Did Substack Nuke Your Email List?

Key Takeaways

um [Music] so for anybody just tuning in i think it was two days ago now substance basically announced uh they're an app so they have a proprietary app and just to give you the quick 30 000 foot view what this basically means is that a lot of the content rather than being read in a reader's inbox they're going to just read it on the sub stack app and you know this could have different implications on your obviously your reach your business good and bad and so tim wrote a really good article uh breaking this down from his perspective we're going to go through it here and then talk about some of the wider implications too just in terms of like owning your audience what it means for your business best practices there stuff like that so take me through your initial thoughts when you saw this announcement and what you think it means for people listening to this who might be like sending their own newsletters definitely and i'm thrilled that you wanted to talk about this obviously i wrote that on my personal blog on timstots.com and so it's like a small audience in comparison to copy blogger and so anytime there's like a handful of people that when they say like hey i really loved what you wrote it always makes you feel good because like you want to be a writer's writer you know and yeah so i appreciate the kind words and i'm thrilled to be talking about this subject because for the last 15 years copyblogger has been borderline militant about this concept of like don't trust anybody they're all going to steal from you like it doesn't matter what they say own your audience on your audience on your audience and i have personally slid a little bit because i built my first company on facebook really but this is a this is kind of a perfect segue into the main point because when i first started sober nation when facebook was really coming out we had like 20 000 followers and i was amped about it and i would write blog posts and i would sit there on the live google analytics post it on facebook and watch these things explode and then three years later the infamous bait and switch from facebook comes out and i'm like wow like copyblog was right the whole time and that's when i really started getting more involved with with seo and email so even still i have adjusted a little bit more towards that like militant viewpoint and i view social media as a tool it's not a platform for me it's a tool to funnel traffic to my platform i i still think that's the correct answer and so in the case of sub stack this one like hurts a little bit deeper and the only reason why is because in the back of my mind i just knew the whole time there's no way this can last there's no way this can last for two reasons one just because they have huge funding behind them and the people that fund them traditionally fund centralized data collecting selling apps you know so it's just kind of like the the best way to predict the future is to look at history you know and i was like there's no way that a16 is just gonna be cool with it and like not try to to centralize it and then also just because i i just knew every time i would see because what subsac does is a lot of people don't change their root domain you know so it's just like ethan.substance.com so every time i saw that i just remember thinking to myself this is so obvious you're building on somebody else's stuff you're building on somebody else's stuff and when i talked to hamish it was always like no you have control of your email you have control of your email and now this is just like a little slip and slide because sure you do still have control of your email but then basically what they're doing with the app is making it so that like your email list is is irrelevant because you can send it to your email if you want but we being substack being the app are going to intentionally draw the attention away from your inbox into our app for whatever it is that they have planned because they got something planned or else they wouldn't have done this yeah and i guess just to give people a little bit of context too so there's there are some specific downsides that like like the one that tim just mentioned so you're now competing harder for attention there's some upsides some potential upsides which we'll get into and there are other sort of points along the substick storyline in which similar challenges have come up so early on as you mentioned like everyone builds on a substance domain or a lot of people build on substance domains and one of the issues with that it makes it a lot easier to build your website and to publish content and so substance was kind of like the publishing tool for writers who weren't really technical which as you point out in your article that's like every that's a lot of them so that's great and it's a really great kind of smooth onboarding the challenge though is that you're basically building a valuable web asset somewhere on the internet that you don't own and that can mean a couple of things so in terms of publishing like you're building all this social or this search engine optimization and uh domain authority for substance not for you and that becomes an issue when you then try and go launch other projects or basically monetize in any other way then there are potential controversies like one that you mentioned in your article a friend of ours cody sanchez yeah now you're gonna have to give me the details on this so it sounds like she was locked out of her account was that definitely because she tried to sell something or was that just i guess well that's what she wrote in a twitter thread that she put together so do you know if that was kind of her guess or did like sub stack tell her like you oh i think that's what they said um i think that's what they told her so if you ask cody she logged into her sub stack she was banned from it due to terms to violating terms and agreements and the reason was because substance wants you to sell subscriptions to a paid newsletter so basically you create content for free to more or less advertise your paid newsletter and she was creating content for free to do what we all do which is to generate an email list so that she could sell a product