Are Substack's metrics sending you down a rabbit hole?

Oh, we're live. Okay, we're live. We've got one viewer. Fantastic. Well, um, yeah, come on in, folks. Um, Michael and I were just chatting. Before I do my whole spiel and introduce him and why we're chatting today on the publishing spectrum, I'm going to give folks a chance to hop in. Oh, hey, it's great. Hey, Tom. It's nice to see you see some names that I recognize. Happy happy happy afternoon everyone.

Hey Ramona. Hey Ramona. Oh, we must know Ramona. Ramona's famous Jinx or Echo. Yeah, I don't know Ramona personally, but like I feel like I know her because I see her comments like for years all over the place and they're always good comments. So, yeah. No, Ramona keeps it real. Like she does not uh she does not mince words and that's why I like her a lot. So, it's nice to see you, Mona. Hey.

All right, come on in, folks. It is is very nice to be here as folks are coming in today. Gosh, what was the title of this? I don't remember. Something about like Substack Analytics sending you in circles or rabbit rabbit hole down a rabbit hole. Rabbit hole. Rabbit. That's right. That was your word. You had a great you had a great title for this and we ran with it. Um, so folks are are coming in and I am just going to uh kind of set the stage for like why Michael and I are are chatting like how I even know Michael. Uh, because I feel like Substack 2022 is very different from Substack 2025. And I have very fond memories of the writers I discovered in the early days of Substack when we were all like in office hours trying to like chat with one another and connect. Uh Michael is someone that I have read I think pretty much from the beginning of my substack um entree and um know him through his work in situation normal. He is um he's someone whose voice sounds very like familiar when I read it and so I when I heard him I was like I think I have met this person but he writes in a way and about things that I know nothing about. And so I feel like Michael teaches me something every time I read it makes me think about life in a different way. And so, of course, I was not surprised, but also surprised when um I reached out to just a handful of folks to see if they wanted like a mini data audit. That's something that I offer these days. And Michael was like was super gracious and just said, I don't think I want it for situation normal, but maybe for this other creative project down the road. And I just I was like, of course, Michael has a super thoughtful reason about like why no data here, but maybe data over here. And so he and I started chatting. I was like, could I just pick your brain about like why one versus the other? And it just sort of unfolded into this interesting reflection on his work um his experience in editorial and um just the whole space of like editorial analytics and like what are we doing on Substack with our data? Um, like what do we do with it? How is it affecting what we're able to produce? So that was kind of the door that opened and Michael was like, "I guess I have a lot to say about this." And he was telling really cool stories in an email and I was like, "Could we just go live? Can we just talk about this and and just hear more about like what you were writing before the internet became the internet that we know now?" Um, I think that was something that was super interesting to me. So, um, welcome Michael. Thank you. Thank you for hanging out with me. Um, and just let me pick your brain about this. Yeah.

Yeah. Thanks for having me. I appreciate this.

Yeah. Yeah. So, um, so I'm going to start back at the very beginning. So, he said he Michael kind of set the stage for, um, like I was like, what's your relationship with analytics like? And he talked about how he was a trade reporter um, in the switch from web 1.0 to web 2.0. And I was wondering if you could just um, like unpack for us like what was a day in the life of like trade reporter Michael in like web 1.0 when things were very simple around the internet and like just set that stage for us like what were you actually doing what were you covering and like who were you writing for what your editors were like I think that would be really interesting to know.

So, so web one and this is going to just to sort of like use a year here. It it's it's a it's a time span, but like where I kind of come into the picture. Um, it's like sort of circle like 2005ish. I think I'd started writing a little bit freelance for other publications, but I didn't I didn't have I didn't land like a staff reporter job until around 2005. um that ended up being at and I've written about this uh I don't think we're like breaking any news here, but like that ended up being at a trade publication that covered adult entertainment. Um I was just like to just be really clear like I think people who know me are like that seems like a really strange fit. Just 100% that was a really strange fit.

Yeah. Yeah.

Um two things that kind of attracted me to that job. Three, one was like health insurance. Um, so that was like I'll lead with that. Um, but the other things that attracted to me that job was that you know it felt at that time that you know 2005 is like it's not not clear that the internet is the future or maybe it's people are saying that it's the future but it's not quite that everything's like there yet. You know it's it's going to take a long time to unfold. We're talking about 20 years ago right? And so I very much felt that way and I was like, well, there's this publication that's like covering this industry and this industry is actually figuring out a way to make money online. So it seems like they're very kind of like ahead of the curve. And that seemed really interesting to me. Then the other thing that just seemed interesting to me just as a storyteller was that that industry itself just and that's a whole another topic, but like just that industry just reigns stories. I mean there are just stories like literally hold out your hand and one will fall into it. So for me that was a that was kind of what made it a a an interesting place to spend some time.

But from a from a reporter standpoint, you know, my day was really not focused on analytics at all at that time mostly because the the sort of prevailing the prevailing metric that we used was page views.

And I think it I think that they mattered somewhat. We had an ad sales team. They were selling ads that had a a not very much to do with performance, right? Like in other words, how many people clicked on this banner and went to wherever they wanted to go wasn't that much of a big deal for our trade publication. It was a big deal because like at this time the adult industry was sort of built on an affiliate marketing model. So, it was a thing that a lot of the people that I a lot of the people that I wrote about were web masters and they obsessed over this stuff and they really kind of thought about it very deeply, but then it was a little bit of a kind of a split screen because when I went, you know, just sort of like editorial meetings. We just never talked about it and if numbers came up it was like, "Oh, my god, can you believe that that thing got like this crazy page views?" But we didn't we didn't know why. We didn't really think about it much. We just kind of joked about it. It was like, "Oh, that was kind of like magic." Like, "Oh, fun."

Yeah.

Like a magic trick. Yeah.

Yeah. And kind of a head scratcher, but no real pressure, none at all really, from my boss or the owner of the company to say, "Okay, we'll increase page views." The pressure was always about, "Hey, let's pump out as much content as we can because that makes it feel like we're kind of an alive ongoing thing. Like our website is always putting out new stuff. So you have to keep coming back and refreshing the homepage. And this is very old web kind of like lingo of like refresh the homepage.

