So I had a handful of video interviews on Substack. They were sent out as newsletters, but they were also posts that I wrote. Not just show notes, but like… full posts.
Well, I didn’t like the way Substack handles podcasts… I mean, no individual episode art? The organization was a wreck, too. I just didn’t like how it felt.
I signed up a free trial of Transistor – for $19/mo you get unlimited podcasts. And they’re all just, like, in their own sandbox. Like, if I just delete one, nothing else is touched.
I learned the hard way that this is not the case with Substack. I uploaded all the audio from these videos to Transistor, and it worked great. Seriously. What a solid system. Everything just laid out in a way that makes sense, unlike how Substack sort of blurs together a post and a podcast episode.
So once I was done moving all the clips and such to Transistor, I was like okay, fine, time to delete the podcast on Substack. It said it’s delete the data, which I took to mean the RSS feed, but no – it wiped out all the videos and posts entirely.
So that was like, six months of comments and permalinks and analytics jsut… gone. SIGH.
I had all my videos backed up. Most of the text. I rebuilt them. I didn’t freak out or anything. These things happen.
But this is why I’m so damn wary of building anything on one platform.
Wait, I built this blog on one platform, I guess. But it’s WordPress, hosted on a server I pay for. I also have a WordPress guy, so if things go sideways, it’ll be okay.
But the Substack platform, man. There’s a support team, and an AI chat bot (whatever), but not like… 20+ years of platform knowledge from people out there who’ve done this podcast stuff before.
So yeah – podcasts are moving to Transistor. People who want those episodes can subscribe to the podcast. I will link to the RSS feed in future newsletters. It’s fine.
I am doing a sort of “voice notes” podcast still on Substack. This seems to be seperate, and a much lower lift. It is behind a paywall, which I hope will help retain paid subscribers, and bring in new ones.
Even then, I think once I hit 10 episodes there, I will post episode 1 on Transistor, sort of as a way of “un-paywalling” them. Again, to keep things not so locked into Substack’s platform. But now? Well, now I can embed a player like this.
As it stands now, a podcast episode on Substack can’t be embedded anywhere. That’s great to drive people to Substack and subscribe, of course. But still… that’s lock in.
Like all the videos they people upload to Substack. They can only be viewed on Substack. Unless you upload them to YouTube, you can’t embed them anywhere else.