Is everyone you know suddenly moving to Substack? You’re seeing it everywhere—people calling it “the future” and the only place to be for content creation. But before you spend thousands to jump ship or dilute your existing digital footprint, stop and ask the crucial question: Is this move a strategic choice for your business model, or is it simply FOMO? In a world of constantly trending platforms (from Substack to Beehiiv to the latest AI tool), it’s easy to get sucked into the hype. We dive deep to uncover the “why” behind these choices, examining when a unified platform makes sense and when “just because it’s trending” is the wrong reason to act. Learn how to shift from tactical moves to clear, confident business strategy.
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Just Because It’s Trending Doesn’t Mean It’s Right
Introduction And Questioning The Move To Substack
As we get started in this episode, if you’ve been with us for more than two or three episodes, you know I don’t normally start the episode. Tonya does, but we’re flipping it because I’m going to be in the driver’s seat. Tonya is going to be in the hot seat and here’s why. I have been seeing something come up so consistently again and again. I started to ask Tonya about it and I said, “This would be a great episode,” so here we are. What I’m talking about is I keep hearing everyone talking about that they’re moving to Substack. “I’m going to Substack.” “It’s the future.” “It’s better than this.” “It’s better than that.”
My first thought was like, “I’m not exactly sure how it’s completely different than what we’ve been doing before. I must be missing something. As we briefly chatted about it, what we got to is it’s so easy to get sucked into moving to something just because we’re seeing it everywhere. I have been around the block enough times to know that and to have seen it in multiple forms. What I want to do is leverage all of the great knowledge from my Chief MOO or my Chief Marketing and Operations Officer to ask the questions about why we should or shouldn’t be moving to Substack. Why is that such a hot thing?
All of those issues. We’re going to find out why. As part of it, why we should be making choices like moving to Substack or not moving the Substack, and how we want to be paying attention to these things. What are those tactical choices and strategic choices? Here we go. Tonya, I already asked you the question. I don’t get it. Why would you want to move to Substack when we’ve got Facebook groups, blogs, and newsletters? If some people are like, “It’s about money.” We have Patreon. There’s lots of other tools out there. What am I missing? Get me started on this.
There’s so many directions that we could take this. What I appreciate is, when we had our brief conversation, you didn’t let me say very much because you wanted this to be off the cuff. Before we start to why Substack and what you’re missing. We need to take a step back and address the fact that you are different than a lot of other business owners, especially when it comes to tech. You have a tech background. I don’t know that people realize that. I don’t know that are readers realize that.
You had one of the first Comp Sci degrees to come out of an institution of higher education because you were in college in the ‘80s. Computers still filled a room. The idea of a personal computer was fairly newfangled. You have a high level of comfort with technology, but you also have a healthy level of suspicion when it comes to new technology isn’t much you haven’t seen before. When you were nineteen in your college dorm room, you probably weren’t thinking we would carry computers in our pockets.
I have statements that I remember making that are so unbelievable for people. My favorite is no one could ever possibly fill up 40 MG. The hard drive. No one could ever fill that up. I absolutely positively remember saying that. I know I said that out loud to somebody.
Meanwhile, we have 2 terabytes that we frequently fill up now that we’re podcasting and we have to back up. The reason it’s important is because readers who are like, “I just went all in on Substack or I just paid somebody like $5,000 to get me on the Substack or whatever that is.” I don’t want them to feel like we think they’re dumb because we don’t. You look at things differently. You’re always looking at what’s the business case for this.
The Low Barrier To Entry And Monetization For Content Creators
The average business owner says, “There’s a guru on a stage or there’s somebody I know who’s making 6-7 figures and they’re saying that anybody who doesn’t move to Substack now is missing the boat. They must know something I don’t know.” They’re jumping over. You can’t blame anybody for doing that because nobody has the time to research every trend. If you trust somebody implicitly and they say you should do a thing. It’s easier to do what they say rather than research why they do it. That’s the first thing.
Nobody has time to research every trend. When you trust someone deeply and they recommend something, it’s often easier to follow their guidance than to research every reason behind it. Share on XThe second thing, though, is Substack. What are we missing? Let’s talk about why people are all hot on Substack now. It’s not just Substack. Substack has competitors. If you’re like, “I haven’t heard anybody talk about Substack.” Replace Substack with Beehiiv or Ghost. They all pretty much do the same thing. Substack got started with journalists. You know how much I love my journalist peeps. I was one for a decade, so I get it.
