Why you should not start a Substack blog

There was a time when medium was a popular favorite on internet. It came as a good alternate to Wordpress and Blogger for online writing.

Then it fell into bloat and mess like most products. It added weird paywalls on readers and tried their best to fail it. ...and they succeeded.

It failed because medium was funded by investors. It had no business model in start and later they tried to make money in weird ways. When they monetized they betrayed their readers, and writers but tried to please investors. That is when things go south.

Substack is also funded by investors. It does have a better business model from start but we don't know if it can last. Substack will put investors above customers any day because the company owes to investors instead of customers.

One example is earlier Substack owners said they won't run Ads on the platform. After raising $100 million they said they might run Ads.

Substack is not profitable which is a huge question mark on the longevity of the platform. When it stops making sense for investors, they will pull the plug. Pick a platform which is customer funded and profitable instead of investor funded. Those are the business that are playing the long game and can't betray customers. Substack like platforms can betray customers but won't betray investors.

Substack is also not an independent publishing platform. It's a social media. Social media steals traffic and audience from small/new creators to funnel it to highest grossing creators. Which is why the top creators gets all the views and lime light and small creators struggle badly.

On independent platforms, you get to keep all your traffic and they are not shown suggested/promoted contented from big creators.

Customer funded platforms like ghost and lykhari are reliable. They are built to last and the customer is the king because customer is the investor as well.

I am Kashif, maker of lykhari. Getting started takes a minute. If you need any help in importing data, I can personally onboard you. If you have feature requests, let me know at kashif@lykhari.com