{"id":34105,"date":"2021-11-08T16:54:19","date_gmt":"2021-11-08T21:54:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=34105"},"modified":"2021-11-08T16:54:19","modified_gmt":"2021-11-08T21:54:19","slug":"a-year-of-platformer-on-substack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2021\/11\/08\/a-year-of-platformer-on-substack\/","title":{"rendered":"A Year of Platformer on Substack"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2021\/09\/what-i-learned-from-a-year-on-substack\/\">Casey Newton<\/a> (<a href=\"https:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=29090448\">Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2021\/09\/what-i-learned-from-a-year-on-substack\/\">\n<p>When I started Platformer with the mailing list I accumulated while writing my previous newsletter, there were around 24,000 of them. Twelve months later, there are 49,604 people subscribed to Platformer&rsquo;s free list, and they regularly open this newsletter at a rate that far exceeds in the industry average.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>The result is a job that feels more durable, and sustainable, than any other employment I&rsquo;ve had. In the past, to lose my job might require only a bad quarter in the ad market, the loss of an ally in upper management, or the takeover of my company by some indifferent telecom company. Today, I can really only lose my job if thousands of people decide independently to &ldquo;fire&rdquo; me. As a result, I&rsquo;ve never felt more empowered to cover the issues I find most meaningful: the fraught, unpredictable collisions between big tech platforms and the world around them.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Platformer loses 3-4 percent of its paid customers per month. To grow, it has to replace those customers and then find new ones.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Guidance I had gotten from Substack suggested I might expect 10% or so of my free subscribers to go paid. Given that 24,000 people had been reading me four days a week when I launched &mdash; some for three years &mdash; I thought that 10% would be a slam dunk. Instead, it was closer to 5%.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Other than the stories I mentioned above, the Discord launch was the single biggest thing I did over the past year to convert paid subscribers.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Casey Newton (Hacker News): When I started Platformer with the mailing list I accumulated while writing my previous newsletter, there were around 24,000 of them. Twelve months later, there are 49,604 people subscribed to Platformer&rsquo;s free list, and they regularly open this newsletter at a rate that far exceeds in the industry average. [&#8230;] The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2021-11-08T21:54:22Z","apple_news_api_id":"ef8457ee-8ee1-4c52-bb40-77003ca3c469","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2021-11-08T21:54:22Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/A74RX7o7hTFK7QHcAPKPEaQ","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[101,2052,2046,994,96],"class_list":["post-34105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-business","tag-discord","tag-substack","tag-media","tag-web"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34105"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34106,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34105\/revisions\/34106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}