🔎 Lessons from how other brands approach Substack
30 Days of Notes, pt. 3
Tami from Buffer <[email protected]>
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Substack shares lessons from other brands' approaches to the platform. The brand highlights examples of successful Substack newsletters, including Rare Insider by Rare Beauty. Substack showcases these examples as part of its 30 Days of Notes series.
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🔎 Lessons from how other brands approach Substack
30 Days of Notes, pt. 3
Tami from Buffer
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After we decided to move The Weekly Scroll to Substack, I knew we’d need to understand platform norms before committing to a voice of our own, so I dove into research on other brand newsletters on Substack. They ran the gamut, from very industry-focused to the more personal to ones reminiscent of magazines.
I looked through each one to try to determine a particular style that would best fit us, and I think that naturally meant Frankenstein-ing a bunch of things together, which turned out to be the right move, not a wrong turn, because, spoiler alert: no single brand offered a complete model to copy. Each one has a specific approach that’s rich in its own right.
On this journey to post a Note-a-day, I thought it’d be interesting to share which examples I looked at within the constraint of similar models and what I’ve observed about their approach to posts and notes on Substack.
If you want a more extensive look at brand Substacks than my ten, The Brand Substack Directory is a rich resource with about 60 of them.
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Rare Insider by Rare Beauty
A behind-the-scenes newsletter on product development, team culture, and mental health advocacy
Rare Beauty aims this one at makeup fans and the brand’s existing community. It’s bylined “Rare Insider,” so it reads more like a community voice than a single person’s newsletter. (The person is MacKenzie Kassab, Rare Beauty’s director of creative strategy, and by her own account, the “team” is “me.”) What I liked most is that the topics are crowdsourced straight from Instagram comments, TikTok replies, and Sephora reviews. It feels personal and responsive in a way that doesn’t come across as corporate at all. They haven’t shared totals anywhere publicly, but they told Modern Retail views are up 281% and subscribers 40% year on year.
MacKenzie’s very helpfully explained her Notes approach in detail. She’s said she thinks of herself “as a representative of the community, and that’s why I’ve been really active on Notes to have that conversation and to ask, ‘What do you want to know?’” The notes I could find match that: “Which formula do you want to know more about?”, a photo of the office toilets because readers asked, a one-liner about lip gloss. It’s less a broadcast channel and more a two-way conversation that shapes what she writes next. MacKenzie also told Modern Retail that they don’t judge Notes by numbers: “We’re measuring our success through the DMs that we get, through the comments and through the general sentiment around it.”
In Stock by Shopify
A magazine-style newsletter on entrepreneurship and commerce trends
Shopify built this for merchants and anyone “in the orbit” of a founder, and they go full magazine here, with a bylined team of writers building out recurring franchises like Commerce Current for data and Viralify for trending products. They publish two to three times a week, with posts aimed at entrepreneurs broadly, not just Shopify customers.
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