I did the same thing right from the start with my newsletter* — referral engine, editor, archives, mail stuff, etc. Nothing worse than building a massive audience on the back of substack & co.
GP wrote "Nothing worse than building a massive audience on the back of substack & co." and I'd value a "here's why, and (esp) HOW to avoid that route"
I wrote a blog post on how to accomplish a Stratechery-style newsletter/blog with paid memberships on my blog[1] — you can hook into Zapier so there’s lots of opportunity to build a full community around Ghost’s built-in membership system, in case you want to send Slack invites, add them to a Mailchimp newsletter, etc.
[1]: https://www.mailinglisthackers.com/creating-a-member-support...