and just because that product wasn't a substance product which they get a 10 cut of they said no no this is against our terms and violations and they they killed her account it sounds reasonable that could that could have been it i know other platforms like um what's the course where you build a course udemy is similar like they'll you you can you can send messages to all your students but you can't promote non-udemy products in those sends and so it really it really kind of is this issue of building in a space where you don't have full autonomy and control and i don't know if we'll get into this deeper in a little bit but it's like i think what we're going to see as these platforms continue i think the platform's going to continue to consolidate power and to be honest similar to you i don't think substance going anywhere because there's enough non-technical people out there who just want to get eyeballs and don't really have a path to do that or don't feel that they have a path to do that also i think from a reader's perspective like email's gotten crazy you know so there's there's definitely a benefit for the readers and as long as the readers continue to come the writers will continue to come you know so i don't think substance going anywhere over this but it is something that i think creators have to ask themselves you know what sandbox do you want to play in and really what i think is going to happen is you'll see a change in the type of talent on sub stack and and how people use it there's i'm kind of torn on this one because there's a sort of like dirty little secret about paid newsletters which is you don't actually need people to open them or read them because they're not paying like it's not it's not monetized the same way that ads are what you need people to do in order to keep like in order to run a paid newsletter business is people need to feel like they either get value from having that subscription or that they could get value or they will get value one day when they finally have time to sit down and read everything right which is very common i pay for multiple newsletters that i plan to sit down and read one day so i'm a little torn on this because i'm like well yeah you know technically they're not seeing your content as much or they may not be seeing you in the inbox but if you're running a paid newsletter i don't know if you need it so tell me this because you looked into this closer than i did do you still get new subscribers email addresses or are they kind of sunsetting that feature the app yeah like i would assume i don't know how it works but let's say somebody is an is a substance app user and they stumble across your newsletter on the app and they sign up are you still going to get their email or is into some other list subscribe like these are your app users or something like that you know what man that is a really great question and i didn't even think about that because well i'm gonna check it out while we're on while we're recording i'll do it next time you speak or whatever but before i download the app again let's assume that if you're on the app and you have a feed of all these newsletters you do still subscribe to emails so let's assume that substack is like being the good guy and they're still providing data to their users the part for me is how long is that going to last for right because there's only one reason to have a free product on an app especially because now they're in the app game so you know what that means they're in that they're in the iphone game you know and so like the only way that ends is that they're going to leverage the data and they're going to leverage the app to sell ads so if they do leverage the app to sell ads then the inbox is the last place that they want to go unless they do like a um [Music] like anchor unless you do a potential anchor thing where sub stack itself and this might be kind of cool actually i wouldn't hate this too much but where substack itself creates an ad network where as a substack user you can use their ads to put in your own free newsletter you know so it's like maybe if subset creates the ad network and then the writers to use subsequent to send their free newsletter can just cherry pick some of those ads and find a different way to monetize i wouldn't hate that so much because that's still at least leaning towards servicing the writer but once again if history is the best predictor this ends in one way they start leveraging the app to sell data to sell ads and then eventually get really really pissed at apple because apple owns the whole game anyway yeah it is really interesting i hadn't thought about the creation of the ad network although you're right that does seem almost like a potentially inevitable step it reminds me though just on the drive in this morning i listened to joe rogan's interview with mr beast which was really eye-opening so i don't really i mean i know who mr beast is but i don't i don't watch any of his stuff for anybody listening who also doesn't maybe keep up with him he is the most subscribed to youtube channel on all of youtube and the biggest earner on all of youtube and they actually didn't go through the numbers but he's making like several tens of millions of dollars a year on youtube it's silly how much money he makes yeah it's ridiculous and he does these crazy uh videos too so i mean he like the thing that he got the most press for recently was after squid games came out you didn't watch that squid games or his version squidward his version of it the squid no i've never seen oh man you got to watch it it was so creative it was so fun he definitely seems so after listening to this i'm more interested to go back and check out some of his stuff i was always kind of like somewhat interested but it's clear just from listening that he's incredibly passionate about what he does and i'd be keen to kind of see how he's grown over the years so when squid games first came out i guess anybody who's again like me didn't catch this he paid to build a facility that was basically the reenactment a stage that reenacts squid games and he brought like 400 people on to reenact his own version of squid games and the crazy thing is that that video has gotten something