Latest / Content, Briefly / Talk Me Out of Moving to Substack

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Talk Me Out of Moving to Substack · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [upbeat music] This episode of Content Briefly is brought to you by our friends at Ahrefs. Do you want to make your business discoverable in search, AI, and beyond?
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  And Site Explorer, which shows you pages and keywords bringing you the most organic traffic and who links to your website.
• 0:48
  Sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools with the link in the show notes to improve your website's SEO performance and grow your traffic from search. Before we start today, Chloe, I really want to ask you about your T-shirt.
• 0:58
  For those who are not watching on video- Everyone... which is everyone, can you please tell us what's on your T-shirt? So this is a Christmas gift from a friend.
• 1:07
  It says, "Prosecco mood," and I took my first spin class in, like, a year and a half today. So when I was trying to figure out what to wear to go meet a friend for a drink later, I was like, "This feels appropriate."
• 1:21
  'Cause the second I finished the spin class, I was in a prosecco mood, but that was at, like, two o'clock. [laughs] So I needed to wait at least a little bit. [laughs] I'm always in a prosecco mood, I feel like.
• 1:32
  [laughs] I feel like we should make it happen for the show, other than the fact that for me, w- we're recording this at 2:00 PM on Wednesdays, which is probably not- It's fine... the ideal time to crack a bottle.
• 1:39
  Five o'clock somewhere. I feel like if work is asynchronous, though, other things can be asynchronous too, right? It's true. My brain can be asynchronous from my body. Yeah. [laughs] Exactly.
• 1:48
  [laughs] Thank you guys for doing this. We're back with another episode with Chloe, our third co-host, and I think we have a good topic today to chat through.
• 1:57
  Unfortunately, we were just debating this before we started recording, so we're gonna try to recapture that [laughs] in a second, Eric. But basically, I posted- Chloe got fired up. I know.
• 2:05
  Well, first Chloe said- [laughs]... "I'm not sure I have any strong opinions about this," and then came at us with some strong opinions, which is actually exactly what we're hoping for.
• 2:13
  So I posted the thing on LinkedIn the other day, and basically said, like, "Content marketers, if you could drop your CMS for Substack or Beehiiv, would you do it?"
• 2:22
  And the responses range from like, "Yes, that would be amazing because I'm so sick of WordPress and all these janky plugins," to, "No, you give up all control over the relationship with your reader," and, "Why would you build on rented land?"
• 2:36
  And then some stuff in between.
• 2:38
  Now, as I often do on LinkedIn, I realize, like, there was not enough context in the post to kinda like make the full argument of why I actually think this is a pretty viable strategy for a lot of companies.
• 2:47
  So I will just briefly do that, and then I'm hoping we just have a discussion on the CMS. Like, would you... Not really the blog. I feel like the company blog is already dead. That's my opinion.
• 2:57
  I feel like this is more about the CMS, like where the content actually lives, like, where its home is. So I'm working with a consulting client. We are spinning up a new content strategy.
• 3:06
  I'm pushing hard for Substack because I feel it's a perfect overlap of the type of content we wanna do and the people we wanna reach, and to me, that's the most important.
• 3:14
  And then there's this third factor of it's just so fast. I can make a Substack, you know, you can only customize it so much, and you can start publishing pretty much instantly.
• 3:24
  I actually don't-- I, I think that, like, going the blog route, like if we were gonna, you know, do Webflow or WordPress or something else like that, it would take so much longer.
• 3:33
  And actually, I think there's something else there.
• 3:35
  I think that if the content lives on the site, I think it sends a certain message to the potential readers about what this is, and I think company websites have been so bloated with marketing and SEO fluff over the years that there's been a loss of trust.
• 3:48
  So all this context didn't make it into my LinkedIn post, obviously. But with that additional context, Eric and Chloe, what do you think?
• 3:55
  Like, if you're starting right now, not starting a brand-new company or a brand-new content program necessarily, more that you have the opportunity to pick up a content program and run with it and have your fingerprint on it.
• 4:09
  Is this an avenue you would go, or are there so many it depends factors that it's difficult to answer? Can I ask a couple clarifying questions of you first before we go on? Sure.