Journalists were like, “There’s layoffs happening at the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times or there’s pressure. We can no longer publish the things that we want to publish. Not to mention we’re not getting paid much. How about if I take all my investigative reporting chops, take it over to another platform and let people who care about this coverage pay to read it?” Would it happen? Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows?
Substack is great because there’s no cost to entry. There’s no barrier to entry. Anybody can start Substack for free. The only time you pay Substack is if people pay you for what you’re creating. They take about 10%. Give or take. That’s where it got its start. It is a great place to get paid to create. If that’s your model, it might make a lot of sense.
Tactical Tool Versus Strategic Choice
This is a tactical question. That feels a lot to me like blogging or having a newsletter. Part of my question is, why would you stop doing one to do the other? Why would you do both if it’s potentially hitting the same market? This is where it’s hit me. I have a lot of places where I have subscribed to someone’s newsletter for a longer time because I like their content and what’s going on. It comes out once a week and it’s not too much. All of the things.
Now, I’m getting a newsletter from them that says, “I’m not going to be doing this anymore. I’m over on Substack.” I’m trying to get a feel for, is this a tactical move for them? If so, why? Is it a strategic move? If so, why? I’ll say, as an end user as a receiver of their content, I’m not sure about the difference. Therefore, I don’t know how to apply it to our own. If we were doing a whole lot of content, if that was like a big thing in a written way.
I would be asking this question to you as my CMOOs, “Should we be doing this instead?” We don’t do that much written content. I’m not as worried from that standpoint. I also know someone who’s stopping their show because they want to be on Substack. I’m losing track of where’s the tactical tool, versus where is the strategy and how we would choose that.
This is tough. You ask big questions which lead to big answers, which are like ten minutes and unwieldy. I’m going to break down. It’s good, but I also don’t want to force the reader to tears with the Tonya monologues. First of all, I’m going to ask one question and then you’re going to probably end up repeating your question a few times. The first thing is, when anybody comes to me, potential clients or current clients. I have answered this question five times, “Tonya, should I be moving this up Substack with current clients?”
I have a friend, Lacy Boggs. She’s a copywriter. She’s amazing. She had this post on Facebook. I was just like, “Isn’t that true?” Her post was, “Every time a client comes to me and says they want to start a show, I cringe. It’s not because I hate podcast. It’s show because I know when they say they want to launch a show, it’s because they feel like whatever they’re doing isn’t working and they want to go do something new. It’s not because they have a strategy behind the decision.”
The same thing is true with Substack or with any other new tech tool, people say. In my space, as a community strategist. When people tell me, “I’m leaving Facebook and I’m going to school.” I know there’s probably not a strategic decision behind that. They heard school is the next Facebook and they want to jump on it before they miss the boat. There is so much FOMO when it comes to new platforms.
That’s what this all feels like to me, and as I said, because I’m not as educated as you are. That difference in the tool doesn’t feel like that big of a difference. As you said, I think bigger and strategically. I can’t see the strategic reason.
You know me. I always talk about how every software as a service. Everyone lands on the scene because they see a gap in the market. They know they can close that gap better than anybody else. I love that. What I hate is pretty soon because they’re trying to serve everybody. They did one thing well. People jumped on it who wanted that one thing, then they start adding on all these features from mass appeal. Substack has done the same thing.
Every SaaS starts the same: someone sees a gap and builds a focused solution. That’s the beauty. But over time, many try to serve everyone and drift from what they did best, adding features for mass appeal instead of staying clear and focused. Share on XWhen Substack landed on the scene, it was a great place for writers who wanted the option of monetizing their writing. A lot of my writerly friends talk about it. It’s blogging back in 2014 when it was still cool, Gwen. We loved it. It gave us a direct connection to our readers. People subscribe to it because they wanted to read. You wanted to drop 1,000 words on them, 2,000 words, 3,000 words, or 400 words. You could do it. Whether you were the Seth Godin who wants to write daily and it’s like 100 to 200 words max.
Super pithy but yet deep.
How do you get that deep in two paragraphs? I don’t know but he is a genius when it comes to that. If you want to do the Tonya monologue thing where I want to dig deep and go deep into a topic with 1,500 words or 2,000 words. People could subscribe to that. They knew what they were getting. They could leave comments. They left comments. They still leave comments and they’re going, “It’s so exciting.”
