Margie NomuraDinner Tonight

The short version

Margie spent nearly 3 years building a paid membership via Substack, becoming a top 50 Substack bestseller in the process. Despite that, she knew she had spent a long time fighting a platform not built for her. Having seen her subscriber base plateau, Margie switched to Clubb, immediately leading to a 22% increase in paid subscribers within 30 days - her best month of growth since the early days after Dinner Tonight first launched.

With huge amounts of positive feedback and reigniting customer demand that had been frustrated by the Substack experience, she's now positioned to grow into a serious subscription platform and build a serious creator income stream.

The seamless migration meant she kept her whole subscriber base and now has a stronger platform to build on.

Who Margie is

Margie Nomura - @desertislanddishes - is the chef, food writer and creator behind Desert Island Dishes, one of the UK's best-known food brands. A professionally trained chef with more than a decade of experience, she's built a loyal audience through simple, seasonal recipes and thoughtful conversations about the role food plays in our lives. Alongside her hugely popular Desert Island Dishes podcast, she shares practical cooking inspiration with hundreds of thousands of followers across her website, newsletter and social channels.

When Margie launched her weekly newsletter, Dinner Tonight, it quickly became a favourite for busy home cooks looking for easy, reliable weeknight recipes. She had already built the audience - the next challenge was giving them an experience that felt as premium as the content itself.

Life on Substack

Like many food creators, Margie joined Substack because she'd seen other creators building there. But it was never really what she wanted - a platform built for newsletters and writers, not for chefs, recipes, or the kind of experience she wanted to give her subscribers.

The switch

Margie had spent years getting feedback on the frustrations of Substack. Confusing experience, very difficult to find content, not easy to follow along with recipes, can't adjust recipes or tweak meal plans, wading through other creators' content to get to where you want.

The Substack model of creators having a quick way to charge for content was great, but the overall product experience wasn't.

She wanted subscribers opening an app that's easy to use, helpful, in her brand and with the features her subscribers actually want.

That's the elevated experience Clubb was able to offer.

Equally important, she wanted the freedom to grow. Substack's centralised app and social network model means that running different marketing campaigns or paid ads doesn't work.

With a simple migration that was handled end-to-end, existing paid subscribers were moved across seamlessly, with payment details preserved so nobody had to subscribe again.

This immediately gave her the base to then grow from.

What Clubb gave her

• Proper content discovery with easy browsing and simple search - making every recipe valuable again
• The actual tools people need for cooking her recipes - smart shopping lists, build your own meal plans, adjustable serving sizes, nutritional values, a real place for her community and much more
• A branded app, not a shared feed. Her logo, her domain, her subscribers seeing only her work
• A proper subscriber experience, not just an inbox
• Payments and subscriber management handled, with her running her own product on her own terms

The results

Within 30 days of switching, Margie saw a 22% increase in paid subscribers - her best month of growth since the early days after Dinner Tonight first launched.

Why it worked

The switch gave Margie a platform actually built for what she does - recipes, meal plans, shopping lists - instead of a generic newsletter feed. Subscribers could finally search and browse properly, adjust recipes, and use tools that made the content itself more useful. That's what drove the response: people weren't just reading her content anymore, they were using it.

The takeaway

There are clear benefits to combining your content with a product built for your content and audience. Substack have very publicly and openly built a platform for independent journalism and for subscribers to read the latest news. They haven't built a platform for chefs and for subscribers to search, discover and cook.

A simple switch and a seamless Stripe migration has changed Margie's business overnight, and she's no longer held back by trying to sell the wrong product. Excited to see what the future holds for her!

Thinking about leaving Substack?

If you've built an audience on Substack but feel like you've outgrown the platform, you're not alone. Many creators reach a point where the newsletter is succeeding, but the platform starts holding the business back - capping growth, limiting the subscriber experience, or making it hard to invest in paid acquisition.

Migrating doesn't mean starting over. Existing subscribers and payment details move across seamlessly, so you keep the base you've already built - and gain a platform designed to grow it.

Get in touch and we'll handle the switch end-to-end.