You People.

It has been a long week. I’ve been consumed. You’ve been under-served. This just hasn’t been a banner week for we good people of this little community here. Thankfully, we’re only this entry away from moving on to better things.

With that said, I wanted to bring closure to the issues of last week with a postscript and also share some color on one particular thing because it involves you… us...

To get there, I have to give you just a little background.

I have written about all kinds of intensely personal stuff that people don’t usually talk about. Yet, ironically, I’ve never talked about the thing people talk about all the time: what they do for a living. Or did for a living. That just hasn’t seemed that interesting a topic to me. Thus, I didn’t think it would be of interest to you. However, it is now relevant, so, super-briefly…

I’m 52. Before my leap off the cliff here, I had a highly atypical career path. In my 20’s, I managed a consultancy in a $2 billion global communications firm. The division I ran provided strategic consulting to large, established companies like BMW and British Airways and smaller ones like Substack.

I oversaw technical, operations, analytics, and strategy groups. From there, I went on to found a digital practice; ran my own firm for a while; was a partner in yet another; and eventually went out on my own.

Across those various companies and roles, I was typically hired to help clients with hard strategic problems that straddled technology, communications, operations, and strategy. I worked on a lot of interesting stuff. When General Motors was looking to build its first online offering, the strategy for it was framed out in post-it notes by two guys in a conference room. Me and another guy. We sequestered ourselves in L.A. to develop the strategy, and then he dropped off the project and I moved to Detroit for a while to implement it. I helped launch a global telecom in 66 countries. I helped found companies, sat on the advisory board of startups, consulted on acquisitions, and built strategic partnerships. I’ve been around.

Substack is a subscription-based business. I’ve worked with more companies like it than I can count. If you have a cellphone, I’ve likely consulted for your carrier. AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon. All former clients. I’ve done work for hotels, airlines, casinos, car rental companies, entertainment companies, publications, etc.. I was the personal strategic advisor to the president of a major media company. That was a spectacular gig. The guy paid me to just take his phone calls a few times a month. Jeez, that sounds nuts now. It kinda was. I’ve had an interesting career.

Anyway, as a result of all that experience, I am not your typical Substack writer.

Most writers arrive here having little to no experience in areas where I have a lot of experience. Subscriber bases, retention, renewal dynamics, customer lifetime value, churn, etc.. I arrive at Substack knowing a lot about their business which now also overlaps with mine as a writer.

In terms of their business…

As a platform, Substack frees up writers up to write while handling all of the stuff writers neither know well nor want to do. Substack provides tools and templates and guidance which is hugely helpful to writers and for the most part, is pretty great.

When a writer signs up for the platform, Substack provides a lot of upfront guidance. It steers writers on how to set up their newsletter, price it, promote it, etc.. Substack’s advice to new writers is to start off entirely unpaid. The suggestion is to offer only free subscriptions and then eventually “go paid” by 1) adding a paid subscription tier which comes with some additional content; and 2) then adding a higher tier with even more content and features.

When I joined Substack, I ignored all of that and did the opposite.

As you have likely seen here, there is no “premium content”. I don’t paywall my writing. I don’t try to coax people into paying by dangling what they can only get by doing so.

My pitch isn’t The Mike Gold vs. the Mike Platinum. It’s just Mike.

I don’t try to sell a package and then upsell people to a more expensive one.

I just tell you the truth and hope that is enough:

I am a writer trying to make a go of it. If you find value in my writing and want to support me being able to keep writing AND it is affordable for you and within your budget, I would appreciate your becoming a paid supporter. That’s it. That’s the pitch.

If the first part is true but the second part isn’t – you find value but cannot afford the expense – I am not only okay with you not being a paid supporter, I am gratified and made happy by being able to be of some value in your life.

I am highly, highly averse to deprivation of enjoyment because of means. We as a society actively worsen the hardship of hardship by withholding things that would be of comfort to people who need and deserve access to them more not less.

So, I am breaking all of the rules here. I entirely know that. It is likely less profitable. It is still the right decision.

My approach is the one that I think is honest and true to who I am. It is what I’m comfortable with, and while I may be naïve or stupid or a silly-hearted pollyana, I believe it is also part of what has led to this little community of ours being so special.

And it is special… and that is the true subject of this entry.

When my peers who run large accounts on Twitter and elsewhere visit my feed here, their first reaction is “Jeez, you have a very engaged audience.”

And my reaction is always surprise. To me, this thing of ours, because it is my normal, seems just… normal.

In my head, I always think “It isn’t always like this…?”

No, it isn’t. It is not. In fact, it almost never is.

Engagement is a measure of how many actions people took in response to something they saw or read. i.e. how much they interacted in the form of likes, shares, comments, etc. It is a measure of interaction.

Online, people usually read a lot but tend to interact very little. So, engagement rates tend to be very small. On a platform like Twitter, large brand accounts would absolutely kill for even 1% engagement. My engagement consistently ran at 3%, 4%, 5%... Off the charts as engagement goes.

The same is true here on Substack… the rate of engagement with my newsletter is higher… but more importantly, the depth of that engagement is just in a whole ‘nother galaxy.

The replies are longer and more personal. They’re thoughtful and have a mutuality. They are reciprocal. They are people sharing of themselves in a conversation not just people who read a thing reacting with an emoji.

That kind of engagement is unheard of… which brings me to my little issue this week and the resolution.

Yesterday, Substack came to me with a proposed make-up for the income I lost over the past few months due to the system issue. As I always do, I reviewed it in ‘seek first to understand’ mode. I read it to understand the math and logic they used to arrive at the proposal before considering its fairness.

One thing jumped out at me as seeming significantly off. It was basically an estimate of the longevity of a subscription. In the straight business math of subscription-based businesses, there is a thing called ‘customer lifetime value’. It is just a fancy way of saying ‘how much are they gonna pay over time?’ The two dimensions in it are ‘how much they pay’ and ‘how long they pay it’.

To me… here… talking about this feed of mine and this community of ours, the number I cared about wasn’t the ‘how much’; it was the ‘how long’. That number is about our relationship. The stability of it. The longevity. The endurance.

Substack and I were far apart on our takes on the longevity of our relationship.

At first, that aggrieved me because it undervalued the relationship. Afterwards though, I went off and thought about it and decided I would accept their proposal and move on. I believe they made a good-faith effort to be fair. Their math was just based on ‘normal’, and this thing of ours, it just isn’t normal. And that is a blessing.

In my opinion, there is a value here which can’t be computed. It is something beyond the math which I am incredibly lucky to have.

Earlier this week, I posted my agonized “I don’t even know what to say anymore” post about feeling laid low by the issue that arose.

Afterwards, I had to log off because I couldn’t handle reading the responses at the time. It was the first and only time… ever... that I couldn’t read the replies to something I had written for a while.

The reason was because I knew they would be personal and thoughtful, and I didn’t think I would be able to handle them at the moment. I was already choking up. They would make me weep.

That right there though… that is the ‘lifetime value’ of our relationship. That is the thing I treasure. It doesn’t show up in a spreadsheet. It is more important than the math.

I am fortunate to have you here.

I am fortunate to be a part of this community with its earnestness and care and connection.

I’m grateful for you and thankful for your support always but this week in particular.

Thank you.