Why I broke up with Substack — and moved to ConvertKit.
I’ve been writing a lot about newsletter platforms lately.
Particularly Substack & ConvertKit — the two I happen to have the most experience with. Substack was where I launched my newsletter in January 2021.
And then switched to ConvertKit 9 months later.
I broke up with Substack one year ago.
But the cheating started far earlier.
I was having an affair with another email platform — ConvertKit — but I wasn’t even using it to publish my newsletter. I just needed a landing page for a lead magnet. ConvertKit fit the bill with their free landing page builder.
Substack didn’t have a suitable option…
So I launched my lead magnet & landing page with ConvertKit. And over the course of a month, I got ~150 new subscribers.
I exported that list of new subscribers and moved them over to Substack and continued publishing there for a few more months.
All the while I couldn’t forget about the experience I had building and launching the ConvertKit landing page. I couldn’t get it out of my head. And turns out there were even more options for newsletter publishing with ConvertKit:
- more styling options
- more tags & segmentation options
- more automation options
I knew my time with Substack was coming to an end.
And it was bittersweet.
Without Substack, I may have never started a newsletter. It was simple, free, and painless to start.
Whenever I mention that my newsletter started on Substack but switched to ConvertKit, someone always asks, “Why?”