like 230 million views and netflix has 220 million subscribers or something like that so his youtube video literally dunked on whatever this series was that was yeah incredibly popular so pretty cool stuff but the reason i bring him up is because rogan asked him a similar question i mean this here's a guy who's built an entire empire on youtube and he's relying on the youtube algorithm in order to continue spreading his content and rogan basically said he's like you know do you ever think about going to do your own thing because you could own all the servers you could display all the ads you could get 100 of the profit uh instead of sharing it all and then also you'd own like your audience and his take was absolutely not like and i don't know how much of that was because he knows youtube execs are definitely listening but he seemed like he was not interested at all in moving off platform because he goes he's like what i love to do is film i love the culture of youtube and it's like even if my audience did follow me to somewhere else it's like i added 32 million subscribers last year how big would that be if i ran my own platform it'd probably be like two million you know so to to your point about the ad network if you have a platform it's still incredibly risky and i think i'm on your side and we laid out this you know this framework for kind of building one of these creator companies the thing that he is not talking about there is that mr beast also makes money through you know the restaurants 1 600 ghost kitchens and snack company and like swag companies and all this stuff so he's got products in the back end of this that are continuing to make money outside of just his ad monetization but it sounds like these platforms if if the platform builds with creators in mind they can help you reach a lot more people and that can be cool so substance still might be doing that i'll give them the benefit of the doubt but as a creator you either got to be number one right like mr beast level so that your opinion matters to the platform or just be incredibly cognizant of the fact that you're the phrase that tim ferriss always uses this building he says building a business based on one of these platforms like building the most profitable mcdonald's in the world atop an active volcano because you just you never know when something's going to change and your entire business is going to get obliterated so did you did you have a chance to look it up while i was yes you don't you subscribe you don't get the email so if you have a newsletter and i'm on sub stack it's just like a subscribe button which basically just means that your most recent post will be on the feed so it's this it's like the same social network and i just to battle test this a little bit more and make sure we're giving substance as much of the benefit of the doubt as possible when you log into the app i'm assuming your email address is related to that do we know maybe they're giving you the email address anyways that's that's associated with that user do we know if that's a case that's a good point because yeah when you log into the app you have to confirm your email address so maybe when you subscribe the app already knows that it's my email address that is subscribing to this newsletter and okay you know what i think we can test this live because i actually have a subset oh do you okay great what is it nobody sign up to this because i don't actually update it i thought that was the name of it that'd be a great newsletter name so for everybody listening this is just something that i i test these platforms to see what the user experience is like and stuff so i don't actually write for this but it's called ai for writers and there should be one article up okay i'm gonna click subscribe are you logged in i'm gonna go log in it might take me a second to figure out i forget which uh i think i use my protonmail account call me gpt3 that's funny yeah well i don't know did i ever tell you about this when i we were experimenting with gbt3 no but i read the article i read the newsletter you guys did it was probably like eight months ago something like that oh no this is different so this is uh this was when gpt3 first came out so i think that was like mid-2020 or something like that yeah i was playing with it and i wanted to see exactly what the capabilities were so i fed it the first paragraph or so of moby dick and then just had it keep writing paragraphs and the results were what's that they call me ishmael basically so yeah so for anybody i mean anybody who is interested in this you can just google gpt3 moby dick and it'll come right up i think it's the it's the top result for that but it was fascinating man this changed my view on writing because what ended up happening was at first the computer wrote profound like beautiful copy i'll read a little bit of it here real quick but gradually the way these text engines work is they're basically trying to guess the next word in the sentence and so if they start to get a little bit off track they'll get further and further and further off track and it just ended in this insane territory so this is a slight diversion but do you want me to read a little bit of this or should we just uh but to be sure the reason of this as of many other things is too obvious to be told why is it that men love to be sailors but not cod fishers or herring fishers [Laughter] okay so yeah i fed it the first like i don't know five or six sentences of moby dick so that's the famous call me ishmael some years ago never mind how long precisely having little or no money in my person nothing particular to interest me unsure i thought i would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world fed it a handful of sentences like that and then you basically with this tool you just click like generate generate generate and the computer keeps generating text if you kind of hear like the lilts and the rhythms of the way uh the original copy was written this is where this is where the computer took over so here's the last sentence of of the original writer i can't believe i'm blanking on his name right now but he says if they but knew it all men or almost all men in their degree sometime or other cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me right that's the last human written sentence and then the computer takes over and goes as you read but to be sure the reason of this as of many other things is too obvious to be told why is it that men love to be sailors but not cod fishers or herring fishers it's because a sailor's life is is a freer life than that of anybody else he's not chained to an ore he's not shackled to anything rolex watches for sale it just inserted this but but it goes on it's like the very moment he comes aboard he steps out of the old harness and falls to promenading the deck like a man in a garden he's not expected to pull hard and sweat and blubber and gasp and swear and get red in the face no no all that was to be done ashore and being done it is over and he comes to see he must have liberty too he must be able to have his own way and do what his own way bids him and then this is the part this i got chills when i read this he's not forced to take his chance with a thousand others in a ten thousandth part of a square mile to all appearance too small for a graveyard a computer wrote that dude and when i read it i was like all right so writer's obviously important right but a lot of the magic of writing is really in what you perceive yeah like what the reader experience is not necessarily what the writer is thinking so i'll just wrap this up very quickly so it starts off beautifully then it starts to get a little bit off track he starts to kind of like it it just doesn't make sense so a couple more paragraphs down it says you know this is a brief preamble but i thought it necessary to make uh now i have a fancy that if a man should succeed and what i'm going to attempt it will be almost as great a wonder as if he should succeed in climbing to the moon at least if the man had never been there before that is my way of thinking about it so it's like it kind of makes sense but it just it's like ah i don't know if this really makes sense it gets a little bit weirder weirder and then it go and then it just goes completely off the rails here's the last a couple of sentences now one word more and i will end this preamble i have not been at sea very long and yet long enough to glimpse from the mastheads of what i may call the heart of the whale the largest land animal as the largest sea animal it's a sort of stupendous tub a bathtub and when you have seen one you've seen all the whale is just such another in shape he's not so much like a tub as a holland cheese for in one end he is like a cheese and in the other he is like a tub and if you will have a small cheese made it will have the shape of a great tub but if you have a tub and turn it upside down and make four or five holes in the bottom and two or three in the top then it will have the shape of a cheese here's the the last sense i do not say it will weigh just as much as a cheese for i do not know but i do say that it will weigh very nearly as much it's amazing so for all the writers out there ai ain't coming to take your job you got some time you got some time yeah i'm gonna i i got the login link so i'll check and see if you subscribe to that i'll i'll see if i end up getting oh yeah yeah okay so coming back i have ai for writers which is the sub stack that we're at on my app on my substack app and i'm about to hit the subscribe button on my app it says you're subscribed to the free plan the confirmation email was sent to you with an additional upgrade option all right so i guess maybe i can confirm my email choose a subscription plan it upsells me which is pretty cool to try to go for the paid subscription do you see my email um oh look at that okay hold on i'm gonna put on my camera so what it does after i subscribe is it oh wait i'm just sharing my screen i can see your camera on the top corner there yeah cause it just sends me to the home page of your sub stack oh wow so you have the option to submit your email yes exactly so i'm subscribed to your sub stack but then it sends me another email that says would you want to upgrade and upgrade means upgrading to the free plan which means actually subscribing my email address that's weird i uh i think yeah we'll have to say in the show notes whether or not we that email ever comes through because it seems like it doesn't but i can't actually get into my email right now in order to check this so i'll uh i'll figure out which email i signed up and created that account under after we're done here and we'll see for certain but it is looking like this might be a nail in the coffin of uh sharing your list which obviously if that's the case and we don't know for certain if it is but if it is that's a problem you know like your list that's all you own that's that is your business yeah and when you were talking about mr beast as well i'm really really happy that we went down that gpt rabbit hole but i want to make sure i don't lose my my train of thought because that was amazing so here's here's always the rebuttal to it right it's like what are you talking about i have built my entire platform on twitter and looked at all the success i have but what you don't think about is the anomalies involved there because there are have you ever read deep work by cal newport yep well in deep work he reminds me that the average uh follower account on twitter is like 280 followers or something and so for 99 of the people who aren't going to get to even 50 000 followers which really is like the bare minimum you need to even be able to sell like a sponsored post and even if you do sell a sponsored post of 50 000 files what are they going to do i'd pay like 10 bucks for that you know right so if you're one of like the regular joe schmoes like you and me who have like 3 000 4 000 followers which by the way i'm still sure is probably one percent of all twitter followers then what are you gonna do like you're screwed you can't actually make a living off of building followers on like a rented platform and it's just the economics are as such where if you have 1500 email addresses you can legitimately make 50 grand a year you really can let's say you have a course that you put together that you're selling for 700 bucks you know you can sell one a week and you can like