Have You Considered..... on Substack?

Suggestions from the Bestseller's team

Hey everyone,

How are you this week? Today I want to share with you a suggestion that the Substack Bestseller’s Team emailed to me yesterday. It’s a terrible suggestion for my publication but might be a good one for you.

One of the categories of my paid publication is ‘Food and Drink’. So I guess the Bestseller’s Team sent this advice to all ‘bestseller’ publications in that category. The advice is to start a cooking club. I won’t be doing it, but why not you?

What follows is advice straight from Substack’s own team members, and could be modified for many different topics. Perhaps even yours?

I hope you find it useful.

Hi Karen!

I work on the product team at Substack, and wanted to reach out with a suggestion that I think could really work for your publication.

Have you considered starting a cooking club in Substack Chat?

We’ve seen a lot of top food publications (e.g. What To Cook, Food Processing) use Chat as a forum for community. You can let paid subscribers post their own cooking questions, photos, or tips in the chat, like a subreddit or Facebook Group, and host weekly threads for readers to share photos of what they made.

Our data shows that subscribers in Chat are more likely to convert and retain their paid subscription—plus it’s a fun, supportive space where your community can exchange advice and inspiration.

You can enable Chat here, or I’d be happy to hop on a 15 minute call to help set this up or answer questions. It’s pretty easy to try out and see if it works for your subscribers. Let me know!

Best,

Jasmine Sun

PS: Here’s what Caroline Chambers’s (the #1 food newsletter) chat looks like—it’s a space for celebrating her recipes, sharing tips, getting advice, and more.

Screenshot of What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking, via Bestsellers@Substackinc.com

I’ve been asked a number of times whether paid chat is a good way to get (and keep) more paying subscribers.

I usually say NO.

No. Paid chat is unlikely to be effective unless you have at least a few hundred paid subscribers - enough that the proportion who might want to get involved in a chat is large enough to form a critical mass. Too few people and you won’t be able to create or sustain a dynamic chat space.

But if you have more than a few hundred paying subscribers (lucky you!), then paid chat might be a fun space for your subscribers to hang out.

If you have fewer subscribers, then free chat is your best bet.

What about you, have you ever upgraded to a paid subscription to get access to paid chats? Let me know in the comments.

Okay that’s it for this week, have a good one,

Karen