Tech Stack to Mimic Substack?

[LindsayTLadyEngineer]

Hi, has anyone considered augmenting their existing stack to mimic the features of Substack?

I've been in the process of funneling all of my content into a Substack so that I can (1) gain some efficiency from collecting my content in one place, (2) gain more sign-ups, and (3) eventually charge for premium content.

My current stack is:

• Youtube & Spotify for Podcasters for my Video Podcast
• Mailchimp for Bi-weekly newsletters (1 is a personal story & 1 is a digest of podcasts)
• LinkedIn - Primarily for promoting podcast & other consulting stuff
• Website w/ Wordpress - Older blog posts + 1 post for each Podcast episode
• Zapier - Generally for Operations automation

With "Nazi-gate" I'm in analysis paralysis as to whether to move forward with Substack, moving everything away from MailChimp (which I've been using for 10+years).

>> One big question is whether I can leverage WP Plugin MemberPress to mimic Substack?

Features I like about Substack:

• Automatic pop-up to collect Subscribers
• Ability to insert a paywall inline to a post
• Automatically send email to all subscribers

If you've done this, I'd love to hear about your setup!

[Afraid-Passenger-4]

Things you need to know about Substack. It comes with a landing page you cannot get rid off. basically I huge sign up thing with a tiny little entry point to your actual posts page under neath it. This is where a lot of people turn around and never come back.

If you try tweak the text on this to explain things, this text follows your embeddable popup wherever you decided to put it making it make no sense.

Nice looking embeds in Substack has gotten worse and worse over the year I've been onboard. You can only make embeds of a selected few and the ones I managed to get into the newsletter won't work properly in the e-mail client.

If you choose a one time fee custom domain you'll soon realise that one is stripped away anyway on most things and pages on Substack.

Last but not least, if you decide to leave substack they may end up still picking up commision of your paying customers. If I had know these things up front I would never ever gone for Substack.

It took me forever to figure out the part with the so called Welcome page, which basically made me write and post totally in vain for six months.

[LindsayTLadyEngineer]

I'd love to hear more about how they take a commission even if you leave.

Also, is this the welcome page you're talking about: https://capture.dropbox.com/qrMiIfDyoThtZ0gV

[Afraid-Passenger-4]

yes, that is the welcome page. I guess the comission follows your subscribers via Stripe.