make a living and do what you want to do when you want to do it and so it's just the economics are as such where as this dream of being like a tick tick-tock star or even having like a huge sub-stack that that everybody talks about is so tempting but it's so statistically unprobable that it's like why bother and so like this is why i keep getting involved in these conversations and like it's always the people that have succeeded on social platforms that are the ones saying like this is where all the attention is right that's the buzzword like garner attention garner attention but it's it's it's kind of [ __ ] because that attention is so diluted and the whole point of owning your list is to have attention that is like yours and so if you have an email list of let's be let's be a little more realistic let's say 5 000 people you have 5 000 people on an email list that like really really really follow you you can make a living but you can have a you can have 5 000 tick tock followers and 5 000 twitter followers and 5 000 instagram followers and 5 000 followers everywhere and make nothing and so it just doesn't doesn't make sense yeah i mean we've talked before about just how powerful niche lists are and you know i've got a friend who runs that list specifically dedicated to people who run photo booth businesses and there's a thousand people on that list and he it generates six figures a year so it it really is possible to do this with small lists and i i'm glad you mentioned this because i want to try and tie a couple of points together here one i think there are first let's get this out on the table there are so many people who have huge social followings but don't monetize well just having an enormous platform in and of itself is not valuable uh you need the other the other like capabilities to build a business to know how to monetize to know how to like have longevity all these types of things what i think there's a couple of things that set mr beast apart in a way that i don't even know these are replicable right like one listening to him is he inhuman level of obsession that he has over the youtube platform i mean he literally he started uploading videos at 11. he's 23 now so that's 12 years of dedicated practice but even inside of that you know he had something like three years where that was just all he was all he was doing all day long he would get on these mastermind calls with a handful of friends who are also trying to build youtube channels and they would just be on like skype from seven in the morning until 10 at night talking through what makes good videos and they would go to bed get up do it over and over again very much getting in that like 10 000 hours thing except he's put 10 000 hours into just figuring out what makes a good thumbnail and another 10 into video editing and another 10 into so at this point i don't think there are many people who can really come close to him because this is like this is the thing that he lives for the other thing that's very unique about him is that he plows all of the money that he makes back into making videos this was shocking because he talks about it with rogan but miss he doesn't you know he's making millions and millions of dollars a year and he's 23. he doesn't really ball out on anything he tried it once bought some like fancy clothes and he's like i didn't even like it he's like it was very uncomfortable and somebody broke in and stole all his [ __ ] and so at some point he's like he just plows all the money back into the business and this is an important point which i've been thinking a lot about recently and i think it relates to this concept of monetizing well through products at the end of the day the biggest problem these substance writers are going to face is that their writing is what's making them a living it's not acting as marketing to sell another product and i think you know i don't think i've ever thought about it in those terms before but you don't really want your writing to make you a living right because if that's the case the writing itself is under pressure to perform when really what you want to do is you want to be selling products so that you can build products like say even if they're written it's like a book or a course or something like that you build it when you have something to say that's important and different and then the bulk of the writing that you're doing through the newsletter is like expanding on ideas engaging with your audience just kind of maybe marketing the product but it's they're not actually paying to read your newsletter every week you know so he is able to plow all the money back into the business because he lives this frugal lifestyle and kind of the full circle point that i was hoping to make with this was if you want to be free as a content creator or a writer you cannot rely on your content to make you money and you can't rely on these platforms to deliver your audience and there's a couple ways to do that obviously one is to like own your own list but the other is to make sure that you're living in such a way that if your income like if your writing is making you money and you suddenly take a hit it's not going to change how you think about your work the work of the writing you know no totally you nailed it and that so there's there's two points there one is the pressure because i don't know if anybody really really talks about this enough but writing is like the hardest thing in the world to do it's brutal it's so hard and there's such a huge difference between writing for teaching informing entertaining and writing to deliver a product whereas the mindset from it is is very very different and i do think that as soon as you cross that threshold it's sort of just a a ratcheting effect which leads to my second point which is another reason why i really really don't like the substack app and that's going to be like the commoditization of writing because what happens with all of these platforms they all figure out the one thing that works and they all do that thing so like on facebook it's like you know be a trump supporter and yell up something terrible about liberals you know what i mean and it's like great you went viral on facebook be ben shapiro just be a