Welcome to the Off the Grid Clubhouse on Ghost!

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Hello, and welcome to the Off the Grid Clubhouse.

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I'm your host,

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Amelia Hruby, and this is the very last episode that I will be posting on Substack.

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So I wanted to record this as a sort of archive of why I have decided

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to leave Substack and move the clubhouse to Ghost,

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as well as a really big flag for anyone who only listens to the podcast

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on their private podcast feed,

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that they get an episode notification that we have moved.

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So I Something that's interesting about Substack is that you can have subscribers

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that engage in so many different ways.

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People can read all the emails.

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They can only see posts on the website.

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They can only listen to the private podcast feed.

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And that means when you want to leave,

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you have to make announcements in all these different ways if you want to try

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to capture everybody and make sure they know the shift is happening.

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And that is actually also why I wanted to make this mini episode.

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So in this podcast episode,

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I'm going to talk about why I decided to leave Substack and move to Ghost.

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I'm going to talk about the things I did to make that transition easy.

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And then I'll share my like literal day one on Ghost experiences.

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Because as I'm recording this, I just did the transition yesterday.

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And I'm excited to tell you all a little bit more about it.

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So if you're brand new, this might be a lot.

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If you've been around for a while, this will be a good explanation.

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And if you want to keep up, head to Ghost and find us at offthegrid.ghost.io.

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The clubhouse is not ending.

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We're just moving.

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And there's gonna be so much great stuff happening there in the future.

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So I'm really excited to keep the clubhouse going on Ghost.

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And let me tell you a little bit more about the why and the how of this migration process.

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If you're unfamiliar,

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the Off the Grid Clubhouse is a space for paid supporters,

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friends, fans,

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and super fans of Off the Grid Podcast,

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which is a show that I host That's all about leaving social media

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and creative business and radical generosity, energetic sovereignty.

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So we have a public podcast that goes out every Wednesday when we're in season,

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plus some Friday bonus episodes, plus some other things.

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And all of that happens anywhere you get your podcast.

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You just search off the grid leaving social media and there's

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a public podcast totally free there for you.

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Now with that podcast, I have a free leaving social media toolkit that you can also download.

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And that you can find at offthegrid.fund slash toolkit.

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And everyone who downloads that gets put on our broader off the grid mailing list.

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So that is actually an email list that I run through Flowdesk.

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It has, I think something like 2,500 subscribers.

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And that's what I consider my primary email list.

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So I'm gonna be making some changes over there this fall as well,

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but that is an email list where I send out updates about the podcast,

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updates about offerings.

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That's the email list where I'm doing more traditional email marketing.

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I have a lead magnet,

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I have a welcome sequence, and I share episodes and do sales over on that list.

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Now, after I had that list for a while and I had the free podcast for a while,

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I was thinking about two things.

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I wanted to have a sort of paid arm of the podcast for people who really loved it

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and wanted to support it and wanted even more episodes than one a week.

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People who were like, I want to hear more of Amelia's thoughts.

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I want more behind the scenes updates.

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And I'm willing to pay for that extra content.

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This is a way that a lot of podcasts monetize.

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So I was thinking about that.

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I was also really excited by Substack.

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When I came over to Substack back in 2024,

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like a lot of my friends are on the platform.

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They're really pumped by it.

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And so I wanted to experiment with starting the clubhouse on Substack as a way

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to have a paid arm of off the grid podcast and to get an experience

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of this platform.

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So that was kind of my initial entry into the space.

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Now, When I joined, I was really excited about it.

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And there's actually a lot of content that I made about launching the clubhouse,

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my first month on the platform, my first year on the platform.

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All of that content has now moved to Ghost.

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So you can go there, search Substack, and you'll still find all of that information.

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I've done a lot of open reflections on my experience on Substack and a lot of

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the reasons I really liked it.

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But over the past,

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you know,

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six months or so,

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I really started to ask myself, like, Is Substack the place for me?

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And that was for a few reasons.

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One is because there was a lot of,

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you know,

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press coverage over the past few years,

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honestly,

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even before I came to Substack,

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I've learned now about their sort of insistence on not censoring publications,

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their insistence on free speech to include Nazi propaganda

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to include anti-trans bigotry.

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And many writers have left for those reasons.

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There's a really good Atlantic piece on it.

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I also have found some Substack writers writing about it.

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And I linked those in my first migration post.

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So that values misalignment was definitely a red flag for me.

