I don’t know whether it’s just the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, but since I started using Substack, it feels like I’m seeing more and more people showing an interest in the platform.

But is Substack deserving of its popularity?

I’m not so sure.

When I first started this experiment in January, I was really impressed with Substack. It had design limitations, but it was like a blog, newsletter, and all the social media platforms rolled into one. LinkedIn was feeling a bit stale, whereas Substack was shiny and new to me.

But as the months have gone by, I’ve found more and more things about Substack that just annoy me. And as more and more people are flocking toward it, I’m feeling more inclined to move away.

I’m not saying Substack isn’t a good platform. It offers so much, and I completely get why people are attracted to it, but it also has downsides and a dark side that some people might not be aware of.

I’ve written a pretty in-depth article about it, so rather than repeat everything, here’s everything you might need to know about using Substack:

I hadn’t planned to make any drastic changes to my publications until the new year. I wanted to give my experiment a full twelve months.

But earlier this week, I started thinking about whether I would keep things as they are going forward, and I got curious about how it would work if I had a second publication on Beehiiv (you can have up to three, so why not). Then I wondered about how easy it actually is to move a publication from one platform to another. And the next thing I know, I’ve moved New Brew Thursday from Substack to Beehiiv.

Well, technically, I haven’t moved it yet. I’ve set up the website, made all the DNS changes so I can have a custom domain, and I’ve imported (almost all) the content.

So I now have two versions of NBT. The Substack version and the Beehiiv version.

Importing the content was easy. All I had to do was put the URL in and wait a couple of hours.

Not all the content came across. The custom pages (about and networking) didn’t pull across. And my Top 5 posts didn’t import, but I think this is because they are set not to show on the home page so it’s probably to do with that particlular setting.

The photo galleries didn’t come across, so I had to manually add these later (I had been pre-warned about this in something I read). And the content tags didn’t pull across, so I had to go through and manually add these (again, I had been pre-warned about this).

Other than that, the whole process was pretty straightforward. I haven’t moved my email list yet (although I already know that’s easy to do from when I imported a list for this publication), but I’ll be doing that in the next couple of weeks.

I just have a few more things I need to do first, such as add the networking page. Then I’ll pre-warn my email list that the emails will be coming from a slightly different email address.

I’m not going to get rid of the Substack version straight away. I’ll add the new links to the pages so people can find me (unfortunately, you can’t add redirects in Substack, and all the URLs have Substack in them).

After I’ve done all that, I need to do something about my other Substack publication, Write with Lisa.

I won’t be making any changes before January. I’ll continue to add monthly content and send my monthly emails - one for free subs and one for members only. But I’m not going to push the paid membership. The membership on this site and my TFF site are exactly the same, so I’ll be focusing on getting sign-ups there instead.

In the new year, I’ll move the paid subs from Substack to one of the other platforms (they all use Stripe to take payments). I’ll also move the member-only posts.

I haven’t decided whether I’ll keep the publication and just build a free subscribership, or whether I’ll move the content and just end the publication. Either way, I probably won’t come off Substack completely because I want to stay up to date with it, so I can help clients who want to use it. And also because I might just use it to write about random things that don’t really fit with any of my other publications.

I’m finding it hard to run a business and create regular, consistent content for four different publications. The WWL stuff is the easiest to wind down because I can move the paid element and then use the free content elsewhere. This will take the pressure off a bit, so I can prioritise other things.

It’s been a bit of a week for impulsive decisions. As well as suddenly deciding to move NBT to yet another platform, I also upgraded my Ghost plan from the basic to the publisher.

The plans have changed quite significantly since I signed up in January. The prices have increased, which is to be expected because they have added new features, but what you get for your money has also changed.

When I joined, you could have paid members on the basic plan, but that is no longer the case. You have to have the publisher plan.

But that’s not why I upgraded. The changes didn’t impact me as I’d already paid for a year, so they honoured the original plan. I might have had to upgrade at the end of my plan or maybe they would have honoured it forever - I don’t know. But I decided to upgrade early anyway.

There wasn’t one specific thing I wanted access to, but there were a few perks I was interested in. The main one is being able to add bigger files. On the starter plan, you can only add video or audio files up to 5mb. My audio files from WWL are bigger than this, but I also want to start adding some video content to my site.

I can now also have a custom email, so I’m in the process of changing it from [email protected] to [email protected] (hopefully it will be changed before my email goes out on Monday). It always bugged me that I couldn’t have a custom email, but it wasn’t worth upgrading just for that. Since I have now upgraded, I’m going to take advantage of it.

And the other upgrade perks include being able to have up to 3 newsletters (not sure what I’ll do with this yet), more analytics and other things I haven’t yet played about with, but will keep you posted on.

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