r/Substack

Some context so you can judge whether this applies to you. I started a newsletter from nothing in July 2025. Today it has about 22,600 free subscribers in 179 countries and roughly 400 paying members. It has a Bestseller badge.

I write about a fairly serious subject for an audience that is mostly educators and professionals, so adjust for your own niche.

What I do have is a full data export every month, read into a database, so the five things below are what the numbers show rather than what 'felt' true. In descending order of how much they mattered.

1. Notes are where paying members come from. Recommendations are where the free list comes from. Do not confuse the two.
Over twelve months, recommendations from other writers brought me about 15,000 free signups and 77 paying members. That is 5 per 1,000, the worst conversion of any source I have. Notes brought far fewer signups and 121 paying members, the most of any source. The free list is wide and cold. Notes readers already know your voice before they land.
So: post Notes every day, and judge them on paid conversions a week later, never on likes. The Notes that convert for me are first-person positions (I think X, and here is the thing that happened to me that made me think it) and short admissions of being wrong. Over 30 days those get about double the reactions of news-pegged Notes. A Note that just reports a news story does a third of my median

2. Pick one day a week for the paid post and never move it.
Half of my paid upgrades happen on a Wednesday, which is the day the paywalled post goes out. Tuesday carries 2%. The day itself does not matter. What matters is that the same readers see the same wall at the same time every week until the week they are ready, and then they know exactly when the next one is coming.
Two posts a week is my ceiling: one paid, one free. I ran a third weekly post for six months to test that: 25 editions, nearly 400,000 emails sent, 7 paying members came through. It is now gone.

3. Put the paywall where the reader wants to keep reading, never where the "value" starts.
My best-converting paid posts open with the whole story for free and cut mid-stride, at the point where the reader's own curiosity is doing the selling. The worst ones give a free "introduction" and put the useful bit behind the wall, which reads as a toll booth. When someone complains in the comments that the cut was a cliffhanger, that post has usually converted best.

4. Deadlines convert. Nothing else I have tried comes close.
Every real jump in paid I have had came from a date: a price going up on a fixed day, a discount ending at midnight, a cohort closing.
The flip side is renewals. If you sell annual plans in a campaign, a year later they all expire in the same month. Make sure what they bought still exists when the renewal email lands. I stopped unpaywalling old posts for exactly this reason; the archive is now part of the product.

5. Judge every channel by free signups to your Substack, never by views.
I have two TikTok videos with 350,000 views each. The platform they live on sent fewer paying members in a year than Notes did. LinkedIn, with a fraction of that reach, sent about 570 signups in the same year. My highest-engagement topic is also my lowest-converting one; it buys followers, and the topic next to it, with half the reach, buys subscribers. If you only look at the view counter you will keep making the first kind.

Two things I would skip. Reddit as a growth channel: I posted here and in adjacent subs for months and got a handful of signups. It is a good place to learn and a poor place to be found. And the open rate as a vanity number: mine is a 28% median across the last 20 sends, down from a lifetime mean in the mid-thirties, because the list got bigger and colder. It has made no difference to paid.

Happy to answer questions about any of these in the comments.

NB: Claude was used to help me gather this data and also edit parts of this post.

Hi, guys, I am a journalist, and I just started writing on Substack. I want to grow my audience. How can I do that

I have this thing in mind: just write.

But guys, writing AND post it online for anybody to read it? Oh my god!! I'm afraid of judgement and fear rejection, but it's so satisfying and refreshing to have them laid out on the net.

Particularly on a website that feels active and alive. And supportive from what I'm reading!

At the moment, I have 1 or 2 subs, but guys who cares!!

First, build your passion, let out whatever you have in your mind and ideas! Tips, travels, amazing views, stances, poetry! With no stress, but relief! The rest will follow and flow! Whether it's you promoting work in a community/websites, or simply getting noticed.

Someone out there will read it and relate, I'm sure.

I'm just happy I get to let shit out of my system, laid out. It's niiiice!