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And at the same time,

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I think pretty much any VC funded tech platform,

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I'm going to not be aligned with their values.

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So I was looking at that,

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I was noticing that red flag and also thinking to myself,

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well, is that just the trade-off for using any big tech platform?

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And so I took a wait and see approach.

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Then I started to notice thatSubstack was adding new features that I found rather suspicious.

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So they made a big pivot to video and really emphasized video on the platform.

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Then they added Polymarket betting embeds where you could like look at bets.

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I don't even understand how it works.

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But they added that and I was like, who wants this?

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What is this for?

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And more recently,

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they've made a big push to add sponsors and for them to have a sponsor network

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that they can send to bigger publications,

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which is something that when they started out,

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they insisted they weren't going to do because they were like, that model is dead.

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Now we are creator driven.

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And it's fine to change course,

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it's fine to change your mind,

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but what I've noticed with the combination of the extreme values misalignment and

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the types of publications that they will platform and make money from,

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you know,

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also the Free Press was a big Substack publication, like,

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so much of that,

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plus all of these new features I don't really agree with and their willingness

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to fully about-face on things they said they weren't going to do...

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When you bring that together, it really made me unsure about the future of the platform.

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It made Substack feel like a place I could not count on.

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And then, of course, they added Notes since I have joined here.

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So Substack went from a place where everyone was posting these longer form articles

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or podcast episodes to now being an algorithmically driven feed through Notes,

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which is largely Substack's kind of Twitter clone of sorts.

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And as they did Notes, they also added leaderboards.

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Everything became algorithmically determined and ranked.

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And When that happened, it just became very clear thatSubstack once again was social media.

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And as you know,

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because I host off the grid,

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you know,

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I have personally been off of social media for over five years and I have

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a whole podcast and a whole platform and

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a whole business around not using social media apps in our businesses.

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And so for those three reasons,

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the values misalignment with the types of content that are posted and promoted

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on Substack,

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the lack of clarity and even disagreement around where the platform is headed

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and all the features that they're adding,

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And the shift to becoming social media with the introduction of Notes,

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which actually like Hamish McKenzie,

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one of the founders of Substack,

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talked about how they wanted to be a social media platform, I think last fall.

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So none of this was a secret.

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But as I watched all this happen, it just kept adding up and adding up and adding up.

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And I finally decided that I needed to leave Substack because it didn't feel aligned

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with the vision for off the grid anymore.

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So this is an important perhaps like sticking point or detail for me,

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which is that I am not deleting my Substack profile or totally just like going away.

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I am moving the off the grid clubhouse from Substack to Ghost.

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And then I won't be using Substack for any active emails anymore.

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I do have a podcast set up there with my friend Taylor.

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We've been making monthly-ish episodes for the past year and a half.

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Like that's going to stay on Substack.

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We still have it there,

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but I will not be sharing anything about off the grid or for off the grid

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through Substack.

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So in some ways,

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I will still have a profile, I guess, on this quote unquote social media platform.

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But because I don't really use notes and because I primarily have just gone there

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to send the clubhouse, I don't see myself being very active anymore.

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And maybe I'll change my mind.

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Maybe eventually I will fully just delete my profile and not be on Substack at all.

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For now, I'm just focused on moving the clubhouse.

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So the next part of this is why did I just decide to move to Ghost?

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So I think late last year,

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early this year,

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it became pretty apparent to me that I wanted to move the clubhouse off of Substack.

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And for a while,

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my biggest sticking point was that there wasn't another platform where I could host

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a private podcast.

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And as you all know,

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my Substack, aka the Off the Grid Clubhouse, was primarily a private podcast.

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I'm not writing essays.

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I do send emails when I put the episodes up,

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and I do have my click-through link roundups, but this is largely...

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And so I needed another platform where I could have a private podcast

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that also sent emails and had comments.

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Those are the three things I wanted.

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I wanted the private podcast.

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I wanted to be able to send some emails to the clubhouse.

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And I wanted there to be commenting possibilities for people to engage and interact.

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And so I started looking for that and I couldn't find it.

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And then finally, Beehive launched it, which was exciting to me.

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I was like, okay, Beehive is doing podcasting now.

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But Beehive is also a VC-funded tech company.

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And I think that a lot of this pathway of inshittification that I experienced

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on Substack that many of us have experienced on Instagram or other platforms

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before it, that

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Because they take venture capital money,

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they need to show massive returns to shareholders,

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which means that they grow in certain ways and they're always looking to bring

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on new ways to profit.

