Substack Exploration

In my last post, I discovered that the Lehigh Lookaway is hosted on Substack. In response, my professor “challenged” me to learn more about their experience on Substack.

With a direct message on Instagram and a comical conversation that followed, I was able to set up an “interview” with the Lehigh Lookaway.

It turns out I know Lehigh’s ultimate jokester… his caller ID showed up on my phone. With ease, we spent time talking about the newsletter’s growth as well as the platform’s backend.

All of the Lehigh Lookaway’s content is free. They have about 500 subscribers who seem to be coming in through word of mouth reference. The Lehigh Lookaway said that he sees certain friend groups follow at a time. (This point is interesting to note when thinking about our newsletter topics. They need to be small enough to be able to pinpoint exactly who is subscribing.)

Immediately after you put your email into Substack in The Lehigh Lookaway’s subscription box, you receive a newsletter. I appreciated the content in the. silly welcome email that I got. The fully customizable nature of the platform is also attractive to users. The Lehigh Lookaway shared that Substack was easy to navigate and could easily cater towards whatever you’d like it to be.

Now, moving onto bigger Substack accounts, I found Trissues.

• Tricia Gillbride (the author) really has my dream job… scoping out Twitter, writing a monetized blog post, all while filling myself and others in on celebrity gossip. I love how deep each post got even though people find this celebrity news silly. We all still love to read it.

I also loved High Tea for its relevance in my life. I’m wrapped up in Internet culture and love that Gen Z/Millennial counterparts are working together to monetize their work.

• Great use of emojis on this account. They added graphic flare.
• Their content breaks down Internet culture in the simplest way possible. Because of the media’s viral nature, it’s hard to keep up with everything going on online. High Tea has solved a problem for Gen Z/Millenials in that “dumb down” niche internet news in one easy newsletter.

Heated embeds a lot of tweets, photos and other graphics. It’s great that they are utilized to break up information and enhance the visual experience for the reader. I saw comments and dialogue between readers on this newsletter. Community is something I want to build on when thinking of my niche.

Finally, I looked up “Philadelphia Substack” to see if there were any niche travel/tourist newsletters for my city. I didn’t find a Philly Substack accounts, but I found It’s Always Donny in Philadelphia. Donovan was bored and unemployed so he started his newsletter. I thought it was awesome that he has the ability to review music and actually embed the music into the Substack post. (I love the creative liberty that Substack gives journalists, especially ones like me who love the entire aesthetic experience of the content!)

Starting off week three, I have a great appreciation for Substack. It’s wild that I didn’t know what it was before then!