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2 years ago, we launched the Write • Build • Scale publication on Substack.
Today, we’re serving over 43,000 subscribers, more than 1,400 paid members, and it’s the foundation of a business generating over $50,000 per month.
But I’ll be honest: growing on Substack as a beginner can be incredibly confusing.
Over the past 2 years, I’ve learned so many lessons I genuinely wish someone had told me before we got started. They would have saved us months of frustration and probably thousands of dollars in mistakes we didn’t need to make.
So here are the most important lessons from 2 years of building on Substack — compressed into a single post.
Some of what I’m about to share might go against what most people in the space will tell you to do. But these are the things that actually moved the needle for us.
Most Substack Creators Skip This Step — And Waste Months Because of It
One of the biggest mistakes I see new Substack creators make is this:
They create their account, pick a topic they’re passionate about, and just start publishing.
A few months later, they have a handful of subscribers, no income, and no real idea what they’re actually working toward.
Before you write your very first post, sit down and ask yourself one question:
What is going to make this Substack a success for me?
Be honest about this.
It’s perfectly fine to run a Substack purely as a hobby. If you just love writing and want a place to share your ideas, that’s a valid reason to be on the platform.
But if you want to monetize your Substack, you need to go a step further and ask yourself what the actual business purpose of your publication is.
Is it supposed to generate revenue through paid subscriptions?
Bring in new leads for your existing business?
Be your portfolio, your email list, or a mix of all of that?
What you’re building toward completely changes how you create content.
Let’s say you’re a marathon coach and your goal is to eventually sell a 12-week training program. Now every post you write has a purpose. It builds trust and demonstrates that you can actually help someone cross that finish line.
With specific goals, your content stops being random and starts becoming strategic.
You don’t need to have products and offers built on day one. But you want to have a direction to avoid wasting your time.
Do the Math Backwards
This one sounds boring, but it changed how we think about growth.
Let’s say you want to make an extra $2,000 per month through your Substack publication.
If you’re selling a $100 workshop, you need 20 sales per month to get there.
If your list converts at around 1%, you’ll need roughly 2,000 subscribers to make that work.
But if you’re doing 1-on-1 coaching at $500 a month, you only need 4 clients to hit that same number.
That’s totally different math, and it means a much smaller audience works just fine.
Most people skip this step entirely and attach their self-worth to arbitrary growth targets.
They think they need 10,000 subscribers before they can make any money.
But I’ve personally seen creators with 500 subscribers run profitable businesses because they built the right offer for the right audience — even if it was a tiny one.
Here’s why this matters even more on Substack specifically: Substack has an enormous amount of different tools and features.
Collaborations, guest posts, live streams, podcasts, paid tiers, video posts, voiceovers, Notes — it’s easy to get overwhelmed trying to do everything at once.
Running the math backwards helps you stay focused. Once you know what you’re building toward and what the numbers need to look like, you can filter every feature through one simple question:
Does this help me get closer to my goal, or is it just a distraction?
Make Your Content Impossible to Ignore
Let’s be honest: AI can write a thousand words about any topic in seconds.
So if your posts read like something ChatGPT could have written, you have a serious problem.
But here’s what most people miss: AI was never trained on your life.
It doesn’t know about the time you failed a launch and learned more from that failure than from any course you ever took.
It doesn’t know what it felt like to get your first paying subscriber after months of writing into the void.
Your lived experience is the biggest competitive advantage you have right now.
The creators growing the fastest on Substack are not necessarily the best writers. They’re the ones who figured out how to weave their specific story into everything they publish.
A post about healthy eating from a nutritionist who reversed her own autoimmune condition hits completely differently than a generic list of meal prep tips.
Same topic, completely different impact.
Find the one experience, the one perspective, the one piece of your story that only you can tell. Make it the thread that runs through your entire publication.
That’s your unfair advantage. No algorithm change and no AI tool will ever take that away from you.
The Free Growth Feature 90% of Substack Creators Ignore
This one is huge, but most creators still have no idea about it.
Substack has a built-in feature called Recommendations. When someone subscribes to a publication, Substack can suggest your publication to them right at that moment.
And it works the other way too: when someone subscribes to you, you can recommend publications you enjoy to your new subscribers.
This creates a network effect where creators are essentially helping each other grow without anyone doing extra work.
Most people completely ignore this feature.
Recommendations have brought us thousands of subscribers. Thousands of free subscribers from a feature that takes about 5 minutes to set up.
There’s also a networking side to it: when you recommend another creator, they’re likely to check out your publication and might even recommend you back. Those recommendations open the door to real relationships — guest posts, live streams, cross-promotions.
It all starts with a simple recommendation or a private message.