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Right.

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Right.

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And so I think Beehive, you know, they have a lot of great options.

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They do a lot of great things.

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But for me,

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I was worried that if I moved to Beehive,

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I was just getting on a slower train than Substack.

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But it was the same train.

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Right.

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It's like Substack took the sort of like express route through incentivification.

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And I worry that Beehive would just be taking the slower path because it's also VC funded.

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Right.

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And so I wanted to find,

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ideally,

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a company that was not going to,

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you know, run by those venture capital norms and timelines.

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And so that's when I came to Ghost because Ghost is a nonprofit and it is

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an open source platform.

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And those two things mean that it's not beholden to VC values and it's not built

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on this like proprietary tech.

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And I think that,

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you know,

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that means that ghosts might move a little slower to develop certain things.

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For a long time, ghosts did not have podcasts.

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Ghosts did not have welcome emails.

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Ghosts did not have all of these things that you really needed to have

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a successful paid publication.

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Over the past like six months, they've added all of that.

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And so especially when Ghost announced that you could now have private podcasts

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on Ghost,

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they would integrate with Transistor,

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which is the podcast platform that I use for all of my other podcasts,

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including off the grid.

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When they announced that that was happening, I was like, okay, great.

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Now I have an option that feels at least somewhat more values aligned

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in its structure, and it has the functionality that I need to make this work.

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And so I decided to move to Ghost, I think about four months before I'm recording this.

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I knew it's what I wanted to do.

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I knew they finally had the functionality that I needed to make the shift.

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But then I didn't rush to do it right away because quite honestly,

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I had a very busy spring and then I lost a person and a pet

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that were really important to me.

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And so I had a very dark spring, I suppose you can say as well.

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And I'm really glad that I was not trying to take on this migration in that process.

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Because as I mentioned before,

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what I heard from people when they talked about leaving Substack was like a lot

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of headaches.

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Not everyone.

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Some people seem to have a pretty seamless move.

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But it also sounded like anyone I knew,

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they had to contact support,

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they had to get help with things, all of that was happening.

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And so I didn't want to make this move during a time when I was feeling exhausted

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or stressed or like I couldn't handle that type of potential tech glitch.

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And so I decided to wait until the summer, which is always a more...

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Sort of chill time for me.

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And that was then this week, mid-July, as I'm recording this.

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And so how did the migration go?

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Let me tell you how this kind of worked for me at the very least.

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So the first thing that I did was I created a ghost account and I set up my publication there.

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And that involved,

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you know,

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picking the name,

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adding the header graphics and publication logo and I had to put in my brand colors,

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which for me, actually, I'm redoing my branding right now.

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That's also one of my summer projects.

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And so I put all the new stuff in there and I got to make some tweaks

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and see how it looked and what I liked.

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That was kind of the first step was to get set up on Ghost.

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Then I upgraded to a paid plan so that I could have paid subscribers.

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So Ghost gives you a, I think, two week free trial as I'm recording this.

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And then you have to have a paid plan to use Ghost.

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It is not a free platform.

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You pay based on, I believe, like how many subscribers you have.

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So for me, when I migrated, it was like $350 to set up for a full year.

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350 for the full year.

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And I should actually pause there because I'm realizing another reason I didn't want

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to leave Substack or I spent a while deciding to leave Substack is

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because it's free.

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It doesn't cost anything to have a list there.

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What it costs is that Substack takes 10% of your paid subscriptions.

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So when someone pays you $5 a month,

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you know, Substack takes their 50 cents and Stripe takes, I think, like,

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So you lose almost, you know, 15% at least of the money that's coming in on Substack.

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I shouldn't say lose, maybe.

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You are paying that to your email provider and your payment processor.

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And so...

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By the time I left Substack, I had,

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I think,

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like $8,000,

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over $8,000 a year in revenue,

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which meant that I was paying Substack $800 a year to be there.

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So moving to Ghost and now paying only $350 a year is already a big deal.

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And, you know,

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when I was making less money on the clubhouse,

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it didn't,

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maybe it was kind of a wash.

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Like when I was making $3,000 a year,

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I was like,

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well, I pay the same thing that I pay if I move to Ghost or somewhere else.

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And also,

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it used to be that to move to Ghost,

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I was going to have to pay another service to have the welcome email and everything,

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but now I don't have to do that.

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And because I already use Transistor, I don't have to pay anything extra to do that.

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So, For me,

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I will just add this note into my migration process that I am saving money

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by making this move.