Yeah.

Like the Drudge Report, like what does he what's he put out there? Like do you have to refresh to see? Yep.

Exactly. And we read the Drudge Report a lot and that was a kind of in a lot of ways like very much of a model of like what are we putting out there that makes people kind of keep coming back to the homepage, but we weren't really we weren't really measuring it in in a in any way that kind of translated into let's do something different. It was just like just keep putting out stuff that you think is clickable, interesting, newsworthy, you know, hitting kind of traditional editorial guides, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. I would say so a few years after that I ended up working at a trade publication that covered digital advertising, digital marketing. And this was kind of at the dawn of like what we call web 2. And web 2 is just a kind of a shorthand. I I kind of call it a shortand for like all of the things that you kind of see with like social buttons and and social media and all these things kind of it's just for lack of a better word like it works better and it's easier and mom can get on there and figure it out as opposed to the the web one internet was like you know you got to be a little bit more nerdy. It's a little bit more complicated. Web two was like everything just just works right.

Yeah, a little more interactive and connected than like you sit and you read a page and then you're done with the site.

Yeah, exactly. And you know endless scrolls and that kind of stuff like these this was kind of coming online th those kinds of things. So around that time that publication was very focused on metrics for editorial and so in a lot of ways my my the the heart of my job hadn't changed much. The people I was writing about wore suits and were more serious Madison Avenue to Silicon Valley people, but the thing that they were doing was basically just moving traffic around the internet and trying to figure out ways to monetize it, attribute, you know, what this click, you know, how did that attribute to that sale and all that kind of stuff. So, the the kind of the meat and potatoes of of what I was writing about hadn't really changed. Just the people who were I was writing about had changed quite a bit.

And then the work environment that I was that that new work environment changed significantly. You know, a trade publication that covers like the advertising industry is just going to be a lot more a lot more button down, a lot more sort of business, you know, just straight ahead. We kind of lived and died by our metrics. Um, and that was on a daily basis you wouldn't see it as much. It was something that we kind of did on a weekly basis mostly because we would publish our web page and then send it out as an email newsletter at the end of the day. So most of our traffic really was from our our email newsletter. So, we sort of had five bites at the apple and then at the end of the week or the beginning of the next week, we would look at the previous week's traffic and we would sort of go story by story and say, "Oh, we sort of look at the subject line of whatever that email was and we'd say, well, is that a good subject line?" Like, I I don't know. And we had the ability to AB test. So, we might look at two different ones. Um, but that wasn't super sophisticated. And then we would kind of go story by story. And that was even less sophisticated cuz I don't think we were AB testing headlines, but we were just kind of going in and saying like, okay, well, like this this story got X number of reads. And I think we were using still page views, right?

Yeah.

But we weren't we weren't like we weren't doing anything other than just saying here's a page view and then here is like here's the headline that we use or here's what this story was about. So we kind of had this like on the editorial side a real qualitative analysis of like okay well we're covering this topic have we covered it too much and just the things that editors talk about and then we had like just enough data to be dangerous I think which is like you could sort of point to it and say oh well there's a number and that number must be you know numbers don't lie that's not true but like you know you sort of point to it and say like okay well that that number must must be some sort of like source of truth and then what ends up happening I oh I noticed very quickly was that we were always writing towards that bigger number, right? There was just a lot of pressure because that editorial meeting I should say was editors, but it was also executives and and just just higher up business people. So basically like everybody in the company was sort of dialed into like why did you write that headline, you know, and it's like I don't know. I I wrote it in five minutes because I had five million other things to do.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So, give me a sense of like the environment because I'm I'm thinking back to like the different environments I've worked in and it's usually somebody who was like in charge of the analytics, right? like like there's a person who's watching it and then they're like giving like how often were you like basically being bugged with this versus like was this just a part of the whole culture that like you wrote and you try to like create a a separation from like the pressure around the data and then like the the work around actually is this a good story like what did that actually look like were they like Michael have you checked the analytics today or did they give you some space like how did it look in that in that time frame?

In theory there was space in practice there wasn't and here and here's what I mean by that so having a weekly metrics meeting you would think like okay well that gives you space to sort of like learn what you did right and wrong last week apply it to the next week come back again and again week after week in reality we handed that job of just sort of pulling all these analytics and it's not it it it was at that time not a terribly simple job there she had to the person who did this had to reconcile both web analytics and email analytics. So these were just two different beasts to begin with. So it's kind of I want to say it's not a full-time thing, but it was a lot of one editor's responsibility. We just worked in like every tech company and kind of an open office floor plan. So all of the editors will basically sit in a bullpin together and you hear what everybody's working on, but the one person who's working on analytics half of the time or some of the time or whatever, you're definitely picking up like what they are thinking about, what they are working on. And then when you go to like put the new what you know what we kind of think about is like putting the newsletter to bed. Meaning, hey, everything we kind of did on the web, we're going to change it up a little bit, but put out a newsletter at the end of the day. that editor is part of that process. They're bringing all of their analytics knowledge to the table. So, when they speak about like, hey, I don't love that headline, well, they have a more a little bit more authority in some ways, right? Not not not an actual authority, but kind of an implied authority. And we're all kind of tuned in because they're like, well, yeah, like we want to I I want to have the best story at the metrics meeting, too, right? So what you say is valuable.

And basically so in that way it's kind of this more constant not by design but more constant feedback loop of okay this is this topic this is how I presented it this is how it performed and you're up again in you know a few hours or the next day or whatever. So you're kind of constantly processing this information. So there's so there's like a writing process that takes in the analytics. There's an editing process that takes in an there's a batching process that takes it in. And this is all kind of I would I would imagine you're also aware of like how the the company's doing as a whole that like your work is now like being able to track like is this actually growing? Like what how did that how did that look? Did you have that pressure? Sometimes I I hear from people who are like it's I'm too close to how the sausage is made to actually able to do like my creative work. How close were you to like feeling the pressure of like oh crap if I don't have a headline?