different version of ben shapiro on instagram it's well we know how those go you know what i mean like they're very like sexually oriented type content and the people that do well on those kind of platforms it's it's usually very sexualized uh if you want to do well on twitter like you know you'd be one of the fortune cookie bros or you'd be into bitcoin you know whoa whoa yeah twitter is still is twitter's the last bastion of profound thinking in the world yes it is twitter's all we got left and now the sub stack is getting into this game it's just like the same exact thing is gonna happen i think we're gonna find so many writers who have to replicate this thing over and over again because they're dependent on like you said on the first thing which is like you need the writing to be the product and so if the writing is the product then eventually all products become commoditized because you got to get it as cheap as you can as fast as you can and that that part that's what really really bums me out because when i had hamish on my podcast a while ago like he's a writer and he made sub stack because he saw that journalism was being dictated by advertisers and so you know like true journalism just turns into [ __ ] buzzfeed because buzzfeed goes viral and now it's like sad that after all of that it's fallen into exactly what he didn't want to be well i think that's where i'm still torn on this and i have to think through it a little more and dig a little deeper personally just to understand what sub stack is after because like i said with the paid content model the one sort of benefit of all this is that or the benefit of paid is that you no longer have to grab attention right like because you make your money whether somebody reads the newsletter or not and that may sound like um advocating that you shouldn't care about your readers obviously you care about your readers but what paid allows people to do is write things that are not buzzfeed articles literally so i don't know to me the biggest impact of this seems to be that it's you may not be controlling your entire list and you may not be getting as many opens as you previously were and if that's the case i mean that certainly sucks but i don't know that it's going to force people who are running paid products to write more spam type articles because it's like you know however you were growing the list beforehand you're going to keep growing it that way and i would assume even if people are subscribing inside the app you know they're going to need to they're still paying you so i think i it's but it's not it's not that's not a perfect assessment though because a lot of these sub stack writers run a free sub stack with a paid option and i think that's kind of a mistake as well for like for exactly this reason right now they're in a position where the free product they don't own any of the information and the only reason you run a free product is to create distribution for paid products if anybody's kind of just tuning in to your first episode listening go back reference the the episode that we did in what was it december on the creator model yeah and i think you really nailed it where that's the difference between creator economy and content writing like creator economy is your creation is the product there's no separation whereas content marketing like your content is a means to an end yeah like we're getting into the weeds a little bit here i just for for me for me it's just a bummer because i really really like sub stack the the you like writing on sub stack is great and i really mean that like so and there's another thing that also doesn't get talked about too much but something that sub stack really really did well and that's if you're on the back end of sub stack if you're writing and you embed a tweet or you embed a youtube video when you send that email substack automatically takes the iframe and turns it into a visual so that when the user is when the reader is reading the email they actually see the tweet and they actually see the youtube clip which is very difficult because email hates iframe and those things are embedded as iframes and so like i always thought that was another really great advantage where these internet bloggers like so many times they reference tweets so they say like hey check out this video whereas if you wanted to do that through wordpress and then do it through an rss feed what happens is like it's just a white box basically like where the tweet is or where the video is that can't come through because the urss feed can't transcribe the iframe into an image and so like because of that because of how beautiful subsequent is to write on because of the creativity on the platform you know and just like my my passion for writers and like yes there's finally a space for them to to be free you know i just maybe i'm being pessimistic but i just don't see this ending in any other way other than a commoditized endless feed that goes forever and ever and sprinkles in an ad every nine inches or so because like this this is the most valuable real estate in the world you know this stupid little screen that we all carry in our pockets is the most valuable real estate in the world so why would they be a one billion dollar company when they could be like a hundred billion dollar company right there's just no way there's no way they don't do it so what can people do in order to adapt around this this brings back to the very beginning where we talked about gravity right like this nothing nobody escapes gravity there's nothing you can do no like the the the same things that you always did is what you do you know you get a wordpress site get a ghost site get it the only things you ever own on the internet is your domain and your email list like that's it nothing else is yours and so i'm turning into like the old guy who's a curmudgeon that's like the grumpy grandpa on the internet saying like oh are you kids and it's still so true post your [ __ ] on your website and collect emails into aweber mailchimp or convertkit i'm a convertkit guy but and that's it and then everything else you do should drive traffic back to that site exactly yeah and i think this is one of the things that co that kind of saved cody