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And I kind of waited until that would be true to make the move.

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So there was a financial component in when I made my decision as well.

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Okay, so going back to setting up Ghost.

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I made a Ghost account.

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I paid for my plan.

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I connected Stripe to Ghost,

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which noticeably had to be the same, like, Stripe account that I used for Substack.

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I connected that to Ghost,

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and then I started their migration process, which was actually very, very simple.

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All I had to do was log into Substack, export my list, and...

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They gave me a zip file of all of my content and contacts,

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and then I put that into the Ghost migration tool,

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and they uploaded everybody into Ghost.

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All of my posts,

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all of my people, including the paid plans, all of that immediately went into Ghost.

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And I have to say, it took a little bit of time, but it worked great.

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Everybody moved right over.

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I didn't have any issues.

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I I know that some people do,

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but for me,

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Ghost Migration Tool was so simple and so straightforward,

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and I'm really, really grateful for that.

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Now,

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before I ran the migration tool, I did make some adjustments to my Substack list.

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So when I was on Substack, I noticed that my list was just growing and that seemed cool.

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I was doing nothing to grow it because for me,

(00:17:39.161):
the clubhouse was always meant to be for paid supporters of off the grid, right?

(00:17:44.226):
Like I have a whole free podcast.

(00:17:45.708):
That is the free thing that I draw people in with.

(00:17:49.030):
I wanted the clubhouse to be perks for paid folks.

(00:17:52.473):
And I noticed over the past year that I had less than 200 paid subscribers,

(00:17:59.538):
but I had over 1,500 subscribers.

(00:18:02.243):
So there were these 1,300 people who were on that list for free

(00:18:07.388):
and were mostly just getting previews of my paid episodes.

(00:18:12.973):
And so I had this sort of curiosity.

(00:18:15.115):
As I noticed the list was growing, I also noticed that my open rates were dropping.

(00:18:18.038):
So my open rate on Substack was typically around 30%,

(00:18:21.441):
whereas on my list on Flowdesk,

(00:18:23.523):
which is 2,500 people instead of 1,500, it was more like 60%.

(00:18:28.527):
I'm noticing that like my Substack list is growing, but the open rate is dropping.

(00:18:32.794):
I don't think I'm really serving a lot to my free subscribers.

(00:18:35.658):
So I wanted to do some list cleaning before I left because on Ghost,

(00:18:39.744):
I'm paying for how many subscribers I have.

(00:18:41.927):
And I didn't want to...

(00:18:43.489):
Transition a ton of inactive people with me.

(00:18:47.311):
If they weren't actively reading the emails, I didn't really want to make the move with them.

(00:18:51.913):
Especially because of what I mentioned at the beginning,

(00:18:54.054):
which is there are a lot of people that I presume,

(00:18:56.735):
you know,

(00:18:57.055):
subscribed or followed me on Substack because they like being on Substack

(00:19:01.598):
and they wanted another publication there.

(00:19:03.398):
And I...

(00:19:06.896):
If I'm leaving Substack,

(00:19:07.977):
I don't want to take the people who just like Substack somewhere else, right?

(00:19:11):
I want to take the people who like me in the clubhouse somewhere else.

(00:19:14.743):
And so I was looking for my more highly engaged subscribers,

(00:19:19.027):
and I wanted to do some list cleaning.

(00:19:21.049):
Now, I want to be clear that when I was staying on Substack, I did not clean my list.

(00:19:25.292):
I was just letting the Substack machine work, and I let it grow.

(00:19:30.597):
If you're actively on Substack, I don't even know that I recommend you clean your list.

(00:19:34.082):
You can, but I don't know that you have to.

(00:19:36.545):
But because I was leaving Substack,

(00:19:38.668):
I didn't want people who were super inactive or only viewing me on Substack to come

(00:19:43.175):
with me.

(00:19:43.715):
I wanna take the people who are there for the clubhouse.

(00:19:46.322):
And so I cleaned my list in a certain way.

(00:19:50.564):
I did a couple things with the filters.

(00:19:52.625):
So the first thing I did is I filtered by free account because I was taking all

(00:19:57.547):
the paid people with me.

(00:19:58.507):
Like you paid to be in the clubhouse, you are coming to the new clubhouse.

(00:20:01.009):
You make the move no matter what.

(00:20:03.170):
I will pack up your cubby.

(00:20:04.250):
I will take you to the new location, right?

(00:20:05.851):
Like I got your locker.

