What Substack got right, and what it got wrong

It is difficult now, in the middle of the 2020s, to remember how much the newsletter economy owes to Substack specifically. Their tool is not particularly technically impressive. Their editor is fine. Their analytics are, by industry standards, thin. What they did was something adjacent to but not identical with building a tool. They made the newsletter feel like a thing again.

That is a real accomplishment and it deserves credit. It also does not require anyone else to send from Substack in order to benefit from what they proved. The parts of what they did that are worth borrowing can be borrowed from anywhere. And the parts that are worth avoiding are worth avoiding whether you send from their tool or from a competitor.

What they got right — the writer as the brand

The single most important thing Substack did was to put the writer's name and face at the top of every newsletter, larger than any brand mark. This sounds simple. It changes everything. For twenty years, marketing emails had done the opposite — the brand mark at the top, the writer's name buried in a signature at the bottom, if it appeared at all. Substack inverted this and made it standard.

The effect on reader psychology was immediate and durable. Subscribers who received emails that read as being from a person, with a person's face and name in the header, replied at rates that dwarfed traditional marketing email. This is now well understood in the industry. It was not well understood in 2018.

What they got right — the plain text bias

Substack's editor makes it slightly awkward to build a heavily designed email. This is deliberate. A subscriber to a Substack publication receives something that reads as though it was written first and formatted after. Compare this to the average branded newsletter, which reads as though it was designed first and written in the gaps between the visual blocks.

The plain text bias is worth borrowing regardless of where you send from. Every mail tool now supports plain text or nearly-plain text emails. Almost no small brand uses them by default. Almost every small brand would benefit from switching to them.

What they got wrong — the algorithm

Somewhere between 2022 and 2024, Substack rolled out what they called their recommendation network. Publications could recommend other publications on their platform. This produced fast subscriber growth for the writers who used it. It also, unavoidably, turned Substack into a place that started to feel less like a newsletter platform and more like a social network with an inbox interface.

The problem is the same problem every algorithmic platform has. Once your subscribers are being served suggestions of other things to read, some of your attention share leaks to those other things. The subscriber who came for you starts to receive gentle pressure to also read someone else, and someone else, and eventually the newsletter is one of many competing for a shrinking slice of the reader's Sunday morning.

This is a design choice, and it is a choice that Substack made deliberately, and it is also a choice that undoes some of the very thing that made newsletters valuable in the first place — the direct, uninterrupted relationship between the writer and the reader.

What they got wrong — portability

Taking a list off Substack is possible. It is not painless. Subscribers who signed up through Substack's discovery features may or may not still consider themselves your subscribers when they land in a different tool. There are corners of the export flow that have caught people out. This is not unique to Substack — every platform has some version of this — but the marketing has, over the years, oversold the ease of moving.

Every platform is a bet. The parts of Substack worth borrowing are the writing choices, not the platform choices.

The writing lessons, without the platform

You do not need to send from Substack to write as though you did. Put your name and face at the top of the email. Keep the design close to plain text. Own the relationship with your subscribers directly, without a platform algorithm in between. Write as though the reader will forward it to a friend and the friend will read the whole thing, because sometimes they will.

These are lessons Substack taught the industry. They are lessons every serious sender can learn without paying for the platform that taught them.