Not so so because this was a this was many years ago we still held pretty strong or as strong as we could to the idea of church and state. So sales would like it's one big open room but sales is kind of very much on the other end. Uh the sales people are lovely like very friendly people. My boss was a very lovely friendly woman but also was like stop talking to the sales people like I just just it's her way of just kind of enforcing that and I and I totally understood that where things were kind of and this might have been unique to what we were doing. you know, the the things that I'm writing about because I'm writing about essentially like digital media and ad sales and stuff like that. Our sales people are reading it not because it's their product that they're selling, but also because it there's some insight for them, too. So, that kind of goes both ways. And so, as a reporter covering that space, I have I can kind I could kind of figure out like, oh, the things that we are doing or not doing so well are are having business effects. So, it's not that anyone was saying, "Hey, Michael, this is what it means for the business." But it's like, "You're a reporter. You cover this. If you can't figure out what it means for your business, I just think, what are you doing here?" That wasn't me. And I don't think that was anybody that I worked with. Everybody that I worked with was like super dialed into that because that's literally what we were thinking about all the time at work. So in that way I think it was a little bit maybe a little canary in the coal mine for us because you know had had we been writing about sports I think we would have been pretty it would have been easier to sort of like be kind of fat dumb and happy and be like do you believe that we just get to write about sports all day and these sales people do their things and that numbers guy and he's weird and like you could just put it off to the side.

Yeah. we're a little bit more like we're a little bit more like kind of stuck in that space and so you know we're just we're just people who kind of know a little bit about what we're talking about and can make educated inferences too.

Yeah, I thanks for thanks for sharing all this. This is really fun to like feel like a like paint a picture of and maybe it wasn't fun but um it's fun to have the picture of like what we know data now and data then. And I think the whole point reason I wanted to talk to you is because you have I feel like you're someone who like really protects their craft and that was kind of the whole context of like our exchange was like you're like I'm going to protect this newsletter like um uh situation normal. I don't really want the data there. Um and that just that but I am interested in the data potentially for this other one. I'm I'm interested like what's the 30,000 foot view of like how have you evolved with protecting your craft over time and like what does it look like on Substack now for you? Um and even in your own work because you in our email exchange you quoted like Peter Ducker that like what gets uh measured gets managed, right? And that doesn't always mean the best product is is put out. And so I'm just I love that context for our conversation today. Um about like how do you based on like your experience like how do you feel about data now? Um now that you've you've felt the infiltration and you've been watching it for a long time now.

So, it's interesting because like I I think I'm going to say something that I think a lot of subsackers who've been here for a while will kind of nod along with which is you know there's been some redesigns in your dashboard and there was a time when your dashboard was hey come here to write like that was literally the first thing that you saw was like write a post.

Yeah.

And that to me is really where I want the sort of focal point of my dashboard to be unfortunately it's not there. And as far as I can tell, there is no way to kind of customize the layout of my dashboard. Instead, what you see in Subex a little bit different in this regard is you see a lot of analytics. I think the I think the main one that they want to kind of put in front of you are monetization, paid subscriber analytics. If you don't have paid switched on, I suppose it looks a little bit different. But really, really, really what they want you to kind of know from the jump when you enter that dashboard is like how you're doing, right? Like it's like going, it's kind of like going to the doctor's office and before you even get to have a conversation about like what's going on, they're like, "Well, here's your chart and like you're you're dead. Just so you know.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

And so I find that to be like a very counterproductive design, right? because I think that writers, it's good that writers have access to analytics and we can get into more of like what that actually means, but I don't think that like any of us get up in the morning saying like, "Oh, well, like what I really need to know is my open rate." Like it's like what are you writing about, right? Like what, you know, I mean, like what's on your mind? And so I just kind of have like I guess since these changes kind of started rolling through the Substack product, I just kind of made a conscious decision to say I'm just like I'm going to open it to write and so when I open it, I go right for and they move it. It does move over the years, but I just kind of go right for that write a post button. And that's that's where I belong, I would say, 99% of the time, right? that's really where I want to be. Um, that training doesn't like it doesn't always go well. It's not like it's not like I'm some like perfectly like enlightened figure who can just be like, "Oh, I block out all the noise and everything's groovy and like no, like of course not.

But I just kind of over over that time I just was like I think there was a moment where I was like, "Why am I looking at all of this stuff now?" Like I don't I came here to write and I an hour later I am down that rabbit hole, right? and still doubt it. So, it just kind of was like a kind of a moment for me where I was like, I don't I'm not here to do this. That's not that's not what I'm trying to do right now. And so, just trying to prioritize that and trying to just sort of say I'm going to open up my dashboard whenever I am working on a new piece. Um, whether you work in like Google Docs or Word or whatever you work in and maybe you put it into Substack or you just work directly in Substack. I just think the intent of like I'm here to work then go straight for that is my that that's sort of my guiding principle on like opening up the dashboard.

Yeah. Yeah. The it's it's really interesting. I think the reason I wanted to chat with you about this is that I've I've worked with different publications where they're like give me more data. Give me more. Give me all of it. And and I have I've come to recognize that like there is there is a um there's almost a privilege to not have to look at it if the creative person doesn't have to look at it and there's other people who basically make the functional production of it work while you stay sort of in this like creative zone. And so for I feel like I think you and I have similarly sized publications um like the there's a point where the efficacy of the data can go too far like it's it's not it's not helpful in both ways like there's there are limitations inside inside the dashboard. I'm wondering um and I definitely relate with like if I'm here to write I just go right to that new post like I'm not here to go like dig around. Obviously, some of my work it I do have a lot of like data adjacent sort of focus because I'm curious about it from a human. I'm interested in human behaviors and data feels like people to me. And so I'm wondering like did you did was there ever a point where like you ever heard people think about data in a way that felt productive? Like when is data productive for you? I guess is what I'm I'm interested in uh interest in hearing about next. Um, because there's a point where there it's not it's just not helpful. Um,

Yeah,

but sometimes it is like what do you think?

