Substack's cold start problem
With twitter effectively shadowbanning substack links, getting an audience to start a substack is harder than ever
For the first few Substacks that I started, growing an audience was relatively straightforward. I have a fairly decent following on Twitter, and all I had to do to get a following was to write regularly, and then post on Twitter.
The links would get shared, and reshared, and some of those people would come over and subscribe. For some of the more professional Substacks that I’ve built (and abandoned) I used LinkedIn as well.
However, this strategy doesn’t work any more, for earlier this year Twitter decided to “shadow-ban” Substack. This came on the back of Substack introducing “notes”, the short format status update posting scheme on the site. Notes are similar to tweets, except that they are Substack native, and Substack possibly hoped to capture some of the exodus from Twitter (this was a few months after Elon Musk had acquired Twitter) with this feature.
Except that what happened was that Twitter started seeing Substack as a competitor and shut down its links. Now, it is pretty impossible for a native Substack link to get much traction on Twitter - the only people who will see it are your followers who use the “following” (reverse chronological) rather than the “for you” (algorithmic) feed.
And this has presented a challenge for my last two new substacks, including this one. Especially in this case, how do I tell people that my blog has moved and it’s now on Substack, when I cannot use Twitter to do so? And when you use Twitter but don’t really put a comfortable link (because the link gets shadow-banned), it is not going to get you new followers.
Note, however, that this is largely a starting problem with Substacks. Once you have built an initial audience, then you can rely on their sharing of your pieces to get organic growth. People will link to your pieces (in the good old blogging format) and so your blog will get discovered. However, the Zero to One problem remains, and that we cannot use Twitter now has made it much harder.
And so I’m forced, given that I like to have an audience, to “grandfather subscribers”. Basically in the past I’ve found that a lot of people who read me read me because it’s me, and not because of the content that I post. And so I have taken the liberty to assume that anyone who has been interested in any of my earlier Substacks must also be interested in this one - where I write about the whole of my life.
So some of you who didn’t really sign up for this Substack (but have followed me earlier, somewhere) will be getting this email for the first time. If you did not intend to get this, my apologies. There must be an unsubscribe button at the bottom of this email, and you are free to use that.
However, based on my experience I assume that the number of people who will be so inconvenienced is far fewer than those who wanted this blog but didn’t know they want it. And so I’m doing this.
Now that you’ve read me till here, maybe you think you want to share my newsletter with other people you know? The earlier avatar of this existed here, and I’ve been writing for nineteen years, on just about everything in the world. Like I like to joke, there is pretty much nothing that I’ve not blogged about (I’ve written 2800+ posts in this period).