I have to admit Hive, I’ve been cheating on you. I was afraid to tell you because I didn’t want you to think that I stopped loving you or that I was unsatisfied with you. I’ve never seen a problem with having multiple loves and exploring them, as long as I make clear where my devotions lie, and that’s with you, Hive.
I don’t plan on going anywhere, and I hope you’ll still have me.
Ok
I came to Hive in hopes of finally earning for doing what I love, sharing ideas, making art, connecting with people and connecting people, helping communities flourish.
It’s been up and down but I feel that I’ve achieved that to a certain degree.
The only thing that’s changed is that before I was willing to do it in my free time, hoping to earn some spare change for a rainy day. As time goes by, my day job, which I also love when its not too demanding, seems less and less sustainable as it is.
It’s really hard to find students these days and I HATE marketing so so so much, to the point where it kills my enjoyment of the work itself. As fewer and fewer people have money to spend, it feels like if I want to continue, I either need to spend even more time and energy marketing, find a way to market that doesn’t feel like marketing, or struggle.
I see 3 solutions.
The first one is to admit defeat and find the best paying job I can find, knowing that I will forfeit most of my energy to create, essentially giving up all my dreams.
Not happening.
The second is that I desperately try to keep this sinking ship (my main source of income) afloat long enough for Hive to 10x.
I’ve been trying to keep this up for a long time, but I am running out of fuel and I am not sure how much time I have left before I drown.
The third is that I triple down on my art and try to turn it into a funnel to find students and clients while also turning it into multiple incomes itself.
I’ve dabbled in this before, trying to hack the algorithms of social media but I find none of these platforms have been ideal for me.
That’s changed recently.
I joined Substack.
I swear, I am not leaving you, Hive. I swear I will remain devoted to your vision of decentralization and this awesome community that got me started. I want this to be a win for Hive too.
I am not the same as some of you here. I’m not looking for opportunities to make money. I’m looking for opportunities to make money as an artist and writer who is stubborn and uncompromising in certain aspects.
I don’t see my blogs and music and books as a hobby, and I am confident as hell that some of my work could potentially attract paying customers. I see them as what I came to this earth to share. I will do what I have to do to share them, and right now I want to triple down and do whatever will allow me to focus all of my energy on sharing things that I think may be valuable to certain people.
That means going to reach those people where they are at, and many of them are at Substack.
It’s not to say that none of those people are here, but if I am going to earn a living from art, I need to pursue multiple opprotunities at once.
Substack is not a place for quick money or easy attention. The grind is very very similar to Hive and the payoff is much slower, so I don’t think you all need to follow in my footsteps.
But if you feel like me, that Hive is everything we need as creators but still needs more manpower, more eyeballs, more variety, and if you want to go out searching for those people through your work rather than through marketing, maybe we can build a two way bridge between platforms.
Who knows, maybe one day, Substack could create a Hive or Leo integration.
Why Substack though?
The algorithms for their new “note” feature are FAR better than X or Facebook or Instagram, and the community is much more engaged than any of those or TikTok or Youtube. They are trying to be ethical web2.
They are much slower to censor and try to be fair to both left and right. There are no ads and they only take 10% of subscription fees. The algorithms encourage more interactions with the same people, don’t feed you as much controversial content unless you engage with it and give love to smaller creators.
They’re also trying to solve for the lack of community at other patron services like patreon and ko-fi.
Most importantly, there is variety and there are young people who are sick and tired of marketing filling up their social media feed and who want to share ideas. There is also no 7 day payout window so people tend to focus on quality over quantity, which has always been my only issue with Hive.
INLEO (among others) is doing their best to fix most of Hive’s weak points. I believe they will and I want to help however I can. They are building a paywall system similar to Substack and an ad system to increase the ways we can earn money as creators.
I will be a part of this growth.
I don’t think the best way for me to contribute is to just keep punping out content the same way forever though. I want to utilize Leo’s subscription service at some point but I don’t think my audience is just here. I need to find some people who are willing to pay and most of us here are just used to relying on whale votes and curation trails.
I need to go out and find an audience elsewhere, one who are readers as much as they are writers and who aren’t pumping out “content” every day. I want to write less. Less and better. I want to put all my work into articles and fiction and music and vidoes that last more than a week and that people go back to multiple times, and I want to find an audience who wants that.
I’d also like to finally start contributing to onboarding at Hive. Since Substack has a lot of people with no experience, the 7 day payout window could be a great excuse for them to experiment. I know that 7 years here made me a forced to be reckoned with when it comes to having the confidence to explore various styles.
It’s also got a younger base and Hive desperately needs more young people.
I don’t think many of them plan to leave Substack, but I can definetly see them becoming active here as well, whether its threads, shorts or blogging. There is something exciting about being part of building an ecosystem rather than just being a user.
I plan to write around 1-2 articles a week, perhaps much longer than before, and do a lot more editing on them, and go much more in depth on certain ideas. I’ll share them both here and there, and once I gain a few dozen loyal readers (already have 10-15), I will put a lot of my back catelog behind a paywall.
Once Leo releases it’s paywall, I will offer the same content at Leo with a discount, as an incentive to get people using HBD and interacting on our chain. I may end up sharing different things entirely.
As of right now, I still have enough students to stay afloat but when people take a leave of absence or when there are national holidays things get kind of rough.
I earn about $200 every mornh at Hive but have no plans to start cashing out regularly. If I can earn the same at Substack, it’ll help me to make up for any kind of instability with my main teaching job. It will require 25 paid subscribers.
I hope to get there by this time next year.
From there I hope to double my earnings on both platforms which will allow me to stop looking for more students and focus more on my art and other community activities (pop up restaurant, seminar, music events) that could bring in the same amount I am earning from writing.
From there I can start to consider turning art and community into my main source of income and teach/coach only when people come looking for me. I can start to build up a potential client base for a shop I want to open in the future, and find a way to tie in Hive, Substack, art, culture and more.
If you know me, you know that this is not the first time I’ve experimented with ways to find an audience outside Hive. But this time feels very different. I respect Substack as a platform. I don’t feel dirty using it. It’s web2 but I think having one web2 home and one web3 home is ok. And I can easily see Substack completely replacing X, Facebook, Instagram and Youtube for many people with ideas. Hive will surely pick up many of those people as well, and I will be a part of that.
Once again, I don’t think anyone should leave Hive for Substack and there are only a few people I’d recommend trying to split their time between the two. But if you are on X maybe consider ditching it for Substack. I find the Substack notes experience to be about 100x more pleasant.
If you are already on Substack or plan on joining, feel free to subscribe