I think a good way to think about this is not is not data first, right? Like like data is like such an it's it's like kind of the word of our era in a lot of ways. Like it's like I I don't know. I I mean I grew up in the 20th century and I just I do not I did not anticipate everyone having conversations about data all the time. Like I didn't that was weird. That's weird to me.

Yeah.

But so I don't really try to I try not to think about it in terms of data first, but just try to think about it as like business objective first, right? And so like what is your business objective and then go out and look for like what is the best available data that can shed some light on what whether if I am achieving that objective or or am I heading in the direction of achieving that objective or am I heading away from it, right? And so to give you an like to give you an example, there's a lot of things going on at Situation Normal that you know like there's just there's a lot of things that that are kind of happening there. The thing that I really care about and really the only piece of data that I'm really kind of tracking over time is does any of this amount to me selling more copies of the book that I wrote and I'm super passionate about and that I love and that I'm like writing the sequel for. Like that's what I care about. That is that is the main thing. So, I don't put any stock into open rates. I don't care how many likes there are or how many comments there are. I'm really not even thinking so much about like, oh, did I add or lose subscribers or did I add or lose paid subscribers? These are all things that you that are valid goals. Like you you you could make that a business goal. I think you can make a business case for why these are important. But for me, I started this whole newsletter really in a just kind of a I mean, I don't think I talk about this a whole lot, but like I had written a book that I'm really proud of and I self-published it and then I realized, oh uh I don't have much of a platform and so I have already told all of the people that I can possibly tell to buy this book.

Yes.

And then at the same time, you know, the advice that I was kind of getting was like start an author newsletter. And I was like, well, I kind of hate those newsletters. I I love authors. I read a lot of books. Their newsletters are usually like they just feel like, I went to this coffee shop and I took a photo of a cat and I'm like, that's cool. I just want to know when the new book's coming out.

And so, it didn't feel like to me that was a way to start or very compelling. And so I was just sort of I just sort of backed it up and said, you know, let me take a bet here that if I write funny stories and my fiction has a kind of an autobiographical element and it is humorous. So the bet was basically like if I write funny stories and share them on Substack, will that convince some people slowly over time to just become to sort of dip their toe in the Michael Esrin fiction pond, right? and and just give it a shot. And the answer is like the answer is yes. It's been slower and kind of more of a more of a slog and a battle than I would like. But the part of it also my fault is that I didn't really do a very good job of promoting the book until about a year ago. But what I basically just measure is I sell the book on Amazon and I sell it through Draft to Digital. So I have basically kind of two two big channels, right? Drafted Digital is a store that kind of it puts together all the stores, right? And then there's Amazon. So, you sort of have these two I get two reports basically. And all I really want to know is like am I selling books this month?

Yes.

And and and ideally like did I sell more books next month? But I don't put much stock into like oh my god this month you wrote four times and it was always about these topics. So you sold 2x the number of books you did the num for four. I don't I don't know. I like I I can't make that inference. I just want to know like it's almost as simple as like tapping a microphone and being like is this thing on?

Oh yes it is. Because when I send out a newsletter people buy a book, right? And that is that you more than one person but like not as many as a hundred, right? Like somewhere somewhere less than that.

Yes. Yes.

But that's that's all I want, right? So I I see a message like I don't have a copy handy. Unfortunately, we're doing remodeling in our house right now and so my entire office is boxed up. Um, which is sucks and I don't want to be doing that again, but that's I'm sorry that's terrible. So, yeah, that's the that's the general like way that I kind of think about like, okay, this is the thing that I want to track data wise. I'll say that like the other data points like again I don't think a lot about subscriber count. I don't think a lot about uh other stuff like likes or comments. I don't the name of the book is not safe for work. Um I've seen I've seen the comments in there. So thank you.

Go for it. Yeah.

Yeah. Appreciate you asking Carrie. Thank you so much. Not safe for work. Um, there you go. Thank you, Sheila. These I'm sorry. The comments are like kind of pulling me down.

They're perfect.

Put my eyes down, not me down.

Yep.

Um, so, but to like like So, one metric that I know a lot of people get kind of obsessed with is like open rate. And we can get into like I just like there's a let's put that aside for one second but just know this about open rate is that or at least what how I kind of think about it is like I'm almost forced to look at it because of the layout of the dashboard and I do look at it.

It is really prominent. Yeah.

Yeah. But prominent but what I'm looking for is a kind of like outlier. In other words like if it is and open rates are all over the place and there's a reason for that. are actually a pretty broken metric.

But anywhere between like literally between like 30 and 60% you will see out there in the world which tells you it's like it's not very good at measuring what is actually happening. And a lot of that's because of like Apple privacy and Proton Mail and Gmail doesn't share all the information. There's a lot that's happening there that'll bore you tears. But

what if I see an open rate of like 5%. That just tells me that something something happened that was wrong with that.

There's a tech problem. Yes.

Yeah.

That's that's kind of what I try to tell folks when they're like when they are obsessing. I was like, look, like open rates. If they drop drastically, we have a tech problem and there needs to be like a tech support like thing filed. Um, if they're like dropping a whole bunch, I mean, like maybe you could fiddle with your headlines a little bit. like if if it's just like incremental like but the reality is is that to your point like there's just not a lot of cooperation around how that metric is measured and so obsessing about that to get it up doesn't actually reflect like quality and so one thing I tell folks is that um uh they complain about Substack not having robust analytics which is interesting because you're like I want less of them but the reality is is that is that what what's the most helpful is to focus on what Substack can measure reliably which is the things inside their network. And so like you can actually draw fair inferences from the data if you if you focus on the things where humans are making a choice. That subject doesn't have any sort of um there's no blocks to it. There's no there's no like there's nobody toggling it. Like they measure it or they don't. And so I think I just went down the boring rabbit hole that you said is not interesting about like why open rates aren't interesting. But I think it's helpful for folks to know that like um if you do look at your dashboard, you know, the things that matter are like what moved people to action, like what changed move them to action or actually like changed their nature of the nature of their relationship with you. Um and outside of that, I'm not interested either. Like I'm interested in tweaking the thing to make the number shinier. I'm interested in like how does this whole thing reach the people I'm hoping to reach and do I have any measurement of like the whole? And I think um for I mean someone like me I mean I started with 12 readers and so I had only worked with on client accounts where like those were their audiences like those were their people and so um I don't know if you have any I'm deviating a little bit from what we said we would chat about but like the data um interaction when it's people reading your voice versus like someone's publication who happens to have your voice. Um, do did you notice do you feel any differently about like the in like what you how you publish knowing that like there's nobody in between you and your readers at this point? Um, whereas like in other in other situations it's it's different.

