I’ve had this pit building up in my stomach for weeks as I’ve gotten error notifications that my mailchimp email campaign attached to my squarespace blog had integration issues. Oh No, The plumbing is backed up!
I was already staring down the barrel of a lost Sunday afternoon trying to frivolously figure out how to re-connect everything - the way an untrained husband might attempt hero ball to fix a broken water heater. I was calculating in my head how many hours and potentially dollars, I’d have to spend to fix the issues of technological obsolescence. That’s what happens when you build something half a decade ago, and don’t do routine maintenance on it. It’s bound to break and you have to make the call to either commit and dig in, ditch it or adapt.
So when I thought about switching over my blog from my personal website to a new platform, I thought, “what solution would make the switching costs near zero and set me up for a more modern approach to periodic writing and blogging?” Ultimately I chose to go with Substack because I’ve seen a few friends and acquaintances whom I respect build their voice on the site. I was still worried about giving up my website as it has felt like a digital footprint of my identity for so long! It had fallen into disarray but it still held the annals of my 2010s. Losing that virtual footprint felt like throwing out a scrapbook. All things considered, I was grappling with the need to move to a more modern, yet simplistic approach to finding my public voice.
Luckily within 3 minutes I was able to port over all my previous blog posts from my squarespace website to Substack, delivering my full blogging history and all archived posts while also setting me on the path to start anew. I felt relieved! I’m back! I’m alive!
One lesson here for the modern day software company is that you can convert many more customers if you can reduce frictional switching costs and alleviate their fear of loss.