter/podcast Stratechery, which launched in 2013 and goes deep on tech and media news, is widely considered the gold standard in the space. Packy decided to distinguish his newsletter by making his writing a little more fun, casual and approachable in tone. Since everything he writes, is “building on top of what Ben Thompson built,” he compares himself to an open source developer who builds on others’ work.
6. Don’t be afraid to experiment with novel growth strategies
Packy drove growth by employing “a little bit of art and a little bit of science” —a.k.a. a variety of different strategies whose collective impact had a compounding effect. Besides simply asking his audience to help him get more subscribers, he created a dedicated landing page, which enabled him to launch on Product Hunt. After a successful run there, he decided to “pour some fuel on that fire” by adding a referral program, which led to mentions in other newsletters, which in turn locked in more subscribers (case in point: After a shout-out in Morning Brew, 500 people signed up overnight.) But be warned: tactics like these can get stale quickly if everybody else is using them, so the key is to keep re-inventing your approach. “It’s really about figuring out what’s going to resonate with your audience and then trying new things. You have to have the guts to just take a risk on a novel strategy that maybe hasn’t been tried and tested.”
7. Think about how you can help your audience connect with each other
To create a more interactive community, Packy recently launched a syndicate offering accredited investors who read his newsletter the opportunity to start investing in some of the companies he’s writing about. So, in addition to building a “big, one-to-many community” the syndicate is helping him build “pockets” of smaller communities comprised of people doing “very specific and intentional things” within it.
8. Set up barriers to entry to create a sense of exclusivity—however small
You’re not for everyone. The more specific you can be online the better, says Packy. “The barrier to entry doesn’t have to be that you’re the richest or the smartest, but on some level there should be something that says, ‘I’m part of this really small group of people who cares about this thing.’ The more that sense breaks down, the less cohesive the group will be, particularly when it’s online.” Nadia agrees: “That also speaks to why the relationship with the creator is so important, and where all the value lays.” She adds: “I think focusing on creating that kind of feeling of natural exclusivity makes [readers] feel that while maybe someone else is also writing a business newsletter that seems cool, ‘this one is mine. I feel like this is my community.’” Besides monetization, she adds, “burrowing yourself into less obvious corners of the internet” and making yourself less easy to find can up the exclusivity quotient.
Want to hear more from Nadia and Packy? Check out our full hour-long conversation on The Digital Campfire Download here.
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Want to learn more about The Digital Campfire Download: what it is, why I'm doing it, what to expect, deets on future and past episodes, or suggest a guest? Check out The Digital Campfire Download site here.
Want my help navigating digital campfires for yourself or your brand? Head to my Website or reach out at sara@swprojects.co.