I appreciate the emails I received from my two posts on starting a Substack. I am also grateful to David Lat who chatted with me at some length about the pros and cons of Substack. David has one of the most successful legal substacks, so he knows the business well.
I'll put my tentatively final thoughts up front: starting a paid Substack probably isn't worth it.
First, David explained how conversion rates actually works. In short, almost all substacks offer different tiers of subscriptions. Everyone can sign up for a free subscription that grants access to some content. Others sign up for a paid subscription that grants access to all content. The percentage of unpaid subscriptions that become paid is known as the conversion rate. I've seen some estimates that the Substack conversion rates hover around 10%. For example, if you have 1,000 total subscribers, about 100 of them are paid. David relays that the average conversion rate is probably closer to 5%. With the same number of unpaid subscribers, there may be about 50 paid subscribers.
