I ditched Hubspot for Substack: I'm sick of collecting customer data

I had email FOMO. I could be making a million dollars a year from my subscriber list! So I capitulated and started collecting data.

The best insight from that data set is how much time a person spends working on projects that run contrary to their personality type. Lots of work is not tiring, but lots of work outside of our sweet spot is exhausting. And, by the way, paying attention to all the little pieces of data is completely not my strength.

So, like Tom Sawyer painting a fence, I told my son if he learned how to use CRM software -- specifically, mine -- he'd always be able to get a job. "Customer relationship marketing!" I told him.

"You mean instagram?" That's what he said. I should have known right then to just forget email forever. But you know that theory about sunk costs? When it comes to email marketing I'm the Titanic.

After two days of learning the ins and outs of Hubspot, my son said no one should have to do this for a living: "This is like Death of a Salesman!"

And just like that, my Hubspot helper quit. So I decided I'd learn the Hubspot intricacies myself. What I learned is that everything I was paying for were tools to form a relationship with potential customers, but I already know the people on my list. Many them have been receiving my blog posts for 15 years. I've exchanged personal emails with about half the people -- 25,000 of them.

Hubspot recommended that I delete unengaged customers. But I realized that many people receive an email from me and don't open it because they go to my blog to read and see the comments. I only realized this after trying to figure out why Hubspot systematically deleted the commenters I'm most familiar with.

Luckily, you are vocal if you stop receiving emails:

I don’t know why I never receive your posts in my email anymore, but I woke up in the night wondering if you’d died and that was the reason you hadn’t posted.

So I’m relieved that you’re alive and I’ll subscribe again to see if that works, otherwise I would never have known that you didn’t have cancer.

I spent two months testing every unengaged email in gmail. And I got the nicest emails back - almost everyone asked to stay on the list. So I looked around for a way to send my blog posts without having to pay $500 a month. ?

I thought this would be a good use for my Patreon. But Patreon wouldn't let me import my list. Then I thought of Substack. I googled, "Substack is evil" to see if there was anything I should know. A top result was a post from Nick Wohlny who said Substack is terrible because you have to have a huge list in order for it to work.

SOLD!

So I'm going to use Substack because it let me upload 40,000 contacts. My posts are still on my blog and LinkedIn so hopefully there won't be collateral damage if this is not a good decision. Meanwhile, in case you're doing the math, If every subscriber paid $25/year, I'd make that $1 million.