Every week, experts, coaches, and practitioners ask me if they should move to Substack. My answer always comes down to one thing—where are you starting from?
I hear this most often from three types of experts:
- Those who already have an active website, an email list, and a body of work.
- Those who may have started a website a few years ago, written a handful of articles, and let things go quiet.
- And those who are thinking about taking their expertise online for the first time.
These aren’t dabblers. They’re practitioners, coaches, teachers, writers—people who have put in the work, built something real, and still feel that tug when a colleague insists Substack is the better path.
The authority you’re after? It isn’t hiding on Substack, Instagram, or any other platform. It lives on land you own.
One Owns, One Rents
A doctor client recently wrote me asking about moving to Substack. A colleague was encouraging her to start writing there. My client had been publishing on her own site for years, while he had been publishing on Substack.
I replied with much of what you’ll read in this article. Then I did something anyone searching for a reliable expert would do: I Googled him.
He was nowhere to be found. His years-old Substack didn’t appear. His name didn’t rank. He was effectively invisible.
Next, I tried Perplexity, the rapidly growing AI search engine. My client came up immediately for her expertise, with links to all the right pages. Her peer on Substack remained invisible.
That’s not some technical glitch; that’s a real problem.
When someone Googles your name or specialty, what appears is your first authority test. What they see when they land on your site is the second.
When publishers, podcast hosts, collaborators, or potential clients want someone with your expertise, they don’t search inside Substack. They search Google or an AI search engine.
My client already ranks on the first page of Google for both her name and her specialty. She is findable. She holds the position he’s been writing toward for years.
Why the Search Test Matters
Here’s the real question: Should you trade a growing authority position for a channel built around the platform’s interests—not yours?
For most people who ask me, the answer is no.
If you already own your website, your list, and your story—even if things have been quiet for a while—Substack is rarely an upgrade. More often, it’s a step backward into a system designed to grow itself, not you.
Once someone finds you, publishers, podcast bookers, collaborators, and high-value clients look closely at your website, your email content, and your social presence.
A clean, owned site with clear positioning and a body of long-form writing signals you’re established. The list you control is what shows you own the relationship with your audience.
You’ve Got Something to Build On
Most of my clients already have that foundation. They did the harder, smarter work years ago. Yet the Substack question keeps coming up, and it’s always presented as “easy discovery,” “built-in audience,” or “everyone seems to be there.”
We heard the same promises from Facebook, Instagram, and every other platform when they were new.
Then reality set in.
Not everyone reading this has an active site or list, and that’s fine. Maybe you’ve got a website with a handful of articles that never quite got traction, or an email list gathering dust.
These aren’t failures; I call these “assets temporarily on hold.” Your domain might have been registered long enough for Google to trust it. Your articles are indexed, even if it’s been a while. And those people on your list signed up because something you wrote or said resonated with them.
Substack asks you to walk away from all of that and start over on their ground, so you can help them build their audience instead of yours.
Even a partially owned foundation puts you in a stronger position than starting fresh on borrowed ground. You’ve got something to build on.
If you want to understand why Substack’s pull is so strong right now—and why those who already built the real foundation should stay put—keep reading.
The Substack Pitch – and the Reality
Substack’s pitch is seductive because it looks so effortless: Easy setup, seamless payments, and built-in discovery. Write what matters with the promise of direct patronage with no gatekeepers, just you and your readers. That’s the pitch anyway.
The discovery tools — Recommendations and Notes — are essentially a list-swap arrangement presented as community-building. You check a box and another writer recommends you to their list. They check a box, and you recommend them to yours.
Your readers start getting newsletters they never asked for, and most of them will never see or open your emails.
High Counts, Low Intent
Sure, Substack can grow your subscriber count. The problem is that for most serious experts, that number stops reflecting reality pretty quickly.
The internal dashboard makes it look like everything is working, but dig into the actual behavior—open rates, click-throughs, replies—and what you find looks a lot like an Instagram following: easy to inflate, hard to monetize, and even harder to build genuine resonance with.
Spend any time in creator forums, and you’ll find writers venting about exactly this. Churn is higher, engagement is lower, and the readers who actually buy something, reply, or show up consistently almost always came in from somewhere else — a podcast, a shared article, a Google search.
Those readers already had a reason to trust you before they hit subscribe. The ones the platform delivered showed up because an algorithm put your name in front of them at the right moment, and that’s about as thin a thread as you can build a business on.
