Building a house on sand is dumb. We know that!
Building a business without protection is equally ill-advised.
That’s what tribe member and ex corporate girl and legal Counsel and Head of Legal in IT companies for 12 years,
, shared which really resonated with me.Coming from this background, when she joined Substack, Noemi was thinking:
Are we properly protected?
That’s why we mutually invited each other to a joint LIVE at 1pm Berlin time today. It was the first time for me to do a LIVE during lunch break and well… my little boy was suddenly standing in front of me in my super hot attic. Then my baby girl cried.
That’s why I’m doing my LIVES in the evening. But that’s another story for another day.
💐Oh by the way, I offer 40% OFF on the annual and monthly (!) plan. I want to celebrate Mother’s Day with you and support you on your way. Here’s how to get it. Also, annual subscribers get a 15 min audit and chat with me.💐
My live was triggered by today’s post: Oh No! How To Not Lose All Your (Paid) Subscribers With ONE ‘Wrong’ Click where I talked about a pretty hitter here on Substack who lost all her 13000 subscribers, paid and free, her stories, videos, bestseller badge. and audio with ONE click.
I wanted to call attention to this and sharing more resources and intel.
No Warranties and Limitation of Liabilities
I knew Noemi could add a new layer to the discussion.
As I shared, a few weeks back, she wrote a story about how to create your own Terms and Conditions that got me thinking.
Especially this No Warranties section here:
And this one - Limitation of Liability:
HERE you can find Substack’s Terms of Service.
Noemi shared something on Notes that hit hard:
If you see the warranty section in the Substack terms it does not guarantee Substack is error free. Even huge platforms do not guarantee error-free services, because at the pace of development of platforms errors will occur regardless how much the QA testing you set out to do. We are the CEOs of our businesses and need to understand the advantages and risks that we take on in choosing any tech stack!
She's right.
Platforms don’t guarantee perfection—even the biggest ones with 5M paid subscriptions and more than 50,000 writers earning money like Substack have bugs.
I could tell you thousands of stories from writing for the publishing giant Medium!
We need to protect ourselves
Because as Noemi shared:
(…)
Look at the terms and conditions before you get on a platform and understand what you are getting yourself into.
Get your own Terms and Conditions to govern the relationship between your and your subscribers, community/chat rules, refunds, warranties, limitation of liability and much more.
Besides accidentally deleting ALL your subscribers, imagine you’d get sued.
(…) one day, out of the blue, you get a letter in the mail.
It’s a lawyer letting you know someone wants to sue you because of something you said on Substack.
WHAAAT?
What the actual…?
The letter says that someone relying on your advice from the platform made a bad investment and lost millions and now they are suing you. And you think to yourself:
✅Is this real? (It can happen!)
❌Don’t the Substack terms protect me? (Quick answer: NO)
✅Can they actually do this? (Yes!)
PS Want to stay up to date all things Substack? Join 14,000 writers inside the Club. I have a special Mother’s Day offer. And new annual members will get a 15 min chat & audit with me as add-on 💐💐
Add your own Terms of Use
Substack allows you to add your own Terms of Use to limit your liability.
At the bottom of my publication (I never scrolled so far down!) you see Terms. The standard Substack’s Terms.
Smart Noemi shows Publisher Terms. Custom Terms she created!:
As we show you in the LIVE, in Settings you can turn on the feature.
Most writers, creators and artists on Substack are missing out on adding this feature.
Noemi shared:
Most people have the standard terms Substack provide. That’s fine, but they don’t not protect YOU from reader liability.
If what you provide can be construed as professional advice, and that advice causes harm or damage to a reader, you may be liable. (Obviously not intentionally, but it may happen!)
But that’s not enough. We went so much deeper.
How to back up your Substack email list and stories
A quick overview, for more check out this story.
Backup your email list - this is the easiest way and something I recommend all my tribe members from day 1
→ Go to Dashboard > Subscribers > Export CSVSave your Stripe income data:
→ Export a CSV from Stripe
→ You can choose to export Successful Payments, Refunded Payments, Uncaptured Payments, or All Payments
Subscribe to yourself & add a publication and backup email address
Mass download your Substack posts and bring them to your own website
Download your Substack Notes posts
Take screenshots
Automate your backups with Zapier
Bookmark your RSS feed
My buddy from Australia
added in the comments of today’s post:(1) Your second email address? Don't just make it a subscriber, promote it to an admin for your pub. That way if you ever get locked out of your main email account and can't access your Substack account with your main email address you'll still be able to get in and keep the show running until full access is restored.
(2) Add a trusted friend as a team member with Contributor status. That way, if you get run over by a bus* she can send an email to your subscribers letting them know what happened and ask Substack to pause/cancel payments.
(I wouldn't give admin rights unless your friend is very cybersecurity savvy as there's a lot of $$ at stake with a high-earning publication and plenty of chances for cyber-breaches)
(3) Back up your welcome emails separately as they don't get exported when you export your posts.
It’s a “platform-wide structural issue around how content and publication data is linked to podcasts”
And
, white badge Substack owner, who also had some trouble when deleting her podcast feed, wanted to provide clarity around the circumstances she experienced, which you can read in the comments section.What I think is super important as many are ranting on Substack, Notes or other platforms, is HOW the Substack support and team reacted:
In my case, the Substack team responded rapidly once I emailed them (the AI help bot was not helpful), and I’m super grateful that they were communicative and able to recover a handful of posts (only 5 out of about 30, but better than absolutely nothing, I suppose!).
Sadly, it seems there is a platform-wide structural issue around how content and publication data is linked to podcasts that I’d love to see tended to.
Also Lucy has her 12,000 subscribers back. Her badge and Noemi also said she thinks she’s gonna have more subscribers (free and paid) than ever before. But of course we don’t want to recreate our list the hard way (with kids and a stomach bug in the house), we want to protect it, so here’s Chelsey’s recommendation:
Exporting all Substack data on a monthly basis - I’ve got a recurring date in my diary. Saving video/audio files and drafts of all written content in my personal cloud. Saving comment notification emails. The Shuffle podcast is set up as a separate section now, rather than linked to my publication as a whole, and I’ll certainly be doing a mass export and consulting Substack in advance if I decide to delete it at any point.
Hope today’s live and the added insights from today’s discussions educate and inspire you!
Oh, one more thing… I’m not an affiliate, I just think it’s cool! Noemi is offering all paid subscribers to help draft their Publisher Terms for their publication. I’ll definetly add custom Publsiher Terms to my publication and Noemi will help me with this.
I wish you a lovely weekend,
PS Want to stay up to date all things Substack? Join 14,000 writers inside the Club. I have a special Mother’s Day offer. And new annual members will get a 15 min chat & audit with me as add-on 💐💐
PSS Please 🔁🔁restack and help educate other writers on this important backup topic!
💓Thank you
, , , , , and many others for tuning into my first live video during lucnh break with from Denmark.
Share this post