You feel like you’re having that direct connection. If you want to offer free and paid and you want two levels. Substack makes it easy on that. Substack does a lot of the marketing like, “Do you like this creator? Why not support them?” They even allow people to pay for just the stuff that they can get for free just because they want to support you or pay for additional levels of service. Maybe that’s deeper articles or maybe you get the first 400 words for free and you pay for the rest of it, however, that is.
Now, you can have a show on Substack. They now host shows and they distribute to Apple and to Spotify. Why pay Captivate? We use Podetize for our hosting here or whoever else if you can just do it through Substack. “Spotify allows me to host for free, too.” “Riverside allows me to host my show for free, too.” You could do everything now on Substack. You can blog and have your show. When Facebook in 2025 said, “Those livestreams that you’re used to sending people to the recordings for year after year, we’re going to expire those after 30 days. They’re just going to disappear from our platform.”
Substack said, “We got you. Not only will we let you livestream from our platform. Now we’ll let that recording live as long as YouTube lets it live.” Now you can live stream from Substack. You can podcast from Substack. You can write from Substack. You can have memberships, community, and create a network on Substack. We are your all-in-one communications tool. From an old school journalist like me, from my perspective, you can create your own publication system through Substack. I can have multiple contributors.
Remember those blogs, A Wife Like Me? I used to be a contributor to that one. They were like twenty of us that would send in an article once a month and they would publish all the time. A Wife Like Me was everywhere, but I only had to worry about sending in one article a month and I got that benefit. We can do that on Substack. If you have been around the block more than once. You’re like, “Tonya, doesn’t that sound like Medium?” Yes.
Substack is now encroaching on all of these things, and they’re like, “If you like to Medium, come here.” Do you blogging like 2014? Do you like this? Come here. The appeal is this everything under one umbrella. If you want to move everything into Substack and say, “I’m killing my website. I’m killing everything else.” That could be a good choice for you. If you’re talking about adding Substack on top of everything else?
That was exactly what was going to go. How do you choose what you continue, what you stop and what the cost of conversion from one to the other is? That’s my operational brain coming in.
As your CMO, here’s what I think of because trust me. From the day you hired me back in 2022, Substack wasn’t as well-known, but they weren’t new back then. I am always thinking like, “What does Gwen like do to? How does she like to connect with her people? What makes sense?” There was a time where we were thinking Medium could make sense. That was before I realized that you’re a talker more than a writer.
Minimizing Confusion And Digital Footprint Dilution
You can create amazing articles, but it takes you a very long time to communicate your thoughts in writing. I’ve thought about Substack, especially when they started launching private subscriber-only podcasts. I was like, “That could work for Gwen.” Here’s what it comes down to, Gwen. Your digital footprint is deluded enough because that’s where I worry. It is hard to win any war if you’re fighting battles on multiple fronts.
We’ve got a website and the whole reason you’re not a creator. Let’s go to business model briefly and we can go back to their if you want. You’re not a creator. Your goal is not to get paid for people to consume your stuff. You are a business advisor who has clients. You work with your clients either in group settings or individually. All the work that we do to put content out there is simply to help people decide whether it makes sense to hire you or not.
Now, if they are able to improve their businesses and improve the work they do as a result of consuming your free content. We are happy for them. You’re happy for them. You love being of service. You cannot afford to fly all over this nation speaking for free on stages. You just can’t. It’s a great way for you to offer that service freely. Let people into your thought process, into your brain knowing how you think. For the right business owner, the established business owner who wants to go to the next level and who is going, “I’ve tried everything. I even went to Substack, or didn’t go to Substack. It’s still not working. I must be missing something. I need some eyes onto my business to see what I’m doing.”
That woman, we want her to call you and be like, “Let’s get on the call. Can you help me troubleshoot this so that you can help me?” You happen to work with people in the service space industry like me or people who are independent retailers and crafters. You’ve got various product-based business clients that you work with. That is why we create content, though. We create content so that the right person who has 1 of 4 very specific problems with their business can find you and take the next step and working with you.
In order to do that, we can’t afford for them to type your name in Google or ask somebody about you and get confronted with five different places to connect with you. We need to minimize their confusion. They go to the website or to LinkedIn. What do either of those do? Sends them to the show because this is the best place to get to know how you think.
