r/Substack

Ok it might not sound like a lot (I know it's not) but they are all people I don't know which is really exciting! I also:

- Fell in love with writing

- Realized what chatgpt sounds like (omg its everywhere)

- May or may not switch my niche just because I've found something I really want to write about.

How many of you have switched what you are writing about? How many substacks did you start before finding the one you really enjoyed working on?

Edit: I actually got 2 new subscribers today so now I'm at 10!!!

Can we at least share that?

How do I share my substack? ive tried sharing within my insta but it doesnt really do much. I'm interacting on substack itself. where else can I advertise?

Hello Substackers,

I was shortly on Substack writing a newsletter that I have paused, but I was thinking how many of you thought it would be cool to have an option/feature to send physical mail to maybe paid subscribers or founding tier members? I want genuine thoughts on this, whether people feel like this is something they want from the creators they are subscribed to, or if you as a creator ever wanted this as an integrated feature? I saw the newsletter website StampFans have it as their primary feature.

Shameless post but I ask as I am thinking of making a Substack integrated tool related to this

Hey there! 🥰

Do you know of any app, extension, plugin, process, magic trick, or anything else I can use to download Substack articles so I can highlight them on my iPad?

For some context: I’d like to be able to add those notes or my thoughts to my Obsidian vault later.

My company started a sub stack almost a year back, and we have about a hundred subscribers - 100% of those subscribers have come from our efforts, none from substack. And traffic from Substack into our main website is negligible, single-digit numbers every month.

In my previous company, we had all of our content on our own website, and in a year we were getting 3,000 to 5,000 fresh visitors every month. This was after chat GPT.

I am seriously thinking about moving all the content back onto the company website. In the hope that it will be more trackable and we will show up more on searches and AI answers.

any suggestions for my situation? Has anyone moved blogs in one direction or the other that can share their thoughts?

I’m considering starting a second Substack publication and I’m curious if anyone here has done it successfully.

I already run one newsletter with a few thousand subscribers, but the topics/themes I’m interested in exploring next are different enough that I’m not sure they belong under the same brand/publication.

For those who’ve started a second newsletter:

• Did it help you reach a different audience?
• Did it split your focus too much?
• Did you keep the brands connected or completely separate?
• Any lessons learned you wish you knew earlier?

I’m less interested in “growth hacks” and more interested in whether having two distinct publications actually worked operationally and creatively over the long term.

I got about 70 views on my first post on Substack in two days before I had the bright idea of spreading the word across a few subreddits. The first one was in the exact niche the post is about and I was surprised they allowed me to post a link. It's performing quite well, 60k views, 65 upvotes, 142 shares. I tried posting something similar to a few more popular subreddits but most of them didn't allow links. Ok, I removed the link, posted a short summary, tried my best not to sound like it's promotion. Maybe people will get interested, click on my profile and go to Substack from there? It got deleted across most of them. Surprisingly, it stayed up on sidehustle for a couple of days where it was the most popular post for this week with over 200k views, over 100 comments, 400 shares and even an award before the mods deleted it without warning or reason given.

You'd expect that this would be a major boost for my blog, right? Well, not really. Just 167 views coming from reddit and I send about 50 PMs to people who kept asking me in the comments for a link. But this means that without counting the PMs, even the shares lead to less than a third of people visiting. Do the many views confirm the dead internet theory? Anyway, just wanted to rant.

After helping several newsletters in the productivity/self-improvement space over the past year, I've noticed a clear pattern: the ones that break 40%+ open rates almost never grew through solo effort. They grew through *cross-pollination* — finding readers who were already engaged with similar content elsewhere.

The problem is that swap arrangements today are totally manual. You DM someone, negotiate, hope they have a comparable list, and then get nothing if they cancel. It's asymmetric and unreliable.

I'm building something to fix this — automated subscriber swaps between newsletters in the same niche, triggered by engagement scores, with Stripe payouts for net-positive trades. Early results from the people testing it: 2.1× subscriber growth, 38% average open rates, $48 average monthly payout.

