Not very remotely I was into the idea of using substack for my blog, mostly because of its huge audience network and easy discoverability via the notes section. But substack is not really a place to blog.
When people write personal blogs, what they want to write is their momentary insight or how their day went or just a funny incident from years ago. Most of the times it's all about recording the current thing. And though this results in unrefined writing, it is usually the purpose of blogging. The occasional researched essay or meticulous rant would always be there, but raw and random is the norm.
Much of the writing one comes across on substack is refined. There goes a lot of time and effort in writing such immaculate articles which generate a lot of virality on the platform. But for someone who writes messy, uncurated thoughts on their blog, such articles create insecurity. As for myself I felt quite a lot of inferiority complex and I could not shake the feeling of being a bad writer for many many days.
But being a good or a bad writer is not the point of a blog. The point is expressing yourselves. And I'm quite sure that a lot of crude writing will eventually turn you into a better writer. But substack ends up defeating the purpose of a blog. The fact that you want people to click on your post and read it and like it and restack it makes substack no better than a social media platform.
I'm not criticizing substack. For all its drawbacks I love the platform. I just think it's not a suitable place for a blog and especially for a person who is just starting to write. On substack there is a constant need to impress the audience, which was very demotivating for me. The background thought that I need to engage readers made me censor my writing a lot. And while some censoring is good, too much will stop you from writing anything altogether.
The point is to advise you to not start your blog on substack, at least when you are starting out. Choose something like mataroa (this one) or bearblog or pika or blogger or wordpress as a place for your blog. It's fine if you don't have any visitors, at least you can express yourself freely without the need to impress and engage. You can later migrate your blog to substack if you want, once you realise your goals with your blog and learn to focus on writing and writing only.