• 4:18
  So can you just summarize why Substack over CMS other than the convenience factor, like from the reader trust perspective? Yeah. Can you just go a little deeper into that? Yeah, for sure.
• 4:29
  I feel like it's not-- Substack in this case is, I just think, the right channel for the reader.
• 4:35
  I think there are other versions of this for other audiences, so we can sort of abstract Substack into like a hyper-focused content channel that is a very nice fit with the audience you wanna reach.
• 4:49
  So that's the first thing. The other thing is I want people to land there, and I want it to be abundantly obvious what they are getting. And this is sort of my problem with the way content is organized in a CMS.
• 4:59
  It's like it just captures everything, and then you kinda tag it and categorize it, and it's just this mess of stuff on a website which also has all the stuff about your pricing and your features and your help doc.
• 5:09
  And what I want is to get rid of all that. I just want content, and in this particular case, there's really, like, one type of content I want.
• 5:16
  So I guess this is like a new fancy way of saying I want a microsite, you know, or I want like... I don't know what. There's probably like older versions of this too where people would publish on other platforms.
• 5:27
  It's just, it's not so much about Substack in and of itself as it is about, like, it just feels like a great fit for this particular use case. Chloe, why don't you go first?
• 5:35
  I see you- Did you have any other questions before I jump in- Thinking... with thoughts? [laughs] That was my question. I think that in answer to your question, I think it, there's definitely a lot of it depends.
• 5:47
  Like, I think I would have 1,000 questions before actually diving into this myself. I don't necessarily think that the company blogs are dead.
• 5:58
  I just think that people have been doing-- A lot of companies have been doing a really shitty job with them. So I think that shitty blogs should be dead, and shitty content should be dead. That-Is fine.
• 6:12
  I don't know if I'm allowed to swear on here, but there we go. Yeah, no, you're good. Excellent.
• 6:17
  [laughs] I think, like, my first question, which doesn't even have to do with the type of content you're putting on there or anything like that, is just whenever you have some sort of barrier to entry, I just worry about, like, the friction.
• 6:33
  So there's a couple things here. Like, I worry about...
• 6:36
  I've recently just started signing up for Substacks myself on a personal level that are more, you know, just personal bloggers that I follow that have switched over s- to Substack for one reason or another.
• 6:50
  I still follow their blogs because it's different content, so it gives me more of, like, a personal, I don't know, insider view. So I like it.
• 6:57
  It's also a blog that I've been following for probably the past, like, 13 years, so I'm very, very invested. I think that it also depends on, like, your audience as well because Substack might just be new to them.
• 7:13
  I feel like as marketers we're in this very insular bubble where we, as marketers, are inherently very skeptical of content, of blogs, of, like, SEO junk, as you said, but is that our entire audience?
• 7:30
  Like, is that actually the audience that you're trying to go for?
• 7:33
  And I think that's a really important question because if your audience isn't, you know, quote unquote, whatever, early adopters or something like that, are they going to want to go jump to a different platform?
• 7:45
  Are they gonna want to get rid of that ease of access if they are already engaging with your product? I don't know. Those are just a few of my initial thoughts on it. Can I ask you a follow-up question? Yeah.
• 7:58
  You mentioned following blogs. How do you follow blogs today? Is it primarily through newsletters?
• 8:05
  Like, someone publishes a thing on their blog, sends you a newsletter to let you know it's there, then you click and go read it?
• 8:10
  This is a blog that I've been following for so long that, like, I visit the website that the blog is hosted on myself several times a week.
• 8:18
  I just got all these, like, warm, fuzzy feelings [laughs] that I haven't felt in a while. I know. I can't remember the last time I visited a website....
• 8:24
  jumping the gun in terms of, like, if you've built that brand affinity, people will go visit your content [laughs] like- Maybe.
• 8:34
  I think- At my old job, and, like, I'll toot my own h- horn here for a second, but, like, people would talk about how much they loved our blog and how much they loved our content and how much they resonated with it, and we were very clearly selling a product, right?
• 8:47
  We were a vendor.
• 8:49
  But I made sure that our content was varied enough and delivered enough value that people would come back, and I think people have for a while lost the plot on that and are maybe just coming back around full circle, which is exciting.
