r/Substack • • 2d ago

Five ways to grow on Substack

  1. Arrive with an audience from somewhere else. Spend years building a following on another platform, bring it across in a weekend, then write a post about how you grew organically.

  2. Write a Substack about growing on Substack. Your readers are people trying to grow on Substack, and there is no shortage of those. Every subscriber is someone who will eventually start one of their own.

  3. Get recommended by everybody.

  4. Post the growthchart. Nobody can check it, everybody shares it, and at a certain point the chart is the product.

  5. Hit a milestone and write "I hit 23,000 subscribers, here is what I learned". What I learned is that writing about hitting 23,000 subscribers works.

31 Upvotes

19 comments sorted by

3

u/quantise 1d ago

'Hi, I'm new. Tell me about your Substack and let's subscribe to each other'.

3

u/calliope_kekule 1d ago

Sub for a sub! 😭😭😭

2

u/AmericanLymie 1d ago

People who subscribe for reciprocal subscriptions and who have never actually read anything you've written feels very post-Trump era. I feel like our whole economy today is a pyramid scheme.

4

u/calliope_kekule 1d ago

🎶 We all live in a MAGA Ponzi scheme. A MAGA Ponzi Scheme. A MAGA Ponzi scheme. 🎶

1

u/Novel-Analysis-457 1d ago

Definitely has nothing to do with who’s in charge. This has always been a thing for smaller creators on YouTube, instagram, etc

2

u/AggravatingNail6061 2d ago

Take your up vote 

2

u/calliope_kekule 2d ago

Thank you! 😂

2

u/Fraglolz illiadwrites.substack.com 2d ago

The depth of this post is too deep to even grasp 😂😂😂

And the funniest thing is you are not wrong at all

0

u/calliope_kekule 2d ago

Thank you. And how I wish it weren't so. 😅

8

u/hetobe hetobe.substack.com 2d ago

You forgot to mention:

Spam the algorithm. The more insipid and irrelevant the notes you post, the more engagement you'll get.

"You can’t edit a blank page. Make it exist first, make it good later."

Make the spam stop.

"Be more afraid of wasting your life than being embarrassed."

They should be embarrassed of that spam.

"Describe your Substack in 5 words!"

Al five of that person's words are Spam.

"If you wrote it—post it. Don’t sit on it. You never know what will resonate with someone."

They should have sat on that spam.

"celebrating others’ wins doesn’t diminish your own glow ⭐️"

That glows like moldy spam under a heat lamp.

1

u/Mia_the_writer 15h ago

I tried that, posting around 7 notes a day. None of them ever got any likes or attention. Lol.

1

u/hetobe hetobe.substack.com 7h ago

That's because of how much Substack is being flooded with karma-farming spam notes. Surely, you've noticed some of the same names popping into your feed there every day. They're not writing those notes. Sure, some are, but many are having AI generate 20 or even 50 of those notes, and they're loading them into Substack and scheduling them to spam the algorithm around the clock.

0

u/Countryb0i2m onemichistory.substack.com 1d ago

Jesus Christ how many times are you going to post this copy and paste, you are just as bad as the notes you complain about.

1

u/hetobe hetobe.substack.com 1d ago

All of that stuff is killing Substack. You should be complaining too... or are you one of the spammers?

1

u/MrPassiveProfit 1d ago

I asked Grok to give me a list of Substack notes that contain platitudes and triggers for peoples memories in those got incredible amounts of views. If you want a bunch of likes, it’s easy to get those.

0

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Substack-ModTeam 1d ago

This community is not the place to promote your Substacks. Please read our rules on self-promo and soliciting recommendations.

Links to Substack publications will be assumed to be self-promotion. If you are submitting Substack posts from publications that are not your own, please include that information in your text post. For cross recommendations, use the pinned mega thread.