(00:20:07.351):
I'm gonna move you into the other place.

(00:20:08.672):
That is definitely gonna happen because you're a paid subscriber.

(00:20:11.173):
So when I was trying to find inactive people, I filtered for free accounts.

(00:20:15.435):
Then I filtered for emails that were opened less than one.

(00:20:20.337):
And what that means is that this person had opened no emails from me, according to the provider.

(00:20:26.380):
So if they opened no emails,

(00:20:28.541):
then I assume they were not reading my emails

(00:20:30.402):
and they would probably not also read my emails on Ghost.

(00:20:34.524):
So I did that filter.

(00:20:36.085):
I also filtered for people who had subscribed like more than two months ago,

(00:20:39.847):
because if you're new,

(00:20:41.068):
it may just be that like you haven't looked at an email yet or you've been busy

(00:20:44.009):
because it's summer or I haven't sent as many emails, which is also true.

(00:20:46.851):
So people who subscribed more than two months ago and haven't opened an email.

(00:20:51.753):
And then I set the activity to zero stars.

(00:20:55.995):
So Substack has this activity rating.

(00:20:59.339):
Where they tell you how active someone is based on like one out of five stars.

(00:21:03.601):
So if they have no stars and they have not opened an email and they subscribed more

(00:21:09.305):
than two months ago, those are the people that I removed.

(00:21:12.807):
And honestly,

(00:21:13.667):
that was 700 people,

(00:21:15.788):
which was wild to me that on a list of 1500,

(00:21:21.061):
700 had not opened an email in the time they've been subscribed.

(00:21:26.594):
And of course, you know,Substack takes into account, as I said, many different activities.

(00:21:33.171):
So my understanding of their activity score is that actually has a lot to do

(00:21:36.575):
with Email opens and engagement on platform.

(00:21:40.240):
And I've read some posts since that really suggest looking at links clicked as well.

(00:21:45.405):
So if I were doing this now, I would also add a filter for zero links clicked.

(00:21:49.328):
If they have not opened an email,

(00:21:50.689):
clicked a link,

(00:21:51.410):
and they have no Substack rated activity, then I think they're pretty inactive.

(00:21:56.775):
And I did spot check this.

(00:21:58.276):
I did not open the sort of profile of all 700 people.

(00:22:01.659):
But when I looked at,

(00:22:03.220):
I would say roughly like 10 to 15 of them,

(00:22:06.124):
They really did have no or very minimal activity.

(00:22:09.189):
Either they had opened nothing,

(00:22:10.471):
clicked nothing,

(00:22:11.152):
looked at nothing according to Substack,

(00:22:13.054):
or maybe they had opened two emails in the past year.

(00:22:16.459):
And that's great,

(00:22:18.122):
but for this type of offering where you I want engaged people who are big fans of

(00:22:23.490):
the show.

(00:22:23.930):
I just didn't feel like I needed to take, you know, those folks with me to the new location.

(00:22:28.597):
So I want to be clear because I got a couple emails about this.

(00:22:31.201):
That's how I went through the cleaning process for my list.

(00:22:35.427):
And again, I did not do this while I was on Substack, and this is not my main list.

(00:22:41.133):
This list has a very specific purpose,

(00:22:43.916):
and it really is only for active, excited fans of off the grid, right?

(00:22:48.281):
So this is not advice on how to clean every list or what other people should do.

(00:22:53.606):
This is just me sharing what I did as I left the Substack.

(00:22:58.671):
And I have put a link in the body of this episode that shares more like

(00:23:02.453):
from someone else's Substack how they went through this process

(00:23:04.975):
because I think it's really interesting and informative and it helped me decide what

(00:23:08.037):
to do.

(00:23:08.997):
So that is what I did to clean the list before I made the migration.

(00:23:13.180):
And so when I went through that easy migration process in Ghost,

(00:23:16.872):
There were,

(00:23:17.413):
I think,

(00:23:17.893):
about just over 800 subscribers that made the move with me,

(00:23:20.896):
which was really exciting and I'm really excited by.

(00:23:23.418):
So after I did the migration, I still had to do two other things.

(00:23:27.121):
The first is that I had to remove Substack's access to my Stripe account

(00:23:32.326):
so they couldn't keep taking their 10%.

(00:23:34.928):
Because the way that Stripe gets set up when you join Substack,

(00:23:38.411):
like they build in their 10% cut of all of those payments.

(00:23:41.894):
And so they have to remove themselves from Stripe.

