I have a question regarding where to place blog content and what newsletter mechanism to use for subscribers as a customer funnel. I’m not ready to advertise my product (aka website), but I want to start in an organized content generation phase in related topic areas. I’m really not a fan of medium (both in the limitations of the formatting you can do), and honestly I really dislike reading a page or two of an article and then its marked as paying content. I am not familar with medium newsletter but it seems via googling possible. I do like the substack free model. It also has a pay model, however I do not intent to charge for my newsletter. I follow both free and paid substack newsletters. I feel with substack however you are locked into hosting content on their site. I’m happy to host content independently on a company site, referencing from LinkedIn and other sources to drive traffic, but I’d still want the newsletter portion and applicable user tracking. Open to any suggestions that have worked for new startup project founders, or examples of what didn’t work and if you could have a do over what would you do.

FWIW, I used Substack for this community newsletter (100% free) and I quite liked it. But I noticed that LinkedIn helps promote newsletters on their platform, and I won't lie - I had some second thoughts.

I can see that LinkedIn provides the ability to write articles (rather than posts), and you get anonymous analytics. I first thought to start here. You can have followers, and your article will be presented in their feed, but LinkedIn to my knowledge does provide the email capability, and the individual tracking. I don’t have a newsletter at this time to know how much value that offers but if you want a customer funnel, I guess do you also encourage followers to subscribe to a newsletter? There are way too many options. I’d like to see 3 playbooks for startup projects with pros and cons of each.