My buddy Dan Popper got a promotion at The Athletic recently. He's moving from the L.A. Chargers beat to a national presence involving free agency and more. Congrats Dan!

He told his Hops with Pop community first. I interviewed Dan last December to talk about his growing community. He's now ranked No. 40 on Substack's sports bestsellers list. He's really built something there.

But, Ian, does that mean the end of Hops with Pop?

Not at all. Dan owns this community space, and he's not abandoning it. That's a signal for all sports creators on Substack and elsewhere, and it's what I've been preaching from Day 1 at Write Sports..

What happened when Pete Abraham left his Yankees blog behind, and why Dan Popper's story ended differently. Plus, two platform moves worth watching if you're building on Substack or Beehiiv. And I'm welcoming three new members to the Write Sports community — with some news on pricing.

If you're reading this, you likely already started a community.

One follower? That's a community. One subscriber? Guess what: community.

I wrote about this last October:

In the days when newspapers ruled sports coverage, community equated to readers. That was the engagement. You wrote. They read. It was a one-way community.

Sports talk radio changed that. Fans had a place to call and engage with the so-called experts.

That call-in show became internet message boards, then blogs.

I don't need to go over the impact of social media.

How sports journalists — and now the all-encompassing term creators — embraced these platforms is part of the evolution.

In the early- to mid-2000s, I worked at The Journal News of Westchester, Putnam and Rockland counties in New York; the lower Hudson Valley. Thus, they changed the digital presence to LoHud.com.

We had a ton of talented journalists there, including Ian O'Connor, Jane McManus, Ian Rapoport (yes, that one), etc.

One of them, Pete Abraham, killed it on the Mets beat and then the Yankees beat.

Pete is not only a good writer, but he's a good, gregarious dude. He started writing a Yankees blog on the LoHud site, and it blew up.

His live game blogs were appointment second-screen viewing. He'd get the ball rolling and interact with all the readers. The comments would eclipse 1,000 replies by game's end.

But LoHud couldn't keep Pete there for long. The Boston Globe came calling, and he's now their baseball columnist.

The blog and the readers remained at LoHud. The writer who replaced Pete did a good job on the blog, but it no longer had the same vibe.

Pete wrote the blog, but LoHud owned it.

Dan Popper followed a similar arc to Pete.

Joining the Chargers beat in 2019, he quickly gained a strong following on Twitter. The engagement came easy because Dan listened to his readers and followers.

Dan knew they yearned for more, so he searched for places where he and his most loyal followers could keep the conversation going without the noise of that platform.

He tried a YouTube channel. He tried some other things.

Then he tried Substack. He could house his podcast there, do live video chats, and use the subscriber chat to interact with his community on a more personal and direct level.

Back in December, Dan had 660 paying subscribers (at $8/month, that's $63,360 a year before Substack's 10% cut). He doesn't have an orange check mark for 1,000 paid subscribers yet, but he must be close.

And now that the focus of his work has changed, he can still keep this Chargers community right where it is and maintain his relationship with it.

You already have a community. The next step is formalizing it.

Me? I interact with my paid Write Sports subscribers in Substack's membership chat. I call it the Creator Lab, but Substack doesn't let us name it... yet.

For The Sunday Back Page, I use it as the submission portal for those who want their work considered for next Sunday's edition. There, I can see some interaction between publishers who are seeing each other's work. I could be more present with it.

Just start a thread. You can even send that thread as an email to your subscribers, inviting them to join in the discussion.

If you have a publication on Substack, then you have access to a subscriber chat. You can choose to put a paywall on it, or a paywall on certain threads. It's free.

Beehiiv announced a new community feature earlier this month. It is only available on its paid tiers. Beehiiv doesn't take a cut of your paid subscriptions, but you have to pay for the community part of the software.

There are other ways to interact with communities, of course.

And if you're looking for something more advanced and you want the community to become a business, Circle has been at the top of the game for several years and just launched its biggest upgrade ever earlier this month.

Dan gets to keep Hops with Pop because he built it on his own ground, not The Athletic's. That's the whole difference between his story and Pete's.

Two platform moves worth a look if you're building on either one.

📰 Substack CEO Chris Best launched AI-detection scanning via Pangram, but it only reads posts and notes published since July 21. I'm testing it now before writing anything full-length.

💡 Adam Ryan flagged that Beehiiv's new terms, released a day after its community launch, let it use subscriber data across publications for ad targeting — his question: is Beehiiv infrastructure, or becoming the next platform?

Welcome to the three newest members of the Write Sports paid community. I enjoyed digging into audits for people at such different points in their journeys.

I also hit the milestone I'd set for revisiting pricing. My wife and mother-in-law have thought I charged too little; I told them I needed proof of concept first.

Now that the community's growing, I plan to show up daily — more active in Substack chat, and testing Beehiiv's new Community feature. Wish me luck.

Thinking about trying beehiiv? Sign up through my link and get 20% off your first three months.

Full disclosure: that’s my partner link, and I earn a commission if you sign up through it.