Between the increased volume of emails and now Substack’s new Chat feature, it’s fair to say they are striking whilst the iron is hot.
I know Micro.blog is not that kind of business but I do look forward to the day when opportunistic, yet classy, PR can be used by the team.
This new feature from Substack also makes me think about the basic assumption from most people online re, having quick access to a reply box and that it continues to be too difficult to achieve on Micro.blog. Hopefully it's on the roadmap 🤞
BIG Substack fan here - and good to see the chat thing that they have been playing around with for a while now now in the 'wild' - how it ends up REALLY working ... well, we will see.
I like their app - and yet still annoys me for three big reasons.
1) synching - if i use more than one device to read / triage - it doesn’t work. Stood in a line in the store - flush out the ones you don’t want to read ... get to your reading device and NOTHING has changed.
2) bulk selection to empty the inbox - particularly important if I can't synch
3) what you do in the app you can't seem to do on the web / on a computer ... so sitting at a computer - chat alert arrives in email - click on reply and get taken to a QR code for the app on your mobile device #LOSE
Outside of the app ...
1) yes they are 'open' - but only just - no markdown support AND you have to write your newsletter in their app
2) they are waaaaaaay too prescriptive on the newsletter design
That all said - the network effect/recommendations side of what they are doing ... pretty much 90% of my subscriptions from the past two months have come from their network.
And yes Simon - I agree on MB. I really hope that we can start to get out of our bubble sometime soon. // @vincent