as well is that she leverages several different email platforms but centralizes the list in one spot so like and i don't know how often she runs backups or anything like that i mean i'd probably recommend what weekly or so just depending on how fast you're growing but i agree again we laid this out in the in the previous episode everything kind of funnels back to your list you need to own that and then you can use these platforms to to point to it and i think the trick becomes figuring out how to there's i think there's kind of two things how do you write effectively in such a way that you can basically sit down develop an idea in a short period of time and figure out how best to then ship that idea off to the different platforms where it's then going to work to drive people to your email list right so you don't have like if you if you're on twitter and tic tac and sub stack and instagram you don't have to come up with four completely different ideas in a day you need to be really good at taking your one idea and splitting it off into those four different domains you know what we should do we should have ross simmons on the podcast you ever talked to ross no what's his deal well his twitter handle is the best ever it's called the coolest cool and his whole entire agency is all about taking one piece of content and chopping it down into a million so he's very much on the idea of like stop creating content like create one piece a month even and then within that one idea you have one long form that can turn into like four or five different 500 word essays that could turn into like a hundred tweets that you can repurpose into instagram videos and a youtube video because yeah like i i hear what you're saying it makes it difficult to continuously create like long-form work that resonates because you don't have you know like let's be honest the value of social networks is that they they help you ratchet your followers you know like there's a reason why just the act of being on twitter makes it easier to grow on twitter right like they help you with that and so without that you're really really on your own and so the trick when you're posting on your own site is to take one idea and then break that idea up into like a million different ideas and then use those ideas to post on social platforms which then comes full circle and draws that attention back to your website so i wonder if ross would uh would explain that to us he's really good at it that would be awesome yeah i'd love to have him on and in introducing that idea you reminded me of the second thing that i was trying to think of which is so if if the if one challenge is figuring out how to divide up your ideas the next one is figuring out how best to pull traffic off of those platforms to your site and this varies from platform to platform right i take this reforge growth class which is great have you have you heard the reforge guys i've definitely heard of them yeah it's pretty cool it's expensive the company pays for it but anybody who can get access to it if you're interested in like growth or product stuff it's some of the best training i've seen on that one of the great things that they say there is when you're first starting like everybody that you want as a customer you're going to get basically you're going to get them by pulling them their attention off of another platform yeah so airbnb the classic examples they would post airbnbs over on craigslist right and people were because they knew there were people there who were kind of surfing around for local listings or even just interested in real estate but the point is if you're starting something new now like all the readers are already out there sure some new ones might come online but they're already out there and they're already doing something and so you're gonna have to figure out how to carve traffic off those other sources and that is sort of phase two of embracing the fact that you have you have to build your own list off these platforms and leverage the platform like a tool like you said in your in your article so true that's something that i i clearly already knew but i never thought of it in that way like it's it's impossible to make something from nothing right like the things are already out there you have to take them from different spots and so in that i think over the last 15 years with copyblogger that has been one of those messages that i think gets lost because people here don't waste your time on social media but then they think okay where am i gonna get this from you know am i gonna walk down the street and just hand out a business card to everybody and be like sign up for my email list that doesn't make sense so well it's like when you say don't waste your time on social media that's more profound than i think most people might think it's don't waste your time on social media you know like you're not just there to grow on social media you're there to get attention and funnel it back to your site so everything you do should be seen through that lens if you're going to spend anything so good holy smokes i'm so hyped up after hearing that that was so good don't waste your time on social media oh [ __ ] right so there you go you heard it that's it man we gotta stop there okay a couple quick housekeeping notes i got a few dms about our last episode i will share them with you ethan that made me feel really really good it was out of our comfort zone to talk about some of those things but i'm i'm glad that we did and um i appreciate everybody's feedback and i i appreciate the fact that most people in this world are good so thank you for your good vibes and and thank you for trying to spread love in the world like us on spotify on itunes we appreciate all the support on the show this has been a ton of fun this is one of my favorite episodes that we've done so far um and thank you anything you want to say then nope that's it i'll just echo uh the thanks to everybody who keeps reaching out and sharing uh positive feedback we see it all love to read it and if there's anything you want to share hit us up on twitter i'm at damn ethan under damn underscore ethan and tim is tim kim stods hi guys thank you so much we'll talk to you next week [Music] you