Why (and how) we moved our blog to Substack
Publishing quality content regularly is critical to any successful content strategy. But if your audience isn't growing, what's the point?
Last December, I floated the idea of migrating Equals’ blog to Substack past our co-founders,
and .We’d recently (re)invested in publishing quality content and seen a significant boost in traffic as a result. But subscribers were not growing at the pace we’d hoped, which led us to explore alternative publishing platforms.
Fast-forward a few short weeks (and a lot of copying and pasting later 😅), and Wrap Text had a new home.
As you can see, it looks a little different now. But this post isn’t about design. It’s about what drove us to make the move, knowing full well we’d need to make some trade-offs, particularly the control we had over appearance.
Two months in, we can safely say that trade-off was worth it.
Let’s dive into why we made the move, the impact it’s had, and how we went about it.
Because content is king
As
recently shared, we committed to content from the beginning. Partly because made Bobby promise that he’d publish a blog post every week if he wrote him a check. Which he did.
And partly because it was something Des did when he first founded Intercom. A practice that Bobby, Ben, and I witnessed first-hand the impact of during our respective tenures there.
But as anyone who’s been on the hook for producing quality content would know, it’s a hard practice to keep up.
Rebooting our investment in content
A few months after I’d joined Equals, and having seen that our blogging efforts had stalled, I put pen to paper on a reboot of our marketing strategy. I shared the full “one-pager” at the time, but here’s the piece specific to our investment in content. It was number one of “our top three”.
The strategy went on to lay out three actions we should take to begin executing our strategy:
- , (me), , and each commit to publishing one high-quality post on Wrap Text per month for the rest of the year.
Revamp Wrap Text to allow for pinning of posts, browsing by topic, and the creation of richer posts (e.g. right now, we can’t embed video).
Bobby invests more time in building a bigger audience by posting low-effort, high-impact posts on LinkedIn (primarily) – a minimum of 3 x week (Matt will be doing this, too)
It’s fun to look back at these and say, fuck yeah, we did all three! And see it paying off.
Why move?
Our platform (and our implementation of it) had some challenges, including:
❌ The homepage wasn’t optimized for browsing or discovery of older posts
❌ Embedding and resizing rich content was broken AF (or didn’t work at all)
❌ Our heading styles and formatting options were limited
❌ The subscription experience for consumers was janky and confusing
There’s nothing on this list that we couldn’t address without investing our own engineering and design time and effort. But as a small team (20 ppl at the time), we couldn't justify making that investment on the blog at the expense of continuing to improve our own product. It was a classic case of build vs. buy (something else).
Why Substack?
Having worked in tech – specifically marketing roles – for the last 15 years, I’d heard of and experienced using Substack (as a consumer). I think my first experience was when I subscribed to
’s Lessons. And later, .The fact that both Molly and Lenny had chosen Substack as their platform to reach tens of thousands of subscribers and that they’re both known for sharing incredibly high-quality content established instant credibility for me.
Substack ticked the following boxes for us, too:
✔️ Look and feel
We appreciated the clean, minimalistic design out-of-the-box. And there was just enough customisation to make the trade-off of not having a bespoke design bearable.
✔️ Publisher experience
The authoring and publishing experience is top-shelf. It's not without issues, but I prefer writing my own and editing others' work in Substack.
✔️ Insights
We get far more detail into the performance of our posts and our (growing) audience with Substack than we did with our previous platform.
✔️ Consumer experience
As subscribers and readers of Substack publications, we knew what to expect here and the upgrade our audience would get. After all, the headline on their homepage is:
The home for great writers and readers
Wrap Text is barely three years young. The risk and effort involved in moving were still relatively low. It felt like the right move to rip the bandaid off sooner rather than later.
Was it worth it?
Short answer: yes. Longer answer below.
Accelerated (and sustained) subscriber growth
As you can see in the chart above, we had seen notable spikes in subscriber growth in the past. First, a post (and subsequent series) back in September 2023 seemingly struck a chord with readers. Then, there was the reboot of our investment in content.
One could argue that the recent (sharper) spike was simply a matter of a few “heavy-hitter” posts doing the rounds. But that’s not the case. Rather, while traffic has been flat – albeit at a higher level than in the past – the number of new subscribers we’ve added every week has grown dramatically since we moved to Substack.
Boom comes to mind. That said, we would like to see another heavy-hitter soon. 😅
What about our strategy reboot?
That looks to be working, too.
When we look at our top 10 posts based on total views and the days since each was published, we see that 60% – and two of the top 3 – are less than six months old.
And here are our top 10 posts based on views per day since publishing, 80% of which were published since our strategy reboot. It’s our best-performing content as of now.
If you’re new to Wrap Text and need to catch up, these posts are a good place to start. As you can see, we write about everything from finance to product to marketing.
We’re data-driven informed
While numbers don’t often lie, getting unsolicited feedback from leads, customers, prospects, and investors has been incredibly encouraging, too.
So, how did we actually make the move?
There’s no rocket science here. Some parts were pretty seamless. A lot was manual. But nothing was too painful.
Migrating existing posts
My advice here is to make a decision to move before you’ve written too many posts. That’s because your existing platform may only surface the most recent 20 posts in your publication’s RSS feed, which is what Substack’s importer relies on.
We had 60-odd posts to migrate, which meant a few copy-and-paste sprints for me over a couple of weekends (as I knocked back some of cold ones 🙊). But that was fine since Substack’s editor handled pasting formatted text and images really well. Most of the edits I had to make were fixing all the spelling and grammar mistakes that had previously slipped through the cracks. 😬
Handling redirects
Fortunately, Ben, our co-founder and CPO, was able to take care of this one by redirecting all existing posts with 301 redirects, ensuring we didn't lose search rankings for our existing content. In working out how to do this we realized we would have to switch domains, so on the old domain we ran a bit of code which knows all the old and new post URLs and redirects them appropriately.
“But what about SEO moving forward?”
To be completely honest, I have NFI. We care far more about optimizing for building and growing an audience than worrying too much about a hypothetical scenario that we ultimately have little control over. Especially now with all the change that’s happening with advancements in AI, the proliferation of AI-generated content (you’ll see none of that on Wrap Text btw), and seeming shift towards GPTs and AI-powered search engines for finding information and answering questions.
It’s not all roses
Yes, I’ve been singing Substack’s praises in this post. They deserve it. That said, there are a couple of gripes I have and limitations you should be aware of:
❌ Tables
Substack’s editor doesn’t allow for the creation of tables. So, if you rely on tables a lot to present information, you’ll need to create those in another tool and embed them as an image in your post. Like we did here, for example.
❌ Custom Theming
Ideally, we’d have a bit more control over the look of Wrap Text so we could bring it to life with the personality and fun of our brand. I also get why Substack doesn’t support this (yet).
❌ Easy Backdating
A necessary feature, especially if you need to migrate a shitload of older posts over – like me. While you can backdate a post, it first needs to be published. And it takes a few too many clicks to set the original publishing date once it is. It’s bearable, but it does feel like an afterthought.
That’s it. And we really can’t complain because Substack’s free.
In closing
I’ll finish by saying that our approach to content continues to be simple.
We’ve always written about things we've learned, mistakes we've made, and opinions we have on topics we believe our ICPs (and their stakeholders) care about.
Now we just do it on Substack. And do it while keeping the quality bar high.
I hope this post meets it.
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good post! do you also use substack for your help center?
Any hypotheses on why subs are up so much with Substack? Anything other than an improved UX for readers to sign-up?