Well, there sort of is somebody in between me and my readers for or in between me and some of my readers. And I think that is an important thing to think about just it just it's just a you have to be aware of this when you're sort of like parsing any substack data. And that is some percentage of your readers are reading you in the app. And by definition that means that Substack is the intermediary between you and them, right? So what it's kind of happening in the app is a black box to us and we really don't know a whole lot. We get information from Substack, but remember that's information that's just coming out of a black box. So for instance, they'll say things like, oh, you know, it's like somebody read some like somebody read Amanda's post that you were like mentioned in and then they subscribed and so that is attributed to you like so the inference for me is like hey doing something with you was like beneficial to me. Right.

Right.

That attribution is basically a little bit of data and a lot of inference and that is just a it is it is just a very educated guess. Yeah, they're tracking the first the first point of contact. It doesn't take into account all the things they were doing before.

Yeah.

Yeah. But then there's another black box to consider and that is you're also directly emailing people and then there's not quite the intermediary, right? Like this is kind of a debatable point, but I think it's heading towards more of a intermediary and that is in theory like email is an open protocol. It should just it should just move across the web, right? Like everybody uses this protocol. It should just work. And it does, except it doesn't quite always. And the reason for that is is because, you know, I'm sending out like a probably about like I don't know a fifth to a third of my readers I know according to Substack are somewhat are using are sort of accessing me through the app. So everyone else is getting me through email or the open web, but realistically email.

Yeah. So that means that like now I'm going through whatever rule sets Gmail has set up both universal and also if anyone's bothered to tinker with their own settings. So that's like a whole series of hurdles that I've got to climb through. And then but Gmail is not the same as Apple, right? And that's not the same as Proton Mail. And believe it or not, there are still Yahoo users out there. And I think I saw a Hotmail user recently like I saw an AOL recently. I was like I was like fancy look at you go. I was like hold on hold on.

It's a collector's item now.

It is. Yeah.

But like so those are all those are all sort of like I try to think of email as kind of that one black box that I kind of have to think about. But just even within that box are kind of different black boxes and they all operate in a similar way but also in different ways and you don't have the answers to this and you can be frustrated by that and I know a lot of people who like work in marketing who are they spend their whole careers being frustrated by that and I have a lot of sympathy for them. If in my shoes from the point of view of like just putting out situation normal, I am like you know what? This is a black box and it is liberating to know that I don't have enough information to make any decisions.

So I can just put it away. It is not useful to me. Right? It doesn't mean that it's not that it doesn't affect me, but there's like a lot of things that like it's like what's that? It's the It's the prayer that like Alcoholics Anonymous has like the difference between like it's like what you can change and what you can't and like knowing the difference, right? There's not a bad way to think about metrics in a lot of ways, right? It's like what you can actually change is probably pretty small, but what is kind of out there is a large complicated blackbox, multilackbox universe of just technological that is kind of being thrown at you and you have my permission if you needed it to just say, "Hey, that's not super helpful to me." You know?

Yep.

Yeah. I feel like um this is this is okay to share. Like last year I did this I did a survey and folks started calling me the Substack data queen and I was like I don't know how I feel about that because I'm actually like I'm a journalist and I'm a storyteller. I just happen to have this like experience and I'm just translating into this environment where I just feel like we don't know a whole lot. And I've and one of the things that like I tell most folks who are just starting out, I'm like I'm like actually just ignore it because like creatively it can just be crippling to your point of like oh you're obsessing about something that you can't actually affect when you're when you're small and what actually matters more is that you can actually hang in there for the long ride of like well the first of all the life of being a storyteller is that um there's lots of silence. There's there's lots of loneliness and silence. So, um I really I like the I like the advice. I one of my last questions on my my written um questions here was like what does a good analytics relationship look like? And it seems like there's probably a spectrum where like you just you keep it where it belongs. And um I don't know if uh if you want to talk at all about like your your next project of like why it might come into the room with like Slacker Noir a little a little more directly. That was part of our original chat was that might that might be a place where like you fiddle a little bit more in the future about it. I' I'd love to hear like what you think about that. So, how do you have how are you going to manage it? I would imagine you're still protective of of how what you're sending out um how does it look different?

Yeah, I think I think well, so first of all, and maybe I just kind of put this out there too because I just think it's important because I know I see a lot of people like obsessing over this is like you start out for most of us, myself included, you start out fairly small, right? Like like I started in 2020. That happened to be fairly good timing. Everybody was sort of stuck at home, right, for reasons that we don't have to get into.

Yeah.

But like but that's kind of when I started out on Substack. I didn't have a huge number of people, right? Like I had a little bit of a Twitter following. So I just DM'd people and said like, "Hey, I'm doing this." Most people like actually just said, "I'm done with you." And unfollowed. But like some people who I just had exchanged, you know, jokes with over the years were like, "Yeah, man. I'll check it out." Right? like, okay, so this ended up being like I feel like I got like maybe a few hundred people. I know that's a lot to some people and I know that's not very much to a lot of people, too.

Yeah.