If you're a Substack writer in productivity or self-improvement and this sounds interesting, I'd love to hear what you think: https://fleaux.nanocorp.app

(Also happy to share more of the data breakdown in comments if there's interest.)

I’m curious how much people are even making on there.

I moved to Substack a few months ago as I do honestly like the simplicity of the web publications (not so much the app versions), particularly for fiction. I haven't even started posting properly yet, but it looks as though gaining (actual, organic, genuine) readers seems nigh impossible without gaming the system.

I've tried to engage on Notes and it's... I don't know. It's hard to explain my issue with it. Plastic is the word I'd use to describe it. I think the issue is that there are genuinely few readers on there, so it just comes across as a giant pyramid scheme. Not financially, obviously. There doesn't seem to be enough money coming in on the platform for that. But in terms of the attention economy that's on there, writers are all clambering over one another for a crumb of attention.

I will admit, the algorithm on Substack seems dreadful. Trying to find things you're actually interested in at first is a nightmare. But when you have hundreds of Notes that have some version of "Connect me with people who like X", when they already have hundreds of subscribers, hundreds of likes and multiple comments from other writers spamming their work below, it just comes across as being disingenuous to the max.

Everyone's so nice on Substack... because everyone is relying on everyone else for exposure.

How does anyone have the time to actually write if you're expected to read and comment on every else's work? Don't get me wrong, I don't expect instant success, but time is finite. Between work and looking after the home and the family, I barely have an hour at the end of the day to put into writing. And yet to be successful, it seems you need to spend at least twice that talking to other writers, who are all in the same boat. No wonder AI writing is getting so prevalent, it's the only way people have the time to push things out!

This isn't anything new, but I think the paid model that Substack relies on actually makes this toxic positivity much worse. If Substack actually wants to make more money, surely there has to be better ways of connecting writers with potential readers than forcing users to constantly spam their work in the hopes of being picked up by the algorithm!

I'm a newbie that just started posting on Substack, writing about the narrowest niche possible about something I'm genuinely passionate about. The thing I'm struggling with are notes. I write non-fiction ecology articles (for more info, visit my substack). How should I write notes? I have no experience with substack. Please help. Thanks!

I've been a classic victim of writing blogs and then getting stuck on 3 likes from friends and family. As someone who loves to write, but hates to promote, this has been a major factor why I was apprehensive of trying Substack.

But then I gave in. Created a fresh account. Chose a niche I am deeply passionate about. Something where I could think of next 10 articles from day 1. And before posting my first article, I actually wrote the complete drafts for the first 3.

I am a designer, so I do have a pretty good sense of brand and aesthetics compared to most folks. I tried to capitalize on this and built a proper brand system for cover images, logos etc.

Now that the base was set.

I went in and posted 3 articles in 3 days. Yes, this might irk some Substack purists. But my logic was simple. If someone lands on my profile, they should have enough content to make a decision that, "yes, this guy writes quality stuff that will make me click on the orange button."

I used notes liberally, like posting 2-3 a day for the first 3 days and now down to 1 per day. Once the initial subscribers started coming in, I did a quick analysis on their profiles to figure out what kind of notes they'd be into. I think this part is important when you have a small sample size. Although my original blog is not directly related to my notes, but the initial deviation could be important to go from first 10 to first 50 subscribers.

After that, I went back to notes closer to my niche. Essentially go a little mass market to get the initial traction rolling and then specialize.

Also, super important, engage with others. I cleared up my Sunday afternoon and went through some posts of the people who kept showing up on my feed, and left some thoughtful comments. That definitely helped in getting profile views where I had already established myself with three posts with nice graphics and some notes with decent engagement. This does the trick.

Again, this is purely anecdotal from one week of experience, but I've been pleasantly surprised by Substack and the community engagement here.

When I first started posting consistently on Substack back in March, I instantly got trapped in the algorithmic game.

