Substack vs Beehiiv: Which is Best For Content Creators?

Which Is Best For Content Creators?

The Milk Road, a popular crypto newsletter, launched on Beehiiv and, in the space of a few months, grew from zero to 250,000 subscribers. Shaan Puri and Ben Levy, Milk Road’s founders, then did what any sane human being would do: they sold it for a big, ol’ pile of cash – apparently an 8-figure sum.

We’re 75 issues in, nothing is ever really what you expect it to be. We’ve learned what people like and dont like. But it’s harder than I expected, figuring out what’s interesting on a daily basis is taxing. There’s an art to finding those interesting bits and then figuring out how to package them so people understand them. There’s an appetite for this and we’re just experimenting to figure out what works.

For instance, Beehiiv’s referral feature is really nice and that’s probably accounted for 5-10% of our growth. The beehiiv team is building really helpful tools for growth. We drive a lot of viewership from Twitter. Our most viral content ever has been a tweet thread that Shaan posted on the Metaverse. We want to keep growing our list through fun and smart content.

Shaan Puri

Proof that, even in today’s saturated market, unicorns can and do exist. Substack has its own unicorns too. But the creators on Substack tend to be very different from the creators on Beehiiv, so it is important to first understand where you fit in – otherwise you could run into trouble.

Marketing or Communication – Or Both?

Most content creators fall into one or two categories: you’re either selling or you’re sharing – some people do both. If all you’re looking to do is share information with like-minded folk, Substack is a great option. It’s simple to set up, it has its own discovery engine, and the learning curve is ever so slight.

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Case in point: the platform tends to be favored and used by writers, journalists, researchers, and even songwriters (Jeff Tweedy’s Substack is excellent). Commercial stuff does happen on Substack but you get the impression it’s not “the done thing”, that it’s a little low-brow. Money is there, but it is done via premium, paid-for subscriptions.

Product Sales or Thought Leadership?

TL;DR: How Substack & Beehiiv Differ

• Substack is a popular platform for independent writers, offering websites and email solutions.
• Beehiiv excels in growth with better analytics and more design flexibility.
• Beehiiv includes a referral program to boost subscriber growth.
• It provides a website similar to Substack and can integrate with existing websites using sign-up embeds.
• Beehiiv can connect with tools like Revue for Twitter subscriptions.

The idea with Substack is to share quality, insightful content that people cannot get anywhere else and convert them into paid subscribers (it’s a bit like OnlyFans in this context).

Affiliate marketing, pushy lead-gen and most other commercial operations aren’t well tolerated on Substack. You can do it, of course, but it lacks the tools and advanced features you get on dedicated marketing platforms like ConvertKit, GetResponse, and Beehiiv.

If you want to do commercial stuff, affiliate marketing, ads, sponsorship deals, Beehiiv is the platform to go for. It comes with its own data analytics tools, growth tools, integration with third-party tools and APIs, and a lot more design options and flexibility for branding.

I kind of think of Beehiiv as WordPress for Gen Z. It’s built with newer, more modern internet usage patterns in mind, its biggest content creators leverage social media for subscriber growth, alongside Beehiiv’s built-in growth tools, because this is where the future movers and shakers hang out. Not on Google, but on Reddit, X, TikTok, and Instagram.

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Your job as a creator is to find a niche, a new angle on something, and go after it and build an audience. Beehiiv is hyper-focused on growth (its referral program is brilliant), so creators get all the tools they need to quickly scale and monetize their output. If you’re looking to go the commercial route, Beehiiv is probably where you want to be looking in this context.

More Into Thought Leadership, Writing & Lit?

If you’re a journalist, a researcher, a scholar, a writer of fiction, go with Substack. It’s completely free and, while it does take a cut of your premium subscriber fees, it is still a great way to get paid doing something you love and/or care about.

Substack is custom built with writing in mind, be it fiction or non-fiction, which is why it is used by the likes of doctors, novelists, history professors, cancer researchers, and musicians like Patti Smith and Jeff Tweedy.

Think of it as Medium on steroids, with email functionality.

It’s less commercially focused than Beehiiv, and it has fewer overall growth tools, but Substack’s discovery engine is powerful and not to be underestimated. If your content is good, you will get discovered and you will earn followers and subscribers. But the emphasis here is that it HAS to be good to work.

This is also why it DOES NOT have an AI writer built into it. Kudos, Substack. Nice see at least one tech company taking a stand against unethical AI.

But it is definitely less of a commercial place than Beehiiv. And that’s fine. Creators use Substack to get paid for their content via premium subscriptions, but most just do it because they like being there, writing, and sharing – only 5% of accounts on Substack have premium subscribers.

Given the state of Google search right now and the never-ending rise of generative AI, high-quality, long-form (written) content is getting harder and harder to find online via search engines like Google.

Once more people realize they can pay a small fee a month and read excellent, well-written content from professional and, importantly, human writers, platforms like Substack are going to get more and more popular.