This is creating a lot of clarity for me because what I’m hearing is part of it is about potentially consolidation, as you said. As substance has changed their model over time and their service offerings. Part of it is consolidation, which could make a lot of sense. Particularly for people who are focused on providing content and I’ll say, for content’s sake. Not trying to minimize it.
Not diminishing it, but the product that they sell is not content.
That makes sense to me. My question then is, how does someone not get caught up in the hype of it and make a good decision for themselves? Particularly when everyone that they think is successful by whatever definition they’re using. Whether it’s their mentor or people that they follow or people that they’re networking with are saying, “This is the thing.” We always talk about a context matters.
I know we all get caught up in comparison. We all get caught up in FOMO and in height. Even as I was hearing it, as you said, been around the block. I’m way more skeptical about this stuff than most. Part of me was like, “Are we doing it wrong? Should we be on stuffed Substack?” My instinct was no but even though I would say I’m probably more immune than others. I still was getting caught in it. How do we think about that? How do we help our readers think about that in a way that they can manage that themselves?
It comes down to knowing exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing. What I have found over the years is most of us in business are doing a lot of things, especially in the marketing space. We were told to do the thing and we have no idea why we’re doing it. You and me have had this conversation before, too. You go to a genius network event and the speaker is like, “We have to do this.” You’re like, “Why aren’t we doing that, Tonya?” I’m like, “Tell me more about what they said. We’re doing this other thing instead.”
It comes down to knowing exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing. In business—especially in marketing—we often end up doing a lot of things just because we were told to, without truly understanding why. Share on XYou’re like, “Yes, but why?” It’s like, “It’s because of this reason.” Everything that we are doing, there is a why behind the what. I have gotten better over the years in telling you that why so that every room you go into, you confidently can answer the question of why you’re doing that. If you go into a room and your rooms are much more elevated than a lot of rooms. Chances are, when you go into a room, nobody’s asking you why you don’t have a Facebook group. If you went into a room and somebody said, “Why don’t you have a Facebook group?” You could say, “That’s not my business model.”
They would look at you and be like, “Huh? Oh, okay.” You have a good answer. What happens is, people say, “Why aren’t you on Substack?” Oftentimes, you’re like, “What’s Substack?” They feel stupid. It’s just like, “These people know about the thing that I don’t know about.” Insert whatever the thing is. There’s talking about it with confidence. Pardon me but, in many cases, all they’re doing is parading what else they’ve heard. They don’t know anything. They’re trying to act like they know something.
This reminds me of the airline magazine that we used to have before COVID. Arlo has run an IT department. It was the thing that you hated. It was like, “They’re going on a trip and they’re getting on a plane. Which means they’re going to have an airline magazine.” I’m so glad that I have those magazines. I love those magazines. They were super interesting. They would inevitably get a little tiny piece. We’ve got to do that and it’s like, “There’s no strategy behind it.”
Strategy At Its Core Is Understanding The Business Objective
Exactly. All strategy at its most basic core is understanding why you’re doing what you’re doing. What is the business objective? People might say, “If you want to help with your Facebook group, Tonya is the person to talk to.” Maybe I am. Maybe I’m not. I’m always going to go, “What’s the purpose of your group? Where does your group fit in with your overall business model? What are we trying to do with this group?”
All strategy, at its most basic core, is about understanding why you’re doing what you’re doing. Share on XIf you don’t have a strategy, I can help you create one. I might also be the person who says, “Based on everything you’re telling me, in your case, specifically, Gwen. A community in the traditional sense is not going to get you there.” You avoid the hype by looking at your business now. Look at everything you’re doing from an output perspective. Particularly, your social media, blogging, and newsletter. Anything that you’re getting money for, we can talk about whether the juice is worth the squeeze there.
Anything of your output you’re doing for free, why are you doing it? What is it getting you? What is it that you’re hoping it’s going to get you? Do those things align with the business model that you have. Back to, we podcast here but we’re not podcasting to get 10,000 downloads or 10,000 downloads a month or 10000 downloads a week. Chances are, there are not 10,000 female entrepreneurs who are interested in this topic. The idea that we are going to get 10,000 downloads in a day is ridiculous. We are here because there’s probably 10,000 female entrepreneurs in the US who may be at any given time interested in one of our topics. Maybe 100 of them per week will find us and be interested in something we’re talking about.
What I’m hearing is this topic of Substack. Although we said Substack. As you said, it could be anything new. The list is long and it continues. We could easily have substituted any of the AI tools for this exact same conversation. That’s another FOMO thing, like, “Everyone’s using AI.” Are they? I don’t know. Maybe.
