Choosing Substack over self-hosting your Ghost blog: why Substack is the ideal platform to start publishing?
Technical people tend to fall into the build trap (I happened many times to me and still does). When starting publishing content, it's very tempting to build your own setup: here is why you shouldn't.
It’s 2023 and you also decided to start your own blog or newsletter and share your expertise, insights and opinion with the world? Choosing the right platform to launch your content can be a daunting questions. You did not started to produce any content that you already think that this platform decision will determine the success of your project. Let’s be honest, it won’t. At that stage you need to get started as fast as possible, test, learn, iterate with your audience.
In this article, I will quickly explain why, after completing the basic setup of a self-hosted Ghost blog, I finally reversed back and chose Substack to launch The Bootstrapping Dad.
Quick setup and no maintenance: what you want is publishing!
The priority being ready to start writing as fast as possible, both Substack and Ghost allow you to get started quickly as you will be ready to publish from day 1. However, you can get started in less than one hour on Substack while you would need 3-4 hours with a self-hosted Ghost platform. It does not seem a big difference but 2-3 hours could be invested in publishing your first article and start building an audience!
The second argument is zero maintenance. Sooner or later self hosting will require you to do some maintenance. If you are a technical person, it might seems bread a butter routine, however the time that you spend updating and monitoring your system is time that you are not spending on your publications.
Revenue-sharing model with zero upfront costs: all you risk is succeeding!
Substack eliminates upfront costs associated with self-hosting, such as domain registration, web hosting and mailing services so basically you get started for free. Substack charges 10% of your paid subscription revenues (Stripe will also take fees between 1.5% and 3.5% + a flat fee per transaction).
In comparison, spinning self-hosting your Ghost blog seems to break even pretty fast with it’s minimal costs: running a Droplet (virtual machine that run your web-server) on Digital Ocean costs less that 5$ per month.
Considering this, hosting your blog on Ghost is way cheaper as soon as your audience is taking off. The point is, at the beginning, you don’t have an audience yet. You can reassess this decision within a few months when you will have reached 100 paid subscribers.
Native newsletter
Based on my experience, a HUGE plus from Substack is that the platform already has a mailing service integrated. This mean that your newsletter is already integrated into your blog platform which is not the case when self-hosting your Ghost blog.
Ghost comes with a native integration with Mailgun (email provider) which used to have a free-plan for starting publisher which was not limited in time. Now Mailgun’s free-plan expires after 3 months… Afterwards the entry plan will costs your 35$ per month which dramatically increases the costs of self-hosting. After researching for alternative, it seems that you can find a pretty quick way around for your transaction e-mails but the marketing emails (for the newsletter) will require a more elaborated and time consuming solution (I’m putting this in my bucket-list of bootstrapping ideas).
Built-in monetisation features
Starting monetising your content takes less than 15 minutes:
Setup a stripe account
Connect your account to Substack
Define your offering, set your price and you’re done
I did not implement Stripe on my Ghost application but I suppose the integration works in a pretty similar way (any feedback about the process in the comments is welcomed).
Why I initially chose Ghost, and what triggered my decision to switch to Substack
When I first went for setting-up my Ghost blog, I based my decision on three arguments that I happened to be not that critical (or counterproductive):
Honing technical skills (and having full control on my infrastructure): hosting you platform is fun an appealing for technical people: falling into the build trap is so easy. After completing this setup on Ghost and facing the challenge of the newsletter (as mentioned above), I remembered that my goal was to get started with writing and ship my first content as fast as possible so I switched options.
SEO discoverability: Ghost seemed to do a better job here but I found a lot of different opinions regarding Substack. Some would say that people cannot discover your content on Google while other manage to be ranked. At that stage I would say let’s see what happen with The Bootstrapping Dad but I’m not believing in the matra “write and they will come”: you need to earn your audience, whatever it means. There are many possible strategies to start getting traffic and growing your publication: you just need to find the one that works for you.
Audience and traffic ownership: In a similar vein, I was afraid of the stickiness of using Substack, especially with regard to the community and the traffic that I would be building. First, I did not build anything yet and it might take weeks before seeing some signs of traction. Second, you can setup Substack to point to your own domain (Substack will setup the redirections) and export your subscriber list. This mean that, in theory, you still can switch to another platform later on and redirect the traffic to your new infrastructure.
Custom integrations and workflow: even before getting started with writing, I already though about all the integrations and tools that I would need to streamline my publishing such as automatic posting on social media with ChatGPT writing an appealing post to generate a lot of clicks…
Just after having my Ghost blog up and running, I checked how to implement a mailing solution. As there where no intuitive low-cost solution (even if I have some hint on how a solution might look like), I realised that I already spend several hours working on this project without having posted anything: it felt wrong to me. The night after, I decided to switch solution to favour simplicity and time-to-market.
Takeaways: a great platform to start writing content and find your audience
To summarise, Substack provides an ideal platform for new creators (even with the technical abilities to self-host their own platform). Its user-friendly interface, cost-effectiveness, robust features, and access to a supportive community make it the ideal choice to get started as fast as possible and try to build a community around your content.
Note: If you are still wanting to self-host your Ghost blog, I’m thinking about publishing a step-by-step tutorial to get started (if you really need it, let me know, I can prioritise that ;)).
I started on Ghost and later moved to Substack. There’s just one feature I miss: the ability to show only part of a post to non-subscribed readers. I really hope Substack adds this sooner or later, because it was fundamental for driving conversions.