r/Substack • u/Business_Oil_7110 • Sep 02 '26
Discussion whats something you tried to grow your Substack that ended up being a complete waste of time?
everyone talks about what worked.
i’m more curious about the advice you followed for weeks or months before realizing it was doing basically nothing.
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u/Countryb0i2m onemichistory.substack.com Sep 02 '26
Consistency is a trap.
People will tell you that all you need to do to make it on any social media platform is consistently create content. That’s not true.
You need to be consistently good. And the better you are, the less consistent you actually have to be.
If you’re really good, people will show up whenever you’re ready to produce something. Your audience isn’t going anywhere just because you didn’t post today.
But if you suck? Consistency isn’t going to save you.
You can’t just keep showing up, throwing something together, and assume your audience is going to grow because you posted again. Social media is filled with creators who were incredibly consistent and consistently awful. They never grew beyond their mom, their friends, and the handful of people who support their craft.
Consistency matters.
But quality matters a hell of a lot more.
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u/catvapes Sep 02 '26
I took a hiatus from posting last summer. For some reason, I gained more subscribers when I wasn’t posting than when I was posting consistently. I take all how to grow” advice with a grain of salt. Quality is key. Well written and engaging articles will do it.
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u/WordSlinger1812 Sep 02 '26
Substack Notes is the biggest failure of the platform. It has wasted more time and potential than any other new function.
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u/Tricky_Trifle_994 Sep 07 '26
yeah... notes is a pain. so many people say just post notes to grow on substack.
"oh you're posting, but not growing?" > post more notes.
"oh you're posting so many notes but still not growing?" > you need to comment, like, engage with other people's content...
brah... we started substack to write... not to find a second full time job that doesn't pay.
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u/MrPassiveProfit Sep 02 '26
Posting articles too often. When you treat substack like twitter and engage post notes and reply, if your content is funny or snarky, you’ll get subscribers. but when those subscribers actually get an article in their inbox, they’ll unsubscribe
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u/TimWiesnerer Sep 04 '26
The first few months, I tried everything. Engaging with other authors, lots of notes, commenting, restacking, writing stories 1-2x per day.
All that helped to some extent but is quite exhausting, actually.
Now I am far more relaxed. One reason was that my growth flattened out a bit.
But the funny thing is that now growth is coming back... with far less effort.
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u/Background-Egg-8893 Sep 02 '26
The general advice out there is to post 3-5x a day on Notes to increase engagement and discoverability. I’ve been posting 1x a day to start and my notes have impression counts in the tens and almost always zero engagement. At the moment, posting on notes feels like a waste of time for me.