Try to just kind of like don't think about like other people's like kind of subscriber number. Just like think about where you are. I had a boss once I worked at a at a publication that was very much a startup and you know what he just kind of

kept on saying was like, "Just, just try to like make it go up and to the right, right?" Like, "Just, he he didn't care that we had 5,000 subscribers or 50,000 subscribers. He was like, 'If we have two subscribers on Tuesday, I would like to have three subscribers on Wednesday, right?'" It's like a very, very simple kind of like.

>> It's very generous of >> like, yeah. >> Just, yeah. Just, just add like a little bit more. And so, in a lot of ways, that's not a bad preference to like what I'm doing with Slacker Noir. Is in a lot of ways, I'm kind of back to one because I have Situation Normal. The goal of Slacker Noir was a place for me to just write specifically about crime fiction. I have a lot to say. I have a lot of thoughts on crime fiction. I'm really passionate about this. And in that way, I think it felt a little bit more organic to the kind of novels that I write. So, it felt like there was a bit more of a connection than, "Hey, just this is funny and this is funny and you like something that's funny." That felt a little bit loose to me. This feels a little bit tighter.

I purposely decided that I wasn't going to import my entire or export my entire Situation Normal list and then put it into Slacker Noir. The reason I did that was because I was like, "I want to figure out of all of my Situation Normies, I want to figure out like who, who's actually like really interested in in crime fiction." That's really what I want to know. So, I put it out there at Situation Normal. I sent an email to everyone saying, "Hey, I'm doing this." And like, I'll just put numbers out there, right? Like, I think I'm closing in around 7,000 like subscribers at Situation Normal. That amounted to about a hundred subscribers at Slacker Noir. Now it's >> it's grown steadily, >> but like, I think we're around 200 now. It's like, it's not huge, right? It's just a sort of like, "Hey, big, big bucket of water, pouring it into like another bucket of water." Turns out you didn't get a lot of water into that bucket, right? Into that second bucket.

>> Yeah. >> I think that's okay. I'm not worried about that at all. I think it's a like, I think it's a good thing to have not kind of like doubled it up because then I wouldn't really, I wouldn't really be heading towards my goal of saying, "Hey, I am trying to create a community on on on the sort of front end side of how I think about like what, how I want to experience it and how I want people to experience it." I want to, I want to create a community of people who are interested in crime fiction and are interested in kind of talking about crime fiction in a way that that kind of aligns with what I'm doing, which is to be specific about it. I'm just a huge, big surprise fan of crime comedies. I love where these two things meet. So that's, I feel like that's not talked about nearly enough in crime fiction circles and that's what I wanted to do. So that's all I'm trying to put those people together.

On the business side, you could say, "Oh, well, he's putting together a list of people who are interested in crime comedy, right?" And again, that's true, right? What I'm curious about is not so much like the rate that it's growing or or anything like that. It's just nice that it like continues to grow, but what I really want to know is, "Do I sell more books doing it through Slacker Noir than I do through Situation Normal?" And the reason why I want to understand that is because I have other things that I do that might be more relevant to the to the broader Situation Normal community. Is say, "Hey guys, don't worry, like, I'm not even going to tell you about the book. I'm just, Slacker Noir is like for the people who are into that and I will tell you about my books whenever there's news. Let's go." But on the Situation Normal side, maybe there's something else we could kind of be talking about, whatever that is.

And I, personally, you know, I, I have experimented with like paid subscribers. I think for humor, personally, my feeling is is that like, free for me, I don't want to tell anyone else what to do, but for me, that model has kind of landed on it's all free and people pay to support. So something like a Patreon model. But what I've also kind of experimented with is sort of reported adventures for that sto for that that for Situation Normal. And so instead of using that sort of promo slot for saying, "Hey guys, I wrote a book." It's a good promo slot to say, "Hey guys, I'm going to go eat a burrito sideways and it turns out that I need $20 for burrito tax, tip, and a drink. I'm a generous tipper and and I so I need 20 bucks and if you just, it however we do this, but here's my PayPal account." And people sent in like a few dollars. So we got, we got to 20 and beyond. But like using that slot as a promo slot and just saying, "Okay, well, that's a little bit more aligned with what Situation Normal is really about, which is, yeah, it's humorous." It's also sort of seeing things in a new way, trying something a little bit goofy. Like there's a lot of things that are kind of going into that, but none of that's like, "Hey guys, like I know you just laughed your ass off about me like, I don't know, getting my garage door replaced, right? Like that's a very popular story, but by the way, I also write crime fiction." Seemed like a weird pitch to me. So that's why I try to break these two apart and try to understand how they how they kind of perform relative to each other is is what I'm trying to.