(00:23:45.397):
I couldn't actually quite do that myself.

(00:23:47.859):
Now, Ghost has a process where you can do it yourself and they help you with that.

(00:23:52.063):
But I sent the Ghost migration team an email telling them I was ready for help with that.

(00:23:56.807):
And then I sent Substack's team an email telling them I wanted them to remove me.

(00:23:59.830):
Or actually, you can't email Substack.

(00:24:02.552):
You have to use their chatbot in the support function,

(00:24:05.977):
which I found really annoying,

(00:24:08.060):
not just because it was a chatbot,

(00:24:09.202):
but specifically that chatbot I found really patronizing.

(00:24:12.847):
Like when I kept explaining what I wanted to do,

(00:24:15.091):
it kept asking me if I wanted to consider Consider reasons I might stay on Substack

(00:24:19.515):
or consider the ramifications of my decision.

(00:24:22.117):
And I was like, no, I made my decision.

(00:24:23.758):
Like, I'm an adult.

(00:24:24.859):
I don't need you to, like, therapy speak me through leaving Substack.

(00:24:27.841):
What are you talking about?

(00:24:29.262):
So anyway, I found that bot very annoying, but eventually it created a support ticket.

(00:24:33.605):
And the Substack support team replied within a few hours and had everything handled

(00:24:37.388):
by the end of the day.

(00:24:38.569):
I heard back from the ghost team 24 hours later, which I think is still a great response time.

(00:24:42.992):
But at that point, it was already done.

(00:24:44.914):
So...

(00:24:45.900):
That is,

(00:24:46.180):
I think,

(00:24:46.521):
also one of those things where it's like when you're working with

(00:24:49.063):
a VC-funded company, they are going to have a chatbot.

(00:24:52.485):
But if you can find their support, it might work faster.

(00:24:56.128):
But if you're working with, you know, open source nonprofit, it's going to take 24 hours.

(00:25:00.612):
And that is okay.

(00:25:01.933):
I think it's really important to like adjust those expectations.

(00:25:04.955):
And I'm grateful that Substack helped me take care of it and it's all done,

(00:25:08.258):
but also grateful to go so they have good support.

(00:25:10.240):
So I did that part of the process.

(00:25:13.405):
And then actually I had to do the most labor intensive thing,

(00:25:16.246):
which is that when I migrated everything to Ghost,

(00:25:20.087):
it took all of my text posts beautifully.

(00:25:22.508):
All of my posts were there.

(00:25:24.869):
They updated all of my buttons so that they relinked to the same posts on Ghost,

(00:25:29.471):
which was great.

(00:25:30.151):
I was worried I was going to have to redo all of that.

(00:25:31.732):
I did not.

(00:25:33.092):
But the thing they did not do,

(00:25:34.554):
because they don't do this, is transfer all of my audio and video content.

(00:25:39.558):
So when you are in Substack,

(00:25:41.900):
you just upload audio or video to their native player and it just works for you.

(00:25:47.205):
But to take it all to Ghost,

(00:25:49.727):
I then had to re-upload all of my audio for every podcast episode,

(00:25:54.071):
which I learned was like over 50 of them.

(00:25:57.839):
And then for the ones that had video,

(00:25:59.640):
I had to host that video somewhere else and embed it into Ghost.

(00:26:03.141):
So Ghost does have native video hosting.

(00:26:05.802):
You can host videos up to 100 megabytes on their standard plan.

(00:26:09.444):
And I believe you can upgrade for increased hosting.

(00:26:12.445):
But I use a site called Bunny to do all of my video hosting for the interweb.

(00:26:18.228):
So I just also use that for the clubhouse videos.

(00:26:21.229):
So there will still be audio and video in the clubhouse going forward.

(00:26:24.850):
It just looks a little bit differently.

(00:26:27.581):
And I think that was the last thing I had to do.

(00:26:30.464):
That took quite a while.

(00:26:31.585):
It took me a full...

(00:26:35.403):
Probably eight to 10 hour workday to make this whole migration happen.

(00:26:39.306):
The first part of getting the subscribers clean,

(00:26:42.109):
getting the page set up and using the migration tool,

(00:26:44.571):
that took like three hours, I would say.

(00:26:46.953):
Updating all the audio took much longer,

(00:26:49.515):
five or six hours,

(00:26:50.676):
I would imagine,

(00:26:51.217):
that I was sitting on my couch watching TV, adjusting all of those posts.

