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SPEAKER 2
where we covered a topic that is very trending and very important at the moment on the platform. And Noemi hopefully is going to join me here in the comments in a bit so that I can add her. But maybe I'm going to start share a bit more about what's going on at the moment on Substack.
0:19
Why on Substack Notes you might see so many sharing now, you know, how important it is to create a back up plan and have like a backlog of all your posts and stories there. And Naomi, if you are in the comments, I would need you to say hi. Hi, Karen. Hi, Cliffhead and all the others here.
0:39
I would need you to say hi. Okay, otherwise I can't add you. I guess that Naomi is going live for the first time, so she didn't know how to accept my invite. That's the reason. But for now, let me start. Today I wanted to also show you a new feature.

🔴LIVE: Protect Your Substack With THIS Feature & How To Back Up Your Email List

She Lost 12,000 Subs With ONE WRONG CLICK - Here's What You Can Do To Protect Your List

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 💐💐

🌸Let me get the Mother's Day offer!


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 CSV

  • Save 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 💐💐

🌸Let me get the Mother's Day offer!

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.

Discussion about this video

User's avatar
Lisa’s Last Words's avatar

I know edit Kristina

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Lisa’s Last Words's avatar

That’s why they call Christina God, the fairy godmother of Substack🙌

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Lisa’s Last Words's avatar

All I got to say is woo hoo🙌🎊

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Lisa’s Last Words's avatar

Got it watch your mouth, Lisa😂😂😂

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Lisa’s Last Words's avatar

Thank you, ladies you’re very helpful🎊🎊🎊🎊

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Lisa’s Last Words's avatar

I will be hitting you up Naomi in the first part of June

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Lisa’s Last Words's avatar

Just through live experience for me, love and laughter👏🔥🤗

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Lisa’s Last Words's avatar

The terrible, terrible day and unfortunate events. I believe it’s a book.

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Lisa’s Last Words's avatar

I have no problem with sub stack at all🌟

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Lisa’s Last Words's avatar

This is business💯

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Lisa’s Last Words's avatar

Hey

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Kristina God's avatar

Hey thanks for tuning in!

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Michael Ginsburg's avatar

Very important conversation for people to understand what Substack actually is.

I personally am focusing on building my following on the Fediverse through my personal profile and will be setting up a Fediverse profile for Actionable Truth once Ghost version 6.0 is released for self-hosting.

I have already done some extensive work to figure out what I am going to use as replacement for each and every Substack functionality I am currently using and a self-hosted Ghost 6.0 instance is the final (major) piece still missing.

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Kristina God's avatar

Oh nice. Keep me in the loop. Tried the fediverse once because it's Berlin based :) when Medium added it to their flow

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Ashley Schmitt's avatar

Wonderful podcast, but I keep missing your "Live" Podcast.

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Kristina God's avatar

Oh, I'm not scheduling them as I'm doing them spontaneously

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Ashley Schmitt's avatar

@Kristina God, Happy Mother's Day to you. Wishing you a wonderful day to celebrate Motherhood.

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Kristina God's avatar

MANY THANKS! Was a lovely day. We spent it in the garden

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Hariprasad Varma's avatar

Hi

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Kristina God's avatar

Hello! Thanks for tuning in

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David Deane Haskell's avatar

What an important, useful, and entertaining video this was to watch. I really appreciate the both of you taking the time to offer this stuff and really spell out some of the dangers that we could face while we're trying to build stuff up here.

It takes ages to work our way up, right? I'm just on the cusp of 100 subscribers, which I realize is not an enormous number, but it took a lot to get there. I have been carefully backing up, because I do understand the value of the mailing list. It's something I wish I'd really started doing years ago, but I couldn't stand dealing with my own website and with email companies and the like. The cheap stuff or the free stuff was garbage, and the expensive stuff was expensive, and I just sort of never did it, even though I do have published novels.

But now with Substack, I'm able to organically build up, and I'm up to 100. So thank you so much for giving me a video that I can come back to and take notes on and really know what to watch out for.

But in addition, I loved the rest of the conversation as well, and the discussion about making our own choices or else being in the storm of a life dictated by other people's choices. And we're just sort of getting tossed around like a leaf in the water, as opposed to steering our own ship.

I absolutely agree with that, and the self-empowerment thing is a complete and total game changer.

So inspirational. Thank you both so much for this wonderful video. I really appreciate it!

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Kristina God's avatar

Hello David, Oh my goodness, thank you so much for such a kind and thoughtful message! It truly means the world that you took the time to share this, and I just want to take a moment to cheer you on — 100 subscribers is huge! That’s 100 real people raising their hand to hear from you. That’s no small thing, and you should be incredibly proud of the work you've done to get there.

I hear you on the whole email list thing — it can feel overwhelming, especially when the tech gets in the way. But you're so right — building that list is everything. And I love that you’re leaning into Substack and finding your groove there. Sometimes it takes finding the right platform to finally feel like, “Yes, this is doable.” And it sounds like you’ve found that — yay!

Also, your insight about steering your own ship instead of being tossed around by the waves? Yes, yes, yes. That is such a powerful reminder, and one that so many of us need to hear (and re-hear) as we grow.

Sending a big virtual hug and a giant high-five your way — you’re doing amazing, and I hope you keep showing up, sharing your voice, and building that beautiful body of work. You've got this! Talk soon, Kristina

Wanted to answer in a long way too.

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David Deane Haskell's avatar

🙏♥️

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Sophie S.'s avatar

Very valuable info, thanks for sharing with us!

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Kristina God's avatar

Hello Sophie, many thanks for your feedback. I'm trying to integrate more lives. Let me know when you're ready :)

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Sophie S.'s avatar

haha oh no lives give me anxiety 😂 always happy to do a non-live chat if you think I’ve got something valuable to share with your readers though!

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Petrena Wilbur's avatar

Hi

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Kristina God's avatar

Nice hearing from you. Hope all is well!

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Petrena Wilbur's avatar

I have been crazy busy with Substack and my freelance editing, plus family commitments. Medium was dead in the water for me and had advice to move off it and focus on Substack, including more use of Notes. My goals are to publish books of poetry, my novels, and possibly a collection of essays and short stories. I try to keep up with your good advice and follow you even though I may be silent. I hope all is well with you. I appreciate the advice you gave!

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Tracy Wright Corvo's avatar

So I had been backing up my email list and posts, and now that feature is not working. It looks like everything is working, but then the export is BLANK. I am trying to resolve this...any ideas?

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Kristina God's avatar

Hi Tracy, is it resolved? If not, let me know maybe I can help. You can send me a DM with screenhot

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Tracy Wright Corvo's avatar

Not resolved. Ugh. Will send.

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Original Junior-Senior's avatar

hello Kristen

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Kristina God's avatar

Hello, I'll get back to you via the DMs. sorry for not replying yet

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0:39
I would need you to say hi. Okay, otherwise I can't add you. I guess that Naomi is going live for the first time, so she didn't know how to accept my invite. That's the reason. But for now, let me start. Today I wanted to also show you a new feature.