We're Leaving Substack...
Interactive newsletter content, an even bolder PI site + app, crazy upcoming guests, and a first glance at what’s next for us.
Big day for Perfectly Imperfect - we’ve built a totally new iteration of our site that doubles down on our day one mission of helping you find real recommendations from real people, and it’s live RIGHT NOW!
The new Perfectly Imperfect is a special blend of social and editorial that brings our signature guest columns and user recs from y’all together on one site. It’s the perfect place for discovering new things and nerding out over everything you love.
This is our big bet on making a positive difference in the state of the Internet by taking on algorithm-driven recommendation feeds, bland legacy media, and toxic social media giants to build something that’s totally new -- yet captures how exciting being online used to feel.
When you go to our bold new home page, you’ll see…
Olivia Rodrigo as a guest on Perfectly Imperfect (it drops next week 🤯)
A bunch of great recs from your friends and the community.
Our new Staff Recs column featuring contributors like Chloe Cherry, Jason Stewart, Cooper. B Handy, Ivy Wolk, Jayson Buford, Veronika Slowikowska, and more.
The new long-form column where legends, like Lance Bangs, write about the recent work of their favorite artists.
Lots of new PI content that covers music, food, film, fashion, nightlife, etc.
...and a big Share button, so you can post a recommendation of your own, adding to this special human-to-human discovery experience.
What does it mean for you, the reader?
You won’t have to lift a finger -- the transition is seamless.
You’ll continue to receive our editorial posts in the same inbox you are reading this from. And if you’re a paid subscriber, you will still have access to our exclusive newsletter content, premium themes on the site, extra app features, and the full PI archive.
If you are yet to activate your PI account, you can claim it now by using your email to sign in. It has a randomly generated username, like @spotless_peach_piranha, and you can either use it to privately bookmark newsletter recs or personalize it to make it yours. For the next 7 days only, you can change your username to whatever you’d like in Settings for free.
By the way, Perfectly Imperfect PRO will now only cost $6 (both existing and new subscriptions). Yup, you read that right -- the new PI PRO gives you more for less. If you haven’t upgraded yet, consider doing it now by going to Settings → Upgrade to Premium. It’s worth it!
The new Perfectly Imperfect
Your recs, front and center
As we announced last month, we’ll be featuring PI users like you in our newsletter. Plus, your rec just might be one of our staff picks featured at the top of the home page right next to Olivia Rodrigo’s and other PI editorial guests.
Interactive newsletter content
Rather than a traditional newsletter that exists as static text in your inbox, PI emails will now be comprised of interactable recs that look exactly like the ones on the site, so you can quickly comment, bookmark for later, smash the like button, or repost on your profile.
It’s same format that you know and love, except it looks much cooler now and it’s easier to act on the recommendations rather than just reading and moving on.
Sharing with friends (who might not be on PI yet…)
We don’t expect you to completely stop using other social sites, so we’ve added an easy way to pop your favorite PI recs straight on your IG story for the friends who aren’t yet on PI.
Hopping directly on IG to post a create-mode story about a movie I just saw has never really felt intuitive, so this has been a fun way to share my recs with friends and show some extra love to other people’s recs that looked cool or made me laugh.
More Rabbit Holes
At the bottom of each newsletter, we’ll now show you a couple related articles and some highlights from the archive.
We’ve done so many Perfectly Imperfect interviews at this point, that I bet a lot of people don’t even realize that we’ve featured people like Charli XCX, Brad Phillips, Will Oldham, Sarah Squirm, Jeremy O. Harris, and Mac Demarco. Find the full archive here.
How we got here
Our mission since day one has been to help you escape the algorithm by sharing a taste of taste from real people.
If we rewind waaaaay back to Fall 2020, you’ll see people like Emily Sundberg sharing her recs on PI in the exact same format we use today. PI’s audience has grown a lot in the following years, and while the guests have gotten bigger, we still use our platform to put on anyone who is doing cool things and deserves more attention.
Launching our social site in January was an experiment to see how far we can push our vision for an Internet that’s more human and free from the algorithm bubbles. There have now been over 150,000 recommendations shared by our users, and thousands of people have met new friends (and even lovers!) based on their love for the same Drag City records and shared interest in esoteric literature. Positive spaces like this are increasingly rare on the Internet.
Perfectly Imperfect has always been more than just a newsletter. It’s a state of mind and a shared yearning for discovery, culture, and human curation. So, our new site feels like a natural progression in building an online community that makes you feel excited and inspired — rather than anxious and overwhelmed.
THANK YOU!
If you have any questions, you can reach out to tyler@perfectlyimperfect.fyi
A BIG shout out to everyone who reads and supports Perfectly Imperfect. There are nearly 100,000 of you, and you’ve made my wildest dreams come true. I’m excited to continue building this really special community around sharing what we love.
A BIG shout out to Special Offer, who designed the site and app. They worked with us on the original PI.FYI designs last summer, and then went on to do Charli XCX’s Brat campaign…one of the biggest design moments of the year. Nbd.
A BIG shout out to ABC Dinamo, the mf goats of typography. They let us use one of their new fonts (Favorit) on the site, which leveled up our old font (Arial Narrow) in all the right ways.
A BIG shout out to everyone who helped PI get to this point. You know who you are, but fuck it, I’m going to do some shout outs— thank you Alex, Jennie, Robbie, Vivi, Lindsey, Mitch, Kate, Viktoriia, Blake, and Clarke.
Love,
Tyler
~
Why we’re leaving Substack (extended, for the newsletter nerds)
This section is mostly for fellow Substack writers and very curious readers.
I probably wouldn’t have ever started a newsletter if it wasn’t for Substack making it so easy back in 2020. This was a great place for us to grow Perfectly Imperfect and learn the ropes, we just have very specific ambitions for what media and community can be that are impossible to accomplish here.
Building something special that’s ours is the primary motivation for moving off platform, but at the same time, I’ve also grown increasingly wary of putting all my eggs in the Substack basket.
In the last year or so, there’s been a huge push for newsletter writers to make use of Substack’s app specific features such as Chat, Notes, and Live Video, which are great for generating followers, but not necessarily subscribers. The problem is, you don’t own your followers, and you can’t export them along with your subscribers if you ever decide to move elsewhere.
Nearly 6% of Perfectly Imperfect’s audience here is comprised of followers, which I’ll lose by leaving today, and I’ve heard that number can be in the 25 - 50% range for some publications that started post-Notes. There used to be only one option on Substack (hitting “subscribe” and trying out someone’s newsletter) but now there’s an equally weighted in-app “follow” button that sits beside it.
Substack says that followers are supposed to be a lower commitment option for new people that you can someday * big maybe * turn into a subscriber… that is, if you chose to play along and become a power user of their app-specific features.
As a user of Notes, I enjoy the community and content, but as a writer I see it as a big step towards getting writers more dependent on Substack’s app, which will make it much harder to leave someday.
I never thought I’d leave either, yet here I am…
Congrats. Smart move.
Congrats, Tyler, and best of luck with the move. New site looks great.