Pro Tips: Matt Kiser on keeping expenses down
Plus: Why it's important to keep re-introducing yourself to the audience
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Last week, I talked to WTF Just Happened Today’s Matt Kiser about his origin story and the secrets to his eight-year run helming one of the first independent newsletters. This week, Kiser shares two tips for anyone else looking to build a sustainable independent career.
Pro Tip #1: Investigate how you’re getting paid (and who you’re paying) and what data you own
Matt Kiser: When I first started, Substack was not really a thing yet and I needed a way to collect recurring subscriptions. There weren't a lot of platforms yet for doing that easily, so I started on Patreon. As soon as I did it, I realized I'd made this giant mistake because all the credit cards and members were now on the Patreon platform and I couldn't export them or move them myself. I was locked into this platform that I paid – I don't know what it was like 12 percent? 10 percent? – at the time on top of recurring charges. That was effectively just a payments platform for me because I wasn't using their blogging tools or their podcasting tools or any of that.
Immediately, I realized I had messed up. I thought, “If I'm going to do this for a long time, sustainably, I can't be forking over 10 or 12 percent on top of everything.” So what I did a year later at the one-year mark was tell everyone what this was costing and why this was a mistake. And I said here's what I want you to do: “I want you to go to Patreon, here's the link, and I want you to cancel your membership. Then I want you to click this other link and re-enter all your information.”
A huge percent of people switched over, which was like, wow. It was this existential risk that I faced.
When you run small businesses, you can increase your revenues or you can decrease your expenses, and sometimes decreasing your expenses is a more effective way of arriving at the right balance. I would think for anyone starting out, it's not just about thinking about what platforms like subsack or beehiiv or ghost can do for your right now. It's thinking about the long term. If I do this for a long time, do I have optionality here, do I have the ability to switch, do I have the ability to change something, or am I going to be fully locked into a platform forever?
I switched to Memberful, which eventually got bought by Patreon, so it all became kind of the same thing. And the prices have gone up since then but at the time it was the thing I needed. I've saved a lot of money as a result.
I think people don't think about that. Or about, like, what do you really own? Can you take your audience with you? A lot of people who went through Facebook sending a ton of traffic and money our way in the publisher world and then having that taken away are extremely wary of wanting to give too much power to the platforms.
When people are in launch mode, they're thinking, “How do I get out there and make a name for myself and build an audience,” right? It's really important to think about all this stuff, too, because they don't want to be like Matt Kiser, asking people to cancel a credit card in one place and reshare in another.
Pro Tip # 2: Keep re-telling your story
Matt Kiser: One thing our conversation reminded me of with regard to longevity is that you have constantly retell your “story” to your audience. We easily forget that people come and go (i.e. churn) and not everyone has read or seen all our updates or knows our journey. Our relationship with the audience isn’t as linear as the one that exists in our head.
Retelling your story is a form of new user orientation, which is about expectation setting. It’s also a sort of crucible you can leverage when it comes to generating reader revenue (ie “this is my full time job made possible by your financial support”).
(See how Matt does just that here. And this should be familiar to anyone who follows Instagram influencers who are constantly posting “Welcome new followers, I’m so-and-so posts.”)