This is the Substack version of Instagram followers who never engage—or worse, emails that land in spam. The high-quality audience you want comes from intentional external funnels—people who already know and trust your point of view.
For most experts who’ve already built something they own, Substack is a distraction, not an upgrade.
The MLM Parallel: Recruiting on Someone Else’s Stage
This “easy discovery” promise has another layer that feels uncomfortably familiar, and I’ll freely admit I might be hyper-aware of it because of how I started my career.
Fresh out of school, I spent a decade as marketing director for MLM start-ups. This was back when many were still founded by actual doctors and passionate researchers with genuinely useful products, growing through authentic word-of-mouth on bootstrapped budgets.
When serious money started flowing, the speculators followed. Their favorite tactic was to find the top performer at a competing company, wave a bigger check and a fancier title, and watch their entire downline follow.
On paper, new companies exploded overnight, and what looked like momentum attracted even more people.
Substack is running the same play: They recruit well-known influencers with large existing audiences, give them priority placement and favorable treatment, and let their presence convince everyone else the party is worth joining. And why not? It’s a win-win for Substack and the influencer.
Here’s what’s significant about these recruited writers: they never really joined. They kept their websites up, kept sending from their own lists, kept posting everywhere else they’d always posted.
For them, Substack is just another social tab to keep open. The day they stop posting there, nothing in their business changes. Most of the writers following their lead can’t say the same.
How the Cross-Promotion Machine Actually Works
When the cross-promotion machine kicks in, the names appearing in your account come from lists you had nothing to do with building and may have zero affinity with. Substack calls it community, but it’s a list swap with extra steps — and the people on the other end of it didn’t go looking for you.
Clicking because an algorithm served you up at the right moment is the thinnest possible reason to subscribe. It’s an even thinner reason to pay.
For the practitioners and coaches I work with, this is a real problem. A lot of them write on subjects that sit outside mainstream consensus — integrative medicine, unconventional recovery approaches, frameworks that challenge what their peers publish. Their readers need to trust them before they’ll act on anything. One wrong recommendation — something mismatched, something that felt like spam — and that trust is gone before it had a chance to develop.
Other platforms are already building the same loop. Kajabi lets one user buy a sponsored block in another user’s emails. Kit pays creators to recommend other newsletters, and sells brand ads into the same inbox. The relationship you built is now inventory.
What could go wrong?
Can Substack Replace Your Website?
If you’re selling services, you need a website where people can find you on their own terms—not buried inside a platform feed or someone else’s ecosystem. That includes social media. You control the journey from first click to first conversation. On Substack, you hand that journey to someone else.
At minimum, a viable website needs to accomplish the following:
- At least six long-form articles that show your point of view and invite your ideal patient, client, or buyer into your world.
- An About page that demonstrates how you can help them accomplish what you specialize in.
- Plenty of opportunities to join your email list, where you’ll develop the relationship further.
Doesn’t Substack do all of these “for you”?
Nope. Here’s why.
Substack’s goal is to get your followers to subscribe to other people’s feeds, then convert those unpaid subscribers to paid—where they earn their cut. Think of it as a web: The email you send is the thread designed to pull the reader back in. Yes, they come to read your article, but the web is sticky by design: other writers’ posts catching their attention, a social feed running alongside yours, with ads placed in the feeds they wander into.
Like social media, Substack optimizes for its own ecosystem. It’s not a neutral website replacement that reliably funnels external traffic to your owned asset.
Sound familiar? Substack is quickly becoming just another social feed. “Notes” is their version of the social timeline. The noise and competition will only grow louder. Attention will fragment, just like it has on every platform before. The complaints are already starting to stack up.
When Platforms Stop Needing to be Liked
Perry Marshall, one of the early Google experts, observed about those early platform days:
“Big platforms build gigantic technology visions. Regular folks don’t get a vote in how those platforms eventually decide to use them. We knew in the 2000s that the big platforms would eventually turn predatory once the investors needed their return. Google did. It’s not personal; it’s just what happens once a platform stops needing to be liked.”
The same clock is ticking for Substack. Every new feature grows Substack’s business, not yours.
What About Authors and Publishers?
I’ve seen a few people claiming publishers want authors with a Substack. I’ll bet Substack’s marketing team loves that story.
I’ve sat in multiple book launch marketing meetings with New York publishers. Not one of them ever asked about the platform. They asked about the numbers that matter.