Are they using it well and all of those things? What I’m hearing from you is we want to look at any of those choices as the strategic choice. Why would it make a difference? Me putting in my two cents is, what is it cost to move? What is the cost to do that and/or what are we giving up so that we have space capacity, time and whatever to do these things? Coming back around trying to bring this baby back around. When people start talking about Substack and we’re seeing it using me as the example.
We’ve talked about that it doesn’t make sense for me as a content creator because I’m not a content creator. What do we need to be thinking about whenever we’re talking about any of these things? Be on the why. What are the ways that we could get close to? You always ask me, “What’s the one question that you should ask yourself or one thing you need to do? How do you simplify this in your mind? What are the one or two questions, be it it’s Substack, AI, or the new blue toothbrush? What’s the way that makes sense that people can take down and say, “These are the two questions, one question or three questions that I’m going to ask myself?”
What it comes down to is, what is the problem that you think this thing will solve for you? I want you to answer these questions if you can quickly. What is the one problem that you’re experience came right now that you think Substack could solve?
A unified platform. I’ll make that up. I’m not sure.
It’s a unified platform. One place to do all the things. That sounds pretty awesome. Have you been looking for one place to do all the things?
The Critical Question: Is This Solving A Pre-Existing Problem?
This is the thing that I love. It’s the question that you asked, which is a great application here. Was this a problem you already knew you had before you discovered the thing? The answer would be no. That wasn’t something I was looking for.
We could we could substitute Substack with HighLevel. Everybody’s all about GoHighLevel because it’s an all-in-one platform. Was that something you were looking for? Is that something you needed? Do you feel like you’re spending way too much money now on multiple platforms? With Substack, it’s having everything all in one place but you don’t feel particularly scattered as far as I know.
I’m not in that many places.
When it comes down to it in terms of creating new stuff, we have the show, which you and me have a conversation. I outline it based on our conversation and then we go. That’s not a ton of work for you because you’ve got me. I’m helping you. If you didn’t have me, you would just hit record and talk about whatever. It would probably be mostly just as good.
It will be fine.
You’re pretty organized. We’ve got LinkedIn and on LinkedIn 24/7. You’re on LinkedIn when you have something important to say or when we’re promoting the show. The website now, aside from updating your services page when we update it, we just put the podcast on there.
It’s minimal maintenance.
It’s like a polished version of a rough transcript, our blog articles. That’s all that’s there so you’re not spending a ton of hours writing articles. There’s the newsletter. We’ve got our one question that goes out every single Friday, but that was like an hour of brainstorming to come up with a whole bunch of questions. That rinses and repeats every Friday. We’ve got one newsletter that goes out once a month that you have to create. It’s usually based on what we’ve been talking about. You’ve got your partnership pulse newsletter once a week. There is not a ton of new stuff. You’re not on the content creation hamster wheel. What’s there’s to consolidate?
The thing is most important to take from this as we go forward is Substack is just another thing. We could replace Substack with any of a thousand words, descriptors, products, SaaS tools. The list goes on. To me, this is the place where you’ve had this wisdom for years. I do think it’s probably the most important thing. When you’re looking at doing something new, say, “Is this solving a problem that I already knew I had or did hearing about this create in my mind that I now have a problem that I need to solve?” Was it a problem I was already looking to solve or am I just getting excited about something that will feel like a very productive distraction?
Speaking of one question, and you mentioned it. If you’re needing help thinking about what are those questions I need to be asking myself. We have free resource that comes out every week. It’s called One Really Good Question. It’s helping you ask those questions. It does not have more things for you to do other than asking yourself questions. It’s not giving you a task list. It’s not telling you the things that you need to be thinking about or giving you more FOMO of things. It is just a question. No advice. No big content. It’s very short. It takes probably less than fifteen seconds to read. It’s focused.
If you want to reply to the question, then I will reply back to you with my thoughts. Sometimes, I’ll ask you another question and sometimes I’ll just give some supportive comments depending on what’s going on. If that’s something that you think would be helpful for you, we would love to have you join us. All you have to do is go to www.tonyakubo.com/Question. Give us your email and you will start seeing that email drop into your inbox on Fridays. It was fun being in Tonya’s seat, but we’ll be back to the normal way next time. We hope we see you again in the next episode.
Mentioned in This Episode
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.
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