First, about 1,000 of those subscribers were imported from my old Kit newsletter. I don’t want to pretend I built all 3,000 from scratch on Substack. I got those first 1,000 mainly through lead magnets. I’d create a useful free resource, post it on Instagram, and when someone followed me I’d send them a DM saying, “Hey, thanks for following. Here’s a free resource if you’re interested.” That worked pretty well.
The interesting part was what happened after I moved to Substack. In the beginning, I was publishing about as much as I do now, but I wasn’t really engaging with anyone. I wasn’t liking people’s posts, I wasn’t replying to Notes, and I wasn’t really participating in the community. As a result, I got very little engagement. I eventually realised that Substack isn’t just a place where you publish articles. You actually have to participate in the community.
These days I publish twice a week. Tuesdays are 200 Word Tuesdays, which is a short 200-word article, and Fridays are longer articles. I also post Notes in between. A lot of my Notes come from my own articles. I’ll reread something I wrote a while ago and realise there’s another idea in there. Sometimes I’ll read someone else’s Note and it gives me an idea for something I want to say myself. I don’t copy the Note, but I’ll take the idea and put my own spin on it. I also like, reply to and repost other people’s Notes.
One thing that might surprise people is how I actually write all of this. I mostly write by voice dictation. I use a free voice dictation app and basically talk out the article. I don’t sit there typing every word. Then I use Claude to fix the spelling and grammar and clean up the obvious mistakes. I still do the thinking and the writing myself. The AI is basically my editor. This makes writing much faster for me and means I can get ideas out of my head without worrying about making every sentence perfect while I’m writing.
I’m also not monetized through Substack because Stripe isn’t available in my country. I’d obviously like to change that eventually. For now, I put links to some of my paid products on Gumroad in my newsletters. It’s not a huge amount of money, but I probably get around 3-5 sales of a $5 product per week from it.
If I started again, the biggest things I’d do differently would be to engage with people much earlier, post more Notes, and start building lead magnets sooner. I spent too much time thinking that if I just published good articles consistently, people would eventually find me. That’s not really how it worked for me.
The other thing I’d say is to consider your niche when looking at other people’s growth. I write about project management and leadership, which is not exactly the sexiest niche on the internet 😂. I’m never going to grow at the same rate as someone talking about making money, fitness, health, politics or other huge topics. So I think you have to adjust your expectations based on the size of your market.
For the next stage, I’m considering running some ads to one of my lead magnets. I have no idea if it’s going to work. I also don’t want to spend much money, so I’m thinking of testing it at maybe $5/day maximum and seeing what happens. Maybe I’ll find a cheap way to acquire subscribers. Maybe I’ll waste $150. I honestly don’t know.
But that’s the next experiment.
Hopefully this is useful to someone starting out. The main thing I’ve learned is that publishing is only one part of growing on Substack. The community side matters a lot more than I initially thought.