ConvertKit vs. Substack + Gumroad

This time, follow the crowd

4 min readMay 14, 2023

This is me and my writer buddies. Photo by Camylla Battani on Unsplash

We’re programmed to follow the crowd.

Unsurprisingly when we talk about building an audience and standing out, one approach is to look at what everyone else does and do the opposite.

This worked for me on many, many occasions.

But in some cases leveraging the masses could be a good thing.

Here’s my story of switching back and forth between Substack and ConvertKit within a month.

ConvertKit is the A-10 of email marketing. It’s a flying tank. There’s virtually nothing you can think of you can’t implement in ConvertKit for an email marketing campaign.

A few things that make ConvertKit a great platform:

send public and private broadcasts, which are basically like a public blog post and a private newsletter
sell products through the platform directly

So essentially, I considered it a replacement for the Gumroad + Substack combination I’ve used for months. With fewer platforms comes less complexity. It’s a win-win. And in my head, this worked out great.

After one month of A/B testing the two platforms, here are some numbers:

Stats from ConvertKit

That’s a stunning 3.37% conversion rate from my ConvertKit landing page.

Stats from bio.link+Substack+Gumroad

Bio.link

bio.link/akoskm

There isn’t a good overview of stats, but you can still see I got 10 clicks for the Newsletter:

Substack

Here’s how those clicks ended up — emails cut for obvious reasons — in Substack:

A 25% Conversion rate!

Gumroad

According to Gumroad, 21 people came through bio.link, where I had a 9.5% conversion rate.

The numbers are hard to compare because of all the privacy enhancements our browsers are getting — which is good.

But whether your browser blocks these trackers, I know how many people gave me their emails.

So what’s the reason for this difference, and what I learned from using both setups?

The lesson

Brand recognition

Daniel, Louie, and Greg all use Substack and Gumroad. Louie even recommends my Substack publication, which I’m super grateful for. You must not neglect where the people of your niche read, write, publish, and purchase other products.

This is my most important takeaway and what inspired this article. Go where other people already gather and buy their products.

3% of 0 is 0

One of the pros of ConvertKit was the low transaction fees of 3.5%+30c. That is way lower than Gumroad’s 10%. If I add the tax I pay in Hungary to that, it comes to around 37%.

When someone pays me for one of my free products, sure, it’s a wonderful gesture. But I was thinking, what if I make $100k? $37k goes to taxes and platform fees. That’s a lot, except… I make absolutely $0 on Gumroad.

Writer’s Fastlane was a good idea at a wrong time

As I wrote here, I like the sound of Writer’s Fastlane. I’m sure one day, it’ll make it into a great brand and a place for people to gather and educate themselves on writing.

But this is not happening right now. At such an early stage of my creator path, I should focus on establishing a voice for myself and solving some actual problems instead of fantasizing about optimizing a $100k revenue stream.

Moving away from the personal brand

I talked to Jovan a few weeks ago about personal brand-building and social media. While he mentioned that it might be confusing for people coming from akoskm.com to my Substack that I don’t write about developer topics in my Newsletter, I believe this is part of my brand. That is an engineer who’s into writing, not just code but blogs like this.

With the launch of Writer’s Fastlane, which I still think is an A+ name, I’m not sure if I mentioned that already, I’d be moving away from the personal brand segment, which is the last thing I want.

Technical Issues

I’m using NordVPN and Brave. That is a powerful combo for privacy, and they together block stuff aggressively.

Until I turned off some additional protections in NordVPN, ConvertKit landing pages didn’t render correctly. This is only the editing mode of the landing page, but they looked identical when I visited the live version. And this isn’t happening only for my landing pages but for other people’s ConvertKit pages too.