David R. MacIver's Blog

Discontinuing paid subscriptions

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/discontinuing-paid-subscriptions.

Hi everyone,

I’m about to be blunt about strategic considerations around money, so before I do let me just say: I am extremely grateful to all of you for your financial support to date in writing this newsletter. It has meant and means a great deal to me, and has made a huge difference to my plans and my life. Thank you so much.

Now, that being said, I’m going to stop taking your money.

Specifically, I’ve clicked “pause billing” on the newsletter, which means that you will retain your paid subscriptions (including access to the full archive of paid newsletters), but will not be charged for them, and new people cannot sign up for the paid version of the newsletter. I will probably never resume billing. So, welcome to an exclusive club that will probably never get any new members.

I don’t intend to open up the previous paid issues to the public (because they have comments on them that were posted while they were closed, and I don’t want to change that from under you), although I may repost edited forms of a few of them. Hence, exclusive club: What’s there is for you and you only.

The reason is basically that I haven’t quite been able to make paid writing work, either as a type of writing or as a source of income.

As a writer, my motivation is very much about writing for a large audience - explaining things that I wish everyone knew - and writing for a smaller private group acts against that, and I don’t entirely know how to do it. Meanwhile, the fact that I’ve promised to do it ends up acting as a block on the free writing which comes more naturally - It’s not a coincidence that I clicked “pause billing” and then immediately sent out a newsletter.

As a business… honestly, I don’t have the audience for it yet, and apparently am unwilling or unable to do the things that would be required to get them. I was saying that I needed to get the number of paid subscriptions up by an order of magnitude for it to do what it needed to count as a meaningful source of income for my plans, and I didn’t get that increase. This is on me, not on anyone else, but it’s still something I have to take into account.

Set against that… I’ve been switching over to a more consulting mode of business right now (if you’ve not seen it already, here’s my pitch document I’m using at the moment), which frankly makes a lot more money than I’m plausibly going to make from my paid writing any time in the next couple of years. If by writing more free issues I raise my profile and as a result get a single extra business client, that probably earns me more for the year than I do from paid subscriptions.

The result is that discontinuing the paid issues helps more people, makes me happier, and earns me more money. This seems like a no brainer, so I’m going to do it.

Once again: I hugely appreciate your support to date. I am glad I did this experiment, and I do not consider it a failure. It was a good experiment that lead to and informed many good things in my life, but it has run its course for now.

Thank you all so much, and I’m sure I will hear from you all in future free issues, in the community discord, and elsewhere.

All the best,

David