Why I am winding down my Substack
Turning a new chapter on my online life
hello folks!
for those who have been reading stuff I’ve been writing, you might have noticed an arc:
first i started posting on my blog
then i started posting exclusively on substack
then i posted in both places and lamented how uncomfortably fragmented that felt
in effect, i wrote and published less and less
well, i think it’s time to hang up the towel of Substack. in this post i’ll share why.
first, i realised i don’t need growth in my email list. i’m perfectly fine if my email list doesn’t grow at all, because i realised i’m not interestesd in making money through newsletter subscriptions (have you met anyone doing this? it’s a lot of work!).
neither do i care to amass subscribers for a “just in case” scenario where i’d have something to sell, like an app or a course. i realise that my connections with people on linkedin is good enough for doing that.
so yeah, i don’t really need to be on a platform like substack anymore because i now know that i don’t need my email list to grow, despite what everyone on the internet keeps yelling at me to do. “you need to start collecting emails yesterday!”... “it’s the only durable distribution channel that you actually own.” i don’t want to care about that anymore.
second, substack is annoying to use. it’s 2026, the year of AI agents. why am i still forced to write in a rich text editor that doesn’t compatibly copy-paste to any other software? markdown is plain text with some added syntax, so copy-pasting just works. i miss that. incidentally, my blog (open sourced on github) has been written in markdown for many years now and i’m happy to go back to writing this way. in lowercase if i so wish to, tyvm.
third, substack newsletters only really grow and ‘succeed’ when you have a tight thematic core. lenny’s newsletter is about product management and AINews is about AI news.
i could never stick to a thematic core. i’ve learned that i get really bored if i have to stick to publishing about a specific topic (i’ve tried many of these over the years, from vulnerability-maxxing to growing rich slowly). i have a neurotic personality and i’m always thinking about things, and said things are myriad and hard to put into a neat box. so substack’s platform was never going to help my newsletter grow - i just had to learn this by trying a lot of things.
fourth, the ‘every post is a newsletter email’ model never quite stuck with me. i’ve written a lot less regularly since i started posting exclusively on substack, and i think it’s because i believe each post always needed to clear a certain bar for it to be ‘worthy’ of landing in someone’s inbox. this is true. i want to respect people’s time. even a post like this one can be hard to justify as worthy of being in someone’s inbox, so i might have very well NOT written it in the first place - the reason i ended up writing this is i’m doing it on my blog, not substack, so i don’t have to worry about its worthiness. the post can just exist quietly on the web. i can point people IRL to it when i want and let it be quietly discovered via good old SEO otherwise.
anyway, you may still be reading this as a substack post, but this will be the last one via substack. going forward i’ll only send out the occasional email when i have something deemed share-worthy with you.
in the meantime, if you’ve enjoyed reading me over the months and years, you’ll find my newest posts on nickang.com. i expect i’ll be posting at a 1-2x per week cadence again. a lot more random (but always truthful, hopefully) posts coming soon.
thanks for sticking around as i grow up as a human being on the internet, y’all. i appreciate you!