(00:26:55.160):
So at this point, the migration from Substack to Ghost is complete.

(00:27:02.066):
I have done it.

(00:27:03.458):
There are still some assorted tasks that I do need to do to sort

(00:27:08.502):
of just like clean up more of my digital presence around this move.

(00:27:12.404):
So for instance,

(00:27:14.066):
when I unhooked Stripe from my Substack account,

(00:27:18.569):
removing their access to the payment meant that they removed the paywalls on all

(00:27:22.992):
of my posts.

(00:27:24.053):
And so...

(00:27:25.173):
Last night I went in and I cleared out all of the private stuff

(00:27:28.455):
that was just like suddenly public because the paywalls were gone

(00:27:31.137):
and I unpublished all of those posts.

(00:27:33.198):
I did leave a few things published on Substack because there are some things

(00:27:39.442):
on there that I know a lot of people have linked to

(00:27:41.743):
or they were already public interviews that I wanted there for posterity.

(00:27:45.366):
So there are still some posts on the off the grid clubhouse on Substack,

(00:27:50.049):
but most of them have been unpublished because they now live on Ghost.

(00:27:54.351):
I also learned that if I had set up my Substack on a custom domain,

(00:28:00.697):
then I could have made redirects for everything.

(00:28:04.521):
So at this point, there are going to be a lot of broken links out there.

(00:28:08.925):
Anywhere that I linked directly to an old Substack post

(00:28:12.608):
that I have now unpublished is going to be a broken link.

(00:28:15.940):
That's just simply the case because I used the Substack domain.

(00:28:21.066):
I was at offthegridclubhouse.substack.com,

(00:28:23.669):
not at offthegridclubhouse.com or something like that.

(00:28:26.473):
So because I used Substack's domain,

(00:28:29.156):
when I unpublish all these posts because I've taken down the paywall, now...

(00:28:33.321):
There will just be like 404 page not found things for a lot of my links.

(00:28:37.788):
And I decided that I'm okay with that because there is so much off

(00:28:42.234):
the grid content out there that people can find.

(00:28:45.018):
The clubhouse was never meant to be my most like,

(00:28:47.562):
it's not even made I don't really want people to find it via search.

(00:28:51.708):
I'm okay if the links break and they go elsewhere,

(00:28:54.372):
but I will be leaving the off the grid clubhouse newsletter up on Substack for a

(00:28:59.860):
while for that reason, because there are so many broken links.

(00:29:03.185):
So I imagine maybe at the end of this year,

(00:29:05.446):
I would pull the clubhouse down off of Substack entirely.

(00:29:09.507):
But for the next few months,

(00:29:11.407):
I'm gonna leave a few posts there as well as leave these posts that say like,

(00:29:16.069):
we've moved to Ghost.

(00:29:17.289):
So if anyone does end up on Substack for the clubhouse,

(00:29:20.870):
they will see that post that says we moved to Ghost.

(00:29:23.711):
I also changed the welcome email.

(00:29:25.431):
So I do have like people very kindly and generously recommending the clubhouse

(00:29:29.652):
on Substack through Substack's recommendation feature.

(00:29:32.577):
And so if new people come through that or they subscribe on Substack for any reason,

(00:29:36.718):
now their like welcome email from me says,

(00:29:39.458):
hey, bad news, the clubhouse moved to Ghost.

(00:29:42.279):
So if you want to get updates, you have to go over here and subscribe here.

(00:29:47.120):
So essentially people might join the list,

(00:29:48.800):
but if they join on Substack, nothing's going to happen for them.

(00:29:51.841):
Like I'm not sending any more emails.

(00:29:53.221):
I'm not doing some sort of campaign to get them to move over.

(00:29:55.542):
It's just like that autoresponder essentially that's like,

(00:29:58.544):
You signed up on Substack, but we're not here anymore.

(00:30:00.305):
Go sign up on Ghost if you actually want these.

(00:30:03.065):
And I'll be very intrigued to see if anyone actually does that or if those,

(00:30:06.866):
you know,

(00:30:07.147):
people aren't even reading those emails,

(00:30:08.867):
if they join through recommendations, who knows?

(00:30:10.908):
So I will leave the clubhouse up,

(00:30:12.968):
as I've said,

(00:30:13.388):
for a few months with those few posts and the welcome reminder just for folks

(00:30:18.450):
who also like hear ads in previous podcast episodes.

(00:30:22.451):
So on the main feed of Off the Grid, I talked about the clubhouse a lot.

