Dear reader,
If you've been following my newsletter via email, you may have noticed that this looks different.
To share my writing so far, I've been using a tool called Kit (formerly ConvertKit), but starting this week, I'm switching to Substack.
This isn't just a tool switch, though. There's a lesson attached that I think you might find useful.
On February 19, 2022, I wrote my first newsletter. It was on Substack — I'd started there because it was the simplest tool I could find for what I wanted to do.
And what I wanted to do was simple: write, share my ideas, and get feedback. That was really it.
But as I learned more about creating on the internet, I ran into this idea of "owning your audience." It came from big creators, and I took it as a rule rather than something to weigh against my own situation.
It made sense on paper. On Kit, I'd get more detailed analytics, more control, automations — a platform that was mine instead of borrowed. I'd own my audience.
What I didn't account for was how different my situation was from the creators I was listening to.
They wanted to own their audience because creating content was the goal, full-time, with teams, actively promoting themselves, with products and courses to sell. I'm not saying anything against that. I'm just saying: that wasn't me.
I'm a student. A learner trying to build an intentional life, not a media business. I don't need to own my audience — and I definitely don't need to pay for it with discoverability.
I'd been writing every week, consistently, across my blog and Kit for over two years. Given that consistency, I'm fairly confident more people would have found the work interesting if they'd had the chance to stumble on it.
But this isn't the blog era anymore. People don't really wander into random blogs and pass them around the way they used to. I picked up a subscriber here and there through YouTube and other articles, but that trickle could have been a real stream — either through constant self-promotion, which I wasn't doing, or through a platform like Substack that has a built-in way for readers to discover you.
That's the part I got backwards. All the automations and analytics on Kit are nice, but they don't matter if no one finds the newsletter in the first place. Substack's existing community and discovery tools do more for a writer like me than any dashboard.
It's almost like trying to build an alternate YouTube from scratch. Owning the platform only pays off if you can also feed it.
So, time to stop trying to build my own ocean, and swim in one that already exists. Call it becoming the Remora, perhaps: the fish that doesn't need to hunt because it's found a shark that's already doing the work, and just shows up for what's left over. Substack is the shark. I'd rather spend my energy writing than maintaining infrastructure no one's discovering.
If you've already been following me, thank you, genuinely. And if you're new here, welcome. I'd love to have you along as I keep figuring things out.
I'll see you next week.
Warmly,
Suraj