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Does your website have meaningful traffic – not bounces, but genuine sustained interest? They don’t care whether it’s on WordPress or Ghost; they want to know: do the right people find you, stay, and take the next step?
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Does your social media have meaningful followers, and what are your engagement stats?
- How large is your email list, how often does it go out, and what are your engagement numbers?
In other words, publishers want stats you control and can measure: real numbers in dashboards you own, not opaque platform metrics filtered through some platform’s self-interest.
None of my clients would have gotten a publishing deal without those stats. Once the book was underway, the marketing meeting was where the strategy took shape – and the execution always landed squarely on us: our list and our social media.
Publishers want to see visibility and a real connection with an audience that will actually buy books. Those things live in your stats, not in your URL. On Substack, unless you’re in the top fraction of one percent, the answer to both questions is usually a hard no.
Why I’m Still Warning Clients Against Building on Rented Land
I’ve warned clients about this for decades. Build on someone else’s platform, and you don’t set the rules; you don’t control what happens when someone clicks your link, and you can’t stop them from changing everything next week with no warning. The landlord writes the rules.
Those pouring energy into Facebook Notes or Pages found this out the hard way. Text posts vanished, and the platform pivoted away from established relationships and toward videos from strangers, boosted by paid ads.
Then the migration to Instagram began, and the game shifted to Reels, Stories, and performing for the feed. The cycle repeated.
It was true with Medium and Patreon. Writers flocked there for easy publishing, a built-in audience, and Partner Program payouts. Like Substack, it felt like the perfect home for creators – for a while.
Then Medium threw up its own paywalls, favoring some topics over others, and tweaked distribution in ways that tanked traffic for many thoughtful writers. Writers who’d built everything there had to start over somewhere else.
Substack is barreling down that same trajectory, at double the speed.
Then the Email Platforms Did It Too
Email platforms did the same thing. Tools that started as clean, simple newsletters kept adding features: social feeds, landing pages, payment processing. More convenience, until the incentives tilted toward their own growth — more cross-promotion, more ads, more of your readers’ data — and your experience started to feel like a side effect.
Now it’s Substack’s turn. Look past the clean interface, and the signs are everywhere.
Your “subscriber” numbers might be growing. But how many of them are truly your audience? How many are just platform-driven noise?
The people who built their own sites saw this pattern early. They chose ownership, and that choice still holds up.
Who Substack Can Work For
Substack can work for two types of people.
The first is writers and creators without a tight niche, exploring ideas broadly, and artists treating the work as a labor of love.
For them, Substack is a lot like publishing a book in a crowded marketplace. It’s a meaningful creative act that rarely pays well on its own. Paid subscriptions, when they come, are a bonus—not the main goal.
The second is established voices who already have a large audience elsewhere and use Substack as just one more distribution channel, the same way they’d use any social platform.
These writers don’t abandon their websites, email lists, or existing funnels. For them, Substack is an addition, not a foundation.
When deciding where to establish your authority platform, I distinguish creatives from expert authorities. For indie-experts turning resonance into services, clients, and sustainable income—especially those who’ve already started building their own site and email assets—the limitations stack up quickly.
If you’re already on Substack, use it like you would any social platform: post there and send people back to your site. Build the list on your own email provider, not Substack’s.
When Your Subscribers Aren’t Really Yours
Check out a Substack creator forum and scroll for about thirty seconds. One guy is complaining about his open rate dropping after a recommendation wave, while someone else is wondering why their paid conversion is stuck at zero despite 800 subscribers.
The answer is that those subscribers showed up because clicking subscribe was easier than closing the tab.
I read several Substack newsletters and found every one through social media. I’m notified of their new articles on the author’s social media feed. I click, read, and leave. And when I do click, I might as well have clicked through to the author’s own site. Substack added zero value to that exchange beyond hosting the page.
Watching so many readers arrive from platforms it doesn’t control, Substack’s response is to become one more noisy, distracting, ad-filled social feed, and in doing so, break the promise that brought writers there in the first place.
Even if Substack succeeds in creating a social media environment, links from outside Substack will still matter enormously for views, reads, and initial discovery – especially for service professionals, coaches, and writers selling high-ticket or relationship-based offerings.
Think about what actually happens when someone clicks through to your site from a shared article. They land on your page and your writing. They see your offer, and the next step is yours to design.
When that same person clicks through to your Substack, they land inside the platform. Other newsletters to explore, a social feed tugging at their attention, and a paywall arriving before they’ve read enough to care. You don’t control any of that. Substack does.