(00:30:25.652):
And I talked about it on Substack a lot.

(00:30:27.452):
So I want that sort of landing page,

(00:30:29.713):
but I've tried to set it up so if people do land there,

(00:30:32.374):
it's really obvious that we went to Ghost.

(00:30:35.094):
But in the meantime,

(00:30:36.274):
I will be taking down some more posts on Substack or unpublishing them.

(00:30:41.096):
Everything is already on Ghost, so the content's not disappearing, friends.

(00:30:44.036):
I did remove a few out-of-date or older episodes

(00:30:46.517):
that I felt like I just didn't really jive with anymore

(00:30:49.918):
or they felt like they weren't relevant.

(00:30:52.190):
For instance,

(00:30:52.910):
I recorded a conversation with my friend Taylor about when TikTok bought

(00:30:55.972):
a publishing imprint.

(00:30:57.293):
And we were like, oh no, is this going to impact publishing?

(00:30:59.274):
But I think last year they closed it.

(00:31:00.775):
So I was like,

(00:31:01.195):
we don't need this like stressed out content on the internet when it actually came

(00:31:05.157):
to nothing.

(00:31:05.637):
Things like that I did take down entirely.

(00:31:08.339):
But 90% of the posts moved over.

(00:31:10.820):
They're on Ghost now.

(00:31:11.921):
I'll slowly be taking more off of Substack.

(00:31:14.362):
And then another project I have for the summer is to go through...

(00:31:18.374):
All of the show notes for off the grid public episodes and make sure

(00:31:22.759):
that there are no Substack links in those show notes.

(00:31:25.702):
Now, I did get more savvy over the past year or so when I knew I wanted to make this move.

(00:31:31.908):
I made a page on the off the grid website,

(00:31:34.090):
off the grid dot fund slash clubhouse that talked about what the clubhouse was.

(00:31:39.595):
And so instead of sending people directly to Substack, I sent them to my website.

(00:31:43.918):
And so I just swapped out that subscribe embed on my website.

(00:31:47.460):
So now when people go there,

(00:31:48.981):
it looks the same, but they just use the ghost embed instead of the Substack embed.

(00:31:53.224):
So I kind of had that put in place for the past year or so,

(00:31:56.166):
but I think there are some old links that still go directly to Substack.

(00:31:59.561):
So all of those will need to be updated over the summer.

(00:32:02.003):
I don't think there are like tons and tons of people listening to really old off

(00:32:05.506):
the grid episodes all the time, but there are some.

(00:32:08.308):
We definitely get like 100 downloads a day even when I'm posting nothing new.

(00:32:12.592):
So people are listening to the back catalog and I need to go clean up those links.

(00:32:15.975):
That's kind of my last task.

(00:32:17.976):
So clean up all those links and then probably at the end of the year,

(00:32:21.059):
take the clubhouse off of Substack entirely.

(00:32:23.941):
And then this will be entirely complete.

(00:32:26.744):
So now you have listened.

(00:32:29.763):
A 30-minute episode all about why I left Substack,

(00:32:33.967):
why I chose to move to Ghost,

(00:32:35.829):
the things I did during the move,

(00:32:37.631):
and then my to-do list for what comes after the move.

(00:32:40.374):
But as we arrive here, I just want to be very clear that I am so, so grateful for your support.

(00:32:46.040):
I am so, so excited about this transition.

(00:32:49.364):
And I'm really pumped to be on Ghost now.

(00:32:50.966):
I think there's just going to be more flexibility,

(00:32:53.450):
more possibility,

(00:32:54.992):
more opportunity,

(00:32:56.134):
all of those things I think we get in a platform that is meant to grow and change

(00:33:01.021):
with us instead of one that's kind of like pushing us in So thank you so much

(00:33:04.705):
for tuning in.

(00:33:05.145):
Please make sure you are subscribed on Ghost.

(00:33:06.786):
And if you are a paid subscriber,

(00:33:08.026):
which you likely are if you're this far in and hearing this,

(00:33:10.807):
then you just need to head over to Ghost and sign in with the same email

(00:33:13.447):
that you were signed up with on Substack.

(00:33:34.047):
And you can get everything set up for yourself again.

(00:33:36.089):
And if you have any trouble, just send me an email at hi at softersounds.studio.

(00:33:40.354):
I will be happy to help.

(00:33:42.577):
And that's it for today.

(00:33:43.718):
So until next time, friends, you can find me off the grid and on the clubhouse on Ghost.