Go to your dashboard, find the Recommendations section, and start recommending publications you genuinely read and enjoy.
Speaking of DMs and outreach, if reaching out to other creators feels awkward or you never know what to say, our Substack DM Playbook gives you ready-to-send message templates for collaborations, recommendations, and networking.
Your Readers Forget You Exist Between Posts — Unless You Do This
In its early years, Substack was purely a long-form writing platform. All you could do was write posts and send them via email. That was it.
But if you still use Substack that way and only show up a few times per month, your readers can easily forget who you are.
Research suggests that people need 6 to 20 interactions with you before they take any kind of action on your work.
If you’re only publishing once a week, that’s a lot of weeks before someone feels connected enough to eventually become a paying subscriber.
Luckily, Substack has changed a lot over the past three years. It now has a strong social layer that lets you show up between your published posts.
Substack Notes is a short-form feed where you can share quick thoughts, images, or quotes from your articles. When you post a Note, people who have never heard of you can discover it.
Subscriber Chat is a built-in space where your subscribers can interact with you and each other. At Write • Build • Scale, we use our subscriber chat every single day. We share behind-the-scenes moments, ask questions, and celebrate our readers’ wins.
Most publications have a dead chat collecting dust. But when you actually show up consistently, it becomes one of the most powerful trust-building and retention tools on the entire platform.
💬 Not sure what to post in your publication chat? OurPublication Chat OS gives you 18 post types, 54+ ready-to-use messages, and a scheduling database so you always know exactly what to post in your subscriber chat.
When we launched the Write • Build • Scale publication on Substack in 2024, we thought consistently publishing great content would be the main driver of our growth.
And don’t get me wrong: publishing great content does matter. But what genuinely surprised us was just how powerful collaborations turned out to be.
This is something unique to Substack that doesn’t really exist in the same way on other platforms.
When you collaborate with another creator, you’re placed directly in front of their audience.
And it doesn’t need to be complicated.
Start by leaving real, thoughtful comments on publications in your space. Not just “great post” — actual responses that add to the conversation.
Then do a guest post exchange with someone at a similar level.
We’ve done dozens of collaborations, live streams, and guest posts with other creators on the platform. It has worked at every single stage. It worked when we had 500 subscribers and it still works now with over 40,000.
The Substack community genuinely wants to help each other grow and you can take advantage of that from day one.
Don’t Build a Newsletter — Build a Business
This is the most important lesson from our 2 years.
Most people treat Substack as a subscription platform. They turn on paid subscriptions, set the price to $5 or $10 a month, and wait.
Most of them never get past a few hundred paid members.
Here’s the shift that changed everything for us: we stopped thinking of Substack as a place to sell subscriptions and started treating it as the infrastructure for an entire business.
Our paid subscriptions — even with over 1,400 members — make up less than 10% of our total revenue.
The real revenue comes from what we built around the publication: courses, coaching, digital products, a private community. Each one serves people at a different stage of their journey and at a different price point.
Your publication is not the business. It’s the entry point. It’s how people discover you, learn to trust you, and eventually invest in your work at a deeper level.
You don’t need to build all of this on day one. Start with one small product — a mini-course, a workshop, a template pack — something that solves one specific problem your readers keep asking about. Then add the next thing when you’re ready.
What matters is the mindset shift: treat your Substack as the foundation of something bigger.
Your Simple Playbook
If I were starting from zero today, here’s the order I’d prioritize:
Month 1: Get clear on what I’m building toward and who I’m writing for. Publish consistently, even if it’s not perfect. Set up Recommendations immediately.
Month 3-6: Pursue my first collaboration. Create one small digital product that solves a specific problem for my readers. Start doing the math backwards.
Month 6+: Layer in additional offers at different price points. Double down on what’s working. Cut what isn’t.
The creators who last on Substack are not the ones with the most talent. They’re the ones who planned ahead and kept going through the inevitable dips.
Your Next Step
If you’re just getting started and want to make sure your foundation is solid, we’ve put together a free Substack Starter Kit that walks you through how to set up your publication, identify your ideal reader, and create content that actually resonates.
Hi Sinem, as someone about to get started, chat GPT advised me to post on Linkedin as well as Substack for faster growth. It said Substack alone would be far slower. Do you agree with this, or is that spreading myself too thin? Should I just concentrate 100% on Substack? Cheers, Rex.
Hi Sinem, as someone about to get started, chat GPT advised me to post on Linkedin as well as Substack for faster growth. It said Substack alone would be far slower. Do you agree with this, or is that spreading myself too thin? Should I just concentrate 100% on Substack? Cheers, Rex.
Such great insights!