Observations and Inferences

Working with creative people, one of the questions I hear most is "Should I start a Substack?" 

It’s not hard to understand why. We hear stories of people making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year with the platform, some even receiving 6-figure advances from Substack itself.

To the creative mind, this sounds like a no brainer. After all, "getting paid well to write about stuff I care about" is what all writers want, and, frankly, is not always that easy to find.

But are platforms like Substack all they're hyped up to be? Or is it another quintessentially American "Hope you got there early!" money rush?

That's the question I'm hoping to help you answer in today's blog.

Substack: The latest big new thing

A little background: I’ve worked in content marketing for the last 8 years. I started in 2014, right at the very beginning of the “pivot to video” era that drained newsroom budgets and led to thousands of talented writers being laid off. That era (which, it turns out, was ba...

Last night, I found myself scrolling through Pretty Decent's Instagram feed. If there had been a microphone in my head at the time, I'm certain it would've picked up the rumblings of...

...well, to be frank, a hater.

"This looks like shit," I thought bitingly to myself.

Naturally, I then went and looked for all of the Instagram accounts in my industry who were clearly doing a much better job than me at branding. Their perfectly kerned text and color-coordinated feeds sneered at me from the other side of my phone.

I felt my body tense. I'm sure if I had done a scan at that moment, I would've noticed clenched shoulders, a tightened chest. One thing I know for certain: It didn't feel good.

Luckily, I caught myself before I archived my entire feed and decided to quit social media and give up on all of my hopes and dreams. As I decided to be intentional about my reaction, a single thought popped into my head:

"No, it's not as good as it could be. But it's good enough for now — and tha...