Here’s Why You Must Control the Customer Journey
Since most people will discover you externally anyway through a social link or a shared article, why hand them off to a platform where the first thing they see is someone else’s newsletter, or worse, an ad?
On your own site, you design every step. On Substack, they decide what happens next.
Then there’s the paywall friction. Someone clicks through from a social post, reads two paragraphs of yours for the first time, and hits a subscription wall. They don’t know you well enough to pay, so most close the tab. And that’s the entire relationship, start to finish, in about ninety seconds.
For practitioners writing about anything outside the mainstream—a recovery approach their colleagues don’t endorse, a protocol that challenges the standard of care—that ninety seconds is especially unforgiving. Readers need to hear your voice and explore some of the context you provide before they’ll trust the idea. The paywall cuts that off before it starts.
Aspirational Math 101
The public narrative around Substack runs on outliers. More than 50 writers now earn over $1 million a year. The top ten alone pull in roughly $40 million in annual revenue. That’s how the opportunity gets sold—on a thin layer of highly visible winners.
Look at the full picture, and the reality is hard to miss. The great majority of the 17,000+ writers earning anything make far more modest amounts. The base rate for a new writer without an existing list remains low.
Substack wins either way. Every “I made it work” post from the long tail keeps the story alive long enough for the next round of writers to sign up and start swapping recommendations.
The writers doing the posting are usually telling the truth — they did make something work. What they’re not telling you is that the readers who actually bought something found them on a podcast or through social media, not through the platform – and that same transaction could have happened just as easily through their own website.
Run the Numbers, and You See the Problem
The average monthly subscription is $5, and the free-to-paid conversion rate hovers around 3%. To clear $250 a month, you need roughly 1,667 free subscribers to produce 50 paying ones.
That’s a serious grind for a modest return.
There are far more efficient ways to get paid for your expertise. A $47 introductory course needs just six buyers to generate that same $250. One-tenth the audience. A fraction of the infrastructure and none of the platform dependency.
The math for a simple course isn’t even close to the Substack model. And that’s before you factor in the grind of building 1,667 subscribers who may never convert.
Membership communities and well-designed offers work the same way. Step back from the glittering promises, and the comparison is simple.
The Illusion of Safety and Freedom on Substack
Substack sells the dream of writing directly to readers who pay you, no algorithm deciding whether your post gets seen, no editor deciding whether you fit the publication. That was a real thing. It also depends on Substack keeping it that way. The minute their investors need a better return, or advertisers get offended, the terms change — and you’ll find out in a forum complaint.
This matters more for some writers than others. A practitioner who questions standard-of-care protocols, or a coach whose frameworks put them at odds with the credentialing bodies in their field, needs readers who’ve had enough time with their work to decide for themselves.
That kind of trust doesn’t survive a paywall at paragraph two. It also doesn’t survive what Substack has already demonstrated it will do: restrict content it previously called protected speech, the moment app store gatekeepers applied enough pressure. An owned site and a list you control are a lot harder to switch off.
Substack’s Future Trajectory: The Pressure to Grow
Substack remains private for now, but the trajectory is clear. They’ve taken serious venture capital, and that money comes with one requirement: growth.
That’s their growth, not yours.
We’ve watched this movie before. A platform launches with a genuinely good deal for creators. Then the VC money needs its return. Suddenly there are more features you didn’t ask for and ad inventory you didn’t agree to.
What used to make Substack feel different —the simplicity and the sense that you’re in control—is exactly what goes first. Link out to your own site, and the algorithm actively treats you as someone working against the platform.
For indie-experts, that’s a direct conflict with what your business depends on. Waiting to see if it gets worse isn’t caution. It’s just a slower way to lose.
If your work sits anywhere near the edges of mainstream consensus — unconventional protocols, integrative approaches, frameworks your peers (or advertisers) find uncomfortable — the pressure to restrict or remove that kind of content will only grow as Substack’s investors get more involved. You’ll have no recourse; that’s the deal.
The competition is closing in quickly. X has rolled out long-form articles with stronger creator incentives and, in some cases, better payouts.
Leaner, decentralized true-patronage publishing platforms like Ghost keep improving. Substack won’t hold the long-form content space forever. Most creators notice the shift only after they’ve already handed over the leverage.