• 9:05
  Let's stop creating shitty content. [laughs] I agree with some of what you're saying.
• 9:09
  Like, yeah, I agr- obviously agree with not creating shitty content, but I kind of feel that the writing is on the wall, that the trend of people visiting websites is declining dramatically, you know?
• 9:20
  And, like, in the content space, like, we think of SEO as, like, the kind of- Mm-hmm... the tip of the spear there. Like, SEO traffic is falling off because every platform keeps the traffic for themselves.
• 9:30
  AI overviews, increasingly the way people use ChatGPT for search, same thing's happening on social.
• 9:36
  It's, like, so difficult to get people onto a website, at least using the tactics that we would have used even just a couple of years ago.
• 9:44
  And so I think this is als- like, while Substack may not be, like, the perfect answer in this particular use case, like, it, I think it is a perfect fit for the audience we wanna reach, but I think it's also me trying to think of, like, how do we get ahead of the curve a little bit here so that a year from now we're not like, "Oh, wow, we did all this stuff, but we couldn't get anybody on the website."
• 10:03
  You know what I mean? And you're gonna have a similar problem with Substack. Like, people still have to subscribe to it in order to find it.
• 10:08
  They're probably not going to find it in search, and that's not really what we're going for anyways. Eric, you're nodding along. You have a Beehiiv at Dock, don't you? Yeah, so I have three follow-up points here.
• 10:18
  Uh, in- indulge me, and I'll walk through them. I've taken notes while you guys were talking.
• 10:22
  So I think the first kind of thing to untangle is the distinction of blog versus newsletter, and I think the traditional blog that used to be, like, Jimmy, CEO, writes for his company and writes down a 200-word, you know, here's the features we released this month, but that's not really a newsletter in the content sense.
• 10:43
  It's, like, product updates. And rather than launch, like, a really content-y newsletter purely to those folks, we decided, why don't we launch a separate Beehiiv newsletter that people can subscribe to?
• 10:56
  It's much more enticing than, like, sign up for Dock content. It's like, no, here's a specific newsletter, Grow and Tell.
• 11:03
  It's about founder growth stories or early s- sales leaders or early marketing leaders, like, very clear point of view. Sign up for that.
• 11:10
  I think that's an easier ask of people to sign up for than sign up for our company blog where who knows what you're gonna get. The, it's the who knows part that I wanna avoid.
• 11:20
  What's the overlap, though, on that audience? Like- Yeah... that's what I'm wondering, right? Is, like, where brand loyalty comes into this. Yeah, so you know what we did is we double-dip and sort of I put my- Yeah...
• 11:31
  I've landed on the fence on this and said, "Okay, I wanna reach a new audience with my newsletter, and we wanna be able to promote it."
• 11:37
  And so we did it on Beehiiv for whatever reason, but one of them is because they have a paid network component where I can pay to be in other people's newsletters. And so we can advertise...
• 11:49
  Like, we can use some ad budget to grow the newsletter, which then we have that audience, and we can, you know, do whatever with that audience.
• 11:56
  We also host that content on our website, though, and then I send some of that to our big email list.
• 12:02
  The thing is, like, the Dock emails, I don't really wanna hit that list too often with, like, "Okay, I'm sending you a weekly product update. I don't also wanna send you a biweekly newsletter."
• 12:12
  Like, I really don't wanna email people more than once a week for Dock. And so basically it gave me a place to build a new audience over here.
• 12:19
  If we want to, I will send certain editions of the newsletter to our main list or say, you know, "Here's the latest four editions"Subscribe here to make sure you get every one.
• 12:28
  Like doing a bit of cheating and a, a bit of mixing, but I felt like I didn't wanna muddy the waters too much with like blog or newsletter, and so we kinda ended up on the fence.
• 12:39
  I don't know if that answers your question, Jimmy, about why.
• 12:42
  No, it's interest-- You talked about a couple things that I love because I'm bringing a bias into this because I want to do this for this company, so I'm like, I'm taking notes 'cause I'm gonna use some of what you just said.
• 12:55
  [laughs] I mean, you could've chosen, you know, Mailchimp, and it would've had basically the same effect, whereas I feel like... Sorry.