Anyone know a good subreddit to promote my substack? Ig the substack sub doesn’t like it when you promote lol

Anyone need help scaling their newsletter? Currently getting great cpa on alot of platforms and im are working on my portfolio so willing to do it for free for month including creatives.

Im only taking on a couple so wont be able to do everyones. pm or comment if your interested!

cheers

(still taking on new people + youll need an adbudget in order for me to run the ads)

Hi all.

What do we think of the sweet spots for article length?

Thanks

I recently started writing on substack and currently have two articles written, where if I use the AI detector built into the platform, it shows around 2-4% AI assisted with the rest human written. I checked the articles of some of my other friends (those whom I assumed didn't use AI assistance) and in their articles the AI detection was pretty high, 60 to 70 percent or more (even 90+) and I had a very glaring question about that particular finding.

Of course, the AI detection is a flawed program conducted by another AI program itself so its easy to confuse if you write in a similar style when compared to that of an AI, so is it just that my writing is at such an amateur stage, riddled with errors, that its easy to detect it's not AI writing or have others used AI assistance to such an extent?

Honestly, I think another question I'm indirectly asking here is that if its good or bad that the AI detection is so low on my articles?

Any insight will be greatly appreciated, so thank you in advance!

i only have a medium account but i really don't use because idk, i just don't feel it 😭 but lately i've been seeing lots of good reads on substack. should i create an account at this point? if yes, please reco some reads!!

Hi,

I joined Substack roughly two months ago, because Instagram clearly isnt suitable for my topics/niche. I'm happy with the way my Substack is progressing, but I wanted to not only do articles about the niche, but also talk about books (that fit my niche),

So IÄm not sure now, if it makes more sense to add a second section to my current Substack, or to create a second publication for the book part.

I have 31 subscribers, so whatever I do, I'm not "loosing" a huge audience and starting from zero with a second publication wouldnt bother me either.

Has anybody tried one (or both) of the two named possibilities? What worked for you? And why (if you know?) How did you go about making the decicion between 2 sections vs 2 publications?

Thanks!

Hi! I'm a new author (first book published in May, second book yesterday) and I just learned about promoting on Substack. I'm not sure how to go about doing that. Any tips?

Thanks!!

I started on Substack around June. I'm an author and a photographer and I found every other platform to be dead or useless, especially Instagram.

My goal is mainly to get my work out there and sell some prints and books.

Once I figured out what I wanted to do with substack, I made two. One is for my stories. The other is pop culture discussion. On my main substack ( the story one), I do have a paid tier, but I never use the paywall. If someone wants to pledge, I would be super grateful, but I view it as a tip. I also encourage people to just buy one or more of my books, rather than pledge.

So my strategy is to get as many free subscribers as I can and hopefully get them to tip me.

I'd be interested in hearing how y'all approach subscriptions.

I've had a stack for a few years, and every so often I find that I'm subscribed to someone I don't remember subscribing to. The most recent time this occurred was a couple weeks ago, but it used to occur more often. This time someone actually said "thanks, will you recommend my blog" and I had to say "sorry, I don't remember subscribing to you"; it's happened so often that I have suspected that sometimes substack would automatically subscribe users just to see if they can get away with it.

A few days ago I made a relatively trivial note that is going a little "viral" (way more than anything I've ever posted before), and from its spread I've picked up, supposedly, over 40 new subscribers. However, my subscriber count doesn't match this (even after waiting for it to update), and when I check the profiles in the new subscriber email notifications, I'd say around half (edit: more like 85%) of these users are no longer subscribed; they also don't show up in the dashboard.

Are people subscribing by accident then unsubscribing? Is substack doing it to them and they're just fixing it? Are people trying to get me to follow them back? Just trying to figure out what's going on. I'm really close to turning off my "new subscriber" emails now. I've gotten so many in the last few days and they don't seem like reliable information anymore.

Thanks!

The Substack UI seems a bit roundabout, especially from the app. If I want to check stats on a not-so-recent post, it seems like I need to open the post first, but this has been inflating my post views. Is there a way to hide your own post views from the post stats? I want to get a more accurate reflection of how many people are reading my posts.