I met some writers who Substack promoted on my algorithm and I fell into that ecosystem.

It became a game of obligatory reciprocity. Like for like. Sub for sub.

And it was a dangerous game too…

Because most people don’t actually want to see you grow… they want you to have to participate in the ecosystem the same way they do.

At first, it feels like it’s working. But when you look at the numbers… it doesn’t add up.

Most of these people have 100s of subs and 20-50 likes per post. Not bad, just average.

But I never wanted to be an average Substack writer. And falling into the algorithmic ecosystem made me forget that.

At the end of last month, I decided it was time to change. I wasn’t going to read everyone’s everything just to get some views on my own writing.

I turned inward and focused on what I wanted to create. I remembered I was writing for me, not them.

And since that day my growth has accelerated. It’s steady and my readers are here for me. Not out of social obligation.

I think this is an important message for any writer out there that feels stuck or like they have to perform for the Substack algorithm.

Pour into yourself. Forget the noise… and you will experience genuine growth.

And if anyone recognizes me from my substack page… no you don’t. ❤️

Hi everyone, I'm wondering if anyone can offer some advice. I have a Substack on a niche topic that I *know* people are interested in - how to get published. I've been in the field for 16 years and am an expert on this.

But I can't seem to grow my Substack beyond 3k subscribers; I've been stuck there for 6 months.

-I post weekly with a mix of free content on how to get published and paid content on how to write and edit your book. Some of my posts are genuinely insightful conversation starters

-I post several notes each week

-I engage with other posts from similar writers, either restacking with my own comments or liking or commenting

-I have a really good ratio of conversion to paid subscribers (13%) but that will slow down if I'm not gaining new subscribers

-My back end is pretty much sorted such as my landing page, etc

-I cross post to my other platforms

But it's only my existing subscribers engaging with my content - others don't seem to see it.

What can I do to get the algorithm to promote my posts so that I get more than the 2 subscribers a day I'm currently getting? I'd really value any insight or ideas, particularly from those that have more than 3k subscribers.

Thank you!

Many people feel sad about their growth. They see others with massive growth and tons of subscribers. Then when they examine those people's work they find it to be the same quality as their own.

Niche matters.

If you are growing slowly, you may be in a "boring" niche. You will never grow as fast as someone writing in health, money, growth-hacking or relationships. Sure there are definitely things you can do to improve, but you will likely never be a rocket.

And that's ok.

You might make more money from a smaller, wealthier audience. You may enjoy a small audience more.

Everyone's journey is different.

(And this is from me, writing in the boring niche of project management. It's taken me 3 years to get to my current 2500 subscribers.)

Curious if anyone has tried this? And was it successful?

I write about safety for parents, especially new parents. Relatively new substack but almost 200 subscribers.

Thanks!

So about two weeks ago I asked a question.

What should I do? My first account has 225 subscribers, now I just started a second account that in two weeks grew to 170 subs. What should I do?

Well, I started scaling back this week my first account. My "second account" just hit 450 subscribers and is way past the first. How? Here are five tips I learnt.

1. Targetting a more precise niche. My first account was general investing, my second account is only the private market. Many are targeting the public market, few the private market.

2. Not caring about piece length. All three of my pieces are in the 20-30 minute range. People like human written in depth content.

3. Growth by connection. I took a much more active role subscribing to accounts I saw in notes and replying to other accounts. In addition, when someone subscribes to me I go over to their account and will like a few posts, why not, costs me nothing and sure gives them a good feeling. I often feels this helps me later when they recommend me.

4. Partnering with experts. So far, on my last two posts, I partnered with experts, one had fewer subs then me, one much more. I did it for the information, not the subscribers that come with it. The articles came out better, subscribers like them more.

5. Use notes to celebrate achievments. First, its nice to be thankful, second, substack seems to love them.

Very excited to continue growing on Substack, its an awesome place. Hope this helps you all!

Joseph