• 13:01
  The big difference being that you can pay for exposure in Beehiiv, and that's very important. Yeah, I think that's really smart. Yeah. And I did look into Beehiiv a lot a-as well as I've been going through this.
• 13:11
  It's far, far more customizable. L- you know, like one piece of pushback that I've gotten on the Substack thing is that like all the tracking and attribution and data stuff they have is like totally out the window.
• 13:24
  You cannot do it, whereas Beehiiv actually does have an API. There are some built-in integrations.
• 13:29
  Like, you actually get to keep at least some of that, like, while utilizing this, like, insanely powerful and specific email tool to help grow the audience.
• 13:39
  You know, but a lot of what you get from Beehiiv, also you could get from ConvertKit or Mailchimp or... Y- you know what I mean? It's like if the thing is you wanna send emails.
• 13:46
  But another thing you said that I really liked was that, you know, y-you don't wanna hit the main list too often, so by segmenting it out in this way, giving it its own content brand, Grow & Tell, which I think is fantastic, you know, you set an expectation.
• 13:57
  People are coming here to read stuff, you know?
• 13:59
  My guess is the engagement with that list is probably really high, whereas engagement when you send content out through the main list is probably low because people ended up there for, you know, maybe half a dozen different reasons in the first place, and only one of those reasons was to get content.
• 14:14
  So I like the s- I like the specificity of it. I think our open rate on the Grow & Tell newsletter is over 50%, and then for our Doc emails, it's a classic, you know, 30%. So definitely the content gets access more.
• 14:27
  And I'd be super curious, and Eric, you don't need to tell us your entire content strategy here, but I would definitely be curious about the percentage of clients versus prospect and, like, where those people are in your marketing funnel overall.
• 14:42
  Because, again, like, I kinda just keep on coming back to brand affinity and brand loyalty.
• 14:47
  I'm wondering, would that be something like an insider view for clients, and it's like, "Well, once you get with us, you get access to all of this value add kind of stuff," for example, and then only prospects, like, get a flavor of it.
• 15:01
  I think
• 15:03
  splitting out what your, you know, run-of-the-mill content newsletter is versus having this one that's much more pointed, it's just interesting because I think you can get a lot of data and just, like, content interest from it.
• 15:17
  Yeah, for sure. I think it's partially the list is muddied by the fact that I do Superpath, and so we launched the newsletter, and I said, "Hey, I launched this other newsletter. Follow me over here."
• 15:29
  So I think maybe, like, a third of the subscribers right now are from Superpath. So, A, thank you for subscribing, but, B, that, like, juices the numbers a little bit. It's not necessarily all our target audience.
• 15:39
  But what I have noticed is, like, all our other emails come in from people signing up for our product. Like, we're kind of product-led in that way, right?
• 15:48
  You can sign up for Doc for free, and then you get dumped into our big email list. This list has, like, some really interesting-- The list, it's so small.
• 15:56
  It's a few hundred people signed up for the newsletter 'cause we just launched it a few months ago. But there have been really interesting brands and, like, non-Doc users who have signed up for it. So it's definitely...
• 16:06
  I mean, this is getting away from the CMS versus whatever question, but, like, yes, having a newsletter that's separate from, like, all of our content has helped drive, like, different people at least and some really notable folks, and we end up on their radar because we have, like, something narrower that they can subscribe to.
• 16:25
  I do wanna, though, like, counter your original point, Jimmy, about is the CMS dead? Because, like, Doc, for example, we went really heavy on SEO on our blog. That's done really well for us.
• 16:38
  80% of our business comes from SEO traffic to largely through the blog. So, like, I don't know where else I would put 10 best digital sales rooms compared. [laughs] You know?
• 16:48
  I, I agree that's not, like, what the blog is anymore, but I think that section of our website drives most of our business.
• 16:55
  So, like, w- maybe if someone started today from scratch and didn't have a f- big freelancer budget or, you know, you didn't have the capacity of writing 10 SEO blog posts per month, all you're gonna do is write, like, "I'm Jimmy, the founder of Superpath.
• 17:12
  Here's my thoughts this week." I think that's a good case for just start a Substack. But if you're like, "We're gonna be this big, serious SaaS business that wants one million customers," I don't see...
