📑 You Don’t Need Substack To Build an Email Newsletter
Put work you care about less—work for hire, short-form editorial, dumb jokes, random experiments—on platforms you don’t control, where the risk of failure is a distinct possibility. Leverage the resources of what else is out there. But when you’re working on the stuff that does really matter to you, put it in a place you have ownership of. Put it on your website. Send the newsletter using tools you run or manage—and be willing to pay for that right.
Ernie Smith goes beyond Substack and Mailchimp to discuss a number of options associated with managing newsletters. Whether it be using Mailgun, Amazon SES or EmailOctopus to send and Craft CMS, Ghost, Sendy or WordPress to host. Personally, I host my newsletter on my own WordPress site and send out a link via Buttondown.Email. However, Smith has me reassessing this, especially in regards to how I email.