How is The Culo Village different from Substack?
People keep asking me whether they should use Substack or The Culo Village, as if it's a contest. It isn't. One builds a readership for new writing, the other pulls together everything you've already made so it can still be found.
People keep asking me whether they should use Substack or The Culo Village, as if it's a contest. It isn't. One builds a readership for new writing, the other pulls together everything you've already made so it can still be found.
Substack is where you publish new writing to people who subscribe to you. The Culo Village is where everything you've already published, across every platform, gets pulled together into one place organised around you and your business. They're not solving the same problem, so the honest comparison isn't "which is better," it's "which question are you actually asking."
If the question is "I want to write regularly and build a readership that follows me directly," Substack is built for exactly that. It supports full publications, paid subscriptions, community features, even audio and video, with its own discovery tools layered on top. The organising idea is the publication and its subscribers. That's a real, well-built answer, and nothing here is arguing against it.
If the question is closer to "I've already been posting for years, on Instagram, on YouTube, on other people's podcasts, and I want someone who comes across my name to actually understand what I've built," that's a different question entirely, and it's not one a subscription platform was organised to answer. A publication doesn't retroactively organise everything you made before you started it. The Culo Village exists specifically for that: not a new place to write from scratch, but a connected profile where your existing stories, interviews and posts live under your name and your business, browsable by someone who wasn't there when any of it was first posted.
On the AI-discovery question specifically, since it's the one people actually search: no platform, Substack included, can promise an AI system will recommend you. What structured, consistently published information about you across the web can do is give AI systems and search engines a clearer, more consistent public record to draw from when your name or your work comes up. That's a meaningfully different claim from a guarantee, and it's the honest one.
They're not competitors in practice. A founder can run a Substack for the audience who wants ongoing writing directly from them, and still want a Village profile as the place that holds the rest of it together. One grows a readership over time. The other makes sure the work that already exists can still be found by someone who wasn't there the first time it went up.
Shared on Instagram in July 2022.
Shakas Designer , based in Brisbane, QLD.
Shakas Designer is an Australian technology founder, serial entrepreneur, content creator and digital marketer with more than 15 years of experience behind the camera and building content around businesses.