>> Yeah. Well, um, here I have got the link to Slacker Noir in case. Oh, wait. I copied it. Um, in case folks want to subscribe there. Um, I feel like one of the gifts of your writing is that, um, the way you write about something I don't know about is actually the way I learn. Like, you, you convince me to give things a chance. And so if you're, if you're like, >> "Whoa, crime, like, what, what, what is he talking about?" Like, just give him a chance. Like, give Michael a chance to like, change your mind because I feel like Michael has changed my mind in the past about topics that I didn't think I'd be interested in. Um, so go ahead and, uh, yeah, give it a chance. And I feel like, um, the the nature of like, like the quality of the comments that that feels like something you're, you're also like trying to protect and so like that would be >> such an >> Oh my god, it's such an important thing. I Okay. >> Yeah. Go ahead. I want to jump on the last. >> Yeah. Go. >> Okay. I have heard this comment and you probably have too. You hear people say things like, "What do you mean they've got like a hundred thousand subscribers but only like 10 comments?" Or like, you know, they try to, they try to like equate number of subscribers to number of comments. And I would, I would just say the relationship between those two is zero. Like, it just, I'm sorry for cursing and maybe we don't want to do that. I apologize. >> But it is so, there is no relationship there. >> Comments are, they can be a reflection of any number of things. What I want them to reflect is a community, right? And a community of just people who are showing up on Sundays is when I publish, right? I just kind of think about it as like, it's a Sunday thing. And that like, "Hey, we're, we're all here." And I put, I, I deliberately started putting in a long time ago, just kind of discussion questions because I realized, yeah, if you don't really, if you don't do that, people might not know that they can comment at all or might not be inspired to. Also, maybe they see that somebody did comment and it's like, one of those things like, maybe I, maybe you write a really funny piece and then the first comment is like, "This sucks." And it's like, well, well, okay, well, you know what the, the offline equivalent of that is like going into a like a new room and and just like farting, right? Like, it's, it's like, it's it's just like, you just ruined it for everybody, right? Like, it's, it's terrible. But I don't want that. I very much want like a lively comment section. My favorite interaction ever. This happened a while ago, but there was, there was something that was going on in my comment section where like somebody basically was responding to somebody else and they were kind of getting into a little bit of an argument and then you could watch it all kind of like play out and then by the end of it they were like, "Oh man, like I'm having a bad day and I just, I misread your thing and and they kind of like they just kind of made up." And I was like, >> "This is exactly the like the the the vibe that I'm trying to kind of cultivate here." So to me, comments are really a reflection of the quality of the community. They're not necessarily a reflection of what story I put out that week, right? It just, you just never know. But what I will say is like, when you have a story that goes like, quote unquote, viral, you, you're going to attract sort of flyby comments, right? And to me, those are >> useless. Like, I just, it's like >> context is everything. I give my readers a lot of context because I'm showing up in your inbox every week. We kind of get to know each other. If you just sort of zoom in on like one of my stories and and take it out of context and leave a comment, I don't know what you're thinking. I don't know who you are. I have no idea. Like, no way. But, you know, personalities emerge when they show up kind of regularly and you're like, "Oh, I can just sort of tell like I something I wrote like really upset this person, but I also know that like they're a very even-handed, funny person." So, I'm not going to take that super personal. I'm just maybe I'll reach out to them and say like, "Hey, like, is everything okay or did I kind of get something wrong?" I have a reader who I has commented a whole lot. I've gotten to know her quite a bit and like, I just, I wrote something and I made an assumption about a person and she's just like, "You're just dead wrong." Well, I didn't realize that I did not realize that the assumption that I made about that person was was very close to her life, right? And and so it just, it just sort of stepped on a nerve and I was like, "Well, you know, the situation, I'm pretty confident in the judgment that I made, but I'm also very, very understanding of where you're coming from because we both have context on each other." And that to me is like, that to me is the goal of comments. I don't look at it as a way to kind of like indirectly prove to people that you're popular. I think that's nuts. I just don't get it. You know, >> it's really boring. Like, I think that that's that's like, I think when people, if you, when you find a place where like people actually care about the topic that they're reading about, that's what makes people want to sign up for Substack. Like, that's typically like, I tell people like, "Come for the writing, stay for the comments." Like, if you find a place where like the author actually wants to hear from you. Um, like that's that's enough to pay for like, "I want to keep this thing alive." And so, um, you know, to your point, I've I've worked with publications that are pretty large and like comments aren't part of their strategy. Like engagement comes from different places and and they're fine with that. Like, that's not part of their goal. And I feel like, um, I don't know, maybe like the, the golden tick away is that I feel like Substack made a place for like being small, being okay that like the value and the like >> that the fact that like these people give something back to you and at least that's what I've experienced is like the people on my list, like they give something back to me that helps me keep going in like this solitary sort of like life of like trying to use the written word to translate the world for lack of a better term. Um, so I don't, I just, I, I have been in some of your comment threads inside Situation Normal and I'm just like, "You could write books from it." Like the quality of of those engagements. And so anyways, I'm interested to see what, what is coming up, um, in the comments at Slacker Noir because >> I'm getting, I'm getting book suggestions and people are just kind of like, so far that's what people are kind of book and movie suggestions and just saying like, "Oh, I really like this." And you know, I'm just finding new things that I didn't know about. So that's, that's actually really cool. I want to just, I wanted to like circle back to one thing you said though, just about like comments in general and and writing. And this is an example from like way early in my career, but like, there was a point in my career where I thought I wanted to be a screenwriter. I was like, just good enough at it to like have a little bit of success, but not, I just, I did not like it. I did not realize it took me a little while to realize how much I hated it for for reasons that have a lot to do with the business and not a whole lot to do. I love movies. It does not have anything to do with movies. >> But the long and the short of it is is like, I think I remember like one of the very first times that I had like, I'd like optioned a script and I like working with a producer and I just got these like, I got notes that were just like, like it was like I felt like I'd just been like gutted and torn apart, right? It was just so much. And I was like, "You really just don't even want me or my script. You don't want anything." >> Yeah. >> And I was like, not handling it well. And a friend of mine kind of took me aside and he was like, "You know what? You, you really need some perspective here because when people are giving you feedback or commenting on your work or just generally sort of com have something to say about what you wrote. He was like, "That's cuz something you said was like, they cared." Like, it, it made them care about something. And it made them feel something. It brought out some sort of emotional response. Right? If you are not getting any feedback whatsoever, he was like, "You should then you should be this upset if nobody is like interacting with your stuff, right?" And that's an offline example obviously, like, it's not, it's not an online thing. But the the point being is is that like, I do think that, you know, coming at it from a perspective of somebody took the time to leave a comment, a quality comment, not like, "LOL" or like, "This is lame, dude." Like, not that, but just something because that's how the comment reads in my voice is like, that's how they sound. >> Yeah. >> But like, if they take the time to leave a comment, it's like, you were successful at reaching somebody, right? And you should be proud of that. And I don't think that >> I don't think the quality of your work is is a, I, I don't think that that's a function of like, how many people you're necessarily going to reach. There's a lot of other things that are happening that that lead to like, you finding more readers. But just so like, if you're small and let's say you've got like 10 subscribers and like one person was like, "Hey, I have thoughts on this too." Like, congratulations. Like, you're, you're, you're doing just fine. Like, that is good and just kind of keep moving in that general direction. And I don't mean topically like, I wrote about bad mitten and somebody said, "This was interesting to me," so I should only write about bad. