10 Pitfalls of paid subscriptions

Brought to you by the fine folks at Outpost for Ghost publishers. Get more subscription revenue for your Ghost publication with Outpost 🪐

You're thinking about what you could offer inside your paid subscription. Maybe a few paywalled posts? How about some merch? Perhaps a community?

I'm here to warn you about making your subscription offer too big at launch.

When I started Legends, I included a sticker pack. I design stickers all the time and it sounded like an easy add to me. I was wrong. Sending stickers is a little more work than I realized. Designing them is one thing, but actually shipping them, especially with an international audience, took me many more hours than I thought they would. Good thing I only do it once a year.

In fact, there's lots of things that are a little more work than I realized when it comes to managing a paid subscription. Many of them are things people tell me they want to launch with. You don't want to burn out in the early days of your project when you're making the least amount of money, so it's worth challenging how big you really need to go. I'm going to tell you to start small. You're not going to believe me and then you're going to come back to this blog post in a few months and realize I was right! Just believe me now before it's too late!

These pitfalls are considerations for pre-launch projects. If you've already launched, you're past most of these, but you may still find them relevant.

10: Having multiple tiers