When I decided to start this newsletter, I knew I’d be writing a bunch of stuff. I also knew that stuff would need to be published and then promoted.1
As I looked into options, a few immediately emerged. Substack seemed like an obvious option; it’s an all-in-one platform — with tens of millions of active users — that combines the publishing part, the newsletter part, and the social media part.
I tried it. I didn’t love it.
It seemed insular, self-referential, and was largely writers writing for other writers. It seemed like a great platform if you're a journalist, an essayist, or someone whose target audience is other people who like to read newsletters about newsletters.2 Every interaction felt designed not to be focused on connecting with the individual publication, but on connecting with the Substack platform as a whole.
I potentially could have pushed through all of that if there was a good reason to, like evidence that my target audience was using Substack, but there just wasn’t. I’m trying to reach marketing practitioners and the executives who oversee them. As best I can tell, they're not browsing Substack looking for their next subscription.
This is the whole point of developing a target audience, personas, and channel strategies. It gives a foundation for these kinds of decisions. A platform with tens of millions of people seems like an obvious opportunity, but if it’s not your target audience then it’s just you shouting into a very large crowd who doesn’t care what you have to say. It’s essentially the platform-selection version of the vanity metrics problem: a big number that feels important but isn't.
It’s an easy mistake to make. A channel strategy will see a platform like Substack and immediately notice its gravitational pull. There’s social proof and a built-in community, and it feels like a legitimate choice because so many people have already made the choice to be part of it.
But "everyone is there" is not a channel strategy; the criterion you’re looking for is whether your target audience is there.3
For me and for what I’m trying to accomplish, I’m trying to build an audience of people focused on practical, fundamentals-driven marketing, and demonstrate that a boring, deliberate, process-first approach to marketing actually works. For that, I needed a platform that lets me own my audience, control my brand, track meaningful data, connect more directly with each individual, and build something that isn't dependent on trends or the platform's own ecosystem to survive.
Those types of decisions become obvious as long as you do the upfront work of establishing what you’re trying to accomplish (business objectives) and who you’re trying to reach (target audience).4 For me, promoting the newsletter will be handled separately across LinkedIn, SEO, paid media, and more — separating the publishing strategy from the promotional strategy.
That's how channel strategy is supposed to work. You don't start with the channel and work backwards. You start with the objective and the audience, and the channel follows from that.
The fact that I ended up on a less culturally prominent platform, with a custom URL that nobody's heard of, running a newsletter about the value of boring marketing decisions is either deeply ironic or exactly the point.
1 Astute marketers are well aware of those being two separate things, and have spent many a meeting explaining how you can’t just publish a thing and be done with it.
2 Yes, I see the irony in using my newsletter to write about newsletters while calling out people who like to read newsletters about newsletters.
3 It’s the same reason most Super Bowl ads for B2B companies are a waste of money.
4 I went with a no-frills platform called Beehiiv that checked all those boxes. So far so good.