Why Start on Rented Land at All? The Migration Slog
Many start on Substack thinking they can always move later. But once you’ve built an audience there, migration is a serious undertaking.
You can take your email list with you, but every subscriber needs to re-opt in to the new provider. You can move paid subscribers, but you’ll face friction, lost momentum, and churn along the way.
Whatever search traction your Substack may have built — if it was even indexed at all — belongs to Substack. The readers who found you through Recommendations, through Notes, through the app itself: Substack brokered those introductions, and Substack keeps the Rolodex. You get the email addresses. Everything that actually brought those people to you stays behind.
That last point is the one most “you own your list on Substack” posts skip. You’re rebuilding from the ground up. Why pay that price from day one when you could own the foundation instead?
I have clients with sites only a few years old getting indexed in search engines and building that compounding asset right now. Yes, it’s still possible.
If you already have a site and a list, even if it’s temporarily on hold, why add a migration headache on top of the work you’ve already done?
Why Your Own Website Excels: The Compounding Asset
If you want clients and readers who actually hire you, buy something, or refer someone — you need three things you control: a site, an email list, and one social channel that sends people to both. That’s it. If you’ve already got pieces of that in place, even if they’ve gone quiet, you’re not starting over. You’re picking up where you left off.
A self-hosted WordPress website is your home base. It’s where your content compounds and readers experience the full range of your expertise and voice.
What you need are three separate, easily replaceable pieces:
- A simple website with articles that show your point of view.
- A simple email list provider.
- One social media platform that sends new people to your website to subscribe to your list.
For decades, I’ve helped clients build solid businesses with exactly that stack. It still works, and it’s not going anywhere.
Here are three options for creating your ownable home base, depending on your goals:
Option One: WordPress website with linked email provider
Who it’s for: I recommend this to indie-experts who want to build their own site:
- A WordPress site built on and hosted by rock-solid, super-secure WP Engine ($28/month)
- Most email service providers offer a free plan so you can test how well the tools work for you.
- Add well-reviewed and supported plugins for courses and memberships as needed.
This is the path most of my clients and students have taken. Many people can build their own site easily with the latest tools.
Others who prefer not to deal with the technical side pay someone for a clean, well-designed site. It’s a one-time investment for a system you can plug your content into.
Option Two: Ghost — a publishing platform you can actually own
Who it’s for: If you like the idea of readers paying writers directly, Ghost is a substantially better fit than Substack. It gives you a site, email, and memberships, but on a different foundation: open-source software, no revenue cut, and payments through your own Stripe account.
Ghost Pro hosts the site for you, and you can take your content and list with you. If you self-host on Ghost (non-pro), you own the entire stack outright.
Either way, the relationship with readers lives on your domain, not inside someone else’s feed. What you give up is Substack’s built-in discovery, which in practice is mostly noise. Ghost and other similar publishing platforms don’t promise to find your audience for you.
Option Three: Rainmaker — Your managed WordPress stack, not a pure walled garden
Who it’s for: If you want your site, email, courses, and memberships under one roof without assembling the stack yourself, or the headaches of the closed, walled gardens, Rainmaker is worth a look.
Full disclosure: I have built my sites, courses, and memberships in Rainmaker for over a decade, and you are reading this on a WordPress site built in Rainmaker. I still recommend it because it’s closer to an owned publishing system than Substack or any closed course platform.
Squarespace and Kajabi are proprietary. You build inside their system, and leaving means rebuilding.
Rainmaker is different: it is a hosted WordPress environment like Ghost Pro, but with proven tools such as LearnDash and MemberPress already integrated, hosted, and supported. Posts and pages can be exported. It is more portable than a walled garden, and less portable than a site you build and host yourself.
The monthly hosting fee is very reasonable, and the Set-Up plan includes help setting up your site.
A Permanent Home
Stop asking, “Where is it easiest to post?”
Start asking: Where can my content create the most long-term leverage? Where can my audience become true buyers? Where can I build something I actually own?
The doctor I mentioned at the start—the one who ranks on page one of Google while her colleague remains invisible after years on Substack—isn’t an exception.
She’s what building on owned ground actually looks like. Visibility is just the beginning. Ownership is what turns it into something that lasts.
If you’re somewhere in the middle and you’re sitting on a quiet list, a handful of articles, or a social account you haven’t touched in years, build it out.
The authority position you’ve already started earning is more valuable than you might think, and far too valuable to hand to a platform that will never serve you as well as the foundation you’ve already built.
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