Thesis Driven is Moving!

Migrating to our new home on Ghost

It’s moving week here at Thesis Driven.

After almost three years on Substack—where we’ve built the highest-grossing real estate publication on the platform—we’re moving to open source publishing platform Ghost. Thesis Driven subscribers (free and paid) don’t need to do anything to keep receiving our emails, but there are a few things I’d like to share about the move.

This is bittersweet for us, as we’ve enjoyed our years on Substack. But as we’ll explain below, the time for change has come.

What You Need to Know

As we said: Thesis Driven subscribers (free and paid) don’t need to do anything. You will continue receiving our email, and billing will continue as normal. But there are a few things you should be aware of:

• To access your membership and billing information, you’ll need to create a new account once we migrate to Ghost. We’ll send out those instructions once we’ve migrated.

• Thesis Driven will be unavailable during the migration tomorrow, September 3rd. Hopefully the downtime will be fairly limited. Our normal Thursday email may go out on Friday instead.

• Post-migration, the Thesis Driven newsletter will live at a new URL. We’ll have a new Thesis Driven homepage that better reflects our business as it exists today.

• One bummer: our letters will no longer be available in the Substack app.

If you’re curious as to why we’re moving, read on.

The Why

Substack is a great publishing platform, a perfect fit if you’re Noah Smith or Matt Yglesias writing about broadly appealing topics of interest to a wide swath of politically-savvy readers. Those writers can take full advantage of Substack’s recommendation and network features, the platform’s key value proposition.

But for a niche real estate publication, those features drive far less value. And as Thesis Driven has grown, Substack’s drawbacks have been an increasing drag on our business. Specifically:

1. Openness

Thesis Driven is now much more than a newsletter. We have courses, a database of real estate developers and owners, CapitalStack, an investor-only newsletter, and minority-stake businesses we’ve incubated like ReZone.

Unfortunately, Substack is a closed platform. There is no API, no webhooks, no Zapier integration, no SSO. So it exists on a permanent island independent from anything else we do—or more importantly, our users do—across Thesis Driven products. This has already caused a lot of confusion and will continue to cause confusion as we grow.

Substack has made clear that this is not due to a lack of engineering resources or capabilities. This is a product choice; they see Substack authors as writers on their publication rather than small business owners purchasing a software solution.

And that’s totally fine, but it’s not in line with what Thesis Driven needs.

2. Growing Up

As you may have seen, we’re hiring an Editorial Director. We’ll be publishing a lot more across all Thesis Driven properties, including more from guest writers. Presenting Thesis Driven and its content in the right way requires more customization than Substack provides. Most importantly, our best evergreen content gets lost in our 400+ letter archive, and it’s tough for even the most ardent readers to fish it out.

There are a bunch of other examples like that I could give, such as our lack of control over our top-level domain (thesisdriven.com). But they basically round down to a need to grow up and move to a platform that can let us build the kind of business we want.

And last but not least, we’d be remiss not to mention…

3. Substack’s Rake

Substack is, to put it bluntly, really expensive. We pay Substack thousands of dollars per month (a 10% rake on all subscription fees) for the privilege of hosting Thesis Driven.

Despite this, I don’t have a relationship with anyone at Substack. There’s no account manager I have to call to deliver this news. We ran into some technical problems a year ago and just… had to figure it out for ourselves. This fortunately hasn’t been a huge problem for us, but it’s kinda weird given how much we pay them.

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As we said, there’s nothing you as a reader need to do—your subscription should transfer over seamlessly. Note this week’s letters may be somewhat delayed given the migration, and our newsletter may be offline for some time.

See you on the other side!

—Brad Hargreaves