I Was Wrong About Substack, I'm Sorry
The other day I wrote a scathing article about Substack.
And I made a mistake that I want to correct in front of everybody right now.
I said that discoverability is a huge problem for the platform and until they can solve it, they won’t be able to compete with anybody else.
I was wrong.
I was flat wrong and I feel stupid for being so wrong.
So let’s talk.
What Discoverability On Substack Looks Like
Contrary to what I wrote in my other article, Substack DOES, in fact, have a page where you can discover great content.
It looks like this:
It’s the “explore” tab that you can click on the left hand side of Substack when you’re logged in on desktop.
I won’t lie, this doesn’t look bad at all.
I really love the simplicity, in fact.
At the top you have a bunch of tabs you can click on to give you stories in different topics.
The Staff Picks are actually pretty decent, but there’s so many topics here that you could get lost scrolling through any of them.
One cool thing I like is that, when you click into a tab, you can see the most popular newsletters in that given tag on the right hand side.
HEY MEDIUM TAKE NOTES.
THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT WITH TAG PAGES AND PUBLICATIONS.
That’s super freaking cool, and helps me as a user figure out what newsletters are the best on Substack as a whole.
Guys and girls, this is pretty darn good in terms of discoverability. In fact, I think Substack is actually gaining on Medium in terms of discoverability.
There’s tag buttons on the homepage of Medium as well, but I can’t see who the top writers are in these categories on the right hand side like I can with Substack.
I still give the edge for discoverability to Medium, but Substack is no slouch anymore. I realized that they just came out with this “explore” page back in November of 2022. So, it was just a few months ago:
This Changes How I View Substack
Substack always seems to put out new features that the community actually likes.
I got to give that to them.
And, knowing this information, I have faith that this platform will only continue to improve in the future and add more features the rest of the community loves.
This kind of changes how I view Substack moving forward.
I now think of them as a legitimate contender to dethroning Medium as the premiere place to read great long-form content. Substack has been so good for so long in terms of making the right decisions that I think it might just be a matter of time before they overtake Medium.
And guess what? The day after I wrote my Substack hit-piece, I got 8 new subscribers to my film newsletter directly from Substack.
They didn’t come from Youtube or Medium or my newsletter.
They came from Substack.
In one day.
I’m starting to see the power and I got to say.. I was wrong about Substack.