• 17:22
  Like, you could just call it resources or whatever, and maybe that's not what a blog is anymore. But I feel like you still need that. Like, s- Webflow is indispensable for me to our business, right? Yeah, yeah.
• 17:33
  I think, okay, that's a very interesting point. I think it's adjacent to the problem I'm trying to solve, though. Like, this company has all that as well.
• 17:41
  They have resources and guides and all that stuff, and it gets lots of SEO traffic. I wanna get away from that, though. I'm, like, running the other... I'm not saying kill it.
• 17:49
  I'm just saying, like, for the style of content that I'm trying to create, which is has somebody's name and face on it, and, like, this is their ideas, w-which is a style of content that I think people like reading because it's not company publishing 10 tips for this or that, I think it has to be distanced from everything else, you know?
• 18:07
  Like, a million years ago in 2018 when I wrote this blog post for Animalz, it's called, like, you know, Your Blog Is Not a Publication, this is, like, kind of what I was trying to get at, although my thinking has changed on it, where I feel like a lot of company blogs were trying to accomplish two things at the same time with their content.
• 18:24
  One was build up this library of resources, which is exactly what you said, like, kinda 10 best digital sales rooms because that was an opportunity to earn SEO traffic.
• 18:32
  But they wereDoing that in a way, they're, like, trying to get people to find it when they're searching for stuff, but also publishing in a way that an actual publication would, where they assume, like, a regular readership.
• 18:43
  But those are two very different things.
• 18:44
  So maybe what I'm saying is, there's the library stuff, which probably does belong in your CMS, and then there's the publication stuff, which should probably live wherever it's easiest, fastest, and most accessible to reach the people you wanna reach.
• 18:58
  Well then I'm just curious, I mean, like, does that content still deserve a corner of your website in some way, or is it exclusive?
• 19:07
  And I think that gets back to Eric's point about distribution, because I remember I've had so many conversations about what, you know, types of newsletters to send out, what types of content to put on our website.
• 19:20
  At one point, the CEO at one of my companies, we really wanted to put together this, you know, CEO corner that was going to be more, you know, thought leadership-y, definitely not a sell, but it was also gonna talk about, like, organically, how he was using the technology that we sold, but doing it in a very, like, human way.
• 19:42
  And so my original thought was like, okay, is that just, like, a miniseries that still lives on the website, still lives on the blog, or in today's world, would that translate to just its own exclusive substack, and then would you then repurpose it?
• 19:57
  Like, right? Like, and I think that's what's... what I love about content strategy, is that, like, there's no right answer.
• 20:04
  Like, we're not gonna sit here and be like, "Everyone on this call is going to be one way or the other." It's very dependent on your audience, your business goals, like, what you're actually trying to do.
• 20:14
  But I do think that it maybe just closes the door on the types of content that you can put on your website, 'cause I don't see why you can't have it on your website still, just in an appropriate way. Yeah, yeah.
• 20:26
  Maybe you can. There's actually a good example of exactly what you just described, Chloe, which is Intercom has this, like, AI support chatbot thing called Fin. And it's actually kinda crazy.
• 20:38
  I didn't realize it, but I interacted with another company's Fin the other day, and it actually did solve my thing.
• 20:44
  Uh, anyways, they have a blog called, I think it's called the Ideas Blog, on fin.ai, and it's exactly that. It's, like, just really cool thought leadership. It's a dedicated part of the site.
• 20:57
  It's not garbled in with a bunch of other marketing material.
• 21:00
  It's just, like, mostly founders and product leaders in this case, kinda like, doing, like, the exact thing that, like, people always have loved reading, kinda like behind the scenes, the frameworks they use to build the product, like, stuff like that.
• 21:12
  And then there is a separate place where all the other stuff lives. In this case, though, they are keeping it all on the same website.
• 21:19
  And maybe if you go that route, you just have to be a little bit more nuanced with the way that you segment subscribers and signups- Mm-hmm...
• 21:27
  so that you don't run into this issue where you have a big email list that you're constantly hitting with different types of stuff, and then the people who wanted product stuff unsubscribe because you sent them too much content, and then you lose the chance to sell them something later.
• 21:39
  Well, and that's where, like, the whole argument, which is could be a whole nother podcast, is like the client newsletter versus the prospect newsletter versus this versus that.
