Build the list where you can export it. For a founder picking one home for the newsletter, that means Substack or a comparable email platform, because every subscriber's address is yours to download whenever you want, and publishing costs nothing until you charge for subscriptions. The LinkedIn newsletter still earns a place in the plan, since it converts followers you already have into subscribers with close to zero extra work and then notifies them every time you publish. What it never hands over is the email list, so treat it as reach, and keep the asset somewhere you control.
The plan for this piece: what the LinkedIn newsletter does well, what it withholds, what Substack charges and what it hands over, why people quit each platform, and the sequence I'd run. Quick basis for the advice: Michael, who I build Megaphone with, grew a Substack to 225,000 subscribers from scratch next to 56,000 followers on X and 45,000 on LinkedIn. I've got 93,000 followers on X and 26,000 on LinkedIn, I was the first CMO at Copy.ai while we grew from zero to $2.5M ARR in under a year, and I review founder content every day. The platform facts below come from LinkedIn's help center and Substack's support docs, pulled this week.
What the LinkedIn newsletter does well
The mechanics favor fast early growth. Per LinkedIn's newsletter help pages, publishing your first edition triggers an invitation to your connections and followers to subscribe, and when somebody new follows you later, LinkedIn sends them an automatic invite too. After each edition goes out, subscribers receive push, in-app, and email notifications. LinkedIn is emailing your list on your behalf, with deliverability handled, which is distribution a feed post never gets. Authors can run up to five newsletters at a time, though one done weekly beats three done sporadically for the same reason one lane beats five on any platform.
There's a second feature founders underrate. The author can see each subscriber's name, profile photo, job title, and headline, per LinkedIn's subscription help page. For a B2B founder that's a readable roster of who signed up: the partner at a fund, the senior engineer you've been trying to hire, the VP evaluating your category. No email platform shows you job titles, and that roster turns into warm conversations if you work it.
Growth comes from the feed, though, and you should keep that straight. Subscribers arrive because your posts put people on your profile, where the auto-invite does its work. A founder posting three times a week on LinkedIn keeps feeding the newsletter, while editions published into a dormant account get the launch notification wave and little else after it.
What LinkedIn withholds
What it withholds is the email addresses. LinkedIn notifies your list and shows you who's on it, but there's no export, and the subscriber relationship belongs to the platform. If your reach drops, if the account gets restricted, or if LinkedIn changes how newsletters distribute, the subscribers stay behind. Every version of the argument that your LinkedIn audience belongs to LinkedIn lands on this point, and on this point it's right.
That dependence has a price even in good times. The platform decides what the notification looks like, when it arrives, and whether future product changes keep email delivery in the package at all. You're renting a very good distribution channel, and rent can go up.
What Substack charges and what it hands over
Substack's pricing page says publishing is free no matter how many subscribers you have. If you turn on paid subscriptions, Substack keeps 10% of subscription revenue and Stripe charges its own processing fees on top. Until then, a six-figure list costs the same as a two-hundred-person list, which is nothing.
The clause that matters sits in a different support article: you always own your readers' email addresses and can export them at any time, and that clause is the entire asset case. The list becomes a company file you can move to any email tool, hand to a new marketing lead, or load into a different platform the week Substack disappoints you. For a founder, those addresses are investors who opted in, candidates who want to hear from you, and customers who said yes to a weekly email, reachable on your schedule instead of an algorithm's.
Michael's Substack is the proof I sit closest to. He built it to 225,000 subscribers from scratch, and the ownership argument held in practice: whatever any feed decides next, the list travels with him. Across the team we're past 200,000 newsletter subscribers on personal accounts, and each of those is an address we can export tomorrow.
Substack has discovery features of its own, recommendations from other publications being the big one, and some writers grow mostly through them. I'd plan as if they contribute nothing, because for a founder the dependable engine is your own social audience sending readers across, the same way it is on LinkedIn.
Why people quit each platform
Search either platform's name next to the word leaving and you'll find departure essays. The Substack exits cluster around three complaints: the 10% fee grows painful once paid revenue is meaningful, moderation controversies have pushed writers out on principle, and some operators outgrow the feature set and move to email tools built for marketing. What makes all three survivable is that a writer leaving Substack exports the list and keeps publishing to the same readers somewhere else, which is the exact property you chose the platform for, so the churn stories read to me as evidence for owning the list rather than against Substack.
People drift away from LinkedIn for duller reasons, mostly reach volatility and feed fatigue. I'd treat that as ordinary platform weather rather than a verdict on the newsletter feature, and I'd also note that a founder who walks away from LinkedIn leaves every newsletter subscriber behind, which is the asymmetry this whole comparison turns on.
Two tools, two jobs
Shanee Moret, who built an audience of nearly a million followers on LinkedIn, has the cleanest framing of this comparison I've seen: a LinkedIn newsletter against Substack is a bicycle against a car, two tools with different functions rather than two versions of one thing. Her video walks through why the LinkedIn newsletter behaves like front-facing social distribution, why Substack behaves like backend email infrastructure you own, and why someone early in the build might still launch on LinkedIn first for the quick win. She says her clients often see open rates around 50% on the LinkedIn newsletter emails, her observed client number rather than a platform statistic.
Her sequencing works if your whole audience lives on LinkedIn, and I'd push on it only a little for founders. The hard part of a newsletter is the writing habit, and both platforms can carry the same issue, so the launch order matters less than where the canonical list lives. Start them the same month if you can manage it, and make the owned list the destination from day one.
The sequence I'd run
Inside the Megaphone weekly publishing plan a founder ships five X posts, three LinkedIn posts, and one newsletter issue every week, and the newsletter issue is the one piece of the week with distribution you own. Wiring this comparison into that shape looks like four moves.
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Put the canonical newsletter on Substack or a comparable email platform, and treat the export button as the reason it lives there.
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Launch a LinkedIn newsletter in the same month if your followers are on LinkedIn. The first edition triggers the auto-invite wave across your connections and followers, which converts an audience you already earned at no cost, and every new follower afterward gets invited without you touching anything.
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Repurpose instead of double-writing. The LinkedIn edition can be the full issue or a trimmed version of it, with one line sending serious readers to the owned list, so the marginal cost of running both stays near zero.
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Let the posts do the recruiting. Subscribers on both platforms come from the feed, so the weekly posts are the growth engine and the newsletter is where the attention gets banked.
One hedge travels with all of this: platforms change terms, Substack could restructure its fees, LinkedIn could ship an email export and collapse half of this argument, and the mechanics above would shift accordingly, while the ownership principle wouldn't move at all. A founder's list is one of the few audience assets no algorithm change can reprice, provided it lives behind an export button.
If you want a read on whether your current posts are doing the recruiting work your newsletter needs, the feed diagnostic quiz is free and takes a few minutes.