Bringing Back The “Membership Site” On Substack
Some quick thoughts on how Substack could become a better monetization home for creators and become a healthier business
Back before being a creator was cool, there were these things called membership sites.
They were essentially a WordPress plugin that allowed you to gate off parts of your website to host things like courses and paid content.
I used to use them for my courses on business development before I became a software entrepreneur.
As I was beefing up my consciousness substack paid offering, I found myself struggling where to put my new paid members’ content:
A database of the 100+ book reports on spiritual books I’ve read w/ all my accompanying notes and highlights
A library of meditations and instructions for the core practices that have been impactful for my consciousness journey
Substack has done a nice job making it easy to distinguish between paid and free posts, but where things kind of fell short for me is there is really no “dedicated area” for me to easily host navigational experiences.
I guess I could put them up as blog posts, but it’s kind of janky and doesn’t really fit the user experience of a course or database.
So I ended up having to build something on Notion, host it on my site, and then do some stuff with password protection. It's a less-than-ideal experience for my paid subscribers and me as the host.
One thing Substack did with email service providers is they made it free to host your mailing list and found an alternative way to monetize. To be honest, this was the whole reason I came over. My mailing list was pretty big and I didn’t want to pay $500 a month for something I wasn’t even sure if I was going to stick with. So I just tried this thing called Substack.
Making things free that others charge for is a classic playbook in SaaS. It’s how companies like Zenefits and Drift got traction in the early days.
As I think about what other commodity SaaS products creators pay for, it occurred to me that Substack could do the same thing with membership sites or course hosting.
Most courses I take these days are web pages with text, video embeds, and comments that have a navigation bar on the side and the ability to dictate a basic hierarchy. Sure there’s other functionality, but it’s not as much the core value as the actual hosting.
It seems to me like that creating some type of “member area” would be pretty easy and make monetizing on Substack way, way more compelling than what it is today: selling blog posts, zoom calls, the ability to chat, etc.
Not to diminish what people are offering their subscribers, but people are much more used to paying for learning experiences on the internet than blog posts and monthly Zoom calls.
If I could host my courses on Substack as part of a broader “community offering” where I’m always adding stuff, I could imagine charging $50-$100 mo/ vs. $5 a month. It’s what serious creators are already doing on platforms like Circle, Mighty, etc.
I guess I could do this on those other platforms, but it’d be way more compelling if it was all an integrated experience instead of having to effectively manage communities, mailing lists, and engagement in more places.
Moreover, I’m sure there are plenty of creators who could be convinced to come to Substack if they could save a few thousand bucks a year because the course hosting was free - just like they got me with email.
I’m obviously not the head of product at Substack and have no idea what their grand ambitions are, but creating some type of lightweight “membership site” functionality that could do the basics of hosting courses and learning experiences seems like a no-brainer.
They’ve already built video hosting, commenting, chat, mailing list, etc. Why not just finish it off and truly become the monetization “home” for the creator-preneur.
What do you think?
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I agree. I would love to integrate the courses I offer into Substack, that would be a huge game changer for me. It would be far more valuable than Notes or even Chat. However, I refuse to even "go paid" until Substack handles the sales tax since digital subscriptions almost universally fall under products that require you to collect and remit sales tax and VAT. Etsy and Patreon both collect and remit sales tax for you so I know it can be done. I see that Substack pushes you over to Stripe Tax which monitors and collects but leaves the much more complicated process of registering in various states and countries and remitting the tax to me, not to mention the expense for contracting with a service which is far greater (especially for VAT/international) than a small 3,000 subscriber creator like I can afford.
yes. I've seen a bunch of comments lately asked for better paywall features. I actually logged a feature request a few weeks ago for something like what you describe; a way to present navigation based on articles marked as for paying subscribers only. Unfortunately I don't there's a way to link back to feature requests...