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> I just mean like, hey, your, something about your voice, the way you kind of tell a story, the way you explain something that was working. Just try to do it again. Different topic, whatever you want to write about, but just see that like, "Oh yeah, people are okay, a person came out. Oh, another person kind of came out." And then for God's sakes, like especially when you're small, like write back to them, right? Like, I just, I do not, I, I don't answer every comment. I would like to, it's just not feasible. But like, I do try to set aside time either on Sunday or Monday for like a half hour or so where I'm just going to jump into the comment section and respond to people and and just, you know, engage with them because I took the time to write something thoughtful. They took the time to write something thoughtful. I want to take the time to write something thoughtful back. Like, it's just a way to be a person. I just >> say this sounds very like baseline like human decency like like just just setting the the threshold of just like, let's just acknowledge when someone speaks. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. >> Yeah. Just >> Yeah. Just be a person. Hey, that's actually a good, that's a great newsletter name. "Just be a person." >> Um, well, I, I'm mindful of the time and I'm mindful that we haven't actually taken any questions. I feel like you and I have just kind of we've gone down our own rabbits, uh, the rabbit hole of of data and what it, what it looks like inside, um, >> creative process. >> But, um, I'm game for, yeah, a couple of couple questions. Anybody wants to ask about like, um, >> I feel like you've got a, you, you've got like, like a master storyteller here. You should totally pick Michael's brain about like, how to chase a good idea. Um, if you're interested in that. Um, and just, uh, like, don't miss the opportunity. And I bet you could probably also show up in the comments of Situation Normal and just, uh, >> get a lot out of it. >> You totally could. I've gotten, I gotten a lot of like, just good stuff from people who just show up in the comments, you know. >> Yeah. Yeah. Give folks a second. I think this might be my largest live stream so far. >> Oh, nice. See, now we're like, now, now we're counting views, right? >> I know. I know, right? Yeah. I'm like, I'm like, "Oh, wow." The longer, the longer you talk, the longer they have, uh, to like send out the notifications through the the interwebs. >> I'll make an, I'll make a little bit of an aside, and maybe this is useful to people, but >> yeah. >> So, I, I never worked on staff at a print magazine, but I did for a good part of my career, I did freelance for several magazines and and like fair, fairly regularly. And one of the things that kind of like, just in talking to my editors who came up through a print world and then kind of were confronting a digital world that I found fascinating was that in a print world magazine, kind of edits apex, everybody is thinking a whole lot about the cover story. What is on the cover this month or this week, right? That is that is everything. And that is where all of the, not all, that is where most of the investment goes, right? Is where they're putting their their high, it's where they're putting their most money into the writer, obviously, a photographer or illustrator, they're just really investing in that. Then they have these other sections though that are like, you know, smaller, like you can call it like front of book, usually was kind of what it would be called, but like, it's like, "Oh, here's like a little quiz, right? It's like, just little things." >> It's all the sidebar, like the subs. >> Yeah, they feel very kind of small and and whatever. And no editor in that analog world is like, "Well, you know, why we didn't sell magazines this month is like our quiz just kind of sucked." Right? They're they're always about like that cover story. We got the wrong celebrity to be on it. Like, it just didn't, you know, whatever. And what I found really interesting was like, if you look at kind of what the web kind of became and sort of gave to us and BuzzFeed is the classic example of this, is like, they did cover stories, they did serious journalism, they lived and died on their cat quizzes, right? And so there is really this, I think the way that I think about it is is that legacy media, traditional media, whatever you want to call it, overemphasized the sort of the big thing because that's the thing that's important to writers and editors and underemphasized the little things that that readers were just enjoying. And now I think we're actually in the exact opposite world where editors are chasing all of the little things that we are super, that we sort of seem to be interested in because it's like, you, you spent five minutes with that quiz, but only one minute with our cover story. And so we're kind of in this sort of like upside down bizarro world. >> Yeah. >> I think there's a lesson there in that is that like, neither one of these worlds was right. Right. Like, like, like they didn't actually understand how people were consuming their their material, their content. >> They just made a series of assumptions based on kind of what they had available to them, right? And that's that's really what it is. >> Yeah. Yeah. Um, No, yeah, I appreciate that. I was in, I worked in print. That's where I started was in print and then I had to make the shift to digital and it was, there was a, there's a lot of shock waves around like, like how you, how you had to do that. We are, we are definitely at time here and I don't have have time to dig into that and we are in the digital world though. So, um, I bring print in whenever I can, but it is, it is in the past >> for me, unfortunately, it is very much in the past. So, um, well, I don't, I don't see any questions that have come in. There will be a replay of this and I always make a note at the end that like, if you want to ask a question, I do keep an eye on the comments like, I try to, I mean, my archive is pretty big, but like, I do take comments sections like, like similar to Michael, that like, if you take the time to read, I will try to get, get back to you. So, um, yeah. Hey, Michael, thank you so much for just chatting about this and I, I hope we gave folks just some permission. I feel like, I think, um, >> that like how you work with data is pretty individual and like, you said, like, um, based on what you're trying to build and what you need to, like, for me, a lot of it is like, what do you need to keep going? And like, a lot of times data is not the thing you need to keep going. Um, you need, you need something else. And so I think the, the rabbit hole when you find it, try to find your way back to a newsletter that will make you laugh. Um, that's at least my >> that those are my, my five, my five cents worth of advice. So, um, All right. Um, well, thank you. Thank you so much for coming, y'all. I, I wave like this as if like everybody's looking at us in a, in a >> God only knows. >> Yeah, God only knows. So, um, anyways, thanks for being here, y'all. And, um, >> yeah, thanks, Michael. I really appreciate it. >> This was fun. Thank you for having me. And and everyone who joined, thank you for joining. I'm, I'm, I hope I said something useful, helpful. Let me know if I didn't or if I did. I both are fine, but like, let me know. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, that'd be great. All right. All right. Talk soon, guys. >> Bye. >> See you later. Bye.