What's a Substack?

Yup. We All Need to Know.

Congrats, you made it! We will attempt to answer the question: What’s a Substack? The answer (below) may surprise you…

New apps and platforms pop up out of nowhere and can be gone before there’s time to find them a nice folder on your phone. Many remain a mystery, a few get taken over by strange dictators, but even when we swear them off and declare - I’M NOT GOING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT REELS ARE - they creep into our consciousness anyway. That’s when we at How To Be Less Old push up our sleeves, tap a youth on the shoulder and try to figure out what on god’s green is going on.  

Why us? Because we made plans with friends using a rotary phone and had to find a payphone to let our parents know we were ready to leave the mall. Because we still hear the sound of dial-up connection in our hearts, and because we survived the social wrath of being forced to pick our “top 5” friends on Myspace (Sorry Donna). Because we’ve been with this since day one.

 So let’s look back, but not quite top-5 far back. 

When we originally launched our podcast How To Be Less Old in 2015, Snapchat and Vine were the applications of choice for the youths. We will readily admit that onboarding to new things gets harder as we age – and in 2015 we were not in a headspace to be making snaps and vines, but we did want to understand them. Also, the podcast taught us that things like Vine can be here today and absolutely gone the next. Let's take a moment to pour out some love for Vine RIP.

The platform birthed so many content creators — a phrase that was new to us at the time. A quick refresh, Vine was user-generated short form video content. You could shoot, edit and upload inside the app. The videos were 6 seconds long. 6! Still shocks ya to the core. Vine fell apart mainly because there wasn’t a clear path for the creators to monetize. The big creators were driving massive traffic but they weren’t getting a piece of the action, they also wanted longer video run time. Eventually the Vine powers that be allowed for a 130 second video (quite a leap!) but by then the creators were bouncing to YouTube where they were getting a cut of the ads! Vine folded in Jan 2017. Some creators never recovered, others were able to pivot. We learned that you gotta stay NIMBLE. Go get yourself a copy of “Who Moved My Cheese,” keep a pair of sneakers next to your desk and be ready to run because things are moving baby, they move real quick. 

Some things die out while others, much to our shock, don’t. In 2017 Instagram rolled out Stories. Did we want to tap those little circles above our feed? NO. Why would we need to tap up there? The feed was great, no notes! To add tapping felt excessive and redundant. We let those little circles “do them” for months, until of course they wore us down. We tapped. Okay. Not as bad as we thought, we liked that you could add text and stickers to a post but how do you know when to use the circles? Felt hard to know. The great Kristen Bell joined us on the podcast and really got our minds right about stories. 

She said (and please listen below), If you are posting something important or evergreen that post should be uploaded to your grid. Then she said something that shook us to our core. EVERYTHING ELSE GOES IN STORIES. (Exhale).

Listen to this HTBLO 2018 throwback ft. Kristen Bell

    

Her words still reverberate any time we go to post. Obviously you don’t have to stick to that format but as the Dalai Lama said, “Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.” Sidebar: What’s really going on with the Dalai Lama? You good, bro?

Here’s the rub: THERE IS ALWAYS GOING TO BE SOMETHING NEW TO EXPLORE. Duh moment - let’s do it together! There’s safety in numbers. Which brings us to our most recent platform hurdle. Are you on …. 

THREADS 

Here’s where we’re at: We’ve downloaded, we logged on, we’ve perused, and we did not delete the app. More will be revealed. Does it feel great to have a Twitter alternative? You Meta believe it! Where my thread-heads at? Are you using it? Liking it? Leave us a comment. 

And finally, why we are all here! What is a Substack? 

SUBSTACK 

We will be learning along with you, but if we had to bottom line it…it’s a newsletter with an intimidating name. 

We are excited to build this community in a flexible newsletter format which will allow us to bring you written posts as well as podcast and video content that show up in your old-timey email inbox. (Cue dial-up sound.) Substack is allowing us to be our best creative selves serving the exact people (you!) who want to hear from us. Thanks for being here. It takes a village.

Grab your "What's a Substack" mug today!