I deleted my @Medium account and have moved 100% of my old posts @SubstackInc, and all new posts will be hosted there as well. This was not an easy decision, as I have been writing on Medium since 2015 and had a presence + consistent traffic there. Here's why I did it:

I got on Medium because I thought it was the future of publishing. They raised 100s of millions, had everyone writing on it, and seemed to have all the momentum in the world. As a writer, I want to host my stuff of a rocketship. And 2015 was early-ish for Medium. So I committed.

I want to point out why the rocketship point matters. If you don't host your stuff on your domain, you're raking a risk. You build no SEO advantage, you aren't able to control the experience of your readers, and you ultimately don't control your audience. It's rough.

80% of the time, my advice to people would be to write on your own domain for these reasons. I only break my own rules but I think a platform is SO HOT, that it will help me distribution SOO MUUCH that the risk of all that other stuff is worth it.

And in 2015, I thought it was Medium. So I took my stuff off of matsherman dot com, and put it onto Medium, and hoped that my writing would explode along with Medium's growth. I wanted to be well known for my writing, and I thought medium could get me there.

Long story short, it didn't. Medium seemed to rewarded marketing-heavy posts from thought influencers and leaders. There was a game to play on Medium, and to win the game, you had to sacrifice some of your own style to get the distribution. As their business model changed,

It didn't change for the creators. In fact it got worse. Up until 2017, anyone could read a Medium post. But in 2017, Medium introduced a optional $5 subscription for readers, which later become required. This throttled some organic growth, but it was supposed to be a tradeoff...

The tradeoff was a way to get creators paid!!! I was totally with this. It was an innovative model and I was all for getting paid for my writing. The model was...innovative to say the least. And it worked, kinda. I probably got paid $10/mo on average for the last 2 years.

I'm not ungrateful, but the tradeoff I was making by having my posts locked behind medium's paywall and NOT making a significant amount of money from the work made me feel iffy. And if I didn't write click baity posts, I felt like i couldn't get noticed by an editor.

At this point, the upside of Medium was gone, and it was time to get back on my own domain and pretty much start from scratch. it was a defeat. I bet on this platform. For me, it didn't work out. but that's okay. Sometimes, things don't work out.

Due to starting from a cold start, I was writing less. I had no built in readership anymore. I just had my social media. No email list. Nothing. The thing I've been doing since 2010 didn't excite me anymore :(. I went for about a year without writing consistently.

And then enter @SubstackInc's A round. It came like a right hook. The raises a nice round from @a16z, and started spreading through the tech world like wildfire. I made one just to test it out, but didn't mentally commit to anything. Was testing the waters.

I didn't like the idea of getting on yet ANOTHER platform to try to ride it as a rocketship to the stratosphere. I was a little burned. Yet Substack was a little different from other ones I tried. See, it wasn't a blogging platform, It was a newsletter platform.

What this meant was it was built natively with newsletter functionality. I never really took newsletters seriously, even though deep down I knew how important they were. I've always had a distribution problem with my posts. Good ideas, not well spread. I was lazy about it.

This concept of having a newsletter built into the core of my blog was really mind-blowing for me. The risk I always talked about was gone. I can build an audience on Substack AND keep them if I decide to move to another platform or if Substack died. Is this real life?

At the same time, Substack is in the first inning of their company lifespan. Whereas Medium raised $100M+ before I heard about them, Substack has only raised $15M! I found this company WAAAAY earlier in their life than when I found Medium.

It kinda felt like finding Youtube in 2006. And those Youtubers are huge today. So what you're telling me is:

- I can built my own audience on someone else's platform that I OWN
- And I can be a early creator on a rocketship?

Either way, I win!

And it doesn't just sound good. In the 3 months since I've been very active on Substack:

- I have made more money than I have on Medium in the entire 5 years I was writing on it.
- I have a quickly growing emails list where as before, none of the metrics were mine

Looking forward, I CANNOT WAIT to see what comes for Substack, and as I am a newsletter writer on their platform, I am excited for what it does for my writing career as well. For my company, @joinGigLoft
, we are suggesting everyone check out Substack as a platform.

As for me, check out my Substack if you like early stage startup stuff! http://forwardthinking.substack.com/ 

This is an answer to @ethannaluz's question. Have a question? Ask me and I may just write a thread on it. https://twitter.com/ethannaluz/status/1276578276085882880?s=20