Dispatch #3: What Substack subscribers want in the AI era

On to this week's dispatch.

So today I'm gonna talk about why fun, taste and perspective matter way more than growth hacks.

Why the era of give your best stuff away for free might be deceased and more.

So I'm just gonna share with you the words I heard a lot and then the words I didn't hear.

Fun.

I heard that word a lot.

It started with Chris Best's opening remarks.

If you don't know Chris Best, he's the CEO of Substack.

Then Dylan Abruscato of TBPN in conversation with Emily Sundberg said, and I love this quote, what we cover on the show and what we do with brands is a very simple decision matrix.

If it makes us laugh and if it's something we would have wanted to watch, we'll do it.

You can have all the money in the world and all the recognizable last names in the world on your project, and you can have the best distribution, but it's really hard to compete with people having more fun than you.

I say this to my clients all the time.

Substack is supposed to be fun.

But, and this is important, that doesn't mean Substack isn't hard work.

If you're doing something you truly believe in, if you aren't using AI to write and think for you or cutting corners or making it stressful when it doesn't need to be and not wasting your energy reading about growth hacks from myriad people, hard work is fun.

Besides, I'm doing the serious work for you, so I promise I've got it covered.

The next word was taste.

I love that this word kept coming up.

It was the first time I'd heard it in relation to the future of media.

What is taste? Taste is style, voice, which I always teach in the craft of writing on Substack.

It's perspective, which Chris Best pointed out as one of the hallmarks of a great Substack.

Taste is you.

You have it by finding your Substack DNA, which I talk about all the time.

Taste is what people subscribe to, stay subscribed to, and pay for.

It's not easy because it's deep work and takes effort and a lot of trial and error, but it's what will help you grow professionally, creatively, emotionally, intellectually, and financially on Substack, as hokey as that might sound.