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Issue #100: The future of Switch to iPad

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Hi!

How are you? Are you as amazed by the number attached to this issue? One hundred is quite a lot. Plenty of words has been written on this computing journey of ours. The newsletter alone is over of 123,000 words over these 100 issues, and that’s not counting things written for the site, or the weekly updates, that’s just proper issues, if you will.

A lot of words, and a lot of thoughts – it’s been a ride, and it’s not over yet.

This week, I’d like to talk about the future of Switch to iPad as a project. But first, I’d ask you to fill out this very brief survey. It would really help me to make several decisions because, as you’ll see further down, I’ve got some thoughts.

The survey is anonymous, I’m not tracking anything, so feel free to speak your mind. Thanks in advance.

(Survey closed.)

Right, so today, Switch to iPad is split between the newsletter and weekly update, and the site. The former is on Substack, which is the newsletter service I launched this thing on to begin with, whereas the site is hosted on one of my servers. Substack takes care of billing, and takes a 10% cut of the paid subscriptions because of that (alongside Stripe, their payment provider, who also takes a small cut).

I picked Substack from the start for three reasons:

  1. It’s easy to get started.
  2. I didn’t want to mess with billing at the time.
  3. I was hoping that the Substack ecosystem would lead to growth.

Now, the first two were true at the time. After all, I didn’t know if anyone wanted to read about switching to iPad, so although I could easily build everything from scratch myself, time and effort was a factor. I’d rather focus on the writing, which I did, until I felt that it was time to launch a proper site, which is where we are today.

The third reason, being growth from the Substack ecosystem, hasn’t been great. A couple of subscribers has found their way to Switch to iPad through the new Substack recommendation feature, which is great, but this is two years into this project. I’d say that, for everyone but the big fish, Substack isn’t great for growth. Not as a platform anyway, there might be other benefits, of course.

I’m not thrilled with the split between the site, and Substack. Not only is it confusing, it also hurts search engine traffic. Why give that to Substack, when I could have people visiting my site? Likewise, I’m not particularly happy with the way the Substack archive pages are laid out. I’d rather have those on my site too. In fact, I’d like it if you could sign up as a member on the Switch to iPad site, get access to the archive, and read everything, right there. That’d make things fit together better, I think. It’d also save me some time regarding publishing and scheduling updates, since I could have a system more tailored to the various ways of reading Switch to iPad content. I could go beyond the written word, making online tools, maybe. And, obviously, I wouldn’t have to give away 10% to Substack for billing, I could just manage that myself.

(If you’re considering launching a paid newsletter, there are several Substack alternatives that charge less, or nothing, outside the payment provider fees. Look into Buttondown or Revue, for example.)

So, what’s next?

That’s the big question, isn’t it? It’s impossible not to think about where to go from here, one-hundred issues in. I wouldn’t want to get stuck reiterating the same thing over and over again, but it’s an obvious risk since things I’ve written about previous evolve, and gets interesting again. When it comes to the larger questions around iPad computing, it’s moving less fast, slowly even, and that means that they’re taking a back seat. Maybe there’s a better way to discuss these things, and educate curious readers as to what’s possible, and what’s less so?

I don’t know. The survey is meant to help me think this through, and find the best way forward. Please take a minute to answer it, it really isn’t long. And entirely private, I promise.

Thank you for your time, and for being a reader. I appreciate it!

— Thord D. Hedengren ⚡