Anyone with Substack experience? (Or similar?) 🙋🏼‍♀️

[RMilner4]

Hi! Looking to hear from anyone who has experience with Substack (or similar) or just knows whether or not HubSpot has some of the same capabilities via another integration or within HubSpot itself. 

Here's what we like about the Substack model:

• Substack allows you to gate your regular blog content & allow access to subscribers only. It shows a preview, then prompts people to enter their information to finish reading. I've seen several news sites that use this model. Here's an example. 
• There's also a monetization aspect to Substack - you can have paid subscribers who are allowed to read your content - but we're not super interested in making money. Moreso, just having a dedicated subscriber base. 
• We really like the look & feel of Substack pages. We could theoretically take our Substack pages and host those on our own website, so maybe there would be some sort of workaround where we could use HubSpot's functionalities alongside Substack? 

Does anyone have any experience with Substack (or similar) + Hubspot? Or is anyone aware of a way to make these Substack functionalities work within HubSpot itself? 

Any advice is greatly appreciated! 🙂 

[Paul_Baier]

Hi,
We are a startup and started with Substack and got a good early following.  We decided to go with Hubspot to have a CRM with 360 view of prospects and customers and were planning to move our newsletters to Hubspot.  BUT after reading pros/cons, we decided to stay with Substack because 1) it does a much better job at generating new subscribers with discover/recommendations and appers to have much better/easier SEO.  we do need to figure out how to integrate the emails from substack to Hubspot automatically and what to do with user who unsubscribe on Substack.    contact me if you are also dealing with this issue.  paul.baier at GAIinsights.com

[AlexNation]

Was having the same issue with integrating Substack and HubSpot - have you found a solution for this? 

[ConnorSlivensky · Accepted solution]

Hey,

I'm not too familiar with SubStack but I have spent a ton of time on the HubSpot side and you can make webpages private and no index etc.  The problem is HubSpot treats webpages, landing pages, and blogs all differently. HubSpot has lots of functionality on the blog side of things (including sending subscribers blog updates regularly) but it's inbound oriented so they don't have a way to gate an entire blog itself. HubSpot see's your blog as the lure to your site and a major component of your SEO strategy.

That being said, you can create multiple blogs (not posts but separate blogs) so you could create a blog and just not link to it anywhere and only share those links through communication with certain segments based on whatever. It wouldn't be hidden from Google but unless you have crazy good SEO, to begin with, I doubt they'd be found over people trying to rank. The danger in this approach is once someone has a post URL they can share it however they want.

If you aren't looking to monetize your blog and are just looking for active subscribers I'd rethink gating your blog. HubSpot does give you in-depth metrics that are worth checking out.