• 21:47
  Like, at one point, we were just creating, like, three or four different kinds of newsletters, and I was like, "S- this is not efficient."
• 21:54
  I wanna make sure, just briefly, that we give credit to MKT1, who probably, I don't know, a couple months ago, they published an article and a podcast actually called Is the Company Blog Dead?
• 22:05
  And I'd say it took on a slightly different flavor than this conversation, but I'm gonna link to it in the show notes because there's a lot of really interesting discussion in that.
• 22:11
  And interestingly, it was sparked by a reader writing in saying, "I think I'm gonna switch to Substack. Talk me out of it." [laughs] And, and they did, I think, in that particular case.
• 22:21
  But interestingly, the person that wrote in to say that was Matt Hodges, who came on this very podcast to explain why he chose Substack as the company, the platform for, in this case, a prior company that he worked for's blog, instead of going with Webflow or WordPress or whatever else.
• 22:39
  So anyways, kinda long way of saying, like, there's a lot of nuance here. There's a lot of nuance here. Mm-hmm. I...
• 22:44
  but one thing I did sense in the comments in the LinkedIn post was that I kinda feel like a lot of people were saying like, "Don't do that because it's not the right way to do that."
• 22:52
  Like, that, that we as content marketers somehow, like, you know, sort of lose our credibility or we lose the value that we can provide these companies if we start relying too heavily on these platforms and not kinda like building on our own ground.
• 23:06
  And to be honest, I used to feel that way, too. I don't feel that way anymore. Like, I feel like the way that work is evolving right now, it's our job actually to experiment really quickly.
• 23:16
  You know, like, the work cycles are just happening so much faster now. So I think you actually do have to be, if you wanna get ahead, you have to experiment a lot, and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
• 23:24
  You know what I mean? Like, luckily, Substack is kinda this middle ground of, like, it's not truly rented land. Like, you can export your subscribers and copy and paste your blog posts, you know?
• 23:33
  And yeah, like, that'd be kind of annoying to have wasted time doing it, but it's not like building a presence on LinkedIn where if LinkedIn one day falls out of favor, you, you can't do anything else.
• 23:43
  Well, it's like five years ago there was all these arguments for, like, starting a blog or a separate copy land on Medium and not having that on your core site.
• 23:54
  So, like, I remember resisting against that because of the amount of resources we had and the fact that we didn't have, you know, the strong point of view that made sense for it, like, we were really focused on what was driving revenue at the moment.
• 24:09
  But I feel like it's a similar type of argument in terms of discoverability, like, what people's mindsets are when they're actually on that, you know, that content land. I don't know why I keep on saying content land.
• 24:24
  [laughs] That, that place. And you're not gonna know that until you really kinda get to know your audience.
• 24:29
  I think I was saying in our earlier conversation, it's really dependent on, like, how open your audience is to it, if they've ever experienced anything like the Substacks, Beehives, Medium, et cetera, et cetera, or if they're really used to just one-One place.
• 24:46
  Like, is that barrier to entry going to not create enough friction so that you then stunt your subscriber growth? And you're not gonna know until you try it. Yes. But I think it makes sense to have a goal, see...
• 24:59
  have a timeline, and then be like, "This is working for us," or, "This isn't." Yeah. I'm so glad you brought up Medium. That's, like, the perfect analogy in this situation.
• 25:08
  Like, probably, like, 2015 or 2016, Janessa Lance, who also has been on this podcast, worked at HubSpot, created a Medium publication where it was, like, very editorial, and it was a lot of, like, you know, f- mostly founders writing these kinda, like, essay-style pieces on, you know, whatever, a variety of different topics, but, like, it was really good, and it was kind of...
• 25:30
  I just remember thinking at the time, like, "Why does it have to be on Medium to actually be good?" You know? And part of it's because Medium sets the proper constraints. And that's my point, Jimmy.
• 25:38
  You can have that good stuff on your website still. Yes, but all the marketing, all the temptations that marketers face start creeping into stuff on your blog, whereas on, like... You, you know what I mean?
