Why Substack?
Lots of little reasons with some icing on the cake
At Pontem, we believe that effective communication is the cornerstone of any successful business. In our pursuit of transparency and improved stakeholder engagement, early on we made a decision to leverage the power of Substack – a platform known for its simplicity and efficiency in disseminating content. Ultimately, we put a lot of thought into that decision during our brand building sessions and we wanted to share how we ultimately came to choose Substack during those early days.
What does every company need?
Every company out there competing in today’s modern world needs to have a way of sharing their voice and Pontem is no different. We can solve some of the world’s most complicated problems, but only if people know we exist.
But where do you share that voice (and how do you avoid becoming just another “thought-leader” that re-shares other’s posts)?
Most companies decide to share things directly on social media sites. The main problem is that you can’t do any long form and thoughtful content on sites like that. The other problem is the content is never aggregated into a single location to easily revisit if needed. Items tend to exist in the present, but then disappear forever in the past.
To overcome this, many companies build complicated (and expensive) backends on their website to host their own blogs. They may also elect to leverage built-in email functionality that allows people to subscribe to their content and receive email notifications of any updates. Finally, they also likely need to integrate an analytics site to try and monitor key metrics regarding traffic and engagement.
Enter Substack.
This platform creates solutions for all of the obstacles mentioned above plus more.
Long form content can easily and efficiently be written and then published (in fact, it’s so easy even Tommy can successfully create and publish a new article).
People have the option to view our content online or they can subscribe and easily receive direct emails of our updates.
Content can still easily be shared via social media sites like LinkedIn and Twitter (“X”), or you can even share within Substack’s own growing social media framework.
Key analytics metrics (something we love at Pontem) is inherently built-in to everything.
You can easily give writing access to everyone at your company, essentially democratizing your companies knowledge sharing abilities.
Finally, everything you produce lives on almost as the written history of your company.
With just a few clicks, we can keep our audience informed about the latest developments, achievements, and initiatives happening at Pontem, which was exactly what we wanted.
The one technical problem we did think of with Substack was that where we write our content within Substack would be foreign to the rest of the our companies domain (www.pontemanalytics.com). But there too, Substack had a solution. After starting your Substack, they have an option where you can link it to your own custom domain, which is how we ended up at news.pontemanalytics.com. This was an important component and allowed us to keep a common domain across all things Pontem, which is important for our brand identity.
Thus the beginning of our Substack “Data and Discipline” was nearly born…
What sealed the deal
Right around the time we were strongly beginning to consider using Substack for all of our media content, we received an email from their team. They wanted to let us know that they had decided to do a rather unconventional thing and had opened up their current round of funding to the general public for investment.
To us, this was the final sign we needed. At that point, not only did we decide to standardize on Substack for Pontem’s media content purposes, but we also made an investment in them as well.
Pontem is a young and exciting company. After looking into Substack as an option for what we needed, we saw a company that was also just starting out (albeit older than us) but one with an equally grand vision of what they can achieve in their own space. In many ways, by investing in them, we feel that we are now sharing a common journey together and we’re excited to see where it ends up.
Interestingly enough, even just since we decided to use Substack for our company purposes, we’ve seen a number of notable people create their own Substack’s (or additional Substack’s) as well.
Final thoughts
Our adoption of Substack for publishing company updates reflects our commitment to open communication and building trust with our audience. The platform's intuitive features and seamless distribution capabilities have allowed us to foster a transparent connection with our stakeholders. By easily creating personalized content, we believe that Substack will play a pivotal role in driving our communication strategy at Pontem.
In today's fast-paced world, where effective (and authentic) communication is paramount, we’re proud to embrace Substack and hope to set an example for other organizations looking to strengthen their stakeholder relations and engage with their audience in a meaningful way. Together with Substack, we are excited about the journey ahead, as we continue to share our updates and insights with our ever-growing community.