Deleting my podcast wiped my publication

Welcome to Hype Yourself 2.0 🤦🏻‍♀️

It’s me, Hi!

Hiya 🌊,

This is not the first post of a new publication I dreamt of writing about, but I wanted to be honest and transparent about what is happening.

I have also made it public (for now) to protect anyone else from not backing up their content or data.

If you are discovering me for my work for the first time, sorry to have to meet like this. I’m Lucy, I had a Substack Top 50 business newsletter with nearly 13k+ subscribers that was to help people like you feel better about sharing their work, and earn income from your expertise. I also shared my own self employed journey from PR agency owner in east London, UK to writer on this platform in rural France. I was halfway to my goal of hitting 1,001 paid subscribers up until a few days ago.

What happened?

On Tuesday 6th May, I was just about to draft my post for this upcoming Sunday.

As I looked at my publication page on Substack, I thought it looked a bit cluttered.

I turned on the podcast section a few months back and posted two short videos, but they took up space on the main page, so I thought I would “just” have a little tidy and remove it.

I deleted my podcast in settings in a super relaxed and controlled manner.

I then had what I’m calling a casual Substack nightmare. Everything was deleted. All subscribers. All posts. All gone.

• I wasn’t prompted to do anything for subscribers like cancel or refund subscriptions.

• I wasn’t in the Danger Zone settings of Substack.

• I wasn’t prompted to archive or export my posts or data.

It all just went.

I’ve spent the last two days chasing explanations from the support team, and I’m sorry to hear that some of you are wondering where the content has gone during that time.

Late last night, I was told that all 180+ of my archive posts are gone, and they can’t get it back.

(I didn’t back them up because I didn’t think I needed to).

Subsequently, three other writers have come forward and told me they have had issues with content disappearing when they delete episodes or content from their podcasts on Substack.

So what now?

• I have to start again from scratch, so this is coming from a new publication page, albeit with the same name but a logo with a green background.

• I debated changing the name, but I’m hoping to try to make some of my old promotional links from media and podcast mentions continue to work.

• I will do what I can to restore the best bits from the archive

• I will continue to send a weekly email every Sunday

• The June 3rd live class with Happiful magazine is still confirmed

• I’m going to make the best collaboration directory I’ve made yet of opportunities for you

• I will send the replay from the May class this week once I’m back on my feet.

Gentle Ask

I wanted to ask for a bit of grace as I put it back together. Life does like to throw us curve balls at inconvenient times. I am on a solo parenting stint until Sunday, and a stomach bug is doing the rounds among my little people.

As much as I want to rush to rebuild, I can’t.

Can I ask for your patience as I restore the archive favourites and rebuild this very empty-looking publication?

Substack sent me a CSV of my data, albeit it’s missing about 500 free subscribers and 30 paid subscribers from my last tally. If you should be a paid subscriber experiencing any issues, please let me know, and I’ll do my best to work with you.

In the meantime, if anyone would like a month's refund while I iron things out, please reply to this email or hit pause in your subscriber settings.

Thank you

Thank you to those more active on the Substack platform for sharing notes or restacking mine around the issue to help me get support, sending me lovely DMs, or reassuring messages about being there for me.

My resilience levels have been tested. My main priority is to ensure that my service to you is upheld.

Once we are back up and running at full steam, I’ll probably write to you about the grief stages I’ve gone through trying to get this back!

But for now, I’ll see you on Sunday.

🚨And a casual reminder to back up your data and make copies of your posts ‼️

Thank you all

Lucy

P.S. If you loved my old content, I would be eternally grateful if you could give me a recommendation on this new Hype Yourself, as I’ve also lost over 220+ publications who recommended me 🥹 which was a large chunk of my growth.