• 25:50
  Like, on Medium, and now I think on Substack, it's like, that stuff will get sniffed out in a second. Nobody's gonna wanna read it. Like, in order for it to feel like other Substack content, it has to be,
• 26:00
  you know, whatever, thought leadership-y, and have frameworks, and mental models, and be written by a person, and use I and us and we.
• 26:09
  It, you know, like, it has to feel like a person actually wrote it, and I feel like that's one of the things I'm after is, like, if it's here, w- we can't mess with it that much.
• 26:17
  It just has to be this thing, or else it won't work at all.
• 26:21
  So that's interesting, because I would argue every company that I've worked for, like, I've fought to have the I and the we, to have bylines, to have, like, these sort of mini brands underneath people, to be like, "Okay, here's their specialty.
• 26:35
  Here's what they're gonna talk about, and then here's how this fits in." So again, like, I don't see it still as, like, an and/or. Hmm. Okay. This is good.
• 26:43
  You're challenging my thinking on this in a way that is really... that I think is healthy, 'cause in my mind, I'm just like, "No, Substack." [laughs] Like, why not? And it's helpful.
• 26:52
  Like, I'm having this conversation with, you know, a CEO of a company.
• 26:56
  It's helpful to hash it out with other content marketers, because, like, we've all gone through, like, kinda various versions of this same scenario, which is, like, we just wanna reach people.
• 27:04
  Like, we just wanna publish stuff we're actually really proud of, and we wanna support the business, and... So anyways, thank you for rounding out my thinking on this a little bit. No, I love it.
• 27:11
  You've got me thinking of other things too, so this is good. Cool. All right. Should we plug some stuff? Let's plug Prosecco time. Yeah. [laughs] Or whatever, whatever the shirt was.
• 27:21
  [laughs] What are your guys' poison of choice? We should start selling those on the Superpath merch store. [laughs] Are you whiskey men, beer men, prosecco? All of the above. I like beer. Within reason.
• 27:35
  That is my drink of choice. We should make it what... You know what? We actually really should publish a video version of this, because now Chloe's dog is here. [laughs] So maybe we will publish this one on YouTube.
• 27:45
  Oh, great. [laughs] A couple just quick Superpath things. The September LinkedIn challenge is happening now. If you're listening to this, you're not too late.
• 27:54
  You still have probably, I don't know, two-thirds of the month if you wanna come and join in the fun. Basically, every day in Slack, Eric posts a thread.
• 28:03
  Everybody goes and posts on LinkedIn, shares the link to their post, and it's just a way to, like, hold people accountable to writing more. You know, writing is such a great way to clarify your own thinking.
• 28:12
  So, like, when I publish something, like, should I go to Substack with no thinking at all? That would be a bad example.
• 28:18
  Like, a good example would be you give it a lot more, [laughs] like, critical thought before you do that, and this is exactly what the LinkedIn challenge holds you accountable to. So we did this earlier in the year.
• 28:28
  It was a huge hit.
• 28:28
  People loved it, and a bunch of people had, like, really interesting experiences come from it, too, like, you know, the people they connected with, in some cases gigs that were picked up, stuff like that.
• 28:37
  The 30-day free trial also aligns very nicely with the LinkedIn challenge, so you can try it free and participate in the challenge without paying anything, and then if you decide it's right for you, you have 30 days before we actually charge you.
• 28:49
  So superpath.co to get information there. Anything I've missed related to stuff going on in Pro that we should mention? Yeah, we did our first AI show-and-tell a few weeks ago, which was amazing.
• 28:59
  Just a kind of a one-hour session where three people, myself included, just showed little AI things they built, mix of vibe-coded things, and just... I just showed a ChatGPT project. We're gonna keep...
• 29:10
  The feedback was so good. Like, the chat was popping off the whole time. Everyone was really vibing, so we're gonna keep those going every month. So we'll have three to four presenters show off AI things.
• 29:20
  The next one's in a couple weeks. And then we have our usual one-on-one pairings, where you meet other folks, and then our social group calls, which have been a continued hit with the content marketers. Awesome. Cool.
• 29:34
  Thank you, Eric. Thank you, Chloe, for being here. Superpath.co to get details on how to join us in Superpath Pro, and otherwise, we'll see you next time. Thanks, folks. Thanks, everyone.
• 29:47
  [outro music]